Arachnophobia

There was a spider in the bath. Her eyes were drawn to it as she pushed the door open, the giant black mass of its hairy body contrasting sickeningly with the white porcelain of the bathtub. As it scuttled across the bath, Melissa imagined she could hear its legs hitting the bottom. Her eyes suddenly seemed ten times more powerful than normal, picking up every hair on the creature’s legs. Suppressing a shudder, she crept towards the bath, clutching the glass she kept by the sink in a trembling hand. Terrified to go nearer the damn thing than was necessary, Melissa dropped the glass, hoping against hope that it would land on top of the spider and trap it there, but, of course, no-one is ever that lucky.

Releasing a groan halfway to a sob, Melissa grabbed the shower head and aimed it at the spider, her hand trembling so water droplets sprayed onto the wall in an ironic web pattern. The spider, apparently startled by the sudden downpour, jittered for a second: its hideous legs continued working, as though it was determined to keep moving, and then, suddenly, it had gone. She thought it had been washed down the plughole, though she hadn’t seen it go, but a tickling sensation at her wrist immediately corrected her.

The spider, unbelievably, had leapt from the bath and onto her sleeve. She screamed and leapt backwards, allowing the shower head to clatter into the bath, ignoring the spray that splattered across the ceiling.

The creature was scuttling rapidly up her arm, seeking the warmth of her armpit, the curve of her neck. It didn’t move like a spider should. It was elegant, almost graceful, sickening in its unnatural movement. As Melissa stumbled back against the toilet, she felt the spider clamber onto her cheek, and almost of its own accord her hand raised to bat it away. There was some piece of knowledge she couldn’t call to hand, some instinctual reaction that told her that under no circumstances could she allow the spider to reach her face.

It took three attempts for the spider to finally fall to the floor, and when it did it made a beeline towards her again, scuttling madly towards her shoe, and it was only when she lifted her right foot and stomped on the creature so hard she nearly overbalanced that it stopped moving, undeniably squished. For a moment or two Melissa watched it with a kind of satisfied triumph on her face- until its legs began to twitch.

I’m imagining it, she thought, peering down at it. The crumbled body of the thing was almost pitiful, and it reminded her of an episode of Wild At Heart she had once watched, where they had dropped a dictionary on a tarantula. But even as this thought occurred to her, even as she stared, the spider rose upon its eight legs, shook itself like a dog, and began to run in jerky circles.

As scared as she was of spiders, Melissa was a stubborn woman at the best of times, and the seventh month of her pregnancy had made her even more so. Determined now to kill the damned thing, she reached for the toilet roll beside her and pulled off six squares. Folding the paper over so she wouldn’t have to feel the squish of the spider’s body, she bent over and squeezed the thing in her closed fist, between the layers of paper. Without even looking, she lifted the toilet seat and threw the parcel into the toilet, flushing it three times for good measure.

There, she thought. That fucking killed it.

*

She was trapped, writhing in a tangle of ropes that she could not escape. No matter how violently she moved her body, she could not break free from the sticky substance that bound her. She could hear a horrible clicking noise and her eyes could not pierce the all-consuming blackness that surrounded her. She opened her mouth to cry out, to scream for help, but the sticky substance invaded her tongue, weighing it down as though she had taken a mouthful of unswallowable syrup. It crept its way down her throat, choking her, the taste so bitter that it stung.

The noise was growing louder now, and she could see a circle of light moving towards her in a strange, jerking fashion. She peered towards the source of it, and when her eyes finally made out the shape advancing towards her she tried to scream once more, again filling her mouth with the cloying substance, that she now knew was a giant spider’s web.

The spider coming towards her was ginormous, large enough to swallow an adult whole. She struggled even more violently, but she was trapped in the spider’s web, and the creature let out a cruel, hungry laugh as it came towards her. The clicking noise was the sound of its pincers, clashing together in excitement, every hair on its many legs standing on end. A scream finally forced its way through the gunk in Melissa’s mouth; it pierced the still air, rising over the spider’s insistent clicking, until the creature bore down upon her.

For a few moments, there was nothing but a struggling black mess blocking her vision, that clicking so loud she thought it would deafen her, and coarse black hair pressing against her skin and filling her nostrils. Then there was only agonising pain and her view of the scene changed to a wide shot. She was watching the scene from afar, watching the spider hold her head in his pincer - but the head was not connected to her body. Her limbs writhed, twitching disgustingly, blood soaking her pale pink pyjamas - and then she was awake, sitting up in bed with the covers tangled around her body and a scream burning her throat.

The dream had been the start of Melissa’s fear of spiders. At six years old, dreams are far more traumatising than they are in adulthood, and this particular dream had followed Melissa through the years. She hated all insects, but spiders were the absolute worst, and a family trip to Australia when she was eleven had only confirmed that fact; in her opinion, spiders as big as the palm of your hand were God’s way of saying ‘fuck you’ to the world.

It was this that had led Melissa to her current job - an exterminator. She enjoyed it to the same level a police officer enjoyed catching criminals: she was purging the world of an evil that shouldn’t exist, and this evil had certainly been growing larger over the previous weeks.

*

Her stomach hurt, and she cradled it with one hand as she padded into the living room and sat down with a heavy sigh, still panting. She had abandoned the glass in the bath: she didn’t want to lean over the bathtub and exacerbate the backache that haunted her after a long day of standing up, and she was quite honestly sick of staring at those goddamn bathroom tiles. She spent enough time in the bathroom when she was peeing every two seconds. Being pregnant was a pain in the ass, but she still had a whole two months left to go. She had wanted to work until the very last moment, and the company she worked for had agreed, as long as she did what they classified as ‘safe’ jobs. In other words, she wasn’t allowed to do any jobs that involved a lot of chemicals, which usually would have meant ridding homes of rats and bats. These last few weeks, however, spiders had been the biggest problem. The thing was that these weren’t normal spiders. Her and a team of scientists had been trying to find out what was different about these spiders, but any attempts to capture or kill them had not come to fruition as of yet.

A groan escaped Melissa as she reached for her laptop, settling it on her knee as she leaned back into the sofa with another sigh. She did a lot of sighing lately, not just at work but at home too, and not just because she was exhausted from the pregnancy. As she opened the web to the news page, she prepared herself for yet another slew of articles slinging shit to the general public. The headline ‘Spider Epidemic?’ caught her eye, and she clicked on it with a resigned expression on her face.

The majority of news outlets were reporting complete bullshit disguised as fact, which wasn’t surprising. They were at least reporting on the increase of spiders in the area, but they downplayed it as though it was unimportant, and some of the things Melissa had seen worked to persuade her that it certainly was important.

At first the news outlets had speculated that the spiders were entering homes due to the unnaturally chilly year they had been having, in a desperate search for warmth, but it had only been a few days before experts had shut that one down. After all, they said, spiders were not attracted to heat - Melissa herself knew that from experience - so they had moved on to suggesting that the insects spiders sought after may be attracted to the heat. This was true in some cases, but they were also attracted to the light that came with winter’s dark nights. Most people were happy with this explanation, and put forward the idea that the spiders would simply go away when the weather warmed again. But those people were naive. Those people hadn’t seen what Melissa had.

As she set the laptop aside once more, frustrated by the repetition that prevails even across websites, she pushed herself to her feet and felt an extremely sharp pain in her stomach, so sharp it made her cry out and double over. A contraction, she thought with a stab of panic, but then she remembered the Braxton-Hicks she had read about. Of course, that would be it. It was too early for actual birth yet. Gasping slightly in pain, she waddled off to fetch herself a hot water bottle.

*

As much as her bosses had tried to give her the ‘mundane’ jobs throughout her third trimester, it hadn’t worked very well. In fact, the jobs she had experienced over the past few weeks had been some of the worst she had ever attended.

The first had been an emergency call out to a house in a suburban area with a ‘serious infestation.’ This term meant pretty much nothing to Melissa, because apparently the words ‘emergency’ and ‘serious’ held different meanings for different people, and in the past she had been sent out to many a ‘serious invasion’ which actually consisted of one or two cockroaches. People were ridiculous about bugs, particularly landlords, who felt they might be sued if their tenants saw so much as a fruit fly. So when she pulled up in front of the house in her car, she didn’t even bother taking any tools with her, though she was admittedly startled when she saw the ambulance parked at the other side of the road. Assuming it was for the house opposite, she made her way down the garden path and lifted a hand to knock on the door, only to see a paramedic jerk it open.

“About time!” he called. Before she could even ask, he stepped aside to let her in, his voice low and jabbering. “I don’t know how the hell this happened. The poor guy’s house is just swamped… I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Unsure what the hell she was about to see, Melissa nervously entered the house, her sharp hazel eyes spotting tell-tale signs of cobwebs in the hallway corners.

The house was not filthy, but it wasn’t exactly tidy either: it showed clear signs of its only occupancy being a single man. The carpets and walls were clean with minimal dust and dirt, but there were empty coffee mugs and drinks cans on the hallway table. This was all Melissa was able to take in before her attention was drawn to the desperate whimpering of a male voice, and she saw the worst infestation of spiders she had ever seen.

The man was covered in hundreds if not thousands of them, only his pale face peeking out from the sea of black. Even as she watched, one of the spiders approached the man’s neck, legs flailing in a manner unnatural for such a creature, and, as she watched, it began to bury its way into the man’s skin. She rushed to soothe him despite her own fear, hands smoothing over the stranger’s shoulders in what she hoped was a reassuring way. He was screaming now, the sound hoarse, and when Melissa looked closer, she could see that his skin was actually crawling. Some of the spiders had already penetrated his skin and wriggled there, grotesque. For a moment the young woman stood there, sickened, wide eyes focused on the paramedic that remained knelt beside the patient. His knees and legs were rapidly becoming covered in spiders, too, and he cast a desperate glance at Melissa as he spoke, brushing his hands over his legs in an attempt to brush them off. “You’re finally here,” the second paramedic stated, almost breathless with relief. “We don’t know what to do. We don’t wanna move the guy without getting as many spiders off him as possible, and the poor bloke can’t come back here with the house like this. Can you help?”

It had taken half an hour to help the paramedics get the patient out of the house, squishing every spider that attempted to invade his body as they went. Finally, he was safely in the ambulance, and Melissa was left with the house. Swallowing her fear, she spent a few long hours entering every nook and cranny in the house, spreading vinegar and essential oils as well as spider killer, and when she finally stood in the hallway once more, her back aching from the hard work and the pregnancy, the house appeared cleansed. But something in her knew it wouldn’t last.

*

The instant she pushed open her car door at the second house, the smell permeated her nostrils, causing a powerful wave of nausea to weaken her for a moment. It was the stench of something rotten, with an undertone of the familiar smell that meant an abandoned house full of insects. She had been called to stop an infestation before it spread: neighbours had seen spiders entering and exiting the house and were eager to stop them entering their own properties. What was more strange, however, was that the owner of the property hadn’t been seen or heard from in days.

Melissa forced herself, once again, to swallow her fear as she entered the house, one hand pressed tightly over her nose and mouth so she didn’t have to breathe in the smell. She cast barely a glance into the living room or the kitchen, instead heading up the stairs where the stench seemed to be strongest. She could hear awful scuttling, scratching noises from behind the bedroom door, and what she saw as she pushed it open would scar her for life.

There was a woman in the bed, undeniably dead. Her hair - or what was left of it - lay fanned out on the pillow, eyelids peeled back from empty eye sockets. For a terrible moment, Melissa wondered where her eyes had gone, until she saw them on the woman’s chest, half-eaten away by the spiders that surrounded her. They clambered on and over her body, their hairy legs penetrating the open sores and wounds that they had created upon her skin. As she watched, a line of spiders crawled out of the woman’s parted lips and nostrils, and Melissa was forced to seek fresh air. The nausea overtook her, and she vomited. She could not face going back into the house, and preyed only that the police would get there quickly.

*

The pain was getting worse. She had suffered nausea on and off all day, but she had attributed it to the news she had received today: the coroner had called and told her that the woman she had found in the bedroom had had spiders living even inside her, exiting her vagina, taking over her inner organs and decaying what was left of them. It sounded humorous to say ‘spiders were taking over the world’, but there was no other way to put it.

The next unbearable stab of pain sent her staggering to the kitchen sink, retching, but nothing came up. She tasted bile, and, with a wave of terrible panic, blood.

She phoned Eddie. With each ring came a sharp, strong pain in her stomach, and the instant she heard the voicemail message she dropped the phone, crying out in agony. She was having this baby now. There wasn’t even time to call an ambulance, because she could feel a wetness dampening her trousers. Her water had broke. She lay down on the cold, tiled, kitchen floor, squirming out of her pants.

It was like nothing she had ever experienced before. It was her first birth, but she had never imagined it to be like this. She had prepared: had read books about labour, had watched terrifying and traumatising videos and had thought she was ready, but this…

Breathing heavily through her screams of pain and terror, she reached down between her legs, hoping to feel something there, but all she felt was warm wetness and sharp stabs of pain. As she pushed herself onto her elbows to try and see if anything was happening, she spotted two small spiders crawling down the pale skin of her leg. She shook them off, a brief wave of anger washing over her: how dare those disgusting creatures try and scare her at a time like this? The urge to push came upon her, and she bore down with a scream that was louder than the rest. She pushed for what felt like hours, her nails scrabbling on the floor in a desperate attempt to find purchase until they were torn down to the quicks. Finally, finally, she felt the baby pass out of her body and flopped back against the floor with a cry of relief.

But she didn’t hear crying. Sobbing in a terrible mix of panic and pain, she forced herself to her elbows once more, hoping against hope to see a little pink human form, its chest rising and falling with each breath.

She screamed. Crawling out of her and onto the tile floor below her were hundreds of spiders. They continued to exit her body, swarming around her and crawling onto her skin. She was frozen with fear. She could hear their terrible, endless scuttling filling her ears like thunder. Her nostrils were invaded by their dusty, dirty smell, and she felt the urge to retch once more. A black swarm, spotted with red, her own blood, forced their way ever closer to her heart.

As she finally pushed herself to her feet, she was covered in spiders. She was not only giving birth to them, but she was choking on them: they crawled up her windpipe and lodged in her throat, blocking her air, causing her to fall to her hands and knees once more, and they took advantage of her weakness. They filled every orifice. They forced their way from behind her eyes, out of her mouth, from beneath her skin. They crawled and tore and fed until there was nothing left but a shattered and broken body, waiting for her husband to arrive and discover her.