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  My teeth clacked together as my lips skinned back over my muzzle. I heard the growl of fear and loathing.

  The spiders had him.

  Not many people ever knew this, in the time before the Third War, when the dogs were altered for telepathy, but we hate spiders worse than humans. No matter how much Aunt Tillie shrieked and hid in the toilet from the baby spider on the draperies, it didn't approach by one one-millionth the natural disgust and fear dogs felt for the stinking slimy things. All hairy little legs and nasty pincers and staring eyes.

  And those fuckers weren't three feet wide around the body, with unshaved legs as tough as hawser ropes, with jaws that could snap a pup's back. And they didn't spin cocoons as strong and white and fast-setting as concrete.

  But that was before the Third War, when nature went insane and lizards grew in pink and purple and their blood carried madness and water rats pullulated like maggots and came in green and ochre with eyes that glowed in the dark and they traveled in killer packs that could bring down a horse or a man, not to mention a low-slung dog, without even pausing to find out what they were ripping apart. Big, everything got big these days. Like spiders that lived in forests and waited for food to come to them.

  I leaped. I scrabbled up the mudbank and barked as mean as I could, and some of them scattered, swinging away on their escape lines. But the biggest of them was still squatting on the open top of the stump, spitting out its cocoon, swaddling the helpless meat inside, trapped by hardened mud.

  One spider leg was dangling off the side, and I bit it with all my strength, feeling the nausea rising up in me merely at the touch of the foul thing. I clamped my jaws and locked them and then ripped up. Something snapped and the scream of the spider went through me like needles through an eyeball. The thing swung around and with silk still dripping, it thrust down, snapping.

  I went for the eyes.

  My claws sank in, slime spattered all over me, and the thing shrieked again like fingernails down a blackboard. Then it broke off and crutched away into the forest.

  I sat on top of the stump and looked down inside.

  All that showed of Vic was part of his head and face.

  His eyes were open, but he was off in that hellish place where the ghosts of dinners in pink dresses hobbled across the landscape.

  “Vic!” I yelled, pouring all my power into the thought. “Vic, wake up, man! Come on! Get out of there!”

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  FROM: THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BLOOD

  “We are all waiting for Fate to send us our orders.”

  “Humor should not be dissected because nothing lives through dissection.”

  I tried to lower my forequarters into the rotted opening, but he was too far beneath me; and I knew if I fell in there I wouldn't be able to get out. The mud, the narrowness of the hollow, the stickiness of the cocoon silk...

  And then a spider dropped on my back. I howled with horror and arched up and snapped at it. It drew back up on its line, a line as thick as bridge cable, and it shot out a stream of slimy white fluid that slopped into my eyes and stung, very nearly blinding me. Then more, and it drew out fine and tight and the thing was dragging me into its jaws.

  I snapped the line with my fangs and skipped off the stump. I drew back waiting for it to attack, but it settled like a disgusting carrion bird over the mouth of the stump and took up where its brother or sister had left off, winding Vic up in a shroud that would never be parted till what lay wrapped within had died and rotted and could be taken out bit by bit for a later meal.

  Everything was dining! Everything in the world!

  And I stood there thinking at Vic as hard as I could, “Vic, please please buddy, hear me! Come back from in there, come out and fight it. You can get loose. Please, please, Vic! I'm all alone out here! Come on partner, come on out!!”

  And I kept screaming until the thing had finished and it looked around, and it saw me; and its work done, it looked for new pleasures.

  So I ran.

  I ran as hard and as fast as pain would let me. I ran away and left him there with whatever air was still in his lungs. I left him off somewhere in a land where his first love held him prisoner.

  And I ran and ran. Until I was gone from the forest, and I continued west, foraging as best I could.

  And I was never again troubled by the ghosts of little girls in shredded frilly pink dresses.

  No ghosts of little girls: just one ghost ... a fifteen-year-old ghost that stared up at me from a hollow stump with eyes that no longer cared what happened to Man's Best Friend.

  * * *

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  Harlan Ellison, Vic and Blood

 

 

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