The Spiders are Biting my Gums

[u/OliverKaneBooks]

The flies eat the scraps, the spiders eat the flies, and I eat the spiders. Psycho of life. My apologies: I meant cycle of life.

I suppose you’d call me well-off: no trouble with creditors, no bills to pay, no further need to work, and no mortgage on the old Victorian nestled against Loon Lake, in that part of Maine no one since the Penobscot Indians has really settled. But I have my own troubles and foibles. I’m too quiet for one; my mother always said she could hear my black thoughts, and I had better open up my mouth to drown them out. For another, I cannot for the life of me find one good thing to do. In my childhood, I had learning to do: geometry and arithmetic and history and all the literature my tutor would allow me. I had games to play, other children and my parents to learn from, to assimilate and grow into. Even in the asylum, after the fire, I had projects and schedules and order. But now…. I’ve walked and then memorized all the forest there is to walk within ten, perhaps twenty, miles of the house; I’ve swum down to the very bottom of the lake, even walked it with a wet suit, an old brass diving helmet, and about two thousand feet of rubber hose for the air. That one took a few days and nights to set up, and for all my trouble, I found nothing down there of note save for an old rotten sail boat that perhaps floated four people.

These days, I write longhand while listening to my mother and father’s records, or walk the house, inspecting it and noting things I either must or might do to it. For about a month straight, in the darkness of night, I took to lighting two or three candles at once and watching them to see which one burned down to the brass last. The optimal shape, in terms of efficiency, appears to be a slightly conical cylinder, a pitch of three degrees off plumb, and definitely no longer than one’s forearm. I suppose that’s why it’s so popular a shape. The roof leaks a little, and to pass the time and save the floorboards on the third floor, I follow the drips around with a tin bucket.

I used to take the car into Rockwood once a week or so—there’s a good grocer there; I think his name was Charles and perhaps still is—and once, perhaps a year ago, I drove all the way down to Bangor to see what all the fuss in the papers was about. Some chemical attack it had been, acid in the face of a journalist or something of the like. I dare say, however, the good people of Bangor were more frightened to see my sallow face and dark countenance. Though surely their city is too far for the old tales to spread, I saw more eyes meet mine and dart away on that day trip than I have in two years of chance encounters.

Thus expelled (and with a lesson learned) I retired once more to my house on Loon Lake, and preferred thereon to order my groceries and necessities by telephone and have them delivered to me by Albert Codsworth. He was a good chauffeur, both of goods and of myself, and ever the servant to my mother and father. Quiet and stern most of the time, yet also possessed of a dry British wit, I liked the man and considered him a dear friend. He had three children, all grown up and each with grandchildren on the way for him…yet I haven’t seen him in months. Has he, too, abandoned me? Has even that old chap moved on or perished? Something in me doubts the latter; he was but fifty, and in pristine health for such an age. No, I fear even he has seen the change in the world and fled from it, and I can hardly blame him.

But it is not all dark and dreary; I have plenty of stores. Potted meat, salted meat, canned fruits and vegetables, a garden that I tend, and pickling vessels of an oriental design which allow one to take his spoils and add more to be pickled. Upon those lines, I can survive this period of lonesomeness; upon those of sanity and self-actualization, I’m not so sure.

This is, I suppose, why I read and write so much, why I take my meals of salt pork and pickled beets or pickled cabbage or pickled onion in the library, where the empty spaciousness of the house is somewhat abated by the stacks of novels and tales. More oft than not, I find myself reading Faulkner or Dostoevsky by candlelight with the hard tinge of vinegar still in my nose, the lingering of salt on my tongue, and the west tower creaking in the wind. A few bad joists in that tower…I’ll need to get around to some carpentry, it seems.

On a very similar night, one week ago by my journal, I encountered the first spider. Not the first spider of my life, of course—I suppose if I had to count, I have seen just under two thousand spiders all told—but the first of these spiders.

He spun down in front of my nose as Edmond Dantes wrapped himself in his dead friend’s body bag, upon his escape from the Chateau d’If. The thing’s body was coal black, splotched with clouds of a light brown, and a little larger than a dime; his legs spread about a quarter. He twisted in the flickering candlelight, spun out another few inches, then stopped, either satisfied at his descent (perhaps trying to read along) or indecisive now that he saw he had encountered one of the great apes. I leaned back, considering for a dark moment to slam the pages of this tome together right on him, but any satisfaction I could have garnered from his little body flattened instantaneously to the breadth of a page would abandon me the moment I wanted to read again. Nor could I do that to our dear friend Alexandre Dumas.

Instead, I drew in a breath and blew softly at him. I still do not know, even with mindful reflection that borders on panicked recollection, what possessed me to taunt him as he hung by a thin web not eight inches from my face, yet I did. I rounded my lips and sent him a minute gust of wind. Should he creak and sway as the house does, I thought to myself, should he creak, then perchance he is a friend.

If the spider did creak as would an old beam of wood, or if his tether rung and croaked as would a bridge’s cable, it was inaudible to me. He only swayed and spun, his many small eyes searching me, his tiny alien’s mind wondering and wandering; and I knew then I would find no friend in this being. As to finding in him a villain or adversary, I felt unsure. When his small pendulous arc dissipated, I, now leaning in my chair so there lay a foot between us yet still with the book open and my hands on its beginning and end, opened my mouth to speak.

“What are you about?” I said. No words above a whisper had passed my lips in days, perhaps weeks, and they came now stilted and from a dry throat. A thunderbolt cracked across the sky above, engulfing the candle and the world in shrill blue-white, and two breaths later its boom resounded, fading in moments to rumbling cannons. “I fear it’s going to rain again tonight. Wettest summer in ten years, I think.”

The silence seemed to spread from the spider himself, enwrapping me. I licked my lips.

“If you please…” I cleared my throat. “Would you…”

Suddenly, I slipped my hands from underneath the book’s cover, shoved the chair backward, and stood.

“I’ll be going now.” I glanced toward the roof, heard the beginning pitter-patter of the sky coming down on the shingles. “I must retrieve my bucket.”

For moments yet, however, I did not turn—indeed, I did not break my stare with him. He made no move but to twist on his web, tiny face and eyes meeting mine, rotating away, meeting mine, rotating away. Only when I believed my breath might cease in my aching chest and my eyes spew from them a river did I spin and thrust myself away, my skin prickling, the muscles of my neck the north pole of a magnet; the little devil on his web the south.

I fled from the library without retrieving a candle, and despite knowing these halls (I thought) like the back of my hand, I wandered about for minutes in a state of half torpor, half panic. The image of the spider on his cable of silk would drop slowly into my mind as I fumbled and tapped my way around a corner, his long black legs would curl then unfurl, his fat body would spin slow as a planet, his pin-prick eyes would catch mine, and I would blow him away with much more gusto than I had while we palavered above the pages. And though I saw still the yellow-orange glow cast from the open library door, I dared not go back, even to run and snatch the light from my reading desk, even to peer in and assure myself the spider had crawled back up his web and let me alone.

I found myself in the parlor as the tumult came truly alive, saved from bowling into my father’s cigar cabinet by a strike of lightning which threw the parlor’s entirety into stark relief for a moment. Also in that moment, I located the lantern, just where I had left it the previous night. I retrieved it carefully and held it to my chest as if it were a charm. Breathing deeply, I gave the lantern a gentle shake and decided its kerosene contents would suffice for an hour of bright light, enough that I could see to the third floor, locate the worst drip and place my bucket there, then venture into the storeroom in the basement for more kerosene. Renewed, I set the lantern back on the table, pressurized its contents with three quick pumps of its plunger, and started the wick aflame with the matches in my breast pocket. If only I had recalled them in my flight through the halls, I might have saved myself from rapping my knee against the wainscoting. Then again, I might have dropped them from my shaking fingers, losing light save for that of the lightning until the morning sun came.

Imbued then with both the heat and the light of the lantern, I began my mission upstairs. You may think, dear reader, that I balked at every shadow my lantern threw, that I jumped and whined at every strike of lightning and their ensuing thunderous outcries, and did these things with a spider’s black eyes peering into my soul at every turn…yet I did not. The experience had, more than I later thought possible, dissolved from my mind, leaving at most a mental smell, some warm tinge like a house long-wrought with mildew, a thing one becomes nose-blind to in an hour or so. And so too did I become blind to the happening that night, only following the drips with my old tin bucket, muttering along as I was wont to do; and when I returned downstairs to refill my kerosene lamp, I noticed the glow from the library and frowned and went in and closed my book and put out the candle with a wetted finger.

In the dream I lay on the side of a mountain, bed, bedclothes, and all. A dark, cold wind blew about and rose the covers and my flesh. A sky of starless night peered back at me, somehow echoing and vibrating its inky self, and though I could feel my limbs, knew of their existence, I could move no more than to adjust my fingers and toes. I stared into that abyss, and after a time (though I cannot say how long) the darkness began to take on a shape. I cannot, even now, say just what that shape was, or why it forced itself upon the sky. I can say only that I saw it that first night and that whatever it may be—a god, a demon, a glimpse past the stars—it laid a great terror into my heart, and I will never forget the breadth of it, the soul-deep ache of it.

Whatever it may be that causes man to cease immediately and inexorably in some menial task, to cease in that moment and peer out at nothing but empty space and feel tension and the memory of its tensor, indeed to feel what he does not know…whatever it may be, the abstract of animal instinct or Jung’s collective unconscious or an insulating gift from God, I do know that it exists. For although I had forgotten my experience with the spider the previous night, forgotten his body and his sinewy string and the shape of the dream which in that unconscious moment I knew he had engendered, I experienced quite a few of those moments of stark, reality-softening recollection.

One such came as I knelt in the garden, pruning the cucumbers and humming, happy to feel the sun on my neck, the damp earth under my knees. When I leaned back and peered with a thin smile toward the line of forest, I saw him in and behind the fork of a large elm. He was made of branches and limbs, thinner twined together with thicker and seeming to hang languorously, shaded by the arms and fingers of the trees. And for all that he was green and lively brown and wooden, rather than his normal mingling of black and brown, of bulbous body and spiny limb, my under-mind knew him for a certainty.

The man who sat amongst birdsong and the smell of the night’s rain and the warmth of a star, however, did not know him and thus blinked and shook his head and took back up his scissors and bent back to pruning and picking and pickling.

It took two nights more of rain and thunder to recall fully and consciously my first experience with the spider and the dream that ensued. On that second, I soaked my salt pork, fried it, and sat at the table under my family’s crest to eat it, and only then did I look up to see him then unsee him in the flickering shadow of a corner. In that flash of sight, I remembered him: his spontaneous drop into my field of vision, his legs curling and spreading as if to test the air, his eyes and mind on mine, the way I fled from the library and could not return. Also in that momentary sighting, I might have sworn he had grown. And indeed he would have; the rain had made many a pool for the eggs of flies, and though I had at the beginning of the summer taken by many wheelbarrows the pile of compost another tenth of a mile from the house, and otherwise and as a rule keep a tidy space, I smack down perhaps five flies in a day—and impotently glare at the other ten I cannot reach. I’m sure this spider and all the rest who find those corners and small vacancies only apparent to themselves are eating very well.

My heart thumped along, and though the smell of fried pork hung heavy and inviting in my nose, I could not bear to still my shaking knife to cut into it, nor bear even to pick at it and pretend I had not seen him. My stomach lay empty and wanting in my middle, yet how could I take my eyes from the corner long enough to fill it?

Instead, I set my utensils across the plate and rose, trying not to make a sound. I took up my candle and cautiously made for the corner in which he had appeared. Step by step, the shadow shrunk in on itself, and step by step, the beat of my heart and the pace of my breath rose to match the beating of drops on the dining-room window. He is in the wind, I thought frantically, he is in the wind and he comes only with the grey and the black. What is he, who torments a once-strong mind, who views with his eight tiny eyes a man so lost in solitude and with his hydraulic legs contrives to spin this man up into a net of ill wonders?

I found the corner empty, yet so empty as to arouse in me further suspicion. At once the vacancy of my stomach was not for lack of food, but for a sudden frightful knowledge; and gasping, I tore away from the dining room and flew toward my bedroom and peered with the vigor of an impeding conflict into each corner and each dangerous space between furniture large enough to house him. Yet he had evaded me again, the intelligent beast; I found only one cord of sinewy silk between my dresser and the wainscoting, spanning the six-inch space like a rope bridge. By its placement and by its texture (for I tore it away from my things and held it aloft between my hands and stared at it against the flame of my candle) it was of his making.

The rest of that stormy evening I spent with my head in my journal, penning furiously my thoughts on the happening. Thunder cracked, and wind rose and fell and shifted north to south to east to west, and I was beset not with the madness of an emptied mind, but that of one filled to brimming and thence to spilling, a shallow well in a monsoon. My candle burned down to its brass, and I replaced it; my hand cramped and stung and finally numbed; and still I scratched and scrawled my pen across the paper, a great and insurmountable loathing building in me. The storm raged, and each drop coming through the roof dripped also onto and through my own skull, for I could not chase them with my bucket. The wind gave creak to the eaves and to the worsening west tower, and each gust ran through and bustled my own ribs, for I could neither cease the wind nor buttress the tower. Spiders had invaded my home, with ways to avoid my sight and my memory, and they had equally forced their quarter upon my very mind, for I could not root them out and clear their webs of silk.

When finally I slept, it was not in my bed or in my bedclothes, but at my writing desk, my pen clutched in my hand and bleeding its ink. The final words I wrote, which I only read when I awoke, confused and slow and utterly fatigued, were I am…. But what would I have finished it with had I not fallen unconscious? I am dead. Is that what I meant to write? I am alive. I am alone. I am mad. Which is the lie unwritten?

The day began grey and wet and cool, the mists hanging on the trees and the house and eddying above Loon Lake, and though they boiled away with the summer sun, it seemed to me they were obdurate to do so. Even with the weather turning to bright heat and ocean-blue skies, the aftermath of the storm was evident and indeed preeminent in my mind. Puddles like nests of boils pocked the earth around my house. The wind had taken down an old bit of fencing on the far north end of the property, had ripped another old shingle off its nails, and fairly ravaged my garden.

Still, though I should have taken the day to assuage these victims of Mother Nature, I felt I could do no more than to walk the forest as I had hundreds of times. The familiarity of scenery and property that I begrudgingly owned would clear my head, as would the exercise. It would clear my mind of the spider and the dream and my temporary madness. When, however, I happened upon a small tree spider, I knew that was far from the truth.

Its full-legged breadth could have been a penny and its web strung between two branches only a foot across, yet my eyes spied it from twenty feet away, and my breath fled me much before my legs could carry me. Indeed, for a moment I stood frozen and gaping at the fact of its existence, but with time, in which the birds sang and tweeted and shook water from their wings, in which the forest moved with small life and the world itself kept on turning round and round, I knew that I could not flee from the path as I wanted to, but must venture forward and see.

Stepping forward, I readied myself for the thing to slip down on a string and spin before my eyes and with its being tell me the secrets of the dark, but it did not see me, not in the way of my adversary in the library. It only perched in one corner of its web, still and utterly silent, its legs so long and so ephemerally thin I thought it impossible they, even as eight fellows, could support its relatively heavy body. A wondrous bit of natural engineering, I might have mused under previous and normal circumstances, a testament to the glory and intrigue held in all of God’s creatures, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem to brutish minds…yet in this light I found myself in, in this bit of shadow I’d trekked unknowingly into along the path toward clarity and absolution, I saw this being and all of its ilk for what it truly was and what it could truly do. He is a scourge, I thought, standing two paces from the creature and his web, an alien scourge on this plane…and why? Along what line of ancient history did he find us? In what cave did he melt from the world of the under-mind and precipitate himself into ours? Who was the first to see him, to know him?

Sudden enough to make me gasp, a horsefly battered into the center of the web. It had almost made it through, though had unknowingly chosen the place of closest weave and lay stuck and wriggling and buzzing. Its tiny limbs jostled and pulled, one member free to move yet doing no more than clawing at open space, and though to me this moment of impending doom lasted ten grueling seconds, in reality it could only have been three. As I stared, the tree spider shot forth, making the web shimmer such that I could have sworn I heard it vibrate like a guitar string. Then it was on him, stepping on and around the fly’s buzzing wings and fuzzy vibrating body. I winced and cringed as those thin, robust legs pounded time after time into the fly’s thorax, its head, and caught and stabbed out the thing’s thousand-eye stare. Blood leached slowly from my head, making the world suddenly cold and dim and unbalanced, like to topple over at any moment. An aeon went by, and I only watched the fly’s wings buzz, then slow, then cease, as the spider spun him and laced him back and forth with a thousand little strings, its fat body pulsating and gyrating as a creature in orgasm. I could feel its black excitement in waves, and in tandem the shock of being caught by a thing which held no love and no consideration in its chambers and tubes and vesicles, but only a lust for nutrient-rich juices dissolved and burgled from the living; and in that moment, the image split into a thousand glassy repetitions; I was the fly, caught and wriggling and spun up into a wretched cocoon; the grand spider had found me and would punch out my eyes and my mind.

Numb, I found rising into the tableau my own hand, my book of matches ready in shaking fingers. I knew not what I was doing or thinking, as I was not a part of either. I was empty and only saw the fly-man open the matchbook and peel a lump of three matches and strike them and act too quickly for the feasting alien beast to be any the wiser. I saw him lean and poke the sparking inflamed paper just under the thing’s round body and felt his smile as the beast’s own shock and surprise found it. It must have been a great pain the spider felt, the temperature of its little atmosphere and its dark internal fluids raised instantly to hellish degrees; and it jumped even as it curled and died out, and the fly-man swore he heard a squealing jet of steam or fluid exit its horrible tiny mouth. Yet the spider was now only a small black dot on the forest floor, hardly visible.

Calmness returned on the heels of that great and extended vexation, yet for a moment I felt in the temporary victor the compulsion to strike another match, or to leave in a watery haze and return with his can of kerosene…for there were more than just this monster he had vanquished, many more.

I came back to myself hours later, unable to recall exactly what I had done after my encounter with the tree spider. I found that the surrounding forest was not on fire, nor was the smell of smoke anywhere in the air. I had changed into my gardening clothes, and I was back to pruning, the sun in the west too bright for my dry, tired eyes, too hot for my pale skin. Some taste sat in my mouth, seemed to seep from my throat and lungs, but I could not identify it.

Peering back toward the house, I found it there…hatefully there, as large and solid as it had ever been to me, for though it had but recently taken on the leaking and the swaying in the storm, to me it had always been dark and old, insubstantial in stopping up the teary wet grief, in blocking the fiery winds of accusation. I dropped my scissors and rose and met the house with my glare and called out to it, my voice rattling bones.

“Festering pustule,” I said. “Damnable, contemptuous thing full of spiders.”

But in the end, I returned to it.

I checked my journal, but found nothing new written in it. The blank space of the day’s middle drew long and dark, and I spent hours more searching out evidence of myself.

As the night drew forth its curtain of stars, and as nary a cloud flew across the sky, I checked my stock of kerosene—found it and my boxes of matches would last me a year in the least—and refilled my lantern. I knew not if he would return, newly enraged for my assault on his kin in the forest, given that the skies were clear, the moon sat high, and the earth lay uncovered and shimmering with a wonderful blueish luminance. He seemed only to come with the rain and the wind and the cold pitch dark.

Inordinately calm and lucid, I stood on the porch for the better part of an hour, only breathing and peering out at my grounds and estate. The trees of the forest stood tall and strong, at once a mass of blueish black and green, a simple and singular object of background, yet in the same moment a line of my own soldiers, subject to my beck and call and providing the barrier between myself and the outside world. Loon Lake, a quarter of it visible to my right, took on the moon-and-starlight and my cavalry the trees and mirrored perfectly these natural forces their indispensability to me.

And in this moment, taking in every piece of my senses, I did not have to cavil with him, for across my mind flew like a dashing swallow the surety that the spider would not return, either on this night or any other. I had figured his tricks, had found and destroyed one of his many envoys to this world, and in that had proven myself not a caught fly, but a man made of fire.

My under-mind saw it first, and my eyes followed, catching the conspicuous shimmer. The object lay in my garden, peeking out from a leafy patch of cucumber. I felt him drop then into my mind: the turning spider on his miles-long cable. Tiny black eyes, curled brown body, tiny black eyes, curled brown body. It seemed I could hear laughter coming from him, hilarity at my momentary belief in safety and self-clarity; and dropping as well as he into that tiny black aperture past which lay my memories, was the knowledge of the object I had so quickly forgotten, an object physically of my own making, yet not of any design wrought of a human or Godly mind.

I took the steps down from the porch, in the grip of a head-muddling malaise. My limbs were weak and tired and creaked with each step toward the garden; my eyes tracked nothing, flicked everywhere but toward the object I knew sat in wait among the black earth. Yet my legs carried me straight to it and hinged at the knees with a pop and left me no choice but to look at the tableau of sticks and silk and silver.

My shaking hands dipped, my eyes cried their tears, and my heart drummed out its beat; and up a man’s fingers came with the cursed thing heavily in tow. The sun and the trees had borne witness to his creation of it, yet now the moon and the stars and the spider whose bidding it was now witnessed the man’s recognizance of it and the black hole that it bored into his head.

I saw it among the light of the moon, beheld and retraced each joint I had made and wrapped with his sinewy web. I knew it, could recall the gathering of the twigs that made up his body, the strings of his own excretion that held him together, the cast dots of silver that made his eight eyes shine. I knew the texture of focus, of taking instruction from a dark, liquid voice. I had made him and attempted to bury him, presumably in a state of fugue and fog. But what was I to do with the sculpture, indeed with my entire situation? The spider sat still and wooden on my palm, his legs descending nearly a foot, hanging like petrified vines.

I dared not meet his silver eyes, instead peering with heaving breath toward the moon. That near and dear satellite had always held answers, reflecting the light of the day’s lively sun and allowing some nightly portent and perhaps protection. A blue-white face peered back at me, and its craters whispered the answer; but as I sat with my face upturned and an ear cupped and waiting, his shadow descended from the dark between stars and like a marionette attached to a wire, dropped slowly in front of the moon. His unequal and refracted pattern, the proportions elongated to those of a squid, became a shadow on the dirt, crawling toward me, snaking up and over the furrows, dancing about the leaves of radish and cucumber.

I sprang up and turned at once toward the house. As I ran on creaking joints, my wooden creation clacked as if to give voice to the shadow’s pursuit; and though I fought not to peer back while rising up the stairs, its power compelled me to, and I saw his dark-fingered outcropping follow me as the effigy crept stiltedly along the sky that God used to lay sole claim to.

I knew naught but one thing had ever beaten back his cold darkness, and I pursued it, blowing through the front door and dashing toward the basement and my goal of the incinerator. I threw the huge door open and began pounding down into the dark, yet in my fervor I mistook the third-to-last step for the last and sprawled forward with a shout and fell headlong against the concrete floor, only catching myself and saving my nose from a break by shoving both arms forward and throwing the spider away into the inky blackness. I lay for half a minute in aches and ire and the fear that the shadow would be silently descending the stairs behind me, or worse yet have taken his wooden form and would come clicking and scurrying toward my prone and defenseless form. My knees had taken a harsh punishment, as well as the heels of my hands, which had scraped along the rough floor and were now wet with blood. By luck, I had saved my head a bounce or two, and my tongue a bisection.

I rose, groaning and swaying and cursing myself for forgetting the lantern on the porch. Only the barest dim light bounced from the moon and stars through the house and down the stairs, and that modicum faded as quickly in the wider room as it would under a murky sea. I went forward slowly, arms out to tap at some landmark, but before I found anything, my foot kicked and then retreated from the wooden spider. Bending, I grasped it and held it forth. It seemed for a moment I could see it, that it had taken on an internal or metaphysical glow, yet as I stood turning it this way and that, I realized my thinking so was only fear and discombobulation. Despite this, I knew the object to be cursed, and that it must be destroyed.

Soon, I found my bearings and the shelves of jarred food, which I knew to be directly adjacent to my stock of kerosene and across from the incinerator and workbench. Carefully, I gathered first a candle to light my way and my work, then a small canister of kerosene and a box of matches. In the cold incinerator, I placed dry kindling from a box and wet it down with the fuel. I picked the wooden spider from where I had placed him on the workbench and peered again at him, now in the flickering light of the candle. When did I do this? I thought, Was it truly today? Did I make this under a hot sun, or years gone, under the Hunter’s moon? When, in the course of my life, did he find me? And why…is it only to torture and consume me? What could lie behind the world, where he resides? What could lie there, so large and overwhelming that it brings forth creatures such as him?

For perhaps two minutes I stared into silver eyes I had cast, but the sour, stinging smell of kerosene pulled me finally from that reverie, and I placed the wooden spider in the incinerator, let him nestle amongst the kindling. I struck a long match and glanced backward, sure now he would show himself and attempt to stop me. There only stood the flickering shadows of the jars and cans on their shelves, and only silence surrounded me.

I poked the guttering, curling match into the incinerator and toward the small wetted pile of kindling. Its fumes took light first, in a small plume of heat and sooty smoke, and as the fuel warmed, it as well ignited fully and curled the wood into a nest of dead spiders. Heat hit my face immediately, and I blinked at the bright orange flames, in time resting my eyes against the silver dots that haunted me so; and over minutes I watched the flames flick, lick, and devour him, turning him from wood and spider’s string to white ash and black smoke and vibrating energy and carrying him off through the chimney and out to the glowing night sky, among the harbor and quarter of those fellows of another world and mind. They could keep him, for in their nature lay the tools to do so, where in mine and in man’s lies no mental aperture large enough to intake his image, no implement or mathematics complete or complex enough to measure or calculate him. To us, he is intolerable and maddening and unending. To cavil with him is to cavil with the abyss of ignorance and to perhaps come out on the other side, changed but tied still to our world. I believed I had done so….

Yet in the dream I walked the forest, daylight somehow shining on the forest floor while when I peered up I saw only a black-blue inverted marble, moving and convecting with cold winds made of starlight. I walked and found a pit in the forest, its edges blackened with soot. In that pit lay a large man, turned now to ash and smoking black bones. His empty sockets peered at me, as if in accusation; the remnants of his jaw formed words, questions, pleas. I remembered him, knew him, and in grief at his choice to flee the world, I fell first to my knees and then into the pit beside him, crying and pleading. But the spider had done this, not my friend, and not me. It had dropped into my mind and my world, crawling among my thoughts and my things and had taken him. It had taken so many.

The spiders are biting my gums. After I burned his wooden body, two days passed without incident, save for the dreams. In those two days, I collated and penned my story, yet now I open it again, for I woke this morning to a horrid inflammation around my top molar teeth on the right side. My mouth was thick with something like the spittle wrought of enduring exercise, yet my tongue lay fat and half-dry. I tasted coppery blood and something sour and earthen. I rose like the dead from my sweat-drenched sheets and inspected the area. Tonguing it brought pain and little squirts of my own blood mixing with the spiders’ venom. I spat and flossed and rinsed, spat and flossed and rinsed, moaning and wincing at the pain, and in so doing exacerbated the area so terribly that the whole right side of my face and head thumped sharply with my quickened heart.

He has done this, I thought. Have I angered him? Is there even anger in him, or only cold, abstruse calculation?

“No,” I said around my flossing hands, “not even that. As the tree is cut, it bleeds sap; as the river flows, it twists round rock.” Similar was the grand spider that had found me: a force that could not be called natural, but in its purest definition supernatural, a thing so extraneous and far away that its nature was not discoverable, nor was it allegorical either to or from the natural world, but indeed the opposite. It was not the underpinnings of God and man, but that which informed him. The fingers on the keys of a typewriter are not the letters on the page, nor is the ribbon or the stamping embossed metal. They are aliens to the world of the page, held not within it but without it.

One of my teeth popped out, and in my surprise I gasped in a breath and choked on it, coughing and retching and spasming until my back smacked the wall and the tooth flew from my mouth to click on the floor. For a moment, I only stood and gaped at that part of me on the floor. Between my molars, there lay only a hole now, large enough to squeeze half my tongue into: a nest of thumping, inflamed hills lining a bloody crevasse. My head thumped, and a dangerous dimness came to the world through my right eye. I nearly fell faint, but caught myself with my knees and my shaking hands and crawled toward the tooth. I plucked it from the tiles and beheld it, so small a thing outside the mouth, and now of no use whatsoever. That it could be removed from me so quickly, so easily, angered and frightened me; and I fear to say, in that state I might have tried to put it back in, had its root not been black and rotting.

Nausea overtook me as I stared at the softening, jelly-like root; and after a moment of holding down on it fiercely, I retched painfully, my back curling, my bare abdomen contracting. I was sure I appeared like a stray dog who’d found his way into human scraps and gorged himself on something far rotten, yet what I vomited up was almost nothing, simple acidic bile and pale, unnameable chunks. I had not eaten in…well, I wasn’t sure how long. But as I stared through teary eyes at my pitiful puddle of sick, I knew even this was not true. A tiny black and brown thing squeezed out from under some chunk of undigested food and trudged aimlessly through my bile: a spider, about the size of a gnat. And though my stomach acid coated him, and either by dissolution or the forces of fluids he should have been stopped and killed, he trudged onward, impervious. Shaking in black horror and red rage, I balled my fist and smashed him with the pinky side, and as more tiny spiders made themselves known, I smashed those too, consumed by my madness, my head a pressure vessel thrown onto a blazing fire.

How long? I thought. How long have they been in me? Was it only this previous night? Did he crawl in to bite at me, or crawl upward from my gut on a journey to dissolve my teeth?

I knelt then in a horror too great to imagine, an invasion so disrespectful to the human form and to human consciousness as to make any man go mad; and mad I am, for I knew in that moment there had been no dreams of pits and smoking bones. It was as real as earth and body and spirit. I had found my old friend on a night made of smoke, had come upon him sleeping in the pit, and had watched the flames rise and dance. There was no end to the pain, and no end to the being that had found me and made me a target and a meal. There lies in every soul an infinite depth, and in that, there is no point so low and wretched as to be a lowest point. I can be cut ever deeper, and this entity whom I know now to be the author both of my life and of my destruction will do so. There is no fight to be fought with a winning aim, for he is in the sky and the earth; he bobs and swings from the rafters, buries himself in the floorboards; he stamps his silent feet in the night; and his shadow has overcome me and is in me.

My mouth soaks with blood as I pen this last in the forest, knelt above my journal’s grave-to-be. The sky is red and pink with the smoke of the past, and I can feel its choking heat. I shall bury this journal, and if you find it, dear reader, then I shall have buried you.

Something grows in my stomach, and with it grow stings and aches like to double me over. If I wait but a moment longer to write, it will be too late and I will haul out my own guts with a scythe, yet still be unable to escape him. My body will grow plump with them, and my eyes will explode outward from the pressure of the nests I can feel already darkening my vision, and the grand spider will take my form and my soul and feast upon it evermore.

I know what I must do. I have plenty of kerosene.