The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

That, at least, triggers a memory. Up until now, it’s been like watching my mother recount a completely separate life. Part of which she’s made up, or at least exaggerated, because I may have only been seven, and I’ve always slept heavy, but surely I would have heard what she’s describing. And retained it.

But those webs. Everywhere, on everything. “I remember them,” I say.

Mostly, I remember the wolf spider outside our front door. We had bougainvillea climbing the iron grating on either side of our little stoop. And for months that spring and early summer — the last months we lived here — this one bulbous, pregnant wolf spider would weave a new web between them every single night. We discovered the web the first time when I raced out the door one morning, headed for the park, and wrapped most of the strands around my face. I don’t think I started screaming until my mom did, and she didn’t start, she later said, until she saw the spider itself dangling just under my earlobe like some outsized, nightmare earring, clawing with its hairy legs as it tried to scuttle up the air into my hair to hide. My mom whacked it into the bushes with her hand, then spent half an hour calming us both down and picking the insect carcasses and threading out of my curls.

We weren’t laughing, then. Or ever, really, about the spiders. There were too many of them, attracted, the tv said, by the freakishly humid spring, the eruption of greenery and insects that draped the hillsides and gardens of midtown L.A. and made it look, for just that short while, like somewhere living things actually belonged.

But we developed a sort of affection for our lone wolf. Or fascination, at least. The way one might for a house ghost. Some nights, before sending me to bed, my mother would bring me to the front couch, draw back those bay-window curtains, flick on the porch light. And there she’d be, gray and translucent and hairy, scuttling back and forth seemingly in mid-air between the columns of bougainvillea, floating on her milky white egg-sac as though it were a balloon. Every morning, we took a broom, said we were sorry, and brought the web down so we could get out of the apartment. But we left the spider herself alone.

“Ry?” says my mother, startling me by brushing a fallen curl out of my eyes. She’s never touched me, much. Not since I was very young. “What are you thinking about?”

I catch myself leaning away and feel bad, but too late. My mother has already withdrawn her hand. I try to smile, get some nostalgia into my voice. I’m surprisingly close to feeling some. I gesture toward the front stoop. “Our furry-legged friend.”

She looks at my hands. Then the front of the apartment. Then she bursts into tears.

“Sorry,” she says fast. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

I reach to comfort her. But it never did any good when I was a kid, and it doesn’t now. The sobs grab her by the shoulders and shake her.

They stop sooner than usual, though. And when my mother lowers her hands from her face, there’s a steeliness in her jaw I don’t remember seeing. “I’m just being stupid, as usual,” she says. “It wasn’t really that. It wasn’t real. Obviously. It was just that time, those moans. I hadn’t slept in so long, and those things were crawling over the place, and I missed your fucking asshole father, and…” her voice drops into its murmur. But lo and behold, it climbs back out. She looks at me. “It wasn’t real,” she says. “I want you to know I know.”

I have no idea what to say to that. “We should get you home,” I say eventually.

“Evie came down a few times that week after Stan died. Mostly in the evening, just to sit. You and I used to steal lemons off the trees by that condo complex around the corner, and I made lemonade, and the three of us would come right out here. Right about this time. We’d watch the spiders dancing up the walls and the sun going down and that turtle nosing around in the grass. Mr. Busby was away, I think his daughter’d taken him to Bermuda or something, and it was so quiet around here.

“I kept trying to ask Evie how she was doing, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She talked about maybe going to see her sister in Maine, but not like she was really planning to do it. You showed her our wolf spider. She said there were lots more up under the eaves. She claimed she could hear them on the roof at night, and that she had a resident, too, who hung out by her bedroom window. An even bigger one. She didn’t like its eyes.

“One night, later than usual — I was in a robe, and I’m sure you’d already gone to bed — she knocked on the door in tears and asked me to come out. She was in a robe, too. This horrible cream thing with blue lilies all over it. She was grabbing her arms to her chest.

“‘They’re biting him,’ she kept saying. ‘They’re biting him. My poor Stan.’ Then she showed me her hand. It was all purple on the back, she had this huge spider bite. Really nasty.