TRANSLATIONS#5 - The Spider's Head

A Story by Denis Vodyakhin

All of us have a bad but favorite habit. My friend, for instance, likes collecting insects. Yup! Inside finished mayo jars. Another friend of mine likes singing into a comb. Seemingly harmless joy but she choked on a clump of her own hair once. In fact, her silly habit of carrying a brush too close to her mouth led a nice doctor into the grave. His laughter was just too long for his heart to take. He is also said to have been an asthmatic.

My habit is not so fatally awful. Like many young ladies, I’m keen on dancing. Being shy by nature, however, I could never show off nor did I feel free to act out of the ordinary even for my family to see. I threw these little “swinging shindiga-a go-goes” in time after midnight in my younger sister’s room when, for some reason, she was away somewhere (in fact, she said she left for her baseball team get-together time). Another thing I liked so much was the metal box our deceased grandpa had mounted onto her windowsill. I put my cell phone playing non-loud music in it to have fun until the crack of dawn.

The sole reason I picked my sister’s room was the windows overlooking the house across the road inhabited by a handsome young man. As far as I know, he was an artist who worked at night casting a seldom glance on the old but noble mansion of ours. I knew he watched me dance; I even managed to spot him smile before he had looked away.

To my misfortune, I had not seen him for four days. A rare light blinking in his house was, one could say, done by a kid fooling around. You know, when they mess with a pull chain? The same thing happened in his workroom.

In a week, our parents departed for their friends’ house in Jersey having left my sister and me to look after each other. She went that night again and I, habitually, entered her room. When I looked through the window, I heaved a sigh. No lights. The man, too, might have gone out of town.

The clock was pointing to 3 A.M. when I felt someone’s eyes on me. I turned around abruptly to see my neighbor’s head hanging over the metal box. It was the moment when I finally took a closer look at him. Almost glowing bright blue eyes, black thick eyebrows, a weirdly beautiful nose and dark hair which was barely touching his snow-white skin. He smiled, I nodded hospitably as to usher him into the house ignoring a not-so-usual way of doing it. My happiness caused by this sudden meeting evaporated the instant I saw his trunk. “Body” is not a word here. Still smiling, he started crawling into the room, his body structure was correspondent to that of a spider: a cephalothorax and tummy.

With every second passing, the monster was getting closer and closer. The easiness with which the giant legs were scraping on the box made me feel like a freshly served meal my neighbor was about to enjoy. I grabbed a bat and, screaming like mad, came whacking him in the head. The blood was trickling down his face but the face looked like it was pain-proof. It just kept crawling and smiling.

No sooner had I stopped hitting him than I slipped on my sister’s jumper and passed out. Last thing I remember was the snide look on the head and a thought flashing through my mind: “I should’ve run when I had a chance”.

I woke up in a padded cell. The nurse assistants were not a bit impressed by my cries and tales of the oversized human-headed spider. They said I had bludgeoned my sister to death the night before.