Up the Water Spout

There was an accident, and a dead woman, cars piled up like crumpled cans. It was a wicked wreck stinking of smoke and rubber, heated metal.

My brother and I ran outside to hellp and found a boy, the woman's son, bleeding and unconscious inside the car. We saved the child from the flaming vehicle - and some of his belongings too - and ran him up into the house away from the road. While we called the medics, I began to notice strange insects crawling from his salvaged possessions. A large purple pearlescent spider with shiny butterknife legs, and another one, olive colored, both sized like Halloween toys. They moved, but not the way spiders normally move. These walked with an ancient awareness, a macabre deliberateness. I lost sight of the purple one, which at first seemed harmless and playful, like a dog, until I spotted it on the ceiling spinning strands of silk like curtains from its stilted scissor legs. The other one, the olive one, had short, sharp claws, and a large circular head the size of a plum, with two eyes affixed on either side; those small adhesive toy eyes that children attach to drawings, the kind with pupils that roll and roam. And as my brother and I looked on, a smaller arachnid, bronze, mounted the olive one and became translucent. The larger spider stood on its hind legs and raised its forelegs over its head like Shiva as it sprouted more eyes, glaring eyes, with pupils that didn't jiggle and fall around loosely, but instead, became focused and ill-inftentioned, evil. They peered and pierced us paralytically, causing a deep, soft humming behind the ears, a sense of burning behind the neck at the brainstem; ensnaring us onlookers in a panicked paroxysm, a web of psychonautic terror and dread. I felt my breath being pulled from my lungs like strands of silk as the eyes continued to multiply and my vision shook from the dull ringing in my ears.

Only with great effort was I able to wrestle free from its eight-legged enthrallment, grabbing onto my entranced brother to pull him back and let him loose. As I turned to lead him away I felt how fatigued I'd become. The air resisted my movement. It had a thick, hard density to it, as though it were solidifying, becoming ice. I knew that even after breaking the spider's gaze there wasn't a true return to safety. It didn't matter, it was too late - we had been marked. It was clear to me that these creatures had caused the crash, that they were cursed, and now, we were too.

A harrowing torment roused me from the dream, and I awoke with the outline of the eyes burned into my vision; floating green dots danced, fast and fading, as though I'd been staring at the sun.