Withining - 1st Chapter

                                                   
*The opening chapter of a novel I am finishing - sorry for the length. Appreciate comments and critiques (ie. like it's too long...!)

                                             
                                                      I
                                              Incubation Over 

          It is commonly assumed he was the result of some great and mysterious transmutation, but this was not so! Even in his youth he was extraordinarily different – extraordinarily perceptive of so much that no one person should ever have been burdened to know. What happened to him was not a transformation into something else; rather, he became vastly more human than the rest of humanity could ever hope to become.
                                                              -from the journal of Jenny Knight


          “I see you, Jeff!” the slender lad of twelve years claimed. “I knew you’d be hiding up there!”
          The boy’s deep-set black eyes recast the light back to the basement in a vibrant reincarnation of itself, illegitimating the sickly sheen of his wraith white face and the deranged vulgarity of the long, tangled, tar black hair concealing a set of earphones and the uppermost part of two wires flowing down to a confluence, emptying into an early model MP3 player submerged in the front pocket of his worn, filthy jeans. The youth slapped his slight chest with an open pale hand, straightened his skinny arm and pointed upward, his coltish black eyes tracking the movement of a dark object high up on the cinder block wall. 
          “Third day in a row you’ve hidden up there – getting predictable in your old age!”
          Though the afternoon summer sun despotically reigned outside, no sunlight infiltrated the domain of the twenty-by-thirty foot room closed off from the stairwell of the basement – where the boy remained confined. Two small windows positioned at the top of right-angled walls had been blocked and mortared eight years past. The interior light of the room emanated from a high wattage bulb in a socket – mounted on a floor joist eight feet high, positioned over a large metal basin sink set between a washer and dryer – with an auxiliary glow cast from a low wattage bulb in a lamp without a shade, set on an otherwise empty desk in a corner.
          Every few days a clothes chute, located in the corner diagonal from the desk and lamp, opened from above to allow soiled linen to be dropped for the twelve-year-old to wash, dry, fold and place in a small basket.  The youth finalized these chores by clipping the basket to hanging cables, the laundry now ready to be hoisted up. Placing his full trash bags in the basket his garbage was delivered up the chute in the same fashion; his books, meals and occasional snacks were provided as well through this solitaire umbilical link to the world above.
          Flush along two walls of the room and angled ninety degrees from the corner desk stood two seven-foot tall bookshelf units, their mahogany grain grotesquely veneered in layer upon layer of grime and dust. Both bookshelves extended in length twelve feet from the desk; each expulsed a still-frame tumble of thousands of mold covered, mildew smelling books, their yellowed pages tattered from persistent use. At the end of one wall unit sat a toilet where it had been functionally, though repugnantly installed – but it was in the corner high above the desk the skinny twelve-year-old honed his eyes on a brown creature the size of his long hand.
          Wiping his ever running nose with the back of a dirty wrist and brushing the straggled strands of coal hued hair off his drawn, colorless cheeks, the youth lifted the lid of a deteriorating shoe box set on the floor under the desk. Reaching in, he closed his hand around and lifted out a small, wriggling object, as black in color and as spirited as his own eyes. The boy replaced the lid before stepping up on a wood chair in front of the desk to gain a closer vantage of the object he remained fixated with.
          “Come on Jeff, come on down for dinner,” he coaxed, and extended an open hand up toward the brown creature; a plump cricket kicked frantically in his other. “And no biting, either! You’ve gotten too big for that. God, it hurt the last time you bit me – my finger still hasn’t healed!”
          The creature progressed slowly down the cement blocks into the dim illumination of the desk lamp, warily approaching the youth’s hand. First extending an elongated leg every bit the length of the boy’s index finger – and another leg, sequentially followed by several more – the creature engulfed the young boy’s entire hand with eight outspread legs supporting a brown, bulbous body, dark linear markings running the length of its head and back.
          The great wolf spider raised its head toward the boy’s gaunt face and opened its impressive fangs, seemingly acknowledging an affable acquaintance with the boy it had known for the last eight years. Indeed, it was eight years ago the twelve-year-old had been sealed off in the room of the basement – eight years ago a much younger, much smaller spider had been entrapped at the same time.
          “Good afternoon, sister,” the boy called out for no apparent reason. Pulling the earphones of the MP3 player from his ears, he draped them as a necklace around his neck as he remained standing on the chair; his freakish black eyes keenly focused on the even more freakish eyes of the giant arachnid perched across his hand and wrist.
          “Oh for the love of God, Sam – how can you let that hideous thing crawl on you?” returned a young female voice from the unlit darkness of the other side of a padlocked, solid metal door, blocking the only entrance to the room.
          The door – salvaged from a long abandoned apartment building located down the street within the same offensively insipid, economically depressed neighborhood – shed a reddish brown hue from eight years of uncontested surface rust. Like nearly any entrance door to almost any apartment a one-way eyehole had been mounted in it, through which the teenage girl spied with a bright green eye.
          “It’s bad enough that you even named it!” the teenager continued, not bothering with an effort to conceal her revulsion.
          Sam smiled without turning to the door. He wiped the reappearing mucous from under his nose with his closed hand.
          “If he’s so revolting to you, then why do you catch his meals for him?” Sam opened his hand to present the giant spider the cricket he held, and lifted the object of their discussion toward one of the bookshelf units with a slender arm. “Besides, beauty is in the eye of the beholder – isn’t it, sister?” He watched the creature scamper across the books, its prospective meal clamped securely within its huge pincers. “Did you ever think Jeff might think you’re hideous, too?”
          “Yeah, right. That nasty thing’s never even seen me,” his sister dismissed.
          Dropping his dark eyes to the concrete floor, the boy pulled his matted hair back from his pale face and over his shoulders before stepping down from the chair.
        “It’s a good thing he hasn’t seen you – you’d probably scare him to death!” Sam turned about and launched the insult at the door, exposing a teasing closed lips grin.
          The small, slender girl of eighteen years brushed her shoulder-length flaxen hair off her high cheekbones as a smile widened across her face – a smile which should have revealed wonderfully perfect white teeth behind her full lips, but for the absence of any light on her side of the door. Though the young woman was very much aware of her comely appearance, she remained unbridled by it.
          “Keep it up, baby brother, and I’ll break down this door and give you the fright of your life too!” she threatened, holding her smile.
          “Just seeing you break down this door would be more than frightening enough,” Sam replied in kind. “But I know you aren’t hideous at all. I still remember what you looked like when you were ten, Jenny. I always thought you were every bit as pretty as mom was.”
        Jenny dropped her flush face away from the door and lowered her slender hands, clutching the hem of her knee-length skirt. “I thought little brothers were supposed to tease their sisters, and make nasty and crude comments about their looks, not compliment them!”
          “Oh, well sorry then. Did I make you blush?” Sam needled, cocking his head to one side to cast a sly look at the rusted door.
          “Don’t flatter yourself,” Jenny denied, and lifted a slashing green eye back up to the eyehole. “You’re not that charming.”
          “Oh really? Then why’d you turn away?” Sam grinned large as he squared his stance to the door, raised his eyebrows and stared wide; the light above skimmed across his mischievous black eyes. “I could tell by the location of your voice, you know.”
          “Sam, I… I graduated this morning,” the eighteen-year-old steered the subject away from her brother’s jesting, as well as bringing up the topic of discussion she had descended into the pitch black of the basement stairwell to see her younger brother about. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. You know…what – what he’s going to do now.”
          The boy placed his long hands on his hips, soldered his eyes to the eyehole of the steel door and expelled a crass snort. “He’ll stagger through the door drunk, as he always does; and he’ll ogle you, as he always does; and he’ll stumble after you, as he always does; and he’ll pound on the bathroom door when you lock yourself away from him, as he always does; and he’ll finally pass out until morning, as he always does!” Sam glared at the door with unrestrained disgust. “Do you really think that will ever change?”
          Jenny dropped her head, recoiling away from her brother’s acidic depiction of the vile ordeal repeatedly acted out over the past several days, and slipped her face into the sanctum of her slender, open hands. The girl sighed softly, sadly, tears quickly overlaying her bright eyes.
          “He…he’s going to break through the bathroom door one of these times,” she whispered desperately; her body shivered from the thought of his yet unfulfilled designs toward it. “I’m so sorry, but if I tell anyone about you – about us, you know what he’ll do…Oh God! Sam, what am I supposed to do?”
          “This afternoon just stay in the bathroom and don’t come out, no matter what you hear and no matter what happens,” Sam instructed.
          The young woman held her breath, lifted her head and peered through the eyehole – taken aback not only by her brother’s response, but much more from the evenness of his voice.
          “I’ll talk to him when he gets home,” Sam stated, emphasizing his intent with a shrug of his slight shoulders.
          Jenny stiffened; her chest tightened. She held her narrowed green eye firm against the eyehole, frenetically searching her younger brother’s face for an indication of his much-too-often devilishly cruel humor. A failure to discern any such telltale sign triggered a sustained, turbulent shudder from the girl within the deep darkness of her side of the metal door.
          “You mustn’t talk to him! If he finds out you can talk, he’ll kill you!” Her voice quivered in cadence with her quaking body. “He’ll kill us both – Dear God, you know this!”
          “Yes, he will try to kill us, but he won’t,” the twelve-year-old assured her in a voice matching its former calmness.
          “Sam, he’s twice your size!” The trembling girl’s voice rose to a shrill pitch, edging precariously close to hysterical. “What chance do you think you have?”
          “Well for one, the big ape has a fraction of my intelligence. I helped you get through your Calculus, so stop talking to me like I’m some ordinary twelve-year-old child! You, of all people, know better,” admonished Sam. The tone of his voice remained composed, though a trenchant agitation surfaced from the depths of his black eyes. “You should be happy we both got our intelligence from mom, and not from him!”
          “Oh yeah – right! Well brother, just in case it slipped your brilliant mind, let me remind you that our mother left us eight years ago!” Jenny heatedly countered; the flooding memory of her mother’s unforgivable act extinguished the panic blazing through her mind. “So you will forgive me if I don’t necessarily consider anything from her as being good!”
          Sam winced, turning away. He closed his eyes tight; his shoulders slumped. “Yeah Jenny, I know. He told you she left us. Told you I was the reason for her leaving: ‘She couldn’t take having a little hell-brat for a son,’” reflected the boy in a hushed voice; Jenny strained to hear clearly. “Anyway, I know you have held that against me all these years and still you stayed here to take care of me. Jenny, she never left us. He killed her that day. The monster buried her under the concrete, in here with me.”
          Sam’s whispered revelation detonated horribly within the teenager’s mind. She staggered, twisting out of control, light-headed, disoriented. With a deep kettle-drum resonance she fell into the door, quickly imploding, her collapsed body abruptly contouring to the hard concrete of the floor. Jenny’s blonde-haired head snapped back from the impact, playing out the part a timpanist’s mallet to bang a second painfully sharp beat against the bottom of the metal door.
          “Are you okay?” Sam called out; but his sister remained silent, prone, belly-down as she stared into the spreading gray mist obstructing her view of the pitch black further beyond.
          Paralyzed in her hopelessness and unable to will herself up from the cold concrete of the stairwell, Jenny’s quick breaths, interrupted by her intermittent sobs, were the only sounds within the basement as she tried to avoid hyperventilating. The teenage girl’s desperate hope for a time – a time when her mother would one day return for them – dissipated in ever-increasing ripples into the distant periphery of the swirling gray-on-black before her empty, unblinking eyes.
          Sam dropped to the floor and leaned his back against his side of the rusted door, stretching out his long skinny legs on the dirty floor before him. He drew in a deep breath and held it captive for a thought effecting moment, finally emancipating the air into the atmosphere of his bleak, subsistent terrarium.
          “I’m so sorry, Jenny. You had just left an hour before on vacation to Great-Uncle Sal’s when he went berserk and strangled mom right in front me – he’s been that drunk demented troll ever since! Now you have your answer to the one question I never answered for you, after I was able to hear and speak.” Sam’s melancholy laden face listed as he spoke. “Yes, Jenny, that’s why he locked me in here. That’s why I never speak when he’s home. He would let me rot away rather than trouble himself with killing what he still believes to be a deaf-mute. Even more he is terrified of me, though long ago he hid the reason for this fear with his drinking. My God, Jenny, the monster buried her body in here with his four-year-old son! Eight years is long enough. His day has come to pay for it.”
          Jenny rolled from her belly to her side. She brushed her blonde hair back from her fevered face, and rubbed her tear-filled eyes to clear the lingering gray impairing her sight of the surrounding absolute darkness – of the desolate emptiness – of the hopeless nothingness now remaining for her on her side of the door. She collected herself, pushed her body up to a seated position and pressed her skirt over her slender thighs. Jenny remained silent as she tried to grasp not only all Sam had revealed to her, but just who – just what her younger brother really was!
          For the first seven and a half of the eight years he lived on, locked away in the room, the boy had remained as deaf and mute as the day he was born. Sam never initiated communication, though he would turn his head from his laptop computer or from one of the thousands of their mother’s books he always seemed to be reading, and gaze at the door with those disquieting black eyes whenever she spied on him through the eyehole. By some disturbing means, the young deaf-mute always knew when she was in the darkness beyond the obstructive door.
          Jenny deeply felt Sam knew as well of her fear of him – somehow he knew an incident at church, though eight years past, remained vividly tattooed on her memory. She frequently recalled the terrifying confrontation between her four-year-old brother and a newly ordained priest – a confrontation so horrific it led to the boy’s anathematization – and too often she still distressed over the cleric, pondering whether he had ever recovered from his complete and utter collapse.
          Yes, she was certain Sam sensed her overwhelming dread of him from that day forward. Likewise, she was absolutely sure her brother knew that not once in eight years had she given any thought to telling anyone about him, regardless of the considered consequences!
          “Sam, what was it that – that made you first speak to me? I mean, after all these years…My God, you really scared me!” Jenny spoke softly, hesitantly from where she sat on the basement floor, her back supported against the chilling metal opposite her brother. “I thought you were…well, possessed or something.”
          She had been much too fearful of Sam to have asked him before. Now, though no less afraid was she of what his response would be, her anxiety over what was going to happen to them compelled her to reluctantly seek the answer.
          “Do you remember the week leading up to that day, when I was so sick I couldn’t move from my cot?” Sam rekindled her memory. He leaned forward from his side of the door, untied the loose knot of his left tennis shoe and proceeded to retie the lace.
          “Yes, Sam, of course I remember. That last night was Christmas Eve. You didn’t move the whole day. Sam, I…I thought you had died!” Jenny answered in a voice echoing both the anguish and unbearable guilt she had felt; she flinched from the troubling recollection. “Oh God…My God, I got on my knees and begged him to unlock this door! I’m so sorry, Sam, but – but he just smiled, put on his coat and left, damn it…damn him!”
          “Make no mistake about it, Jenny. I was meant to die. I should have died,” Sam adjudged, followed with an imperceptible sigh. “I heard your voice for the very first time, though I had no idea it was you. Did I ever tell you I thought I had been listening to an angel praying for me?”
          Sam’s brow furrowed in quick puzzlement. He lifted his face up to the ceiling of the basement, reflecting for a brief moment; lowered his eyes back to the basement floor and continued, “Well, anyway, I heard you pray for me. I was allowed to return, though I returned with a terrible awakening. I got up and walked to the door –”
          “And you thanked me, told me you loved me and that everything was going to be alright,” Jenny softly completed. She remembered the tenfold increase in her fear of Sam that day when he first spoke – a fear that had diminished very little, even five months later.
          As bewildered as Jenny was, she understood with a defining absoluteness: whatever had re-entered this world was much more than her already unsettling twelve-year-old brother. From that moment the young woman felt an ever-present current surging through her, churning out from the very core of her soul.
          “Jenny, it was you who prevented my death – you caused my return…oh my God! What ever made you do it? Why the hell did you have to pray for me?” Sam lashed out with a shocking desperation exhumed from an unfathomable, subconscious sepulcher within. He dropped his tormented face into his open hands. “Why couldn’t you trust your feelings about me and just let me die?”
          Because it was my fault you almost died! Jenny silently, harshly accused herself; admonishing herself for her self-perceived cowardice and unable to forgive herself for never telling anyone about her brother’s horrible, inhumane existence!
          “I’m so sorry, Jenny! I’m…I’m sorry I just said that. It really meant a lot for you to pray for me, even fearing me as you do. But you wouldn’t have done it if you’d known that you –” Sam jerked his head away, as if he were diverting his eyes from the hypnotic affect of a car’s oncoming headlights. He shook his head, dispersing the unspoken thought before swerving to a less troubling response: “I’ve brought to this world a fate it isn’t prepared to deal with, Jenny.”
          Sam stood up and drew a breath, letting it go in a sustained, tranquilizing release. He leaned over, stretched his long willowy legs and slapped the dirt from his jeans. Making his way across the room the boy sat in the chair at the desk and pulled a laptop computer out of the drawer, placing it on the top surface.
          “I got the laptop to work, the one you dropped down the clothes chute yesterday. I switched out the hard-drive with the old one. Next time, how about warning me ahead of time so I can catch it,” he teased, turning the computer on. “But really, thanks Jenny. I never could get that other laptop to power up again. I suppose I could thank him for leaving the internet connection down here, though I know the imbecile just forgot about it.”
          The boy splayed his fingers and proceeded to type on the keyboard. “By the way, I hacked in and found out he does a lot of money laundering for Great-Uncle Sal…oh, and should I bother asking how you got these computers for me?”
          “No, don’t bother asking,” Jenny softly deflected. She stood up, brushed the dirt off her skirt, reached a slender hand up and wiped away the few tears that had yet to dry on her flush cheeks. “Sam, I have to get back upstairs. He’ll be home anytime.”
          “Okay.” Sam turned his head to the door. “I’ll be up soon.”
          A startling, pitiless smile spread across the boy’s face as his black irises clouded over to become impossibly blacker, opaque, severely eclipsing the very light of the room – a sight mercifully not witnessed by the distressed young woman lightly ascending the basement steps.

          As Jenny gained the top landing and opened the basement door into the kitchen, she heard a disengaging click of the lock to the door on the other side of the room. The girl pushed the basement door shut just as a heavyset, middle-aged man stumbled into the kitchen from the garage, ravishing the teenager with a vulgar, inebriated glare.
          “You’ve been down there with that thing, haven’t you?” he growled as he advanced, his hot breath permeating the small room with a stench of alcohol.
          Jenny reacted, turning to run – not quick enough.
          The man charged across the room, engaged her shoulders with two thick hands and expulsed all air from her lungs with a slam of her back against the kitchen wall. He smiled depravedly, lifted her from the floor and pressed his stimulated body against her, forcing her skirt up and her legs apart as he pinned her to the wall with his fat abdomen.
          “You little sneak – you’ve been spying on that hell-brat brother of yours, haven’t you?” he drunkenly spewed. His inadvertent spittle desecrated Jenny’s face as she pushed against his large chest with her slender arms, struggling frantically to escape his groping, defiling hands.
          “Why don’t you come down here and see me for yourself, you fat troll!” Sam’s contemptuous challenge whelmed forth from the basement and burst through the door, stunning the man rigid. “Or do you still tremble before what you locked away?”
          The man leaned back; Jenny slid down enough for her feet to reach the floor. He loosened his perverted clutch and she twisted, breaking away, a staccato tap dance sounded across the linoleum floor from a shower of buttons torn from her blouse. As the girl ran out of the kitchen and down the hall, the huge man stood silent, stricken, staring at the basement door.
          Hearing a door slam shut, the man turned to the hallway. “That bathroom won’t be your haven anymore, Princess! We’ll finally have our time together, soon enough…right after I take care of your devil spawned brother!”
          The large man made his way down the hallway, staggering to a halt. He opened a closet door alongside the bathroom where Jenny sobbed uncontrollably behind the locked door. With a drunken, perverse smile he reached in the closet, pulled out an aluminum softball bat and banged it against the bathroom door.
          “Go away!” the teenage girl screamed the only response she could manage from within her rapidly deteriorating internal defenses.
          Sneering, the man turned and walked unevenly down the hall and back into the kitchen. He drew a deep anticipatory breath before pulling the basement door open, closing it behind him as he stepped through onto the landing.
          Slowly, deliberately, the large man stomped pugnaciously on each step as he descended into the pitch dark basement, hitting the bat several times into the palm of his hand with subsequent muffled thuds. Reaching the bottom of the basement stairs he stumbled, caught his balance, stood in the black for a moment before concentrating on the next several steps through the darkness – muttering a curse as his fleshy nose met up with the heavy metal door.
          Reaching down his shirt, he lifted over his fat head a thick silver necklace with a single key fastened to it. The man felt along the door with his hand, extended the key toward the padlock he found on a large hasp; pulled his beefy hand back with indecision and stepped up to the door.
          Lowering his shaved head he pushed his fat, unshaven face against the metal and spied through the eyehole into the room. With the bright light on the ceiling joist off, the dim bulb of the small lamp – on the corner desk, positioned between the two massive bookshelves – illustrated a shadowy preface.
          “Good afternoon, fat ogre. It’s been a long time since your face has been pressed against that door. A nice day to meet the master of your Hell-bound soul, don’t you think?” the question flowed in a much too pleasant demeanor for its content.
          The big man’s ire-raised eye darted around the shadow entangled room, his range of vision severely limited by the eyehole.
          “So, you’re going to kill me?” An engaging grin took up position across his face – a grin that, but for the pitch black, would have glaringly displayed eight years of neglect of his broken, yellow-stained teeth. “What happened to thou shall not kill, and honor your father?”
          “Ah yes, you quoting scripture – there’s some irony for you!” Sam noted amusingly, remaining out of view of the man. “But really, you said I was never your son anyway. You even accused your wife of sleeping with the devil and conceiving me. You do remember saying that, don’t you? I remember it. I read it on your lips as you strangled her.”
          “Damn you! Don’t lay that one on me, devil spawn! We both know what happened that day – you killed her!” the large man ferociously accused. His body quaked with both uncontrollable rage and abject fear as the long dammed-up memories of the fateful day deluged his mind. “You were the one who drove me to do it with those black devil eyes of yours… you forced me to do it!”
          No reply.
          The basement remained fettered within its pressing, fell silence for several moments, save for the deep panting of the drunken man as he leaned heavily against the door, still searching through the eyehole for the boy.
          “So, hell-brat – if you do kill me, then what? What do you think you and your sister are going to do to survive out here in the world?” the quickly composed man taunted, before unleashing a depraved laugh spawned from a despicable thought: “I know, maybe she can prostitute herself out! A pretty little thing like her could make a fortune!”
          Two large and glowering eyes flashed before the eyehole –  astonishingly savage, grappling, scorching – their irises, as black lightening out of surrounding white storm clouds, bolted through the man’s own eye and coursed deep into his brain.
          A vivid vision of a blue tipped, orange-yellow-white fire voraciously feeding on his flesh instantly incinerated the heavyset man’s command of his consciousness. Flinching and flailing about, he let out a short, startled yell. The large man stumbled back from the door and dropped unimpeded onto his back, writhing violently, silently in excruciating pain. The fiery vision slowly dissipated after a minute; the man remained prone on the concrete floor for a moment, his face contorting hideously from the rage boiling inside of him.
          Exploding up from the floor with an unnatural agility for his large girth, he unlocked the padlock with the key he still held tight and wrenched the door open, slamming it into the cinder block wall with an echoing sledge-to-anvil timbre. Reaching a hand down and feeling around the floor, the man grasped the softball bat, scraping the aluminum across the concrete as he lifted it from the floor. He charged the room, letting out a sustained bestial howl.
          The lamp on the desk was off, leaving the contents of the basement concealed in pitch darkness. With his fury reigning in its totality the man did not hesitate as he staggered across the room in his berserk and inebriated state, swinging the bat with blinded savagery.
          “I got something…for you…little hell-brat!” the crazed man yelled out between heaving gasps, sadistically frustrated he had yet to feel his bat connect with the boy. “Show yourself and I’ll…introduce those…devil eyes of yours…to my bat!”
          “A bat out of hell, no doubt,” ridiculed a quiet voice out of the darkness somewhere above the man.
          As the man raised his arms to swing, a creaking noise terrorized the room before it was abruptly dispatched by a deafening crash – followed instantly by a similar creaking preceding an equally loud, clamorous dissonance. The big man, knocked violently to the floor, found himself pinned on his back under an unmovable weight. He moaned loudly in the pitch black in attempt to diffuse some of the agonizing pain racking his entire body.
          A bright light came on. From a ceiling joist high above Sam stared down with his black eyes, the cruel firestorms having receded from their irises. Clinging to the beam, using his gangling legs and one of his long slender hands with an arachnid-like adeptness, the boy finished screwing the bulb into the fixture over the washer and dryer with his free hand.
          “You’re in real bad shape. I’m quite sure your neck is broken. From all the blood coming out of your mouth you must have a lot of internal bleeding too,” Sam surmised, performing the diagnosis from his vantage overhead. “My guess is you have just a few minutes to live. If you wish to repent then I suggest you do so quickly, though I really doubt it will help now.”
          “Go… to… Hell!” the man expelled between labored gasps. A deep scarlet liquid sprayed from his mouth as he spoke, splattering across the books strewn about his head.
          The two huge bookshelves, fallen and pressing heavily on him, had cracked and splintered in several places. Still they held together to present a masterful testament to the craftsman who built them, though this alternative use was certainly not considered during their construction. Two bed sheets, tied to the top of each bookshelf, lay in a heap across the large man’s crushed body – where Sam had dropped them.
          “Go to Hell? No, I don’t believe I’ll take you up on that,” declined Sam with a straight smile. He swung his legs downward, lighting on the floor near the man’s head. “As you are so fond of pointing out, I’m all too familiar with his domain. It’s not a place I would wish on anyone, even you! Nonetheless, we both know which of us stands before those gates this time around, waiting for them to swing open.”
          Sam squatted down and leaned forward, staring into the man’s feral eyes.
          “Who…are… you?” The man forced the words out; blood quickly filled his mouth.
          The boy held his stare, probing deep into the man’s eyes from his crouched position. He shrugged his shoulders.
          “Good question. Truth is, I don’t really know. Those memories don’t exist, except for momentary images – a flash now and then. All I know is that I am Sam. Mom once told me I was named for an angel, though I think she was playing with me.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Anyway, you should really be more concerned with what I am. You now realize you locked me away not altogether because of what I had witnessed, but because you fear me. Oh yes! You, along with the rest of this world, definitely should fear me now. ‘Hell-brat’ and ‘devil spawn’ you call me, but you fall well short of the mark with both. I was spared death and in its stead I have been ordained a destiny far more terrible.” The boy let slip a wicked smile, followed with a wicked suggestion: “When you meet, you can ask the master of your soul what I am. He knows.”
          Sam raised his eyebrows, widening his eyes as a self-admiring thought entered his mind. “By the way, I embezzled fifteen million from Great-Uncle Sal’s offshore accounts this afternoon. I hacked into your computer and discovered you did a lot of his money laundering. The Carmen brothers will pay you a visit in a day or so, though it won’t matter to you by then. Just wanted to make sure Jenny was well looked after…you know, not scratching out a living as a prostitute.”
          The large man stared menacingly up at Sam and tried to verbalize a response, but the blood filling his throat and mouth allowed only a gargling, indistinguishable slur.
          A large object shifted next to the man’s head, catching his attention. He adjusted both eyes to observe the brown, many legged creature standing next to a leathery skin-covered human skull with strands of straw colored hair still attached to it, set near the rest of the mummified corpse Sam had dug up from beneath the basement floor. In spite of his paralysis the dying man tried in vain to move his head away from the giant spider as it inched its plum-sized body closer. He watched as two great fangs opened in front of one of his wide, horrified eyes.
          “That’s mom. Eight years under the concrete has changed her appearance considerably, so I thought you might not recognize her. Oh, and you haven’t met him yet…I named him Jeff,” Sam made the introduction as he stood up. He turned around, walking away just as two huge, powerful fangs thrust forward and closed quicker than a blink of an eye.
          A piercing, gurgled scream echoed throughout the basement, reaching up to the aboveground levels of the house.

          Jenny reined in her hysteria upon both hearing and feeling the two crashes reverberate from the basement. The walls of the bathroom had shaken violently; some of the plaster had broken free from the ceiling, falling on the teenager as she lay curled up tight. All had remained oppressively still for several minutes before an agonizing scream had jolted her off the floor, terror maniacally surging through her. Jenny, unable to distinguish from whom the horrible sound was forced, had harmonized with a high pitch scream of her own.
          Now she remained silent and motionless with her ear pressed against the bathroom door, listening carefully, though she gave no thought of her own as to what exactly she was listening for, or what exactly she would do…could do! But Jenny desperately clung to Sam’s simple instructions: “Stay in the bathroom, no matter what you hear and no matter what happens”. This she certainly knew how to do – this, she proved time and again, she definitely could do! Yes, this she trustingly would do.
          Hearing footsteps on the basement stairs, followed by an injured caterwaul from the bottom hinge of the basement door as it swung open, the small and slender eighteen-year-old backed away from the bathroom door, trembling. She dropped to the floor and curled up fetal-like, eyes closed hard. Jenny let out a soft, short whimper. The teenager listened to the footsteps slowly, surgically progress down the hall before ceasing with an incising finality; the sustained silence anesthetized the young woman, hindering her ability to exhale for several prolonged seconds.
          “Just like a girl to spend so much time in the bathroom! If you’re almost done in there, I really need to get cleaned up.”
          Unleashing a piercing squeal, Jenny jumped up from the floor and unlocked the bathroom door, yanking it open. Lunging forward she ensnared her brother and squeezed his slight frame, managing to compress a moan out of him with her slender arms.
          “Jenny, please, let me get cleaned up!” groaned Sam; he squirmed to escape her constricting grasp. “We have to get going.”
          “Get going? Where are we going, Sam?” The slender girl loosened her hug just a little, leaned back and looked into his dark eyes. She let out a startled gasp.
          With the bright light of the late afternoon sun streaming through the bathroom window and attaching to the boy’s lacteal face, Jenny discovered Sam’s eyes were not black after all – but radiated the stunningly deep cobalt blue she now recalled from their youth.
          “Let go, Jenny! We need to catch the bus to the airport. I got tickets for us on the internet under Knight, mom’s maiden name. Our flight leaves in three hours, and –”
          “Wait a minute, Sam! I don’t know what you’re talking about! I don’t have a single dollar in my bank account right now,” Jenny interrupted, taken aback by her brother’s apparent naiveté of their situation. Most of the money her great-uncle had routinely given her she had used to secretly provide for the boy the last eight years; the remainder was used to purchase her brother another laptop computer. “I’m going to call Uncle Sal –”
          “No, no – no, don’t call him! That is definitely not a good idea right now! Oh, and you’re right. You don’t have a dollar in your checking account, Jenny, you have thirty-thousand. I put the rest of fifteen million in a hundred and two offshore accounts that I set up for you,” disclosed Sam with a sympathetic smile, observing the utterly confused expression on Jenny’s face. “I guess I should’ve told you first. Thanks to…um… an advance on your inheritance from our Great-Uncle Sal, you’re a multi-millionaire.”
          “What…what are you saying…Sam…how…” stuttered Jenny, staring into her brother’s pale face.
          “Nope, don’t even bother asking,” Sam deflected, a flurry of sunlight diffused off his midnight blue eyes. “I’ll explain later. Now let me get cleaned up. We don’t have much time before this house blows up.”
          “Sam? My God, what did you do?” Jenny cried out; her bright green eyes widened as his comment brought to her attention a strong, distinctly gaseous odor.
          Catching a glimpse from the corner of her eye of an object moving in the hall, Jenny shifted her wide-eyed gaze to the floor. She screamed as she watched the great wolf spider jitterbug toward her – a partially consumed, though still recognizable eye held in its huge pincers.