The Mystery Megapack

his daughter lay.
    “My God!” whispered the sergeant, upon one knee beside her. He looked blankly into the face of the other man. “She’s dead!”
    Two plain-clothes men were busy knotting together tapestries and pieces of rare stuff with which to draw Durham out of the pit; but at these old Huang Chow looked not at all, but gropingly crossed the room, as if he saw imperfectly, or could not believe what he saw. At last he reached the side of the dead girl, stooped, touched her, laid a trembling yellow hand over her heart, and then stood up again, looking from face to face.
    Ignoring the mingled activities about him, he crossed to the open coffin and began to fumble amongst the putrefying mass of bones and webbing which lay therein. Out from this he presently drew an iron coffer.
    Carrying it across the room he opened the lid. It was full almost to the top with uncut gems of every variety—diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topaz, amethysts, flashing greenly, redly, whitely. In handfuls he grasped them and sprinkled them upon the body of the dead girl.
    “For you,” he crooned brokenly in Chinese. “They were all for you!”
    The extemporized rope had just been lowered to Durham, when:
    “My God!” cried the sergeant, looking over Huang Chow’s shoulder. “What’s that?”
    He had seen the giant spider, the horror from Surinam, which the Chinaman had reared and fed to guard his treasure and to gratify his lust for the strange and cruel. The insect, like everything else in that house, was unusual, almost unique. It was one of the Black Soldier spiders, by some regarded as a native myth, but actually existing in Surinam and parts of Brazil. A member of the family Mygale, its sting was more quickly and certainly fatal than that of a rattlesnake. Its instinct was fearlessly to attack any creature, great or small, which disturbed it in its dark hiding place.
    Now, with feverish, horrible rapidity it was racing up the tapestries on the other side of the room.
    “Merciful God!” groaned the sergeant.
    Snatching a revolver from his pocket he fired shot after shot. The third hit the thing but did not kill it. It dropped back upon the floor and began to crawl toward the coffin. The sergeant ran across and at close quarters shot it again.
    Red blood oozed out from the hideous black body and began to form a deep stain upon the carpet.
    When Durham, drenched but unhurt, was hauled back into the treasure-house, he did not speak, but, scrambling into the room stood—pallid—staring dully at old Huang Chow.
    Huang Chow, upon his knees beside his daughter, was engaged in sprinkling priceless jewels over her still body, and murmuring in Chinese:
    “For you, for you, Lala. They were all for you.”

ANCHORS AWAY, by C. Ellett Logan
    Gina paused in her kitchen doorway to listen to the message on the answering machine.
    “Axel Boyette? Swinson Concrete here, confirming your 10 a.m. appointment for Saturday the seventeenth. We want to remind you to complete the required site prep: clear all brush and debris—then rake smooth. If you need to reschedule for any reason, you must do so at least forty-eight hours prior to your reserved time by calling 703-3 …”
    Gina tuned out the rest of the message, furious that her husband had followed the instructions to the letter, destroying her roses in the process. She stepped from the kitchen onto the dirt and stones of their side yard—a no-man’s land bathed in the perpetual shadow of the house, where even weeds would not grow. From her shady post, she observed that the noonday sun rendered everything else a washed-out white, especially her husband’s bass boat. Around twenty feet in length, including outboard motor and trailer, the thing was covered with a canvas tarp that somehow made it look like a whale in a silly cap, waiting to go for a ride.
    Skirting the boat, she knelt beside a pitiful pile of plant remains, suffering as if it were her own body parts dumped in a heap on the hard-scrabble ground.
    “Oh, my sweet babies,” she said, carefully picking up the severed limbs that had once been her Knock Out roses. Aromatic blossoms stubbornly clung to the stems, heads bowed and petals limp.
    “I’m so sorry.” Gina swallowed hard, wiping the wetness from her cheeks on the back of her thick gardening gloves. She carted the bushes close to her body like injured children until she filled the compost pile around back, the pricking of their thorny teeth barely