Quest for the Thing from the Sky

Part One

The clouded, steely October sky outside his window was full of quail flying east, into the brewing storm, and Raymond wanted nothing more than to join them. Instead, though, his desk was full of spiders, and so in the last thirty minutes of his Friday afternoon, he went to go conquer the greatest fear of his childhood.

They were long and spindly, of a sickly brown color that horribly mismatched the nest of eyes in the middle of them. Each spider was half a hand across, and Raymond counted seven before he went to the second drawer, and eighteen altogether.

Finally he was free, though--he walked out the main doors of Ranier Hall and into his weekend. Something in his shifted when he was free for two days, and he wasn't Professor Magus anymore. He was Raymond again, not the mask of himself that he had to show for the students.

He went to text Julian once he reached his car, but the other guy had messaged him already. I'm gassing up and hitting Burger King. lmk when you're ready

Meet me at my house, Raymond sent back, then sparked the engine and got on the road.

Traffic at five o'clock on a Friday was as horrendous as ever, but he made it back to his ramshackle little house at five twenty-five. 

It wasn't really a disaster, but he hadn't gotten around to repainting the place yet, and his teacher's salary wasn't paying him enough to outsource the job. It must once have been a very bold, bright white, but in the sixteen years since it saw a previous owner, the paint had flaked away and dulled almost into gray.

The house had been cheap, though, in a university town where livable apartments began at six hundred a month not including utilities, and dingy bedrooms in eight-person shared houses were still four-fifty. No one had lived in the place for sixteen years, and it showed. Everything inside was outdated to the point of antiquity, but not quite.

Raymond still felt like he was living in the past whenever he stepped through his doorway, though, and living how his parents must have when they started out--but they'd been together, with a baby on the way, living in the town they grew up in. He had graduated college and was living alone in the place where he had gone to school, but the struggle was the same. He was just reaching higher, for more.

The house had been a dream come true. All his friends were living in apartments, but the house was cheap and furnished, so he inquired. The realtor was an old woman, with wispy white threads of hair that almost covered her entire liver-spotted scalp, and she hadn't tried very hard to sell him the place. In her five years as the property's third realtor, none of the visits she'd arranged with potential buyers had yielded any fruit.

When Raymond asked why, she'd looked him right in the eye. "You really don't know the story?"

He didn't, and so he sat on a dusty leather love seat across a glass coffee table and listened as she told him the story.

"The guy who lived here--well, Turtlebrook Hills is a small town, so you kind of get to know everyone after awhile. People talk, and there aren't that many people to talk to. I didn't know him personally, but through a friend of a friend, Zach didn't seem all that strange. No one even knew he had pets until they saw it on the news.

"There were hundreds of them--snakes, mostly, rattlers and hooded cobras, little black vipers and bright ones, like coral snakes, if that's what they were. The biggest in the menagerie were a pair of lion cubs, a boy and girl, almost a year old. He was feeding the snakes to them, and I guess he must have thought he could handle bigger things, so he dug himself a trench in the backyard that he could call a pond, and he brought home a saltwater crocodile."