Songs for The Lost

Your Bone Spider Will Find You

YOUR BONE SPIDER WILL FIND YOUShe fingered the keen blade extending from the finger-smudged plastic base of the pocketknife. Its edge, caught in the moon’s light, flashed a silvery smear through her tears. She pressed the blade against the throat of the snow-white kitten pinioned between her knees, wincing as she did this but resolute in her action. She paused there, though, unable to go on. The animal’s plaintive, mournful meowing shook her. Its soft emerald gaze seemed to implore her. She closed her eyes on the moon-coloured picture of her great cowardice and fury. A moment passed. A wind from off the river gusted through the great desolate yard, chilling her in her denim jacket. She shivered against its insistence, her bangs annoying her eyes and her cheap plastic earrings jangling loudly as she trembled. With as steady a hand and determined a mind as she could muster she pressed the blade into the kitten’s scrawny throat.

Her wrist was then caught in an unyielding grip. She tried turning about to confront her assailant but, thrown off-balance, only toppled onto her side amid the tufts of wild grass spiking into her face, momentarily blinding her where they shot up through the time-shattered cement. She felt the knife pried from her fingers, discerned through the pounding rush of blood like a river in her ears the heavy breathing of the man behind her, and the renewed frightened yipping clamour of the kitten from somewhere near at hand.

She ceased her futile struggles, allowing her arm to grow limp in his grasp. She waited, heart hammering, until the kitten’s saviour released her. Cowering, she peered over her shoulder. Gradually, her vision cleared, and the man coalesced from the star field against which he stood silhouetted. His eyes were hard but solemn. They burned in their appraisal of her. She couldn’t help but look away from them, to examine her hands in her lap, the frayed cuffs of her jeans, her fingernails bitten down low and the grime wedged behind them. She took her first impression of him with her, though, and saw his dishevelled hair, unshaven features, wan skin, filthy sweatshirt and jeans as if he lived in the streets, or perhaps in this very lot behind the derelict warehouse.

She looked to him after a prolonged moment had passed in silence, found him looking into the middle of the vacant lot with his intense stare. She peered there, too, saw the snowy kitten padding there, away from her and her knife. When next she looked to the man his eyes were beholding her, accusatory but still curiously sympathetic, impelling her against her will to look to her hands again. They looked small, she thought distantly, thin-fingered and too weak to wield knives effectually.

She saw from the corner of her eye as he raised an arm. She followed his hand gesturing in the direction of the river somewhere in the night. More specifically, she understood, he pointed towards the skeleton of the warehouse before them. Its belly had long ago been eaten by fire. Its roof, she saw, had collapsed inwards. Long fire-blackened wooden and steel support beams spiked outwards from the rubble like an enormous splintered ribcage. The structure’s aura of death and abandonment had called to her when she’d wandered through the lot thirty minutes earlier, and found the kitten pawing at a spot in the grass, looking startled at her presence, shaken in the crisp wind, utterly lost in the night.

Suddenly the man’s hand was beside her face, palm out as if offering her to take hold and be guided from the lot by him. He turned his gaze to the warehouse and then again to her, beckoning still with his hand.

A ball of fear unfurled itself in her stomach at this invitation. “I’m not going with you,” she said indignantly. “f**k you, man.”

The man’s voice was younger-sounding than his weathered features appeared, his tone firm but its timbre un-coarse, un-ravaged by time. “Oh yes, you will.”

The man’s striking incongruity startled her, his unremittingly calm demeanour and grave gaze unsettling. She watched him with a hard, angry stare. She considered her proximity to the street beyond the empty warehouse towering between her and freedom. She considered her small voice in this large unfrequented lot near to the river past midnight on an icy Fall night when most sensible, untroubled people were indoors and sleeping and wandering in their good or bad dreams. She watched his tranquil but uncompromising eyes a moment longer without words and then finally she spat at him, audaciousness in her voice and a seething look of disdain in her gaze, “I’m not scared of you. f**k you. Let’s go then. Come on.” She stood and led the way towards the shell of the warehouse hulking at the periphery of the weed-choked lot.

The man eyed her curiously, then followed in her fuming wake like a thunderstorm blowing across the cement and into the black mouth of the derelict building.

The place smelled of rotten wood and old fire. The floor was filmed in ash and dust and debris. Shadows ruled the immense room despite the moonlight pouring through the hole where the roof had once been and illuminating the central portion of the space.

She walked brazenly into this moonlit area, feeling immediately as though the shadows surrounding her had begun to encroach into the lunar light. Once there she turned about, extending her arms defiantly. “I’m here. Okay. Now what, man?” Her eyes, the man saw, were angry and dark. He looked into them. He watched her without words, and then only nodded sympathetically, a gesture which infuriated the girl further. “Well, what the f**k, man? What do you want? Eh? What do you want from me? Have I got something you want, man?”

His voice was soft following hers, a caress from the shadows pooled before her. “This is a lesson for you. To not do things like you tried tonight. To not add to the darkness and foulness in the world, when it’s not in you to do. How...How old are you?”

She grew silent at this. Dark suspicion returned into her appraisal of his indistinct form. Her mouth moved as if to speak but no words came. Emotions played across her features, naked in the lunar light for the man to examine as closely as he wished: her telltale emotions, with the added weakness of her general unattractiveness: speckled around her mouth with tenacious acne whose presence haunted her no matter how diligently she scrubbed her face with soap-lathered washcloth each night before bed and upon waking every morning; the hint of purple lingering among her brown chin-length hair from when she’d dyed it herself several days before, the only way she could afford, with grape-flavoured Kool-Aid, so that teachers would look at her disapprovingly and certain boys with interest; her thin lips and makeup-less cheeks and eyes as un-feminine as a boy’s. Grown discomfited by this unexpected turn in their strange exchange, the girl fidgeted in her place, but remained standing helplessly beneath the man’s scrutiny.

Then, as if he’d extracted something from her that he’d wished to learn, the man said with a solemn, teacherly tone, “There.” His hand stabbed from the shadows and was pointing with a grubby finger into the darkness beyond her. He stepped forward a step and she saw his feral eyes devouring her, as if he gained strength from her great unease. “Look!” he seethed with greater vehemence, until she turned in her place and followed his gesturing hand.

When it became evident that she discerned nothing in the shadows he placed his hands on her small shoulders and edged her forward step by incremental step. Her instinctual resistance to his pushing her forward ceased, and she allowed him to move her easily. Then, when they were bathed in the shadows beyond the perimeter of the moon-washed central space, his whisper guided her: “There, in the heap of rock and wood. In with the bones, those pale sticks rising from the debris in the centre. It moves there.”

She wondered if the wan timbers rising from the heap were indeed bones, felt an instant queer thrill and revulsion at the thought. They watched silently. Then, there, amid the blackened wood and soot-smudged bricks and bones, she saw long, slender skeletal legs unfolding.

She held her breath reflexively. She placed a hand across her mouth as if she might cry out though no sound issued from her. She looked with incredulity at the great pale spider and the bones over which it traveled. She sought to fathom the weird spectacle of it floating in the dilapidated warehouse remains like some malign spirit or scavenger. Its size was staggering – both her hands placed beside one another would be dwarfed by it. It wove a strange pattern with its nimble legs, making a soft but clear percussion in the huge quiet, a sound of sticks rattling across the rubble. She remained standing in her place though her revulsion of the thing urged her to hasten away. She shuddered, no longer discerning the man’s hands where they remained resting – gently now – on her narrow shoulders.

“I first found it ten or more years ago,” his foul-breath whisper came in her ear. “Crawling on a homeless man laying dead in a room of rubble. The man’s skin was like ash, grey, powdery. He looked like his life had been drained from him. His neck, though, was dark, black with bruises. Like he’d been choked to death. It was perched on his chest. It seemed to be... watching me walk towards them through the room. It didn’t move, just sat there on the hobo like it owned him. I guess it did.”

She heard his words as if in some peculiar time-delayed manner and murmured, feeling as if too-long after he’d fallen into silence, “What... What is it? I’ve never seen a spider so big. Not even in books.”

He eyed her curiously. A tender look entered his gaze, as if he suddenly realized the age of the girl he was observing. “A spider? Is that what you see?”

She nodded, noting absently the strange nature of the man’s question. Turning to him, feeling suddenly greatly afraid, she whispered, “What do you see? I mean – what is it?”

But he only watched her with his new eyes of unsettling sympathy, and then turned to observe the gargantuan thing once more.

They watched it a while, and then he told her, “I see a great...hand. I see a large, strong hand. Masculine and muscular. Fingers long, hard. With long, dirty nails. That’s what I see. It’s...It belongs to the homeless man, the hand. It’s the hobo’s hand I see.” He paused, and she heard him swallow deep in his throat, and the pause before he next spoke seemed to her to be one wherein he gathered himself. Then, “It’s the hobo who stole me when I was around your age, with a knife at my throat in the lot behind the convenience store behind the house where I lived with my parents in the neighbourhood just beyond this lot. He was younger then. Quick and strong. His hands were quick and strong. And awful. When I saw him next, he was dead, in this warehouse. I come here to...to see it. I come here to see it and give my thanks. It’s always here. Here and elsewhere, too. I’ve seen it throughout the city. In overgrown fields, on the hoods of cars in driveways after dark. Once inside a locker in the change room at the downtown gym, stuffed into the bottom of the locker like a grey baseball mitt. Once it was on the porch of a well-to-do house on the south side, a giant hand spread open in the middle of one of the two chairs sitting there, facing each other at midnight.” He paused, and swallowed audibly again, and making his voice gentle, said, “I see it often hanging from bars in jungle gyms, in schoolyards around the city. In sandboxes and the steel-and-wood skeletons of bleachers, and in school parking lots. I’ve looked inside dusty old school buses parked there, and found it on the leather seats, waiting. For me, though, it’s always here, in this place. This place is the place I see it without fail. I know this place. I know this place well. It’s good that...It’s good that you see it, too.”

Her breath had been stolen by his revelation. She felt tendrils of cold snake all along her body beneath her denim jacket and t-shirt and jeans. Her heart crashed behind her chest. She turned to the spider, saw its hackle-like forest of pale fur spiking from its rotund body, its baleful grey eyes beholding them coldly, its long, needle-like legs perched delicately in its place atop the mountain of rubble. She felt the words rising up from her like vomit, unbidden and unwanted, bitter and shameful.

She said, in the quietest of whispers, though it sounded like thunder in her ears, “I woke up yesterday. In the middle of the morning. He...He was...He was raping me. Raping me. Oh God...” And she wept softly, and shook violently.

In the bated silence they felt acutely the thing watching them with its cold avid gaze, unmoving in its perch, as if estimating their intent, weighing their sin or innocence.

After a moment, the man spoke, softly, too. “Then it’ll find him, too. It finds everyone, I think. They wake up one day, they look up one day, and they’re face to face with themselves, like they’ve never been before. I hope it finds him soon. I’m...I’m sorry I frightened you.”

She nodded. She wept harder, hugging her thin arms about herself.

The man whispered, “I mean that. I am sorry, but I saw you, young and angry and foolish with a knife in your hand. I saw your future, of regret, and, and...I wanted you to know. I saw your eyes, and I wanted you to know about...this.”

He let her have another moment of silence and grief. Into it she eventually murmured, “I didn’t mean to want to hurt the kitten. I’ve never done anything like that before...”, trailing off, dismal and small.

“I know,” the man said to her. “I know.”

He let her cry. He wept, too, as he did on nights such as this.

And all the while the pale thing remained there with them, unmoving but watching, silvered in moonlight and kingly in its throne of debris and dilapidation, like a protector of the place and perhaps them convened within it, too.

When the girl’s crying ceased several minutes later, the man murmured, “Here.” She looked to his hand proffered her. In the centre of his palm lay her pocketknife, its blade folded into its rounded plastic shell. She stared at it. She shook her head, denying the idea of it. He dropped it among the dust and stones at their feet.

Eyeing the thing on the summit of ruins, she said, “Are there...Are there really bones there in all that rock and wood?”

“There are bones everywhere,” he told her softly, watching the rubble with her. “The city’s filled with them.” Then he turned to her. “Goodbye,” he said. “I have to go home now.”

She eyed him curiously. She wondered, for the first time, about the man’s home, his life outside of the night and this place of shadows and moonlight and memories. She wondered about those things which interested the man, his hobbies and passions, the everyday activities in which he engaged, and the people – the friends or family – with whom he shared his days. He eyed her with a peaceful gaze over his shoulder as he trudged through the toppled warehouse.

He left her like this, in the dust and ashes. A great fear stabbed its way into her heart in her new aloneness. She shivered and cast huge eyes around the chaos of shadows surrounding her. Her nostrils seemed wholly filled with the aftermath of fire and death. She considered the thing before her, like an amputated appendage belonging somehow always to the city. She wondered of its other forms, in the lost, weeping eyes of others like herself and the haunted man who brought her here to this place. She wondered what other awful aspects of human beings ghosted the streets and alleys and lots and fields, and she shuddered. She shuddered a long deep shudder, and her hands ached from the chill air, or else from a deeper cold awakened in her at the new knowledge she had about the world and the things happening in its secret folds.

She stooped and retrieved the pocketknife from the floor. She eyed the crooked landscape of wood and stone and bone. To the spider she said, in a clear voice, “His name’s Frank. Just so you know. His name’s Frank and he stinks like sweat, and his breath stinks like vinegar. He’s hairy all over. Thick hair all on his back and arms and chest like a big tarantula. I hate him more than anything in the world.”

The spider, watching her, placed two of its long legs together before itself as if in prayer.

She turned from it and its kingdom of rubble and bones. She hurled the pocketknife she’d been savagely clutching – conscious even as she did so of her girlish throw, weak and crooked and nowhere near the middle of the wall she’d been targeting – and fled the shadowed place.

Moonlight drenched her anew when she arrived in the vacant lot. The air tasted cleaner somehow than before as she sucked it into herself despite it being the same city-air of smog and foundry fumes she knew every day. She relished its faintly acrid tinge but with the subtle suggestion of the nearby river permeating it, too, icy and aquatic, the perennial smell of the docks, where old boats lay tethered bobbing in the current, where dirty ducks occasionally were to be found, too, misplaced in the chemical waters with their pretty emerald plumage and innocent passage.

And to the night, quite like a fervently-uttered prayer, she seethed, “Just you wait. Just you wait.” And she felt relieved, expelling that fury from herself with the words, and the great burden of it like all the concrete and stink and badness of the city filling her up and blown out like smoke into the air.

She turned eastwards and began her fearful and brave walk home. And, strangely, the longer she walked the cleaner the air tasted, the cleaner her thoughts seemed to become, unsullied with dreams of blood and vengeance that had never really been like her to dream at all.

Twins burning.