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    Mantis
    Mantis
    Mantis
    Ebook119 pages1 hour

    Mantis

    By Venla Mäkelä

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Russell West, his wife Gina and their two daughters move from Wisconsin to Chicago, where Russell grew up. Russell has a new job as a columnist at the Chicago Tribune. A public works employee repeatedly calls the paper about the monster he's seen in the city sewer, a creature that resembles a spider-human. Russell's colleagues think the guy is a nut job and ignore him, but Russell is curious and wants to hear more - secretly worried the monster is the thing he set free years ago.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVenla Mäkelä
    Release dateJul 11, 2014
    ISBN9781311051523
    Mantis
    Author

    Venla Mäkelä

    Venla Mäkelä writes screenplays and fiction.She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

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      Book preview

      Mantis - Venla Mäkelä

      Mantis

      Venla Mäkelä

      Copyright 2014 by Venla Mäkelä

      Smashwords Edition

      Tom - thank you, thank you, thank you.

      MANTIS

      That's probably how people who get away with a fatal hit-and-run feel - at least those not completely psychopathic - that a dark cloud is hanging over everything, that one day you'll be found out and what you have done will be dragged to light, and it will destroy everything you have. I waited for my punishment for over twenty years, and I guess you could say I got it. I didn't go to jail, and my friends and relatives still speak to me. People tell me what happened was not really my fault. But my actions caused the death of at least five people, and perhaps more. (Over the years there were a few bodies hauled up from the Chicago River, always found too late to really determine the cause of death or accuse anyone - I kept all the newspaper clippings.)

      You have a bad dream. You wake up, realize it was just a nightmare and that everything's okay. But just a second later you remember your secret, and you're back in the nightmare.

      *

      I slid a movie into the dvd player on the floor and straightened up, my spine sore. That morning we had packed our stuff into a moving truck and driven from Wisconsin to Chicago. It's less than two hours by car, but the overall hassle had taken its toll and now we still had to unload everything and unpack the bedding and stuff like that. The movie started, Tangled. Once again the red-headed Rapunzel would let down her hair and escape from the tower.

      All right, I said.

      The girls sat on moving boxes in front of the TV. Samantha was holding her iPad, irked she couldn't get to her YouTube videos and her daily dose of whatever it was she was consuming for hours every day. She was nine years old and already had major attitude about everything. I dreaded the day she would seriously start butting heads with her mother.

      Why is there no Internet? Erica asked. She was seven and still sweet.

      You have to order it, stupid, Samantha said.

      There will be, tomorrow, I said. The Internet guy will come tomorrow.

      Samantha let the iPad clonk onto the floor.

      Hey! I said.

      Samantha just stared at me, blank. To our kids a computer is no more valuable or exciting than a coffee maker. I felt like giving her the when-I-was-young speech, but let it go - it had been a long day for everyone. Please pick it up, I said.

      She did.

      Put it somewhere safe, I said.

      I can just hold it, she said.

      I said, Okay, you guys okay now?

      Is there any food? Samantha asked.

      After we get all the stuff in, I said.

      Aww, Samantha said.

      They were so spoiled, and very cute with their dark blond curls and the honey toned skin they had inherited from my wife Gina, who had Puerto Rican blood. Puerto Rican, Dutch, Portuguese and German to be exact. It's perfect, I often said, the perfect mix. It should be patented. I called her the melting pot. She called me the bland white guy.

      Fifteen minutes, I said to the girls, though I knew it would be at least half an hour until the moving truck was completely unloaded. I went to help the movers.

      When I met Gina - eleven years ago, on a holiday in New York - I didn't waste any time but proposed to her within two weeks. She was born and raised in Milwaukee and had returned there after getting her degree at Berkeley. She was a nutritionist and worked for a group of doctors who all had their practices in the same red-brick, ivy-covered building that looked like something straight out of a storybook, with rose bushes and a small fountain in the courtyard. Until then I had lived in Chicago and had worked for a small weekly paper, but I was lucky and landed a job on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel right away. Samantha was born, then Erica a year and a half later. We had a big house with large windows, a small rock pond in the backyard and a river not far away. In summer, with the windows open, you could hear the water trickle down the pebbles: it was like some heavenly instrument playing. At dusk a hedgehog might putter across the lawn, or a deer could stop by to nip at the young apple trees.

      The house was sold now. This house we were now renting in Chicago, in North Center, was not what one would call charming, though the area was very nice. The house had a kitchen, a dining room and a living room downstairs, and two bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs. A little nook in the living room where we could set a home office. Strange ashy beige paint on the walls - I had promised Gina I would paint if the landlord said it was okay. The house was near a good school which was all that really mattered at the moment.

      I had convinced Gina the job at the Tribune was a dream to come true, a job that I had coveted since one silly school play in the fifth grade. I told her I was headhunted. This was not entirely true - I had worked hard to get the job, had hustled quietly making calls to people who mattered. It had taken years, but finally I was discovered and asked to become a columnist for the Tribune, and I had immediately said yes. And after that I had asked Gina if she thought we could move. It took her two days to decide. Perhaps it would be exciting for all of us, she said, and I said, We can always come back if it doesn't work out.

      I carried in the dining table chairs, two at the time. It was difficult but that's how the movers did it and I didn't want to seem like a wimp. Gina placed a box on the kitchen counter and glanced out through the window at the moving truck. How come we have so much stuff? she said. Stuff, stuff stuff!

      We don't really have that much, I said.

      It looks like a lot, Gina said. Tons and tons of stuff.

      But the guys are fast, I said.

      Yeah...

      I hugged her briefly. You tired?

      Just want to be done with this, Gina said and smiled a little. And I'm hungry.

      I know, me too. I saw the movers carry a sofa out of the truck and went to the hall to guide them.

      Around seven p.m. everything was done and Gina ordered two pizzas. We wolfed them down, the dining table and the chairs still partly covered with bubble wrap.

      Pizza never tasted this good, I said.

      Never, Gina said.

      While Gina made sure the girls brushed their teeth, I put our bed together. After ten minutes Gina came and said, Passed out, both of them. She started slipping the pillows into pillow cases. I pulled the mattress on the bed frame and put the sheet on. Gina tossed the last of the pillows on the bed, then jumped on top of it all, exhausted. She looked at me, stretched and yawned. How does it feel to be back in Chicago? she asked.

      Great. Nostalgic. Odd. Great, I said.

      She smiled. I lay down and kissed her. We did it.

      We did it honey, Gina said.

      We lay in silence for a moment, staring at the ceiling.

      Is that a spider on the ceiling or just a stain? she asked.

      "It's a giant spider. Bloodthirsty. Giant. Waiting for you to fall asleep," I said.

      Gina snorted and got up and went to the bathroom. I heard her electric toothbrush whir. After a moment I said, Are you worried about the girls?

      She stepped to the door and stopped brushing for a moment. A little bit. You know, a new school, new friends and all that...

      They are very bossy, outgoing, bratty girls, I said, and Gina laughed.

      True, she said.

      On Monday morning Gina drove the girls to the school and I took the train to the office. The Chicago Tribune building was even more impressive than I remembered. I stopped by the main entrance and took a moment and looked up where the pointy Gothic towers met the sky. A hard wind flapped the flag violently in the pole on the top. Office workers entered the building in a steady stream, carrying laptops and coffee cups. It was eight a.m.; my first day in the new job.

      I walked up the stairs and entered the lobby. Before the construction started, in 1922, Colonel McCormick, owner of the paper, asked correspondents to bring rocks and bricks from historical sites around the world so that they could be incorporated into the building. You can still see them, labeled with the location of their origin: rocks from the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon or the Great Pyramid, to name just a few.

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