The Forest of A Thousand Legs | CreepCast

[MUSIC] Welcome back to Creekcast. Today we are going to be doing a spider special. We've been seeing that Iraq Nephobia is very present amongst the online space and we have two spider stories today. The first one being my wife under one exposure therapy to cure her Iraq Nephobia. But it worked too well and now she's freaking me out. And then we have an even older story from, that was one year ago it said it was posted to. No sleep and then we have one from almost 10 years ago that's called The Forest of a Thousand Legs, which is like one of the most brutal names of all time for a story, let's say. >> Yeah, I'm pretty excited for these spiders freak me out. Well, some spiders freak me out. I'm not Iraqi phobic to the point that if I see one, I'll lose my mind. But if I see certain ones, I lose my mind and I've nightmares about spiders, a lot of things like that. So the stories, the stories today definitely have the potential to bother me. You're not really afraid of spiders, just snakes, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> No, I mean, like listen, if I see tiny spiders and always, you know, I don't want them like biting me. If they can bite, I don't want that, but I will say the, like if I saw a fucking giant, one of the giant, like hairy spiders, I mean, I would not be stoked on that. >> Yeah. >> Also, I feel like every depiction of the scariest version of a spider, it can be, is in movies, is when they have a real spider come in like into frame, walk in, you know? And then they have it on a string, like a practical version of it, and they just literally pulled at the camera and it's just like flat, it's flying at you. That actually freaks me out a lot. >> It's like in that movie of Rack Naphobia when it jumps at him, when he's looking forward at the end. >> There's so many fun spider movies, at least when I was young, I really loved the Rack Naphobia because John Goodman's great, but also eight-legged freaks. >> Eight-legged freaks is awesome. I used to watch that all the time as a kid, didn't like shooting the spiders in the mall and all that. >> The spiders in the giant spider in Lord the Rings and in Harry Potter, both freaked me out. >> I'll put out this bounty, you don't get anything for it, but you'll help me feel better, so that's its own reward. >> I'll put out this bounty. There was a movie when I was a kid that I watched on the sci-fi channel with my dad a couple times about a giant spider or several giant spiders in the subways under New York, and every time I looked that up, it brings up a movie called Spiders, which is about like alien spiders taking over a train station underground. It's not that one. It was a movie. >> The scene sounds a lot like what you just literally said though. >> No, no, no. I remember a few very distinct scenes. There was one scene, it's like a SWAT team goes down and they have to get on a train car to go to an abandoned part of the track where like there's a spider's nest and there's a shot where one of the girl SWAT team members is loading a gun and she looks down like an empty rail car tunnel as they're going and she sees a giant shadow of a spider on the wall. And then there's another scene where there is a wedding party on a subway train that is going to I guess a reception or whatever and a giant spider gets on there, they're screaming and everything and then there's a shot of the train car pulling up to station and the doors opening and blood pouring out of the door. And I have looked for this thing, I've looked on like old horror movie forms, I've looked on sci-fi channel forms, I have not found this film. So if you can find it, I would really appreciate that. I'm not crazy. I have this recurring dream where there's this one kind of spider that really bothers me, they're called golden orb weavers that even seeing them like makes me uncomfortable. And I have this dream where like there will be a bunch on me and I can't get them off or people are throwing them at me or something like that. So I'd say I'm fairly a recnophobic. So we'll see if the story's freaked me out. Are you going to recommend something before I cut you off? I'll recommend just as a movie that it may be a lot, I feel like it's gotten a lot of hype over the last couple years. There's this movie called Possum. It's really good. Yeah, unsettling kind of very unsettling movie, but it's just about a man just carrying out a briefcase and there's like this puppet on the inside of it, but it's like a spider and it's like this fucking human head. It's very, very sick. So if you haven't seen Possum, check that out. It's really good. Yeah, but guys, thank you so much if you're listening on Apple's fucking podcast or Spotify for to listen to audio platforms for the podcast, it does help a lot. And please be sure to give us a nice writing there. It would mean the fucking world. And also just want to shout out the patrons. Thank you so much for the support on what we're trying to do here. And then also if you want some extra content, we watch the lead cronens, the mummy. So if you want to hop along for some of those fun experiences, feel free. I think whenever the back rooms is out, we'll probably talk about that out there on there too. So without further ado, well, a little bit of further ado because our first story about the wife undergoing exposures by Christian Wallace, which obviously, you know, friend of the channel, OG rider, we love covering his stories. He did the story about my wife's taking a role play too far. The only other astronaut on this mission, the deer that walks on to legs, bunker for prepper family, and another story I think I'm missing. And then when we were in person, I don't think it's been posted yet, at least not the time of recording, but we recorded the story about an abandoned white supremacist camp also by Christian Wallace. Oh, big fan of his stuff, everything that he writes. But before the episode, Hunter, I looked up Christian Wallace creep cast because I was trying to remember how many stories that we had covered of his, because I know it was a lot. And one of the first results took me here. I just sent you a link. Did you know that this existed? Let me see. What is this thing you're about to show me? No, what's the hell is this? This is the creep cast Wiki. And dude, this, I don't know who's running this or how many people are. It is, okay, for example, you go to the episode list, it's every episode we've ever done. Let me just click on turn it off, for example, one of the first stories of 2026. It gives a summary of the episode, the number of the episode, and then all of our gags and bits. For example, it's for turn it off. It says the episode begins with both host fighting like divorce parents at 1753, both host laugh at how much juice the protagonist drinks at 2649. The video ends when it's revealed the characters are British at 4732. Windagoon mentions how often meet Canyon brings up belly kisses at 5008. Windagoon talks about goosebumps episode, cry of the cat at one hour three minutes 53 seconds. The editor adds a bear trap clip when when the goon is right and at one 1916, both host laugh as the protagonist yet again drinks juice. And then in the trivia segment, it says the 3D animated background for this episode depicts a lit-up tint in a forest clearing. This is more than I keep track of when we work with these things for every single episode. And then get this, okay, grandpa Ernest Wiki, bless their every single character that we've made up in bits has their own wiki entry with a list of how many episodes they've shown up in. And what gags around them and stuff like that, God, I was running this. I have no idea, okay, so I found the bunker of a proper family, right? If I click on that, it's said, where was that at? Oh, there's a character list. And the character for that one is officer mole. And it's a description when you did the mole voice, it says officer mole is a subterranean mole person masquerading as a police officer. Bob, as he's called by his colleagues, is known for his love of digging holes. And then it has like physical description, mole. This is uncanny. This is uncanny. The David King page just says he wants hired obese Italian mobsters for $42,000 in Buttcoin in 2012, which is now worth $1.2635 million, making the mobsters rich. That's just that's just written down in here. Okay, there's more stuff in here that I think I've ever written about anything I've done. Like okay, I just click on I talk to God. It's said in the trivia segment, it says at 2834, 3309 and 3550, the editor plays with one to go to screen screen, I don't know if I should feel flattered or terrified. This is actually incredible. This is so in depth, whoever's doing this, I applaud you. This is extremely impressive. All right. Well, with that out of the way, let's begin. Christian Wallace, my wife underwent exposure therapy to cure her rachnephobia, but it worked too well. And now she's freaking me out. I don't like spiders. I don't like it when they bunch themselves up so their legs look like tangled wires, and 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. the man. Then I kinda just wound up taking over spider killing duty. At first this meant squealing while trying to lob a shoe at one of them from a distance, but as the years went on I kinda just got tired of the stress and anxiety. Fear is exhausting, toes the pageantry of it, jumping up and shouting and 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 didn'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 him either, but it wasn't what I'd call worthy of therapy. For the first 10 years I knew her, she was a fairly run-of-the-mill arachnophobe. 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, Wendy 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 lighted out a sigh, ran her hands through her hair, and she looked a little puzzled by what she'd felt. When she lifted her hand away, there were thin black legs poking out from between her fingers. Took a second for her to react to what was all bunched up inside her cup-tan, then she screamed and threw it onto the ground. I saw it for only a second, it was so fast. Then it was off and under the nearest door and my number one concern became comforting my wife, was having a full-blown panic attack. She screamed while slapping out her neck and hair. I hugged her tight, checked her hair, and then checked it again when she asked me to. Then she stripped her top off to make sure nothing else was clinging to her clothes, before I took her into the kitchen, we had a cup of tea while she kept scratching at the back of her head. Little fucker. I can't believe it. Did you see it? It was huge. One of the biggest yet. Truthfully, I had only half-glimpsed memories of it scuttling away, but it had been big. Large enough that a pint glass would fit over its starting legs. Just seen it, it left me feeling anxious. But at the time, I ignored my own discomfort. After all, I'd hardly been the real victim. It got away. God. It's still now somewhere, isn't it? I wanted to lie, but not better of it. Somewhere yeah, but we'll spider-proof the bedroom tonight and I'll go looking forward in the morning. Thank you. Jesus, I know, I'm going to have a hard time sleeping tonight. So I said like, oh, the story might bother me. It might mess with me or whatever. The description of the legs coming through her hands, he immediately bothered me. Yeah. I've already checked out. I just thought of all the bristles, the tiny little hairs going through. There was something that kind of was similar last night that happened to me. Not necessarily in my hand, but my dog threw up in our bed and it was just a full-fledged like a mouse, like a field mouse, and that just made me think of, I don't know why, maybe think of that where you're like, oh my god. And then the dog just looked, the dog just looked me like, I don't know, sorry, that kind of thing. But I immediately, I didn't bother my wife, my wife is gone right now with her buddy on vacation. And yeah, I texted her that and I was like, you really dodged a fucking bull if I tried not to be here tonight. I feel now I'm thinking about spiders, stuff like that. When you read a story like this, you're going to start feeling shit on like your legs and hands, your arms. I'm already, I'm looking at my desk. There was one to, I don't even think it was a spider, I think it was a beetle or something, but one day I was at my desk and I just saw the legs peer over the side and it was something crawling underneath my desk, but now I'm like looking at the prim of the desk and making sure it's like already messing with me a little bit. Gosh, I keep thinking about the stream I had where like someone was throwing a spider at me. And in the air, I could see it's little legs like flying, trying to grab onto me. And so. She made me strip the bed before she got in it. And all night she kept flicking at her and all night she kept flicking at the fringe of the hair on the back of her neck, 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. Also, that's a fucking, that has to be some kind of set up there. Now, if I was a betting man, I feel like she's going to do something that is like, I don't know if she's going to go full spider like, but I just feel like there's going to be something where I feel he's going to be like, well, we're going to have to put you down. Yeah, I've got to break up, we're going to have to cross it. Didn't it? It was Christian Wallace, the one who did the, my daughters becoming a dog or no, that was Elias with a row, wasn't it? The one about the guy who was the guy who got the mother in his child, 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, but then she saw a spider on some TV show and the anxiety came back full force. Every night was the same. I distriped the bed of everything, lift the mattress and check for spiders. She even got rid of her bedside table, so there'd be less hiding places for one. In the meantime, I was on hunting duty. In her own words, I had to find the bastard, or she never feels safe in the house again. It's funny, but in hindsight, I can't really say what I saw go scuttling under the 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. The fibers were thick, like fake stuff they bring out on Halloween, and I had to peel them off the carpet like Velcro. I found a couple of these nests throughout the house, but I never mentioned them. One of them hit a hole in the floor that really should have alarmed me, but I just ignored it. This giant spider mull thing that's digging through the floor that's got party city webs everywhere. You're just like, yeah, I won't bring that up. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I haven't seen enough extremely large spiders in life to know at what point would I? I feel like if I saw something not even abnormally large, I'd be like, oh my God, this is an infestation. I feel like I would psych myself out too much. I saw the other night there's one on the wall of the house that was like, I don't even know what kind of spider it was because normally like the big spiders around here are brown. They're like the little wolf spider wood spider things. This thing was black and it was like huge. It was super fat. And I don't know what that was. I don't know how many are in my house and I don't like it. So I don't know. But if it's tunneling through the floor, yeah, I think that's a problem. Is it tunneling though? Or is it just like there's a hole in the floor and he's, they're just like hiding in there and there's nest and stuff? Well, I guess it's possible. Yeah. As I say, at least not yet. I haven't, I haven't, I haven't caught onto this mole hybrid that you're speaking of. But I don't know. Have you ever, I don't know if it's the same in the Midwest, but have you ever done the thing where you walk out into your yard at night and shine a flashlight? So a lot of the time in Tennessee, if you walk outside at night and you shine a flashlight across the yard, you'll see what you think is due everywhere, like little webs. No, they're eyes. They're spider eyes. Oh, okay. No, well, you're probably living a much more forested area. I feel like I wouldn't see it as much, you know, I mean, we don't have as many trees because someone told me that one time and I'm like, there's no way, like I see do all the time at night. Those are spiders. And then I would walk up to each of the two, quote unquote, and it would be spider eyes. So what's nice? It's, yeah, I don't like that, but yeah, yeah, it's awesome. It looks like it's everywhere. It's across everything. Yeah, I'm, this story is psyching me out. Really? I'm leaning forward in my chair right now, so there's nothing touching me. Well, I'm setting up. I'm going to have to console you the same way this man is. I'm the wife. Yeah. I'm the wife now. I need you to take care of me. I need you to get by the wife. Oh, all right. I'd say that. 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. See, it's boring. It's sticking. Nothing normal about that, but I just covered it up with some cans and moved on. The behavior I find hard to explain in hindsight. Maybe my attention was elsewhere. It literally wasn't in a great place and she was slowly getting worse. She cried a lot and any little thing the touch to her skin would result in lots of panic falling. She couldn't even meal without slapping out her arms and neck every few seconds. Things got real bad when I came back one night to find her shaving her 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 ever lived with anyone who's had a breakdown, there's usually this moment where your heart sings as you realize that what you're dealing with is transcended 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, the patchy head, like the doll from Toy Story. When she looked over her shoulder, it means she smiled and her eyes were so wide. I felt like I wasn't looking at my wife anymore. Love that immediate turn to psychological horror, by the way. Yeah. Hey. I mean like it reminds me of a But it reminds me, I feel like I've brought this up on the story before. There used to be this great short film on YouTube that was, that was what Kronenberg film. I think this is when I think his wife had gotten breast cancer or has dealt with cancer. I know that she had just recently passed, which is why he made his latest movie, The Shrouds. But there was this, I believe it was a Kronenberg short film, but it was called The Nest. It was about this woman, it was like the POV of a doctor walking in, almost like I found a photo style, but it was just his POV, I don't think there's a camera. But her top was off, and she was like basically like these, there's insects crawling around my breast. I want them, I want both my breasts removed, and the guy was like kind of playing in this way where he was treating it like a psychological horror. It was only like 14 minutes long, but it's this idea that was kind of fun where it's, he's like, okay, well, we can like look into it and do whatever and it looked like, it was just a fun thing of like, oh, is this like is she just insane or is there actually something there? Because it kind of like sways, both ways through the, through the film, but I just love these psychological turns of like having to deal with somebody who's like, there's something wrong with my body, or like, I have to remove my hair because it's the same sensation. Like, I think that that only develops and evolves. You know, there's, I think that's like such a slippery slope. So I just, I love that turn here. Um, I'm, I'm freaked out. I'm not going to like just, I'm just thinking about these long legs and yeah, have you ever miss someone while you're still, 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 tell her about work and she'd tell me about how she scrubbed to the bedroom, topped to bottom looking for spiders or started pulling up the bathroom tiles to check for nests. 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, which 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 the 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 partially bald 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 to visit her, but in the meantime I had to call her parents and it was, well, it was a relief because I wasn't alone anymore. Other people knew what was going on and that made it a little easier for me to navigate. Well then, I'd been afraid to mention it to anyone. I guess I was a little embarrassed, or maybe just not sure what etiquette was for discussing someone else's mental health. She was only gone about a night, not even 12 hours, really. The neighbors agreed not to press 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's 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 moths? Step into a room with thousands of them. This is oversimplification, of course. It's a special program that involves gradual increases in the nature of the exposure. The first night she called me and told me they'd had her looking at pictures of a spider and 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 the 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. Exposure therapy to spiders sounds like the worst thing ever. Yeah, this idea of, like, slowly gradually raising it up to, I like to think that it's going to be this thing where she starts becoming too comfortable with them. She becomes almost needy or dependent on them, maybe even starts talking to them. I feel like that seems like I'm sure that's a real thing, but thinking about it as a person who is completely ignorant of how it actually works, it does make you think that it's like, yeah, if you, it just feels like you're exchanging one extreme for another, right? Like almost like if you're in this kind of shattered or cracked broken place, healing it with, like, overexposure of the thing that is like breaking you, I feel like it would like crack you in a different way. Does that make sense? Yeah. I think, I think if you're already at such an unstable point, maybe it like goes the other direction. I agree. But I'm also looking at it. I do. This is a real thing that's apparently like yeah, super, do they just make you touch spiders or something? I think it's just getting you introduced to the thing that like what spiders are like like the pictures, curtunity pictures to where you see that like over time one, it isn't like they can't hurt you immediately or whatever, but I think just making it more introduced to like trick your brain because your brain is apparently going on like, I mean, I would assume like a fight or flight kind of response. Yeah. So I think it's like gradually doing it to where you're like receptors in your brain don't like immediately trigger that thing and you like have a full blown panic attack. I think it's just kind of like slowly. It's like almost weaning somebody off drugs. You don't do it immediately kind of have to like slowly, you know, it becomes a little less, a little less every time until your body like isn't fully dependent on it anymore. Okay. So this is, this is not from like a PubMed or anything. This is from some wellness website. But according to them, it seems spider exposure therapy and order goes from pictures to cartoons to like spider toys to watching videos of them to seeing a live one in a jar. Now they do virtual reality spider simulation. Listen to recordings of spider sounds. I don't know about that. It's got to be, it has to have some kind of success to it to be sure it does. I mean, it's a very like exposure therapy is a well-documented thing that has a ton like here's a, I think this is PubMed. No, this is the NIH National Institute of Health, like showing graphs about how well it works. So I'm sure it's a thing, but, uh-huh. Okay. All right. No, it's funny because in like the last recording or the last one that got posted, I talked about how it's been a while since we've gotten scared in a story. And you know what? I mean, in my words right now, I just want to say I'm very happy that we didn't read this before. We were in that fucking basement. Oh, my gosh, because that would be, there was so, um, yeah, that would be. There were bugs everywhere. Yeah. This actually would have been helpful. It's right there. Just freak. Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. 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 doctors confirmed as much hardgoing for sure. They had to sedate her 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, a 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. What is a money spider? Is it a money spider? Oh. That's what people call them. Those are just, I always call those house spiders or asking. 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 wept up in the back of the kitchen covered. 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 sit 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 what little out of 11, brother, you lead with these things. You can talk about your fucking crazy spider girl, but you're not going to bring up, you have dementia. What? Come on, man, pacing people, pacing, we got to figure this out. I guess that's supposed to help make sense of things, right? I don't know. It doesn't feel like it makes sense to me. It's not like Alzheimer's runs in my family. They say the neurons of human brain with Alzheimer's looks like a cop web that's had holes poked in it. It's a good way to describe how my mind feels to live inside. Thoughts travel along a given route and then just drop off. I feel like that's a fucking set up and a half. I mean, the whole thing, too, so he keeps leaving all these like cutesy little endings to paragraphs being like, yeah, thoughts travel along, given round and then just drop off the same way that, I don't know, cocoons and spiders keep dropping off at my house. Also the Alzheimer's, that's kind of a fun parallel that they say neurons of the human brain with Alzheimer's look like cobwebs that have holes poked in it. It does make it seem like maybe, which is, would be an interesting concept of like a person with dementia, like attracts, I mean, like a spider insects or something, you know, like your your brain waves to give off some kind of eye. I don't know, just kind of a cool thought. - I think what it might be implying is that this spider is like a supernatural thing because he mentioned when she threw it off of her. He was like, I didn't exactly see it. I just know it was big. So it's almost hinting to the idea that something about the spider's appearance doesn't look like a normal spider. And also now it's eating like mice and birds and stuff like that, so it's growing. But it's like caused her to lose her mind as it's causing him to lose his mind just in different ways. He may not actually have dementia. It could just be like the spider's effects causing it. - I wanna know how much he's forgetting. - Yeah. - He hasn't, you know what I mean? - Yeah. It can't be like, maybe the whole house is just covered in webs right now and he's walking around like thousands of spiders. He's like, yeah, I saw a bird outside. That was kind of weird. - Yeah, I don't know. I think like there's the way that piecing that in. Kind of throwing that, actually, it was random but throwing that in, not at the top, actually makes sense for a dementia patient. So I actually have a lot to do. - Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this. - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, I bet you fucking did forget the measurement. - Yeah, right on time, yeah. Lily's there, people dress nicely though. I remember that quite clearly. The phone calls and the sound of her voice, real vivid. God, I missed, God, I missed her so bad during this time. I hate being overly sentimental, but it had been tough in lonely six weeks and hearing her 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 wanted her back. And when she told me, giggling with joy, that she'd held a little spider on day 10, I burst out crying right with her. I felt pride at her accomplishment and I felt relieved 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 I didn't reach my eyes because the woman who got into the car looked 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 her couple of youths to work in 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. She told me photos of her setting next to big house spiders some as wide as her palm. Had to fight back my own fear while looking at them. She told me that was day 13. But when I asked what happened on day 14, she said it was mostly just packing up and saying goodbye. There's 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, been 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 class giggling like a toddler. It wasn't the light and airy laughter of the woman I was used to. It was more like the laughter of a bunch of kids egging on a fighter cheering on an 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 feet. Flicking it gently with her fingers. When I walked around the table I 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. Brother, I think that would be big anywhere. Yeah, I thought we'd call it like in what fucking human is like, that's pretty small. I mean, I mean like my god, it's big. I mean, I guess if you're like South America or Southeast Asia, a big spider is like larger than your head, I get that. But you know what, dude, between us we'll call it big together. How's that said? Yeah, I mean, I will graciously call that big, okay? Just for you, buddy. This thing was even bigger with legs bundled up against the side of the glass like spools of segmented wool and seeing it maybe jump way back. I realized I hadn't seen another spider since the night of the storm. And that thing all crawled up with legs as thick as hair pins was a real shock to my system, cried out in 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 happy, but in a way that was a little alien because I didn't understand the thoughts and feelings that went into that 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 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 her patchy hair and gleeful teary eyes and I got so desperate to break the standoff that I stammered out the words. He's a big one, Amy. Her face relaxed. Her shoulders slumped. She slipped out of the crazy, like it was only ever an outfit. They'll get bigger. (laughing) Hit the road, Jack. And don't you come back no more, no more, no more, no more. Hit the road, Jack. And don't you come back no more. My wife's a spider. Hit the road, Jack. Don't you come back no more. Yeah. No, I, uh. No, no, no, no. What point actually? 'Cause listen, I know what point do you tell you why. I mean, at what point do you tell me why? I mean a lot by immediately leaving my partner. Leaving your wife. In any kind of distrustful moment. Yeah, I know. But at what point do you actually say this is like a, this is a broken person. She's been back not too long. But how long would this have to go on for you to just be like, I, because this is what I always wonder. When you are in a relationship with somebody like this, like people, people who stick by, people like, there's this, I forgot what it was. There's a person who's in a car wreck and the wife stayed with the husband, even though he was basically a vegetable. I mean, like he like, I think he didn't have a lot of brain activity. And it's this thing where there's this deep sea of love, whatever. At what point, I think is it different if the person has gone mentally? Oh, I would say. I thought you were about to say it. What point is it okay to leave an injured spouse? No, no, no, I say that there's an honorable thing. The problem leads to another problem. Like, I think you see that a lot was like, you know, spouses that have head injuries and become violent, right? Like you can't be expected to stay with that person. Well, there's that. And I think exactly at what point do you say, like I don't want to get to that point? Yeah, you know, like when I see this and then like it's man, also manic laughing catching this spider. I mean, like you would only assume that it gets worse at what point do you are you actually able to walk away and not be like, I hate myself forever for being a coward and leaving you know, at at this specific level, we're at where she's just like, oh, they'll get bigger and laughing about spiders, not now, not now, not now. But I think this might be, I, hey, honey, I'm going to go stay with my mom for the night. I guess the way that it's being read right now, it feels like there's little cohesion of like, she's almost like has the mental understanding of like, not the mental understanding of toddler, but she cognitive function. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Exactly. And if this went on every day, like I personally would be like that it would be extremely challenging. Like that would be like that's also, it's fundamentally a completely different person than who you were in a relationship with before. I think I think it's obviously a hard question, but a situation like this for someone you know, has an, you can see it as an injury or a snap that leads to, I think this is time to maybe take a step back and get her another kind of help, you know, I would have your therapy obviously worked a little too well. Maybe another. I would have. I would have a stamp card and I would give it, I would give it 10 goofs before I'd have to punch that free pizza ticket and then be like, all right, I think I think I'm, I think I'm lickity splitting right now, you know, I mean, right now she just got out of the, the goddamn hurtlocker. You know what I mean? I mean, come on, give her some grace, but if it just, I mean, I don't know, once again, I'm just saying, got the puncher in hand, got the card. This is a punch. This is one step closer to your free coupon. I agree. Your free shape. This is me doing. Yeah. I do. I turn around. I'll slip it on my Wrangler jeans, I do. I put it right back in my, my, my jean pocket. Yeah. But you know how he's, I wonder what would justify a stamp, though. You turn back around, baby, feeling pizza, she's just like, Oh la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, no, what? Turn back around, like, like, like, like, like, like it. Back, back, back, clicks. It's getting worse, Greg. I've done four clicks in the last two minutes. Just six more, buddy. Just hang in there. Hey, is your, is your mom, is your mom coming over this weekend? Oh, just the spiders. Got it. Yeah. I don't know looking to the trees. Oh, that is so cool. So how many until you abandoned your family? Oh, it's got to be a 10. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a total punch card. And that's the universal punch card system. On the 10th purchase, you get a free one. You get the free now. That's the free, the free, the free, the, yeah, yeah. And then she lifted the glass, snatch the spider up, and stuffed it into her mouth. (laughing) That is a punch card. That's the, that's the rest of the punch card. That is a, that is a, you do not pass a code. You do not collect two under it. You just get the rest of them. I do imagine he had his hand, his phone in his hand, who's like calling for like Chinese takeout and he does, all right, so you're full. (laughing) You know what? I'll just go get it myself, honey. No reason to order that. Yeah. And he never comes back. I was the same time though. I hate to see this, but that would kind of, that would kind of turn me on a little bit. If I'm in honest, just a little bit. Just, just a hair. What? Just, just a spider's hair length. If my lady, if my, if my lady was like, I am deathly afraid and she's fucking picked up and ate it, I would be like, that is fucking kind of badass. Okay. It's disgusting, but that sounds like something I would say. Second of all, there is nothing attractive about her putting a spider in her mouth. I just, I have got to see the disagree. She's got the beef of a dead of thing going on right now. GI Jane, bald ass head, eating that stuff. I didn't see it, not fully, but I stood, frozen in terror, and watched the muscles in her badly shaved head, tense and relaxed as her jaw worked away, crunching at those hardened legs. God, sounds were bad enough, but when she was done, she looked over her shoulder at me and smiled, and her teeth were smeared green and black with little bits of, with little bits of a leg and hide and still stuck between the gums. Oh, I, I don't know if I like that. I also don't like that, that's kind of the, that's kind of a no go for any person. If you have a big bowl of pasta, spaghetti, and you're chewing down on it, you know, fucking reason you should be smiling with all that sauce. Like, yeah, she's gone, mentally gone. I'm going to take a couple of liberties and step away, and like I said, punch the rest of them. I'm like, okay, well, I don't know. I need to feel better. I'm going to hold this until I feel better. I'm not entirely sure what happened next, but now I knew why it felt so good. No different around her since she'd come back. I was afraid of her. Like, I thought, really, what made you think of that? 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. I couldn't have told you what was on half the time. I had every ounce of my being was focused on her, every breath, every motion. When she got up to use the 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. Uh, let me, I need to find Kayla's keys. I'll be back in a second. While he's gone, that would be kind of unsettling. Having a, uh, heavy girl knowing that she just ate a spider and you're all freaked out, elevated heart rate and the only thing you're not really looking at the TV, you're watching her, she's like getting up to go take a shit and you're like watching her walk away and all you hear, and you're all you hear and you're left ears just. I'll be watching the whole time here, blown out the bathroom. I did this girl one time. She's like, where's your bathroom? It was right behind us. I had a couch in the living room and it was all right there and I hadn't, we, we, her, my buddy and all right, he's like my roommate. We're sitting there. We were watching. I think, uh, I don't know some Daniel, they lose film who fucking last moheekens or some shit. I was like, I don't know. I don't know. She was dropping like mad bombs. This bad toilet, those bad porcelain farts where it's like all, you just like ricocheting off every fiber of that porcelain bowl. My roommate was like, God, damn, she comes back out and she was like, uh, did you hear that? Well, hell yeah, we heard it. She was like, yeah, I was trying to put on a show for you. And that was the last time I associated with that girl. That was not a good time. I was trying to put on a show for you all. What a time. She had a pretty smile though, so big wasn't that good. Never mind. That was cold. Diet Coke. I tell you, when I was a, when I was a younger man, did not care for Diet Coke now. Oh, you'd have to pry it for my hands. A nice cold can of Diet Coke. Oh, shit. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Give me those chemicals. The hell's in this? There's an aspartane baby. Like, what were you doing? I was just chatting with them while you're gone. So they were going to dead. I found the key. So apologies for that. Anyway, no problem. Nights were bad. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The hell's in this. Nights were bad. A lot of the time I'd wake and get the feeling 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. I thought it was probably just in my head. But the one night I woke up and she was right there, face inches away from mine. I cried out. Couldn't help it. Shuffled backwards while trying to avoid touching her, 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 a fly. What are you doing? Cryed 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. She'd say a word as I grabbed my things and left the bedroom. I wasn't sure I would manage to fall asleep after that. But I did. 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 pitfully, if at all. I woke up 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. Life without sleep was difficult, and I struggled to hide my dislike for Lily. Over time, our habits and routines diverged even further apart. I stopped going upstairs almost entirely, just didn't need to. I had work and sofa and the kitchen, and the days when I came back and barely saw Lily at all refined by me. I preferred being away from her, something that kind of broke my heart, if I'm honest. There were times I didn't want to reach out, but Licking at her gave me the funniest feeling to my stomach. I didn't want to change things, didn't want to get closer. If anything, I wanted to run away. Then I don't mean that I wanted to flee my life in adult responsibilities in some abstract way. I mean, I felt a powerful urge 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'd realized I'd forgotten to pay for the repairs to the wall. I think it slipped my mind. Emphasis on things, because I don't remember what I have and haven't forgotten. I just nailed some plywood over and left it in 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 toolkit in the kitchen that wasn't mine. I might have called someone out for a quote. I don't know. But once I remembered that I'd never actually fixed the whole, I was filled with this shame and embarrassment, and I decided the best thing to do was to face it head on and go apologize to my neighbor. Okay, finding the toolkit and thinking he called someone out, is this spider just killing people? I can't tell if it's the spider or if it's just the woman who I think might be becoming a spider. I'm unsure. It's hard to say. Controlling spiders like Willard, who controlled rats. Remember that? Oh, yeah. I do remember that. How, how spider-like does your wife have to become before you leave her? I don't know. I mean, if I. are you saying that she's also growing new limbs and stuff or are you saying that she's just like literally, well, maybe, is that an extra limb? I think I'd be kind of stoked on like, if my wife had four arms, like, she was goro. That would be kind of cool, right? That would be kind of sick and she had like four, it'd be kind of, I don't know. I mean, like, honestly, if she was shitting webs, like, that would be, that would be for me. I'd be like, we got to, we got to cut that out. I don't know if I just want to see a bear asshole day shitting webs, like, I don't know. I would agree. Can you give it the cookies? The extra set of arms could be cool though, but I feel like four eyes, no, no, no, I feel like the extra eyes would be a no go as well. I don't know. I can see a world where I would, I would be into it. You'd be down for that. If they were human eyes, though, not the black spot, yeah, what if like, what if she gets like these little mandible, like, pinch her mouth? I mean, come on, wait, what's that, what's that pinch your knife, you know what I mean? Yeah, I like a little areas, I like a little tug and poke, why not, what, come on? I was like, just bite a little bit, there is pinch just a little bit, ooh, just a bit. That's what I thought. All right. I never knew a lot about the guy. He was an older man who liked his football, and I had to nose like a tomato, and spent most nights in the pub. I knew he looked alone though, and when I knocked his door and there was no answer, it wasn't too strange. At least it 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 I knocked a couple more times, figuring he maybe hadn't heard me, but there was still no answer. I found this weird. It didn't seem like the kind of guy who'd avoid a neighbor he didn't like. He just opened the door and told you to screw off. I went back and looked, but couldn't see anything through his windows, and all I could see looking through his letterbox was a grey sheet across the opening. When my fingers came away, covered in a sticky thread, I had this terrible feeling in my stomach. I couldn't have possibly explained how, but I was convinced that Lillia 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 tarps over half-drunk cups of coffee and plates of multi-food, and the material that covered everything was cloudy, and made of thread, and obviously some kind of silk. Took a lot of effort to control the urge to just hop the fence back and pretend like I never saw a damn thing. But if he needed some kind of help, I knew I had to at least try. Brave Amanda me. I would have just said, "Well, he's dead." I looked briefly at the stoop by the back door. There was a lighter on the ground, where someone had dropped it. It was strangely conspicuous, and made me think that whoever had left it there had done so in a hurry. It didn't make sense that someone would drop it there and not notice. Not unless they had been otherwise occupied. I picked it up and went 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. I couldn't think of anything worse than having to push ahead, but I tried to handle and it 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 cop webs that got thicker and thicker as my eyes drifted deeper into the house. I couldn't help but wonder if there 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. At the hallway out of the kitchen, I had been turned into a web-line tunnel. No straight lines, just a dark silky womb who's rounded funnel walls fluttered gently in the breeze. I stared into, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not. It's a great stuff. It's an all the visuals and stuff. I feel like I'm there in that room. It's fucking awesome. It's so well-written that the, the details fantastic. I feel like I, I feel everything he's wanting me to feel right now. I feel the uneasiness, the tension. I also don't want him to go into that room because then I'm going to have to read about it. Man, I stared intently into that dark. This reminds me actually, did you ever watch that movie Kingdom of the Spiders? It was an old, it was one of those old B monster movies and it had the original Captain Kirk. What's his name? William Shatter. William Shatter in it. And it was about this town in like the desert who a bunch of spiders start showing up and they're like tarantulas, but they're just super venomous and they live in colonies and they bite people and people die. And that's all they do. They don't get giant or anything, but they build these big webs and they'll web up bodies. And I remember being a kid and being so terrified by the shots of like people bloodied and like wrapped up in webs. It's a great thing. I mean, it's, it's forever scary. Oh, it's forever scary. And the movie ends with one of the guys gets knocked out and he comes to and there's a few survivors who drug him into a room in town and they've like covered up all of the air pockets and vents and stuff like that with clothes. And the camera pans out and the entire town is underneath the giant web like this. That's fun. And that's just how it ends. And I was terrified of that for a long time and I'm getting flashbacks to that now that same feeling. No straight lines, just a dark silky womb whose rounded funnel walls flutter gently in the breeze. I stared intently into that darkness, trying my best to see if there was the shape of a man's corpse cocoon somewhere in the 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 explode. It was almost in the kitchen before my heart had time to skip a beat. And then it stopped halfway 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, God, it took me another minute just for my brain 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 tears 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 and static. 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, whose front limbs and mouthy feelers spread out like tinge rolls and gripped the doorway, it was ready to pounce on whatever it had sent disturbances through its web. I've read that spiders can be a little like Venus fly traps. They won'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 had approached the initial alarm and half blind. It waited for another hint of something trapped inside its web. I had to wonder, lifting my shoe count, did I have a choice? Man, this is so just the tension and the moment. And also, in all these giant spider movies, the spiders always move so slow. But having it be like the speed of a normal spider just that big, I couldn't stay there. Looking at the damn thing was bringing me closer and closer to 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. Spider didn't move. As soon as both feet were outside, I let go of the door handle and felt something sticky to touch from my palm. It feels like an exaggeration to say that lightning moves slower. Oh my god. I'm sure most of you have seen a nature documentary with one of those fish or maybe even a trap door spider and you thought, oh shit, 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, woolly 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 forearms. They moved independent of each other and something about the side of all those wheel spoke legs and segment of joints clumped together. in its thorax sent my mind reeling. I said at the beginning of this that a lifetime of exposure had helped curb my arachnophobia, 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 neighbor's former living room. It wasn't actually pitch black, but it did take a few terrifying minutes for my eyes to adjust 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 was 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 a half inch of the stuff and felt like I was wearing ten layers of lycra, that was too small. There's a tiny bit of give enough to let me move my fingers or toes or even bend an knee just for action, but that was it. It was horrifying. I'm not exactly claustrophobic, 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 hooked into it, then maybe I could start tearing away? I was desperate, but the more I found, the more I realized it was hopeless. The silk was elastic and strong and covered in the thick, stodgy glue that only further limited my movement as everything I did spread it around until it was gumming my legs and hands together. Wasn't until exhaustion caught up to me and I was forced to take a short break that 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 and forgotten tomb. So thin and desiccated, you could hook a finger under the tendons in his neck and jaws. I nearly cried when I realized I'd risk everything to save a dead man, but that wasn't actually true. The air in my thinking became apparent when he opened his eyes and glared at me with pure, unbridled tear. 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 plopped 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. "It's okay." My neighbor's entire body relaxed. His eyes vacant and confused as it slowly knelt down beside me and stroked my head. She said pressing a single finger to my lips. "It's okay, it's gonna be okay." I managed to wiggle my fingers into my pocket, hit another punch on the punch guard. From the cocoon that's right here. It's been a while since the story's bothered me this much. Honestly, I can't. This is how I remember feeling when we were reading stolen tongues with the part about the thing that was wearing the native guy's skin. This is the same feeling only. It's much longer. I'll tell you what, man. Christian Wallace, he knows how to phrase his stories. While I'm afraid of spiders in real life, I didn't think a story about them would bother me, but here we are and it's because of the way he says things. Behind her 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 fuck?" "I told you they'd get bigger." She said nodding towards the spider, my neighbor just spat on at the floor. "You won't be in a real help." She touched my neighbor's head, but he barely responded. She just gazed vacantly as she rolled him over so that he was facing away from me. "We're such a clever animal." She added as she parted his hair. "I'm always curious about it, just how much you miss." Something was clamped around the back of his head, a throbbing bulb of molten brown skin and hair. It looked like a spider without legs. A tick maybe? That's what I thought it was until my wife ran a finger playfully along its back, my neighbor let out a gut wrenching squeal of pain. Slowly, the shape seemed to wriggle and rise and long thin legs emerged from beneath its body, and I realized I was looking at a spider wrapped tied 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 to the incision and sliding it back into place. Every inch disappeared with a gruesome wet sound. It displaced muscle and hair. When it came to rest, I realized just how much shape and the skull had become from all those legs wrapped tied around his head. "What the fuck? Do you ever find it weird that you came over what it looked like?" The thing came running out of her hand. She asked before reaching over to stroke my head. Nothing I want to claim any dignity right now, but that is my bear trap. When I said him throwing it on the ground, I was like, "You know, I'm out to something looks like I was right, but I'm also miserable, so who cares?" Her hand came away, covered in cobwebs. Something about her touch revolted me. It sent strange shivers coursing through my body. A deep primordial need to get away came over me. That strange revolution all over again. The same one that it taunted me over and over again over the last few weeks. Without even meaning to, I found myself convulsing and panicking. My body tried to thrash violently, but with every limb constricted by that silk I could do nothing except ride around 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 it was no use. I could do nothing except glare at my wife in the enormous shadow behind her. The one that towered above us both, its great legs clustering around the floor, sealing. At some point I grabbed onto my trousers and clenched my fist and felt something small and hard, the lighter. I knew there was 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 to tilt her head like a curious dog as I clenched my fist around the small object and used every ounce of willpower I had left to fight the violent seizures that racked my body and thumbed the trigger. The web went up and flames immediately must have been the glue, but the flames exploded across the silk like they'd 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 and put out the flames. 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 thrashed 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 tender 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 the choking sun. The only escape was the back door, and I stumbled towards it, but was stopped the last moment by the side of my wife standing there. You really are such a fascinating sp- I've barreled past her, but to my surprise, she offered no resistance. I merely merged into the open air. My lungs gasping desperately for clean air as I collapsed onto long, unkempt grass. I looked over my shoulder, saw orange tongues of fire were already leaping out of the windows on the upper floor. Left uncontrolled, the fire would rage and consume the entire row of tares 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 wasn't over. Literally sitting on the fence. I don't know how she got there, but she looked completely undisturbed. I never once imagined that when that when blew me into your home, I'd meet such an interesting pair of people. What a fun mind to sink my legs into. Really had no idea what I was going to find. I did months ago, as a matter of fact, there were some incapabilities and it just made sense to move homes. She pointed at me and smiled. I've enjoyed living inside your head quite a bit. That explains his forgetfulness, not remembering things and all that. Struggling to make sense of her words, but still somehow aware of their terrifying implications, I placed one hand on the back of my head and felt it. Felt 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 a relationship has to lie. forever to be meaningful. I lit my hair on fire. My last memories were of heat and a sudden release of pressure. I couldn't possibly describe it to you. Not really. Something slid out of my skull and lily waved 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's also, I'm assuming, that lily never made it out of therapy. She was always gone and the spider just gave him the apparition of her. Yeah, I don't know, I'm like, well, let's finish it and see. 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 trepination. He said I must have practiced it on my wife, at least based on the body they found in my neighbor's house, but I can't really be sure of anything. I am forever tipping in and out of reality, writing this down, it's been difficult. I'm not entirely aware where I am right now. One doctor told me I might make some kind of recovery if it was just a normal brain damage, but he never seen anything like it, so it 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's one orderly who's 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. He 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 worry because he was going to keep an eye on me, 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 or anything to go by. What a funding. Do you think that the spiders are real, or do you think they're just a manifestation in his mind? I think that, no, I think they're real because what started all was the windy day when one blew in and then got in her hair and he thought it pulled it out, but she was actually infected by the spider that had burrowed into her brain and then his brain. Now they've gotten to either, I guess he orderly has it because of the cobwebs in his hair or they're back in him. The trepidation thing means it like burrows into the skull. That's what the doctors suspect happened. That's what led to him like burning down the neighbor's house and stuff. So I think I think at the very least the spider that's in his brain is real. Maybe not the giant one in the house, and I'll think the visage of his wife was real, but yeah. Her shaving her head and stuff makes me think that that's what she was trying to get the thing off. Yeah. The back of her head. Yeah, yeah. I think, well, I think she was, and that's what she's talking about, spiders in the walls because there was one in her head, but he was also under the influence somehow because if she had a shaved head and he didn't see it, that could be the dementia, could be the thing he's forgetting. I think by that time he was already or he was also infected, yeah. Yeah. I think by that time he was already hooked. Yeah. For sure. That's a great story though. That was very creepy. Fantastic. Dude, I can't remember being that scared of a story in a while. That was a, that was one, two where I feel like the ending had a really fun payoff as well. Yeah. Which doesn't happen a lot. No, sometimes the ending and like the explanations kind of sours it, but I feel like the spider and the brain thing is a good, a good fit there and I like the neighbor and then like it's obviously the webs, everything webbed up and stuff like that. I think that's all awesome. I think it's all very well done. Okay. Well, excellent spider story, Christian Wallace, link in the description. The goat, be sure to check out his publications like with teeth and also the CH Wallace website. It's a ton of cool stories on there. With that hunter, are you ready to make it even worse? As you say, let's dig in. It's fun that we're doing another one too because the, I'm very curious. I love the title of this one, the force of a thousand legs. Having a double feature. It's going to be fun to see. Does this one hurt you as much too? I'm curious. If it's just, if, if now that we've read one, does this one also just, is it like, you know, pins and needles with how your approach is you're already affected? You know? No, no, no. It's going to hit even deeper. Maybe make everything worse. Perhaps. Yeah. So this is by, this is a nine year old story by a user named Lavinsky, who it seems they were pretty active in these online communities like no sleep and stuff like that. But this is the only story at least that I see from this account they posted to no sleep. And then they also posted to our slash Creepy, which I'm not sure if that's a story and it's an offsite link. And then a lot of like Creepy art and things like that. So they're into the creepy, but this seems to be their one no sleep story. So, but it has 2.7 thousand upvotes. So to have one, one story that does that well is pretty impressive. So we're going to see how it goes. I feel like my heart rate's elevated right now. I know. You're primed. Oh, all right. See, a Lavinsky will be and the original story will be linked in the description. Be sure to show them some love and if it's good, Lavinsky, hopefully you decide to ride again. I'm already so scared. All right. Hunter. Are you ready? Les Louis. Let's do it. Okay. Little Lucy Lockett ran from her daddy's frying pan. The force of a thousand legs killed her and then laid their eggs. Goddamn. I don't know if that's a fun poll. What do we getting? To the point, I appreciate that. That's a jump rope rhyme. My classmates used to sing on the playground in elementary school. It's really screwed up that they sang that because Lucy Lockhart was a real person we attended school with. She vanished when we were in second grade, so we must have been around 7 years old. The rhyme was loosely based in truth and that the official story was that Lucy Lockhart did in fact vanish into the Lockhart wood, 50 yards from her father, Robert's house. But he wasn't chasing after her brandishing a frying pan to beat her with. I was too young at the time to understand what was happening and it wasn't until much later that my mom actually explained it to me. Wasn't a particularly shocking story to sad. I remember the day Lucy went missing. At least the first day she didn't come to school. It was Monday. She went missing the Friday before. My mother told me it was a few days before Lucy's seventh birthday and that Lucy had asked her father if she could have a birthday party at the house. I remember that. Lucy and I had been in the same group of friends and I remember her telling us that she was going to ask her dad about having a birthday sleepover. I especially remember being annoyed that she wanted it to be a sleepover because I was the only boy in the group and was never allowed to sleep over with them. I was still excited at the prospect of a party though, as we all were, because we knew her father Robert Lockhart Jr. was a retired entomologist or we just called him the bug man. He had lots of pretty preserved specimens like butterflies and beetles and cases that Lucy would sometimes bring in for show and tell. Anyway, according to my mother, Lucy asked her father if she could have a sleepover for her birthday and he said no because she was going to spend her birthday at her mother's house while their house was being fumigated. It was a normal enough reason for a six-year-old to cry and storm out of the house, but running into the Lockhart wood was a bad idea for any person of any age without the proper equipment. Here's the thing about the Lockhart wood. Some people call it the forest of a thousand legs, presumably to make it sound creepier than it already is. It doesn't need help. There are roughly 4,000 species of spider in America, and the Lockhart wood is a phenomenon on its own in that it's home to all of them. Not only that, but there are documented populations of some spiders previously thought endemic only to certain countries such as the Goliath bird eater, a couple of funnel web spiders, and some species of peacock spiders. Here's that myth that says you're never more than three feet from a spider at any given moment. In this forest, it's not a myth, it's filled with the brim of spiders. I think at this point it goes without saying that if you're a racquet phobic, the story is not for you. What is a peacock spider? I'm going to type this in and I'm going to immediately regret it. Because I know what the other two are, oh, I've seen these guys are cute. That's not scary. The Goliath bird eater, those fucking insane. Yeah. Have you seen pictures of people holding those things? Yeah. They're like, you're higher now. It's crazy. They're massive. And then the funnel webs are like super venomous. They're the most venomous spider, and Australia at least, I think the world, unless the Brazilian wonder is considered more venomous now. Yeah, peacock spiders are cute, jumping spiders are cute, and velvet spiders are cute. They don't bother me. I would have to pet one of those, I think. But yeah, the, like I said, as long as the story doesn't mention any orb weavers, we're good. We'll be fine. I'll get through it. I'll be okay. Because I'm stronger than my fear. My fear does not control me. I control it. Of course, it's naturally of great interest to biologists and arachnologists, but Lockhart Wood is private property, and restricted guided access to the forest was hard to come by even before Lucy Lockhart's disappearance. Afterwards, nobody could go in. Obviously, anyone could get into the forest if they wanted to. It's not fenced off or anything, but there's a steep fine if you're caught trespassing. And nobody's exactly clamoring to delve into a forest full of venomous spiders anyway. You need the right kind of boots, clothes, gloves, first aid kits, and knowledge of the forest to step past the tree line. The most common spiders at the edge of the forest are jumping spiders, various wandering spiders and orb weavers. Most people who emerge from the forest have a number of banana trees. I'm so freaked out from the previous story that just descriptions of these are bothering me now. And I hate it so much. I'm so freaked out right now. But we have banana spiders all the time around here. They're also like a kind of orb. We have to check the ceiling stuff. Most people emerge from the forest have a number of banana spiders clinging into their hair and jackets startled by the destruction of their webs. If visitors are a lot deeper into the forest, the spiders get bigger and they lurk on the ground. According to my mother, Robert Lockhart Jr. lived with his father in that house for a long time. They were a father-son duo of entomologists from Alabama, but Robert Lockhart Sr. had focus on a racknology. He had bought the house and the forest specifically for its spider population, which also made it super affordable and he usually worked from home. Robert Lockhart Jr. did a lot of work at a university three towns over. He married a professor there who taught evolutionary biology, and the three of them lived in the elder Robert Lockhart's house until Robert seniors suddenly passed during the study on tarantula hawks. Lucy Lockhart was born a year later, and Robert Jr. was able to retire from teaching and live as a stay-at-home dad while Lucy's mother continued teaching at the university. He still worked collecting and preserving specimens, mostly butterflies and moths, and had reports published in the entomology scene. And very, very rarely, led guided tours around parts of Lockhart Wood for a price. My mother only got to know Robert Jr. once Lucy and I became friends. She said he didn't talk about the forest very much. She got the feeling that he was afraid of it. When he and his wife divorced, my mom suspected part of their irreconcilable differences was Lockhart Wood. She never really pried into it after all. Lucy and Robert Jr. only spent time together because Lucy and I spent time together. Although I remember hoping they would get married so that Lucy and I could be brother and sister. Robert Jr. hated the forest he owned and made sure that anybody who stepped but in it was dressed and prepared for the occasion, which is part of the reason why my mother never believed he killed Lucy when he was the prime suspect in the investigation. When Lucy ran off into Lockhart Wood that evening, my mom said Robert Jr. gave chase without hesitation. It sucks sweat pants and a t-shirt. Must have received dozen bites of varying severity the second he went in. He was in there for four hours. My mom was working at a night shift at the hospital when he was brought in, delirious and swollen over. There's no telling how many bites he'd received and to this day my mother doesn't know how he survived. He needed to antivenom that no hospitals in the United States could offer and when he had dragged himself back home after desperately searching for Lucy in that forest, he could only self-administer so much. Maybe luck in a developed resistance was what saved him. Lost both legs below the knee, but he lived. From what my mom could gather in the weeks following Lucy's disappearance, the investigation was chaotic. Search teams entered the forest, but they never spanned it all. Two officers in the initial search team were bitten by what was most likely a Sydney Funnel Web Spider and unfortunately both died. After all, the Sydney Funnel Web Spider is otherwise found only in Australia. Don't have that antivenom at the ready here in the States. Anyway, the search of the forest lasted maybe a week before branching off elsewhere. My mom says they couldn't, maybe wouldn't search the whole forest. More than one officer who searched Lockhart Wood left the forest and subsequently skipped town. Those who didn't leave might as well have. They don't get out much anymore. My mom doesn't want to know what they saw in there. Lucy never turned up. It didn't take long for suspicion to fall on her father before he was even discharged from the hospital. My mom says there was a point where he was handcuffed to his hospital bed, even though both of his legs had been amputated. For a while, she couldn't tell if he was totally lucid because he would spend hours sobbing. The forest got her. Those spiders got my baby girl. There's no evidence to convict him of kidnapping or murder. My mom and the parents of Lucy's other friends, mine, were involved in the trial as witnesses. And they all insisted that they never had any reason to believe Robert Junder was abusive towards Lucy or that he would be driven harder. I didn't know any of this at the time as my mom responsibly sheltered me from the details of Lucy's disappearance, but obviously some other kids we went to school with got wind of some information, hence the morbid jump rope rhyme. It upsets me a lot when I hear kids chaining at during recess. I was young, and I missed Lucy very much. It's been 11 years since Lucy went missing. It doesn't really upset me anymore, just a sad mystery that I still think about sometimes. A group of friends that Lucy and I shared stayed close until middle school, and then we all branched out a bit. I don't think any of us ever forgot about Lucy. I recently graduated high school. The original group of us got together at a diner to discuss an amazement now. We were all finally done with high school forever. At one point, I nudged my omelet around my plate and said absolutely, "It's been years, but I still wish, man, I wish Lucy could have graduated with us, you know." My friend Stella leaned her shoulder into mine and knocked our mortar boards together with an understanding smile. Same here, bud, but she'd be proud of us for doing it. Conversation drifted elsewhere, but the point that thought of Lucy stuck with me for a long while after that evening. Was it until the day before I went off from my freshman year at college that I told my mom I wanted to stop by the Lockhart House and sort of say goodbye to Lucy if Robert Jr. would let me. "Well, she shrugged over breakfast?" "I guess he couldn't hurt. You don't ever get over losing a child, but all things he said to her, he seems to be okay. He might have bled you." So later that afternoon, I drove a cross-town towards that dark, looming forest that stretched into the sky on the horizon. I hadn't been to the Lockhart House in over a decade, but the sight of it instantly made me happy. I no longer mourned Lucy. I only cherished the brief time we knew each other as children, and I had lots of fallen memories in that house. As I pulled into the gravel driveway, I saw the curtains in one of the front windows shift, so I knew someone was home. You might not want to let me in, but there was no harm in trying. I went up to the front porch steps and found a wooden hanging of a lunar moth adorning the front door, that had no sign of grime or weathering, and the pale green paint still had its glossy finish, so I guess it was fairly new. I didn't know what I expected from Robert Jr., maybe that he was too far gone after the loss of Lucy that he wouldn't bother decorating anything, but it had been more than ten years, and recovery is possible. I knocked and he answered a few moments later, browning curiously as, at me from the cap in the door. Hey, Mr. Lockhart, I floundered a little stupidly, because I hadn't planned on how I was going to talk to him. I'm Aaron. You know my mom Jane at the hospital? You know it's funny. You see how they have Lepinsky like that in brackets? Yeah. That's because on no sleep, you cannot give the full name of a fictional character. So originally, this was posted with like a fake full name, but you can't do that. So they just inserted their user name for the last name. That's Lepinna. Oh, you get that stalk scene. You can't dox this person in the giant spider story. You can't tell me what a fake character's name is. Deleted. Deleted. I don't care about the quality of writing or art or anything. Why is this? Their name is Butch Cassidy. The door eased open a bit more. His face was relaxing with recognition. Jane's boy. Yes. You're one of Lucy's little friends, weren't you? Come in. Wipe your feet. I was surprised you remember we were friends. I admit it. Step it inside and wiping my feet on the floor mat. It looked like a monarch butterfly. I remember all you kids. Robert Jr. said with a wave of his hand leading me inside his prosthetics clicked on the linoleum. It was Lucy. You Stella. There was two little girls named Hannah, wasn't there? You're the one that cried a lot because you never got to stay for sleepovers. Yes, sir. That was me. You gays on, you game on the top rope, are you gay? Immediately. I didn't realize that Jr. was actually Mr. Wiedmouth. Yeah. Can you drop out the window and clear the shelf? Don't be gay. What about Mr. Wiedmouth? You're way creepier than this. spiders. I like the idea that like Mr. White Mouse is like he's no longer a homophobic he simply just informs people that they are homosexual. Yeah, I don't know if he rises but you are gay. I just want to let you know. Really not even bisexual? Nope. That's excellent Spanish Mr. White Mouse. See. He's like six foot tall where he's like a bath of rum like holy coffee. It was a startingly straightforward question tossed over his shoulder as I followed him into the house. There wasn't anything accusatory in his tone though so I said yes. He grunted. He'd be fun to sleep over with the girls. Could have spared you a lot of wine and then crying. Oh so he was right. He was immediately right for the gay thing. It's funny. He took me past numerous framed bug specimens as we made our way to his living room. It was a big room cluttered with bookshelves and work benches with paper strewn about. Dozens of terrariums of various sizes dotted out of the room and lined the wall like trophy cabinets. The only gap where the din opened into a kitchen. A bright desk lamp illuminated the whole room and the light bounced off a magnifying visor headset and laptop screen. It looked like he had been dissecting a large beetle before I knocked on the door. It was good to see that his passion for bugs had been destroyed after losing his daughter to the lock art wood. So what brings you here Scootler? Yes going into the kitchen to retrieve something from the fridge. Well we graduated in May and I'm leaving for school tomorrow and I just kind of I mean I still think about Lucy a lot so. So I was wondering if you had kept any of her things over the years that I could see and sort of you know remember her by if you're okay with that sir. Robert Jr. came back over to me with a shrug and two beers. He said ain't much a little girl has to her name but a hello kitty bedsheet and baby babies. Oh man baby babies. I can't help a grin at the memory. That was always my go to gift. I give her a bunch of mine. Well you want them back or something? Off my startled look of chakran he chuckled and handed me the second beer. I'm messing with your boy. Rooms this way. He led me down a long familiar hallway down which Lucy and our friends and I had sprinted recklessly over a decade ago. I recognized a few framed insect specimens that we had knocked from the walls and our rough housing fits. We went into Lucy's bedroom at the end of the hall and it was virtually unchanged from how I remembered it. We're still pale pink and decorated with pastel colored cross stitch artwork made by Lucy's late grandmother. The canopy bed was neatly made a hello kitty bedding crisp and unfaded from years of disuse. The shelves upon shelves stuffed animals with an army of beanie babies gifted by me populating their own full shelf and surprisingly long to worry him against the wall with an enormous black spider sitting motionless underneath a black light. Before we get into the spider detail there's something so heartbreaking in all these stories about like and it's true in real life too. When a parent loses a kid in the room is left exactly the same way. It's understandable as to why but there's such a misery to like the waiting for someone who never comes. Yeah. It's a completely frozen time capsule that's just there so you can. I think it's a big part too of basically so you don't lose the memory of them or like who they were. Or something so heartbreaking about a parent tending to an empty room. You know? I recognize that spider. No way that's not. Robert Jr. flipped on the lights which turned off the terrarium's black light. The massive spider retreated into a hide with the twitch of its long slender legs. He grunted. That's her. What's he mean by that's her? He said it because I think that's the that's the the I thought that was the spider or whatever. What? I mean it is a spider. What do you mean you think it's the spider? Lady Legs was the type of huntsman that Robert Lockhart senior had discovered in the Lockhart wood and kept for 10 years before Lucy was born. There were plenty of live specimens in the Lockhart house over the years but Lady Legs was the only one that Lucy seemed to cherish as a pet. Robert Jr. had said in the past that some tarantulas can live to be 25 years old. Lady Legs was in a tarantula and if this was the same Lady Legs from that time, this would make her over 30 years old. Do Huntsman spiders live that long? I asked incredulously, moving to the terrarium with a fascination I hadn't felt in years. Robert Jr. stood in the doorway with his arms crossed and an expression of distaste creasing his features as he looked at Lady. None that we know of sides that one. She seemed bigger than I remember. I murmured. My breath fogging up the glasses I tried to peer into the spider's hide at an angle, but I couldn't see her. As far as I can tell, her size depends on her enclosure. She won't get no bigger as long as she's in that tank. So do you think that there's like a single giant one of these spiders in the woods and that's what people are freaked out by? Yeah, 100 percent. Have you seen Huntsman spiders before? Yeah, when I was googling some of the things earlier, I saw one. It's crazy. Yeah, they're terrifying. They are super fast too and they run at people a lot. The one chase you outside. They're awful. I was talking to a buddy of mine in Australia and he was telling me about. He was in his car one time and he flipped down the visor and one of those that was like bigger than his hand just landed on him. No, no, no, no, no. And those people are just okay with it. They're like, yeah, you know, it happens. It's like what? Yeah, free. So what kind of animal are you? The golden orb we were the thing that freaks me out. I was talking to him too. He's like, oh, yeah, they're all over my parents place. My parents have a garden and there's like hundreds of them. It's like, dude, I would drown. I would drown myself before I'd dealt with what you go through every day. That is absurd. Okay, you know, earlier at the beginning of this video, I said, I'm a little rechnephobic. Maybe I'm just rechnephobic. Yeah, I think I'm just freaked out. I think I'm a scared boy. I saw Lady Legs move in the hide, then turn my head to look out Lucy's bedroom window. It faced the deep gray green mass of Lockhart Wood. I stood absently tracing my fingers through the condensation on the bottle on my hand. Lady came from the forest, didn't she? How big do they get in there? Robert Jr. didn't respond. I looked over at him. It was down in nearly his entire beer. He finished it with an angry sound in his and said finally, "Ungodly big." Anyway, take your time in here. Do what you want. Look at what you want. I'll be down the hole. Okay, thanks. As he started to leave, I remembered the drink in my hand and held it out to him awkwardly. Oh, hey, I'm not 21. Ain't nobody gonna snitch on you. He left the room and I hissed open the beer. I don't know how long I spent in there, meandering around fondly. Maybe an hour. Took a spider beanie baby off the shelf and held it as I looked around. I stood over the dresser looking at the frame pictures on top of it. Most were of Lucy and her parents. A few of Lucy from toddlerhood to age seven holding the gargantuan lady legs and her comparatively tiny hands. I was in a couple of pictures too. Group pictures of us and our other friends at birthday parties. Our messy little faces smeared with cake. I found an old elementary school binder from the first grade class Lucy and I had together. Where the first activity of every day was to make an entry in our journals following a single prompt given by the teacher and then draw a picture to go with it. Naturally, lots of Lucy's entries were about Hello Kitty, play dates with me and our friends, and bugs. Some of them made me laugh like her outrageously mangled spelling of the word Sintar. And several entries about herself and lady legs, spider lady Sintars. After a while, I just stood at Lucy's window looking out at Lockhart Wood as I finished my beer. I'm a lightweight when it comes to alcohol, so I was pretty buzzed. The force of a thousand legs never looked so eerie. The angle of the late afternoon sun didn't penetrate the darkened woods, but it glistened on countless spider webs suspended along the tree line, emphasizing how dark the forest was beyond that. It was strangely inviting, in a predatory way, like the lore of an angular fish. Out it swallowed Lucy up. Movement outside the window caught my eye. I looked over and saw Robert Jr. standing under the car port facing the forest, down in another beer, a backpack hanging from his shoulder. He was dressed in different clothes in the flannel shirt and cut-offs he had been wearing when he left me inside. He was wearing a heavy jacket and a hat, with a different set of prosthetics that had shoes. He looked like he was dressed for going into the forest. I left Lucy's room, crossed to the other end of the house, and threw the screen door off the kitchen. Robert Jr. didn't respond to the wooden rattle of the door paying in shot. You're going in? It wasn't a question. I was incredulous. I've been in here since I lost Lucy. I think it's about time before I go back one last time before I torch it. The sun was hidden behind Lockhart Wood, not quite set, casting the house and us in shadows. Before I could stop myself, I asked. Can I go with you? I like this setup because it establishes so much like his expertise, the father's longing with it, but also that he very, very, rarely. took anyone. So it's like this and he hasn't been in it since Lucy died. So it's this very four-learn moment. It's a very like special moment, but it's also terrifying. So it's like kind of covertly everything we've learned about him throughout the story has been building up to this moment of him letting someone go into the woods with him. Right. Did this day? I'm not sure why I wanted to go with him. Maybe for a sense of adventure, of danger that 18-year-olds are attracted to and think they can survive anything. Maybe I had some stupid notion that we'd find Lucy and their dead are alive. Maybe I just didn't want a guy who had lost his daughter the last time he was in those woods to go in for the first time since then alone. It's dangerous in there. Said Robert. It wasn't a no. I'd be with you. I said dumb and optimistic, but in my defense, you let me go with him. Neither of us mentioned it, but I know he didn't want to go in those woods alone either. I don't need to be dressed right. It was all he said. And the next thing I knew, he was jamming a hat on my head, layering me in protective clothing, the size too big, and cramming my hands and feet into clothes and boots, the size too small. Not a perfect button, close enough. He said tucking my baggy pants like scented my boots. I had zipped the jacket most of the way, but he yanked the zipper all the way up to my chin. It was my gear back when I was a little old knew. My daddy bought this place. He strapped a headlamp to my hat, did the same for himself, and shrugged on a backpack that he had filled with first aid kit and a cold pack for any venom. I watched him put it all together, fascinated, signed nurse to another beer. It was hard to believe he had adventureed into the forest in more than 10 years. The speed and certainty with which he prepared everything was like that of someone who explored Lockhart Wood daily. He gave me a set of strict, reasonable rules, basically telling me not to leave his side and not to thrash around if I walked into a web, and to always watch my step even when I was wearing boots. And to watch my step even though I was wearing boots. I could change my mind at any time in the forest, so if I wanted to leave, he would guide me out of the forest. I said a quick lie of a text to my mom telling her that Robert Jr. had invited me to stay for dinner, and to zip my phone into a breast pocket. By now, Twilight was fading. The purple sky soon turned into an inky blue, and we set off. The trail leading into the forest was rough and overgrown from years of seeing no-foot traffic, but not completely hidden. The first thing I did when I entered the forest was walk right into a web that Robert Jr. had subtly avoided. I started to flail instinctively, but Robert Jr. caught me with an arm across my chest, saying, "Don't thrash soon." After he assured me the web didn't belong to anything venomous, I carefully picked the web from my face and hair, following him deeper into the wood. It was darker to the nine dissipated beneath the trees. There were a few spots of visible death in the trees, suffocated and deprived of sunlight under thick layers of web wrapped around them. But most of the forest looked healthy, supporting the spider population symbiotically. Robert Jr. and I switched on our headlamps pretty quickly when the scant moon light didn't light our way sufficiently. I looked down at the ground, casting a wide circle of light at my feet, and immediately froze in place. I skin crawling horribly. Spiders, the size of half dollars, were scurrying away from my boots and troves, not quite a swarm, but enough to be uncountable. "You're right, son. Those ones ain't gonna hurt you." Robert Jr. hadn't looked back at me, but he must have heard me freeze behind him. "You want me to take you back?" Brides weld higher than the fear in my chest, so I said, "No, I'm fine." One of the spiders crawled slowly over my boot, its long legs probing curiously at my laces. I wrenched my eyes away from the ground, shook the spider off violently and pushed forward. I've never been particularly arachnephobic, but it was impossible not to feel itchy all over, imagining hundreds upon hundreds of unseen eyes, creeping into my protective clothing, slipping down the collar of my shirt, and edging, along my scalp and my hair. I just got so cold. "The description of the shirt collar." The tiny spiders became less of a presence, however. When we came to a fork in the trail, and Robert Jr. dropped to a sudden crouch, grabbing my sleeve and yanking me down with him. "Look at this." Whisper just headlamp fixed on a spider not two feet away from us. "This year's a nasty one." A spider the size of my hand stood strangely before us with two sets of thick, hairy legs thrown in the air. "Oh, it's a Brazilian wandering spider." They do that. It might have looked silly, if not for the vivid, violently red jaws on display, pulsing angrily in our direction. Worse still, the spider continued to move, swaying gently with its rosy, calisera throbbing almost obscenely, inching infinitismally closer with its side to side motions. Wide-eyed, I whispered back, "What is it?" Infuriated at the sound of my voice, the spider lunged closer. This time, I could see its fangs protruding from the red, quivering with rage and clinting with wetness. "Brazilian wandering spider, be fair it looks like, but it can be hard to say without a closer look. We'll live in South America, except for this place, you know." He ends up two pockets and with through a large pair of gloves to slip over the ones he was already wearing. "That might be the deadliest in the world." Instantively, I shrank back, but then took hold of Robert Jr.'s jacket sleeve, popping eyes, when I saw him reach towards the spider. "Don't!" Spider struck at his two fingers, with lightning speed and a force that made a sharp, snapping sound pierced the dark woods around us. In the blink of an eye, it struck twice, a red brown blur. Horrified, I tucked frantically at Robert Jr.'s sleeve. "Relax!" he said, pulling his hand back and showing me his intact glove. "I'll just can't quite bite through these." The spider darted out of our joint headlamp beams and off the trail into the woods. Robert Jr. removed his bulky second pair of gloves and stowed them away. "I can't do much delicate handling with gloves like that, but anything else in those things we'll go right through." So Brazilian wandering spiders, they do this thing where they throw their front legs up and they like whip them towards you. It's like a defensive posture. I remember seeing a video of a dude camping and one of them did that and like chased him into his tent. I hate him. I just looked up a picture of it. It's fucking crazy. Yeah, there's huge two. It's going up. And super venomous. If you ever heard old legends of spiders getting shipped to the United States in bananas and like biting people, that's the ones who the stories are about because they hide in banana clusters. He stood suddenly, leaving me crouched and trembling, clenching and unclenching my fist. I'm pleasantly aware of how thin my gloves were now. I stood slowly. My headlamp slid up the trees in front of me where the bark seemed to shiver and shift with the traffic of smaller spiders oozing up and down the trunks. I turned my head to see where Robert Jr. was looking and my light fell on his back several meters away as he moved down the left path in the fork. Wait, I squeaked rushing after him. I stumbled over tree roots and ran haltingly, skidding awkwardly to step around more than one fat lumber inch ranch as I made my way back to Robert Jr. Zelbo. Our headlamps bobbed in the darkness and my gaze was drawn farther up where the lamps beams lit up past laverinthian webs high overhead where nothing on the ground could destroy them. Blinting white cold in our light, they shuttered in an imperceptible breeze. This is going to be the golden orb weavers and I hate it. I hate it so much. Okay, go ahead. Those webs are way better high up there. I said with a breathless chuckle, trying to shake off the anxiety from the Brazilian wandering spider. We won't walk into India down here. Robert Jr. walked briskly, barely acknowledging me with a grunt. Well, I looked all around me casting my headlamp slides to and fro. Robert Jr. hardly moved his head focusing steadily on the twisting path down which he led us. Occasionally, he would stop so abruptly that I would collide with his back and he would gaze up into the ever-thinketing tree tops at the spider webs overhead, which were now so large and thick that massive sections of leaves had suffocated and died. I could see clusters of spiders creeping every which way in the stuff. All more obscure movement shifted on the other side of the web so thick that I couldn't see what it was. My depth perception was off in this environment. What? I'm getting lightheaded. Maybe I have to take a breath because God willing to admit I have a problem. What was the distance between myself and the webs and the number of different sizes of spiders I could see? Everything looked bigger up there from where I was standing. Communal webs said Robert Jr. pointing at the massive net of silk. No spiders live alone, but some are social. Butch of different spiders taking care of the same babies, sharing the same food. They must catch a lot of prey. I said move my headlamp over the vast web. It's huge. It would be surprised that they make a regular meal of birds. Squirrels too, maybe, if any wander in this far. I looked at him, bathing his stubble-shadowed face in yellow light and said slowly. That's kind of big for a spider, isn't it? P. Blondie and South America has been known to eat birds. It's the biggest spider in the world. At least outside of its god for sick and forest. This place ain't like the rest of the world. He paused muscle jumping in his jaw, then said. But they don't make webs. They live in burrows, so watch your step. I remember seeing a video one time because in some parts of the world they'll harvest spot. like this to use the silk for stuff. And there was a, I remember a video I saw one time if these guys in Southeast Asia who harvest these spiders for a living. And they have these long poles. And they would reach the poles up into the trees and get a bunch of them on the stick. And then they would pull the stick down and dump them all into a bag. And for the camera, he opened the bag and dude, it's, it is, it is like a Walmart bag full to the brim of these giant spiders crawling over each other. I, I don't care for that. I, I think about that video. So off the way their legs were tangled on each other and they were all writhing and moving. And yeah, they're so, their bodies are so fat and their legs are so skinny. It's so, okay. I resisted the urge to clamp onto his arm like a child as I swept my head lamp over the edges of our path. Spiders littered the forest floor, scurrying busily. But the irregularly spaced holes along the path and nestled between tree roots, what made me nervous now. The biggest holes looked like it could swallow my leg. We continued to walk uninterrupted by webs for the most part, but there were a few low-built ones that I would walk into and I was staring off into the woods and Robert Jr wouldn't tell me to duck. Unurved as I was, I was starting to get used to sensation, hardly jerking back when the sticky feather light strings snuck upon me. My pulse would still spike when it happened though. Pounding loudly in my ears as I carefully brush the webs for my face, but then Robert Jr took us down a second fork in the path and I distractedly collided with two webs of surprising density in a row. I finally focused on Robert Jr ahead of me to complain about not warning me in a tangle of silk lit up my head lamp centimeters away just in time for my face to crash through it. Even though it was my fault for not watching where I was going, I said testily, come on Mr. Lockhart, at least give me a heads up. So I dragged my left hands down my face, raking the web for my skin, Robert Jr said nothing. I looked up over his shoulder in front of me and saw why. The trail ahead was entirely choked in web, a glistening haze like morning fog stretching farther ahead, shapes twitched within it, different from the shifting masses of hundreds of smaller spiders in the first communal web we saw. These were heavy, singular. With sharp angles plucking at individual lines of silk, I couldn't quite make sense of what I was seeing. Something crunched under my boot. I looked down at the wispy stringy gray floor, brittle old bones of some animal I could have identified lay there. Among the bones lay the aged empty remains of a huge tarantulas, skeleton and exoskeleton locked together in death. They fought, died, tangled with one another. Jesus. I said loudly, just as Robert Jr breathes softly. Jesus. He wasn't looking. (gasps) (laughs) He was. (laughs) No, I feel sick. I feel like I'm gonna gag. He wasn't looking down. He was looking directly up. I looked up too, and froze. All right, our headlamps joined and lit up the webs that swallowed the understory, washing over the enormous spiders that moved within them. Things the size of fish bowls with fat, round abdomens, and. (gasps) I feel sick right now. I'm like, huh. Next week, we're reading about snakes. (laughs) We gotta balance the sound. It's only fair at this point. (sighs) Clusters of eyes reflected like back at us in the movement of their heavy bodies made meaty, organic clicking noises. (grunts) These things weren't what Robert Jr. had commented on. The creature slowly descending from its web by a thread was. At first, I thought it was a spider with the squirrel or a rat or something in its jaws, but a small logical corner of my mind reminded me that that's not how spiders eat. Not even tarangulas. You don't wrap their prey in silk. The rodent appeared bisected, as I couldn't see its back legs, with ugly gray skin visible around its midsection like it had mange. Its back half was impossibly the swollen bulb of a spider. It looked. (sighs) (laughs) (sighs) It looked like some gruesome mockery of a scintour. The limp torso of some parasitic rodent bursting forth from an unwitting host. There was no way that thing could be real or if it was, it couldn't be alive. But the things spinnerets kept pumping a hearty silk line to spinly back legs touching a delicate tips as it worked its way down. And the rodent's head twitched. It's furry front legs extending, paused grasping. I saw its face, a squirrel with too many beaty black eyes extending up the front of its head, blinking gumbly down at us. I could see its long yellow teeth, its mouth lulled open. I was distantly aware of my body moving weekly grasping. Robert Jr.'s jacket sleeve and yanking on it. Movement in the quarter of my eyes somehow managed to pull my attention from the abomination above us. My eyes were drawn down to the edge of the trail on which we stood and for a moment, I thought the ground had dipped down in embankment and we were simply elevated on the path. But I soon saw that it was a massive hole in the ground, a burrow. I continued to tug mechanically on Robert Jr.'s arm. What the fuck? A face peered out from the burrow, ghostly pale against the darkness within, and seemed to drift up and out closer to us. He was a human face. Too many eyes clustered across the bridge of its nose, glittering black and blinking slowly. It duct its head, long dark hair hanging from its linked angles. As a woman's bare moon white torso emerged slowly from the hole in the ground, a hulking, hairy mass of a spider's abdomen the size of a Volkswagen Beetle followed, connected at her waist. Her eight branched thick legs crunched in the leaflet her audibly thumping with the weight. Robert Jr.' and I staggered backwards, upsetting more spider webs in the underbush. The creature's legs were striped with wide at their joints. Then I thought of lady legs back at Robert Jr.'s house, and what he said about her species' size in the wild. Ungodly big. Robert Jr.'s thoughts were also back in his daughter's room, because as his hand gripped my arm in return, I heard him say, "Lucy." I knew as soon as it mentioned the squirrel that things that die in here become spider hybrids, that it was going to be his daughter, but that is so messed up. Imagine losing your kid and you find him as like a spider thing. Out here. My eyes flew back to the creature's face. It's a natural addition of eyes surrounding the originals, and as it tilted its head, I recognized her too. Her mouth dropped open, lower lip dripping with something too viscous to be saliva, and her rail thin arms spasmed once before lifting up, sending a painful jolt of electric fear at my spine. Her wide, long, fingered hands took hold of the squirrel spider dangling between the two of us and herself. The thing squeaked and convulsed. It's like thrashing horribly, and Lucy brought it to her mouth. I ran. I thrashed my way blindly through web after web, back the way we came. I heard Robert Jr. call my name, unexpectedly close behind me, and suddenly felt him crashing my back. I hit the ground hard, face first. I barely had time to register the bright starburst to paint as my nose broke and began to bleed, or the scattering of spiders, millimeters in front of my eyes before Robert Jr. yanked my bodily back upright and rolled me around. I thought he was slapping me, but realized he was swiping away spiders that I picked up his passengers from the ground. Don't you run off in here, boy. Robert Jr. hissed to my face, shaking me hard. Something else will kill you before. The enormous creature loomed behind him, creeping down the trail after us. I started to yell, but Robert Jr. clapped his hand over my mouth, spinning to face her. He forced us into a sort of half-crouch. His body waned me down to keep me from running again, and I stared with bulging eyes, struggling to breathe throughout my bleeding nose as Lucy bore down upon us. - It's okay. - Robert Jr. said, but he wasn't talking to me. I could feel him shaking against my back. - It's okay, Lucy here. You're okay. - She came closer. The precise movements of her vast spider body and stark contrast against the limp, feeble movements of her human torso. Her face seemed alert. Even with the six blurry eyes that looked infected in their unnaturalness, but her arms hung listlessly at her sides. Her posture hunched. Venom, blood, saliva, flowed, slowed down her chin. All that remained with the squirrel spider. I could hear her breathing. See her pale throat throb as she swallowed. - That's a good girl. That's a good girl, baby. - Said Robert Jr. His voice low and soothing despite his violent trembling. "That didn't know you lived here, Lucy. We didn't know we'd see you here. You did such a good job here, I'll buy yourself, didn't you, baby?" "Daddy's proud of you." He was slowly inching us back as he spoke nonsense to the thing in front of us. The spider shifted mind-newly, almost moving after us, but not quite. Lucy's stark, wet mouth, trooped open. The voice that sounded like wind in the leaves, she hissed. "Oh man, that's so terrible. The idea of your poor daughter being stuck in this state for years." Robert Jr. laughed, wild and terrified in my ear, pulling me another step back. The palm of his hand still crushing my lips against my chattering teeth. "That's right, baby. Daddy's here. Daddy didn't think he'd see you all grown up in the woods, huh, baby? Good girl, Lucy." She didn't move after us as we backed away. Although her eyes followed us with the laser focus, again, her voice hoarse and vacant. "That's right. Daddy's gonna take your friend back home, okay? You remember Erin." I groaned behind his hand, sick with fear, as all eight of Lucy's eyes shifted onto me. She didn't say my name. Wildly in the back of my head, I wondered if she recognized any of the things Robert Jr. was saying to her, but it's certain that she was all spider-like this, that the two words she'd said were empty repetitions preceding her final attack. But still, she stood motionless, watching our retreat. "That is gonna take Erin home. Is that okay, baby? Will you let me do that, Lucy?" She was silent for a long moment then. "Good girl, Lucy. We're going away. Good girl." Long stretch of silence as we move steadily away from her. She still didn't follow, really watching us. Voice, I'm prompted this time, shook me to my core, but it next cracked through the night. The noise Robert Jr. made was something of a strangled sob in a laugh. "Yeah, baby. I'll come see you. I'll come see you again. Just let me take Erin home. Daddy will come see you again." We were several meters away from her by now. I was sure we were nearing the bend and the fork in the trail we had taken. Slowly Robert Jr. lowered his hand from my mouth and I culled to deep, shaking breath. "I can't get us out of here backwards, but I need you watching behind us. You hang on to me and I'll walk you out. You tell me if she follows. Can you do that son?" White-outed, unable to look away from Lucy's figure down the trail, I nodded. "Yes, sir. Okay. Careful now." His hand encircled my wrist tightly and with a firm tug, he took us around the bend. I struggled to walk in reverse. My legs like rubber and my pulse roaring in my ears. Lucy didn't follow us once I lost sight of her. Robert Jr. navigated us back through the forest, avoiding all webs this time around. I don't know how long it took to get out of the woods for all I knew it took days, but eventually we broke through the tree line and the unobstructed moonlight was blinding. I felt separate from my own. I felt separate from my own body as I brushed harmless jumping spiders and orb weavers from my hat and jacket. Distantly, I heard Robert Jr. chuckling weekly, turned around to look at Lockhart Wood almost casually, leaned over and threw up on the grass. A few yards away, Robert Jr. did just the same coughing and laughing harder when he was done. "Fuck!" He gaffed hands on his face, washed him stagger and fall heaving onto his ass, giggling maniacally. I went over to him and set beside him on the grass, staring at the forest. I spat remnants of bile on the ground between my knees. I fumbled with my headlamp, turned it off, threw my hat aside. I peered at Robert Jr.'s tear-street laughing face, vaguely concerned. "Pfft." "I can't tell if that's good laughter or a bad laughter." "Crashed." He gaffed, possibly hyperventilating. "You and me both, fuck." He pressed two fingers to his neck, checking his own pulse. "What are you gonna do now? Shit's good or I don't know. Probably visit my daughter every now and then, damn." Scraped his hands over his face, groaning deeply. My head swam. I flopped backwards, staring at the night sky. The stars looked like little white spider-leens. I thought suddenly if my mother back at the house, and for whatever reason, all I could think to say was, "Hey, so I was thinking, you should give my mom a call sometime. She's not seeing anyone." I don't remember getting home that night. I don't remember getting settled on campus the next day, but I think I'm going to change my major to biology. I'd like to see Lucy again. And I think maybe a study in her technology might be a good place to start. Man, what a wonderful way to end that. It's weird, it's horrifying, but at the same time, it's very sweet. You know, like it's like a very kind of like- I don't know. I don't know how many of this is sweet. It's a tragic, yeah. The daughter, like, I don't know. It didn't attack them. They remembered who it was. And then she said, "Come see me." She obviously has, like, some ribbed it's her memory there. But it's, I don't know. It's like cathartic in a really weird way. It's horrifying because obviously the child has been, I mean, like transformed. Now, that being said, do you think that had anything to do with the spiders in the woods? Or do you think she was just this creature that was born to like change with her like woods? You think so, because she was talking about the centaur before. She was talking about the centaur before because she had that spider that her father had discovered in the woods. I see. And the spider said that, or the father said that the spider grows as big as the, you know, aquarium is. So in the woods they get on godly big. So that's why Lucy had dreams of like the centaur spider and stuff because she was weird. But I don't think he lags. And then she's like, oh, we'll become spider centaur's blah, blah, blah. So maybe that's like an idea. Yeah, but I don't know how they ended by the spider or the forest. How does that translate to it being a morphed creature, half spider, half whatever? When she runs and understands it, like the same thing that happened to the squirrel. It creates like biology hybrids. I see. Like it turns, it turns whatever DNA it finds into like spider creatures, basically. A sad and heartwarming ending at the same time of like a girl being transformed into. There's nothing heartwarming that you see your, you see your kid out there as a giant spider thing with the venom mouth and stuff like that. That is not heartwarming. Your daughter is now like gargometh the destroyer for old. It is a crazy, crazy monster. But there was a sense, there was a sense of like a cathartic feeling. I'm killing my kid and then killing my kid. Yeah, I don't know. There was something, there was something to it. But I don't think it's, it's not, it's not a happy ending. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that it must be cathartic being like you get to talk to your kid again in whatever form. It's kind of interesting. Also, she's not just a brain dead, like just monster. She remembers you and has like a cognitive ability to speak even if it is like a fucking demon. But I don't know. That's if that was fun. Two great stories. I'll be honest. I was going into this being like spider stories can come off as kind of cheesy. But I think both of these really, really did. And they were, they were scary in different ways. Like the first one was scary because of the descriptions of like spiders in the home kind of thing. And the second one was like a monstrous spiders. I mean, obviously there was a monstrous spiders in the first one. But the second one, like the focus of the horror was like how big these things can get the unknown woods and stuff like that. They were both very well written. I mean, obviously we know Christian Wallace is a great writer. I'm sad that Lavinsky or loves in ski. This is the only thing they posted to no sleep. If they're out there, please write more. That was fantastic. But both of the stories are great. Both of them were terrifying. I can't. This is like in the running for the most scared I've been. It didn't think I'd be scared by reading about spiders. But here we are. So listen to you just like dry he would be like, oh. Was quite the trip for me. So I I it was definitely a story that has deeply hit you to your core. Yeah, it's it. It's hit me somewhere. All right. These are the kind of stories. So I'm glad I'm read them. They were terrifying. Never going to look at them again. Yeah, never ever again again. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, guys, that's our episode this week. Thank you for being a little spider with us and hanging off your web. And you know, hopefully another spider euthanism that I can think of. I do appreciate you guys listening on Apple podcast, Spotify, all the audio platforms. If you haven't done it, try checking it out next time. I swear it's a lot of fun. I'd be sure to give us a good rating there. Also, thank you to our patrons who supported us today. We appreciate you. If you want some extra content, we are reading the chatting in the woods right after we're done with this recording. So if you want to get in on that little extra sauce, feel free. Otherwise, until next time, guys, we will see you in the next one. Stay creeped. We'll see you in the next one. I just want everyone to know one of the top comments on that last story is damn is Lucy single. Which is not only insane, but she's also seven. So someone should probably call someone about that guy. Bye. Hit the road, Jack. And don't you come back. No more. No more. No more. more hit the road. My wife's a spider hit the road Jack hit the road Jack and don't you come back no more no more no more no more hit the road Jack and don't you come back no more my wife's a spider hit the road Jack hit the road Jack and don't you come back no more no more no more no more hit the road Jack and don't you come back no more my wife's a spider hit the road Jack and don't you come back no more