He sped the only way that was left to him, though he was moving deeper into the nightmare with each step.

  What choice did he have?

  Black panic propelled him forward.

  He grabbed the bannister, crushing more of the hideous spiders underhand, and flung himself up the staircase, half-crawling.

  Behind, the horde followed, silently closing in on their prey.

  27

  As Jess watched, the sea of spiders slowly dispersed.

  Those that hadn’t given chase to Pete as he’d fled the kitchen had all but lost interest in their cruel game. Slowly and surely, as though working with one inconceivable mind, the loathsome horde made their way for the shadows permeating the corners of the dimly lit kitchen. They seemed to crawl into the darkness there, become a part of it, one by one, merging with the shadows until they were as insubstantial as the darkness itself, swallowed by it, embraced by it.

  Jess wondered where the devils of one’s nightmares existed, once the dreamer awoke.

  Slowly, the creatures, seemingly borne of Emily’s own will, became one with the shadow. Soon it was as though the whole terrible ordeal had been nothing but a vivid hallucination; the very definition of a ‘bad trip’. The spiders had been physical entities, horrifyingly tangible, yet they evaporated like mist as though no more than phantoms. She studied the flow of arachnids with wonder and awe as they fled from a reality that, until very recently, Jess had considered concrete, slave to the laws of natural order.

  When it came to Emily there was no natural order.

  Wincing in pain, Jess used her good hand to hoist herself up. She leaned over the table for support, hardly believing that moments before, the table had been all but invisible. Buried beneath the terrible manifestations of Pete’s inner fear.

  As for Pete, he was gone now…chased by the remaining horde, to what end she didn’t wish to know, lest it drive her to madness. She could still hear his screams, though they sounded so very far away, a distant wind whispering terrible truths from another world.

  Across the room, Emily now sat on a kitchen chair, watching as the last of Pete’s nightmares crossed over into the darkness of their own realm. She looked pallid, tired, worn down by the burden of her ‘gift’.

  Jess turned to her sister-in-law. Sometime during the insanity, Lisa had come around.

  “Lisa.” Jess knelt over her, gently taking the woman’s badly shaking hand in her own. Lisa was a mess, but she was alive. Thank God, she was alive. Jess wondered what she, herself, must look like. Pete had done a number on them both. There was no question in her mind that he would have killed them if he’d had the chance.

  If it weren’t for Emily.

  And her dark power.

  “Am I dreaming?” Lisa asked.

  “No.”

  “I’d better be, Jess,” she pronounced it, Jesh. “Because what I saw…”

  Jess nodded gravely. “I know.”

  “That was real, wasn’t it?” Lisa asked, her voice tinged with terrible awe.

  “It was real.”

  “They were real.” Lisa gasped, her eyes wide with fright.

  “They were…but it’s okay now. They took care of Pete, Lisa. The spiders chased him away. We’re safe.”

  “The spiders…” The words spilled from Lisa’s lips like liquid dread.

  “Try not to think about it. Just take your time, okay? Can you stand?” With Jess’ help, Lisa struggled to her feet. She looked frail. More than that, she looked petrified.

  “Easier said than done. Christ almighty, Jess…” said Lisa, momentarily forgetting the horror she’d witnessed. “What did he do to you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s over.”

  “Where is he? I must have blacked out during…”

  “He’s upstairs, or…”

  “Or…what?”

  “Or he’s somewhere else.”

  “What do you mean, ‘somewhere else’?”

  Shaking her head, Jess said. “All that matters, is that we’re safe now. All of us.”

  Realization dawned on Lisa’s face. “Oh god, Jess…Curt! The bastard told me he killed Curt!”

  “I know…I…he told me the same thing.” Jess allowed the tears to come. Now that the madness seemed to be over, the thought of what she may have lost washed over her like a tsunami.

  “Jess,” Lisa mumbled around split and swollen lips. She still addressed her sister, but all her attention was on the small girl, sat on the chair with her legs swinging back and forth. “What I just saw. What she just did…you have to tell me everything.”

  “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

  From upstairs, there came the sound of a door crashing shut. The clarity of the sound stood in stark contrast to the man’s distant screams of terror. He sounded far off, his voice traveling down a dark canyon, echoing off ancient walls. Jess thought of worlds colliding, merging, fusing as one.

  “He’s still up there! He got away! I’m going to kill the son of a bitch,” Lisa snarled.

  Jess was amazed and impressed by the big woman’s resilience. She’d just came face to face with her own death, and something outside the natural order, and though she seemed to have missed much of what had occurred, she’d seen enough to send most people screaming straight to the mental hospital. The thought of her brother, dead at her ex-husband’s hands, had shaken her from her fear at least for now. Breathing heavily, Lisa rose on heavy legs and took two stumbling steps to where Jess’ knife lay on the linoleum. She bent forward, wheezing as she reached for the blade. “Fucking kill him…” she said to herself, spitting blood from threshed lips.

  “You don’t need to do anything,” Emily said quietly, from her place on the chair.

  Lisa, registering the girl’s presence, looked confused.

  Jess laid a hand on her shoulder.

  Emily looked up at the ceiling, seeing beyond it.

  “He’s already dead…”

  28

  Pete moved along the upper hall, lost in a blind terror.

  He was aware he was gibbering to himself as he stumbled from wall to wall, fighting off the hungry arachnids in a crazed, spasmodic dance. They flowed up the stairs to his rear, they swung on black silken webs from the ceiling, they coated the walls to his sides. He howled as a fat, black and purple spider, the size of his palm, dropped from above, landed on his face and made for his open mouth. His scream was suffocated by the abomination as it climbed inside.

  Pete bit down hard.

  There was a warm gushing sensation as his teeth ground through the vile meat of the spider’s bulbous body, followed by a bitter taste that reminded him of uncut amphetamine. Pete gagged, spitting the halved spider from his mouth. Two of its legs, broken and mangled, he swallowed in his fright.

  Behind him, the spider army rushed forward.

  Pete looked up the length of the hall. He’d taken a turn somewhere and now had no idea where he was going.

  Anywhere was better than where he was.

  If he could find a room free of the spiders…If he could find a window…

  Down the hall, he could make out the shapes of two doors, one on either side of the shadowy corridor. The light from his rear barely illuminated the gloom ahead, but it was enough to reveal that one door was writhing with the infernal monsters, and the other…

  The other looked almost clean.

  There were twenty or so small spiders scuttling across the length of the wood, no more than that.

  Near-crying with relief and with a desperate hope kindling in his heart, he made for the door, his every footfall accompanied by the bursting, popping sounds of spider’s annihilated bodies.

  He was at the door in seconds.

  He grabbed the handle and turned.

  The door swung inwards. Pete rushed into the room, slamming it shut behind him.

  Pete turned from the door.

  There was a window.

  And this one, like the door, was clear of spiders.

  To Pete, it looked just like salvation. Moonlight shone into the room in a solid translucent beam, its radiant light, pure and welcoming.

  Pete, teetering dangerously on the precipice of madness, giggled with delight. The room, dark though it was, looked entirely free of the hungry arachnids.

  He was going to make it.

  Pete moved toward the window, crossing into the soft light of the moon. He was half a meter from the blessed escape route when, from up and to the right of the room, he heard something move.

  Pete looked up, into the shadowy corner above.

  It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the darkness up there, where the light of the moon could not reach.

  And when he saw what awaited him, poised, limbs coiled, nestled in its dark, impossibly huge web, he wished he’d been born blind.

  The massive spider, easily the size of a large dog, opened its long, hideous limbs, uncurling them from their place beneath its black, mottled body.

  Silently, it began to crawl from its web.

  It moved with terrifying speed and grace, scurrying down the wall from its dark nestling place, its long legs reaching the floor in the blink of an eye. First two, then four, then eight. Its fangs jutted from beneath soulless eyes, slick with fluid.

  There was no time to scream.

  For Pete, there was only time enough to whisper the good lord’s name. And wonder where his soul would lie.

  Is sped towards him in a frenzied dash.

  Then the spider was on him.

  It curled its many legs around his shivering body, embracing him in an infernal grip, its black and bulbous head only inches from his exposed face. The eight purple orbs shone with feverish malice as it surveyed its meal. In the cruel mirrors of its eyes, eight terrified reflections stared back at Pete, gibbering, already insane.

  And lower, below the pitiless eyes, its fangs.

  There was no fight left in him. All his will had been crushed by the mere sight of the nightmare scurrying from its web. Pete could only watch, sobbing, as the huge incisors drew ever closer to his eyes until he could see nothing else in all the world besides the sharp points of the hideous mandibles.

  He’d wished to be blind.

  He got his wish.

  The spider’s fangs punctured both Pete’s eyes simultaneously.

  His world became darkness and pain. A terrible suckling filled his ears as the hellish arachnid fed on his juices while he bucked and writhed in its deadly embrace.

  Despite the pain, Pete was glad for the darkness.

  He was dead by the time the spider had shredded and eaten the better part of his face, and he hadn’t seen one moment of it.

  Wishes did come true.

  Pete faded into forever on a sea of darkness, terror and pain, grateful for the end of all things.

  His gratitude was short-lived.

  29

  He re-awoke in a place outside the world.

  His body was whole once more, naked as the day he was born, renewed down to the last hair on his head. He could feel the musculature beneath his skin, the reality of his form.

  Though he found out quickly that he couldn’t move.

  He was trapped, held in place, suspended above an abyssal darkness by thick, sticky ropes. A dim, sickly bluish light, its source unknown, illuminated the strange, alien realm.

  It took a moment to realize he was using his eyes again.

  And with his sight, Pete found himself introduced to his ‘bad place’.

  The web, vast and glistening, stretched on endlessly into the deep dark void.

  All around him, in a wide circle and sat deathly still, spiders perched on its infinite strands. Some great, some small. Their numbers were endless.

  There was a moment, a splinter of a second, in which the stillness held.

  Pete felt the web shiver as a million arachnids anticipated their kill.

  The silence was broken.

  As one, they crawled.

  The small ones filled his mouth, scuttling down his throat and silencing his pitiful scream.

  The larger ones went to work on his renewed form.

  Hungry fangs punctured Pete’s ethereal flesh in a million places, feasting both inside and out, devouring the tender skin and the pulp beneath while he hung helpless in the endless web. Spasming in agony, choking on his own blood and the bodies of the feeding spiders piercing his gullet, Pete silently begged for forgiveness.

  From God, from the Devil, from those he’d hurt, from all the cold, infinite universes his existence had affronted.

  Forgiveness never came.

  And the spiders fed forever.

  30

  “I have to go look for Curt,” said Jess. “He might still be alive. For all we know he could be lying in a ditch someplace, bleeding to death.”

  Jess fixed her gaze on Lisa.

  Christ, the woman was strong.

  She was also damn near unrecognizable, her face a black and bruised tapestry of cuts and broken bone. When she breathed, a high-pitched wheeze came from her mashed, pulverized nose. Thick hardened blood, black as oil, clung to her nostrils and her teeth…

  What teeth? Jess asked herself, dismayed.

  She’s lucky to be alive, never mind standing upright.

  And so am I.

  So am I…

  “Lisa, honey…I need you to stay here with Emily. Can you do that for me?”

  She’d never seen the big woman so scared.

  The shock was wearing off now and despite her imposing bulk, Lisa looked as fragile and timid as a lost child. “With her?” she asked quietly, eyeing the little girl in the corner. Emily continued to swing her legs beneath her, lost in her imagination. Serene as a spring rain.

  “She did what she had to do, Lisa. Just believe me when I say that she won’t hurt you.”

  Lisa looked dubious. Jess could hardly blame her.

  Lisa eyed the girl as though she was the devil, sprung up from Hell.

  Jess wondered if perhaps the little girl was exactly that.

  She turned her thoughts to where she needed them to be.

  Curt.

  He was out there, somewhere along the road. One way or another she planned to find him.

  She took the big woman’s arm gently and led her towards the quiet, bored looking girl on the chair. Lisa allowed herself to be directed, lost in a dark reverie, until she was stood before Emily. The girl turned her head up.

  “He deserved it,” she said.

  Jess watched Lisa’s reaction. She half expected her sister-in-law to turn tail and run screaming into the desert. And who would blame her?

  Lisa cleared her throat. Jess winced as a fragment of broken tooth slid from her sister-in-law’s shredded lower lip. “I know he did, honey,” rasped Lisa.

  Jess breathed a sigh of relief.

  Lisa looked afraid, confused. Yet cutting through her dread of the girl, Jess could still sense the motherly instinct in the woman that she’d so long admired.

  The girl would be safe with Lisa.

  If she’d ever even been in any danger.

  Jess pictured the river of spiders, the sheer, mind-cracking terror it inspired in Pete, his greatest nightmare brought to vivid, terrible life. She shuddered.

  No, the girl had never been in any danger.

  Not when they abducted her, not when she’d been confined in the room upstairs and certainly not when that sick son of a bitch, Pete, had set his sights on her.

  She could have broken the man and destroyed him any time she chose.

  The thought gave Jess pause.

  Why had she waited so long to intervene? How long had Emily stood by, watching while he was raping her? How long before she’d chosen to come to Jess’ aid?

  She cast the thoughts out.

  Curt was out there. Maybe still breathing.

  Jess reached forward and touched the little girl’s face. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I hope you find him. I hope you can bring him back…your friend, I mean.”

  Jess smiled. “I hope so too, Emily. Lisa…?”

  “Huh?” Lisa mumbled.

  “You okay here?”

  Lisa nodded resolutely. “I got this.”

  Her fear betrayed her stoicism.

  “You sure?”

  Emily piped in. “I’ll look after her. We’ll look after each other.”

  “Thank you, kiddo,” Jess answered.

  “Won’t we?” Emily said, facing Lisa.

  The big woman nodded again. “You bet your ass we will.”

  Emily smiled, though Jess sensed a quiet, troubling sadness behind the girl’s gentle features.

  Lisa managed a smile of her own, though it sat crooked on her ruined face, more a grimace than the desired expression of unity.

  Jess worried for her.

  “Lisa, I…”

  “You’ll need my Chevy,” Lisa said, cutting her off. “It’s parked around back. The keys are in the ignition. There’s a first-aid kit in the glove compartment. Find my brother, Jess. Find him.”

  “I’ll be back soon. Lisa…are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I think so. Yeah.”

  Emily reached forward and took Lisa’s massive hand in her own tiny one. “You don’t need to be afraid. I won’t hurt you…”

  Then Jess was making for the door.

  31

  The earth came hard and fast towards Curt.

  He was back down in the dirt, breathing in the desert dust, coughing his lungs up as his fingers scraped the sand.

  How many times had he fallen over now?

  Five? Six? Ten?

  Who gave a shit?

  What mattered was the he was almost there.

  He looked up, his vision blurred by pain and stinging sand. There, in the distance, stood the old house. In the darkness, he couldn’t properly discern the building’s shape, but there were no other houses out here. This had to be it.

  Light shone from both a lower window and one higher up; two lights guiding him home, back to his Jess.

  All you gotta do now is make it there.

  Easier said than done.

 

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