Now, it wasn’t the fact that Sheriff Grip had just gotten devoured by an arachnid the size of a house that scared me, but rather something else. Something deeper. That man wasn’t ever wrong. Not in my entire time growing up in the town of Caleco did I ever witness that man duped. It was chilling, watching his legs disappear into a black blob of legs and hair.
They were saying that something was happening to populations of various species of forest dwellers in the past few months. That, and there were a few disappearances. A few was a hell of a lot for this town.
I noticed something was wrong when all the bird feeders out back were staying full for weeks on end. My backyard was big, and had trees for acres. Seventy-five acres, to be precise. I lived on the outskirts of town. I liked all the people in town, but I liked my wife much better. That was kind of funny because I had only spent fourteen years with her. Spent my whole life with the other people.
Anyway, I had a whole kingdom of bird feeders in my backyard. It was really something else to see the forest animals take to that. Didn’t even have to go through and clean up. Birds, deer, more birds. They polished off the seed like it was nothing. But then, gradually they disappeared. The seed stayed on the lawn.
Well back to Grip. An honest man. Not one to keep things from people. As a lawman, he saw fit that there weren’t anything to be kept. And he was smart. Way smart. Like I really kind of thought of him as some kind of higher conscious. You almost didn’t want to bring up any form of intelligent discussion around him because you felt like you were being monitored and then evaluated. He never said anything though, just sat silently. He was a nice man like that.
Now, if he was talking, and you contradicted him, that was a whole ‘nother story. He’d make sure that you got your facts straight. Ask you a bunch of questions, the kind that you ask when you don’t really want an answer. Whoever tried to top his argument sort of got left in the dust. Been that way since I was a boy.
He didn’t think there was anything out in the woods. There were all kinds of speculation as to the strange events that started happening in our town, but Grip refuted them all. And everyone believed him. Well, that’s not true, not everyone. In fact, a lot of people were getting scared. Angry, too. People and animals were disappearing. This was something that was just too different for our community. It was as if Grip had a big weird blanket that he was muffling everybody with, the way he was refuting everyone’s complaints.
Sooner or later, a body’d been found. Venom. Spider venom. A man wrapped up in silk off in the woods. His body was sucked dry of all fluids. I saw him as they brought him up to town. He had a beard. I think it might have been Jackson. God, he was scary. His body, I mean. He wasn’t Jackson anymore at that point.
Regardless of this, Grip wanted everyone to remain calm. He spent a lot of time blanketing, muffling, and contradicting. About a week I guess. That’s about when we rallied up and stomped over to the town hall. We didn’t feel safe anymore. The seed on my lawn was frightening me. The Sheriff came out and stood in front of all of us. He started blanketing again. People were getting angry. That’s when the spider creeped it’s way over the top of town hall and contradicted Sheriff Grip.
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