The Crackspider Won't Kill If You Walk Away

Brother is minding his own business, daydreaming about the girl in the velvet bathing suit; then the Crackspider decides to pay him a visit.

The sun sets on a simple trailer house. Inside a family is eating dinner: a typical summer scene at Lake Morin. Father asks Mother to pass the snow peas, ten year-old Sister munches on a mouthful of roast chicken. They chat jovially about the day’s events.

But twelve year-old Brother is silent. His elbow planted on the table, he rests his tired head in one hand while he picks at his creamed corn with the fork in the other. Mouth ajar, he remains lost in thought despite Mother’s best efforts to make him snap out of it.

The ceiling shakes a little but nobody notices. They are too engrossed in conversation and Brother is too busy daydreaming. The girl in the velvet bathing suit is all he can think about. He met her this afternoon while playing volleyball with the other children. At first as they determined the teams nobody would pick her because this group of friends had known each other forever and they had never seen her around here before. But Brother didn’t mind picking her up; she was charming and beautiful after all.

Eventually the game ended and everyone retired to their respective trailers for the evening. Brother and the girl in the velvet bathing suit became the only ones left on the pitch. They walked around the lake and talked as they watched the sun set. For a long, delectable moment their eyes met. Those eyes; he was bewitched by those deep, hazelnut eyes.

An awkward silence followed but it didn’t last very long. The subject of tonight’s nearby rock concert came up. She asked him where he was staying, so they could meet up there and go to the concert together. He obliged, but not without warning her that his parents would not approve.

Now Brother is weighing tonight’s options in his head: stay inside, ask his parents for their permission, or simply sneak out undetected. Something startles him: the screeching of chair legs on the floor. It’s Sister. She excuses herself, gets up and heads to the restroom.

Moments later she runs back screaming.

“Father! Father! A spider crawled out of a crack in the wall and now she’s in the sink! You must come and sweep her in the plug hole! Please, Father!” she cries.

“Oh come on, it can’t be that big!” Father protests.

Sister shows him the alleged dimensions with her fingers: barely half an inch, even by her approximation. Father sighs, stands up and heads off to investigates. Mother gives Sister an annoyed look. Brother resumes daydreaming.

Hissing! Yelling! Father staggers back into the kitchen, holding his arm. Brother and Sister are paralyzed by Father’s state of mind. Mother raises one hand to her mouth in shock, clueless as to what’s going on. Father removes his hand from his forearm and reveals a gruesome red lash, as if a rope of hot lead had been wrapped around it. The surrounding skin is sizzling, a massive blister appears. There’s bleeding. The children stare at the spectacle. They’re stunned. Mother’s gaping mouth quivers. She doesn’t know what to do.

The spider comes out into the hallway and emerges from the shadows into the kitchen. It has become bigger, much bigger. Its round body is large as a volley ball; that’s the first thing that comes to Brother’s mind because even now he is still obsessing over the girl in the velvet bathing suit from that afternoon. The monster bounces up and down seemingly in thin air, its core black and furry like a tarantula. As the spider comes fully into view, Brother notices that the red stripes on the creature’s flanks are of the same colour as the girl’s suit. For an instant he is entranced by the beast’s deep, hazelnut eyes and bleeding crimson lips. Her mouth opens, revealing multiple rows of needly shark-like teeth and two feral fangs sticking from the upper mandible.

In a single vile motion the creature spits venom straight into the eyes of Mother. Startled at first, Mother loses her mind and sobs. Or does she? No it turns out she’s laughing. While stumbling around and frantically rubbing her eyes with her fingers she says something along the lines of:

“It’s pointless, we shouldn’t bother trying to escape!”

It’s only when Brother looks back at the spider that he catches on to what she’s trying to say. Like fractal tentacles, four of the spider’s legs keep stretching out, curling and twisting in every direction like some sort of lasso wrapping itself around her prey. Pots, pans and dishes clatter and shatter onto the ground as the tentacles knock them aside, leaving singed burn marks in their wake.

Father, his arm still bleeding profusely, rushes over and takes Mother into his arms. He heads for the door, the only escape route not encumbered by the spider’s legs, all the while dodging the encroaching tentacles and yelling for the children to follow him. Sister does so without question.

Brother is the last one to get up. As he flees the spider spits out more of her vicious venom; a single glob lands squarely on the back of Brother’s neck. Instantly he stops dead in his tracks. His mind becomes filled with surreal images of him and the girl in the velvet bathing suit being spun into a web together in the restroom. As the venom slips underneath Brother’s shirt, the cool sensation of the viscous liquid slivering down his spine instills in him the eerie yet calming thought that as long as he is locked in the embrace of the girl in the velvet bathing suit he actually wouldn’t mind spending the rest of his days in the spider’s possession, even if the monster devours him in the end. Firmly entrenched in his delusion, Brother turns and faces the grinning monster; he smiles back sheepishly.

Yet just as the tentacles are closing in on the hapless boy Father comes in and grabs Brother by the shoulder, steering his son back toward the entrance as another shower of venom rains down on them. With crazed yet resolute eyes that lock onto Brother’s own Father yells at him:

“Run, son! It won’t get you if you just run away with us!”

Father’s voice breaks the vision of the spider spinning a child; the child is shaken into action. Father and Brother run out. Within seconds, the whole family has gotten inside the car. They hightail it out of there. From the back seat, Brother and Sister watch as the spider annihilates the cabin from the inside out, causing it to burst into flames.

The next day Lake Morin is on the headlines of every newspaper. It turns out that the entire campsite has been burned to the ground, taking millions of dollars in damages and several lives in the process. For all the sheriff’s best efforts the cause remains unknown.

Everyone in the family is interviewed by the police. But nobody says a word about what happened in their cabin. They wish only to forget these terrible events in hopes of never encountering the culprit again.

Years go by. Father loses his arm and Mother becomes blind in one eye; still, they move on and try to live as normally as they can. As for Sister she recovers from the experience to a certain degree by inexplicably shutting out not only this one incident but the whole of her childhood up to that point as well.

And what of Brother?

From the outside it looks like he’s moved on. But sometimes in the dead of night he still dreams about the girl in the velvet bathing suit and the volley ball games and the trailer house on Lake Morin. And just as he sees himself and his family sitting down at the table for dinner, he wakes up screaming and covered in sweat, forever haunted by the sight of Father’s mangled arm and the surreal boil of tentacles and the crackspider’s deep, hazelnut eyes staring straight into his soul.

Author's Note

Is there anything good about it?