Crackpot Palace (33 page)

By the time Kaufmann had wiped the web from his eyes, Daddy was gone, the distraught mother above had spotted the inspector and was yelling for his assistance, and behind him, Mrs. Frey, pocketbook on her wrist, the candelabra in her right hand, the blackjack in her left, shuffled inexorably closer. The inspector dropped the gun and ran away.

Daddy sat atop the smokestack of the abandoned Harris Electric Loom Mill, nursing the wound to his leg where the bullet had grazed his calf. The spider in his head unhooked the strings that sent pain, and then nestled back into the center of things, half high from the effects of the rich essence of youth. His imagination took off and he plucked the silver strands, composing as he played, spinning a web of an idea. “Herd them,” Daddy said in a voice that cracked and clicked. The spare scattered pattern of the lights of Grindly required design.

Exhausted from running, Inspector Kaufmann leaned against the coral facade at the entrance to Grindly Station. His own thoughts were as scattered as Daddy's were inspired. Against what would have normally been his better judgment, he chose to believe that for some reason the train would, that night, stop at the platform and take him aboard. He hurried on so as not to miss it. His quick footsteps echoed across the wide rotunda and he passed through another set of doors into the dome that held the station platform. He was surprised to find himself the only passenger.

Kaufmann cupped his hand behind his ear and cocked his head toward the track in order to check for vibrations of the coming train. He thought he felt the merest rumble deep in his chest. After listening for a long time, all he really heard was the sound of water dripping. It interfered with the anticipation of escape. Then he realized it wasn't water dripping, but more a tapping. It stopped and then started again. He looked up at the inner dome and froze.

In an eyeblink, Daddy leaped down on a forty-foot thread of web and stood before Kaufmann. Mandibles clicked together and Daddy did a bad job of hiding the drool. From some forgotten byway of his brain, the inspector's years of experience on the streets of Grindly engaged. He made a fist and swung with everything he had. The punch hit the mark, cracking the left lens of Daddy's rose-colored glasses and sending him stumbling backward a few feet. The inspector didn't know whether to flee or continue to attack, and in the empty moment of his indecision, he definitely heard the train coming.

He made a move toward Daddy with fists in the air, but his nemesis twirled with insect precision and speed and clipped Kaufmann under the chin with a foot that struck like the tip of a bullwhip. The inspector was almost brought to his knees by the blow, but instead of going down he righted himself and backed off. Blood trickled from the side of his mouth. The train was louder now, and a faint light could be seen filling the tunnel. He looked down and saw that the backs of his heels were off the edge of the platform. He put his fists up and kept them moving.

When Daddy took one long-legged step to the left, Kaufmann saw salvation. The roar of the approaching train filled the tunnel and set the entire platform vibrating so that it was impossible to hear the squish of Mrs. Frey's galoshes. She inched up upon Daddy from behind, the candelabra glimmering, the blackjack waggling in her grip. Kaufmann threw a flurry of jabs to distract the arachnid, and the old woman lifted the leather club as high as she could. The locomotive entered the station but didn't slow.

In the reflection of rushing windows, Daddy detected treachery. He spun in a blur, his mandibles severing Mrs. Frey's neck with a swift clip, like cutting a rose. From the hole in his trousers, he shot a blast of web at Kaufmann. It happened so quickly that the inspector could only stand motionless as the strand of sticky thread wrapped twice around his neck. The web's long tail was pulled in by the rush of the passing train and affixed itself to the handle on the back door of the caboose. Kaufmann was jerked off the platform by the neck, and flew behind the train. The last thing he saw in Grindly was the mosaic face of God. Mrs. Frey's head hit the platform then and spat.

The next evening, in an abandoned warehouse by the docks, Daddy stood in total darkness, emitting high-pitched squeals that called all the natural spiders of Grindly to him. When he felt their delicate heaving presence surrounding him, he clicked and
blzz'
d out his plan. He gave instruction on rethreading the human brain. He spoke of the ear and the path to take, warning of cul-de-sacs. “A quarter pound of fly meat for every human restrung,” he promised. Spirits were high, but, later, when they returned to him for payment, he gleefully crushed them beneath his slippers.

By the time he got done with Grindly, the city shone and ran like one of Tharshmon's pocket watches. Everything moved as if to music. It became for Daddy a web of human thread. “Purpose without a point,” he often reminded his human electorate, and they tacitly nodded. He continued to feed at night, roaming the rooftops and alleyways, leaving old luggage indiscriminately in his wake. People showed him smiles during the day, but, still, no one wanted to meet him in the dark. The reconfiguration of their brain patterns didn't eliminate terror, only their ability to react to it. “Fear and Industry” was Daddy's motto and it took him far.

After the train was again making scheduled stops at the station, Daddy boarded with a ticket to the capital one evening. He never returned to Grindly, but instead bit into the larger politics of the Realm and kept eating in a spiral pattern until he reached the center of everything. There, he made himself a nest.

A Note About “Daddy Longlegs of the Evening”

I stole the title for this story from the title of the Salvador Dalí painting,
Daddy Longlegs of the Evening—Hope!
I'd gone to a Dalí retrospective some years ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was a great show. They really had the goods, and it was all topped off in a dark last room by Dalí's hologram of Alice Cooper. Dalí's
Daddy
painting is one of those melt jobs, with weird figures draped on tree branches and ants crawling all over. A cool painting. But in the same show there was a drawing he had done, which I'm afraid I've never been able to find again in order to corroborate the title, of a guy with long, long legs, running. He's wearing a tall hat and maybe a scarf. Unless I'm just making this up in my mind, I think the figure was also wearing circular glasses. Seeing this image and thinking about the title of the painting gave rise to the idea of my Daddy—a boy transformed into a spidery monster. Once the image of my character came to mind, it morphed in my imagination into a figure from the old Fleischer brothers cartoons (Betty Boop, Coco the Clown, etc.) where the entire world could, at the drop of a dime, come to anthropomorphic life. One of the best compliments I've gotten as a fiction writer came from reading this story for the MFA students at the Stone Coast Writing program in Maine. Jim Kelly told me that one of his students, after hearing the reading, asked him—“Is he allowed to do that?”

Permissions

“Introduction” by Jeffrey Ford. Copyright © 2012 by Jeffrey Ford.

“Polka Dots and Moonbeams” first published in
Stories: All-new Tales
. Copyright © 2010 by Jeffrey Ford.

“Down Atsion Road” first published in
Haunted Legends
. Copyright © 2010 by Jeffrey Ford.

“Sit the Dead” first published in
Teeth: Vampire Tales
. Copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey Ford.

“The Seventh Expression of the Robot General” first published in
Eclipse Two
. Copyright © 2008 by Jeffrey Ford.

“86 Deathdick Road” first published in
The Book of Dreams
. Copyright © 2010 by Jeffrey Ford.

“After Moreau” first published in
Clarkesworld Magazine
. Copyright © 2008 by Jeffrey Ford.

“The Hag's Peak Affair” first published in
Portents
. Copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey Ford.

“The Coral Heart” first published in
Eclipse Three
. Copyright © 2009 by Jeffrey Ford.

“The Double of My Double Is Not My Double” first published in
Eclipse Four
. Copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey Ford.

“Daltharee” first published in
The Del Rey Book of Fantasy and Science Fiction
. Copyright © 2008 by Jeffrey Ford.

“Ganesha” first published in
The Beastly Bride
. Copyright © 2010 by Jeffrey Ford.

“The Dream of Reason” first published in
Extraordinary Engines
. Copyright © 2008 by Jeffrey Ford.

“Every Richie There Is” first published in
Puerto Del Sol
. Copyright © 1993 by Jeffrey Ford.

“The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” first published in
Interfictions 2
. Copyright © 2009 by Jeffrey Ford.

“Relic” first published in
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities
. Copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey Ford.

“Glass Eels” first published in
New Jersey Noir
. Copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey Ford.

“The Wish Head” copyright © 2012 by Jeffrey Ford.

“Weiroot” first published in
Weird Tales
. Copyright © 2009 by Jeffrey Ford.

“Dr. Lash Remembers” first published in
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded
. Copyright © 2010 by Jeffrey Ford.

“Daddy Long Legs of the Evening” first published in
Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy
. Copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey Ford.

About the Author

JEFFREY FORD is the author of three previous story collections and eight previous novels, including the Edgar
®
Award–winning
The Girl in the Glass
and the Shirley Jackson Award–winning
The Shadow Year
. A former professor of writing and early American literature, Ford now writes full-time in Ohio, where he lives with his wife. You can follow him on LiveJournal at jeffford2010.livejournal.com or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/JeffreyFord888.

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Praise for Jeffrey Ford

“[Ford's] writing is both powerful and disturbing in the best possible way.”

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“Jeffrey Ford is one of the few writers who uses wonder instead of ink in his pen. Some writers, if they are very good, have a reader going ‘Oh!' every few pages for one reason or another. It is a rare and wonderful talent, and Ford has it in spades.”

—Jonathan Carroll, author of
The Wooden Sea

“His fiction shares the visual clarity and precision of Roald Dahl's work, but without the ugliness of Dahl's inventions. . . . Ford's sentimental, exalted prose demands more than one reading.”

—
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—
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Praise for THE SHADOW YEAR

“
The Shadow Year
takes the shape of a mystery (who is Mr. White, and what is he up to?), but it also has supernatural elements (especially Mary/Mickey's ability to influence actual events by moving around those clay figures in the basement), while at the same time it scrutinizes its pivotal family with almost sociological rigor. . . . Doomed though it may be, Botch Town is one of the most enthralling places I've visited in a long time.”

—
Washington Post Book World

“Ford keeps the reader turning pages at a rapid pace, trying to separate event from illusion as three kids with an absent father and a mother whose heart is permanently out to lunch come to grips with the enemy. Better yet, he finishes off
The Shadow Year
with a surprise you won't likely see coming. And to make a good book even better, the real drama is seeing how kids whose parents are too preoccupied to notice can survive—and triumph.”

—
Chicago Sun-Times

“
The Shadow Year
captures the totality of a lived period, its actualities and its dreams, its mundane essentials and its odd subjective imperatives; it is a work of episodic beauty and mercurial significance.”

—Nick Gevers,
Locus

“Surreal, unsettling, and more than a little weird. Ford has a rare gift for evoking mood with just a few well-chosen words and for creating living, breathing characters with only a few lines of dialogue.”

—
Booklist

“Spooky and hypnotic. . . . Recommended for all public libraries.”

—
Library Journal

“Put Jeffrey Ford's latest novel, a Long Island bildungsroman replete with marvels and monsters, on the shelf with Harper Lee, Lynda Barry, Ray Bradbury, Tobias Wolff.
The Shadow Year
is the kind of magic trick writers dream of being able to pull off—Ford evokes the mysteries, the inhabitants, the landscape of childhood briskly, unsentimentally, and with such power that you come away feeling as if someone has opened up a door to another world.”

—Kelly Link, author of
Stranger Things Happen
and
Magic for Beginners

“Properly creepy, but from time to time deliciously funny and heart-breakingly poignant, too. For those of you—and you know who you are—who think the indispensable element for good genre fiction is good writing, this is not to be missed.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Ford travels deep into the wild country that is childhood in this novel . . . the observations and adventures of these sharp, wayward children provide more than enough depth to be satisfying.”

—
New York Times

“Children are the original magic realists. The effects that novelists of a postmodern bent must strive for come naturally to the young, a truth given inventive realization in this wonderful quasi-mystery tale by Jeffrey Ford.”

—
Boston Globe

“[T]he setup is perfect for the bleached-out nostalgia [Ford] does best: suburban malaise hiding unspeakable darkness. . . . Setting has always played a central role in Ford's work, and he clearly knows this yellowed glimpse of Long Island very well—the streets, the trees, the frozen lakes all bear the imprimatur of reality. That's what keeps you turning pages.”

—
Los Angeles Times

Praise for THE DROWNED LIFE

“
The Drowned Life
raises a banner to salute the power of the imagination. . . . As wildly different as these stories are, they show us one thing: The imagination should be nurtured, allowed to run into its darkest corners and up to its brightest peaks. Or maybe, it just needs to stretch for a spell, under a tree in the backyard.”

—
Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Unusual and provocative . . . sometimes shocking, sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes humorous, this collection will please fans of Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor. Recommended.”

—
School Library Journal

“A collection of surreal, melancholy stories dealing with everything from worlds of the drifting dead to drunken tree parties. Ford is the author of the superlative, creepy Well-Built City trilogy and his writing is both powerful and disturbing in the best possible way.”

—Gawker

“The 16 stories in this collection are a perfect introduction to Ford's work and illustrate the vast range of his imagination. . . . If you haven't discovered Ford, it's time you did. His carefully crafted novels and short stories are all top-notch. Grade: A.”

—
Rocky Mountain News