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Title: The man who had spiders
Author: Roger D. Aycock
Illustrator: Kelly Freas
Release date: January 9, 2026 [eBook #77665]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1955
Credits: Tom Trussel (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHO HAD SPIDERS ***
The Man who had Spiders
by Roger Dee
_All too modestly, we feel, has Roger Dee tried to shrug off
his undoubted kinship to Saki--that master of whimsical fantasy
supreme--in this ebulliently breathtaking excursion into a realm as
darkly mysterious as it is irresistibly enchanting. Adrian’s spiders
may make your flesh crawl. But we predict you’ll like Adrian himself
quite as much as did Mr. Marcus, and rejoice in his triumph._
=There is probably more than one way of curing a tragic addiction to
alcohol. But Adrian’s way was as shuddery as a smiling Medusa.=
When Mr. Marcus, who had sold novelties to novelty shops for forty
years and so had lost the capacity for astonishment at human
unpredictability, returned to Maysville on the 8:04 train for his
regular April week of selling, he went at once to Mrs. Ponder’s
boarding house and found Kitty playing Delibes on the living-room piano.
It was almost like coming home, Mr. Marcus thought with an
uncharacteristic twinge of nostalgia. He paused for a moment in the
doorway, suitcase and sample bag and his inevitable parcel of books in
hand, to listen.
Tender was the word for Kitty, with her cool, sure touch on the Delibes
theme and her clear blind eyes and her nestling of fair hair that
just brushed her shoulders. And wasted, Mr. Marcus thought, with all
the beauty and the talent of her shunted to obscurity in the dingy
gentility of her mother’s menage.
If he were thirty years younger--
Mr. Marcus cut the thought dead. _If you were thirty years younger,
Marcus_, he told himself with dry cynicism, _you’d travel and sell
novelties. Just as you did thirty years ago._ Kitty sensed his presence
with the near-tactile acuity of the blind and let the Delibes theme
trail off in a random tinkle.
“It’s only I, Miss Kitty,” Mr. Marcus said. “The old man who sells
loaded cigars to idiots.”
She turned on the piano bench, pleased at his coming but nevertheless
disappointed. “Oh, Mr. Marcus. I thought at first you were Adrian.”
“Adrian?”
She laughed, a sound as light and clear as the vanished music. “Adrian
Hall, our new boarder. He’s only been with us a week.”
A week. Seven days, Mr. Marcus thought, and her face could light up so
at the sound of his step?
When Kitty smiled it was impossible to think that her eyes could not
see him. “You’re thinking that my interest is unusual, and you’re quite
right. But Adrian is an unusual man, Mr. Marcus.”
“I’m sure he is,” Mr. Marcus said cautiously. “I’ll have to meet him.”
The prospect pleased her. “You were always nice to me and Jay Kirby
because I’m blind and Jay has fits, but you never noticed anyone else.
You’ll notice Adrian. You’ll like him.”
“I’m sure I shall,” Mr. Marcus said. Her eagerness made him feel old
and tired and somehow resentful. The books and bags grew heavy in his
hands. “I was just going upstairs to see if my room--”
Kitty’s face lighted up. “Please wait,” she begged. “I hear Adrian
coming down now. We’re going out for a drive, but I’d like you to meet
him first.”
The new boarder was perhaps thirty, hardly older than Kitty, and
totally unremarkable. Shaking hands, Mr. Marcus cast back through the
dry files of his memory and exhausted them without turning up a more
ordinary face or figure. Moderately tall, he catalogued: average build,
plain face, neutral hair, good teeth and mild blue eyes. The man’s only
distinction seemed to be a round, black mole on the left side of his
neck, half hidden by his shirt-collar. Politely, Mr. Marcus did not
look at it twice.
It rather startled him to discover that Kitty had been right. He _did_
like Adrian Hall, at first sight and without reservation.
Mr. Marcus was never quite surе what was said during the shaking of
hands. He was too absorbed in trying to justify such uncharacteristic
regard to do more than nod when Adrian excused himself to hold Kitty’s
light coat for her. Hе did retain a bizarre impression when the two of
them went out, however, that the new boarder’s mole had shifted from
the side to the back of his neck and was watching him with an air of
amiable curiosity.
The conviction left Mr. Marcus more annoyed than disturbed. He’d have
to see an oculist and have his lenses changed again, he told himself
resignedly, as he climbed the stairs to his room.
Jay Kirby was waiting there for him, crouched against the farther wall
like a fearful puppy hiding from the adult pack.
No other boarder in Mrs. Ponder’s house would have dared violate
Mr. Marcus’ privacy, but Jay enjoyed the privilege of handicap and
exercised it. Mr. Marcus sighed when he saw that Jay was suffering, or
had just suffered, another of his periodic attacks. His corn-colored
hair was wildly touseled, his blue eyes had fallen two octaves darker
with stress and there was a wide smear of grime across one sweating
cheek.
Jay was far too badly shaken to bother with greetings. “You got to do
something about this Adrian Hall,” he blurted. “Mr. Marcus, he’s got
_spiders_.”
Mr. Marcus found the proposition as repellent as it was improbable.
Still, the turn of Jay’s latest fantasy intrigued him. Large spiders or
small, he wondered, gray or black, poisonous or innocuous, caged or--
“Spiders?” He put his books and bags on the bed. “In his room, you
mean?”
Jay denied it violently. “On _him_.”
Mr. Marcus wondered with some bitterness if nations would ever outgrow
their penchant for expedient wars that left men broken as Jay Kirby
was broken. Left alone Jay would have been a pleasant young man and a
first-rate musician, but with the spirit of him maimed and trembling
like a frightened child’s at the edge of nightmare--
Mr. Marcus opened his suitcase. “I brought you a record, Jay--something
just released. A New Orleans stomp, the music-shop man said, with an
alto sax that--”
Jay came across the room and clutched his arm, towering over him. “I
didn’t shuck my wig this time, Mr. Marcus, honest. I really saw this.
The guy had his clothes off, and he was all over spiders.”
Mr. Marcus felt a touch of chill. Jay had been committed twice before
coming to rest at Mrs. Ponder’s; if he were sent away again, it might
be for good.
“Sit down,” Mr. Marcus said. Hе sat down himself, on the room’s one
chair. “Tell me about it, Jay, and from the beginning.”
Jay sat on the bed, and rose, and sat again. “It’d be all right if he’d
keep them to himself,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind that because I _like_
him. It’s Miss Kitty I’m worried about.”
“Miss Kitty?”
“Everybody likes Adrian, Mr. Marcus, but Miss Kitty’s in love with him.
How’ll she feel when she finds out he’s got spiders?”
Mr. Marcus nodded gravely. “I can understand your concern. But Miss
Kitty is blind, Jay. How can she find out?”
“I thought you’d see that right off,” Jay said, disappointed. “She’ll
know when they get married, won’t she? She’ll _have_ to know.”
Mr. Marcus permitted himself a small shudder. Jay had outdone himself
this time.
“You saw these spiders, you said,” he reminded. “Where, and when?”
Jay got up and paced restlessly, limping. “Half an hour ago, when
Adrian went up to shower and dress for his date with Miss Kitty. I was
out on the porch roof, tightening a loose bathroom shutter I’d promised
to fix for Mrs. Ponder, and--”
“You spied on him, Jay? In the _bathroom_?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Jay said defensively. “But I couldn’t look away
after I saw the spiders. Could you?” He turned a stricken face to Mr.
Marcus. “Mr. Marcus, he was all covered with them until he stepped into
the shower. Then he held up a towel and they jumped on it to keep dry.”
“I see,” Mr. Marcus said. “And when he came out?”
“He dried himself off,” Jay said. “And they jumped on again.” Hе began
to tremble with the violence of imminent seizure. “What am I going to
do, Mr. Marcus? I like Adrian, but I like Miss Kitty, too. I can’t let
him--”
Mr. Marcus rose hastily and led him to his room down the hall. “You
won’t have to do anything,” he promised before he left Jay to have his
fit in privacy. “Trust me, Jay. I’ll take care of it.”
It was not until later, when he had settled himself in his own room to
a volume of Saki’s inhumanly perfect short stories, that he remembered
the new boarder’s peregrinating mole.
“Can’t happen outside fiction,” he assured himself. “Tricks of the
eyes, or else the fellow has two moles.”
But his eyesight was disturbingly good when he went down to breakfast
next morning at seven and found himself seated beside Adrian Hall.
Adrian was neatly dressed for work. He was a newspaper reporter, it
developed, and was thinking seriously of launching a weekly of his own
in Maysville--and he was every whit as likeable as he had been on the
night before.
But not as unremarkable. This morning, he had no moles at all.
* * * * *
Forty years of selling novelties and reading books had not prepared
Mr. Marcus for the role of detective that was thrust upon him, but it
had given him a certain resourcefulness. Between stock-taking calls at
local shops during the day he made discreet inquiries, and by nightfall
had amassed a considerable array of fact and opinion.
The opinion was unfailingly enthusiastic. Never, Mr. Marcus thought,
had a man been so instantly and universally liked in a town as small
and insular as Maysville. Adrian Hall could have borrowed money from
any bank, had any job or married any girl in the community.
What could make so plain a man so prepossessing Mr. Marcus could not
imagine. He was certain only that he liked Mrs. Ponder’s new boarder
more than he had ever liked anyone in his life, and that he felt not
only uncomfortable but downright guilty in spying out his personal
affairs.
Actual fact was harder to arrive at. Adrian Hall had come from Kansas
City, some two hundred miles distant. He was a good newspaperman
and Gus Willis, who operated the Maysville _Bugler_, had liked him
well enough--as who hadn’t?--to hire him on sight. He was sober,
industrious, efficient and considerate.
No one but Jay Kirby and Mr. Marcus seemed to suspect that he harbored
spiders under his shirt. And Mr. Marcus, returning from his first day
of selling and inquiry to find Adrian singing _The Rose of Tralee_ with
Kitty at the piano, found that repellent idea hard to believe.
Until, at supper again, he happened to look up quickly from his plate
and discovered that the new boarder’s elusive mole had returned. Mr.
Marcus blinked and--he was quite positive, this time--it blinked
genially back at him.
The conviction so unnerved him that he closed his eyes to defend his
composure. When he opened them again the mole had gone, together with
Mr. Marcus’ lost appetite.
Mr. Marcus excused himself from table and went upstairs to his room. As
he had expected, Jay Kirby was waiting for him again.
“Did you tell him?” Jay demanded. Mr. Marcus blinked, remembered the
mole that had just blinked back at him, and shuddered.
“Did I tell what to whom?”
“Adrian,” Jay said. “Didn’t you tell him yet to get lost? How’re we
going to keep him away from Miss Kitty unless we threaten to expose
him?”
“I couldn’t do that,” Mr. Marcus said. “I like him too well.”
“So do I,” Jay said. “Damn him.”
Mr. Marcus went over the possibilities again and found nothing of
promise.
“No one would believe us even if we tried to expose him,” he concluded.
“We wouldn’t believe in his spiders ourselves if we hadn’t seen them.”
Jay began to sweat. “What are we going to do, Mr. Marcus? We can’t
brace Adrian because we like him too much, and we can’t tell Miss Kitty
what’s wrong with him. How are we going to keep them from getting
married?”
It was a formidable question. Mr. Marcus evaded it by posing one of his
own.
“How do you know they’ll be married, Jay? Has any announcement been
made?”
“Not yet,” Jay said. “But there will be.”
Mr. Marcus sighed. “Then I’m afraid we’re stumped. I wish we knew more
about him.”
A new avenue of approach occurred to him then, but Jay anticipated the
inspiration. “You could find out something about him in Kansas City,”
Jay said. “He was a newspaper reporter there once, wasn’t he?”
Mr. Marcus could not drop his selling--he had only two days left now
before he must move downstate toward St. Louis--and go to Kansas City,
but he could pursue his investigation by proxy. Providentially, he had
a friend on the staff of the Kansas City _Star_ who might do his leg
work for him.
“It seems our last hope,” Mr. Marcus said. “I’ll make the call now.”
He preferred not to use the house telephone because of its several
extensions, and the nearest booth stood in a corner of the neighborhood
drugstore. Mr. Marcus went out and made his call, received his Kansas
City friend’s promise to do what he could, and returned to Mrs.
Ponder’s boarding house.
He found a small party in progress, with a beaming Mrs. Ponder and an
assorted handful of her boarders gathered round Adrian Hall and Kitty.
Lemonade flowed freely and an air of rejoicing prevailed.
“Congratulate me, Mr. Marcus,” Kitty cried. “Adrian and I are going to
be married.”
Mr. Marcus congratulated them both with deepest sincerity. His
scalp prickled only once during his well-wishings, when one of
Adrian’s--moles?--crept out of its shirt-collar, just below the Adam’s
apple this time, and peered at him complacently.
“God bless you both,” Mr. Marcus finished, and fled upstairs.
But his room, for once, was not sanctuary.
For the first time in his life his books failed to sustain him and
he felt truly alone and impotent, caught vicariously in exactly the
sort of emotional muddle he had avoided so religiously. There was not
even Jay Kirby to lean on in his extremity. Jay had heard the news of
Kitty’s engagement during Mr. Marcus’ brief absence and had given way
under the strain, suffering another of his fits in his own room.
Mrs. Ponder’s tapping brought Mr. Marcus out of his funk, if briefly.
“Telephone call for you,” she said. “From Kansas City.”
Mr. Marcus, knowing that Mrs. Ponder would eavesdrop if he used the
upper hallway extension, took the call downstairs. It was his friend of
the _Star_.
“Got the dirt you wanted right here in the office,” his friend said
cheerfully. “A question here, a phone call there, and it’s wrapped up.”
He gave his information tersely. “The guy’s a bum, Marcus. He’s been
thrown off every paper in town for drinking--even Alcoholics Anonymous
finally wrote him off as a lost cause.”
Mr. Marcus said nothing. There were no words for what he felt.
“Wasn’t ever vicious,” his friend said. “He was just one of those poor
fish with a twist, an uncontrollable drinker. Sponged handouts and
probably stole a little on his bad days, but never robbed any banks.
What’s he doing up there--more of the usual?”
Mr. Marcus found his voice. “Not at all. This must be a different
Adrian Hall altogether.”
But it wasn’t. Mr. Marcus discovered that when he went upstairs again
and found Adrian waiting for him by the upper hallway extension.
“I came up and listened in,” Adrian said. “I had an idea that you were
checking on me, Mr. Marcus. When Mrs. Ponder told us you had a call
from Kansas City, I was sure of it.”
“I had to do it,” Mr. Marcus said. “Once Jay had told me about your
spiders, I had no choice.”
Adrian took Mr. Marcus’ arm and led him away down the hall. Mr. Marcus
went along unprotestingly, numb with disbelief at his own composure. It
was downright frightening, he thought, to find himself so unfrightened.
Adrian’s room was much like Mr. Marcus’ own, or like any other in the
Ponder house. Adrian seated Mr. Marcus on his one chair and himself on
the bed, and they measured each other equably over the flimsy expanse
of Adrian’s writing-table.
In any decent piece of fiction, Mr. Marcus thought, there must be
some element of suspense; in fiction running to such a situation as
this, even of outright horror. But somehow, being dragged to the very
lair of the monster he had set out to scotch brought him no touch of
uneasiness. He felt sympathetic rather than fearful, and he liked
Adrian Hall more, if that were possible, than ever.
“I’m really glad you unmasked me,” Adrian said. “I need help, Mr.
Marcus. I need help more than I ever needed it in my life.”
“I’ll do anything within my power,” Mr. Marcus promised. “But I’m
equally interested in helping Kitty, else I wouldn’t have bothered with
your past at all.... Your problem is that you can’t keep your spiders
and marry Kitty too, isn’t it?”
Adrian nodded. “It wouldn’t work. Not because Kitty might object to
them, for she wouldn’t--they’re not really offensive, and it’s no fault
of their own that they’re here--but because a honeymoon without privacy
is no honeymoon at all. My friends are quite intelligent, not to
mention inquisitive, and keeping them wouldn’t be fair to either Kitty
or myself.”
“You could get rid of them.”
“That wouldn’t be fair to _them_,” Adrian said. “And since I’m
responsible for their being here, and they’re responsible for my
reformation--”
He broke off apologetically. “It would be better if I told you about it
from the beginning, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” Mr. Marcus agreed, and settled himself to listen.
“First,” Adrian said, “what your friend of the _Star_ told you is
perfectly true. I drank and scrounged quarters on the street and slept
in gutters, not because I liked it but because I couldn’t stop doing it
any more than poor Jay Kirby can stop having fits. Until I got help,
that is.
“I used to have the shakes regularly, like any other confirmed
alcoholic. The d.t.’s can be pretty awful, you know, and my personal
cross was to wake up from a binge and imagine myself all covered with
spiders. It happened so many times that I lost count, and usually it
meant several days in a hospital ward before I recovered.
“But one particular morning I woke up with spiders that wouldn’t go
away. They were real, though they weren’t spiders at all, and they were
anything but the horrors I’d dreamed of. They were such incredibly
pleasant creatures--whatever they were, and are--that just being
associated so closely with them made a new man of me overnight. I was
perfectly happy until I came here and met Kitty.”
“I can see they’re not common or garden variety Arachnida,” Mr. Marcus
said. He could with justification, for two of them had perched on the
rim of Adrian’s collar and were observing him with a bland good-nature
impossible to doubt. “You’ve no idea what they really are?”
“Not the faintest,” Adrian said. “I’m not going to quote _Hamlet_,
but a great many things happen every day in the world that no one
understands. Personally, I think they were drawn here from some other
plane or dimension by the strength of my obsession. I can’t be sure of
that because I can’t talk to them, but I do feel that I’m responsible
for them. And they’ve done so much for me that I can’t just brush them
off. It would be inhuman.”
“You’re right, of course,” Mr. Marcus agreed. “But on the other hand,
neither can you brush off Kitty. You’re in the position of the man who
couldn’t go but couldn’t stay.”
Adrian nodded unhappily “There you have it. Mr. Marcus, what am I going
to do?”
But Mr. Marcus, unlike the Saki he had been reading, had no instant and
adequate answer.
And, since the next day was his last in Maysville for the season and he
could not linger on in unemployment at Mrs. Ponder’s even to help the
couple who had become his dearest friends, he was forced to take the
8:04 to St. Louis without having discovered any solution to Adrian’s
problem.
It was a shame, Mr. Marcus thought when he was somewhere in the
neighborhood of Hannibal, Missouri, that such things never seem to work
out in everyday life as conveniently as they do in fiction. It was
entirely possible that he might never learn the outcome of Adrian’s
problem, and at best he had a year to wait.
* * * * *
Mr. Marcus, at the end of his forty-first year of selling novelties to
novelty shops, returned again to Maysville. But not immediately to Mrs.
Ponder’s boarding house.
A prosperously-dressed Adrian met him at the station with a
conservative but handsome new station wagon. With Adrian was Kitty,
still blind but lovelier than ever, and in Kitty’s arms gurgled their
firstborn, a boy named Marcus Jay Hall.
On their way to Mrs. Ponder’s they passed first the offices of the
Maysville _Bugler_, of which Adrian was now owner, and then the Hall’s
newly-financed home. A little later Adrian slowed the car to give
Mr. Marcus a closer look at a neighborhood billboard advertising the
excellence of Maysville’s own dance band, a five-piece combo of which
Jay Kirby seemed to be both originator and conductor. Jay’s face,
smiling and assured and with no trace of its old crippling tension,
took up a large part of the poster. And a handsome face it was.
“Jay is the most popular man in Maysville nowadays,” Adrian explained.
“He could be mayor if he liked, but he’d rather play the saxophone.”
A year had dulled Mr. Marcus’ perception not at all. “You mean?” he
said.
“Just so,” Adrian agreed. “It worked out very well, after all. The
worst of problems have a way of settling themselves without too much
help, have you noticed? It was only a couple of nights after you left
that Jay had another of his attacks and woke up with the conviction
that he was covered with spiders. And he was, and everyone has been
quite happy since.”
It was a fair enough ending, Mr. Marcus granted, but his private
opinion was that it lacked imagination. Saki, he felt sure, would have
handled it better.
Transcriber’s note:
This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe, February 1956 (Vol. 5,
No. 1.). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.
Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but minor
inconsistencies have been retained as printed.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHO HAD SPIDERS ***
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