Antwerp is the spider collector and anatomist of Baton Rouge, whose stolen specimen set the Deep Ones on the trail of a parasitic spider. “I understand insects better than men.”
| Type | Character (collector, anatomist) |
| Era | Antiterra, 1888 |
| Home | Southern mansion with veranda, Baton Rouge |
| Assistants | Azul; Jud (tracker) |
| Spanish entry | Antwerp |
Description
A plump little man with white hair tied back, soft delicate hands and very English manners, who offers champagne or burgundy “at this hour of the morning” and saw at a glance, as an anatomist, that Antonia was expecting. His mansion has rottweilers, shrubs with rare fruits, and a huge candle “chandelier” (in Spanish, araña) in the salon. In the lobby stands a stuffed drider — the spider-centaur, a dark elf degraded by her goddess — in attack pose, treated as a museum piece.
His house is a phylogenetic museum of dead spiders (the camel-eater of Arabia Felix, bird-eaters) and holds a case of scorpions that wake with the light, beings that only “seek to kill and feed”. With Erzebeth, whose scorpion stirred at seeing its kind caged, he held the gesta’s philosophical debate on collecting the living. A perpetual bachelor: “what woman would put up with bugs everywhere?”
The case of the dead spider
The sale of a very rare specimen, a unique arachnid of the depths, was stolen from him; it reappeared on the black market, dead. A dead spider of that species means it has already laid its eggs — thousands, inside other creatures: parasites born in a host that consume it from within and, depending on how much they eat, grow to the size of a tiger. He asked the Deep Ones to bring him the carrier — the infected man who “will burst into eggs” — and lent them his dossier, his assistant Azul, and Jud, his Jewish tracker with a big pistol.
On a night watch he described the power behind the throne of Baton Rouge: a council that does not decide alone, a knife stuck in with instructions, and the warning that some things “had better stay in the dark”.
See also
- Doc Hawk — the swamp rival who also seeks the spiders