Jorogumo (part 2 of 4)

CHAPTER 2: KUMO

The barrel of his rifle stared face-to-face with a women in a clean white dress. She had gorgeous green eyes that somehow shined despite the lack of sunlight in these dark woods.

"Oh, pardon me" she said. Her voice was angelic. "I did not mean to frighten you."

"Who... are you?" Matt responded, confused.

"My name is Kumo. I live just beyond this ridge. I would.."

Matt interrupted her. "Woo wait a minute...you LIVE out here in these woods?!"

"You are injured." She said, ignoring his question. "Won't you come with me back to my home and you can rest up?" She smiled at him.

"Wait. You didn't answer my question."

"I promise I will answer all of your questions along the way" Kumo reached down and lightly took a hold of Matt's arm. The touch of her soft, pale skin felt heavenly. "What is your name?"

Matt couldn't believe how beautiful this random girl in the woods was, let alone how she lived out here without anyone knowing. But he answered her. "Uhh..Matt. I'm Matt."

"What a lovely name." She smiled again. "Won't you come with me, Matt?"

Before he knew what he was doing he was following her through the woods. He has completely forgot about the deer he shot at. Everything seemed so dream-like.

As they walked, the girl explained that her father was an environmentalist in Japan. She told him about her extended family, some of which she said had lived in these woods for over 400 years. Matt thought that what he was hearing sounded strange, but he didn't care. All he could focus on was her radiating beauty. After she told her story, she asked Matt about his. For some reason he began to tell this woman he just met everything about him...from his upbringing to the death of Grant, to the divorce, and his daughter. Every little detail came spilling out as if he was just given a truth serum. Komo payed very close attention and soaked up every minute detail.

They came up onto a small cabin. There was a pond behind it. Oddly, long strands of what seemed to be string hung from some of the trees around the pond. They were difficult to make out in the still dim, darkened light of the forest, but he could tell they were there.

"Well, here it is." Won't you come inside, Mathew, and let me play nurse?"

Play nurse. The way she said it stiffened Matt. He felt like he was in a trance, but it just felt so good. Matt was completely and helplessly enamored by this women.

And so Matt walked up the creaky wooden steps that lead up to her home. He followed her inside.

"Here, take a seat on this bed, in here." She pointed to a comfortable-looking bed in a side room. "I'll be right back."

Matt sat on it, and it was so soft that he nearly fell asleep that instant. He glanced around the room. She was obviously very poor, as there was not much decoration or personality in the small cabin. He noticed a spider race across the floor, and he shuttered.

The moment that he shuttered he began to hear a beautiful melody from was sounded like a wind instrument such as a flute. His eyes glossed over and turned smokey. The music entered his body and took control. Matt stood up off of the bed and began to make his way out of the room, through some side hallways, and out a back door of the cabin. Outside, Kumo stood naked playing some sort of lute-like instrument.

Matt never felt such euphoria in his life. There was nothing except this perfect woman and her entrancing music. He was her servant, her puppet. She stood in front of the pond out back. As she played, she walked backwards towards the pond. Matt followed as if on an invisible line connected to her that she was reeling in. She continued to step backwards until her feet dipped into the shimmering water of the pond. But, despite only being about 5'7'' in height she never fell below the surface of the water the further she wadded out. In fact, it was almost as if she was gliding over the surface of the water.

Matt's feet touched the shimmering blue-ish water. Then did his ankles. Then his knees. Then the glossy water came up around his waist. And then something miraculous occurred. He suddenly heard the voice of his daughter, Susan.

"Daddy...Daddy WAKE UP!"

As soon as Matt heard his daughter's voice, the gloss covering his eyes dissipated, and the reality of his situation revealed itself. Matt was waist deep in murky, blood-red water. The trees surrounding this bloodbath were covered with a silky white webbing. Broken bones littered the ground under the trees and under Matt's feet in the water.

Then he saw what he was staring at in the middle of the pond; what was producing the hypnotizing music. It was not the beautiful women who had stole his curiosity and affection. Instead, a behemoth and horrifying spider took her place. It towered over him at about the size of a small house. The monster's eight piercing black eyes were fixed on Matt. Realizing she had lost her grip over her next meal, the beast let out an other-worldly shrill screech:

"Sheeeriiiiiiii!”

A new trance held Matt in place, unable to move. Fear. But as the monstrous arachnid extended her long legs out to ensnare him, his body jolted back to life. Fighting through the murky red water he reached the shore and sprinted inside the cabin, through the hallway into the living room, past the room where his backpack and gun lay, and out the front door. He kept on sprinting. He ran and ran and never looked back.

Falling to his knees a while later, he reached out his hands into the mud and held himself up with his arms. "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!" he blurted out loud as he panted heavily from being out of breath. Spinning around, Matt scanned his surrounding. His heart and his mind raced.

His thoughts came out loud. “I….I’m just hallucinating. Yeah, that's all it was...just a hallucination.”

He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he suddenly realized where all of those ghost stories about these woods came from. “I...I gotta get outta here” he thought. He reached for his phone which had been in his pocket of his hunting jacket when he stood in the bloodbath of the monster back behind that cabin. He pulled it out, hoping by some miracle it wasn’t water damaged. It was wet still, and refused to turn on. Matt frantically hold down the power button over and over, praying that it would turn on.

It was dead. And Matt feared that soon he would be too unless he could escape these woods. So he dried his phone the best that he could and continued on through the skeleton forest. With every step, with every slight noise of branches rattling or the brush blowing in the wind, the paranoia of that monstrous arachnid catching up to him tormented Matt. For a long while he walked. He walked in circles, it seemed… until the horrible thoughts of becoming the meal of that great thing faded and thoughts of starving to death became reality. Fatigue finally landed a crushing blow, and Matt laid down under a sizable pine tree, defeated. His eyes grew too heavy, and sleep overtook him...

Despite everything that he was enduring, he dreamt of his wife, Elaine. In his dream he was back at their old house. Susan was asleep. Matt had made himself a drink and walked into the living room and sat down next to his wife. She leaned over onto him.

“Ya know, Baby, we have a perfect life” she told him. “And I couldn’t imagine it without you in it.”

He stared lovingly into into her green eyes. She has a perfectly beautiful face. He kissed her cheek, but then when he removed his lips he noticed a dark blue and purple bruise where he had kissed her. Then a cut formed right below her eye on her socket, and a slight bit of blood trickled down over the bruise. He was puzzled and shocked, but his attention was pulled away when Elaine grabbed his inner thighs and began rubbing up and down, alluding to what was to come next. Matt closed his eyes.

Then suddenly...her hands morphed into thick claws that dug into Matt’s upper thighs. He screamed as blood shot out over his body and her face.

The fear and shock from the nightmare woke him up immediately. But his terror did not end with the nightmare. He awoke still lying under the pine tree...except a large figure was leering overtop of him and the pain still in his thighs. His eyes looked face to face with the eight eyes of that horrid spider from the cabin. Her claws were deep into his legs, rendering him unable to escape. The scream of pain and terror from Matt was drowned out by a louder, more frightening shrill of the demon just inches away from his face.

The monster’s meal would not elude her again. She ferociously lunged in and sunk her fangs into the upper chest of Matt. He screamed more as she violently shook side-to-side, ripping deeper holes into his flesh so that the blood would flow faster. Just before everything went black and Matt screamed his last breath, he noticed that the spider had vanished…

And what took its place was himself. Another version of himself sat on him, a version that looked extremely sorrowful and depressed. The fangs that tore his chest apart were broken rum bottles. This other Matt leaned in and spoke:

“Forgive me” was all he said.