Unfortunately, in this case, our captor had gone biblical. Yep, you guessed it. Six thousand was the number I was thinking. No, I didn’t stop to count. Hell, it was all I could do not to faint dead away right on the spot. Everywhere I looked was a sea of black – a blanket of eight-legged freaks in various shapes and sizes, all equipped with freaky pinchers and long fangs and over-the-top hairy legs racing up the walls and across the floor heading straight for me.
For one fleeting instant, I had a moment of clarity. I’d forgotten someone very important. Yes, I had been trying to save both our butts, but at the sight of all those arachnids and for one fleeting second, I’d neglected to scream, “Duck, Edgar! It’s spiders!” Eyes flying one way and the other, up then down, left then right, I searched for my fickle Familiar.
Snapping my head to the left and my chin to my chest, I was as close to freaking out as I’d ever been. I knew he was there. I’djustbeen talking to him. Heck, I’d been the one trying to keep him sane. Where was he when I needed the same?
Then I saw it, over in the corner, kinda-sorta leaned against and falling behind the tiniest boulder in the history of boulders, the white pompom atop the curly tip of his Elf boot. And there was the other one. And his legs, and his round tummy and oh my Goddess, there was all of him. My crotchety, cranky, cantankerous Familiar was there and alive and – passed out cold.
Any other time, I would’ve laughed till I cried. I would’ve recorded it for prosperity and emailed it to his arachnid-loving sister, Esther. I would have thrown a party with life size pictures of my passed-out buddy plastered on every wall of my cozy little cabin.
But on this occasion, I felt bad. It hurt my heart that the shock of all those spiders, the one thing in all the world that my one-thousand-three-hundred-and forty-seven-year-old Christmas Elf was afraid of had caused my frumptastic Familiar to get a whopping case of the vapors.
(You had to know it was coming. Yes, I felt bad, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t already coming up with ways to taunt, tease, and generally pester my dear Eddie for the rest of forever. Come on, had roles been reversed,you knowhe would’ve done it to me. But, again, I digress…)
Ready to scream for Edgar at the top of my lungs, I got as far as opening my mouth when every single one of those ugly, eight-legged, vicious little monsters stopped. I don’t mean slowed down. I mean came to a screeching halt - in a semi-circle - not ten feet from where I was propped against the wall.
Holding perfectly still, my mouth still open wide, I looked side-to-side then up and down, my pretty hazel peepers the only thing moving. Making eye contact with each and every one of the spooky spiders in the front row, I saw the venom dripping from their fangs and the wiggle of the short, black hairs around all eight of their beady little eyes that made me think of eyelashes even though I was pretty sure arachnids didn’t have them.
The silence was too much. Not knowing what they were doing or why they’d stopped their advance was driving me crazy. In the best of times, I have absolutely no patience. So, when I was faced with a legion of spiders, all I could do was snarl, “What? What’s wrong? I’m not good enough to eat? You chickened out? You changed your minds? You’re…”
“They’re waiting for me,” the low, rumbling, ominous voice – the same one had the utter audacity to taunt me when I was being pulled into that vicious vortex answered. “After all, this is my party and I’ll have spiders if I want to.”
Clip! Clop! Clip! Clop!
The loud, heavy, echoing plodding of hooves on stone resonated around and through me.
More emphatic and heavier – if that was possible - closer and closer the stomping and tromping beat at my brain. The walls of the dungeon shimmied and shook causing a shower of dust and pebbles to fall from the ceiling as the sea of hairy, fangy black parted right down the middle.
I couldn’t breathe. My heart refused to beat. For the first time in my very long life, I had no clue what was about to happen, and all I could think was,“Well, shit, I never got to kiss Liam Archer. Not even once.”
And that’s when I saw him. The flipping freaking frothy fudgecicle who’d dared to hijack Dr. Bombay’s Magic, who’d pulled me and Edgar into some dingy dank dungeon, and who was smirking like Rudolph on December twenty-sixth.
Unfortunately, my mouth started working before my brain and I spat, “Well shit, Great-Great-Great Grandaddy was right. Youarea son of a motherless goat.”
And with that, the spiders – in unison – en masse – as one single unit – took three giant steps forward. Shame nobody told me we were playing Mother May I.