The Sleeping Room, by Erik T. Johnson

Tick-tick.

The inspector has come to feign sleep on the sumptuous white-curtained four-poster canopy bed to solve a series of mysterious deaths.

Five men have died sleeping in this room, and the bodies have disappeared. But the faces of each one were found on the pillow, cooler than the morning air, twisted into a horrible expression, lips curled back, eyebrows arched into the hairline, eyeholes wide as change-purses.

Tick-tick.

The inspector is not afraid. He believes the culprit is a man he has been tracking for many years, who is the vicinity. This master of murder, Jim Whisk, has killed eighty-one people by scaring his victims to death, creating the effect of an overpowering nightmare on his prey. In a fatal dream, the inspector believes, one wakes before one dies, but if the dream were to be realized, the death would follow in actuality. Whether Jim Whisk knows of some universal, primordial fear that never fails to kill the dreaming-self, the inspector does not know.

But the inspector has a secret weapon: He has never dreamed so long as he can remember. He does not even go for fiction, which he thinks is a waste of time. “I have never heard a story that struck me as true,” he tells his literary friends. “And should I ever hear a story that rings true in my heart I believe it will explode into my throat and choke me to death.”

Tick-tick.

Therefore the staging of a nightmare will have little effect on him. Pulling up the covers and resting his large head on a goosedown pillow, he thinks:

“I have never slept on a more comfortable bed in my life. They will not find my eyeholes wide as change-purses come morning.”

Tick.

Indeed, the bed is very soft and supportive and the Sleeping Room is worth every cent. He tries not to fall asleep as he waits for Jim Whisk to arrive. He is confident in his scheme because he can smell traces of his foe’s presence, who always wears a cologne resembling ozone, that afterscent of lightning storms and electric bumper cars…

Tick.

He notices the clock on the dresser ticks too slowly. It is not counting time but something else. The inspector twirls the ends of his moustaches like an insect playing with its antennae, and wonders what. Then he stops, realizing he must remain still as the weary moonlight that has fallen through the window at the foot of the bed and rests like a ghost who has not eaten for seven thousand years between the door and bureau.

The moonlight shifts through the dark hours until it paints the inspector’s face a pale funereal mask. The inspector hears something; or rather doesn’t hear something. The clock, which ticked out of time, has stopped. Perhaps it has wound down? But no: he hears Tick-tick. The sounds come slowly out of the night. He counts six more ticks. Then there is only his breathing, in…out…in…out…The inspector prepares for the murderer and clutches the revolver which he holds loaded to his side beneath the covers. The gun seems to grip him back. He’ll not be Jim Whisk’s eighty-second kill.

In…out…

Has time stopped? The room is cold yet the inspector begins sweating. “I have a fever,” he thinks, but knows it is unlikely. The moonlight is suddenly eclipsed. Fine: a cloud is drifting across the sky.

But a cloud does not have legs, and the shape blocking the window is lowering one, two, three . . . eight legs, the pupil-black body suspended from the ceiling like a suicide. As lunar rays travel 230,600 miles to silhouette the thing he recognizes a spider large as a dog with mandibles like hacked and bloody limbs. Its breath wafts across the room scented with bones, cancers and tumors, gifts no prayer has ever exchanged.

Out…in…out…

He feels his gun solid in his fear-moldy hand. But he wonders: “Have I loaded it? What if I forgot?” The idea is maddening because if he has forgotten, then pulling the gun out quickly may give the spider the advantage. So rather than act he waits and tries to decide what to do. The spider slides forward on its breath. It sits on the inspector’s chest. It grows quickly as a spot where a black wax candle continues to drip and the mattress wails beneath the increasing weight. The inspector’s heart beats so wildly that the bristly abdomen is rocked up and down from the force of so much blood chasing itself in circles.

But still the inspector lives. He may be shaky, but he has his faculties. He decides to try the revolver. The spider opens its mouth wide. Its cracked tongue fills the room so that there are no longer walls, windows, moons. Midnight is a morsel lodged deep in the arctic time zone of its gut. The inspector raises his gun.

Out…in…

Before he can shoot the spider spins out a fine white web that floods the barrel. He cannot fire the gun, he cannot move his limbs. The spider is spinning him round and round and pushes him into the mattress, which he realizes is made entirely from giant silky-smooth webs. He collides with the partially digested and preserved bodies of other men.

Out…

Suddenly the inspector is twisted about and his face is removed by careful black spider-hands. The pain is incredible, the story is true, and he gags on his heart. The spider plunges him back into the bed face to face with a man without a face but who has the unmistakable smell of Jim Whisk.

“Comfy,” he hisses. “But can’t sleep…”

The spider finishes making the bed, pulls the covers on tightly and places the sixth face on the pillow. In the mattress, the eggs crack open and the hungry young crawl—

Out.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I am a writer from New York whose work has appeared in The Absinthe Literary Review, New York Stories, Trunk Stories, and The Midnighter’s Club Anthology. A short story of mine is also currently available at Saucytooth’s Webthology.