The Anaerobic Spider

I hope that by sharing this, maybe I can scrape some kind of repentance together. But no one else believes me and it doesn't work unless people believe me. People kept thinking I was joking but I'm not. I need help and I was told this place would believe me.

I need you to understand just how bad a person I am, or else the confession doesn't mean anything. I think it's too late but I need to get this off my chest, if only so I have a chance at entering heaven when my time finally comes.

You see, bad things have a weight. They stay with you long after you’ve done them. I know I’m not a good person but sometimes I do think it’s unfair. I know other people aren’t perfect. I have to wonder if I’m really that much worse. I know that everyone must have bad things in their past. Do they all have dark little nasty things they hide away? How do they cope? Knowing all the awful things they’ve ever done?

I just don’t understand how normal people live. I see them, from my window. I’ve spent decades watching them going past. They all look so busy. They have smartphones and cars and cups of coffee and when I look at them I think, sometimes, maybe that’s all they’re worried about. But then again I remember what it was like for me. I used to have things too. I used to have a wife and two children and a job. It was so many years ago that it feels like a different person lived those memories. But I did have them, and even back then I was just pretending. I was lying to myself and everyone else. When I was nine I stole a pound from my mother’s purse and blamed a visiting cousin. When I was fourteen I noticed a teacher’s panty line and I deliberately stared at it, savouring it even as I knew I should have looked away. Time and time again I have wronged, and it’s all stayed with me.

But the worst, oh the worst were the things I could have fixed if I’d just been honest. By now they should just be silly forgotten mistakes but the longer and longer I left my sins to fester without facing up to them, the worse they became until I have no chance of being saved. I once missed a payment on my school uniform and lied to my parents, saying I gave the money to the school. I spent all year hiding from Sister Mary, afraid that I’d have to tell my parents about the furious Irish nun that the family owed £5. I didn’t even take the money! I was so afraid, so guilty, I buried it in the garden. Money my family needed and I wasted it. My poor mother fretting over everything and I couldn’t even care, couldn’t even summon a moment’s thought of how it affected her until it was all too late and I was too scared come clean.

My whole life, it’s just been the same thing. Am I normal? Is the difference between me and you simply that I stopped pretending that I was worthless? Or am I broken? I have to ask, even as I know that writing these words proves just how guilty I am… But does everyone have one too?

Does everyone have a spider?

I know it’s different for everyone, of course. For them it’s a metaphorical spider. But for me, it’s real. It’s a spider I trapped in a glass. It’s so hateful. I know why. I made it like this. It wasn’t always a broiling crawling mass of thick segmented legs. It was once just a spider, a little part of nature. A diligent hunter and its only sin was being big! Isn’t that funny? I was never bothered by little spiders but past a certain size something about their knotted up silhouette terrified me. At the time, having tip-toed drunk into my own home trying not to wake my wife, I thought I was being a good person by trapping it. I thought it was better than killing it.

When I look at it now, when I see what it’s become, I know how pathetically wrong I was. I should have killed it. It would have been wrong, but it wouldn’t have been so needlessly cruel. A quick death would have been the lesser of two evils. Instead I palmed it off, hoping that my wife would come down the following morning and throw it away only she never had the chance. We all went on holiday that very morning and I forgot about the poor spider trapped in a glass prison, sitting on a shelf in the pantry next to some peaches.

Waiting to die.

We were gone for two weeks. At the time it seemed so long. I came back and saw him in there and I saw that it had changed. It was angry… it was like all that hatred it had for me had nowhere to go so it started twisting and changing, poisoned by its own vitriol. Legs had split apart, growing in all directions.. Some were as thick as pencils and others as thin as hair, and every now and again they’d flicker with a hint of life. Its body had grown so fat, betting bigger and bigger until it throbbed with every desperate breath, thick hairs like black paperclips jutting out of hard segmented chitin and writhing like black little worms.

My own cowardice had poisoned it, turning it into something utterly grotesque.

And it wanted to be let out! Could you imagine? I knew could do it, if I wanted to, but I felt so guilty and scared. Letting that thing go would have surely been the end of me! I couldn’t possibly risk it. At the time I thought that two weeks was too long to have left it. It must have been furious at whoever had trapped it and left it to rot. I hoped that maybe if I just waited, it might die.

I waited for forty-two years.

It’s funny, looking back to think I could have taken my chances. Two weeks was the best it was ever going to get. It’s just, I kept hoping it would eventually die and I know just how cowardly that sounds but I’m not hiding from how God damn awful I am. I know exactly how bad it was because I did it! I was there. I was there for every single day of the following four decades. And every single day where I chose to do nothing has just compounded my sin, piece by piece by piece.

15,447 pieces in total.

And for every single one it’s just gotten angrier, and bigger. It didn’t take long before it smashed through that glass. I’ve only ever opened the door once after that and what I saw has haunted my nightmares everyday since. There were so many legs. It was like a furry thorn bush with a rabbit sized body tucked deep inside its tangled limbs. I even had to seal the keyhole after its thin legs started to poke through, flailing around, probing the outside, desperate to find me. With each passing year that paltry barrier looked more and more fragile until it was bulging outwards like a pregnant belly. I always knew that door wouldn’t hold forever.

I deserve what’s going to happen to me.

Maybe if I’d stopped then. But no. It never ends. My cowardice never ends. I used to let the delivery driver bring the food in and I’d it on his face. He was disgusted by me. They all were. Forty-two I’ve stayed indoors, but I had to! Anyone could have opened the door and then what? What if I wasn’t around to make sure it stayed trapped? No one knows what that thing is, or the things it will do to me. My wife… she didn’t know either. She would look at me now with horror, just like everyone else. She’d see the towering walls of rubbish that surround me, she’d see the ragged cloths I wear, the food I eat, and she’d hate me.

She’d see the real me.

I didn’t deserve her. She trusted me so much. Back then a wife had to be supportive of her man no matter what and she never failed me. As the days turned into weeks and my absence from work raised concerns and whispers became rumours she worked tirelessly to convince everyone I was okay. How could she possibly have guessed why I stayed inside all day, why I refused to answer the phone or the door, and why I beat one my own son senseless when he dared to touch a certain door handle? She lied even as she took him to the hospital, saying he fell down the stairs. But you have to understand, I couldn’t let him open that door and risk the chance he’d free the spider.

It’s looking at me, even as I type this. It’s been days since it got out and it’s just looked at me the whole time. I can’t even move but I know now just how strange it’s become. It defies any natural design now, stretching up and out the pantry so that it might loom over me as I sit and wait for judgement. Half the house is taken up by it, whole rooms and hallways cast in darkness as a myriad of clicking legs choke the very air, blocking windows and smashing lightbulbs.

But it’s changed in other ways too. There’s a hideous intellect buried inside that body. I know it and oh God, even worse, it knows me. It knows me through and through. That’s why it’s waiting, isn’t it? It’s making me write my confession but I didn’t know! I didn’t know it wasn’t hungry! Isn’t it bad enough that I have to be me? Can’t that just be my punishment? Did it have to bring them out here and sit them down? Those hollow eyes are staring at me.

I thought it might be hungry! I heard that dreadful shatter one night and I just… I didn’t know what to do! It needed to eat. That’s what. It needed to eat. But what? What would be enough? I ran around the house throwing cupboard doors open looking for anything I could find. I was screaming, hysterical, ranting and swearing about how it needed something from me. I needed some kind of penance. Something to give it, to appease it.

And then I saw them. They were huddled under the stairs, scared of me. I caught a glimpse of my ragged face and wide bloodshot eyes in a mirror as I approached them. God I looked like a mad man. But I kept thinking that I just needed to feed it.

I tried to take just the boy. He was the youngest. I couldn’t lose my wife or my daughter but I thought maybe the boy… he was just four. They’d have forgotten about him if they’d just listened to me and done what I’d asked but they didn’t! My wife grabbed a knife and cut me when I went to take him and it hurt so bad. I over-reacted. I know that. But the entire time I could hear that spider slamming into the door over and over and over…

I snatched the knife out of her hand and I just started stabbing. I didn’t even look at what I did. I screwed my eyes shut and fell on top of her, driving that blade down again and again while my children screamed. I reached out to my daughter trying to calm her but she struggled, pushing hard and I tried to get her to stop. But it was too late. Things were moving too fast and when I pushed the knife against her throat it was only meant to be a warning for her to stop screaming. But she moved too much and before I knew what was happening, thick rivulets of red blood were streaming down my hand, soaking her floral nighty, and her voice turned to a ragged whisper.

But I still had to feed it. There had to be penance. Not just for the things I’d done to the spider, but for what I’d just done to my family. I found my son cowering in the kitchen and I dragged him and the bodies towards the pantry. I pulled the door open, so afraid I actually soiled myself even as I rolled the two girls and then shoved my crying child inside. The last thing I saw before I shut the door was that horrible spider rising out of the darkness to take me. I slammed the door shut before it reached me and fell down, crying, hoping it might finally stop coming for me.

If only it had been hungry.

If only that had been what the spider wanted.

But you have to understand… once he was in there, it’s not like I could let him out! How was I supposed to know they’d just stay in there, the lot of them, bodies, spider, and the boy!? How was I supposed to know it’d just sit back and leave him be?

It took weeks before he finally stopped crying, his chubby little fists banging against the door the entire time.

Now he’s sitting on my sofa, along with his sister and mother, their mummified corpses pulled out of the darkness to taunt me. It’s been weeks and weeks and it won't let me go. I'm starving. I can feel it. I'm sitting in my own filth, slowly dying and I can't do a damn thing about it! If I do it corrects me, those wretched legs dragging me back with horrible strength, forcing me to sit and stare at those leering grinning skulls.

They're all going to watch me die, no matter how long it takes.