Following the death of Samir Hassan’s wife, people began to talk. Such a tragic, sudden loss, they would say. He has been acting odd since the death of his love, and he is thinner. Thinner and as one who walks in his sleep, lost in the desert without her beauty to guide him. It’s such a sad story he’s found himself in.

But no one knew exactly what the details of the story were: not when she had died or even how. No calls for a doctor or a priest were made, before or after. Hassan’s wife, a great beauty with thick hair and small feet, had not been ill. The servants could report no accidents or secret afflictions. No one knew the circumstances but Hassan, and he, unable to abide sad stories, said nothing.

The day she died, he covered her naked body in honey, stopped all of her orifices with wax, and wrapped her in layers and layers of clean, white cotton. Over this, he loosely wrapped a shroud, and laid her on their marriage bed. His demands for these materials exposed the servants to the death of their mistress for the first time, but their master would allow them no reaction other than to fetch him what he required and, when the items were delivered, said nothing, but shut himself up in the room. They were sent away with no explanations and no facts. They could report only that their master was resolute, but could not even guess what about.

For three days he neither ate nor slept. He sat at the foot of the bed with his eyes open, as though waiting. He would not be persuaded to rest or to eat or to call a priest, and the servants began to whisper. They were still not allowed them into the room; Hassan spoke to them through the door. At night, he would shift restlessly around the bed. Waiting.

As dusk fell on the third day, he finally moved. He left her body in the home they had shared and went alone to the edge of town. There he walked among the tomb mounds, and sat at the base of the outermost one, near a small fracture in the clay, and faced the desert. He did not shiver from cold as night set in. He did not move at all, except to blink his eyes in a slow, measured way.

He finally stirred when a fat white spider crawled out of the fissure in the tomb. It glowed from somewhere inside its bulbous body, just as the stories of his childhood had said it would. As though his muscles had been coiled like a snake, waiting for this instant, his hand shot out, took the spider between his fingers and lifted it to his mouth. He swallowed it without chewing and became still again.

Hassan, who had as much taste for spiders as he did for sad stories, swallowed two more of them as they crawled out of the tomb, and then sat with great patience, unmoving except to scan the darkness before him. Within the space of a few, even breaths, the night grew brighter and things unseen before flickered before his spider-altered eyes. Crypt spiders, the old grannies said, could make a man see things in the desert that were not meant for men to see.

When the night reached the splitting point between one day and the next, he shifted onto his knees. Coming toward him was a creature that would change his story from one of sorrow to one of satisfaction.

It stood short with its head level with Hassan’s naval, and it’s open, black-skinned hands, left eight shallow furrows as they dragged in the sand. A crouching run brought it within five paces of him, and there it halted, weaving where it stood, as though it would have liked to duck around the man who was an obstacle in its path.

“I am Samir Hassan, a householder from this city of Ganush. I would make a deal with you.”

The creature didn’t answer. It swayed. It clicked its teeth together. It squatted in the sand as though settling in. Hassan took that as an invitation to continue.

“My wife is dead. I will do whatever I must to protect her body from those that would devour it. I will do what I must to preserve her beauty!”

The creature did not seem unmoved by the conviction in his voice. It spoke in a whisper of stones scraping together, and it’s words were not any that Hassan knew.

He did not want to waste time nor did he want to fail at what he had come here to accomplish. When he interrupted it to ask if it could understand him, it waved a hand before its face to cut him off, then held up both hands, fingers splayed.

“...Eight?” he asked, leaning forward. With his face closer to the creature, he saw that two of the “fingers” were thumbs, one on either side of its palm.

It grunted, then gave an awkward, lunging nod of its large head, unused to making such human gestures.

“Eight what?” Hassan’s voice was desperate. On his hands and knees, he leaned further toward the creature.

The creature gave a sweeping gesture, encompassing Hassan, the tombs and the city behind. Hassan looked back and for the first time with his new eyes saw the specters that stood atop and walked among the tombs, marking their own graves for the eaters of the dead to easily find a meal. He looked back at the creature before him; the blood drained from his face.

“Eight bodies?”

The creature gave the same uncoordinated nod, and if it heard either the hollowness or the resignation in Hassan’s voice, it gave no indication that it grasped their meaning.

“And when I have delivered to you eight bodies, this will secure my wife’s body from desecration?”

Another abrupt nod. Hassan was on his feet in an instant, his face its normal color and his tone strong once more.

“I will do this. I will leave the bodies here in this spot, one each night, and in eight nights, I will bury my wife without fear.”