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Return to Old Orchard Road	By : SheliakBob Category: 1 through F > 10,000 BC Views: 1105 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own "Jungle Captive," "The Spider Woman," "The Spider Woman Strikes Back" nor any of the characters from them. I make no money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Return to Old Orchard Road
- 1
RETURN TO OLD ORCHARD ROAD
Empty, the cabinet drawer rolled back and the stainless steel door closed with a clang.
The wheels on the cart squealed as it was pushed down a long, barely lit corridor.
Under a stained white sheet, the cadaver quivered with each jolt. A hand—huge, blanched bloodless white, with massive knuckles and veins like cords across the back, slipped out from under the sheet. The fingers seemed to twitch as the morgue attendants hurriedly pushed the cart toward the Examining Room.
“Bet it’s the mother.” Mortimer said. His voice was dry and raspy, barely more than a croak.
“Why do you say that?” Tobias asked. His voice was as thin and reedy as the man himself.
The cart screeched to a halt.
Mortimer grabbed the sheet covering the cadaver and yanked it down off of the face.
The dead man’s face might have belonged to a Neanderthal. The brow was boney, the nose broad and flat. The scalp was covered with tight curls of bristly hair and the jaw was massively thick and heavy. Bloodless lips drooped in what might almost be a pout. The eyes were open, again. They always seemed to be open, no matter how many times the Coroner tried to close them. There was an oddly beatific look to the glassy orbs, the look of someone who had found peace in his last moments, more peace, perhaps, than he had found in life.
“’Cause…” Mortimer croaked.
“…That’s a face only a mother could love!” They both said in unison, before breaking into cackling laughter.
The pair sniffed and chuckled, then continued on their way, pushing the heavy body on into the Examining Room.

The Coroner was talking to a tall, statuesque woman dressed in black with a heavy veil when the attendants wheeled the cart with the cadaver into the room. He flipped through some papers, giving them only a perfunctory examination, before stamping the last page and signing it.
“I don’t see why there should be any difficulties, Mrs. Dollard.” He said gently. “The case was closed, so no autopsy is required. As there isn’t going to be more than a pro forma inquest, I don’t see any reason why we can’t release the body for burial.”
The woman stifled a soft sob and wiped her face under the veil with a white, lacey kerchief.
“All we really need is your signature and an official identification of the body.”
The woman nodded. She slowly shuffled over to the sheet-covered body.
On a signal from the Coroner, the attendants pulled back the sheet, revealing the face underneath.
The veiled woman stared for a long time, seemingly mesmerized by the brutish features before her.
Finally she sighed heavily and nodded.
“Yes. That’s my boy. That’s my son.” She whispered.
The attendants looked at each other and simultaneously burst into broad grins. The smiles vanished almost immediately under the Coroner’s glare.
“I am very sorry for your loss, Ma’am. If you would just sign here…and here. And once more, here.”
Paperwork concluded, the massive cadaver was prepared for delivery.

“I don’t like this! I don’t like this at all.” Whispered Bill as the black hearse turned on to Old Orchard Road.
“Are you sure this is the right place? This can’t be the right place.”
“413 Old Orchard Road. That’s what it says right here, in the damn delivery order.” Jim replied, not at all happy himself.
“That can’t be right.”
The hearse paused at the mouth of the dirt road. Headlight beams stabbed futilely down a long dusty lane surrounded by gnarled tree branches. The branches swayed and twitched in the wind.
Jim pulled out the crumpled delivery order and clicked on the dome light. Bill leaned in and they both read it together.
“Damn.” Muttered Bill.
“Fuck!” Shouted Jim with somewhat greater fervor.
“It is. It’s the Stendahl House.”

The black hearse crept slowly down the dirt road, like a beetle prowling a garden row. White splashes of light proceeded it. A red smog created by dust and taillights followed it. Close to the highway there were a few lonely farm houses and a couple of trailers, but as they drove deeper into the dark, the habitations became fewer and fewer until they were past the last lighted porches and alone in the night.
The road twisted between low hills then curved to skirt the side of a wooded slope. To one side oaks and rock outcroppings lined the edge of a deep canyon. To the other side crouched row after row of crooked apple trees, the remnants of the old orchard the road was named for, gone feral after decades of neglect. The trees marched up over the hill in a disorderly tangle of old growth and brush.
“I hate this.” Muttered Bill.
Jim just grunted and white-knuckled the steering wheel.

In the dense thickets that had grown up around the trunks of the apple trees, a coyote hunted for dinner. It pushed its nose through the dirt and dried leaves, sniffing furiously. There was a trail in the dirt, a smear of scent strong and clear to the coyote’s nostrils.
Rabbit!
A big buck, from the strong musky smell of its trail.
There was something wrong about the scent, it was too bitter. There was a tang to it that the coyote had never encountered before. Something tingly. It tickled the coyote’s nose and made its eyes water.
But the coyote was hungry and rabbit was rabbit-meat waiting to be chewed.
The coyote yipped in excitement.
Drool dripped from its jaws.
The scent-trail led into a hole mashed through an impenetrable tangle of brambles. The foolish rabbit had cornered itself in the brush. All the coyote needed to do was shove its snout into the hole and bite, bite, bite!
Something was hidden in the brush, something that might have been a rabbit once. Curved saber-fangs snapped out and closed on the coyote’s head. The thick fangs punched through the coyote’s fragile skull and impaled the brain within.
With its prey trapped and dying, the thing in the thicket began to eat, unconcerned that the prey thrashing and howling in its mouth was not yet dead.
Blood and bits of bone and torn blobs of flesh geysered out of the brambles.

The hearse followed the road as it turned away from the canyon-cliff and plunged full into acres of more trees in rows. A thin ground fog was beginning to rise from the roots of the feral orchard. Wisps crawled along the ground like wounded ghosts.
Something howled horribly, in pain, out in the woods beyond the road. The howls choked and stuttered, but went on for far too long.
“I really, really hate this.” Whispered Bill.
Finally the hearse rolled up in front of an old bungalow-style house, half-swallowed by the woods around it. Dark drapes hung in the windows, but harsh white lights were on inside the rooms behind them.
There was a waist high white picket fence surrounding the property. The double-gates were open, swaying slightly in the wind. They were expected.
The two men hurriedly parked and opened the rear gate. The coffin, made of thin planks of raw, unvarnished pine, wasn’t heavy but the body inside it was.
The men wrestled it on to a dolly, with a great deal of grunting and no little sweat.
They wheeled it to the front porch, then walked it up the stairs, and rolled it to the door. They stood there silent, each looking expectantly at the other. The columns of the porch and were covered with winding vines. They felt like they were standing inside a giant cage.
Eventually Jim cursed and reached out to knock on the door.
“Eternal Rest Mortuary. We have a delivery.”
They both stood and waited, fidgeting.
“Someone has to sign for it!” Shouted Jim with exasperation.
There was no sound except the wind, which was picking up, thrashing through the tree tops.
“Screw it! Let’s get out of here.” Bill said, panic edging his voice.
“Right.” Agreed Jim, a little too quickly.
“Okay, we’ll just leave it here by the door. We’ll leave the paperwork too. Just sign it and mail it back when you get a chance.”
The men rocked the coffin off the dolly and laid it on the porch in front of the door.
“Let’s go!”
Both of them ran for the hearse. Bill pulled the dolly rattling behind him. He tossed it in the back then slammed the gate closed. Jim was already in the driver’s seat and the engine was revving when Bill pulled open the passenger side door.
Behind them the front door of the Stendahl House creaked open. No one was visible in the rectangle of bright light. The coffin obscured the lower third of the doorway. A pair of gnarled brown hands grabbed the coffin by the sides. It shifted and rocked, then began to slide through the door into the house.
Jim stomped on the gas and the hearse slewed about in a tight turn, throwing up a curtain of dust and pebbles, then roared off down the dirt road toward the highway, beyond the trees.
Jim glanced at the rearview mirror just in time to see the coffin disappear through the doorway and the dark door slam shut.
The hearse leaped like a racehorse and careened away down the road.

They were almost back to the populated stretch of the old road when the headlights picked up eyes staring at them from the darkness. The eyes flared red, gleaming like an animal’s. A shape covered with thick black hair, yet unmistakably feminine in form stepped into the road ahead of them. Shreds of a torn white surgical smock clung to its curves but hung open in the front. The hairy monster slapped its bare black breast and bellowed. Fur-knuckled hands reached toward them, imploring.
“Hungry!” Rasped a hoarse voice.
“Oh HELL no!” shouted Jim.
He leaned heavily on the horn and didn’t slow a bit.
The hairy black shape leaped nimbly out of the hearse’s path at the last minute. It lashed out with its fists and a window shattered along the rear compartment.
“Crap! That’s coming out of our pay.” Muttered Bill as they pulled away.
Glass tinkled in the back.
The shape stood panting in the blood-colored dust behind them.
“I hate this road.” Gasped Bill. “I’m never, ever coming out here again, no matter how much they pay us.”
“Damn straight.” Jim agreed.
The hearse leaped out of the mouth of the dirt road and back on to the welcome pavement of Ridgefork Highway. An oncoming truck nearly T-boned the hearse. The truck driver laid on the horn and hit the brakes, sending his rig slewing about for several seconds before coming to a halt on the graveled shoulder.
Weaving back and forth themselves, Jim and Bill raced for home, seriously in excess of the posted speed limit.

Beneath the harsh white lights Moloch’s dead face was even uglier than in life. The eyes had popped open again and were beginning to turn white and cloudy.
Zenobia Dollard sucked in a lungful of air, smothering a gasp before it could get out of her throat. She clicked her white teeth with a metallic pen.
“Look at him, Mego! It’s uncanny. It’s unbelievable. He is the spitting image of my Mario. They could be twins.”
Zenobia leaned over the corpse, scrutinizing the features with a coldly dispassionate, clinical gaze.
“Acromegaly, no doubt. But look, the boney extension of the orbital ridge, the thickening of the mandible with significant lengthening of the rami, the way the thoracic cage has thickened and expanded, all the exact same symptoms that Mario showed. But I know for a fact that Mario did not have a brother, let alone a twin. Besides, look, the eyes are a lighter color, the hair is more coppery than Mario’s. There are subtle differences in the cheekbones, in the way the nose has flattened. Despite the identical Acromegalic symptoms, this man probably didn’t resemble Mario at all, before the deformations occurred.”
Mego, Dollard’s pigmy sidekick, squinted at the deadman’s face. Mego was all face, barrel chest, and muscular arms.
“Ugly.” Was his entire verdict.
Zenobia sighed with exasperation.
“You miss the point, Little Man…”
“Don’t call me that!” snarled the dwarf.
“…I don’t think that these deformations, nor those Mario exhibited, are from Acromegaly at all.” She ignored the murderous glint in her servant’s eyes. Despite the burly pygmy’s extraordinary strength, she believed herself safe from any violence he might contemplate.
“I think these symptoms, this pattern of deformation, so exactly alike—also identical to those described in the Hoxton Creeper, are actually latent Neanderthal genetic traits, triggered by some agent Some chemical or bio-organism. Anyone exposed to the same agent would manifest the same traits.”
She pulled a magnifying glass from her surgical smock pocket and examined the corpse’s face closely for several minutes. She hummed a melody from a Spanish opera as she worked.
“Of course, I can’t rule out the possibility that this ‘Moloch’ might in fact be the Hoxton Creeper, or just The Creeper as he was called here in the States. Certainly Hal Moffet is supposed to be dead, but he has been reportedly ‘killed’ at least three times. The Creeper seems to be very hard to kill. He keeps recovering from supposedly ‘mortal’ wounds with surprising regularity.”
“He’s dead now.” Growled Mego, cracking his oversized knuckles.
Zenobia stood up from her examination and sighed.
“Yes. Whoever this Moloch really was, he most certainly is dead now.” She thumped the huge curved ribcage for emphasis.
“But, I can fix that.”
She smiled an evil, cold smile.
“What?”
“It’s why I bought this house immediately after Stendahl’s death, and claimed this body—an ideal test subject. Stendahl reportedly perfected a device for restoring life to the recently dead. He successfully tested it on a rabbit. Albert mentioned that experiment in a letter he sent me. And he reputedly used it to revive this Cheela-Paula creature. I do wish I could have secured her body as well, but it seems to have gone missing. Again.
“Regardless, we are going to use Stendahl’s Electro-Cardial Needle on our friend here and see what happens.”
“He’s been shot.” Mego pointed out, dubiously, sticking his blunt finger into one of the bullet holes.
“Well, yes. That might present something of a challenge.”
“He’s been shot several times.” Poking the other bullet holes.
Zenobia shook her head impatiently.
“You always fixate on the little details.”
Mego bared his teeth and growled at her, actually growled like an angry animal.
She ignored him and began to prepare for her experiment.
Outside another coyote howled in pain as it became prey for something that should have been dead.

“’Revolutionary new discovery’,” Zenobia quoted with equal parts disgust and sarcasm. “Why, this Electric Needle is nothing more than a crude copy of Dr. Riga’s electrovitalization process scaled down to affect only the heart instead of the whole body. And let’s not forget that Riga stole all his best ideas from Janos Rukh and old Heinrich Frankenstein. Why do men spend so much time stealing each other’s toys?”
Mego, an operating mask stretched across his lower face, shrugged.
“I don’t care about machines.” He stated bluntly.
“Ah, but then you’re only half a man, aren’t you?” quipped Zenobia.
Mego stared bloody murder at her and actually picked a scalpel up from the tray of surgical tools he carried.
Zenobia laughed.
“Oh, don’t be so touchy, Little One. We have plenty of work that needs to be done and done quickly!”
She held out her gloved hand.
Mego reluctantly passed her the scalpel and she began to the process of digging bullets out of Moloch’s body. The Coroner had only bothered to remove one for ballistics, to prove that it came from Stendahl’s gun. Since Stendahl was already dead, there was little need for more evidence.
Zenobia hummed happily as she sliced and dug about in the cadaver.
Shortly, the last of the slugs clattered into a tray and she began to stitch up the various holes she’d made.
“I think we are just about ready for the Needle.” She said, wiping her own brow with a cotton pad.
Mego climbed down from the step-ladder he stood on for the operation. With a grunt he wheeled a heavy cart of machinery to Zenobia’s side, then went to make sure all the power cables were properly connected.
The Electro-Cardial Needle unit was fairly simple in design. A metal cone and armature was fitted over the subject’s chest, to steady and insulate the needle as it was inserted. The needle had to be placed with exact precision and then held rigidly in place. The least wobble of the inserted needle could tear cardial tissue and render the whole operation impossible. The needle itself was a large gauge stainless steel syringe connected to a power cable that was inserted directly into the heart. Electric current was discharged down the metal shaft while a conductive fluid was injected into the coronary arteries.
It was not far dissimilar from hooking a spike to a car battery and jamming it into the heart.
Zenobia guided the needle down the cone, carefully lined up to pass between Moloch’s thick ribs and into the heart. However, the needle barely punched through the skin before becoming jammed.
She stopped humming and spat a curse at the machinery.
“The muscle tissue is too thick, and partially hardened from dehydration. Ahhh! You are nothing but a big lump of gristle, Mr. Moloch!”
She worked the needle, rotated it, withdrew it then re-inserted it. The heavy gauge point was beginning to give more than the flesh it was supposed to pass through.
In the end, Zenobia climbed up on Mego’s step-ladder and threw her weight into the insertion effort. She barked a triumphant laugh when she felt the needle finally penetrate dried flesh and puncture the heart beneath. There was an audible pop and a nasty wet noise and then the needle was lodged in Moloch’s heart, albeit deeper than Stendahl’s notes recommended.
Zenobia sighed and wiped her brow with a clean pad.
“You are a stubborn brute, Mr. Moloch, but Zenobia Dollard ALWAYS gets her way!”
Mego grunted noncommittally.
There was little left to do but inject the conductive fluid and switch on the juice.
The lights dimmed, almost going out, and there was a loud buzzing crackle that turned into a sharp snap as the Needle was activated.

Moloch was dragged from a murky dream of velvet blackness and the faces of beautiful women smiling down at him. He dreamed that he was holding his mother’s hand, but something pulled him away. He tried to hold on, but her slim fingers slipped from his grasp. He fell upwards, tumbling through darkness shot through with flashes of lightening.
Stunned, with a terrible pain in his chest, Moloch gasped for breath. His entire body exploded into an agony of pins and needles. His heart was pounding twice as hard as it should and three times as fast.
He groaned.
Somewhere, nearby, a woman laughed and shouted happily.
Wearily he opened eyelids made of lead.
The light was dazzling. Too Bright. All he could see was a harsh white glare.
Then something dark leaned in over him, blocking out the overhead lights.
“Hello, Handsome!” a husky female voice said.
Moloch struggled to focus on the shadowy face.
Slowly the features came into focus.
Imperious, aristocratic, great cheekbones with a strong chin. A smallish mouth pressed into a tight smile. Great luminous eyes, sharp as steel, dissecting him with their gaze. Dark hair rather tightly bound. She was not beautiful in a classical sense, but she was certainly a handsome woman, mature with not a jot of softness anywhere to be seen. She might actually have been beautiful if it weren’t for the cruel lines around her mouth and eyes. Or the scars that disfigured the right side of her face. The skin there was shiny, too smooth looking. The skin was a bright, raw-looking pink darkening to a bruise-purple at corrugated edges along the eyebrow and corner of her mouth.
Her lips compressed even tighter, into something too hard to be called a pout.
“I was in a fire.” She explained in a tightly neutral tone.
Her eyes glittered dangerously.
Moloch tore his gaze away from the scarred side of her face and focused on the unblemished left side.
The lips relaxed into something more vaguely smile-like.
“It won’t look so bad once the final grafts are done.” She added with deliberate nonchalance.
“Who…who…are you?”
Moloch’s voice, always raspy, was coarse as sandpaper and barely comprehensible. His mouth and throat were so dry they felt wrinkled. His tongue was practically glued to the roof of his mouth.
Sensing his discomfort, the woman held his head up slightly and gave him some sips of lukewarm water from a paper cup.
“My name is Zenobia Dollard, and now you work for me. You will be my servant, the way you were once Stendahl’s servant.”
“Assistant.” Moloch rasped back.
“Servant.” Zenobia said with iron finality.

It took Moloch days to regain his strength. Even then it was a pale shadow of his previous might. His body was riddled with painful scars from the bullet wounds. His back was slightly crooked from where one of the slugs had nicked his spine. He never felt the same as he had before he died. His fingertips were permanently numb. He was always cold. And his heart! His heart banged in his chest like a mule kicking his ribs. Too fast, too hard, it was all Moloch could do to contain the panic that constant jackhammer thudding raised. His dreams were of blackness and peace, but he rarely slept more than a couple of hours at a time. He woke sobbing every day.
Zenobia treated him like a stubborn child who was not learning fast enough. She became exasperated when his vitals didn’t improve as fast as she wanted. She sneered at him when he couldn’t keep his food down. When he fell down because his legs were too weak and numb to support his weight, she stomped off in a huff, leaving him in a heap on the floor.
Mego, at least, treated him with some modicum of compassion. The dwarfish Pygmy patiently cleaned up his messes and brought him chicken broth and cream of wheat when his stomach couldn’t handle the food Zenobia served him.
“I like you.’ The gruff little man said at one point. “You’re uglier than I am!”
He grinned with a mouth full of big yellow teeth and scratched at the tribal scarifications that lined both of his cheeks.
Soon enough, Moloch felt well enough to walk and handle light chores.
Relieved that her patient had give up his stubborn refusal to recuperate from being resurrected, Zenobia set about outlining what she wanted next.
“I need to see what has happened to the two previous test subjects, the rabbit and the Ape Girl.”
Moloch frowned.
“Dat rabbit got strong and mean.” He said. “It grew big teeth and started wanting meat, nothing but meat for food. It broke outta da cage and ran off.”
“We will find it.” Zenobia declared with a certainty that defied all logic.
“Da girl. She’s dead now. I think. Shot like me.”
“Yes, shot like you. But you’re not dead now, are you? The ambulance drivers who took the body away swore up and down that she came back to life in the back of their ambulance, before they crashed it. I’ve read the police reports. She may still be out there, too, living somewhere in the woods. We will hunt her, and we will find her.”
Zenobia paced back and forth through the lab, impatiently brushing stray equipment out of her path.
Moloch thought she had good legs, for an older woman.
“Don’t look at me like that, you ridiculous beast!” She snapped without looking up.
Moloch’s face burned.
She laughed harshly.
“Don’t laugh at me.” Moloch growled angrily.
‘Oh, Good Heavens, why not?”
“I’ve killed people. Men. With my bare hands.”
“So have I, you silly man. It’s not as hard as they make it sound. So has little Mego.”
“I don’t want to do things like that no more.” Groaned Moloch. “I let Mr. Stendahl boss me around. He said he could fix me. Make my face look like it did. Can you do that?”
Zenobia gave his brutish face a quick glance, then grimaced in disgust.
“Most likely not. Maybe. If I could find out what really caused your condition. But I have other research to do, and you are more useful to me like that.”
Moloch bared his teeth in a snarl and lumbered to his feet. He advanced with his huge hands held out, ready to grab her by the neck.
“Now, Mego! The spider.”
She took a couple of paces back but stopped to watch what happened.
Mego came running up, something clasped in his hands. With an underhanded heave, he tossed a hairy something at Moloch. It hit him square in the chest and clung to his shirt. Moloch looked down, seeing a large spider—somewhat like a tarantula with a huge furry gray body. But it had longer, more spindly legs than a tarantula. Its legs had yellow bands around them. Its fangs were huge. They dripped with poison.
With a shout Moloch went to brush it off. But the spider was deceptively fast for its size. It bit him twice, once sinking its fangs into his chest, then again as his hand came near enough, tearing into his finger and refusing to let go.
Pain exploded through his body. Sheer, intense, fiery pain, as if his nerves had all been set on fire. The pain was so intense that he threw up and collapsed on the floor. He shivered and shook as the venom wracked his nervous system. He couldn’t see anything but fiery red, shot through with black streaks. He ground his teeth so hard two of them cracked.
“Lycosa Carnivora.” Dollard said with a smile.
“It has the most excruciatingly painful bite known to Science. Strong men have killed themselves just to be free of the pain. The venom bonds to the nerve endings, sending pain signals through them continuously. It does no actual damage, but it never dissipates. The pain never ends. You could live another forty years and the pain would never fade, would never cease.”
“Kill…me! Please, kill me!” begged Moloch as he writhed.
“Oh, I think not! Silly Man. I went to a great deal of trouble to bring you back from the dead. Why would I do all of that just to go and kill you again? Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“PLEASE!” sobbed Moloch.
“Will you obey me, if I make the pain go away?”
“Yes! Yes! Please!”
“Without hesitation or argument?”
Moloch made gurgling, choking sounds, but nodded his head vigorously.
“There! No, that’s better.”
She pulled a syringe out of her surgical smock pocket and stabbed it into the side of Moloch’s neck. With a jerk of her thumb she jammed the contents into his bloodstream.
The pain seemed to vanish, almost right away.
In seconds there was no hint of the agony the venom had brought on, despite the fact that the spider was still viciously biting him, over and over.
“Mego.” She commanded.
The dwarf stepped in and gently pried the spider off of Moloch’s chest. It clung so tightly that he had to tear Moloch’s shirt to dislodge it. He held it gingerly, as if it were both precious and fragile. The spider sunk its fangs into his thumb and wiggled frantically.
Covering it with his other hand, Mego carried it back to a glass terrarium and dropped it inside. He had to shake his hand to break its grip on his thumb. Quickly he slid a lid over the glass tank.
He sucked his thumb and spat a gob of venom on the floor. He smiled at Moloch.
“Mego’s people have built up resistance to the Lycosa Carnivora’s venom. They are genetically immune to it.”
“It still hurts.” Mego groused.
He held up an open hand, showing off the angry red welts the spiders bits left.
“The injection I gave you neutralizes the Lycosa Carnivora’s venom. Temporarily. You will need periodic shots to keep the venom inert. I am the only person in the World who knows how to mix the antidote. I trust you will show adequate concern for my health?”
Moloch nodded sullenly. Beaten.
“Fine!” Zenobia clapped her hands. “Now get up and dust yourself off. We have a rabbit to hunt!”
Moloch obeyed.
- 1
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