Speaker 1: I don't like spiders. I don't like it when they
bunched themselves up so their legs look like tangled wires.
I don't like it when they spread themselves out like
the radial spokes on a wheel. It was bad luck
that when I met my wife, we discovered we were
both scared of them. As the man, I just kind
of wound up taking over spider killing dooty. At first,
this meant squealing or trying to lab asshure at one
of them from a distance. But as the ears went on,
I kind of just got tired of the stress and anxiety.
Fear is exhausting, so is the pageantry of it, jumping
up and shouting in lots of running around. Over time,
I found myself having less and less of a fear
reaction to them. Don't get me wrong, I don't want
one crawling on my face, but it wasn't like they
had me running away in fear every time. Lily was
never great with them, either, but it wasn't what I
call worthy of therapy. For the first ten years I
knew her, she was a fairly run of the mill,
a rachnophobe. Things only got bad after this one night
when we'd just come back in from an evening with friends.
There'd been a storm outside, windy as hell. I remember
putting the keys down on the table by the door,
and when I looked back, she was pulling down the
hood of her coat. She let out a sigh, ran
her hands through her hair, and she looked a little
puzzled by what she felt. When she lifted her hand away,
there were thin black legs poking out from between her fingers.
It took a second for her to react to what
was all bunched up inside a cupped hand. Then she
screamed and threw it on to the ground. I saw
it for only a second, it was so fast. Then
it was off under the nearest door, and my number
one concern became comforting my wife, who was having a
full blown panic attack. Get it off, Get it off,
Get it off, she screamed, while slapping at her neck
and hair. I hugged her, tight checked her hair, and
then checked it again when she asked me to. Then
she stripped the top off to make sure nothing else
was clinging to her clothes before I took her into
the kitchen and we had a cup of tea while
she kept scratching at the back of her head. Little asshole.
She half cried, half laughed. I can't believe it. Did
you see it? It was huge, one of the biggest yet,
I said, truthfully, I only had half glimpse memories of
it scuttling away, But it had been big, large enough
that a pine glass wouldn't have fit over its darting legs.
Just seeing it had left me feeling anxious, but at
the time I ignored my own discomfort. After all, I'd
hardly been the real victim and it got away. She cringed.
Oh God, it's still in this house somewhere, isn't it.
I wanted to lie, but thought better of it. Somewhere, yeah,
I said, But we'll spider prove the bedroom tonight and
i'll go looking in the morning. Thank you, She smiled mournfully. Geez,
I just know I'm going to have a hard time
sleeping tonight. She made me strip the bed before she
got in, and all night she kept flicking at a
fringe and the hair on the back of her neck.
I felt so bad for her. If that had been me,
I can't say I would have reacted much better. Neither
of us slept that well, but I was mostly just
worried about her. When you love someone, it's tough to
see them suffer. But it wasn't just that one night.
The second one was much the same, the third, fourth,
and so on. It petered out a little in the
second week. Then she saw a spider on some TV
show and the anxiety came back full force. Every night
was the same. I had to strip the bed of everything,
lift the mattress, and check for spiders. She even got
rid of a bedside table so they'd be less hiding
places for one. In the meantime, I was on hunting duty.
In her own words, I had to find the monster
or she'd never feel safe in that house again. It's funny,
but in hindsight, I can't really say what I saw
ghost scuttling under that doorway that first night, but I
do know I didn't try all that hard to find it.
I remember finding some webs under the living room sofa
that were real odd, like the fakes that they bring
out on Halloween, and I had to peel them off
the carpet like velcrow. I found a couple of these
nests throughout the house, but I never mentioned them. One
of them hid in a hole in the floor. That
really should have alarmed me, but I just ignored it.
I ignored a lot. Actually, I found dead mice spun
up in cocoons, and something bore a hole through one
of the kitchen cupboards and filled it with silk. Nothing
normal about that, but I covered it up with some
cans and moved on, a behavior I find hard to
explain in hindsight. Maybe my attention was elsewhere. Lily wasn't
in a great pace, and she was slowly getting worse.
She cried a lot, and any little thing that touched
the skin would result in lots of panicked yelling. She
could ne eat a meal without slapping her arms and
neck every few seconds. Things got real bad when I
came back one night to find a shaving a head.
She told me she got tired of mistaking the feeling
of her own hair for a spider. So this was
the simplest way to feel clean and safe. If you've
ever lived with anyone who's had a break down, there's
usually this moment where your heart sinks as you realize
that what you're dealing with has trescended the norm. It's
quite frightening, actually, reminded me of when my mom found
a lump. It's a very isolating sort of fear. I
remember lying awake in bed that night and just thinking
about how I'd found Lily bent over the bath shaver
in hand with a head like that dull from toy story.
When she looked over her shoulder at me and smiled,
and her eyes were so wide, I felt like I
wasn't looking at my wife anymore. Have you ever missed
someone while you still live with them, made them coffee
and breakfast and chatted about your day, but it's like
nobody's there. Every day was the same. I'd tell her
about work, and she'd tell me about how she scrubbed
the bedroom topp to bottom looking for spiders, or started
pulling up the bathroom tiles to check the nest. At
one point, I realized she'd taken a lot of time
off work, but she wouldn't give me a straight answer,
so I had to call her office. They wouldn't even
answer my calls. We're I had to take as a
pretty bad sign. It came as a relief when she
got sectioned. Everything came out all at once. She tried
putting a hammer to one of the walls to find
what was behind it, not realizing that it was just
a neighbor's living room on the other side. I was
at work during all this, but things clearly escalated pretty quickly,
and the police arrived to find a partially bold woman
screaming about spiders in the walls. By the time I
got home, they'd already taken her to be assessed at
the local hospital. I rushed the visitor, but in the
meantime I had to call her parents. And it was
well because I wasn't alone anymore. Other people knew what
was going on, and that made it a little easier
for me to navigate. Until then, I'd been afraid to
mention it to anyone. I guess I was a little embarrassed,
or maybe just not sure what the etiquette was for
discussing someone else's mental health. She was only gone about
a night, not even twelve hours. Really. The neighbors agreed
not to breast charges if I paid for all the
repairs and Lily got therapy. Lily's parents are quite well off,
so they helped us out with that. They found this
clinic that she stayed at for a couple of weeks.
It specialized in exposure therapy, which really just means getting
a person used to their phobia. Don't like water, spend
hours every day in a pool, don't like maths, step
into a room with thousands of them. This is over simplification,
of course. It's a special program that involves gradual increases
in the nature of the exposure. First night, she called
me and told me they'd had a looking at pictures
of a spider while talking about her experience. They were
literally just cartoony drawings, but she told me she found
it hard anyway. She cried, and I cried too. She
was only a few hours drive away, but I didn't
want to be away from her, and everything had happened
so suddenly. It was only six weeks between that night
with the storm and her ending up in that clinic.
But in that short period of time, I felt like
the ground had fallen from beneath my feet. Two weeks
she was in there, I don't remember them well. There
were phone calls every night. She was getting better, she
told me, and the doctor confirmed as much. Hard going
for sure. There to Sedata the day she graduated from
cartoons to actual photos of spiders. Apparently she scratched an
orderly up, real bad. My time in the house was lonely,
little weird too, if I'm honest. I woke up at
one point with cobwebs in my hair, and at some
point I realized that I hadn't seen a spider in
my home for a long time, not even a little
money spider. I briefly wondered about what the hell had
been leaving cobwebs around the place, but never followed up
on it. It's hard to get my thoughts straight. I
do remember finding more dead mice, all webbed up in
the back of that kitchen cupboard. One morning, I came
down to find a starling cocooned on the outside of
the kitchen window. No sign of what did it though.
I just stared at it and sipped my coffee. Then
I left for work, and when I came back, it
was gone. Probably not a good time to tell you.
I was diagnosed with a kind of dementia some time ago.
I guess that's supposed to help me make sense of things, right,
I don't know. Doesn't feel like it makes sense to me.
It's not like Alzheimer's runs in the family. They say
the neurons of a human brain with Alzheimer's look like
a cobweb that has hole spoked in it. That's a
good way to describe how my mind feels to live
in thoughts travel along a given route and then just
drop off. Lily's therapy progressed nicely, though I remember that
quite clearly. The phone calls and the sound of a
voice real, vivid. Jeez. I missed this so bad during
this time. I hate being overly sentimental, but it had
been a tough and lonely six weeks, and hearing us
sound increasingly happy and confident with each new phone call
was like a shot of pure happiness right into my veins.
I missed her and I want her back. And when
she told me, giggling with joy, that she held a
spider on day ten, I burst out crying right with her.
I felt pride at her accomplishment, and I felt relief
that things might be getting back on track for us,
like the nightmare was finally going to be over. It
wasn't so simple. When I saw her in person, she
came back looking like the war wounded. I should say
she looked beautiful, but I want to be honest. I
smiled when I saw her, but it didn't reach my
eyes because the woman who got into the car looked
like a lifetime apart from the woman who'd been living
with me just a few months ago. She was thin
as a rake, with ashy, pallid skin and a shaved
head that made her look like a matchstick, and her eyes,
the look in them wasn't right, but she was smiling,
So I swallowed the funny feeling I had in my
stomach and pretended everything was okay. There was no work
for her to go back to, and I managed to
get some time off after speaking to my boss. It
was just us, and that can be a weird feeling
for a couple used to working nine to five. I
was on edge, didn't know what to expect. She smiled
a lot, tried her best to reassure me, and I
asked a lot about what therapy was like, and she
told me it was fantastic. Showed me photos of her
sitting next to big house spiders, some as wide as
a palm. Had to fight back my own fear while
looking at them. She told me that was day thirteen,
but when I asked what happened on day fourteen, she
said it was mostly packing up and saying good bye.
There was a dark and uncomfortable truth to relationships, and
it's that time only flows in one direction. My wife
hadn't done anything wrong, and I didn't really feel any
ill will towards her, but a distance had been placed
between us. All the best will in the world couldn't
undo it. She changed, being changed, I guess at the time,
I didn't know how to understand any of it, but
I wasn't sure how to treat her. When I kissed her,
it was on the cheek. When I held her, it
was like hugging a female coworker. I didn't know what
my own feelings were, and I wouldn't until I found
her one morning in the kitchen, tapping away at a
pint glass and giggling like a toddler. It wasn't the
light and airy laughter of a woman I was used to.
It was more like the last after a bunch of kids,
egging on a fight or cheering on her nasty bully.
She didn't speak when she looked at me. She just
turned back to the glass and kept laughing, flicking it
gently with her fingers. When I walked around the table
and saw it under there, a very large house spider.
I don't know what is normal for people around the world,
but a UK house spider is big if its legs
are wider than the palm of your hand. This thing
was even bigger, with legs bundled up against the side
of the glass like spools of segmented wool, and seeing
it made me jump way back. I realized I hadn't
seen another spider since the night of the storm, and
that thing all called up with legs as thick as hairpins,
was a real shock to my system. I cried out,
and my wife she started howling with laughter. I mean,
it was like a toddler discovering cartoons for the first time,
manic and weird and just so damn happy. But in
a way, there was a little alien because I didn't
understand the thoughts and feelings that went into the ear
splitting cackle, and it was all wrong coming from her.
I waited for her to say something, but she didn't.
She just laughed until something in her got tired and
she slowly stopped giggling, but she still didn't say anything
even after she'd gone quiet. In the end, it was
me who broke the silence. I didn't have a clue
what to say. The whole time she was staring at
me with a patchy hair and gleeful, teary eyes, and
I got so desperate to break the stand off that
I stammered out the words He's a big one, ain't he.
Her face relaxed, her shoulders slumped. She slipped out of
the crazy like it was only ever an outfit. They'll
get bigger, she said, and then she lifted the glass,
snatched the spider up, and stuffed it into her mouth.
I didn't see it, not fully, but I stood frozen
in terror and watched the muscles in a boldly shaved
head tense and relaxed as a jaw worked away crushing
those hardened legs. Jeez, the sounds were bad enough. But
when she was done, she looked over a shoulder at
me and smiled, and her teeth was smeared green and black,
with little bits of legs and kiting that still stuck
between the gums. I'm not entirely sure what happened next,
but now I knew why I had felt so different
around her since she'd come back. I was afraid of her,
like a kid around an abusive parent. I just didn't
know what I was going to get. There was always
this energy in the room that had me on edge.
I'd sit there watching TV, but I wasn't really watching.
Couldn't have told you what was on half the time. Instead,
every ounce of my being was focused on her, every breath,
every motion. When she got up to use that toilet,
I watched her intensely to see what she was going
to do, the fact that she rarely did anything except
carry on as normal was all the more unsettling, because
I knew something was wrong, and I couldn't stop remembering
the way she laughed with that thing under the glass.
Nights were bad. A lot of the time. I'd wake
up and get the feelings she'd just been watching me,
but she was usually fast asleep, or at least that's
how it looked. Sometimes there were furtive movements, like she
just rolled over. I got used to it, thought it
was probably just in my head. But then one night
I woke up and she was right there, face inches
away from mine. I cried out. I couldn't help it,
shuffled backwards while trying to avoid touching her, and wound
up falling off the bed. When I looked up from
the floor, She had a completely blank expression. She was
just looking at me, like a cat watching her fly.
What are you doing, I cried out, unable to stop
the irritation from bleeding into my voice. She shrugged, just watching.
Then she rolled over like nothing had happened. That night,
I slept on the sofa. She didn't ask why, didn't
say a word as I grabbed my things and left
the room. I wasn't sure I would manage to fall
asleep after that, but I did, and when I woke
up I had cobwebs in my hair. I was lucky
if I slept more than a few hours a night.
After that, it came fitfully, if at all. Oh, I
got too many times to the feeling of something tickling
my face and chest, a sensation like someone running a
feather over me. Every time I'd come to in a panic,
But I never found anything except nearly invisible silk clinging
to my skin. In life without sleep was difficult. Then
I struggled to hide my dislike for Lily. Over time,
our hybits and routines diverged even further apart. I stopped
going upstairs almost entirely, just didn't need to. I had work,
and the sofa and the kitchen, and the days when
I came back and barely saw Lily at all were
fine by me. I preferred being away from her, something
that kind of broke my heart, if I'm honest. There
were times I wanted to reach out, but looking at
her gave me the funniest feeling in my stomach. I
didn't want to change things, didn't want to get closer.
If anything, I wanted to run away. And I don't
mean that I wanted to flee my life and adult
responsibilities in some abstract way. I mean I felt a
powerful urged to quite literally run away from her. It
was horrible feeling that way about my wife, and just
trying to understand those emotions was enough to give me
a headache most days. I became real forgetful during this time,
and it was a long time before I realized I'd
forgotten to pay for the repairs to the wall. I
think it slipped my mind. Emphasis on think, because I
don't remember what I have and haven't forgotten. I just
nailed to plywood over and left it. And three months later,
one day, out of the blue, it occurred to me
I should probably have done something more about it. I
did find a tool kit in the kitchen that wasn't mine.
I might have called someone out for a quote, I
don't know, But when I remembered that I'd never actually
fixed the hole, I was filled with this shame and embarrassment,
and I decided I did the best thing to do
was to face it head on and go apologize to
my neighbor. I never knew a lot about the guy.
He was an older man who liked his football and
had a nose like a tomato, and spent most nights
in the pub. I knew he lived alone, though, and
when I knocked his door and there was no answer,
it wasn't too strange. At least, they didn't seem out
of the ordinary until I went back inside my house
and heard footsteps on the other side of the wall.
So I went back and knocked a couple more times,
figuring maybe he hadn't heard me, but there was still
no answer. I found this weird. He didn't seem like
the kind of guy who would avoid the neighbor. He
didn't like he'd just opened the door and tell you
to get lost. I went back and looked, but couldn't
see anything through his windows, and all I could see
looking through his letter box was a gray sheet across
the opening. When my fingers came away, covered in sticky thread,
I had this terrible feeling in my stomach. I couldn't
have possibly explained how, but I was convinced that Lily
had done something. After all, it was him calling the
police who'd gotten her into trouble. But it wasn't like
I could kick his door down to check, and I
wasn't going to go scrambling through any half open windows. Fortunately,
we shared a fence in the back garden. It was
easy enough to jump, and from there I checked the
windows on that side of the house. He left the
kitchen blinds open, and at first what I saw baffled me.
For a moment, I wondered if he was decorating, because
everything inside was covered by a thin, translucent sheet. But
I only had to pay close attention to realize that
didn't make sense. When painting a ceiling, you don't throw
tarp over half drunk cups of coffee and plates of
moldy food. And the material that covered everything was cloudy
and made of thread and obviously some kind of silk.
It took a lot of effort to control the earths
to just hop the fence back and pretend like I
never saw a damn thing. But if he needed some
kind of help, then I knew I had to at
least try. I looked briefly at the stoop by the
back door. There was the lighter on the ground where
someone had dropped it. It was strangely conspicuous. It made
me think that whoever had left it there had done
so in a hurry. Didn't make sense that someone would
drop it there and not notice, not unless they'd been
otherwise occupied. I picked it up and winced when it
came from the floor with a sticky tearing sound. It
was covered in barely visible silk threads. God, I wanted
that back door to be locked. Couldn't think of anything
worse than having to push ahead. But I tried the
handle and he went down. The door popped open with
barely any effort, and I got a good look at
how every last inch of that place was covered in
pale cobwebs. They got thicker and thicker as my eyes
drifted deeper inside the house. I couldn't help but wonder
if they were strong enough to trap a person. Was
my neighbor in there somewhere, somebody was I knew that
much from the sounds I'd heard, but I couldn't see
him in the kitchen. I wanted to cry out for him,
maybe even go marching into the house and look for myself,
but the hallway out of the kitchen had been turned
into a weblind tunnel, no straight lines, just the dark,
silky womb, whose rounded funnel walls fluttered gently in the breeze.
I stared intently into that darkness, try my best to
see if there was the shape of a man's corpse
cocooned somewhere in that pale white silk. I leaned forward,
my head and shoulders, just moving past the door frame,
when the blackness in the tunnel grew. Legs, dark carapace
and segmented limbs exploded towards me so fast it was
almost in the kitchen before my heart had time to
skip a beat. And then it stopped half way into
the room, standing perfectly still and brazen in the fading daylight.
A bundle of legs the size of a horse, A
real life monster. I didn't move, geez. It took me
another minute for my brain just to process what I
was looking at on a conscious level. My nervous system
was quicker. Sure, it was like a blanket of disgust
and terror was thrown over me. My stomach plunged to
the floor, my skin crawled, my heart felt like it
was going to explode, But my actual mind was blank, white, noise, ecstatic.
The creature was huge, so big its legs could just
about fit in the hallway behind it, but in the
kitchen with a little more room, those front limbs and
mouthy feelers spread out like tendrils and gripped the doorway.
It was ready to pounce on whatever had sent disturbances
throughout its web. I've read that spiders can be a
little like venus fly trap. They don't always pounce on
a single trigger. They need multiple hits. When I looked
down at my feet, I saw that I'd taken just
one step inside, but that was all it needed to
be alerted. Now it approached the initial alarm, and half blind,
it waited for another hint of something trapped inside its web.
I had to wonder would lifting my shoe count. Did
I have a choice? I couldn't stay there looking how
the damn thing was bringing me closer and closer to
a full blown panic. With every passing second. I had
to do something, and I had to do it with
some semblance of control. I slid my foot backwards. The
spider didn't move. As soon as both feet were outside,
I let go of the door handle and felt something
sticky detached from my palm. It feels like an exaggeration
to say that lightning moves slower. I'm not sure I
have the worst to describe how fast it was. I'm
sure most of you have seen a nature documentary with
one of those fish, or maybe even a trapdoor spider.
Oh damn, that was quick. But this thing, maybe it
was just because it was coming right at me. I've
never seen anything like it, except for when videos get edited.
All of a sudden, it was just there, and before
I knew it, thick wooly paps were pinning me to
the ground, and I was looking into a pink slit
of a mouth framed by fangs as long as my forearm.
They moved independent of each other, and something about the
sight of all those wheel spoke legs and segmented joints
clumped together in its thorax, said my mind. I said,
at the beginning of this that a lifetime of exposure
had helped curb my ragnophobia, but there are limits. I
blacked out. When I woke up, it was dark all
around me. I didn't know it at the time, but
the belly of the beast was my neighbour's former living room.
It wasn't actually pitch black, but it did take a
few terrifying minutes for my eyes that were just well
enough just to be able to see my own body
stuck and wriggling beneath me. I was wrapped up tight.
And if you've ever heard the refrain that spider silk
is stronger than steel and doubted it, well, trust me
it's true. A few thin threads doesn't give you a
proper sense of it. But I was wrapped in what
must have been half an inch of the stuff, and
I felt like I was wearing ten layers of lycra
that was too small. There was a tiny bit of
give enough to let me move fingers or toes or
even bend aneach, just a fraction, but that was it.
It was horrifying. I'm not exactly clostrophobic either, for what
it's worth, but given the circumstances I found myself panicking
as I tried to get some purchase. I kept thinking,
if I could get a finger hugged into it, then
maybe I could start tearing away. I was desperate, but
the more I fought, the more I realized it was hopeless.
The silk was elastic and strong, and covered in a thick,
stodgy glue that only further limited my movement, as everything
I did spread it around until it was gumbing my
legs and hands together was an until exhaustion caught up
to me and I was forced to take a short break,
and I realized I wasn't alone. There was another cocoon
beside me. My neighbor had been a big man in life,
podgy with a large pot belly and a head like
a thumb, but in the dim light of that room,
he looked like a skeleton wrapped in skin that had
been found half decayed in an ancient, forgotten tomb, so
thin and desiccated you could hug a finger under the
tendons in his neck and jaws. I nearly cried when
I realized I'd risked everything to save a dead man,
but that wasn't actually true. The error in my thinking
became apparent when He opened his eyes and glanced at
me with pure, unbridled terror. He opened his mouth, and
I was convinced he was about to scream, when instead
he coughed and gagged, and something wet and brown dribbled
out of his mouth. It flopped down his chin and
came to rest on the floor between us. It resembled
a hair band encased in bile and vomit, and I
was momentarily stumped until I saw a thin brown leg
unfurl from the tangled mess. Hit okay, my neighbor's entire
body relaxed, his face vacant and confused as Lily knelt
down beside me and stroked my head. Lily, you've got
to get me, sh she said, pressing a single finger
to my lips. HiT's okay, It's going to be okay.
Behind her, a shadow appeared. It had legs as thick
as my wrist, and they reached from the floor to
the ceiling. It won't be much longer now, she added,
as the darkness behind her grew. Probably best just to
keep you here, Lily, What the help? I told you?
They get bigger, she said, nodding towards the spider. My
neighbor had just spat on to the floor. He won't
be any real help. She touched my neighbor's head, but
he barely responded. He just gazed vacantly as she rolled
him over so that he was facing away from me.
For such a clever animal, she added, as she parted
his hair, I'm always curious about just how much you miss.
Something was clamped around the back of his head, a
throbbing bulb of mottled brown skin and hair. It looked
like a spider without legs. That's what I thought it was,
and to my wife ran a finger playfully along its back,
and my neighbor let out a gut wrench squill of pain. Slowly,
the shape seemed to wriggle and writhe, and a long,
thin leg emerged from beneath its body, and I realized
I was looking at a spider rapped tight around his skull,
its legs buried beneath the skin and muscle of his scalp.
For a moment, it playfully curled the leg in the
air before returning it to the incision and sliding it
back into place, every inch, disappearing with a gruesome wet sound.
It displays muscle and hair, and when it came to rest,
I realized just how misshapen his skull had become from
all those legs wrapped tight around his head. What the hell,
I gasped, Do you ever find it weird that you
can't remember what it looked like? The thing that came
running out of her hand, she asked, before reaching over
to stroke my head. Her hand came away covered in cobwebs.
Something about a touch revolted me. It sent strange shivers
coursing through my body. A deep, primordial need to get
away came over me, that strange revulsion all over again,
the same one that had taunted me over and over
again over the last few weeks. Without even meaning to,
I found myself convulsing and panicking, my body trying to
thrash violently, but with every limb constricted by that silk,
I could do nothing except wrther a round on the floor.
I tried with everything I had to move my hands
to get some purchase on the silk and tear away
at it to free myself, but there was no use.
I could do nothing except glare at my wife and
the enormous shadow behind her, the one that towered above us,
both its great legs clustering around the floor and ceiling.
At some point I crabbed onto my trousers and clenched
my fist and felt something small than hard, the lighter.
I knew there was a great risk in using it,
but I had no choice. I managed to worm my
hand into my pocket and find it with my fumbling fingers.
My wife seemed oddly aware of what I was doing,
and she seemed a tilt her head like a curious
dog as I clenched my fist around the small object
and used every ounce of will power I had left
to fight the violent seizures that racked my body. And
thumbed the trigger. The web went up in flames immediately.
It must have been the glue, but the flames exploded
across the silk like they had been soaked in kerosene.
Before I even realized that it had weakened enough for
me to free one arm, the tongues of fire were
already spreading across the floor where they found my poor neighbor.
The burning sensation that crawled across my legs and chest
hurt like nothing I could imagine, but I was finally free.
I rolled over and began to push myself up, already
desperately patting at my body to try put out the flames,
and when I looked around me, my wife and the
shape that followed her were gone. For a moment, I
considered helping my neighbor, but his body thrush too violently,
and although his eyes were wide open, spiders were pouring
from his mouth, and I could not summon the courage
to take another step towards him. All I could think
of was escape. The house was going up like a
tinder box. It wasn't far to the kitchen, but the
fire had already beat me there. Smoke billowed upwards, and
trapped by the ceiling, started to fill the air with
a choking soot. The only escape was the back door,
and I stumbled towards it, but was stopped at the
last moment by the side of my wife standing there.
You really are just a fascinating spit. I barrowed past her,
but to my surprise, she offered no resistance. I merely
emerged into the open air, my lungs gasping desperately for
clean air. As I collapsed onto the long, unkempt grass,
I looked over my shoulder and saw orange tongues of
fire were already leaping out the windows on the upper floor.
Left uncontrolled, the fire would rage and consume the entire
row of terrace houses. I felt a moment of remorse,
but there were already sirens in the distance, so I
knew someone had noticed and done the right thing. But
it was an over Lily was sitting on the fence.
I don't know how she got there, but she looked
completely undisturbed. I never once imagined that when the wind
blew me into your home, i'd find such an interesting
pair of people, she said, What a fun mind to
sink my legs into. I really had no idea what
I was going to find. Let her go, I gasped,
I have, she said, with a shrug. I did months ago.
As a matter of fact, there were some incompatibilities, and
it just made sense to move homes. She pointed at
me and smiled, I've enjoyed living inside your head quite
a bit. Struggling to make sense of her words, but
still somehow aware of their terrifying implications, I placed one
hand on the back of my neck and felt it her.
The mere touch was enough to fill my mouth with
a coppery taste, while my vision blurred at the edges.
Something beneath my skin shifted and I felt a terrible
pressure behind my eyes. I had to get rid of her,
and I only knew of one weakness. Oh well, she said,
as she watched me fumble desperately for the lighter. Not
every relationship has to last forever to be meaningful. I
lit my hair on fire. My last memories were of
the heat and the sudden release of pressure. I couldn't
possibly describe it, not really. Something slid out of my skull,
and Lily waved at me from the fence before she
seemed to blink out of existence, and then nothing, not
even darkness, just total absence. I wouldn't regain a sense
of self until the hospital several weeks later. There was
nothing left of either house, but they did manage to
control the fire before it spread to the others. I'm
sure there was still some damage, and to this day
I feel guilty about it. I think I was charged
with arson, maybe more. I vague memories of being wheeled
into a courtroom. The doctors have agonized over me for
a long time, and one mentioned amateur trepanation. He said,
I must have practiced it on my wife, at least
based on the body they found in my neighbour's house.
But I can't really be sure of anything. I am
forever dipping in and out of reality. Writing this down
has been difficult. I'm entirely aware of where I am
right now. One doctor told me I might make some
kind of recovery if it was just normal brain damage,
but he never seen anything like it, so he couldn't
be sure. Feels like it's a different doctor every time
I see them. Then again, I don't always recognize myself
when I look in the mirror. Of course, that could
just be the burns, but I reckon even then, I
still look a fair bit older than I should. There
is one orderly who stuck around long enough to get
to know me. He knows me by name, smiles a
lot when he sees me, talks to me about all
sorts of things. It seems genuinely interested in me, and
what I remember. I called him in once to get
rid of a spider that had spun a web on
the window outside, and he did so with a warm smile.
I told him I was deathly afraid of them, and
he said he already knew that, but I shouldn't be
worried because he was going to keep an eye on
me and make sure nothing bad happened. I'm glad he's around.
Ever since he started working here, I haven't seen many
of the nasty little things hanging around my room. I
guess he's not that bothered by them, at least not
if the cobwebs in his hair is anything to go by.