Somewhere up in the shadows was her nest. I could hear her humming to herself. The holding tank was full of shadows, and shadows within shadows. Somewhere in its recent past it could have passed for a police station’s drunk tank – empty except for a couple of uncomfortable benches and a commode in the corner – but now sheets of filmy gray silk draped from the ceiling to the floor and between the walls, and silvery-gray bundles that looked like strings of watermelons wrapped in bedsheets littered the floor. One of the benches had been torn right out of the concrete concrete, leaving potholes in the floor.

She’d unscrewed the lights in her tank, leaving it in a sort or perpetual twilight, so I didn’t bother to turn on the lights in the observation room. Doing so would would have lit up my table like a stage, and all I would have been able to see in the window was my own reflection. I saw more than enough of that every day. Cupping my penlight behind my hand, I read over the notes on the clipboard. The project title at the top of the first page was a preposterously transparent, ‘Spiderwoman’.

“I’m sure you know the story of Spiderman, right?” The humming had stopped.

I didn’t know what I’d expected from her voice, but it sounded like any average college-aged girl. I flicked off my pen-light and stared through the thick plexiglass window, searching for the source of the voice.

“I mean, I hear it was a popular comic book, and then there were all those movies, not that I watched them. Not when they were in the theater, anyway. I was more of a Hope Floats kind of girl. Back then.”

I struggled to place her voice in the tank; through the spiracles in the window it sounded distant.

“Maybe you haven’t seen it. You don’t look like you spend much ‘you-time’. Plenty of food time, though. A little round in the face, aren’t you? And where did you get that suit… Wal-mart?” She snickered before continuing in a condescending, teacher-like tone. “So the premise of Spiderman was that this dork is bitten by a nuclear spider or something and starts getting all of these spider-related abilities, like he can climb up walls and shoot spidersilk from his wrists and he becomes this expert tailor – with lycra, no less. Pretty dumb, right? If he’s got spider DNA floating around in him, why wouldn’t he just grow eight legs or six eyes or his face turn into some palpitating butt-head like in the Fly?”

Some of the shrouds on the other side of the glass swayed, and her voice came from a little closer, I thought.

“I’ve seen that movie now, too. Jeff Goldblum. Yummy!” Now she sighed, almost wistfully. “Well, not so dumb, I guess. Granted: that spider that bit me wasn’t some atomic freak – it had been genetically altered to manufacture a retro-viral toxinase that was suppose to give cow udders the ability to produce silk, and apparently they hadn’t quite finished working the bugs out. But I guess the end result is more or less the same.”

I flinched with surprise when something clicked against the plexiglass. Slowly, a silhouette – human, but upside-down – descended until it perched at the center of the window, hovering at the hole there. At the center of the shadow, pressing – almost rubbing against the window, was a bright-red hourglass that seemed to catch all the spare light in the room. I heard sniffing through the spiracle.

“You’re here to analyze me, of course. Like the others. To see what use you may have for me. So let’s go down the superhero checklist, shall we?

“Pudgy, ungainly body transforms into the svelte, muscular, curvy body of a goddess. Check! I’ll even let you touch it if you just come around the other side of the glass…”

I stared back blankly, unmoved. I flicked my penlight on to scribble a few more notes in the margins of her file.

“No?” she pouted. “Or not yet? Maybe later, hmm? So..

“Senses sharpened and refined? Check! Everything’s so much clearer, but especially touch and smell. They’re like new dimensions! You’d be surprised what you haven’t realized you’re missing.

“Ability to scale sheer glass walls and hang from ceilings? I’m getting much better, as you can see, though I still need a dragline. I don’t care who you are – if you can hold your own bodyweight on the tips of your fingers, then you must be a popsicle stick or something!”

I sat patiently through a long pause, during which she sniffed at the spiracle again. In the moments while the pen-light was out, my eyes adjusted enough to make out the pale smudge of her face at the bottom of her shadow.

“Hmmm. You really are dense, aren’t you. That was an opportunity for you to compliment me on my figure. You keep missing those.

“Where did I leave off? Newly-found science aptitude? Hardly! But when a bunch of scientists lock you up for months, you learn how to say ‘retro-viral toxinase’ without getting a cramp in your tongue.

“Super-strong, sticky webbing flying out of my hands?” She chortled. “Half-check on that one, dude. I can spin a better silk than any cow ever will, but it doesn’t come out of my wrists, if you know what I mean… Think about it – where do spiders have their spinnerets? It’s not anywhere by which I want to be hanging from the side of a building, I’ll tell you that. But it’s had its uses in bed.

“Come on… not even a little laugh? Is it so hard to smile? I can think of other ways to make you smile.” She grinned, and her white teeth flashed almost as brightly as the hourglass on her belly. They had a jagged look to them.

“Stupid costume? Uhmmm… no.”

My brow raised – the first change in expression I’d allowed since entering the observation room. She pressed up against the glass again and sniffed.

“Okay, I take that back. It’s not like you’re going to see me bouncing around town in a cherry-red unitard with some kind of logo turning my chest into a target, but this isn’t jeans and a t-shirt, either. It’s just those little fibers in my fingertips and toes – the ones that let me climb – they’re other places, too. When I don’t think about it, they stick out and things get snagged and my clothes ride up and… Well, I guess now that I finally have the body to wear something form-fitting, I have a reason, too. It’s that or go naked, but some of the scientists thought that was too distracting… So, sure – I ended up wearing a lycra and leather bodysuit, but it was only because that’s what the delicious gentlemen in the white lab coats thought would be the most comfortable for me. I kind of like it now. It’s sexy.

“But I swear I’m not a freak. Really.

“Oh, and my boyfriend suggested the black-widow hourglass, so that’s his fault. I take no responsibility for that.”

I tapped my pen against the top of the clipboard, then wrote something quickly without turning on the light. I could see her better now – see her as a shape instead of a shadow. The red hourglass was distracting, but she did have and idealized figure, and she moved with a creepy grace: alien but sexualized. Her legs had spread wide over the glass, and while she was speaking she had begun to rub her pubis against the window, leaving an opaque gray smear.

“Last but not least… Let’s see… Some idiotic overwhelming desire to go out and fight crime?” Her voice lowered to a sing-song hiss. “With great power comes great responsibility.” She cackled, and for a moment her voice sounded nothing like any average college-aged girl. Then her shadow and hourglass were gone and her words came more faintly, from the other side of the room. “Whatever! I was more dangerous behind the wheel of my Honda than I am now.”

The web-encrusted lumps scattered around the floor of her room disagreed with her, but I said nothing.

“On the other hand, while my sense of ‘duty’ hasn’t gone into overtime, my hormones have. It’s just that they keep me so hungry!” Her voice rose into a whine, and returned to the hole in the plexiglass with her shadow. Her pale face pressed right up to the hole, and I could see her thick, dark lips pursing through it. “They got my wires crossed, you know? I can’t separate the desire to fuck with the need to feed, and trust me, you’re all some sexy food.” An equally dark tongue flicked out between her lips. “Do you want to know what I fantasize about? What makes me really wet? The others did.” Only one hand held her against the glass now; the other disappeared between her legs. “I think about sinking my fangs into you – yes, you – someplace nice and soft, like your neck or the inside of your elbow, or maybe someplace naughtier, where my teeth can just squish deliciously into your flesh. I can smell your every emotion wafting away from your skin. And then I hold you tight while my venom runs through your veins like heroin. Skin to skin, I can feel the fire burning in you.” She sighed wistfully before her voice became excited. “Have you seen what happens? Have you seen the video? Once the poison got going you’d get the shakes really bad, but they’d pass as soon as your insides started turning to jello-salad. Do you know what comes next? Do you like kisses? Big, wet, sloppy kisses? Who, doesn’t, right? That’s when the real fun begins, but I don’t think you’d be able to appreciate it by that point. But I do.”

She seemed to have talked herself into a state of arousal, because she was rubbing against the glass again, staining it gray, and then she leaped away from the glass and disappeared behind the shrouds of her webbing. Her voice moved back and forth, coming from first one spiracle, then another. “Maybe I am dangerous. Hunh? I wasn’t always in this terrarium. I mean, I really liked my boyfriend and all – maybe we would have had a future together – but he was too delicious! What do you think I’d do to you!”

She grunted out the last word, and it was accompanied by a loud crack. Light and dark lines shot out like a web through the plexiglass window, centered on the gray smears she’d left. Taut webbing twanged from the other side.

I started out of my chair, sending it clattering to the floor, and clutched the clipboard to my chest.

The plexiglass thumped inward and crackled again. Little cubes of plastic sprinkled over the ground of the observation room.

“Julie, STOP!”

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