She didn’t take off the ring.
The whispers were growing steadily louder. The closer Maria listened, the more she could make out individual voices from the cluster. None of them were speaking in words, exactly, or at least no words Maria knew. But their meaning was clear. They wanted Maria to follow them.
Stepping down from her bed, Maria found an unbroken line of them, crawling up and down the wall, in and out of the bedroom, so that they looked like a stream with currents flowing in both directions. It didn’t matter that it was after midnight and completely dark; Maria could see the spiders as if they carried their own kind of light.
She got dressed quickly, then tiptoed down the hallway and into the kitchen. The spiders had found a crack in the wall by the sliding glass door that led into the backyard and the park beyond.
So that’s how they’ve been getting into the house.
Quietly, carefully, Maria slid open the door and followed the spiders outside.
She reached the imaginary line where her yard ended and Falling Waters began. When her mom had forced her to play outside as a little girl, she used to pretend that this was the boundary between the good kingdom and the evil kingdom. Tonight, she wasn’t half as afraid as she used to be. It was like she was walking under a spell — a spell that made her brave. Whether it was a good spell or a bad spell didn’t seem important.
In no time, Maria was crossing the gravel path near the stream that fed the waterfall. Her feet crunched on leaves and palm fronds as she stepped off the main path and into the dense woods. The ground grew damp, and the spiders led her downstream to where the water was faster and more treacherous. Maria hardly noticed that her black flats were getting ruined. She was too focused on following the spiders to the very lip of the waterfall, where she found a progression of worn, smooth stones she’d never noticed before. Taken together, they almost looked like a staircase, leading down the rock face behind the waterfall and into the sinkhole far below.
The spiders showed her the way.
The rock steps were slick and uneven, but Maria took them confidently, one at a time. She followed the stairs down until the waterfall rushed over her head, then blocked the outside world altogether. When she reached the last stair, she lifted her eyes from her feet, and there, cut into the rock face, was a hole that looked like the mouth of a cave. Even her mom probably didn’t know about this.
Maria followed the spiders deeper into the hole, her eyes taking in the dark details of the cave without a problem. Faded graffiti filled the walls, with letters and hearts spelling out a history of brave or reckless people who had discovered the cave before her. Tiny animal bones littered the ground, all of them completely covered in spiderwebs. The voices in Maria’s head reached out in hunger.
Finally, Maria could walk no farther. The cave had narrowed into a dead end, where she found a collection of boxes and debris. None of it was covered in the dust and cobwebs that smothered everything else, and there was a plate of half-eaten meat sitting atop one of the boxes. If it had been here awhile, it would have already decayed.
All of this junk stirred a feeling in Maria, a feeling that crystallized into a memory. It was like she was back in Grandma Esme’s living room, and she just needed to figure out the pattern to the chaos. There were even books and papers scattered about. Maria had half a mind to check for secret compartments.
The spiders began to gather around her. At first, she thought they were going for the meat. But no, they were forming a circle around one of the books — one already in the center of a crate, set apart.
The book was bound in leather and looked quite old. Picking it up, Maria saw that the cover was adorned with little beads of glass arranged in a symbol. Many of the beads had fallen off over the years, and some of their edges were rough to begin with, but if Maria squinted hard enough, she could make out the shape of a spider inside of a circle. She might have guessed.
The pages inside were yellowed with age. Corners and edges were ragged and torn, and some of the pages had been ripped out completely. Every page was filled with scribbles, sketches, and diagrams. There were detailed drawings of animal anatomy next to arcane weapons and mysterious plants. Maria could tell that the handwriting surrounding these drawings belonged not to one person, but to a countless many.
Some of the writing was in English, and some of it wasn’t. Some of it looked neat and deliberate, while some of it looked hurried, even desperate. Either the many authors of this book had all worked on it together, or it had passed from one person down to the next through the years.
Maria came to a drawing near the back of the book that she recognized immediately. The voices in her head became a frantic buzz. There, in black ink, was her spider ring.
There were seven other spider rings drawn on these two pages, and each of them looked just a little bit different. One of the rings bore a spider whose legs and sternum were drawn in outline, and under that ring was written, The Mirror. Another ring had a spider that was shaded in around its four front legs. Under that ring was the label, The Orb.
The spider on Maria’s ring had what looked like two lima beans on its back. She never would have described it that way before, but now that she saw the drawing, it was impossible to miss.
Maria’s ring was labeled The Brown Recluse. The voices in her head said that this was right.
There were more interesting things about Maria’s ring. For one, hers was the only spider that had six eyes instead of eight. For another, it was the only ring for which there were two drawings. One showed the ring exactly as it looked on her finger. The other showed the ring with the spider flipped open, revealing the secret container Maria had discovered. There was even a little arrow pointing to it. Next to the arrow, a long list of words had been written and crossed out, with different-colored inks suggesting that whenever a person wrote a word down, that person crossed out the one before it. The words included hemlock, cyanide, arsenic, and nightshade.
Maria gulped. They were all types of poison.
She turned the page, hoping for something more pleasant, but at that exact moment, what sounded like a falling rock echoed from the cave entrance. Maria had seen enough.
Against the will of the voices, she closed the book and yanked her hands from the cover. The book hit the crate on its spine, and Maria hurried to catch it before it toppled and crushed a cluster of spiders scrambling to get out of the way. That’s when Maria realized — some of these spiders were brown recluses, with lima-bean backs and six minuscule eyes, but more, many more, of these spiders were not. Most of these spiders had the bulbous silver bodies of the mirror spider.
… Arturo would do the most unbelievable things with just a handkerchief and a mirror …
Oh, no —
Maria turned to rush out of the cave, already telling herself that when she got home and went to sleep, she would wake up and realize this had all been a terrible dream.
But she didn’t make it out of the cave.
She’d taken all of two steps when a black shadow appeared and blocked her way.
The shadow flickered and swirled into the shape of a man — a man in a black silk suit who wore a spider ring of his own.
“They told me you’d be here,” the man said coldly. He didn’t look scared like he had in the woods. He looked like he was in total control.