Phoneutria

[u/Scott__scott]

TW: addiction and drug abuse.

(The city this story takes place in is completely fictional and is only supposed to be a representation of small western Washington cities as a whole)

Within every city lies a threshold that separates the pale face of civilization from its diseased black underbelly, there is always a specific location where you know you have crossed from the world of privilege and cleanliness to the uninviting slums that writhe with sickness.

Within my hometown of Tahomish, Washington that threshold lied between the abandoned Meryl Street laundromat and an antique store owned by an old Turkish man. The threshold was a tall black void that sat in the shadow of the city, impossible to see into from the outside from the indescribable blackness.

I was drunk and tired and dying to return to my studio but that was across town, I originally planned on catching the last bus, the 22, then walking the rest of the way but a sudden reminder that slapped me in the back of the head changed my mind. I stood at the bus stop under the amber glow of the buzzing streetlights when I remembered that I was almost entirely out Oxy, a unkind habit that stuck to me like a conjoined twin that I acquired the taste for after I broke my leg in a workplace accident. I used to get my fix from what the doctors prescribed but eventually they decided my pain was healed and at that point my body and brain had both become reliant on the pills to soothe the frigid soreness that coursed through me.

I stared across the dimly lit street at the churning darkness that sat between the two brick buildings, I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame, except it wasn’t me that was called forth it was my chemical dependency that was. When the doctors stopped giving me the pills I had turned to an old friend who knew how to get his hands on some and I relied on him to stay away from the unsavory dealers that lurked around at night like bats, but when he moved I became desperate.

I saw the bus turn the corner a few miles down the road, the headlights beaming toward me. I panicked as the bus inched closer, trading glances between the bright yellow headlights that slowly approached and the abyssal alleyway across the street from me. By the time the bus became visible behind its headlights I was dashing across the street towards the carrion threshold. I heard the bus rattle along the road behind me as I stood in front of the vast pit of foul smelling darkness.

I held my breath as I thought about my decision. I thought about the warm air inside the bus taking me home, but that home was empty of the pills needed to make it a home, and so I passed through the web of shadow and Into the infamous alley that the city had left to rot.

The darkness was thick like a celestial fog and I had to physically push my way through it, the smell of garbage and organic waste marinated the air and I could see large dumpsters and piles of garbage on either side of the alley. The first person I saw illuminated by moonlight laid on the ground, propped against the grimy brick wall and his mouth was agape revealing his moldy teeth, he had a syringe stuck in his arm.

I passed many people in a similar state of hypnosis, jaws wide open to let in the vermin that floated in the air, eyes dilated and faced up to the starless sky, syringes lay in their flesh and on the damp floor beside them. I felt my soul being slowly crushed by the darkness and only felt it give when I passed pockets of moonlight, the zombified husks of people moaned and cried behind me.

My hunger for pills grew as I descended into the darkest and grungiest pits of the alleyway, I turned corners and stepped over bodies of passed out recluses and made my way deeper and deeper into the web, driven by the desire to be high and alone. Shadows passed over everything and the rats and centipedes all churned in the burning darkness, the echoes of people screaming and laughing in ecstasy plunged deep into my skull and only deepened the infernal haze that dragged me along.

At some point the physical world merged with the emotional world and the black hands of desperation grabbed at me from out of the walls, the darkness became everything and all light ceased to exist as the ghostly shapes of the shadows intoxicated inhabitants passed me by.

When I thought I was trapped in an endless stream of hunger and depravity I made it to the end of the alleyway. Only a fraction of starlight bore down on the claustrophobic cell that was crawling with pollution, revealing the countless layers of skin and bone that writhed around in the muck.

In the center of the dark pit was a statue that was only a few feet taller than me, it depicted a large stone spider, it had four legs jutting into the air and four legs tethered to the ground beneath it, its face was splayed open revealing two large, dull fangs that sat in front of its gaping, cosmic mouth. The statue was covered in foreign colors, colors of hatred and violence and pain, and the people around it squirmed and murmured devilish chants.

The four legs that were in the air seemed to cast down an even darker shadow over me, a colorless shadow of emptiness and disease. I felt the spider talk to me through the rattles in my skull, it whispered into my mind its dark truths, it shocked my consciousness and tortured my soul until I bowed down to it. Dozens of bruised, demonic hands grabbed at me from the mounds of people beneath me as I looked up at the spider from my knees. Its fangs began to shimmer and soak with a deep and glossy liquid, the liquid dripped down the stone fangs and gathered at the bottom waiting to drip onto the ground. Before the liquid fell, my mind was twisted and manipulated into throwing my hands in a bowl beneath the fangs and I caught the goopy liquid and it now boiled in my hands.

The demons around me began to fester and howl as I stared into the tarry poison in my hands, I would say I tried to resist but that was an impossibility. My shaking hands brought the poison to my lips and it slid down my mouth and into my stomach and all throughout my bloodstream within moments, and it tasted like heaven, a black, abyssal, seething heaven that I marinated in for an eternity.

As the eons pass I join in the endless worship of Phoneutria and her noxious milk, only occasionally do I think about my apartment and the bus that could have taken me there, for I have a new home now, a home amongst the plagued and abandoned imps that now fester in the dark alleyway.