Spider’s Cage
J
IM
N
ISBET
âN
OVELSâ
The Damned Don't Die
(
AKA
T
HE GOURMET
)
Lethal Injection
Death Puppet
The Price of the Ticket
Prelude to a Scream
The Syracuse Codex
Dark Companion
The Octopus On My Head
Windward Passage
A Moment of Doubt
Old and Cold
âP
OETRYâ
Poems for a Lady
Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley
Morpho
(with Alastair Johnston)
Small Apt
(with photos by Shelly Vogel)
Across the Tasman Sea
âN
ONFICTIONâ
Laminating the Conic Frustum
âR
ECORDINGS
â
The Visitor
For more information, as well as MP3s of
“The Visitor” and “The Golden Gate Bridge,” visit
NoirConeVille.com
This edition first published in the United States in 2012 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
For bulk and special sales, please contact
[email protected]
First published as
Le Chien d'Ulysse
by Rivages/Noir Inedit, Paris
Lyrics for C'est La Vie by Jack White and Jack Stark © Universal Music
Publishing Group, EMI Music Publishing
Copyright © 1993, 2012 by Jim Nisbet
The author extends his hearty thanks to the editors of
Pangolin Papers
wherein the first chapter of this novel first appeared in English, under the
title
Ulysses'
Dog, and to the readers of that magazine, who awarded it
the magazine's very first Annual Fiction Prize.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the
publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection
with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-4683-0506-7
Chapter One
T
HE INDIGO THATCH OF STARS AND SPACE CONTAINED
the desert night, the desert night contained a solitary building. Night and building evolved and moved imperceptibly, one about the other, cool and smooth like a pillow over a gun.
The moonlight that filled the open door of the shack threw a bright nacre path from the threshold to the foot of a calico armchair. This pearly rectangle floated beneath an ochre gloom cast by a kerosene lantern that stood on a small table next to the chair.
A tarantula stood beneath the table.
It was a big tarantula, grey and silent, just inside the edge of the tongue of light. Its two forelegs stroked the little red flowers on the green cloth, one two, one two one. Outside in the desert night a coyote lifted its nose and howled.
In the ensuing silence, the spider began its climb. The second pair of legs followed the first, bringing after them the third pair, and the fourth, bearing between them the tripartite body, the whole mechanism contriving without apparent effort to scale the nearly vertical pleats in the calico skirt.
The kerosene lamp guttered softly. By the time the tarantula attained the underside of the swelling that defined the chair's broad arm the lantern was flickering regularly. It emitted the thick sounds of a liquid hastily poured, and its
inconstant light caused shadows to jump erratically on the walls and ceiling.
These sensations did not deter the spider from its progress, no more than had the transit from light to dark at the edge of the doorway's shadow, nor the howl of the coyote; but the protruding leaves of a book, opened face down over the top of the chairarm, now occluded its ascent. The big spider paused for a moment to patiently explore above itself with the two forelegs. Their tarsal claws scratched noiselessly about the upper edge of the book's cloth cover, but could make no purchase by which to farther advance their attendant parts. Accordingly the spider surveyed beneath the overhang, first taking a step toward the back of the chair and then several toward the front, whereby this latter course at last it circumambulated the book, and came to stand on top of the scarred walnut finial that comprised the forward corner of the calico chair's right arm. Here the tarantula paused again.
High in the hills behind the cabin a coyote yipped three times into a howl that descended through a long and plaintive yodel into a modulating silence.
The spider moved. The chair arm was sufficiently wide to cause the open book to lie almost flat upon it, and the eight legs rowed easily astride the cased spine and the faded symbols embossed there, hesitating only when, halfway along the binding, they encountered the first finely boned finger.
It was the longest of four extending parallel the book's title, three on one side of the spine, one, with a thumb, on the other.
Just a slight hesitation, an adjustment to the change in the grade, preceded the starboard legs mounting the length of this finger. They passed over the arc of a gold ring, in
which the lamplight gleamed like a cautionary roadsign. And soon all eight legs, rising in pairs, passed over the ridge of knuckles and into the fine white hair on the back of the hand, to the cuff of the shirt that met the hand at its wrist. Here again the spider paused over the occurrence of fabric, its two forelegs tested the cuff's surface, very like the cotton calico draping the chair. One of its curious vanguard touched the first of the three silver-encircled mother of pearl buttons set along the slit of the cuff, one two, and withdrew.
From without, a draft gently filled the room, and caused the kerosene flame to flare and deliquesce. The black cameo of an immense tarantula poised on the edge of a shapeless ridge swelled along the floor and up the bookcase against the wall beyond the side of the chair opposite the lamp, and receded. As if spurred by the temperature of this breeze drawn from the hills by the cooling valley floor, perhaps startled by it, the tarantula leapt halfway up the forearm, then scrambled past the elbow and rapidly ascended the upper arm before it paused, lifted the two forelegs, and scuttled along the shoulder to the point of the collar and the open vee of the shirt, and the throat exposed there.
The spider touched the protruding adam's apple, from which the neck curved straight up to the chin thrust toward the ceiling. It walked the throat, touching four times the jugular hollow, mounted the hinge of the stubbled jaw, and arrived at the mild swelling the cheek allows around the fissure of the mouth. Here it took a momentary interest in a fleck of spittle dried there, pivoting around it, testing it with the tips of the delicately crooked pair of legs, one two, one two one.
Its body directly over the parted lips and the teeth exposed by them, the tarantula stopped. Its girth easily straddled the entire mouthâindeed, there were legs from the thin, silver
hair on the high forehead to the point of the chin, and from ear to ear. Its body hung above the two nostrils, the underside of its abdomen grazed the tip of the hooked nose. Yet, not a line of the facial musculature so much as twitched; and though directly in the paths of the three passages designed for the movement of air, not a hair on the spider so much as fluttered. Perfectly groomed, quite undisturbed, the tarantula perched over the center of the upturned face.
The coyote howled again.
A moment later, as the spider discovered that the eyes, two one two, were open, one two, the kerosene lamp exhausted its fuel. The shadow on the bookcase limned the odd silhouette of the upturned chin, nose, and brow, and along this line a forest of lines that was the tarantula suspended between its legs, staggered along the line the facial features made between darkness and a further darkness, waxed and diminished and waxed again until the wall went black as the lamp extinguished itself.
Outside the house little stirred in the moonlight. Thirty yards from the shack an oil pump, its electric motor and attendant machinery, made little noise. The bull wheel went around, the walking beam and pitman link nodded up and down in the unctuous whir of birthing lucre. When the breeze freshened, the chainlink fence surrounding the pump site soughed evocatively, much as a grove of cypress might. The pump was old, its venerable presence dated from the early thirties. The beam and wheel were of hewn douglas fir, deeply checked, the pitman of oak; only the bearings, brushes and the foot-valve, once, had ever required replacement as over the years, day and night, the pump nodded crude oil up from the deep, rich well in slow, uninterrupted strokes.
The poise of the hunter and the stealth of the hunted endow the desert night with a kind of mild, impalpable suspense, belied by such a regular periodicity as a lone oil pump's monotonous cycle, and the peaceful wheel of stars above. The barn owl, for example, whose shadow flicked briefly under the roof of the short porch, between the supporting post and the front door of the shack, was a nocturnal predator. Early in the evening, perhaps shortly before dark, its talons and wings might be heard scratching at the mouth of a hole chewed through the weathered siding under the ridge of the shack, as it exited its burrow for the night. This owl could make a meal of any kangaroo rat careless enough to expose itself on the wide, unprotected ribbon of paired ruts that led away from the yard in front of the shackâa seldom traversed, gullied track that wound up and down the hillocks and across the gravelled washes, making a road that zigzagged from oil pump to oil pump, and the occasional valve or tank or power pole, to the battered highway, thirteen miles away; and making not incidentally a fine site for predation.
Tonight as yet, the barn owl remained hungry. From its customary perch atop the power pole next to the oil pump it had twice glided in absolutely silent pursuit of its supper, without success. Twice, kangaroo rats had avoided the efficient adios afforded by the beak and talons, springing like their marsupial namesake to safety with unerring agility, each forewarned by the jagged moonlit shadow preceding the owl's arrival. In the first instance the alerted prey had escaped into a hole as handily as if it had completely memorized the dense network of tunnels and entrances that perforated the crust of the desert floor. Only the half-dormant rattlesnake, not quite dozed off this time of year, or
yellow-eyed den of kitfox pupsâdiscovered by a mistaken deadly slapstick in the frenzied dive for protectionâand the rat's own insatiable need to eat, spurring its forage, might induce the little creature to re-expose itself to the merciless eyes and beak set in the heart-shaped face of one of its most relentless fates.
Nor would the barn owl have missed the second time, had not the target availed itself of the free zone beneath the dusty black 1959 Cadillac parked between the oil pump and the shack. While the owl scowled fiercely under the rocker panel, unable to maneuver beyond it, the kangaroo rat covered the ten feet between the car and the house in three hops and dove into a hole at the corner of the porch. The owl flapped aloft and circled the shack, passing under the narrow porch roof just to show it could still do its stuff, then glided up to the top of the power pole and settled there, arranging its wings, to watch the hole and wait. In spite of a nagging howl from a coyote not so far away, a competing consumer of kangaroo rats, the owl looked the very model of patience.