Choose
Your Own Nuthouse
Section 87
“Well,” says Walt, “at least you’re honest.
I like that, even though I don’t approve of
such excesses. You’re young, though,
and I suppose you should get it all out of your system now, rather than
sinking
into a black hole of debauchery and sin later in life.”
You’re beginning to like Walt, despite the CD of Disney’s
greatest hits playing on the stereo.
Even more to his credit, Walt refrains from making speeches
about
youthful indiscretions, God, or politics.
Instead, as the station wagon travels at reasonable speeds
toward scenic
Lake Doomhole™, you have a pleasant conversation about yourself, your
interests, et cetera, and about Walt and his family.
They’re nice people. Soon
you arrive at Lake Doomhole, and Walt drops you off near the cabins
where your
friends will be having drunken, drug-addled, orgiastic sex later on. Thankfully, they all seem to be down at the
lake at the moment. You’re glad they
aren’t there to embarrass you in front of such pleasant people.
“So, you need me to call Triple-A for your car?
I’ve got an account with them.”
Beyond anybody‘s reasonable expectations of you, you have
actually done at least one intelligent thing in your life, and that was
getting
a Triple-A account. “No problem,
Walt. I have an account, too.
But thanks for the offer.”
“Well, then. It was nice meeting you. Give
us a ring if you need anything. Be safe!”
Walt and his family drive off after you thank them again for
their
generosity. Warmed by their kindness,
you wave as they drive away into the night.
You will never see Walt again.
Well actually you will.
But it will only be his face, which is soon going to be removed
from his
body. It won’t bother you too much,
though, because by that point you’ll have already seen things much
worse than
that, and you’ll be pretty preoccupied what with the screaming, the
fire, the
rain of spiders, and the koala bear, to mention just a few of this
section’s
forthcoming attractions.
***
It is now pretty late at night, and your friends and
yourself have been having a truly wild time.
At the moment, you are zipping around Lake Doomhole on a Jetski,
trying
to steer and smoke a cigarette at the same time. You
are understandably startled when the girl clinging to your
waist begins shrieking in horror, right in your ear.
You lose control of the Jetski, and the two of you go
ricocheting
across the surface of the placid lake.
“What?!
What?!” You shout to the girl,
who is about ten feet away from you. “Are you hurt?
What the hell is--”
You see, then, what the hell is, as you follow the girl’s
petrified gaze across the lake. There
is something on the moon. This is
enormously disconcerting, and your mind is, frankly, in no condition to
process
what you are seeing. Even if you were
sober, this would be a fairly difficult event to grasp.
When an everyday guy like yourself sees the moon, there
is only a kind of general grasp on its actual size.
Sure, you know it’s actually pretty big, but you don’t
consciously think about it. It’s just
there in the night, never appearing much larger than a silver dollar or
something. But in the back of your mind
you know it is quite a bit larger than a silver dollar, and that
knowledge is
what causes you to panic a bit as you stare at the thing perched on the
moon.
For lack of a better term, we will call it a dragon.*
The dragon is the type of creature that H.P. Lovecraft
edited out of his stories because it was just to fucked up for the
human mind
to contemplate without dissolving into screaming madness for all
eternity.
And it’s sitting on the fucking moon!!
It’s perched there like some Zen Yoga guru
balancing on a beach ball. Your mind is
screaming that this thing must be freakin’ enormous. And it is.
It is very, very big. And
anything that big, and that utterly, mind crushingly terrifying must be
exceedingly evil.
If you went up and asked the dragon face to face if it
was evil (assuming it were possible for you to be able to retain your
sanity
long enough to do anything except shit yourself and die of fear), it
would tell
you no. “Hey, man,” it would say (only
it wouldn’t, because it doesn’t speak in words) “I just do what I do. Is a tiger evil for eating a majestic
moose?” It would say this because it
has no idea that tigers and moose don’t live in the same part of the
world. It has no interest in such
things as tigers and moose. And
besides, its argument would be completely irrelevant anyway because
tigers and
moose are not incomprehensible and eldritch terrors from beyond space. And even if its argument weren’t irrelevant,
it would be just flat out wrong, because what the dragon does is eat
worlds.
The girl is still screaming. The
girl will probably never stop screaming ever again, because
her mind has been torn apart by fear, and screaming is pretty much all
she’s
got left. It’s a pity, because she’s
really hot and you were looking forward to having sex with her.
You are not screaming, though. In
this case, your binge drinking actually serves a constructive
purpose. You are able to remain
functional and begin swimming back toward shore. You’re
not under any illusion that this will save you, but it
can’t really hurt at this point. On
land, you will be in a better (well, infinitesimally less futile)
position to
do something about this situation.
You reach the shore and stagger to the campfire, where
your friends have somehow failed to notice the dragon sitting on the
fucking
moon.
“Moon! Moon!”
You scream. Three of your buddies
laugh raucously, stand up, and bare their
asses at you. Defeated, you slump to
the ground. You’re drunk,
remember? It doesn’t take much to break
your will. You notice something on the
ground. It’s a medallion, and it looks
a bit evil. You ask about it.
“Oh, that belonged to Harlan,” says one of your friends.
“Belonged? What
happened to the little freak?” Harlan
is not an entirely normal guy. There’s
a lot about him that just ain’t right, and it comes as little surprise
to you
that Harlan just happened to be around on the night when a dragon (a
freakin’ dragon,
for Chrissake!) shows up on the moon.
“What’s with the past tense? Is
he dead?”
“Well, he did go into the fire.” This
strikes you as dumb, even for
Harlan. He never seemed like the
suicidal type to you. You peer into the
fire, but can’t see anything that looks like the charred remains of
Harlan.
“I just see some logs, and what appears to be somebody’s
spare tire,” you say.
“Well, he went in there and disappeared. Like,
POOF! And he’s just not there
anymore. There was green
lightning.” This makes a lot more sense
than Harlan walking into a fire and dying on purpose.
“Well, I guess that’s Harlan for you. Did
he happen to mention anything odd?”
“Dude, everything Harlan mentions is odd,” says a
girl, and you have to concede the point.
“He did say that he was sorry we were all going to be consumed
in
eldritch terror, and that he regretted that he couldn’t take any of us
with him
to the other realm. Then he said
something about a koala bear and cloud holes and went into the fire.”
And then, suddenly, something bops you on the head.
You reach up to brush it off and bring your
hand away with what is possibly the most alarming spider ever perched
on your
fingers and glaring at you. It is
useless to describe the spider, other than to say that it is very, very
horrible. You scream and fling it into
the fire, where it crouches on a burning log, staring at you with what
is
obviously hatred. It is, you reflect,
never ever a good thing for a spider to be capable of communicating
emotion so
clearly. Across the circle, one of your
buddies screams, and you see several more spiders on his arms. You don’t quite understand where they are
coming from. They seem to be dropping
from above, but there aren’t any trees above you. You
look up, which is a mistake.
Spiders fall on your face!
Then it dawns on you that they are simply falling from
the sky. Only it’s more of a
subconscious realization, because your conscious faculties are occupied
with
screaming like a girl. The rain of
spiders gathers strength, and it is so far beyond awful that the no
human
language can ever begin to convey the sheer awfulness of the event. You thought a dragon sitting on the moon was
messed up, but this…this just sucks out loud.
You run up the hill to the cabins, operating purely on instinct. Thankfully, there is a covered porch on the
cabin. Your revulsion as you brush the
large (very large) spiders off of you causes you to vomit.
This is really okay, because there were five
spiders in your mouth, but you were too busy screaming to notice. That’s how horrible things are at the
moment. When you are too freaked out to
notice five spiders in your mouth (especially these spiders;
actually,
the word ‘spider’ has connotations too warm and fuzzy for these
arachnid
terrors, but we’ll go with it anyway), you know you’re in some shit.
Before the spiders can regroup* and get you, you
dive into the cabin and slam the door.
And lock it for good measure.
You can only pray that it’s enough to stop the spiders. You try not to think about how the campfire
apparently had little effect on the first one that fell on you, other
than to
make it angry.
You peer out the window, despite the fact that you know
what you’re going to see will probably make you vomit again. And, sure enough, you vomit.
It’s not just the millions of spiders
skittering all over the ground. It’s
not just the millions more skittering over the trees, or the millions
skittering over the outside of the cabin, your friends’ cars, and your
friends. It’s the way your friends are
screaming and tearing at their skin and flailing about as the spiders
run
through their hair and dangle from their fingers and go into their ears
and
crawl on their eyes and sneak up their noses and invade their clothes. It’s the fact that you can hear the spiders
skittering on the outside of the cabin.
It’s the fact that you can hear more falling despite the noise
of your
friends’ spider-muffled shrieking. It’s
the fact that the sheer weight of the spiders is causing the cars
outside to
rock back and forth. It has always been
your deepest belief that there should never, under any circumstances,
be a
sufficient number of spiders to rock a car.
It is unacceptable.
You sit down on the floor and cry because things are so
very, very bad. In circumstances such
as this, it is perfectly alright for a grown man to cry.
There is no shame in it. Probably
even Clint Eastwood would cry, or
John Wayne. And they’re manly men.
You wonder, briefly and inexplicably, what kind of alert
the National Weather Service would issue for this.
Local weathermen would probably be all inappropriately cheerful
about: “If you’re planning on a picnic
this weekend, you might want to stay inside instead, because our
exclusive
Channel Six Early First Alert Warning Doppler Radar has indicated
spiders will
be falling from the sky for no good reason at all!
Kinda makes you wish for all those cats and dogs back, huh? Back to you, Mary!” Or
maybe they’ll have really enthusiastic
coverage of the event: “Well, folks, it’s raining spiders today at
Beautiful
Lake Doomhole™ and that’s the worst thing ever! Our
Channel Six reporter on the spot, Weathergirl Wendy, has
details! Wendy?” “AAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!
AAAAAAAAIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!” “Well, it looks like that’s all she wrote for
Weathergirl Wendy! On the lighter side
of news, firefighters rescued a fuzzy little kitten from a tree today,
but now
they’re all enveloped in awful spiders!
Too bad!”
All too soon, (as if there would ever be an okay time for
this), the roof starts to creak. You
can see it sagging. Any moment now, a
roof-full of spiders will fall on you.
You know that these are very sturdy cabins, and that no small
amount of
spiders would cause the roof to fall.
Large and unpleasant as these spiders are, they are not
monstrously
large. The spiders, individually, do
not weigh very much. There are
obviously a great many spiders up there, and soon the spiders will be
in
here. With you. They
will fill up the roofless cabin, and
you will be trapped in a box of spiders with no hope of escape. It occurs to you that you might be able to
swim through the spiders, but this is a horrible thing to think of. It rattles around in your head: SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS. It’s
just there now, and for several minutes
it’s all you can think of. It ceases to
be a phrase so much as an actual tangible thing that exceeds all
wrongness ever
envisioned by the human mind. It is like a three-word noun. Or maybe it could work as an adjective:
“Dude, I just got
herpes!”
“Oh, man. That is so SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS.”
War, Famine, Pestilence, Death, SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS.
You try not to think about SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS any more,
but now the thought is there and will never, ever go away for as long
as you
live. If, somehow, you escape from this
disaster, it will always be with you.
In the night, just before you doze off, you will think of SWIM
THROUGH
SPIDERS, and you’ll be awake for days afterward, unconsciously brushing
phantom
spiders off your skin. You will meet a
girl, and fall in love, and one day you will get down on one knee and
open a
tiny little box containing several months’ pay, and you will ask her
The
Question: “My love, in all this world there is nothing that makes me
happier
than you, so I want to know will you” and here your eye will twitch a
bit and
you’ll finish, “SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS!
SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS!”
And that’s only if any girl will stay with a guy who
inexplicably screams randomly during sexual intercourse and huddles in
a corner
clawing at his skin for the rest of the night.
Well, now that SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS is both inevitable as
an event and indelibly carved into your mind as a concept, your only
logical
recourse is to just die. You look
around the cabin for something that will help you with this, such as a
knife or
a gun, or some cyanide caplets.
Unfortunately, there is nothing that seems likely to help you
avoid SWIM
THROUGH SPIDERS by dying. However, you
do find some other items that may be of use…
Only moments before the roof gives in totally, you burst
through the door of the cabin. Before
you leave the shelter of the covered patio, you open one of the huge
beach
umbrellas you found in the cabin.
Praying that the duct tape you’ve used to seal points of ingress
into
your clothing will keep the spiders out, you run into the lawn, wading
through
spiders (Bad, but not quite as bad as SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS), and
feeling them
crunch under the slightly-too-small army boots you discovered under a
bed. It seems like a really, really long
time
before you manage to reach the car that beeped and blinked when you hit
the
unlock button on the key fob that was dangling from a hook by the front
door.
Once you’ve arrived at the vehicle, you use your newfound canoe paddle
to brush
truly obscene numbers of spiders off the car.
It is almost futile, since many more spiders are falling all the
time. But with the help of the
umbrella, you manage to clear off more
than you get. Acting quickly, you open
the door just wide enough to get in with the canoe paddle, a full
backpack of
hopefully useful stuff, and a second beach umbrella.
You leave the first umbrella to the spiders, and slam the door.
Your next few minutes are occupied with the task of
killing the surprisingly few spiders that managed to smuggle themselves
into
the car with you. Luckily, there are
none in your mouth this time. You were
smart enough to keep it closed this time.
Only when it seems that you have killed all of the spiders that
got in
do you allow yourself to relax. It
would seem you have successfully avoided SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS, at least
for
now.
You sit there for a while, trying not to vomit
anymore. You can still hear the spiders
falling from the sky. You can hear them
skittering around the car. You can see
them, and they can see you. They are
not happy that you are, apparently, inaccessible to them.
Abruptly, you become aware that somebody is in the back
seat of the car, and you turn, startled.
You pray that it is not further horror, and are extremely
pleased to
discover that it is not horror. It is a
girl. A hot girl, too.
She is clearly terrified, which is
good. If she weren’t, you think to
yourself, you would have to get rid of her quickly, because anybody not
clearly
terrified in this situation would be bad news indeed.
It is obvious that some sort of soothing gesture of kindness,
some promise of hope is called for. But
you are a guy, and so all you can think of is to crawl back with her,
pat her
on the back and say, “There, there.” It
seems to have some effect, at least.
“I think we should drive away from here very quickly,”
you suggest, trying to sound a little lighthearted, as if the situation
was
only some bad weather, or a dangerous wild animal, or nuclear holocaust
instead
of a dragon on the moon and spiders falling from the sky, and the
looming, unforgettable
threat of SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS. The
girl does not respond, and so you pat her on the back again and climb
forward
into the driver’s seat. The car starts
without trouble, miraculously.
It is difficult to drive though many forms of inclement weather. Rain causes slick roads and dangerous
floods. Snow obscures vision and makes
maneuvering hard, and ice is even worse.
But driving through spiders is probably the single worst thing
ever in
the field of bad weather driving. There
are so many spiders at this point that they are actually impeding the
forward
motion of the car. They cling to the
windshield, and using the wipers, while slightly effective, has the
unfortunate
side effect of smearing spider insides across the glass.
And soon you begin to wish that you had
lived your life without having to plow through a drift of spiders. It is, to commit an almost criminal
understatement, nerve wracking.
You have a map; it was one of the things you put in the
backpack. Sadly, it is very difficult to
use a map properly when everything represented on the map is, in the
real
world, blanketed heavily by a vast and ever-deepening sea of spiders.
With deepening nausea, you push slowly through the spider
ocean. After about an hour, you notice,
thankfully, that the rain of spiders seems to be tapering off. Soon it is just like a light spring
drizzle. Except instead of refreshing
cool rain, it’s horrid spiders. Your
destination is a large cave a few miles away from the lake. The trip there is relatively uneventful,
though now that the spiders have stopped falling as hard, you can see
the
dragon is still sitting on the moon.
There is also a strange orange glow in the night, coming from
where Lake
Doomhole would be. You try not to think
about it, because it is probably something bad. You
don’t mention it to the girl, either. She
seems content to mumble quietly, rocking
back and forth, twisting her hair around her fingers.
You reach the cave.
It sits on high ground, in the bluffs above Lake Doomhole. In better weather, the view would be
spectacular. In a good way.
The current view is spectacular, too, but
not in any way that you would ever, ever hope for.
The lake has become fire. It’s not on
fire.
It is fire. Weird
fire. It twists around in a manner fire
shouldn’t, and illuminates the carpet of spiders, which undulates and
glistens
nightmarishly. Above the Lake, the moon
is still in the same position as it was when you first saw the dragon. It’s a little detail, in the sense that it
would be easily overlooked. Of course,
the fact that this is clearly impossible, considering how much time has
passed,
makes it an important detail, and one full of menace.
You can’t quite make up your mind whether it’s good that the
dragon is no longer there. You kind of
think it would be better to know where it is at all times, now that you
know it
exists. It’s a good idea, you decide,
to know at al times the location of planet-sized monsters from beyond
the realm
of human nightmare. It was bad when it
was hanging out on the moon. You knew
where you were at when it was on the moon.
Now all bets are off; it could be up to anything.
Well, anything bad. It’s probably
not out collecting shoes and
blankets for poor children with big, sad eyes.
You gather your wits about you and get out of the car,
brandishing the umbrella and canoe paddle.
Then you notice another car by the entrance to the cave. It belongs to one of your friends. Or at least, you think it does.
There are many spiders on it. Not
as many as there could be, though; Above
you, the cliffs jut out overhead, creating a convenient shelter. There are a lot of spiders milling about,
but at least they have to work a bit to get here. You
sweep away as many as you can and coax the girl out, promising
it will be better in the cave, and that there is a good chance some of
the
others made it here as well.
Together, you enter the narrow cave entrance and make
your way down a twisting hallway of slightly damp stone.
After a few yards, the corridor widens into
a large chamber, about the size of a modestly priced two bedroom
apartment. You are overjoyed to see
that several of your friends are here.
Dave, Chris, Dave’s girlfriend (you wink at her), and Zorlath
the
Betrayer.*
There is a silent moment during which everybody just
stares at each other. You drop your
backpack to the ground and squoosh a spider under your boot heel. “So,” you say, and clap your hands together,
“how bout that weather, huh?”
There is a beat, and then Chris snickers. Soon,
everyone is laughing in a manner
befitting the end of an eighties sitcom.
It is a warm, happy moment. But
it is only a moment, and remembering it will only make what is to come
seem all
the more horrible.
You sit around the propane lamp your friends brought, and
catch each other up on the events of the night. Your
buds, it seems, got to the car pretty quickly after the
spiders began to fall, and drove around until Dave remembered the cave. You tell them about getting to the cabin,
and your subsequent escape. Graciously,
you refrain from telling them about SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS.
They really don’t need that, and they are
your friends.** They, like you,
are probably psychologically scarred now, but everyone is too relieved
to worry
about it right now.
“So, who’s the girl you brought with you? She
seems pretty screwed up,” says
Chris. “Hot, though.”
The girl is sitting slightly away from
everybody else, hugging her knees to her chest and muttering in that
same
indistinct voice. As you and Chris are
admiring her tear-stained, mentally shattered beauty, you notice for
the first
time that she is clutching something in one of her quivering hands. It looks familiar, so you scoot closer to
her to get a closer look.
As you thought, it is the medallion that belonged to
Harlan before he took the eleven-thirty fire to Dimension X. Gently, you pull it from her grip, tell her,
“There, there,” and scoot back to the lantern.
“I don’t know who she is. Like I
said, she was in the back of the car I stole. I
guess she’s one of those
friend-of-a-friend people who get invited to weekend excursions of
debauchery
and sin.” You hold up the
medallion. “This used to be Harlan’s.”
“Yeah, I recognize it.
He was always fiddling with it.
Poor guy. He freaked me out, but
it’s a pity he’s probably been buried alive under an avalanche of
spiders.”
“Actually, he left.
He went into a fire and vanished.”
Chris expresses very little surprise at this
revelation. Anyone who knows Harlan
wouldn’t be very shocked to hear he would do something like that.
Meanwhile, Zorlath the Betrayer has gone to the entrance
of the cave to see if the weather has cleared.
You, Dave, Chris, and Dave’s girlfriend have begun trying to
formulate a
plan with the aid of beer and cigarettes when he returns.
“My friends,” he says, “Rejoice! For
the unnatural rain of spiders has
ceased!”
I told you Zorlath the Betrayer talked strangely.
Everyone cheers, and gathers their things. You
gently pull the mystery girl to her feet
and guide her back to the entrance, just behind the rest of the group. When you emerge from the cave, you see they
are all staring, slack-jawed, at the panoramic view spread out before
them.
“Well, shit, Zorlath the Betrayer. You
could have told us everything was on
fire.”
Somewhat flustered, which is out of character for Zorlath
the Betrayer, he says, “Had this fire been here when I, Zorlath the
Betrayer,
came hither to see if the plague of spiders had finally ceased, then
truly I,
Zorlath the Berayer would have mentioned it.
‘twould have been foolhardy to omit a detail of such obvious
import!”
You aren’t exaggerating when you say that everything is
on fire. There doesn’t seem to be a
single thing that isn’t engulfed in flame.
“Well,” says Dave, scratching his head. “I
guess we’re sort of hosed now.” His
girlfriend rolls her eyes and turns to
head back to the cave. You squeeze her
hot ass as she passes you and she likes it, the naughty vixen. Chris and Dave stare at the flaming world
for a few seconds, and then turn back also.
You do not squeeze their asses.
“We should be thankful, at least, that Lake Doomhole is
no longer a chasm of living flame,” says Zorlath the Betrayer. And he’s
right.
It’s not fire anymore.
“You’re only saying that because it was your Jetski I was
riding out there. Besides, a lake of
boiling blood isn’t much better.”
“No. You are
probably right, my friend. And
certainly, it is most likely no picnic for the poor souls floating
screaming
and naked therein.” There are, as
Zorlath the Betrayer says, thousands of writhing naked human forms in
beautiful
Lake Doomhole™. You can see, even from
this distance, their flesh bubbling and sloughing off as they twist and
scream
in the roiling blood. They do not seem
to die, though. Which is pretty crummy. Not being boiled to death if you are in a
lake of boiling blood is quite possibly the only thing that is worse
than being
boiled to death in a lake of boiling blood.
Except, you think, for SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS.
SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS is the trump card of
badness. You shudder and brush absently
at your arms. “Hope it’s nobody we
know.”
“Indeed.”
You and Zorlath the Betrayer lean against the inner walls
of the cave entrance, and you light a cigarette and stare in silence at
the
admittedly impressive view. After a
while, you break the silence. “What do
you think we should do?”
“Run. And
swiftly. And far. For
behold!
The flame encroaches!” Zorlath
the Betrayer is right. The flame has
begun to move steadily toward you.
Horribly, it seems to be carried on the backs of thousands of
spiders. “Into the cave, my
friend! Posthaste!”
Zorlath the Betrayer does not need to tell you
twice. Both of you tumble into the
cavern, startling the others.
“There you are. I
thought we were going to have to come turn a hose on you lovebirds,”
jokes
Dave. However, there are more pressing
issues at hand than your jerk friend’s juvenile insinuations of
homosexuality.
“Friend, there are more pressing issues at hand than your
juvenile insinuations of homosexuality!” announces Zorlath the Betrayer.
You are a bit more succinct. “The
spiders! The spiders
are coming with fire!”*
“AAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE!” Screams the mystery girl, and you
find yourself in full agreement (Fire bearing spiders are an absolutely
perfect
reason to scream.) But then you follow
her gaze and see what she’s actually screaming about.
It’s worse than the spiders, and possibly worse than the dragon
on the fucking moon. (Where did that dragon go?). It
is, quite possibly, the most unsettling thing you’ve ever
seen.
A koala bear!
Gasp!
No, seriously. A
koala bear. All cute and furry and
cuddly looking, and holding Walt’s face in its mouth.
You vomit, but only because another round of puking has
been a long time coming, and you figure this Is as good an excuse as
any. The spiders and dragon -on-the-moon,
and the
whole SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS nightmare have pushed you past your quota
for being
disturbed by things. However, just
because it isn’t freaking you out at the moment (although later it will
probably start to bug you), that doesn’t mean you’re quite stupid
enough to
hang around with it all day. This is,
after all, a koala bear gnawing on a man’s face. Not good mojo. You
start to
back away, but remember that there is a vast army of spiders bringing
fire to
you. You are trapped between a rock and
a hard place, except in this case it would be more appropriate to say
you are
trapped between a flaming spider army and a koala with Walt’s face. It sucks.
It sucks real bad.
Then Dave’s girlfriend starts screaming. Although
you don’t want to, you turn to see
what’s wrong. Ah. The
spiders have arrived. They put the fire on
Dave’s girlfriend. She burns and screams
and burns and flails,
covered in spiders and flame. Screaming
and burning and flailing and…oh for Christ’s sake, just look the other
way, you
asshole! Jeez.
So you look the other way and see Dave, who is seeing his
girlfriend. He does the stupid hero
thing and runs to her with a blanket.
As if a blanket is going to make this any better.
In a few moments, you are not only looking
at Dave’s girlfriend burning and screaming again, but also at Dave, who
is also
burning and screaming. Noble as Dave
may have been, it wasn’t any match for a thousand flaming spiders. Idiot.
You, Chris, and Zorlath the Betrayer, having seen what
lies the way of spiders and fire (screaming death, if I have to spell
it out
for you), decide to take your chances with the koala bear and Walt’s
face. You drag the mystery girl behind
you,
wishing she would just shut up. On the
other side if the cavern is another passage way that leads God only
knows
where. You hope it can’t be worse than
where you are right now, and realize that you are a fool for thinking
so. But all the same…
Chris is in the lead, and this is okay with you in the
sense that you don’t mind having something between you and the koala
bear. It’s sad because you know you’re
going to
see, in about two seconds, a koala bear eviscerating one of your
friends.
And of course, this is exactly what happens.
Chris is screaming and thrashing in no time
at all, with a koala bear ears-deep in his stomach.
To put things lightly, this is not something you thought you
would be witnessing when you woke up this morning.
Not wanting to meet a similar fate, you push ahead, girl in tow,
and Zorlath the Betrayer hot on your heels.
Fifteen minutes later you are hopelessly lost in a vast
subterranean labyrinth. This is almost
never a good thing. It is absolutely
never a good thing to be lost in a vast subterranean labyrinth while
you are
being chased by a billion incendiary spiders and a koala bear.
Quite unexpectedly, Zorlath the Betrayer falls into a
bottomless chasm and is never seen ever again.
Despite everything that’s happened this evening, you think that
this is
a little odd. Anti-climactic, even,
though you find this thought a little inappropriate in the face of the
loss of
yet another one of your friends.
You have absolutely no idea how long you have been
wandering around below the earth. It
feels like a very long time. You are
hungry, and near dying of thirst, and cannot even remember anything
else but a
constant level of absolute terror. And
then, miraculously, you emerge into daylight.
It’s late evening, actually.
Around you, you see that a great deal of the world is still
smoldering,
with several large fires still burning merrily away here and there. Not too many spiders, though.
Only a couple hundred thousand.
Comparatively, that’s not bad. Which,
of course, is what makes it bad. But not
as bad as it…okay, sorry.
The sun is
sinking toward the horizon. This means
that you were down there, at the very least, for the remainder of the
long
night and most of the next day. You
suspect it was longer than that.
And yet, mystery girl is still screaming. She
hasn’t stopped. You’ve refrained from
smacking her because
she has, after all, had a very stressful day.
But you’d really like it if she would just shut the fu--
There is silence.
You turn to look at the girl, and see that she has collapsed on
the
ground. You think for a second she has
simply screamed herself to sleep*, but then you see that her
eyes are
wide open, and her face is a rictus of terror.
You lean down to take her pulse, although it’s pretty obvious
she has
simply kicked off. As you lean in, you
see something reflected in her lifeless eyes.
Oh, hey! There’s
the dragon!
You spin and see it in the sky. Or,
to be more accurate, you see it instead of the sky.
Remember that it is quite large. It
is also now quite close. And terrible. Remember that this isn’t your everyday dragon. It is a terror more terrible than the most
terrifying…um…terror that ever, ah…terrified.**
But on the bright side, you car is right there!
How lucky and coincidental!***
Not so good is the fact that the spiders are beginning to
pour out of the cave. Beyond all reason
(ha! That’s funny, all things
considered), they are still on fire.
You figure the koala bear is lurking somewhere close by. Last you saw, it was just ahead of the
spiders.
Well, nothing to do but hop in your car and get the hell
out of Dodge. You turn away from
mystery corpse girl and, thankfully, trip on a twisty root. Ordinarily, this would kinda suck, but it
saves your life in this case. If you’d
actually gotten to your car, you would have been instantly killed when
this
speeding van comes careening out of nowhere and plows into it. You roll out of the way just in time to
avoid being crushed. You catch a
glimpse of the driver, and will be confused about it for the rest of
your
life. It couldn’t really have been
Steven King, could it? Naw…
It would seem that you are fucked. You
are being hunted by a koala bear, chased
by angry spider arsonists, you’ve just narrowly survived a hit and run
by one
of the most successful authors of all time, and there’s a big honkin’
monster
in the sky. Defeated, you slump against
a tree and wait to be immolated by the spiders. Or
eaten by the koala. Or
whatevered-to-death by the dragon creature.
You hope you’ll have time for one last cigarette before you die. You fish your pack out of your pocket, shake
your last coffin nail out, and stick it in your mouth.
Happily, your Zippo works first try, and you
are about to touch the dancing flame to the end of the smoke when
Harlan’s face
appears in the fire.
Huh, you think.
“What’s up?” you ask Harlan.
“Um. Hey. Um.
Do you have my medallion? And a
virgin? Try it. You
know, virgin’s blood. I really like
parsley.”
“Dude, what?”
“Parsley.
Green. Yum.”
“A virgin’s blood?
Your medallion? What?
Will this make everything okay? Is
she a virgin? The dead girl?
What the
fuck are you talking about?”
“Armadillopaste.”
And just like that, Harlan pops out of existence, taking your
Zippo
flame with him. You swear and try to
relight your Zippo, but it’s no use. It
must waste a lot of lighter fluid to talk to cryptic little weirdoes
across
dimensional borders.
But, with your time running out, and nothing else to do,
you take the medallion from ‘round your neck, and walk back to the
mystery
girl’s body. She doesn’t seem to be
bleeding, which means you are going to have to get some blood out of
her
yourself. You feel nothing as you pick
up a rock (ouch! Still hot…owie!) and rhythmically bash it against her head
until you have created a gooey mush on the forest floor.
You reflect that this might have been a bit
much, but you’ve got a lot of frustration pent up.
For the first time in your life you find yourself hoping
that a hot chick knew how to keep her thighs closed, and drop the
medallion in
her head goo.
And, glory be, it works!
Neat!
The koala bear goes away with a *pop!*. The
eldritch horror from beyond space-time
goes back beyond space-time, and the fire on the spiders extinguishes
itself. The spiders, unfortunately,
stay. Just your luck.
They do seem pretty bummed out, though. You
figure they didn’t think they would meet
their defeat at your hands. Depressed,
the spiders begin to slink away, murmuring.
You shudder and hope that a lot of birds will have a really
swell dinner
soon.
Speaking of dinner…you haven’t eaten in a really long
time. You remember a package of Oreos
in your trunk, but soon find that the van crumpled your car into such
an
unrecognizable mess that you can’t get to them. You
sigh, and start walking toward the nearby (Only sixteen miles
up hill!) town. You’ll have a good long
hike alone with your thoughts, most of which will unfortunately be
about SWIM
THROUGH SPIDERS.
Beware the Twinkies.
--Harlan
PS:
Spatulapocalypse.
<>You may, at long last,
proceed to Section 91, and
conclude your long and arduous journey!!!
* Actually, it isn’t very much
like a dragon at all, at least not the JRR Tolkien type of dragon, and
it’s
totally, way far removed from all the shitty fantasy art your
ex-girlfriend
tacked up all over her dorm room walls when she went all
goth/roleplayer on you
and sank irretrievably into an elf-populated geek universe of
grammatically
retarded online chat room social misfits.
Stupid bitch.
* It is simply and unarguably not
right that the word describing the action of spiders can ever be a word
like
’regroup’, but that’s the way it is.
Sorry.
* A note on Zorlath The
Betrayer: He’s weird, sure, but not as
unnaturally fucked up as Harlan.
Zorlath the Betrayer is a D&D freak. He
seems trustworthy, despite the name. But
you can’t be too sure, especially in circumstances such as
these. You’ve still never figured out
whether Zorlath the Betrayer is his real name or not.
He won’t tell. You’ve
never met his parents and he never talks about them.
He lives alone in a pretty nice studio apartment filled with
some
seriously disturbing art and sculptures.
He talks strangely and owns a cobra, always wears a cloak, and
cooks a
mean spaghetti sauce.
** Anybody who would willfully
plant SWIM THROUGH SPIDERS into the mind of a friend is probably a
phenomenal
asshat.
* I would never wish upon even my
worst enemy a situation in which such a declaration is necessary. I’m really sorry it had to happen to you.
* Never something it is pleasant
to do. Take my word for it.
** Okay, I admit it. I
had nothing there. We’re almost done,
though. So shut up and keep reading.
*** And out of gas, but you’ve
forgotten that. Not that it matters,
since what’s about to happen will render the whole empty tank thing a
moot
point.