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I STOP THErecording and turn the phone off, not yet willing to break the silence the whispers have left in their wake. “She’s still in here. Grace,” Becca says. “She’s still trying to find someone to leave with her, because I wouldn’t. She’s dangerous.”
“What do we do? How do we fight that spider? How do we fight Grace?”
Becca shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t—”
I touch her arm, stopping her. “We’ll figure it out,” I promise. “You said you needed to get your things. Let’s get them, and find the others, and figure it out from there.”
She crosses to the corner, where the shadows have concealed a black backpack. The one she vanished with. She opens it and pulls things out. There’s a phone, probably long dead, and a flashlight, which she tests pressed against her palm so her skin takes on a glow but the light spills no farther. She puts everything back in the bag and settles it over one shoulder.
And then we hear the scream.
It seems to live in the walls. As if it is not echoing down thehallways but has been consumed by the thing that holds us, the walls themselves vibrating out the sound. The moment splits us in two, our instincts sending us arrowing in different directions before we correct—Becca away from the sound, survival the only truth in her blood, and me toward it. We stop steps from each other. Our eyes meet.
There are moments when the world realigns itself. The words for it are too grand—revelation, epiphany. This moment is more subtle. Pieces that fit one way find a new arrangement. Becca bends her course. She follows me.
We race toward the scream. We are not the only things drawn to it. We hear the clattering, the skittering, deep somewhere behind us, and the echoing clip of swift and steady footsteps. Everything that hungers hears prey.
But we’re closer. We nearly crash into them—Trina, Mel, Jeremy, Anthony.Where’s Kyle?I think, and then the spider-thing comes around the corner, too. There’s no time for stillness or silence. Too late for that. No time for reunions, either, and the skittering and singing behind us says there’s no place to run. Not down the halls.
The doors, maybe. I lunge for the nearest. We rush and tumble through. I try to slam it shut, but a leg stabs through, pierces the floorboards at my feet. I shriek and stumble. Someone catches me, hauls me upright—Anthony, face pale in the dark. Another door on the far side gives us an exit, but only the narrowness of the doorways is keeping us ahead of the creature.
“Scatter,” Becca says. “Find a place to hide.”
“No,” I say. There it is again: that shift, things fitting in a new way. She listens. “You said it hates the light. The woman—”
We can hear her steps. The faintest clamor of bells.
“We can lure them together,” Mel says. “I know how.”
No time for more than that. We closed the second door behind us, but the skittering drawing near says the spider has a fix on us—or its friend found us. Either way, we need to move.
Mel points. Four of us move, unthinking, to obey. Becca trails. Trina’s limping—ankle twisted. Jeremy gets a shoulder under her arm, helps her along. We shuttle left-left-right-straight-left, Mel tapping her fingertips against her thumb.
The skittering, the footsteps—they’re coming from opposite directions now. And they’re close.
“Hide,” I say. Through one last door, not quite closed behind us. We’ve dropped into stillness, though none so still as Becca, who stands apart from the rest, watching us with her head cocked to the side a little.
The spider—the pale one—stalks down the hall. The woman comes in the opposite direction, swift and angry. The light sweeps along with her. The spider rushes into it.
Through the narrow crack of the door, I can’t make out much. The woman makes that horrible shrieking sound. The spider screams. The hands in its chest scrabble at the ribs that cage them, and it rears back, blade-like legs slashing down.
Becca reaches past me. She puts her palm against the door and shuts it. Shakes her head. “Don’t look,” she says. “It’s safer not to look.”
She waits, then opens the door again. An empty hallway, the sound of inhuman screaming far away. She slips across the hall, and we follow. This door she leaves cracked. She turns. “You’re lucky. That shouldn’t have worked,” she says. She looks at the others. “What happened to you guys?”
“Grace,” Mel says, and Becca nods, as if unsurprised.
“Becca,” Anthony says. “Is it—are you really...?”
“I’m me,” she says, smiling, face softening in a way it didn’t for me. “I’m alive.” And then she steps forward and kisses him.
I don’t want to tell you about what I feel in that moment, the jealousy that steals over me—the anger that she would go to him when she could hardly look at me. I don’t want to tell you about the kiss, either, the way her hands creep up behind his neck, the way his run up her back as if he has to feel the curve of it to believe she is real.
So I will tell you instead about the way her weight settles back, her heels lowering to the floor again, and the way that the simple movement brings her back to her center of gravity and bringsBeccaback. It’s as if she began waking up when she saved me and is finished now, free of the unceasing dream she has been trapped in for months.
I will not tell you about how I feel my ribs are twigs, snapping one by one, but instead about the way he leans his forehead against hers and lets out a sigh like he’s been holding his breath for a year.
“I told you that you shouldn’t have gone off with him,” Anthony says.
