“Ooooooh. He speaks.” Her shape, now obscured by the lacework of cracks, began to heave against the ruined window, trying to push it through. Her words were punctuated with the strain of her effort. “Or else what?” The center of the window bulged, and more plastic fell to the floor by my feet. “You’ll gas me? They tried that.” This time the bulge became more of a cone, and the layers of plastic separated. “You’ll kill me? I don’t know which department you belong to, but I guarantee your bosses would choose my life over yours.” Pale fingers ending in talons stabbed through the center of the bulge and began to stretch a hole.

“I’ll leave.” My hand had already begun to turn the handle on the door behind me.

“I’ll catch you.” She laughed. “And then we’ll play.”

“No. You won’t. And then we’ll never be friends.”

“Friends!” she snorted. “I don’t have any friends any more.” But she had pulled her fingers back through the hole and lined up her eye to look me over. Her eye had no sclera; it was only a glistening black almond set in pale, almost blue skin. “What do you want?”

My voice lowered half an octave as forced it full of confidence. “The better question is, what do you want.”

Her voice, in turn, became impatient. “I told you. I need to eat. It’s been a week since I’ve seen anyone in here.”

“Then I’ll feed you.”

Her eye widened, then narrowed to a slit. “Not a pig or a dog. They already tried that. I could barely keep them down, they made me so sick.”

“Oh, no,” I countered. “That wouldn’t be a good way to start a friendship. Trust me – I have just what you want.” My mind turned quickly, running through what I was about to do, and I stepped forward to set down the clipboard. “But you have to do something for me first. ”

“What?”

“Turn on the lights – I want to watch.”

The suspicion bled from her eye to be replaced with a crow’s foot wrinkle. “A voyeur, eh? I don’t mind. But you’re the one who has to make the first move. After all, I’m going to have a meal today whether I come through this glass or not. So tell me your name.”

“Williams,” I grunted.

“You’re a liar! No-one as boring as you look could have such a boring name, too. You’re a Suckaluckovitch or a Bloodowski or a Thormagnusson. But it doesn’t matter. Williams is good enough. It’s something I can call my new ‘friend’.”

Then she was gone – in a quick leap she sprung out of the view of the ruined window. Up from the ceiling came sounds of scraping and scratching.

Once she was gone, I slumped and let out a long breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Beneath my suit I was sweating profusely; I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and dabbed the beads from my hairless hairline, from my brows, my lips, and from behind my neck where it bulged out above the collar of what really had been an expensive suit. My hands shook and I nearly fumbled my glasses to the ground when I cleaned them with my tie. I only just managed to shove my handkerchief back into my pocket, take a deep, calming breath, and fish out my camera from its case before the neon lamps above the tank flickered on, one at a time.

“There you go, ‘Williams’.” She lowered herself back down to the ruined glass, and poked her fingers through the hole again, widening it by an inch. “Now where’s my dinner? Or have you decided to play with me after all? You’re my type, you know. Alive and all.”

I cleared my throat. “Thank you, Julie. Now please step back to the corner.”

When she backed away from the window, I pushed the lens end of the camera through the hole she’d made and focused on her. I caught her face full in the light and tightened the focus further – I’d need to pull some HD stills later for the department. She still had the shape of the face in her file – mostly. Her blue lips were swollen, puckered into a grin, and behind them gnashed a whole row of glistening fangs. Two obsidian jewels glistened on either temple, blinking like her still-human-shaped eyes. She’d tied her black hair back the way a lot of girls did, but it had begun to slicken and merge into something single, hard and glinting like chitin.

I pulled back to a wider frame, to take in her whole body, and I had to force myself to swallow the lump in my throat. Something had erupted from her back – proto-limbs bursting through seams in her bodysuit behind her shoulders and above her hips. The tiny hands at the end of the arms mimicked the movements of her real hands and tried to clap in delight as the door to the tank began to open. The little feet on the end of foot-long, double-jointed legs flexed and stretched out from her hips. Something about the way she moved made me thing she hadn’t even noticed the deformities.

The door to the tank knocked open, slamming into the torn-out bench, so I pulled out to an even wider frame. The room was even more of a mess than it had seemed in the dark: between the tattered sheets of silk hanging from the walls and the ceiling, cords as thick as my smallest finger dangled like jungle vines. Some of the bundles on the floor had a disturbing “mummy” quality to them.

The screaming, the shouting and cursing in some foreign language had begun even before the door opened, but now a slender man in his late twenties, arms wrapped in a straight-jacket, stumbled into the room at the end of a long pole, and the volume increased. The pole quickly retracted and drew back, slamming the door shut behind it, and the man screamed again. I didn’t know his name – he was informant gone bad sent over by another agency, an illegal from those boats that always turn up in the harbor. In other words, no one who would miss him would come looking for him. I didn’t feel too bad for him – I didn’t feel much one way or the other. He wasn’t crazy, despite the straight-jacket. One of the yahoo’s in my team had told him earlier what was in store for him, and that was the only way we could keep him under control.

I don’t think he’d even spotted Julie; he fought his way back to his feet and back to the metal door, began shouting at it and kicking it until the metal dented.

Julie danced excitedly in her corner, squeezing her thighs together like she was holding a full bladder. She licked her lips. She grinned at the camera and said something I later was able to transcribe as, “All wrapped up like a present! You shouldn’t have!” And then I had to move the camera quickly: she scampered up the wall, ducking between her own shreds of silk, and dropped down onto him from the ceiling.

For a few moments they wrestled and rolled against the wall. There was no contest – he had no hope of winning; he was just being handled while she got herself into a better position. Once her legs were wrapped around his his hips and her arms around his shoulders, she bit deep into the base of his neck. His cries begin to gurgle away, then fade to mewling as she stroked his his hair and pumped her venom into his blood. A thick, black-green ichor dribbled from the corner of her lips, but she didn’t release his neck until his legs wobbled and they slid together to the floor.

She still sat in his lap, her thighs clenched around his hips, when he began to shiver uncontrollably. She hugged him and kissed his face and whispered into his ear until the shakes passed and his eyes glazed and his mouth fell open.

He was no small man, but she tucked him under her arm and clambered up the wall into the funnel of thick, corded silk in the ceiling corner, draped him over a cluster of threads, and secured him with a few stick strands that squirted out from between her thighs.

I tightened the focus again, and caught her grinning down at the camera.

“Mmm, baby.” With quick, efficient movements she’d broken the straps on the straight jacket, and while it fluttered down toward the floor she tore off his shirt in pieces. His slacks were next, but once the fly opened an erection popped up like a light-switch. “Did you know,” she called down to me, “That it takes a muscle relaxant to make a hard-on? I can tell you that he’s really relaxed now.” His pants and shoes snagged in a lower tier of webbing, and she didn’t bother with his socks.

I had to zoom in again to see what she was doing, and I almost pulled right back out when I saw her fingers down in her crotch, and refocused to find her kissing and whispering to his erection like a pet. But this was for the record, so I rolled my tightening shoulders and shifted my legs to make more room in my pants. I didn’t have the same excuse for an erection.

“It doesn’t last long, though,” she continued, whining just a bit. “Unfortunately. Another half-hour and he’ll be as soft as jelly all over. Maybe next time I won’t be as hungry and you can get a better film, eh?” Her fingers came away from her crotch trailing strands of silk which she wrapped around his neck. Over the next few minutes she wrapped him, sometimes using her fingers to guide her threads under his arms or around his waist, sometimes crouching right over him and rubbing herself against him while she turned him like a rotisserie beneath her. Either way she seemed to enjoy it – she moaned and gasped and giggled as well as any aspiring porn starlet, and spoke to her dinner in tones too low for me to pick up. I thought her hips gyrated and bucked more than was strictly necessary. She fussed over her work, snipping threads with teeth, tightening loose ends, adding more silk wherever her spider mind told her to.

I stayed longer than I meant to – longer than I should have. With the glass broken it was still too dangerous, and if I let myself relax she could be on me in seconds. But she seemed to be delighted up in her nest, the rest of the world forgotten, and I really didn’t expect any trouble from her once she was done eating. I thought it would make me sick to watch her feed, but it didn’t. I’m glad I made the room in my pants. I won’t admit to being aroused either, not officially. Not if I want to stay the lead on her case. I was transfixed by her movement.

She hung him head-down like an IV from an anchor point on the ceiling, tested to be sure he was secure, and climbed up to wrap herself around him. Her legs clutched his, her arms twined around his shoulders, and her bluish face pressed against his mummy’s head while they dangled, swinging gently. With one clawed finger she cut a hole through the silk that covered his mouth, spread his teeth apart, and closed her lips over his before his liquefied innards began to spill out.

While she suckled for the next hour I watched, never thinking about moving. My arousal had passed, though there were moments when she dry-humped the cocoon – probably to wrap it in tighter silk and squeeze more of him into her greedy mouth – when some part of me tingled. She moaned happily, and her belly swelled as the cocoon shriveled.

When at last she cut the spent cocoon free to tumble to the floor, and fell back herself to laze in her funnel, her belly had plumped up to about the size of a watermelon. The lycra in her bodysuit had stretched along its seams, like it was designed for exactly that purpose. She rubbed the bulge with satisfaction. “Are you still there, Williams.” It wasn’t really a question.

“Yes. Are you happy, Julie?”

“Yes, very. For now.”

“Then we’re friends.”

“For now,” she agreed.

It was a good start, and my section chief would be happy. I had no idea how long it would take for the drugs they’d pumped into that man to work in her system, but I could wait. I used the time to wonder just what kind of bribe I’d have to give her to win her trust after that.