I went back to see Morden the following evening after the sun went down. It was Saturday, so I only left the house to run some errands. Sure enough, as I made my way home, he was waiting at the gate right where I'd left him the night before.
This time he was easy to spot. The streetlamp was on its best behaviour, and Morden was holding a book open and leaning against the post. I thought he hadn't heard me coming, but as I approached he glanced up calmly and tucked a leaf—a literal leaf, Maple in fact, and coloured yellow from the cold—between the pages.
His face lit up with muted excitement.
"Hey again," I said as I walked up to him.
"Hello." The word was curt, like he was trying to downplay his enthusiasm. "How was your, eh, day?"
"Better without a giant spider living on my back," I replied as if it wasn't the strangest thing that had ever happened to me. I held up a plastic bag in my left hand. "Also just bought some new seeds for next spring."
"Seeds?" He asked.
"Yeah, packets of them," I hooked a finger on the edge of the bag and pulled it open wide enough for him to peer inside, "It's easier to get plants already sprouted from nurseries, but I like growing them from seeds. Feels more rewarding, you know? Like I actually worked for it."
Morden nodded politely, but I was sure that he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
"The only shopping I do is online," he admitted, shrugging, "I'm not really good with crowds. Also," he pursed his lips in annoyance, "Most stores are usually closed by the time I wake up."
I smirked. I couldn't help it. I could tell that Morden wasn't being funny deliberately, but the way he complained was entertaining. I was worried that he might take offense, but he seemed to like my reaction.
"What will they grow into?" He asked.
"Huh?"
"Your seedlets," he gestured a finger at my shopping bag.
"Oh, veggies, mostly." I plucked a packet of tomato seeds out of the bag and held it up for him to see, "I've never tried to grow food before. Well, I mean, I have a little herb planter in the kitchen," I laughed at myself, "But that doesn't really count."
"No?" Morden said, mystified. "Are you planning on becoming a farmer?"
I snorted, then caught sight of his earnest expression.
"Oh, you're serious." I coughed and dropped the packet back into the bag, "Um no, no I don't think it'll ever go that far. I'm just going through the motions to see what I can do."
Morden tilted his head a tiny bit and did that sort of big-eyed smile people do when they have no idea what you mean but they're too embarrassed to say so. I tapped my finger on the top of my other hand unconsciously, unsure how to address this sudden pause in the conversation.
"Anyway," I said at last, "How was your day?"
Morden glanced left, then right, then looked me dead in the eye and tilted his head forward as if to make a point.
"I was asleep." He said.
"Oh." I felt stupid for asking, "Yeah, of course."
There was a small, strange pause.
"I meant to ask before, but your hair," Morden stared my head, "That colour, it's not natural, is it?"
It was my turn to be thrown by a ridiculous question.
"What?" I couldn't tell if he was joking, "Um, no, I don't think anyone grows blue or green hair naturally. It's just dye."
Morden's posture went strange at my words. He seemed to pull himself inward, arms bent at the elbows, not quite crossed but with his hands drawn in and tucked under the joints. It was as if he were trying to become smaller, less noticeable.
"Sorry. That was a stupid question." He said, and even his voice was small, "I'm not very good with talking face-to-face. I mostly talk in online forums, where it's harder to get my foot caught in my mouth."
"What? No, it's fine," I brushed it off, "Is it easier for you to type? If you want, we can chat on our phones. I'll give you my number."
This somehow made things worse, as Morden's eyes went large, then downcast as he hunched his shoulders a bit.
"I don't...really..." He closed his eyes briefly, "Have a phone." He glanced at me for a second, then aside, "I mean, who would I even call?"
It was either a strange thing to say, or a very sad thing, or both. I felt like I'd made him uncomfortable, and I didn't know how to express that he had no reason to be.
"Sorry, please forget I said that," Morden said quickly, covering half of his face with his palm, "I'm so embarrassed I could die."
I grinned again, without meaning to, and that seemed to help him relax.
"Look," he held a hand into the air, like he was physically grasping at his words, "Honestly I wasn't sure that you were going to come by," he said, starting to pick at his sleeve and looking aside, "I was worried that I'd made a strange first impression on you."
He forced out a rough laugh in an attempt to mask his nerves.
"Well, to be fair, the spider was the weirdest part," I shrugged, "And that wasn't your fault." I got another chuckle out of him for that, "Don't overthink things, I'm having fun."
It wasn't exactly a compliment, but Morden looked like he'd taken it that way. He smiled sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders, his whole body loosening up again.
"You're interesting," he said in a way that sounded like high praise, and we walked over to his porch and sat down on the steps, "I don't really talk to anyone in-person other than Mama, so this is very nice."
"Mama?" I asked, grinning. I couldn't help myself; I'd never heard a guy openly refer to his mother as 'Mama' before. It sounded like a southern kind of way to address your mother, and we were about as far north as you could get. It didn't match up at all.
"Mama keeps me safe." He explained, like it was the simplest thing in the world, "She's very protective of me, since Father's gone." He didn't seem very upset, and I wasn't sure how to react, so I just nodded.
"My Dad's gone too," I said, "He died a while ago. Cancer. My Mom did the opposite of yours though. It's more like...she was suddenly afraid to care about anyone anymore, so she just decided to leave. Now she's overseas or, I dunno, somewhere. I don't get to talk to her much."
Morden looked genuinely angry about this.
"Your Mama left you all alone? And in this neighbourhood?" He was visibly trying to reign in his frustration, "What if something happened to you?"
"I guess she just figured I would take care of myself," I said, shrugging. The way he said 'this neighbourhood' made me a bit nervous.
"That...It's not right," Morden looked down at his knees, wearing a serious expression, "It's her job to keep you safe, to love you. For her to just disappear—it's not right at all."
"Yeah well," I rolled my eyes, "You can tell her that if she ever visits. I'm okay though, don't worry."
But as I said it, I knew that it was a lie. The same lie I told everyone when the topic of Mom came up. I wasn't okay. Not with her being so far away, and not for her acting like a stranger instead of a mother. I mean, would it kill her to visit me? Call more often? Hell, I'd take a postcard over nothing at all.
I clenched my teeth a bit, covering my frustration in a sarcastic smile. A hand squeezed my shoulder. I glanced over to see Morden give me a small, understanding nod.
I hadn't meant to open up to him like this. I'd never really talked about my family with anyone. Even with classmates who I'd known forever, who already knew exactly what happened, I still refused talk about it openly. I never wanted to.
I could remember, in grade ten, there was an event at the school that many parents attended. I was there as a volunteer. I can still hear it now; Luke's mom, Mrs Dryden, talking to Mrs. Ferrell the science teacher, shaking her head and whispering "Who leaves their teenage son alone at home alone and tells him to just 'take care of himself'? How could she do that to her child?" I'd been standing behind her and she hadn't realized. When she saw me she felt awful, but I was kind to her. I told her that I was okay, I thanked her for worrying. Mrs Dryden was a good mother, and I remember feeling jealous of Luke in that moment.
But on this night, sitting there with Morden, it was different. It was probably because he was still a stranger, or maybe it was the way he complained so openly, but I felt like I was allowed to be bitter in front of him. I was allowed to say the words.
"Actually, it really sucks." I said, wincing down at my sneakers, "I know that Mom and I both had a rough time with Dad." My smile vanished, and I ducked and spoke in a low voice, "But her? She didn't actually deal with it. She just ran away. From him, and from me. I just wish she'd own up that, I don't know," I sighed, "I'm just tired of her doing this, whatever she's doing. This fake connection of hers. Pretending she has nothing to answer for."
Morden nodded with vigor, frowning righteously as I spoke.
"Sorry." I said, "I guess I was holding that in a bit too long."
But Morden was shaking his head.
"You can come tell me how awful she is whenever you want," He said fiercely, "What's your Mama's name?"
"Beverly?" I said, confused.
"Beverly." Morden practically spit out the word, as if it were vulgar, "Where does she get off, abandoning you? Making you feel like you're not good enough." And as he said the words, I realised that he'd perfectly described how I felt, "Well now you turned out fine and Beverly," again, he spat the name, "Can't take any credit for any great things you do. They're yours. Your successes, your failures."
He leaned in and gave me a defiant look.
"You. Own. It. All." He said, putting emphasis on every word, "You—" he pointed at my chest, "—are your own master. And she'll regret abandoning you, mark my words."
What he said was surreal to me. It wasn't just the words themselves, it was the genuine anger in which he said them. Morden didn't seem to care if I wanted to apologize for Mom, because he wasn't going to accept it. He didn't need details. She'd done something cruel, and she deserved scorn. For him, it was that simple.
I caught myself smiling again. It was a strange feeling.
"Thanks," I said, and he gave me a resolved nod. "You know, it's nice being able to talk to someone about this stuff." I propped my arms up behind me and leaned back against them, staring up at the cloudy sky, "Can we meet up more often?"
"I'd like that," Morden said, but then something seemed to occur to him, and he lurched forward, "Don't come tomorrow, though."
"You're busy tomorrow?"
"Every third day," he said, his tone strangely grave, "You definitely can't come every third day, okay?"
"Sure, okay."
"You promise?"
"Yeah, I get it, you're busy every three days."
He exhaled, then perked up again.
"But the rest of the time is good, so definitely come visit me, alright?" He pulled a paper and a golf pencil from his pocket, "I'll give you my email. I'll check every time I wake up to see if you're coming."
His enthusiasm was contagious, I couldn't remember the last time I'd been this invested in making a friend. But there I was, walking home with his email on a scrap of paper, eager to see where it went next.
***
At the time I hadn't really thought about asking what he'd be up to every third day, but hours after I'd gone home and to bed, my mind began to wander. Not just on the strangeness of Morden's schedule, but also other matters.
The spider creature, whose corpse was sitting in the trashcan in my garage. The dead bird in the pentagram, whose blood still stained my front porch. The red-eyed figure lurking at my second floor window.
At the rate everything was happening, I couldn't help but go along with it. The past few days had been filled with such a mundane strangeness, so casually impossible that it felt easier to just smile and nod instead of questioning it. But if I stopped to think about it for too long, I began to feel consumed by how absurd it all was.
I couldn't talk about this with anyone else. I'd sound like a lunatic, or a liar. There was only Morden, but his behaviour seemed to suggest that this was in the realm of what he considered normal, or at the very least that it wasn't worth fretting over.
That attitude was worrying in itself. Morden seemed fairly normal on the surface, but I was beginning to suspect that he was another symptom of whatever was happening around me. And something was definitely happening.
At the same time, Morden was the one upside to the escalating weirdness. I wasn't willing to disregard that. So there was nothing to do but stay vigilant and hope I didn't get in over my head. Besides, I reasoned, I was probably overreacting. Nothing bad had actually happened to me. It was still fine.
Really, I was fine.
And so, for the next week or so, I continued to visit Morden after school. Just an hour every night. I was afraid to bring up the spider again, or anything weird about Shadow Avenue itself, and especially not the pentagram on my doorstep. I didn't know if I wanted it to be real.
Instead, I told him what school was like. I told him about my classmates, teachers, courses. He was riveted. It sounded like he could count the number of people he'd had physical interactions with on one hand. The very notion of being trapped in a room with dozens of other kids for hours at a time both horrified and thrilled him.
He told me about his online escapades, and I realized with no small amount of shock that I'd come across the internet troll in its natural environment. His idea of a good time seemed to be targeting rude, obnoxious commenters who were harassing others, who he then publicly belittled into submission. It was a mean-spirited way of standing up for the little guy, which was almost inspiring, but I found myself privately hoping I'd never be on the receiving end of his wrath.
But it was nice. Getting to know another person, actually connecting with them, was rare for me. And it warmed me to the idea of finally getting some answers. The following Friday, when I walked up to Morden's front door where he'd just emerged, I finally worked up the nerve and bypassed the small talk.
"Hey, can I show you something?" I asked.
This caught him off guard, and he nodded slowly, like he wasn't fully sure he wanted to. I led him across the street to my front door, which seemed to be making him nervous, but then I stopped on the porch and pointed down.
He crept up the steps after me, cautious, until he saw the pentagram.
"Do you know what this is?" I asked.
He nodded, slowly.
"Yours?" He asked, and I made a horrified expression.
"No!" I cringed, "I was going to ask if it was you."
Morden raised his eyebrows while staring at the symbol and shrugged, clearly at a loss.
"Well someone left a dead bird and, whatever this is," I gestured down, "Here last week, and the blood won't wash off. I've tried."
"Well of course not," Morden almost laughed, "It's a protection circle, there'd be no point if it just washed off."
"It's for...what? Protection?" I glanced down at it, "But there was a dead thing in it."
"Oh, that's only because it's a blood sacrifice, to fuel it, you know?" He crouched down and squinted down at the drawing, "Really well-made too. You can feel the heat off it."
He placed a finger against the dried blood. I frowned at him and did the same, then blinked in surprise. He was right, it was warm to the touch.
"So weird." I muttered.
"Well, whoever placed it knew what they were doing," Morden leaned back, bemused, "This won't need to be replaced for months. Is there one at the back entrance too?"
My eyes went wide at the very idea. I hadn't used the back door in months, I'd always just left it locked. Morden followed me to the yard, on the other side of our 8-foot fence, and sure enough there was a second blood pentagram with a small rodent skeleton in the center, painted right in front of the sliding doors.
"Well, you've got an admirer." Morden said, glancing suspiciously around us.
"I don't want one!" I threw my head back and groaned, "What does it even mean?" I turned to him, "I mean, what's it supposed to protect me from?"
"Well, everything, for starters." Morden was looking at me like I should already know this, "It keeps anyone or anything with ill-intentions from entering. The spider must have been on you from before this was placed. It fooled the circle, essentially."
This was too much for me. Morden could see my frustration, and it confused him.
"You really don't know this sort of stuff?" he asked, and I shook my head. "I just assumed everyone knew. You must be having an exciting week, then."
"A little too exciting," I said with a sigh, "Well, at least these aren't a curse or something."
"Far from it," Morden said, "You didn't see who made it?"
"I saw...there was someone at my window that night, I think." I kicked the little skeleton off the deck, "I didn't get a good look."
"It might not have been the same person," Morden said, "It could have been something trying to get in after the fact, only to find that it was locked out."
This hadn't occurred to me at all, and left me feeling sick to my stomach.
"Well, like I said, you're the first person I've seen around here in ages," Morden said, "But I'll keep an eye out for you, let you know if I notice any strangers."
I thanked him, walked him back over to his own house, and chatted with him a bit longer before heading back. The whole exchange had left me rattled, as I'd feared, but I tried to take comfort in the fact that the pentagrams weren't malicious.
When I went to cross the street, I happened to look up at the streetlamp. It was flickering something awful again. But this time I noticed a large shape sitting over the light bulb, and realization dawned upon me.
It was another giant spider, like the one we'd killed but about half the size. They fed on energy, didn't they? The spider was draining the power from the light, and that was why the light flickered so feverishly every evening. I couldn't believe I'd never noticed that massive thing sitting up there, draining away the electricity.
'They're very good at hiding' Morden had said, and remembering this made me uncomfortable again. I was starting to think that it was less 'hiding' and more 'completely invisible and intangible', because there was no other explanation for one so large living on my person for weeks without me noticing.
That train of thought, once again, led me to question my perceived safety. These spider monsters that most people couldn't see? They were real. They lived here. Morden, more than once, had insisted that Shadow Avenue wasn't safe. And now I'd discovered that the wall-climbing stranger had either been trying to get at me, or been attempting to stop anything else getting at me. Both options were unpleasant to think about.
I was too riled up to sleep. I got out of bed and pulled my blinds up—I'd been shutting them ever since the night I'd been visited—to peer out at the street. There was nobody there, as usual, but I stood there and kept looking. Maybe it was like the spiders. Maybe there were other things out there that I just wasn't seeing.
For long minutes, there was nothing. I could still make out the spider on the flickering lamp, but nothing else seemed out of place. I briefly got excited when I saw movement coming from the left side of the street, only to spot a very unhappy skunk shuffling across the road. It wasn't long before I could smell its displeasure wafting by the window.
Annoyed and feeling a bit stupid, I stopped to question my own motivations. What was I hoping to see? I kept remembering our science teacher, shaking a finger at us and stating that mental illness usually presents itself between the ages of 18 and 24. I was now comfortably in that zone. What if I was just sick, and this was all in my head? The spider, the street, Morden, all of it?
A noise from outside caught my attention and forced me out of my thoughts.
A thin, dark-haired woman emerged from behind Morden's house. I could see her clearly because unlike our yard, her picket-fence was short and barely obscured my view. She had to be Morden's mother, I reasoned, but the sight of her put me on guard. She was dragging a large, heavy bag out of the house and into the backyard. It looked stained and filthy, even from this distance, and there was something erratic about the way the woman moved. She bent down to pick up a shovel, and then she started digging.
After a few minutes, when the hole was fairly deep, she stopped and abruptly looked up at my window. I jumped backwards and ducked. My heart pounding in my ears, I didn't have the guts to look back. I could still hear the sound of the shovel hitting dirt for a short while, but soon there was silence. When I checked, Morden's mother was gone, and so was what she'd dragged out of the house. All that was left was a freshly filled hole on her lawn.
The next morning, after a sleepless night, I snuck into their yard. The grass was dead and dry, and there was evidence that holes were made and filled often. Upon closer inspection, however, I noticed what was clearly a rotting human finger poking out of an older patch of overturned soil.
There were bodies buried under Shadow Avenue. Whatever else might be in my head, that part I knew was horrendously real.