The Carp-Faced Boy and Other Tales

The Spider Sweeper-3

He raised Jin’s staff above his head and brought it down on the branches overhead. The tree trembled, raining down morning dew, dying leaves, and spiders. Hundreds and hundreds of spiders. Spiders in all shapes and sizes. Some dropped on the abbot’s saffron robes, finding purchase and scuttling into folds or down his neckline, while others landed on the ground only to disappear under the man’s yellow hem, scurrying up the abbot’s fat legs. While the old man was busy yelping and slapping them away, he didn’t notice the others, the ones that swung down on delicate threads. The ones that lowered themselves slowly, intentionally. He screamed, flailed. He stomped and howled.

And Kumo-harai laughed and laughed as he beat the tree; for a few minutes anyway. That is until something made him stop.

Even the abbot ceased his thrashing when he saw Kumo-harai’s face, saw him gazing over his shoulder, beyond the persimmon tree, deeper into the forest. Eyes wide and mouth ajar.

“Wha-what is it?” the old monk asked. But he didn’t turn. He watched as Kumo-harai dropped the walking stick and then clutched at the collar of his robe, kissing it and whispering a prayer. The young man stumbled backward. He saw what was coming.

But the abbot was frozen with fear, couldn’t move. Could probably not even guess what the younger man saw. He might have heard the sound of something horrible and hungry moving along the leafy forest floor, the snap and splinter of tree limbs as it approached. A heavy moldy woof of its breath. But the old monk had never been there to listen to Jin’s stories. His imagination couldn’t possibly allow the idea that the crack of a small tree being bent in half was some enormous beast coming to feed. A monster picking its way closer and closer on eight grotesque legs, dozens of eyes glassy and wild. No, the abbot couldn’t imagine that or even this: that a moment later—an instant after he felt the fiery heat of the beast—there might be another echoing crack to fill his ears. And this time it wouldn’t be a tree or a branch but the very peculiar and satisfying sound made by a jealous man’s head being opened and cleaned of the treasure inside.