I’ve been living on the family farm all my life, unlike my brother. He’d moved off to the city for a spell, but he came back eventually. He bought the old Wilkes place on the edge of town, and he’s been fixing it up these last months.
When we was kids, we’d all been scared of the Wilkes place—thought it haunted. Ol’ Mr. Wilkes was pretty scary, too. Nobody ever messed with him in a direct sort of way. I mean, we’d sneak over at night on a dare maybe and throw rocks at his porch or something, but that was as close as we’d ever got. Occasionally he’d come storming out on the porch and scare the hell out of us, and we’d scatter like a bunch of chickens running from a fox. One night I thought I’d heard him calling my name as we’d run away, but I’d managed to convince myself that he’d just been yelling gibberish. No way he could’ve known I’d been out there.
It was just one of them things you did when you was a kid, just harmless fun. It wasn’t nothing anybody was ever in any real danger over—we just liked the feeling that there might be danger. Then one night Mrs. Crenshaw said she caught him in her backyard eating her cat like he was a wild dog or something, and everything changed. I knew for a fact then and there that my days of chunking rocks at ol’ Mr. Wilkes’ porch were over. Of course, Mrs. Crenshaw reported him to the sheriff and they all went over to his place, but it was like he’d just up and disappeared. They couldn’t find a trace of him nowhere, and nobody ever saw hide nor hair of him ever again.
His house had sat empty all these years since, right up to the day my brother got the bright idea that buying it and moving in was a good idea. We talked about it and I told him what I thought—that there were lots of other decent houses in town and why did he want to risk disturbing whatever might be hiding in the walls of that old rundown place—but he just laughed at me, said we weren’t kids anymore and thought me silly for thinking that way. It was just a piece of land with an old frame house on it, and that was all. I couldn’t really argue, could I.
So, he bought the place and set about cleaning up the yard and fixing up the house—and, of course, he asked me to come over and help. I went over a few times, mostly when there was work to be done on the outside of the house because the few times I went inside, I got this strange feeling, like there was something that didn’t want me to be there—or maybe it did, which was worse. I couldn’t tell my brother that, though, because he would’ve just laughed at me again, so I started making excuses about why I couldn’t come over and help him. I even flat out lied about my health and stuff a few times, and I think he knew because he finally just stopped asking—which was fine with me.
Anyways, he was over here at my place visiting the other day, and I asked him to go get a few tomatoes from my garden for us to have with our lunch. While he was out there I looked up at him through the kitchen window, and I thought I saw him reach out and grab something and pop it in his mouth. I sort of felt a chill because it’d seemed wrong somehow, like maybe whatever it was he’d grabbed wasn’t food per se, so I kept watching him. As he started back toward the house, I again saw him reach out and grab something from next to my old shed and pop it in his mouth—just like before.
Later on—and after he’d gone home—I walked out to my old shed and looked where I’d seen him grab. The only thing there was a spider web, one of them webs with a big zigzag pattern in it made by them big ol’ shiny black and yellow garden spiders. Those suckers always gave me the creeps. I was having a hard time believing that my brother would’ve just eaten one or more of ‘em—but then again, he’d been living in the Wilkes place. And if I were being honest, I’d have to admit that he’d been acting a little strange lately.
The truth of the matter was that I didn’t really want to be around him after what I’d seen him do, but I had to know. There was potentially more at stake here than what met the eye, so I invited him back over the next day—told him I wanted to pay him back that twenty dollars he’d lent me. But before he got here, I went out back and caught a few of them garden spiders in a mayonnaise jar. Honestly, I didn’t really want them fuckers in my house at all, but I figured the jar was safe (I’d screwed the lid on real tight), so I brought it on in and hid it behind a pillow on the sofa.
Once he got there I sat on the sofa and he sat on the rocker across from me. We sat there for a spell without talking, and then he asked me about the twenty dollars. I didn’t want to give him twenty dollars because I didn’t really owe him twenty dollars—I’d just made that up so he’d for sure come. I reached in my billfold and pulled out a twenty and set it on the coffee table between us. Before he reached for it, though, I reached behind the pillow and took hold of the mayonnaise jar, and then I set it on the table next to the twenty, those two spiders sitting there all fat and juicy, their long, spindly legs splayed against the glass.
My brother immediately tensed up all over—I could see the sinews straining against the skin on his neck. He was staring wide-eyed at them spiders as though they were the only thing in the room. He’d long since forgot about the twenty dollars lying by the jar. He was laser-focused on them spiders, like they was the most important thing in the world. His eyes flitted between looking at the spiders and then looking at me several times, and I can’t say that I’d ever seen him in such distress. It was like he was about to burst at the seams, like he was dying to quench a thirst, like it was all he could do to keep himself from launching at the jar. Finally, he looked back at me with unfathomable pleading in his eyes. Without thinking, I sort of gave my head a little nod, and quick as a snake he snatched the jar from the table and ran outside. I looked through the window—I could see him reaching in the jar and then reaching his hand to his mouth, and I could see him working his jaw. It made me sick to my stomach just watching, imagining them spiders crunching around in his teeth.
To say I was freaked out would be an understatement. I mean, what was next? Was he gonna start attacking the neighborhood cats like ol’ Mr. Wilkes had done all them years ago? Was he gonna attack something else . . . something more important—like me, for instance?
Even though I’d seen it with my own eyes, I couldn’t really believe what my brother had just done. I thought about ol’ Mr. Wilkes, wondered what ever become of him, where he was, if he was still alive—or something like alive.
My mind had sort of drifted off inside itself, which probably wasn’t a good idea considering that my brother was still about. Turns out he was closer than I thought, too. When I looked back toward the window, my brother had already come back inside the house. He was just standing there in the doorway, looking at me with stone dead eyes. He didn’t really look like my brother anymore neither, now that I think about it. Strange as it seems, he looked a lot like ol’ Mr. Wilkes standing there in his overalls and no shirt, a face that hadn’t seen a razor in the better part of a week.
By then it didn’t really matter much, though, because it was clear as he started coming at me that he hadn’t seen my Remington resting in my lap. My brother or ol’ Mr. Wilkes—it didn’t really matter much one way or the other at that point. And nobody will ever know, neither—less they find the hole in my garden I buried him in.