Itsy Bitsy Spider (Emma Frost #1) (19 page)

Old Mrs. Frost
read
about the boy in the paper. Someone had found him
on the ferry headed towards the mainland. How he had managed to sneak on board
nobody knew and now they didn't know where he came from, where he belonged to
and they asked people for help. A big picture covered the front page, but Mrs.
Frost didn't need any picture to recognize him. She sighed and looked out the
window into the yard where the boy and his mother had lived for so long.

After coming back from the hospital with a new
hip, Mrs. Frost had walked down to the bunker at the end of the yard on her
crutches. She could tell the door was open from afar and knew it was bad. The
bunker turned out to be empty. The boy was gone. With much difficulty she
climbed inside.

Damn those old bones that she
should fall and break her hip right then when they needed new supplies
.
Mrs. Frost had cursed every day she needed to stay at the hospital, and to be
frank she thought she would come back only to find both of them had starved to
death. But somehow the boy had survived.

She walked down the many stairs and walked
inside groaning and moaning and there, inside on one of the beds was her answer
to how the boy had managed to stay alive.

She walked closer, humping on her crutches
trying to have as little weight on her new hips as possible. The stench from
the dead body was horrendous. Mrs. Frost found a handkerchief in her pocket and
held it in front of her nose as she examined the body and especially the lower
parts of it.

Half of the meat on one side of her stomach was
missing and so was most on the right side of her leg. Now it was covered in
flies and ants. Mrs. Frost shook her head in disbelief. As she walked back to
the house, humping on her crutches she mumbled under her breath.

"You little bastard. You ate her, didn't
you? You ate your own mother to survive."

Now she was staring at his picture in the paper
and she got the feeling he was somehow staring back at her. The article stated
that he hadn't spoken a word so far, so they didn't even know if he was Danish
or maybe a German tourist who had somehow gotten away from his parents.

"So you've decided to keep quiet,
huh?" she said to the picture. "Well you're smart, my boy. Very
smart."

Mrs. Frost picked up the phone on the end table
next to the chair she was sitting in and dialed a number.

"Mrs. Heinrichsen. Have you seen the paper?
No. No. I don't think he will pose any problem for us. After all he is just a
young boy. What can he do? Yes. I'll make sure to notify the pastor as well. Do
you think we need to speak to Irene Justesen as well, tell her he is on the
loose? No, no. You're right. She doesn't need to know. She is busy with all
that fitness mumbo-jumbo. She is no longer one of us. We risk she'll try and
find him or something and then it will all blow up in our faces. I believe in
keeping a low profile. He won't say anything if we don't, I'm sure. Goodnight
Mrs. Heinrichsen and God bless."

Mrs. Frost hung up the phone suddenly feeling
uncomfortable in her own living room with all those big black windows. She got
up and leaned on her crutches. She pulled the curtains to cover all the windows
to stop the eerie feeling of someone watching her from the outside. As she
grabbed one of the curtains a spider jumped right at her face and landed in her
hair. Mrs. Frost screamed and let go of her crutches with the result she fell to
the ground with a loud crash and hurt her leg.

Lying on the floor she moaned for someone to
please help her, please help an old lady. But there was no one but her and the
spider left in the big old house.

I ran into my
dad's bedroom and woke him up.

"What's going on, sweetie? Is it something
with Sophia? Is she not feeling well?"

"No. No. It's not her." I was gasping
for air after having stormed across the yard, up the stairs and into his room.

"Is it one of the kids?"

I shook my head. "No. No. That's not it
either." I felt my eyes tearing up and couldn't hold it back any longer.
My dad saw it and wiped a tear away with his thumb.

"What's the matter then honey?"

"Do you remember when we came to visit
Grandma when she was at the hospital when I was only four years old?"

My dad rubbed his eyes. "Vaguely,
why?"

"Do you remember I was in the yard when you
called for me, when Grandma came back and we all ended up yelling at each
other?"

"No. I do remember her yelling at you,
though. That's when I decided we had to leave again. We had been staying at the
house for several days, cleaning and making sure it was ready for her when she
got back. I remember I was angry that she wasn't the least bit grateful for
what we had done. We left right away and that was actually the last time I saw
her alive."

"There was a boy," I said and tried to
press down the tears. "Do you remember I told you there was a boy? Right
before Grandma came home."

"You have a very detailed memory of that
day all of a sudden, don't you? No I don't remember that there was a boy or
that you said that."

"I dreamt about it. I thought it was just a
dream, but it wasn't. It was real. There is a hatch that leads to a hole, a
room underground in the yard."

"The old bunker, yes."

"Have you ever been down there?"

"No. My mom kept it locked up. But I do
know that she kept it ready in case a war broke out again. She did grow up
during World War II you know. Always afraid it was going to happen again. She
never forgave the Germans."

"There was a boy inside the shelter that
day. I found the key by coincidence a couple of days before and then I tripped
over the hatch and found it was locked. I went back to get the key and it fit.
When I unlocked it and opened it there he was. Looking back at me. What was he
doing down there, Dad?"

My dad shook his head. "I have no idea what
you're talking about. Are you sure you're alright, dear? Maybe you just had a
very lively dream or something? Do you have a fever?"

"I'm not sick, Dad. I'm not sleeping
either. I'm very much awake. I don't think I've ever been this awake before in
my life. I need to know what that boy was doing down there, Dad. Why was he
locked inside of the bunker in the ground?" I was almost yelling now and
my dad looked at me, frightened.

"What's going on here?" he asked.
"I don't understand anything of what you're saying."

I sighed and turned away. "Neither do I.
But I have a bad feeling about this Dad. I went down there again. I went into
the bunker."

"Now? At this time at night?"

"It's six in the morning. It's hardly night
anymore. The kids will be waking up soon anyway. And yes, I went back into the
bunker. I found the key in the same place and went in there. And guess what I
found?"

My dad sighed and rubbed his face. "I don't
know? Another little boy?"

"Drawings, dad. The walls are plastered
with drawings, made by a child. Old drawings like they were made a long time
ago."

"I really don't know what to say to all
this," my dad said and leaned back on his pillow.

"Do you think your mother kept the boy down
there for some reason? Do you think she had locked him down there?"

"No," he chuckled. "My mother was
many things, among them bad tempered and controlling, but I refuse to believe
she could be that cruel."

The man was
looking
down the pot and inhaled the wonderful scent
coming from it. He added some more bouillon and rosemary. It had been cooking
since seven this morning, but that's the way he preferred it. Letting it simmer
for hours and hours softened the meat and made it very tasty.

He was planning an early dinner for himself
since he was going to have a busy night. The heart was what needed the longest
cooking so he had put that in first. Now he found his knife and threw a big
lump of meat up on the table. He started cutting out the lungs into smaller
edible pieces before he put them into the pot as well. Lastly it was the liver.
He took it out of the refrigerator and threw it on the table that was covered
in blood from all the chopping and preparing. He lifted his knife up high and
closed his eyes as the blade went through the meat and produced the most
intoxicating sound to him. He cut it into slices that all ended in the pot
along with the rest of the meat. Then some thyme and more rosemary. Now all it
needed was time.

"A good nice meal strong on proteins,"
he said and put the lid back on. Then he turned the heat down.

It was a little after lunch but he still felt he
deserved a glass of red wine, so he opened a bottle, poured some in the pot and
drank some of it from the bottle.

"It's five o'clock somewhere," he said
to himself looking at his reflection in the mirror on his wall. His skin was
still pale and never did cope with much sunlight. Even after all these years.
You could still see all of his blood veins through the skin. It didn't matter.
Made him kind of special, he thought. Unique. And he was one of a kind. He knew
that much.

They had given him a new name. After finding him
on the ferry, the police and social workers had tried everything to make him
speak. But after weeks of silence and no one turning up to claim him, they
didn't know what to do with him. So they sent him to an orphanage where he was
given a new name. For years he still didn't speak, not until he was much older
and by then they had stopped asking questions.

But he never forgot the name his mother had
given him in the bunker where he was born and when he was alone he sometimes
called himself his real name.

"Sebastian." He said out loud watching
himself while he said it. "Sebastian."

He had liked that name, but he had never liked
that boy that he used to be. He was buried in the bunker along with his mother.
With the new name came a new life. Sebastian got an education and once done
with high school he got to finally see the world. He worked as a waiter in a
restaurant where he picked up a lot of his cooking skills, then saved a lot of
money and finally travelled around the world with nothing but his backpack.
Sebastian enjoyed the great plains. He climbed mountains, slept under the
endless starry sky, surfed waves in the ocean and all the time he thought about
how much his mother would have loved this. How she would have liked to be there
with him under the open sky with no walls to keep her.

Once he came back he started planning her
revenge. He wanted those people that had done those bad things to his mother to
suffer. He moved back to the island and began a new life for himself, got close
to the people and it didn't take him long to know exactly who he needed to
punish. Who had been behind it all. He knew about Mrs. Frost, that she had
locked his mother in there while she was pregnant because she didn't want her
son to have to marry her, because it was a scandal that she had gotten pregnant
outside of marriage, when she was only sixteen, and on top of that, the girl wasn't
very bright and especially not suitable for her only son, heir to her fortune.
He knew all about that even before he came back. His mom had told him those
things while they were still down there. She had told him the truth. The rest
he figured out on his own. He came close to them, they trusted him and now ...
now there was only the last one left.

"Always save the best for last," he
said as he found his set of knives and started sharpening them. "Mother
always said. Save the best for last."

My dad and I
went to check on Sophia right after breakfast. Maya promised to look after all
the kids while we were gone.

"Are you sure you can do that?" I
asked and looked at my beautiful daughter whose strength in this time of crisis
had impressed me. "Five kids ... and Victor. It's a lot of hard
work."

"Of course I can," she said and
kneeled in front of Sophia's youngest who was sitting on the floor with two
wooden spoons and a pot that Maya had taken from the kitchen and now he was
playing it like it was a drum. I smiled and blew her a kiss. I think I was the
proudest mother in the world at that instant. Seeing my daughter stand up like
this had touched my heart.

"We'll be right back. Victor told me he'll
stay in his room. I think all these kids kind of get to him, but he'll be fine
as long as he stays up there."

I followed my dad across the street and into
Sophia's house where he went into the bedroom alone first. I heard him talk to
her and then she answered. She sounded more like herself than she had done the
day before. It was a relief.

I waited for ten minutes or so until my dad came
out of the room.

"How is she?" I asked.

"Better. Definitely improving. But she
needs her rest. She should stay in bed for at least a couple of days more. At
least," my dad said.

"I'll make sure the kids stay at our place
till she is ready. Can I see her?"

"Sure. She was just asking for you. Go
right in. I'll head back to assist Maya with all the munchkins before they eat
her alive."

I chuckled and watched my dad's face. He looked
like he was enjoying this.

"See you over there in a bit, then." I
said and knocked on the door to Sophia's bedroom.

"Come in," Sophia said.

I opened the door and went in. Her face was
still unrecognizable and all of a sudden I felt really glad that her kids were
at my house and that they didn't have to see their mother like this.

"How are my kids? They are not too much
trouble, are they?"

I shook my head and grabbed a chair. I pulled it
close to her bed and sat down. "No they have been very sweet. Maya is
playing with them now and my dad just went back there to help her out."

"And you're fine with it? I mean it kind of
ruins your dad's visit and all."

"Stop worrying about stuff like that. I
don't mind having them. You have to focus on getting well. The kids love our
place and we love having them there."

Sophia tried to smile, but it was too hard. I
grabbed her hand and held it in mine. Tears kept pressing on but I withheld
them. "So how are you feeling today?"

A tear escaped from her swollen eyes. "Why
would he do this to me? I don't understand."

I held her hand tighter in mine and stroke it on
top. "I don't know Sophia."

"I keep thinking if I only ..."

I interrupted her. "No! Don't you even
think that, Sophia. This guy is a maniac. He's a psychopath and you really
should report him before he does this to anyone else. I think he is a very sick
man if you ask me."

"You think he might have done this
before?" Sophia asked.

"Of course he has. He is a sick man,
Sophia. He needs to be stopped. Let me talk to the police, let me tell them
what happened, let them take him in for questioning. All you have to do is tell
your story when they come to take your statement. I'll help you with the rest.
I believe you're not only helping yourself but all the other women he might run
into in the future. A man like this needs to be locked up."

Sophia sniffled. I found a tissue and wiped her
running nose. "Okay," she said. "You talk to them and report
what he has done. But promise me one thing."

I smiled and wiped her nose again.
"Anything"

"Tell Officer Dan Toft. Let him handle
everything. I trust him."

I nodded eagerly. "Of course. I'll make
sure to talk to him."