Wellness Check
(Released for Halloween 2023)
Content warnings (click to show):
Spiders, body horror, medical horror, gore.
The phone gave a shrill scream. It was a landline, aged yellow and fixed to the wall with nails, and it had been there for about as long as the house had stood.
My bones creaked as I rose, leaving my dinner on the table. It took effort to bite back a sigh as I picked up the receiver. “Hello.”
“Hey. Hi. I’m sorry to bother you so late.”
It was a woman. Young. She spoke quickly, and from her accent, I guessed she likely lived in the city.
“My name’s Marlee. Marlee Hargrove. My parents moved in down the road from you a couple of years ago?”
“Ah. Yeah, they did.” They’d stopped at my house to introduce themselves. A couple not that much younger than I was. They’d both been spindly people, the kind who looked like they had more bones than they were supposed to, but their smiles had been wide and they had dirt on their clothes from working on their garden. I’d seen them on the road a couple of times since then, but that was it.
“I can’t get a hold of them,” Marlee said, speaking so fast that she seemed afraid I was going to hang up. “I last spoke to them nearly ten days ago. And they seemed fine then. Dad said he had a sore on his leg but—but otherwise—” she sucked in a breath. “Otherwise they seemed fine. But you know what they’re like. They go on long hikes and think they can forage food and the house is so far from anywhere and they’re getting older and—” a pause. “And they’re not answering their phone. I’ve been trying since Tuesday. I left messages, but they’re not returning those, and, well. Now the phone isn’t even ringing.”
Casper stared up at me from the floor, her eyes patient, her tail slightly less so as it thumped on the wood boards. She normally got morsels of my dinner while I ate. This interruption had put pause to that, and she wanted it over.
“Anyway, they gave me your number,” Marlee said. “When they moved in. Because it was so rural and because their cell phones didn’t get reception. They said you were a neighbour and that I could call if anything went wrong.”
“Yeah, I remember.” That day they’d arrived at my front door to introduce themselves, they’d asked for my contact information. Just in case, they’d said as we traded details.
It was a sensible thing to do. We were a long way from town, and strange things tended to happen around the forest.
“Could you check on them?” Marlee asked. “I can’t get there myself without booking a flight and that would take days. And I don’t want to call the police unless… anyway. Could you see that they’re okay? Just knock on their door, maybe take a look through the window?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Thank you.” The relief in Marlee’s voice was noticable. She paused, then added, “If they’re there, tell them to call me. Tell them I’m worried.”
“I’ll do that.”
She thanked me again as I hung up. Casper rose and trotted to my side, seeming to sense that it was time to get back to work. I peeled a sliver off my stake and fed it to her as we headed out the door.
The truck’s headlights lit up the dirt and weeds ringing my property as I turned onto the road. Casper rocked in the passenger seat, her ears pricked up as she watched insects flash past the windshield.
Marlee seemed to be overestimating just how close her parents and I were as neighbours. We were in the foothills of the mountains outside Harob. Not many people lived there. The roads were bare and weaving, the houses small and cracked as the aged shells fought for their existence in an ocean of wilderness. I’d only seen the Hargroves a few times in the years since they moved in, but that wasn’t from any reluctance on either of our sides. Just a product of the sheer space that separated us.
I had a cassette for long drives, but at night I preferred to sit in silence and listen to the insects and the car’s rattles and the soft panting of my companion. I shuffled to reach into my jeans’ pockets and pulled out a cigarette and lighter. Click. Click. And then a spark. I inhaled deeply, then blew the smoke out of the open window.
At last, the Hargroves’ property appeared ahead, heralded by a thatch of plants clumped around a wooden mailbox. The couple liked gardening, I gathered. They’d said something about that when they moved in. Something about wanting to try their hands at homesteading now their kids were all moved out. Foraging, goats, an orchard. Living off the land and spinning out the retirement savings as far as they’d go.
The driveway was almost a road in its own right. It wove through patches of trees before the house to come into view. Old, rickety, well-worn. Not a large house, but plenty for two people.
The lights were off. It was still early in the evening, the last moments of a sunset bleeding out on the horizon. Too early most folks to want to go to bed. Too dark to work inside without lights. I pulled my truck up outside the house, stubbed the cigarette in the dirt, and told Casper to stay.
The yard had been let go. Plants spilled out of their containers, needing both water and tending. A bird feeder hung askew on a tree, empty except for husks and dead leaves. Long grass rustled against my jeans as I walked. The daughter had said she last spoke to her parents ten days ago, but the neglect had been going on for longer than that.
The porch and I groaned in tandem as I climbed onto it. Under the shadowed overhang, I could see more clearly.
The front door hung open.
Most folk in the foothills didn’t bother locking their homes. We all knew each other, and strangers rarely found their way up the roads. But the door hung wide open, drifting in the light breeze. It was the sort of thing you’d do if you were stepping out to shake the table cloth and planned to shut the door on the way back in.
Dirt and dried leaves and small, twitching insects had crept over the threshold. They crunched underfoot as I stepped inside.
“Hello,” I called, and my voice seemed rusty as it rushed down the halls and vanished into the dark rooms.
I felt for the switches behind the front door. The overhead lights—dim and dusty—came on.
At first look, the hallway seemed as normal as you could expect. The leaf litter scattered along it, growing thinner but persisting right up to the end. Photos were hung on the left-side wall above a small side table and the landline it held.
The hallway could have been found in any house, but little crawling sensations rose over my arms as I stared down it.
The leaves shifted as a breath of wind skittered past my work boots. The photos were askew. Not in the small ways that happen when you hang them without much care, but badly: tilted at nauseous angles, corners pointed at the ceiling. One was knocked off its hook. It lay near the side table, its shattered glass glittering. It looked almost as though someone had swiped a hand across that wall of photos, sending them careening.
The phone’s glossy black receiver was off the hook, laying on the small side table. The angle struck me as strange. If a person is holding a receiver and places it down, they’re likely to put it facing a certain way. This one is turned around all wrong. Like it was dropped.
“Hello there,” I called, louder than before.
A spider skittered between the leaves. It had a small body but enormously long legs, pistoning it across the floor.
I crossed to the forgotten phone and took up the receiver as I pressed the switch. There was no response, not even a tone. I tapped the switch a few more times to be sure, then placed the receiver back into its cradle. The phone was dead.
Cellphones were no good out here. If your landline stopped working, you’d need to drive to the nearest neighbour to ask them for help. I was the nearest neighbour. And the Hargroves certainly hadn’t come to me.
I hadn’t seen their car outside, though. Maybe they had gone to stay at a friend’s place. But, if so, why go so long without contacting their daughter?
And why leave the door wide open?
A thought struck me. I curled one finger around the phone’s cable and lifted. It came out from behind the side table without resistance. The cable ended in a mess of jagged plastic casing and exposed wires. Cut, and crudely.
As I turned, I saw it: the kitchen archway had a smudge of discolouration on one side. I moved closer, squinting in the dull light. The stain was a heavy brown now, but I was willing to bet it had been red when it was planted there. I could make out the distinct outline of four fingers. I leaned through the arch. The thumb’s print was on the other side. As though someone had grabbed the archway for support.
It was blood, I was fairly sure.
I reached for the kitchen light. It felt grainy, and as the bulbs above flickered on, I saw why: it bore another dried smudge.
Three more dried drops of blood stood out on the linoleum floor. One had been scuffed by a shoe walking through it.
Ahead was the sink. Dishes lay in messy piles in it. My sense of smell had been fading for years, but the stench of rotting food still hit me hard.
Tiny dark shapes shivered on the plates. Flies, disturbed by the sudden light, were waking. Slender, long black legs rise above the lip of a bowl as a spider reared up.
The cupboard doors were all open. And they were all empty. A cereal box lay tipped on its side, its contents missing. A box of crackers was in a similar state. A flashlight sat next to an empty jar. Everything else was gone.
The cut telephone line and the blood suggested something quick and violent. An intruder. But the empty cupboards argued that whatever had happened to the Hargroves might have been a protracted affair.
Ten days since their daughter had last spoken to them. Ten days wasn’t enough time to starve. But it was plenty of time to succumb to an injury.
I left the kitchen and followed the hall, checking inside each room. There were two guest spaces—unused and musty. The last door opened into the master bedroom.
Compared to the rest of the house, it was tidy. The bed was made. A pair of men’s slippers rested next to one side of the bed.
A woman’s purse lay on the vanity. I didn’t like touching other people’s things, but I unzipped it to check inside. A small bundle of cash lay there.
This hadn’t been a robbery, then. Or, if it had, the attempt was abandoned part way through.
Still no trace of the Hargroves. And I’d covered the whole house.
It was time to call someone. The police. It would take them at least an hour to reach us. And I’d have to go back to my own home to make the call, since the Hargrove’s phone was out of service. But that was the best I could do.
I made to leave, but stopped beside the window. There was a light in the distance. When I’d arrived, the horizon had held just enough dusk to disguise it, but now that the dark had truly set in, it glinted like a beacon in the distance.
The barn, I thought. I had a vague memory of the place having a barn, pressed in close to the trees.
I retraced my path through the house, stopping in the kitchen to pick up the flashlight I’d seen. As I moved past my car Casper barked once, front feet on the dash as she watched me. I motioned for her to be patient and then turned around the house’s corner.
Raised vegetable gardens dotted the land behind the house. The Hargroves had used whatever they had to build them—mostly metal that had rusted in the two-year interim. They spilled over with plants left go to seed, their leaves shredded by insects.
Beyond the gardens was a field, grown long and ringed by a fence that was starting to collapse. The gate had been left partly open. It creaked as I pushed past it.
The barn’s light scattered across the field. It also caught on something large and metallic standing in the long grass. I couldn’t see it clearly enough to be sure, but I thought it was the Hargroves’ truck, an old blue thing that I’d sometimes seen driving along the road to town.
The barn was large. Larger than the house, easily, and built tall. The light shone out of the windows, turning them into rectangles of yellow. The source seemed low-set. It had to belong to a lamp or maybe candles. The lit-up rectangles held dark silhouettes, blocking their corners. Equipment, bags of grain, gardening tools.
As I drew near, one of the shapes in the windows moved. It happened so quickly that I almost missed it: a thick silhouette blocking out the light one second, then darting away the next.
My footsteps faltered, but only for a second.
“Hello,” I called, aiming towards the barn doors. I tried to remember the Hargroves’ first names. They’d told me, but that was two years before. “Patty?” I tried. The husband’s name began with a J. Had it been Jim? John?
The light inside the barn vanished abruptly. It went from being a beacon to a wall of darkness, blotting out the distant trees and the stars above. It felt bigger without the lights.
I paused at the doors, waiting. For something. Anything. For movement, for a voice to answer, for the scurry of an intruder shimmying out of a rear window, even. There was nothing. Nothing except…
My hearing was going the same was as my sense of smell, but I thought I could make out a scratching hum. Like the sound of a flowering tree full of bees. And yet… not quite that. Higher, pricklier. More like fingernails on wooden walls. Thousands of them.
And there was a smell. Something musty. That wasn’t unusual in barns. But it had a sickly undertone, like rot and spilled blood.
I took the door’s handle and pulled, testing if it was locked. It wasn’t. The massive roller door grated on a runner turned rusty.
The barn’s insides were dark. I turned on the flashlight and raised it, angling it through the gap.
Stalls were visible, running down each side of the space. That jogged a memory: the previous owners had kept horses for a time. They’d had a plan for a summer camp for teens. That had all fallen apart when the husband’s health turned bad, though, and the barn had probably been empty for upwards of ten years.
I leaned through the door, my flashlight trailing across the wooden posts. It was hard to make out the details. Harder than it should have been. I pressed the heel of one hand into my eyes, trying to get rid of the haziness, but it didn’t help. The light shone over shapes, pale and dreamy, and it was like trying to see through mist.
A noise came from deeper in the barn, inside one of the stalls. A shuffling, scraping sound. The noise a person makes when they’re struggling to move.
I stepped fully inside. “Who is that?” I called, but my voice seemed to fade into the back corners of the barn, sucked up by the space.
To my left, just inside the door, was a rack of tools. Closest was a garden fork. I reached for it, just to have something to hold, just to look a little more intimidating in case that was needed.
Spiderwebs clung heavy around the tool’s handle. They stuck to my hand like a second layer of skin. I tried to ignore the feather-light sensation as I stepped deeper into the barn.
My light darted from surface to surface, all of them hazy. An open stall door. A post. A bucket, overturned.
Drops of blood, scattered over the floor.
They shimmered in my light. Still wet.
A sound came from one of the stalls ahead. A rasping, gasping breath. I snapped the flashlight’s beam towards it.
The stall’s wall and open doorway stood out in stark relief, clumps of mildewy hay gathered up against the wood like snowdrifts. My angle was all wrong to see inside. I began to shuffle sideways, craning.
Something pale moved near the floor. Long, probing shapes crept around the edge of the stall, like snakes reaching out to taste the air. They fixed around the edge of the post.
Fingers. But damaged. They were swollen and their tips were blackened, the nails split down their centres and peeling free from dying skin. The hand tightened on the post, right near its base, and white knuckles stood out through tight, greying skin.
“Who…” I couldn’t catch the breath. I ran my tongue over my lips. “Who is that?”
The rasping sound came again. I’d thought it was breathing, before, but now I recognised it as laughter. Broken and cracked, low, throaty chuckles.
The fingers twitched. A shock of white hair caught my flashlight’s beam. The very top of a head shifted into view behind the hand.
My throat caught. The eyes were all flooded with blood. An ugly, swollen, festering kind of red that stained the whites and the iris until there was no other colour. The hair around her head was loose and damp with sweat and something dark that was either dirt or blood. Bruise-like patches ringed the loose skin around her eyes.
“Didn’t think anyone would find us here,” the figure said, and I realised it was a woman. Her fingers twitched, the broken nails peeling up as they dug into the wood. The eyes blinked and horrible recognition crashed over me.
This was one of the Hargroves.
“Patty,” I managed.
She looked nothing like she had when we’d met two years before. She was sick. No, more than sick, she was dying: the colour of her skin and the sunken bruised colour around her eyes made that clear. She might already be past anything a hospital could reverse.
“You need help,” I said, knowing I’d have to be the one to get her to it, but my feet felt as though they were lead weights.
“Shh.” Her bloodied eyes fluttered. I wasn’t sure she could still see through them. I wasn’t sure she knew who I was, for that matter.
She shuffled slightly forward, and more of her head appeared around the stall’s wall. It exposed her mouth, which was open in a gaping smile. There were no teeth left. Just dark, swollen gums. “Shh. They don’t like the noise. Didn’t like that phone when it rang, so we made it quiet. Didn’t like how bright the house was, so we came here instead. Quiet, quiet, now.”
I needed to get her up off the ground. Needed to get her to my car. But I still couldn’t move.
Bubble-like sores pocked her jaw and cheeks. The largest and rawest oozed. Another cluster had swollen the back of her hand.
I remembered what the daughter had said about how they liked foraging. I remembered how many strange things came out of the forest.
“Patty.” I was almost certain her name was Patty. She didn’t try to correct me, if it wasn’t. “Where’s your fellow? Where’s he gone?”
Her mouth twitched as the rasping laughter grated out of her dry throat. She didn’t answer, but the blood-filled eyes turned towards something above me.
I looked up, swinging the flashlight’s beam. At first I saw a leg. Then a limp hand.
Then I saw the rest of it.
Jim or John or whatever his name had been hung near the barn’s exposed wood ceiling. His limbs were spread out, both limp and strangely angled, and it gave the impression of a person who had been hit by a car and thrown through the air, only frozen a second before they smashed back into the ground. One knee was drawn up near his chest. A hand was at a wrong angle from its wrist, either broken or dislocated. His other leg was twisted around wrong, long but angled badly.
A drop of blood fell, landing near the others on the floor.
His clothes were damp and discoloured, either with blood or some other body fluid. His stomach seemed swollen. Blisters, like on Patty, marked the exposed skin. His leg was the worst. His daughter had said something about him having a sore there, but his jeans were now limply crumpled around the thigh, as though his flesh had turned to pulpy liquid.
But the strangest part was that he seemed to float. His body was shaped like he’d been tied up in the rafters with ropes, but as my flashlight cut across blistered skin and bulging, damp clothes, I couldn’t see a single thing holding him up.
Except…
A thick haze existed around him. The same haze that had bothered me since I first walked into the barn: the one I had thought was either mist or airborn dust. It was thicker up there, though, around Jim-or-John. Almost thick enough to be a cloud gathered about him.
Spiderwebs. The prickly sensation still existed on the garden fork I clutched. I was seeing a haze made up of millions of gossamer-thin spiderwebs.
It was concentrated across the barn’s ceiling, but it existed everywhere. Spreading between the stables. Draped over the wooden beams. Even creating a dew-like layer across the floor that I disturbed with every step.
A strange, beast-like sound escaped me, something between a grunt and a groan.
“Shh,” Patty whispered behind me, but the rebuke was broken by a burst of manic laughter that she couldn’t quite stifle. “Shh, shh!”
Beneath her voice was another sound. Something I’d heard before, but now hit me clearly. Insect-like. The sound of thousands of arachnids, their joints flexing, their thin legs tapping. It came from every direction, pressing in on me.
I couldn’t tear my eyes off Jim-or-John. He was dead. He had to be. But there was still movement. Beneath his damp shirt, something squirmed around his chest. Around and up. Towards his head.
Then the shape swelled into his throat. It formed an enormous bulging lump just below his Adam’s apple, forcing his chin up as the skin turned bruised and shiny-taut. The swelling was so enormous that I feared hearing his neck snap.
Then his slack jaw parted. Something dark existed behind his off-white teeth, filling the cavity of his mouth. A long, glossy leg extended out, delicately touching down on his chin. Another followed. Then one more, this time pressing against his open, unseeing eye.
A spider began to emerge. It was larger than anything I’d ever seen before. So monstrously big that it was a miracle it hadn’t torn the man’s throat. The hairs coating its body were slick with mucous. Each leg flexed as it came free, languid and perfectly precise as it touched down on the dead man’s face. I swore I could hear the mandibles working.
And then Jim-or-John’s nearest hand twitched. His eyes rolled in their sockets, rotating to look past the enormous beast on his face to stare down at me. And his body convulsed with a sickly imitation of laughter.
Not dead.
“They don’t like the light,” Patty whispered.
She sounded so much closer than she had before.
I swung around, tearing my torch’s beam from the scene playing out in the rafters.
Patty stood directly ahead of me. She was naked, her hair a shock of grizzled white as it cascaded over her shoulders.
Her skin was filled with sores. Many were open. Weeping. In the flashlight’s uncanny illumination, I watched as a small, twitching black leg reached out of one of the sores, tasting the air, before withdrawing back inside.
She shuffled as she tried to move closer to me, but I doubted she had any feeling left in her legs. The limbs were grey, the toes fully black and necrotic.
“We thought we’d bring them here, where it’s so lovely dark and quiet.” Patty’s raw-gummed smile seemed unnatural on her broken face. “But they’re hungry for so much more than we can give them. We cut the phone’s cord before we thought of that. But look…” another shuffling step. “Look, look, you came anyhow. They’ll like that.”
The sound of tens of thousands of working legs filled the quiet between her rasping words. I could see the spiders now, in every shaky angle of my flashlight’s beam. Creeping across the barn’s exposed wood. Over the floor, mapping out the maze of webs they’d built. Spinning down from the ceilings.
The darkest corners of the barn writhed with them, more spider than structure.
“There was only one to begin with.” The manic laugh clotted Patty’s words. “At least, we think. In the mushrooms. Or maybe from the dandelions we picked. We never quite figured that out. Look how many there are now, though. Look how quickly they’ve grown.”
Her fingers pressed into her stomach, and bile filled my throat as I saw the swollen flesh bubbling with movement.
Patty’s bloodfilled eyes turned towards the rafters. Her smile grew.
I turned. The spider was no longer on Jim-or-John’s face. I swivelled my light, searching for it, and was just in time to see it had positioned itself above me. It dropped effortlessly, its glossy legs stretched wide.
I lurched back. One of the shiny legs grazed over my shoulder, tearing shirt and skin.
The spider hit the ground at my feet with a meaty thud. Mucous flicked off its body on impact, forming a halo around it.
I swiped out on instinct, using the only weapon I’d thought to carry: the garden fork.
It was hard to see in the dark of the shed. I hit the spider, but only barely. It sent it skittering aside.
“No!” Patty cried. She threw her arms around me from behind, the damaged fingers digging into my shirt as she tried to pin me into place. “No, no, no!”
The spider was already turning back towards me. Patty’s hold was stronger than I’d have thought. I twisted, feeling pain run through the tear in my shoulder, and stabbed the fork behind me to break Patty’s grip.
She staggered back, releasing her hold on me with a gasping, pained noise. Her hands fluttered to her bare stomach. I’d only meant to knock her back, in the same way I’d knocked the spider away, but I’d done far more than that. The fork’s tines had pierced the delicate skin in her belly.
Patty’s eyes were wide and stunned as she pressed her fingertips into the tear. Then she slowly raised her head. The shock faded from her face as the wild, uneven smile took its place.
She dug her fingers into the gash and pulled to widen it.
I choked on my own gasps as her skin peeled back like dough. A dark liquid spilled free.
No. Not liquid. Something that acted like it.
Thousands upon thousands of spiders, each one no larger than a seed. They poured onto the floor and spread outwards like a wave.
I stepped backwards, trying to get out of their reach, and felt something sharp and cool press into the back of my leg.
My flashlight landed on the massive arachnid. Its legs stabbed into me, squeezing me through the jeans, as it began to climb up my leg.
I jerked, desperate, trying to kick if off. My balance wasn’t good, made worse by the gloom. I staggered. The spider held on, and I felt the damp, hard surface of its sternum bump into my thigh as the motion rocked it.
And then Patty pressed into me from the other side.
Her arms were lax and cold as they wrapped around me. Her breath smelled like rot as she exhaled into my ear. And I felt movement as my elbow pressed into the hole she’d opened in her stomach.
Raw fear coated me as I tried to lurch out of her grip. We fell. The hard wood floor stabbed into my hip, my ribs, the back of my skull. Patty landed on top of me in a gush of seed-sized spiders. Spilling from her mouth. From the tear ducts in her eyes. The weeping sores across her body.
And the massive arachnid from her husband continued to clamber up my body, over my hip, its legs digging into the sensitive skin below my ribs.
I slashed at them both with the garden fork in one hand and the flashlight in the other. I felt a crack as the fork connected with Patty’s head. Another crack against her jaw. The flashlight hit the spider, but didn’t knock it free.
My skin began to burn as the spawn poured over me. They crawled through the gaps in my shirt. A thousand tiny legs tapped across my skin as they spread.
Another crack against Patty’s head. This time her grip relaxed. I crawled backwards, stars shooting across my vision from lack of oxygen.
The smallest spiders crawled over my jaw. I pressed my lips tightly closed as they reached my mouth.
The bigger spider was on my chest now, glittering damp and shockingly heavy. I smashed the flashlight into it, trying to force it off, but its legs dug in and sliced lines through my shirt and torso.
Whimpers escaped every time I exhaled through my nose. I still refused to open my mouth as the dark spots trailed across my lips. They were into my hair. I felt tiny legs exploring inside my ear.
One more hit with the flashlight, harder this time. One of the spider’s legs burst free from its body, expelling a glut of milky white fluid. The leg curled up as it fell to the side.
The spider reared, its front legs raised.
I stabbed the garden fork into the thorax, right where its sternum and abdomen connected. The tines made a meaty noise as they embedded.
The spider convulsed. I gripped the fork’s handle and hauled on it as hard as I could. Milky fluid flooded over my hand as the spider tumbled aside.
I couldn’t see where it landed, but I could hear it thudding into the old wood floor.
Every inch of my skin prickled as the babies crawled across me. They were in my pants, in my hair, in my boots. I rolled, my ears ringing and my closed-mouth breathing too loud and fast, and crawled towards the barn’s partially-open door.
My hand hit something solid. It fell, and I heart the crack of glass shattering.
An old gas lantern. The source of the light I’d seen when I’d first neared the barn. The stench of spilt fuel burnt my nostrils.
I reached into my jeans’ pocket. Past the cigarettes. To the lighter.
Click. Click. And then a spark.
I managed to get to my feet as the flames caught in earnest. They sent red light and strange shadows across the high walls ahead of me. I swore I could see the image of dancing spiders in the flickering light, but I didn’t dare look back. Not towards Patty, not even to see if she was still alive. Not towards Jim-or-John hung like a discarded mannequin from the ceiling. Not towards the spider that was very likely not dead. I just focussed on putting one foot ahead of the next, each one carrying me nearer to the door, and I didn’t stop until I was well outside and staggered to the fence that had once been used to hold horses.
The barn was old and dry; built of wood and scattered through with forgotten hay. It would burn like a dream. Even as I felt the heat of the flames on my shoulders and neck, I still didn’t dare look backwards.
Instead, I fought to get my clothes off. The spiders covered every inch of me. My clothes and skin alike were growing sticky with freshly spun threads that were too thin for me to even see.
I stripped until I was naked. And then I staggered to an abandoned drinking trough. It was tipped on its side, long dry, but there was a tap attached to the fence railing nearby, and I suspected the piping would connect to a rain water tank near the barn. I turned it and was rewarded with a gush of water.
I crouched there as the barn became a bonfire, washing every inch of myself. It was too dark to see well, so I used touch alone.
The cuts left across my body stung but it felt more cathartic than painful. I ran my hands through my hair again and again, first washing it, and then squeezing it, hoping to crush any tiny bodies that might be left. I trailed my fingers through every crease in my skin, searching for any space they might hide in. I scraped beneath my fingernails and toenails. I washed and washed again and then once more until I was too exhausted to do anything else.
Then I left my clothes on the ground and, wet and cold and barefoot, staggered back across the field and towards the distant house.
I could have probably used the shower in there if I’d wanted. It would have lights and mirrors and hot water and soap to help me. But I’d already seen at least two spiders inside the abode, and I didn’t know how many others Patty and her husband might have left there before moving into the barn.
Instead, I aimed for my car. Casper was still in the passenger seat, only now she started barking when she saw me.
I kept a spare change of clothes in the trunk in case of dirty jobs, and changed into them as well as I could manage with shaking hands and blurry vision.
Then I slid into the driver’s seat. The key was in the ignition. I turned it and felt the engine kick into life beneath me. My muscles worked on memory as I turned the car around to leave the Hargroves’ property.
In the distance, an enormous bonfire burned, sending a pillar of light and embers into the night sky.
Casper whined. She’d stopped barking, but she sat as far away from me as she could, pressed against the door, her hackles standing up like spikes. She’d always been perceptive like that.
I drove along the road in complete silence, except for my high-pitched breathing. My hands shook as I clenched the steering wheel. The turn-off to reach my own home appeared through the night, but I let it pass by and kept following the road.
I only slowed the car when I reached the driveway belonging to Pete Carre’s place. He was my next nearest neighbour, and he’d been living there long enough that I’d gotten to know him well. I wouldn’t be stopping in for a visit, though. I didn’t think I had time for that. But he’d help me in another way.
It was growing hard to think, but there was still enough of me left to know that I didn’t want Casper around for what came next.
I reached past my dog, ignoring her bared teeth, and opened the passenger door. She leapt out without even being instructed. She knew Carre’s place. And Carre knew Casper. He’d take care of her for me. He was good like that.
My mind was growing twitchy as I closed the door and turned the car around. The wheels crunched as they returned to the main road, carrying me back towards my own place.
I’d been so thorough when I’d washed. But I had a memory—a memory that was growing increasingly blurry as my headlights flashed across the dirt road—of the sensation of prickling legs travelling up my ear canal.
It didn’t upset me as much as it had before. In fact, I was starting to feel peaceful. Content, even.
I’d go home. I’d finish my dinner, and it didn’t matter if it was cold. I’d need whatever energy I could get for what was to come.
And then, I supposed, I’d disconnect the phone and switch out the lights.
Patty had been right.
They liked it best when it was dark.