Latest / INSPIRE STORY / The Forest of A Thousand Legs

Transcript

The Forest of A Thousand Legs · INSPIRE STORY

0:15
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Greek Cast.
0:16
Speaker 2: Today, we are going to be doing a spider special.
0:20
Speaker 3: I've been saying that iraq nophobia is very present amongst
0:24
the online space, and we have two spider stories today,
0:28
the first one being my wife underwent exposure therapy to
0:31
cure her arak nophobia, but it worked too well and
0:33
now she's freaking me out. And then we have an
0:36
even older story from that was one year ago. It
0:39
said it was posted to no sleep. And then we
0:41
have one from almost ten years ago that's.
0:44
Speaker 2: Called the Forest of a Thousand Legs.
0:46
Speaker 3: Which is like one of the most brutal names of
0:49
all time for a story that's sick.
0:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty excited for these spiders freaked me out. Well,
0:54
some spiders freak me out. I'm not arachtophobic to the
0:58
point that if I see one I'll lose my mind,
1:01
but if I see third at once, I lose my mind.
1:04
And I have nightmares about spiders a lot and things
1:06
like that. So the stories, the stories today definitely have
1:09
the potential to bother me. You're not really afraid of spiders,
1:12
just snakes.
1:13
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah?
1:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I mean, like, listen, if when I see
1:17
tiny spiders I'm always you know, I don't want them
1:20
like biting me if if they can bite it, I
1:22
don't want that. But I will say the like if
1:24
I saw a fucking giant one of the giant like
1:27
hairy spiders, I mean I would not be stoked on that.
1:31
Speaker 1: Ye.
1:31
Speaker 3: Also, I feel like every depiction of the scariest version
1:34
of a spider it can be is in movies is
1:36
when they have a real spider come in, like in
1:40
the frame walk in, you know, and then they have
1:43
it on a string like a like a practical version
1:47
of it, and they just literally pulled at the camera
1:49
and it's just like flat it's flying at you.
1:51
Speaker 2: That actually freaks me out a lot.
1:52
Speaker 1: That's like in that movie of Rechtophobia when it jumps
1:55
at him when he's looking forward at the end.
1:57
Speaker 3: There's so many fun spider moviest Least when I was younger,
2:00
I really loved to Ragtophobia because John Goodman's great, but
2:03
also eight Legged Freaks.
2:04
Speaker 1: Eight Legged Freaks is awesome. I used to watch that
2:07
all the time as a kid. Them like shooting the
2:09
spiders in the mall and all that.
2:10
Speaker 3: The spiders in a The Giant Spider and Lord of
2:13
the rings and and Harry Potter both freaked me out.
2:16
Speaker 1: I'll, uh, I'll put out this bounty. You don't get
2:19
anything for it, but you'll help me feel better, so
2:21
that's its own reward. Appl out this bounty. There was
2:24
a movie when I was a kid that I watched
2:28
on the Sci Fi Channel with my dad a couple
2:30
times about a giant spider, or like several giant spiders
2:35
in the subways under New York. And every time I
2:38
look that up, it brings up a movie called Spiders,
2:40
which is about like alien spiders taking over a train
2:43
station underground. It's not that one. It was a movie.
2:47
Speaker 2: It's a lot like what you just literally said, though, no, no, no.
2:50
Speaker 1: This movie, I remember a few very distinct scenes. There
2:53
was one scene it's like a swat team goes down
2:56
and they have to get on a train car to
2:58
go to an abandoned part of the track where like
3:01
there's a spider's nest, and there's a shot where one
3:05
of the girl's swat team members is loading a gun
3:08
and she looks down like an empty railcar tunnel as
3:14
they're going and she sees a giant shadow of a
3:18
spider on the wall and then there's another scene where
3:22
there is a wedding party on a subway train that
3:27
is going to I guess a reception or whatever, and
3:32
a giant spider gets on there. They're screaming and everything,
3:34
and then there's a shot of the train car pulling
3:38
up to station and the door's opening and blood pouring
3:42
out of the door. And I have looked for this thing.
3:44
I've looked on like old horror movie forms, I've looked
3:47
on sci fi channel forms. I have not found this film,
3:50
So if you can find it, I'd really appreciate that.
3:52
I'm not crazy. I have this recurring dream where I
3:57
there's this one kind of spider that really bothers me
4:00
called golden orb weavers. Even seeing them like makes me uncomfortable.
4:05
And I have this dream where like there will be
4:08
a bunch on me and I can't get them off,
4:09
or people are throwing them at me or something like that.
4:13
So I'd say I'm fairly arachnophobic. So we'll see if
4:16
the story is freaked me out. Are you gonna recommend
4:18
something before I cut you off?
4:19
Speaker 3: And I'll recommend just as a movie that it may be.
4:22
I feel like it's gotten a lot of hype over
4:23
the last couple of years. There's this movie called Possum
4:26
that's really good. That's unsettling, kind of very unsettling movie.
4:31
But it's just about a man who's carrying out a
4:33
briefcase and there's like this puppet on the inside of it,
4:35
but it's like a spider and it's like this fucking
4:37
human head. It's very, very sick. So if you haven't
4:39
seen Possum, check that out.
4:41
Speaker 2: It's really good. Yeah, but guys, thank you so much.
4:45
Speaker 3: If you're listening on Apple's fucking podcast or Spotify for
4:50
I'll listen to audio platforms for the podcast. It does
4:53
help a lot. And please be sure to give us
4:55
a nice writing there. It would mean the fucking world.
4:58
And also just want to show out the patrons, thank
5:01
you so much for the support on what we're trying
5:04
to do here. And then also if you want some
5:06
extra content, we watched Lee Cronin's The Mummy, so if
5:09
you want to hop along for some of those fun experiences,
5:12
feel free. I think whenever The back Rooms is out,
5:14
we're probably we'll probably talk about that out there on
5:16
there too.
5:17
Speaker 2: But without further ado.
5:19
Speaker 1: Well, let's lead a little bit of further ado because
5:23
our first story about the wife undergoing exposures by Christian Wallace,
5:27
which obviously you know, friend of the channel og writer.
5:31
We love covering his stories. He did the story about
5:34
my wife's taking our role play too far, the only
5:36
other astronaut on this mission, the deer that walks on
5:39
two legs, bunker of a prepper family, and another story
5:41
I think I'm missing, And then when we were in person,
5:44
I don't think it's been posted yet, at least not
5:45
the time of recording, but we record the story about
5:48
an abandoned white supremacist camp, also by Christian Wallace. So okay,
5:52
big fan of his stuff, everything that he writes. But
5:54
before the episode Hunter, I looked up Christian wallace creep
5:59
cast because I trying to remember how many stories that
6:05
we had covered of his, because I knew it was
6:06
a lot. And one of the first results took me here.
6:11
I just sent you a link. Did you know that
6:14
this existed?
6:15
Speaker 3: Let me, Sam, what is this thing you're about to
6:18
show me? No, okay, what the hell is this?
6:26
Speaker 1: This is the creep cast wiki and dude, this I
6:31
don't know who's running this or how many people are
6:34
it is okay. For example, you go to the episode list,
6:37
it's every episode we've ever done. Let me just click
6:40
on turn it off, for example, one of the first
6:43
stories of twenty twenty six. It gives a summary of
6:46
the episode, the number of the episode, and then all
6:49
of our gags and bits. For example, it's for turn
6:53
it off, it says. The episode begins with both hosts
6:57
fighting like divorced parents. At seven eventeen fifty three, both
7:01
host laugh at how much juice the protagonist drinks. At
7:05
twenty six forty nine, the video ends when it's revealed
7:08
the characters are British. At forty seven thirty two, Windagoon
7:12
mentions how often meat Canyon brings up belly kisses. At
7:15
fifty oh eight, Windagoon talks about Goosebumps episode Cry of
7:19
the Cat. At one hour, three minutes, fifty three seconds,
7:22
the editor adds a bear trap clip when Windagoon is right,
7:25
and at one nineteen sixteen, both hosts laugh as the
7:28
protagonist yet again drinks juice, and then in the trivia segment,
7:32
it says the three D animated background for this episode
7:35
depicts a lid up tent in a forest clearing. This
7:38
is more than I keep track of when we say
7:42
wow for every single episode, and.
7:45
Speaker 2: Then get this Grandpa Ernest wiki what, Yes.
7:49
Speaker 1: They're Every single character that we've made up in bits
7:52
has their own wiki entry with a list of how
7:55
many episodes they've shown up in and what gags are
7:58
around them in.
7:59
Speaker 2: So, my god, I was running this. I have no idea.
8:04
Speaker 1: Okay, so I found the bunker of a prepper family.
8:06
Right if I click on that, uh, it's said where
8:10
was that at? Oh, there's a character list and the
8:13
character for that one is officer Mole and this description
8:17
when you did the mole voice, he says, Officer Mole
8:19
is a subterranean mole person masquerading as a police officer. Bob,
8:23
as he's called by his colleagues, is known for his
8:26
love of digging holes. And then it has like physical
8:29
description mole.
8:32
Speaker 2: This is on This is uncanny.
8:35
Speaker 1: The Dana end up freaking me out a little.
8:39
Speaker 3: David King page says he wants hired Obese Italian mobsters
8:43
for forty two thousand dollars in buttcoin and twenty twelve,
8:46
which is now worth one point two six three five
8:49
billion dollars, making the mobsters rich. That's just that's just
8:54
written down in here. Okay, what the fuck.
8:59
Speaker 1: Dude, there's some more stuff in here than I think
9:03
I've ever written about anything I've done. Like, Okay, I
9:09
just click on I talked to God. It's in the
9:11
trivia segment. It says at twenty eight thirty four, thirty
9:14
three oh nine and thirty five fifty the editor plays
9:16
with Windgoon's green screen. What is the same amount of information?
9:24
I know you feel flattered or terrified?
9:27
Speaker 3: Uh, this is this is actually incredible. This is so
9:31
in depth. Whoever's doing this, I applaud you. This is
9:34
an extremely impressive all right.
9:36
Speaker 1: Well, with that out of the way, let's begin. Christian Wallace,
9:39
my wife underwent exposure therapy to cure her rachnophobia, but
9:42
it worked too well, and now she's freaking me out.
9:45
I don't like spiders. I don't like it when they
9:48
bunch themselves up so their legs look like tangled wires,
9:51
and I don't like it when they spread themselves out
9:53
like radial spokes on a wheel. It was bad luck
9:56
that when I met my wife, we discovered we were
9:58
both scared of them as the main and I kind
10:00
of just wound up taking over spider killing duty. At first,
10:03
this meant squealing while trying to love a shoe at
10:05
one of them from a distance. But as the years
10:08
went on, I kind of just got tired of the
10:09
stress and anxiety. Fear is exhausting, so it was the
10:13
pageantry of it, jumping up and shouting and lots of
10:16
running around. Over time I found myself having less and
10:20
less of a fear reaction to them. Don't get me wrong,
10:23
I didn't want one crawling on my face, but it
10:26
wasn't like they had me running away in fear every time.
10:28
Lily was never great with him either, but it wasn't
10:31
what I'd call worthy of therapy. For the first ten
10:35
years I knew her, she was a fairly run at
10:37
the meal of rachnophobe. Things only got bad after this
10:40
one night when we just come back in from an
10:43
evening with friends. There'd been a storm outside. Wendy as hell.
10:48
I remember putting the keys down on the table by
10:50
the door, and when I looked back, she was pulling
10:53
down the hood of her coat. She led out a sigh,
10:56
her hands through her hair, and she looked a little
10:58
puzzled by watch you felt when she lifted her hand away.
11:03
There were thin black legs poking out from between her fingers.
11:07
Took a second for her to react what was all
11:09
bunched up inside her cupped hand. Then she screamed and
11:12
threw it onto the ground. I saw it for only
11:15
a second, it was so fast. Then it was off
11:18
and under the nearest door, and my number one concern
11:20
became comforting. My wife was having a full blown panic attack.
11:24
Get it off, Get it off, she screamed, while slapping
11:27
out her neck and hair. I hugged her tight, checked
11:30
her hair, and then checked it again when she asked
11:32
me to. Then she stripped her top off to make
11:35
sure nothing else was clinging to her clothes before I
11:37
took her into the kitchen. We had a cup of
11:39
tea while she kept scratching at the back of her head.
11:42
Speaker 2: Little fucker.
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Speaker 3: I can't believe it. Did you see it? It was huge,
11:46
the one of the biggest yet.
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Speaker 1: Truthfully, I had only half glimpsed memories of it scuttling away,
11:52
but it had been big, large enough that a pint
11:55
glass wouldn't have a fit over its darting legs. Just
11:58
seeing it left me feel anxious, but at the time
12:01
I ignored my ound its comfort. After all, i'd hardly
12:05
been the real victim got away.
12:08
Speaker 2: God, it's still nouse somewhere, isn't it.
12:11
Speaker 1: I wanted to lie, but thought better of it.
12:15
Speaker 3: Somewhere. Yeah, but we'll smider proof of the bedroom to
12:17
night and I'll go looking for it in the morning.
12:19
Thank you.
12:20
Speaker 2: Jes said, no, I'm gonna have a hard time sleeping tonight.
12:22
Speaker 1: So I said, like, oh, the story might bother me.
12:25
It might, you know, mess with me or whatever. The
12:29
description of the legs coming through her hands immediately bothered me. Yeah,
12:34
I've already checked out.
12:35
Speaker 3: I just thought of all the like bristles, you know,
12:37
like all the tiny little hair is going through. There
12:40
was something that kind of was similar last night that
12:43
happened to me, not necessarily in my hand, but my
12:45
dog threw up in our bed and it was just
12:47
a full fledged like mouse, like a field mouse, and
12:52
that like it just made me think of I don't
12:54
know why it made me think of that where you're like,
12:55
oh my god, and then like the Dodgers looked the
12:58
doctors looked me.
12:59
Speaker 2: Like, I don't know, sorry, that that kind of thing.
13:03
Speaker 3: But I immediately I didn't bother my My wife is gone
13:06
right now with her buddy on vacation.
13:09
Speaker 2: An yeh.
13:10
Speaker 3: I text her that and I was like, you really
13:11
dodged a fucking bullet by not being here tonight.
13:17
Speaker 1: I feel I'm thinking about spiders like this, stuff like that.
13:24
Speaker 2: When you read a story like this, you're gonna start
13:26
feeling shit on like your legs.
13:27
Speaker 1: And I'm already I'm looking at my desk.
13:30
Speaker 2: There was one.
13:31
Speaker 1: I don't even think it was a spider. I think
13:32
it was a beetle or something. But one day I
13:34
was at my desk and I just saw the legs
13:36
peer over the side. Uh, and it was something crawling
13:40
underneath my desk. But I'm like looking at the brim
13:42
of the desk and making sure. It's like already messing
13:47
with me a little bit.
13:48
Speaker 2: Gosh.
13:48
Speaker 1: I keep thinking about the stream I had where like
13:50
someone was throwing a spider at me and in the
13:52
air I could see its little legs like flying trying
13:55
to grab onto me, and so immediately like.
14:04
Speaker 3: Take my head, saying I'll save you, I'll spider.
14:10
Speaker 1: She made me strip the bed before she got in it,
14:12
and all night she kept flicking at her friend, and
14:15
all night she kept flicking at the fringe and the
14:17
hair on the back of her neck. Felt so bad
14:20
for if that had been me, I can't say I
14:23
would have reacted much better. Neither of us slept that well,
14:26
but I was mostly just worried about her. When you
14:29
love someone, it's tough to see them suffer.
14:32
Speaker 3: Also, that's a fucking that that that has to be
14:35
some kind of set up there. When you love someone,
14:38
it's tough to see them suffer. Now, if I was
14:40
a betting man, I feel like.
14:42
Speaker 2: She's going to do something that is like.
14:44
Speaker 3: I don't know if she's gonna go full spider like,
14:47
but I just feel like there's gonna be something where
14:49
I feel like he's gonna have to be like, well,
14:50
we're gonna have to put you down.
14:55
Speaker 2: That we're gonna have to cross.
14:56
Speaker 1: Did it was Christian Wallace the one who did the
14:58
my Daughter's become I mean a dog? Or No, that
15:01
was Elias with a row? Wasn't it the one about
15:04
the guy person the guys I'm smothering his child. I
15:10
think that was the Lias But same idea, same idea.
15:13
But it wasn't just that one night. The second one
15:16
was much the same. The third force and so on.
15:19
It petered out a little in the second week, but
15:22
then she saw a spider on some TV show and
15:24
the anxiety came back full force. Every night was the same.
15:28
I had to strip the bed of everything, lift the mattress,
15:30
and check for spiders. She even got rid of her
15:33
bedside table so there'd be less hiding places for one.
15:36
In the meantime, I was on hunting duty. In her
15:39
own words, I had to find the bastard or she
15:42
never feels safe in the house. Again. It's funny, but
15:45
in hindsight, I can't really say what I saw go
15:47
scuttling under the doorway that first night, but I do
15:51
know I didn't try all that hard to find it.
15:54
I remember finding some webs under the living room sofa
15:57
that were real odd. The fibers were like the fake
16:00
stuff they bring out on Halloween, and I had to
16:03
peel them off the carpet like velcrow. I found a
16:06
couple of these nests throughout the house, but I never
16:09
mentioned them. One of them hit a hole in the
16:11
floor that really should have alarmed me, but I just
16:14
ignored it. Okay, so you have this giant spider mole
16:17
thing that's like digging through the floor. It's got party
16:21
city webs everywhere. You're just like, Eh, I won't I
16:24
won't bring that up. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
16:30
I don't know.
16:30
Speaker 3: I haven't seen enough extremely large spiders in life to
16:35
know at what point would I I feel like if
16:37
I saw something not even abnormally large, I'd be like,
16:40
oh my god, this is an infestation. I feel like
16:43
I would psych myself out too much.
16:46
Speaker 1: I saw the other night there was one on the
16:47
wall of the house that was like, I don't even
16:50
know what kind of spider it was, because normally, like
16:52
the big spiders around here are brown, they're like the
16:54
little wolf spider wood spider things. This thing was black
16:58
and it was like huge, it was super fat, and
17:03
I don't know what that was. I don't know how
17:04
many are in my house, and I don't like it,
17:09
so I don't know. But if it's tunneling through the floor, yeah,
17:12
I think that's a problem.
17:13
Speaker 3: Is it tunneling though, or is it just like there's
17:15
a hole in the floor and he's they're just like
17:17
hiding in there and there's nests and stuff. Well that
17:19
is possible. Yeah, does it say at least not yet
17:22
I haven't. I haven't. I haven't caught onto this mole
17:25
hybrid that you're speaking of. But I don't know have
17:27
you ever I don't know.
17:28
Speaker 1: If it's the same in the Midwest, But have you
17:32
ever done the thing where you walk out into your
17:34
yard at night and shine a flashlight? So a lot
17:39
of the time in Tennessee, if you walk outside at
17:42
night and you shine a flashlight across the yard, you'll
17:44
see what you think is do everywhere like little like webs. No,
17:49
their eyes their spider eyes.
17:51
Speaker 3: Oh okay, No, well you're You're probably live in a
17:54
much more forested area. I feel like I wouldn't see
17:57
it as much, you know what I mean, you don't
17:59
have as many trees.
18:00
Speaker 1: Because someone told me that one time, and I'm like,
18:01
there's no way, Like I see you all the time
18:04
at night, there's no way those are spiders. And then
18:06
I would walk up to each of the dew quote
18:09
unquote and it would be spider eyes. So that's nice. Yeah,
18:13
I don't like that, but yeah, yeah, it's awesome. It
18:16
looks like it's everywhere, It's across everything. Yeah, I'm this
18:20
story is psyching me out. Really, I'm leaning forward in
18:23
my chair right now, So there's nothing touching me. I
18:27
don't know.
18:27
Speaker 2: I have to console you the same way this man
18:29
is consoling.
18:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm the wife. Now, I need you to take
18:32
care of me. I need you. Oh all right, don't
18:36
say that I ignored a lot. Actually, I found dead
18:39
mice spun up in cocoons and something bore a hole
18:41
through one of the kitchen cupboards and filled it with silk.
18:44
See it's boring, it's sticking. Nothing normal about that. But
18:47
I just covered it up with some cans and moved on.
18:50
Behavior I find hard to explain in hindsight. Maybe my
18:53
attention was elsewhere. Lily wasn't in a great place, and
18:56
she was slowly getting worse. She cried a lot. Any
19:00
little thing that touched her skin would result in lots
19:02
of panic yelling. She couldn't need a meal without slapping
19:06
at her arms and neck every few seconds. Things got
19:09
real bad when I came back one night to find
19:11
her shaving her head. She told me she got tired
19:14
of mistaking the feeling of her own hair for a spider.
19:17
So this was the simplest way to feel clean and safe.
19:20
If you ever lived with anyone who's had a break down.
19:22
There's usually this moment where your heart sings as you
19:24
realize that what you're dealing with has transcended the norm.
19:28
It's quite frightening. Actually reminded me of when my mom
19:32
found a lump. It's a very isolating sort of fear.
19:36
I remember lying awake in bed that night and just
19:38
thinking about how I'd found Lily bent over the bath shaver,
19:41
her in hand, with a patchy head like the doll
19:44
from toy story. When she looked over her shoulder at me,
19:47
she smiled and her eyes were so wide. I felt
19:50
like I wasn't looking at my wife anymore.
19:52
Speaker 3: Love that immediate turn to psychological horror. By the way,
19:55
like yeah, hey christ idea. I mean like it reminds
19:59
me of a It reminds me. I feel like I've
20:02
brought this up on.
20:03
Speaker 2: The story before.
20:03
Speaker 3: There used to be this great short film on YouTube
20:06
that was that was a Cronenberg film. I think this
20:11
is when I think his wife had gotten breast cancer,
20:14
or his deale with cancer. I know that she had
20:16
just recently passed, which is why he made uh his
20:20
latest movie, The Shrouds, But there was this I believe
20:23
it was a Cronenberg short film, but it was called
20:25
The Nest.
20:26
Speaker 2: It was about this woman.
20:27
Speaker 3: It was like the POV of a doctor walking in
20:30
almost like a found footage style, but it was just
20:32
his pov.
20:32
Speaker 2: I don't think there's a camera, but her top.
20:35
Speaker 3: Was off and she was like basically like these there's
20:38
insects crawling.
20:39
Speaker 2: Around my breast. I want them by what both my
20:41
breasts removed?
20:42
Speaker 3: And the guy was like kind of playing in this
20:44
way where he was treating it like a psychological horror.
20:46
It was only fourteen minutes long, but it's this idea
20:49
that was kind of fun where it's he's like, okay,
20:51
well we can like look into it and do whatever.
20:54
And it looked like it was just a fun thing
20:56
of like oh is this.
20:59
Speaker 2: Like is she just didn't saying or is there actually
21:01
something there?
21:01
Speaker 3: Because it kind of like sways both ways, uh, through
21:05
the through the film, but I just love these psychological
21:07
turns of like having to deal with somebody who's like
21:10
there's something wrong with my body, or like I have
21:13
to remove my hair because it's the same sensation. Like
21:16
I think that that only develops and evolves, you know,
21:18
there's I think that's like such a slippery slope.
21:21
Speaker 2: So I just I love that turn here.
21:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm I'm freaked out. I'm not gonna lie. Just
21:30
I'm just thinking about these long legs and yeah, have
21:34
you ever missed someone while you're still Have you ever
21:37
missed someone while you still live with them? Made them
21:40
coffee and breakfast and chatted about your day, But it's
21:43
like nobody's there. Every day was the same. I tell
21:47
her about work, and she'd tell me about how she
21:49
scrubbed at the bedroom top to bottom looking for spiders,
21:52
or started pulling up the bathroom tiles to check for nests.
21:56
At one point, I realized she'd taken a lot of
21:58
time off work, but she wouldn't give me a straight answer,
22:01
so I had to call her office. They wouldn't even
22:03
answer my calls, which I had to take as a
22:06
pretty bad sign. It came as a relief when she
22:09
got sectioned. Everything came out all at once. She tried
22:13
put in a hammer to one of the walls to
22:15
find what was behind it, not realizing that it was
22:17
just the neighbor's living room on the other side. I
22:21
was at work during all this, but things clearly escalated
22:24
pretty quickly, and the police arrived to find a partially
22:26
bald woman screaming about spiders.
22:28
Speaker 2: In the walls.
22:29
Speaker 1: By the time I got home, they'd already taken her
22:32
to be assessed at the local hospital. I rushed to
22:34
visit her, but in the meantime I had to call
22:36
her parents and it was well. It was a relief
22:39
because I wasn't alone anymore. Other people knew what was
22:42
going on, and that made it a little easier for
22:45
me to navigate. Until then, I'd been afraid to mention
22:48
it to anyone. I guess I was a little embarrassed,
22:51
or maybe just not sure what etiquette was for discussing
22:54
someone else's mental health. She was only gone about a night,
22:58
not even twelve hours. Really. The neighbors agreed not to
23:01
press charges if I paid for all the repairs and
23:03
Lily got therapy. Lily's parents are quite well off, so
23:07
they helped us out with that. They found this clinic
23:10
that she stayed at for a couple of weeks. It
23:12
specialized in exposure therapy, which really just means getting a
23:16
person used to their phobia. Don't like water, spend hours
23:20
every day in a pool, don't like moths, Step into
23:23
a room with thousands of them. This is over simplification,
23:27
of course, It's a special program that evolves gradual increases
23:30
in the nature of the exposure. The first night, she
23:33
called me and told me they'd had her looking at
23:35
pictures of a spider and talking about her experience. They
23:39
were literally just cartoony drawings, but she told me she
23:42
found it hard anyway. She cried, and I cried too.
23:45
She was only a few hours drive away, but I
23:47
didn't want to be away from her, and everything had
23:49
happened so suddenly. It was only six weeks between the
23:52
night with the storm and her ending up in that clinic,
23:55
But in that short period of time, it felt like
23:58
the ground had fallen from beneath my feet. Exposure therapy
24:01
to spiders sounds like the worst thing ever.
24:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, this idea of like slowly gradually raising it up
24:08
to I like think that it's gonna be this thing
24:10
where she starts like becoming too comfortable with them, and
24:13
she like becomes like almost needy or dependent on them,
24:16
maybe even starts talking to them. I feel like that
24:19
that seems like I'm sure that's a real thing, But
24:22
thinking about it as a person who is completely ignorant.
24:25
Speaker 2: Of how it actually works.
24:26
Speaker 3: It does make you think that it's like yeah, if
24:28
you it just feels like you're exchanging one extreme for another,
24:32
right Hm. Like almost like if you're in this like
24:35
kind of shattered or cracked broken place, healing it with
24:38
like overexposure of the thing that is like breaking you,
24:42
I feel like it would like crack you in a
24:44
different way.
24:45
Speaker 2: Does that make sense?
24:47
Speaker 4: Yeah?
24:47
Speaker 2: I think.
24:48
Speaker 1: Uh, I think if you're already at such an unstable point,
24:50
maybe it like goes the other direction. I agree. But
24:55
I mean also looking at and this is a real
24:58
thing that's apparently like you super do they just make
25:02
you touch spiders or something?
25:04
Speaker 3: I think it's just getting you introduced to the thing
25:06
that like with spiders are like the pictures cartoonity pictures
25:11
to where you see that like over time one. It
25:14
isn't like they can't hurt you immediately or whatever. But
25:18
I think just making it more introduced to like trick
25:20
your brain because your brain is apparently going on like
25:23
I mean, I would assume like a fight or flight
25:25
kind of response.
25:28
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, So I think it's like gradually doing it to.
25:30
Speaker 3: Where your like receptors in your brain don't like immediately
25:33
trigger that thing and you like have a full blown
25:36
panic attack. I think it's just kind of like slowly.
25:38
It's like almost weaning somebody off drugs. You don't do
25:40
it immediately, kind of have to like slowly, you know,
25:44
it becomes a little less, a little less every time
25:46
until your body like isn't fully dependent on it anymore.
25:50
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is This is not from like a
25:54
a pub met or anything. This is from some wellness website.
25:57
But according to them, it seems spider exposure to the
26:00
therapy and order goes from pictures to cartoons, to toy
26:03
to like spider toys, to watching videos of them, to
26:06
seeing a live one in a jar. Now they do
26:09
virtual reality spider simulation, listen to recordings of spider sounds.
26:15
I guess, uh, then you see one in a terrarium,
26:18
and then finally controlled live encounter. I don't know about that.
26:25
Speaker 2: I don't know. It's got to be it has to
26:28
have some kind of success to it to I mean.
26:31
Speaker 1: I'm sure it does. I mean it's a very like
26:34
exposure therapy is a well documented thing that has a
26:36
ton Like here's a I think this is PubMed now,
26:40
this is uh, the NIH National Institute of Health, like
26:45
showing graphs about how well it works. So I'm sure
26:47
it's a thing, but uh huh, okay, all right, No,
26:52
it's funny because then, like the last recording or the
26:54
last one that got posted, I talked about how it's
26:57
been a while since we've gotten scared in a story,
26:59
and you know what I'm meaning my words right now,
27:02
I just.
27:02
Speaker 3: Want to say, I'm very happy that we didn't read
27:04
this before we were in the fucking basement, because that
27:08
would be there was so much yeah, that would be.
27:10
Speaker 1: There were drugs everywhere.
27:13
Speaker 3: This actually would have been explatory there just freaking yeah,
27:16
Oh my.
27:17
Speaker 2: God, it's time to talk about something.
27:20
Speaker 3: Scary, your health. I know I don't go in the
27:23
doctor as much as I should.
27:24
Speaker 2: If I'm feeling sick, I'll just lie in bed and
27:27
sleep it away.
27:28
Speaker 3: But that's only because I don't want to have to
27:30
deal with the appointments, insurance and.
27:32
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Back to our spooky story, I.
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and we are now back to the episode. Two weeks
30:31
she was in there, I don't remember them well. There
30:35
were phone calls every night. She was getting better, she
30:38
told me, and the doctor's confirmed as much. Hard going
30:41
for sure. They had to sedate her the day she
30:44
graduated from cartoons to actual photos of spiders. Apparently she
30:48
scratched and orderly up real bad. My time in the
30:50
house was lonely, little weird too, if I'm honest. I
30:54
woke up at one point with cobwebs in my hair,
30:56
and at some point I realized that I hadn't seen
30:59
a spider in my home for a long time, not
31:02
even a little money spider. What is a money spider?
31:06
Money spider? Oh, that's what people call them. Those are
31:10
just I always call those house spiders interesting. I briefly
31:13
wondered about what the hell had been leaving cobwebs around
31:16
the place, but never followed up on it. It's hard
31:19
to get my thoughts straight. I do remember finding more
31:22
dead mice, all wept up in the back of the
31:24
kitchen cupboard. One morning, I came down to find a
31:27
starling cocooned on the outside of the kitchen window. No
31:30
sign of what did it though. I just stared at it,
31:33
sip my coffee, and then I left for work, and
31:36
when I came back, it was gone. Probably not a
31:39
good time to tell you I was diagnosed with a
31:42
kind of dementious some time ago.
31:44
Speaker 5: What that, brother, You lead with these things? Yeah, you
31:53
can talk, you can talk.
31:56
Speaker 3: About your fucking crazy spider girl, but you're not gonna
32:00
if you have dementia.
32:01
Speaker 2: What come on?
32:03
Speaker 1: Come on, man, pacing people, pacing. We gotta figure this out.
32:09
I guess that's supposed to help make sense of things, right.
32:13
I don't know, doesn't feel like it makes sense to me.
32:16
It's not like Alzheimer's runs in my family. They say,
32:19
the neurons of a human brain with Alzheimer's looks like
32:22
a cop web that's had holes poked in it. It's
32:25
a good way to describe how my mind feels to
32:27
live inside. Thoughts travel along a given route and then
32:31
just drop offize.
32:35
Speaker 3: I feel like that was of nowhere. I feel like
32:38
that's a fucking setup and a half. I mean the
32:40
whole thing too, is he keeps leaving all these like
32:41
cutesy little endings to paragraphs being like, yeah, thoughts travel
32:45
along given round and then just drop off the same
32:48
way that I don't know, cocoons and spiders keep dropping
32:51
off at my house.
32:52
Speaker 2: Also the Alzheimer's.
32:53
Speaker 3: That's kind of a fun parallel that they say neurons
32:55
of the human brain with Alzheimer's look like cobwebs that.
32:57
Speaker 2: Have holes poked in it.
32:59
Speaker 3: It does make it seem like maybe, uh, which is
33:02
would be an interesting concept of like a person with
33:05
dementia like attracts, I mean, like a spider, insects or something,
33:10
you know, like your your brain waves to give off
33:12
some kind of ebe. I don't know that that just
33:14
kind of a cool thought.
33:15
Speaker 1: I think what it might be implying is that this
33:20
spider is like a supernatural thing, because he mentioned when
33:25
she threw it off of her, he was like, I
33:27
didn't exactly see it. I just know it was big.
33:30
So it's almost hinting to the idea that something about
33:34
the spider's appearance doesn't look like a normal spider. And
33:36
also now it's eating like mice and birds and stuff
33:38
like that, so it's growing. But it's like caused her
33:42
to lose her mind, as it's causing him to lose
33:45
his mind, just in different ways. Dementia. It could just
33:49
be like the spider's effects causing it.
33:51
Speaker 2: I want to know how much he's forgetting. Yeah, he hasn't,
33:54
you know what I mean.
33:55
Speaker 1: Because it kind of be like maybe the whole house
33:58
is just covered in webs right now and he's walked
34:00
around like thousands of spiders. He's like, yeah, I saw
34:02
a bird outside that was kind of weird.
34:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know.
34:05
Speaker 3: I think like there's the way that piecing that in
34:08
kind of throwing that actually you know it was random,
34:10
but throwing that in not at the top actually makes.
34:13
Speaker 2: Sense for a dimentsibation, so I actually have a lot.
34:16
Oh yeah I forgot that.
34:17
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, I.
34:19
Speaker 1: Bet you fucking did forget Yeah, right on time. Yeah,
34:24
Lily's there. He progress nicely though, I remember that quite clearly.
34:28
The phone calls and the sound of her voice real vivid. God.
34:32
I miss god. I missed her so bad during this time.
34:37
I hate being overly sentimental, but it had been a
34:40
tough and lonely six weeks, and hearing her sound increasingly
34:44
happy and confident with each new phone call was like
34:46
a shot of pure happiness right into my veins. I
34:49
missed her and I wanted her back, And when she
34:52
told me, giggling with joy, that she'd held a little
34:56
spider on day ten, I burst out crying right with her.
34:59
I've I felt prided her accomplishment, and I felt relieved
35:02
that things might be getting back on track for us,
35:05
like the nightmare was finally going to be over. It
35:08
wasn't so simple. When I saw her in person. She
35:11
came back looking like the war wounded. I should say
35:14
she looked beautiful, but I want to be honest. I
35:17
smiled when I saw her, but I didn't reach my
35:20
eyes because the woman who got into the car looked
35:23
a lifetime apart from the woman who'd been living with
35:25
me just a few months ago. She was thin as
35:28
a rake, with ashy, pallid skin and a shaved head
35:32
that made her look like a matchstick, and her eyes,
35:36
the look in them wasn't right, but she was smiling,
35:39
So I swallowed the funny feeling I had in my
35:41
stomach and pretended everything was okay. There was no work
35:44
for her to go back to, and I managed to
35:47
get some time off after speaking to my boss. It
35:50
was just us, and that can be a weird feeling
35:52
for a couple used to working nine to five. I
35:55
was on edge, didn't know what to expect. She smiled
35:59
a lot, tried her best to reassure me, and I
36:02
asked a lot about what therapy was like, and she
36:05
told me it was fantastic. Showed me photos of her
36:08
sitting next to big house spiders, some as white as
36:11
her palm. Had to fight back my own fear while
36:14
looking at them. She told me that was day thirteen,
36:18
but when I asked what happened on day fourteen, she
36:20
said it was mostly just packing up and saying goodbye.
36:24
There's a dark and uncomfortable truth to relationships, and that
36:28
time only flows in one direction. My wife hadn't done
36:32
anything wrong, and I didn't really feel an ill will
36:35
towards her, but a distance had been placed between us.
36:39
All the best will in the world couldn't undo it.
36:42
She changed, been changed, I guess at the time, I
36:46
didn't know how to understand any of it. But I
36:48
wasn't sure how to treat her. When I kissed her,
36:51
it was on the cheek. When I held her, it
36:53
was like hugging a female coworker. I didn't know what
36:56
my own feelings were, and I wouldn't until I found
36:59
her one in the kitchen, tapping away at a pint glass,
37:02
giggling like a toddler. It wasn't the light and airy
37:06
laughter of the woman I was used to. It was
37:09
more like the laughter of a bunch of kids egging
37:11
on a fight or cheering on a nasty bully. She
37:14
didn't speak when she looked at me. She just turned
37:17
back to the glass and kept laughing, flicking at gently
37:21
with her f She just turned back to the glass
37:24
and kept laughing, flicking at gently with her fingers. When
37:28
I walked around the table, I saw it under there,
37:32
a very large house spider. I don't know what is
37:36
normal for people around the world, but a UK house
37:38
spider is big if its legs are wider than the
37:41
palm of your hand, brother, I think that would be
37:45
big anywhere.
37:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, like what fucking human is Like, that's pretty small.
37:52
I mean, I mean, like, my god, if it's big,
37:56
if its legs are whiter than the palm of I guess.
38:00
Speaker 1: To America or Southeast Asia, a big spider is like
38:03
larger than your head. I get that. But you know what, dude,
38:07
between us, we'll call it big together. How's that saying?
38:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I will graciously call that big.
38:14
Speaker 1: Okay, just for you, buddy. This thing was even bigger,
38:18
with legs bundled up against the side of the glass
38:21
like spools of segmented wool. And seeing it maybe jump
38:24
way back, I realized I hadn't seen another spider since
38:28
the night of the storm, and that thing all curled
38:30
up with legs as thick as hairpins was a real
38:33
shock to my system. Cried out, and my wife she
38:36
started howling with laughter. I mean, it was like a
38:39
toddler discovering cartoons for the first time. Mannic and weird
38:43
and just so happy. But in a way that was
38:46
a little alien because I didn't understand the thoughts and
38:49
feelings that went into that ear splitting cackle, and it
38:52
was all wrong coming from her. I waited for her
38:55
to say something, but she didn't. She just laughed until
38:59
something and her got tired and she slowly stopped giggling,
39:03
but she still didn't say anything even after she gone quiet.
39:08
In the end, it was me who broke the silence.
39:11
I didn't have a clue what to say the whole
39:13
time she was staring at me with her patchy hair
39:16
and gleeful, teary eyes, and I got so desperate to
39:18
break the stand off that I stammered.
39:20
Speaker 2: Out the words he's a big one Annie.
39:23
Speaker 1: Her face relaxed, her shoulders slumped, She slipped out of
39:27
the crazy like it was only ever an outfit.
39:30
Speaker 2: They'll get bigger. Hit the road jack and don't you
39:36
come back no more?
39:37
Speaker 6: No more, no more, no more, hit the road jack
39:41
and don't you come back no more?
39:43
Speaker 2: My wife's a spider. Hit the road jack. Aren't you
39:47
coming back no more? Yeah?
39:53
Speaker 3: No, I uh no, no, no, no. At what point, actually,
39:58
because listen, I at what point, I mean, at what point?
40:02
I know? I mean I mean a lot by immediately
40:07
leaving my partner any kind of distressful moment, Yeah, I know,
40:11
But at what point do you actually say this is
40:14
like a this is a broken person.
40:17
Speaker 2: She's been back not too long.
40:19
Speaker 3: But how long would this have to go on for
40:21
you to just be like I because this is what
40:23
I always wonder when you are in a relationship with
40:27
somebody like this, like people people who stick by people
40:34
like there's this I forgot what it was. There's a
40:36
person who was in a car wreck and the wife
40:38
stayed with the husband even though he was basically a
40:41
vegetable I mean, like he like I think he didn't
40:43
have a lot of brain activity. And it's this thing
40:45
where there's this deep sea of love whatever. At what
40:47
point I think is it different if the person has
40:50
gone mentally say I thought you're about.
40:54
Speaker 1: To say, at what point is it okay to leave
40:56
an injured spouse? I thought, no, no, no.
40:59
Speaker 2: No, I say, there's there's an honorable thing.
41:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, the problem leads to another problem, Like I think
41:05
you see that a lot with like you know, spouses
41:07
that have head injuries and become violent right, like you
41:11
can't be expected to stay with that person.
41:13
Speaker 3: Well there's that, And I think exactly at what point
41:15
do you say, like I don't want to get to
41:17
that point. Yeah, you know, like when I see this
41:19
and then like it's also manic laughing catching this this spider.
41:24
Speaker 2: I mean, like you would only assume that it gets worse.
41:26
Speaker 3: At what point do you are you actually able to
41:29
walk away and not be like I hate myself forever
41:31
for being a coward and leaving it, you know, at at.
41:35
Speaker 1: This specific level we're at where she's just like, oh,
41:38
they'll get bigger and laughing about spider.
41:40
Speaker 2: Now not now, not now.
41:42
Speaker 1: But I think this might be Hey, honey, I'm gonna
41:46
go stay with my mom for the Well, yeah, I guess.
41:51
Speaker 3: The way that it's being read right now, it feels
41:53
like there's little cohesion of like she's almost like has
41:56
the mental understanding of.
41:59
Speaker 1: Like a NOD, but she's cognitive function.
42:03
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, exactly.
42:04
Speaker 3: And if this went on every day, like I personally
42:06
would be like that, it would be extremely challenging, Like
42:09
that would be like that's also it's fundamentally a completely
42:12
different person than who you were in a relationship with them.
42:15
Speaker 1: Before I think. I think it's obviously a hard question,
42:17
but in a situation like this, where someone you know
42:20
has an you can see it as an injury or
42:23
a snap that leads to I think this is time
42:30
to maybe take a step back and get her another
42:32
kind of help. You know, I would has your therapy
42:35
obviously worked a little too well, maybe.
42:38
Speaker 2: I would have. I would have a stamp card and
42:41
I would give it.
42:43
Speaker 3: I would give it ten goofs before I'd have to
42:46
punch that free pizza ticket and then be like, all right,
42:50
I think I'm I think I'm lickety splitting right now. Yeah,
42:52
you know, I mean right now. She just got out
42:54
of the goddamn hurt locker.
42:56
Speaker 2: You know what I mean.
42:56
Speaker 3: I mean, come on, give her some grace. But if
42:58
it just I mean, I don't know. Once again, I'm
43:00
just saying, got the puncher in hand, got the card.
43:04
Speaker 1: This is a punch. This, this is one step closer
43:07
to your free cupon I agree, your free shake.
43:09
Speaker 2: This is me, This is me doing. Yeah, I do
43:12
I turn around, slip it on my wrangler jeans. I do.
43:15
Speaker 3: I put right back in my my my jean pocket.
43:19
But you know how many I wonder would justify a stamp.
43:22
Speaker 2: Though. You turn back around, baby feeling pizza. She just
43:25
like turn back around, back to back to back clicks.
43:33
Speaker 3: It's getting worse, Greg, I've done four clicks in the
43:35
last two minutes.
43:39
Speaker 2: Just six more, buddy, Just hang in there.
43:41
Speaker 1: He is your is your mom? Is your mom coming
43:43
over this weekend? Just the spiders got it?
43:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know.
43:48
Speaker 3: Look into the.
43:48
Speaker 4: Trees, pok. That is so cool.
43:54
Speaker 7: So how many until you abandoned your family? Oh, it's
43:57
gotta be a ten. Yeah, it's it's card. That's the
44:02
universal punch card system. On the tenth purchase, you get
44:05
a free one, get free the free fry coffee.
44:10
Speaker 1: And then she lifted the glass, snatched the spider up
44:14
and stuffed it into her mouth. That's that's the rest
44:21
of the punch card. That is a that is a
44:24
you do not pass go, you do not collect to
44:28
would hit the rest of them.
44:30
Speaker 3: I like to imagine he had his hand, his phone
44:32
in his hand, Who's like calling for like Chinese takeout?
44:34
Speaker 2: And he does, all right, so you're fold.
44:38
Speaker 1: The phone. Okay, you know what, I'll just go get
44:43
it myself, hoddy, no reason to order? Yeah, And he
44:46
never comes back.
44:47
Speaker 2: At the same time, though, I hate to say this,
44:49
but that would kind of that would.
44:50
Speaker 3: Kind of turn me on a little bit, if I'm
44:51
being honest, just a little bit, just just.
44:53
Speaker 2: A hair what just just a spider's hair length.
44:57
Speaker 3: If my lady, if my if my lady, it was like,
45:00
I am deathly afraid and she fucking picked up and
45:03
ate it, I would be like, that is fucking kind
45:06
of bad.
45:07
Speaker 2: First, disgusting, but.
45:08
Speaker 1: That sounds like something I would say. Second of all,
45:12
there is nothing attractive about her putting a spider in
45:15
her mouth.
45:16
Speaker 2: I just I have gotti disagree.
45:17
Speaker 3: She's got that viva Vedeta thing going on right now,
45:20
you know what I mean, g I Jane bald ass
45:22
head eating that stuff.
45:23
Speaker 1: I didn't see it, not fully, but I stood frozen
45:28
in tear and watched the muscles in her badly shaved
45:31
head tints and relaxed as her job worked away, crunching
45:35
at those hardened legs. God, the sounds were bad enough,
45:40
But when she was done, she looked over her shoulder
45:43
at me and smiled, and her teeth were smeared green
45:46
and black with little bits with little bits of a
45:53
leg and kid and still stuck between the gums.
45:57
Speaker 3: Oh, I I don't know if I like that. I
46:02
was also don't like that. That's kind of the that's
46:04
kind of a no go for any person. If you
46:07
have a big bowl of pasta spaghetti and you're chewing
46:10
down on it, ain't a fucking reason you should be
46:12
smiling with all that sauce, you know what I mean? What, Yeah,
46:15
she's gone, mentally gone. I might take a couple of
46:18
liberties and step away and like I said, punch the
46:20
rest of them.
46:21
Speaker 2: Be like, Okay, Well, I don't know, I.
46:24
Speaker 1: Need to feel better. I'm gonna hold this till I
46:26
feel better. I'm not entirely sure what happened next, but
46:30
now I knew why I felt so different around her
46:33
since she'd come back. I was afraid of her.
46:36
Speaker 2: Like a boy.
46:38
Speaker 1: Really, what made you think of that? Like a kid
46:41
around an abusive parent. I just didn't know what I
46:45
was going to get. There was always this energy in
46:47
the room that had me on edge. I'd sit there
46:51
watching TV, but I wasn't really watching. Couldn't have told
46:55
you what was on half the time. Instead, every ounce
46:58
of my being was focused on her, every breath, every motion.
47:02
When she got up to use the toilet. I watched
47:04
her intensely to see what she was going to do,
47:07
the fact that she rarely did anything except carry on
47:10
as normal was all the more unsettling because I knew
47:13
something was wrong and I couldn't stop remembering the way
47:16
she laughed with that thing under the glass.
47:19
Speaker 3: Uh.
47:19
Speaker 1: Let me, I need to find Kayles's keys. I'll be back,
47:21
give me a second.
47:22
Speaker 2: Well he's gone.
47:23
Speaker 3: That would be kind of unsettling having a uh, having
47:28
a girl knowing that she just ate a spider and
47:29
you're all freaked out, elevated heart rate and the only
47:32
thinking you're not really looking at the TV. You're watching her.
47:34
She's like getting up to go take a shit, and
47:36
you're like watching her walk away. And all you hear
47:38
in your all you hear in your left ear is just.
47:41
Speaker 2: Men men men men menly men men men.
47:44
Speaker 8: Ooh men men men men manly men men men men
47:53
men men ly men ooh men men men men men
47:57
me men men men ah man.
48:02
Speaker 3: That'd be w We watched it the whole time. Here
48:06
blown up the bathroom. I did this girl one time.
48:09
She's like, where's your bathroom? And it was right behind us.
48:11
I had a couch in the living room and it
48:13
was I mean right there, and I had her my
48:16
buddy in early He's like, my roommate, we're sitting there.
48:19
We were watching I think, uh, I don't know, some
48:22
Daniel day Lewis film, Who fucking Last Mohicans or some shit.
48:25
I was like, well, I don't know. Oh I no.
48:28
She was dropping like mad bombs this bad toilet, those
48:35
bad porcelain farts where it's like like all just like
48:41
ricocheting off every fiber of that porcelain bowl. My roommate
48:44
was like, god damn.
48:45
Speaker 2: And she comes back out and she was like, uh, did.
48:48
Speaker 4: You hear that.
48:50
Speaker 3: I said, well, hell yeah, hell yeah, we heard it.
48:55
She's like, yeah, it's trying to put on a show
48:57
for you. And that was the last time I shitted
49:00
with that girl. That was not a good time. I
49:03
was trying to put on a show for y'all. What
49:07
a time. She had a pretty smile though, so it
49:11
wasn't that good. Never Mind Damni's coke.
49:14
Speaker 2: Dike Coke.
49:15
Speaker 3: I'll tell you when I was a when I was
49:17
a younger man, did not care for Dike Coke. Now, oh,
49:20
you'd have the pride for my hands, a nice cold
49:23
can of die coke. Oh shit, oh yeah, oh yeah,
49:30
give me those chemicals. The hill's in this. There's an aspartame.
49:34
Speaker 2: Baby, What were you doing? I was just chatting with
49:37
them while you're gone, so they were well.
49:38
Speaker 1: I found the key, so apologies for that anyway, no problem.
49:42
Nights were bad A lot of the time. I'd a
49:45
wake and get the feelings she'd just been watching me,
49:48
but she was usually fast asleep, or at least that's
49:51
how it looked. Sometimes there were furtive movements, like she
49:55
just rolled over. I got used to it, thought it
49:59
was probably just in my head. But then one night
50:02
I woke up and she was right there, face inches
50:05
away from mine. I cried out, couldn't help it, shuffled
50:10
backwards while trying to avoid touching her, wound up falling
50:13
off the bed. When I looked up from the floor,
50:16
she had a completely blank expression. She was just looking
50:19
at me, like a cat watching a fly.
50:22
Speaker 4: What are you doing?
50:23
Speaker 1: Cried out, unable to stop the irritation from bleeding into
50:26
my voice. She shrugged, just watching, Then she rolled over
50:34
like nothing had happened. That night, I slept on the sofa.
50:38
She didn't ask why didn't say a word As I
50:40
grabbed my things and left the bedroom. I wasn't sure
50:43
I would manage to fall asleep after that, but I did.
50:47
When I woke up, I had cobwebs in my hair.
50:50
I was lucky if I slept more than a few
50:52
hours a night. After that. It came fitfully, if at all.
50:56
I woke up too many times to the feeling of
50:58
something tickling my face and chest, a sensation like someone
51:01
running a feather over me. Every time I'd come to
51:04
in a panic, but I never found anything except nearly
51:07
invisible silk clinging to my skin. Life without sleep was difficult,
51:12
and I struggled to hide my dislike for Lily. Over time,
51:16
our habits and routines diverged even further apart. I stopped
51:20
going upstairs almost entirely, just didn't need to. I had
51:24
work in the sofa in the kitchen, and the days
51:27
when I came back and barely slily at all were
51:29
fine by me. I preferred being away from her, something
51:33
that kind of broke my heart. If I'm honest. There
51:36
were times I didn't want to reach out, but looking
51:38
at her gave me the funniest feeling in my stomach.
51:42
I didn't want to change things, didn't want to get closer.
51:45
If anything, I wanted to run away. And I don't
51:49
mean that I wanted to flee my life in adult
51:51
responsibilities in some abstract way. I mean I felt a
51:55
powerful urge to quite literally run away from her. It
51:59
was horrible feeling that way about my wife, and just
52:02
trying to understand those emotions was enough to give me
52:04
a headache most days. I became real forgetful during this time,
52:08
and it was a long time before I realized I'd
52:10
forgotten to pay for the repairs to the wall. I
52:13
think it slipped my mind emphasis on think, because I
52:16
don't remember what I have and haven't forgotten. I just
52:20
nailed some plywood over and left it. Three months later,
52:23
one day, out of the blue, it occurred to me
52:26
I should probably have done something more about it. I
52:29
did find a toolkit in the kitchen that wasn't mine.
52:32
I might have called someone out for a quote. I
52:35
don't know. But once I remembered that I'd never actually
52:38
fixed the whole, I was filled with this shame and embarrassment,
52:42
and I decided the best thing to do was to
52:44
face it head on and go apologize to my neighbor, okay,
52:47
finding the toolkit and thinking he called someone out. Is
52:50
this spider just killing people?
52:52
Speaker 3: I can't tell if it's the spider or if it's
52:54
just the woman who I think might be becoming a spider.
52:58
Speaker 2: I'm unsure. It's hard to say. Or is she controlling
53:00
spiders like Willard who controlled rats? Remember that?
53:04
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, I do remember that. How how spider like
53:07
does your wife have to become before you leave her?
53:11
Speaker 3: I don't know, I mean if I because you're are
53:14
you saying are you are you saying that she's also
53:16
growing new limbs and stuff?
53:17
Speaker 2: Are you saying that she's just like literally.
53:19
Speaker 1: Well maybe no physic an extra limb.
53:22
Speaker 2: I think i'd be kind of stoked on.
53:24
Speaker 3: Like if my wife had four arms like she was goro,
53:28
that would be kind of sick. And she had like four,
53:31
it'd be kind of I don't know. I mean, like honestly,
53:33
if she was shitting webs like that would be that
53:36
would be for me.
53:36
Speaker 2: I'd be like, we gotta we gotta cut that out.
53:38
Speaker 3: I don't know if I just want to see a
53:39
bare asshole day shitting webs like I don't know.
53:44
Speaker 2: I mean I would agree, speak, can you give me
53:46
the cookies?
53:49
Speaker 1: The extra set of arms could be cool, though, but
53:51
I feel like four eyes no no, I feel like
53:54
the extra eyes would be a no go as well.
53:56
Speaker 2: I don't know I could. I could see a world
53:58
where I would I would be in to it.
54:00
Speaker 1: He'd be down.
54:00
Speaker 2: They did if they were humanized, though not.
54:03
Speaker 1: The like the black spot.
54:05
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, what if?
54:06
Speaker 1: Like what if she gets like these little mandible like
54:09
pincher mouth?
54:10
Speaker 2: I what's that pincher done? Yeah? I like a little
54:17
I like a little tug in poke.
54:18
Speaker 4: Why not come on?
54:21
Speaker 2: You know, I'd say, just bit it a little bit.
54:23
There was pinch, just a little bit, Oh, just a bit,
54:24
That's what.
54:25
Speaker 1: I thought, all right. I never knew a lot about
54:27
the guy. He was an older man who liked his football,
54:30
that had a nose like a tomato, and spent most
54:32
nights in the pub. I knew he lived alone, though,
54:35
and when I knocked his door and there was no answer,
54:38
it wasn't too strange. At least, it didn't seem out
54:42
of the ordinary until I went back inside my house
54:44
and heard footsteps on the other side of the wall.
54:47
So I went back and I knocked a couple more times,
54:49
figuring he maybe hadn't heard me, but there was still
54:52
no answer. I found this weird. It didn't seem like
54:56
the kind of guy who'd avoid a neighbor he didn't like.
54:59
He just opened the door and tell you to screw off.
55:01
I went back and looked, but couldn't see anything through
55:04
his windows, and all I could see looking through his
55:06
letterbox was a gray sheet across the opening. When my
55:10
fingers came away, covered in a sticky thread, I had
55:13
this terrible feeling in my stomach. I couldn't have possibly
55:17
explained how, but I was convinced that Lily had done something.
55:22
After all, it was him calling the police who'd gotten
55:24
her into trouble. But it wasn't like I could kick
55:27
his door down a check, and I wasn't going to
55:29
go scrambling through any half open windows. Fortunately, we shared
55:33
a fence in the back garden. It was easy enough
55:36
to jump, and from there I checked the windows on
55:38
that side of the house. He left the kitchen blinds open,
55:41
and at first what I saw baffled me. For a moment,
55:46
I wondered if he was decorating, because everything inside was
55:49
covered by a thin, translucent sheet.
55:54
Speaker 2: Buddy, don't think those are sheets.
55:55
Speaker 1: I don't think those are sheets, buddy. But I only
56:00
had to pay close attention to realize that didn't make sense.
56:04
When painting a ceiling, you don't throw tarps over half
56:07
drunk cups of coffee and plates of multi food. And
56:11
the material that covered everything was cloudy and made of
56:14
thread and obviously some kind of silk. Took a lot
56:18
of effort to control the urge to just hop the
56:20
fence back and pretend like I never saw a damn think.
56:23
But if he needed some kind of help, I knew
56:26
I had to at least try braver man to me,
56:29
I would have just like, well, he's dead. I looked
56:34
briefly at the stup by the back door. There was
56:36
a lighter on the ground where someone had dropped it.
56:39
It was strangely conspicuous and made me think that whoever
56:42
had left it there had done so in a hurry.
56:45
Didn't make sense that someone would drop it there and
56:48
not notice, not unless they'd been otherwise occupied. I picked
56:53
it up and winced when it came from the floor
56:55
with a sticky, tearing sound. It was covered in barely
56:59
visible silk threads. God, I wanted that back door to
57:02
be locked. I couldn't think of anything worse than having
57:05
to push ahead. But I tried the handle and it
57:08
went down. The door popped open with barely any effort,
57:12
and I got a good look at how every last
57:14
inch of that place was covered in pale cop webs
57:18
that got thicker and thicker as my eyes drifted deeper
57:21
into the house. I couldn't help but wonder if there
57:24
were strong enough to trap a person. Was my neighbor
57:27
in there? Somewhere? Somebody was I knew that much from
57:31
the sounds I'd heard, but I couldn't see him in
57:33
the kitchen. I wanted to cry out for him, maybe
57:36
even go marching into the house and look for myself,
57:39
but the hallway out of the kitchen had been turned
57:42
into a webline tunnel. No straight lines, just a dark,
57:47
silky womb whose rounded funnel walls fluttered gently in the breeze.
57:52
I stared, I'm getting chills.
57:55
Speaker 3: I really, I'm not all the visuals and stuff, but
58:00
I feel like I'm there in that room.
58:01
Speaker 1: It's fucking it's so well written that the details fantastic.
58:04
I feel like I feel everything he's wanting me to
58:09
feel right now. I feel the uneasiness, the tension. I
58:11
also don't want him to go into that room because
58:13
then I'm going to have to read about it. Man.
58:18
I stared intently into that darkness. This reminds me, actually, Uh,
58:21
did you ever watch that movie Kingdom of the Spiders.
58:25
It was an old it was one of those old
58:27
bee monster movies, and it had the original captain Kirk
58:30
what's his name, William Shanner. William Shatner had William Shatner
58:34
in it, and it was about this town and like
58:36
the desert. Who a bunch of spiders starts showing up
58:39
and they're like tarantulas, but they're just super venomous and
58:43
they live in colonies and they bite people and people
58:45
die and that's all they do. They don't get giant
58:47
or anything. But they build these big webs and they'll
58:50
web up bodies. And I remember being a kid and
58:52
being so terrified by these shots of like people bloodied
58:56
and like wrapped up in webs. It's a great I mean,
58:59
it's for oh, it's forever scary. And the movie ends
59:03
with one of the guys gets knocked out and he
59:05
comes to and there's a few survivors who drug him
59:07
into a room in town, and they've like covered up
59:11
all of the the air pockets and vents and stuff
59:14
like that with clothes, and the camera pans out, and
59:17
the entire town is underneath the giant web like this.
59:20
That's fun and that's just how it ends. And I
59:23
was terrified of that for a long time, and I'm
59:24
getting flashbacks to that and now that same feeling. Oh,
59:31
no straight lines, just a dark, silky womb who's rounded
59:34
funnel walls fluttered gently in the breeze. I stared intently
59:38
into that darkness, trying my best to see if there
59:41
was the shape of a man's corpse cocoons somewhere in
59:44
the pale white silk. I leaned forward, my head and shoulders,
59:48
just moving past the doorframe. When the blackness in the
59:52
tunnel grew legs, dark carapis and segmented limbs explode. Oh,
1:00:04
dark carapis and segmented limbs exploded towards me so fast
1:00:08
it was a It was almost in the kitchen before
1:00:12
my heart had time to skip a beat. And then
1:00:15
it stopped halfway into the room, standing perfectly still. Embrace
1:00:20
it in the fading daylight. A bundle of legs the
1:00:24
size of a horse, a real life monster. I didn't move. God,
1:00:30
it took me another minute just for my brain to
1:00:32
process what I was looking at. On a conscious level.
1:00:35
My nervous system was quicker. Sure, it was like a
1:00:38
blanket of disgust and terrors thrown over me. My stomach
1:00:41
plunged to the floor, my skin crawled, my heart felt
1:00:45
like it was going to explode. But my actual mind
1:00:48
was blank, white, noise, and static. The creature was huge,
1:00:54
so big its legs could just about fit in the
1:00:56
hallway behind it, but in the kitchen with a little
1:00:59
more room. Whose front limbs and mouthy feelers spread out
1:01:02
like tendrils and gripped the doorway. It was ready to
1:01:06
pounce on whatever it had sent disturbances through its web.
1:01:09
I've read that spiders can be a little like venus
1:01:12
fly traps. They won't always pounce on a single trigger.
1:01:16
They need multiple hits. When I looked down at my feet,
1:01:19
I saw that I'd taken just one step inside, but
1:01:22
that was all it needed to be alerted. Now it
1:01:26
had approached the initial alarm, and half blind, it waited
1:01:29
for another hint of something trapped inside its web. I
1:01:32
had to wonder I was lifting my shoe count did
1:01:36
I have a choice? Man? This is so just the
1:01:41
tension and the moment. And also in all these giant
1:01:43
spider movies, the spiders always moved so slow, but having
1:01:47
it be like the sheet of a normal spider just
1:01:49
that big.
1:01:50
Speaker 2: Uh.
1:01:51
Speaker 1: I couldn't stay there looking at the damn thing was
1:01:54
bringing me closer and closer to full blown panic with
1:01:56
every passing second. I had to do something, and I
1:02:00
had to do it with some semblance of control. I
1:02:03
slid my foot backwards. Spider didn't move. As soon as
1:02:08
both feet were outside, I let go of the door
1:02:10
handle and felt something sticky detach from my palm. It
1:02:13
feels like an exaggeration to say that lightning moves slower.
1:02:17
Oh my god, what an awful way to start the paragraph. Dude,
1:02:24
what an evil way to start the bear. Oh. I'm
1:02:33
sure most of you have seen a nature documentary with
1:02:35
one of those fish, or maybe even a trapdoor spider,
1:02:38
and you thought, oh shit, that was quick. But this thing,
1:02:42
maybe it was just because it was coming right at me.
1:02:45
I've never seen anything like it, except for when videos
1:02:48
get edited. All of a sudden it was just there,
1:02:53
and before I knew it, thick wooly paps were pinning
1:02:56
me to the ground, and I was looking into a
1:02:59
pink slit of a mouth framed by fangs as long
1:03:02
as my forearms. They moved independed of each other, and
1:03:08
something about the side of all those wheel spoke legs
1:03:11
and segment of joints clumped together in its thorax sent
1:03:15
my mind reeling. I said at the beginning of this
1:03:18
that a lifetime of exposure had helped curb my ractophobia,
1:03:22
but there are limits. I blacked out. When I woke up,
1:03:26
it was dark all around me. I didn't know it
1:03:29
at the time, but the belly of the beast was
1:03:31
my neighbor's former living room. It wasn't actually pitch black,
1:03:35
but it did take a few terrifying minutes from my
1:03:37
eyes to it just well enough, just to be able
1:03:39
to see my own body stuck and wriggling beneath me.
1:03:43
I was wrapped up tight. And if you've ever heard
1:03:45
the refrain that spider silk was stronger than steel and
1:03:48
doubted it, well, trust me it's true. A few thin
1:03:51
threads doesn't give you a proper sense of it. But
1:03:54
I was wrapped in what must have been a half
1:03:56
inch of the stuff and felt like I was wearing
1:03:59
ten layers of flat that was too small. There was
1:04:02
a tiny bit of give, enough to let me move
1:04:05
my fingers or toes or even bend a knee, just
1:04:08
a fraction, but that was it. It was horrifying. I'm
1:04:12
not exactly claustrophobic either, for what it's worth, but given
1:04:15
the circumstances, I found myself panicking as I tried to
1:04:18
get some purchase. I kept thinking if I could get
1:04:21
a finger hooked into it, then maybe I could start
1:04:24
tearing away. I was desperate, but the more I found,
1:04:28
the more I realized it was hopeless. The silk was
1:04:31
elastic and strong, and covered in a thick, stodgy glue
1:04:35
that only further limited my movement, as everything I did
1:04:38
spread it around until it was gumming my legs and
1:04:41
hands together. Wasn't until exhaustion caught up to me and
1:04:44
I was forced to take a short break that I
1:04:46
realized I wasn't alone. There was another cocoon beside me.
1:04:51
My neighbor had been a big man in life, podgy
1:04:54
with a large pot belly and a head like a thumb,
1:04:57
but in the dim light of that room, he looked
1:04:59
like like a skeleton wrapped in skin that had been found,
1:05:03
half decayed and ancient and forgotten tune, so thin and
1:05:07
desiccated you could hook a finger under the tendons in
1:05:10
his neck and jaws. I nearly cried when I realized
1:05:14
I'd risk everything to save a dead man. But that
1:05:17
wasn't actually true. The air in my thinking became apparent
1:05:20
when he opened his eyes and glared at me with pure,
1:05:23
unbridled terror. He opened his mouth, and I was convinced
1:05:27
he was about to scream, when instead he coughed and gagged,
1:05:31
and something wet and brown dribbled out of his mouth.
1:05:34
Oh ugh, ugh. It plopped down his chin and came
1:05:44
to rest on the floor between us. It resembled a
1:05:46
hair bin encased in bile and vomit, and I was
1:05:49
momentarily stumped until I saw a thin brown leg unfurl
1:05:54
from the tangled mess. It's okay, my neighbor's entire body relaxed,
1:05:59
his eyes vacant and confused, as Lily knelt down beside
1:06:03
me and stroked my head.
1:06:04
Speaker 2: Lily, you've got to get me sh she.
1:06:09
Speaker 1: Said, pressing a single finger to my lips.
1:06:12
Speaker 2: It's okay, It's gonna be okay.
1:06:14
Speaker 1: I managed to wiggle my fingers into my pocket to
1:06:17
hit another punch on the punch car.
1:06:23
Speaker 2: From the cocoon.
1:06:23
Speaker 1: That's right here, I'm I'm like, it's been a while
1:06:31
since the story has bothered me this much. Honestly, I can't.
1:06:37
This is how I remember feeling when we were reading
1:06:39
Stolen Tongues with the part about the thing that was
1:06:40
wearing the Native guy's skin. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, this
1:06:46
is This is the same feeling, only it's much longer.
1:06:50
I'll tell you what, man Christian Wallace, he knows how
1:06:53
to phrase his stories. And while I'm afraid of spiders
1:06:56
in real life, I didn't think a story about them
1:06:57
would bother me. But here we are, and it's because
1:07:00
of the way he says things. Oh. Behind her, a
1:07:05
shadow appeared and had legs as thick as my wrist,
1:07:09
and they reached from the floor to the ceiling.
1:07:12
Speaker 2: It won't be much longer now, she added.
1:07:14
Speaker 1: As the darkness behind her. Crew.
1:07:17
Speaker 2: Probably best just to keep you here, Lily. What the
1:07:20
fuck I told you they'd get bigger.
1:07:23
Speaker 1: She said, nodding towards the spider. My neighbor just spat
1:07:26
on to the floor.
1:07:27
Speaker 2: He won't be any real help.
1:07:29
Speaker 1: She touched my neighbor's head, but he barely responded. She
1:07:33
just gazed vacantly as she rolled him over, said he
1:07:36
was facing away from me.
1:07:38
Speaker 2: We're such a clever animal, she added as she parted
1:07:42
his hair. I'm wast curious about it. Just how much
1:07:44
you miss.
1:07:45
Speaker 1: Something was clamped around the back of his head, a
1:07:48
throbbing bulb of molted brown skin and hair. It looked
1:07:52
like a spider without legs. A tick. Maybe that's what
1:07:56
I thought it was until my wife ran a finger
1:07:59
playfully along its back. My neighbor let out a gut
1:08:02
wrenching squeal of pain. Slowly, the shape seemed to wriggle
1:08:07
and writhe, and long, thin legs emerged from beneath its body,
1:08:12
and I realized I was looking at a spider wrapped
1:08:15
tight around his skull, its legs buried beneath the skin
1:08:19
and muscle of his scalp. For a moment, it playfully
1:08:22
curled the leg in the air before returning to the
1:08:25
incision and sliding it back into place, every inch, disappearing
1:08:30
with a gruesome, wet sound. It displaced muscle in hair.
1:08:34
When it came to rest, I realized just how Misshape
1:08:37
and the skull had become from all those legs wrapped
1:08:39
tight around his head.
1:08:41
Speaker 2: What the fuck do you ever find it weird that
1:08:43
you can't remember what it looked like? The thing came
1:08:45
running out of her hand.
1:08:47
Speaker 1: She asked, before reaching over to stroke my head. Not
1:08:50
that I want to claim any dignity right now, but
1:08:53
that is my bear trap. When I said him throwing
1:08:56
it on the ground was gonna you know, Matt, Something
1:08:59
looks like I was right, But I'm also miserable, So
1:09:01
who cares? Her hand came away covered in cobwebs. Something
1:09:05
about her touch revolted me. It sent strange shivers coursing
1:09:09
through my body. A deep, primordial need to get away
1:09:13
came over me, that strange revulsion all over again, the
1:09:17
same one that had taunted me over and over again
1:09:21
over the last few weeks. Without even meaning to, I
1:09:24
found myself convulsing and panicking, my body trying to thrash violently,
1:09:29
but with every limb constricted by that silk, I could
1:09:32
do nothing except writhe around on the floor. I tried
1:09:35
with everything. I had to move my hands to get
1:09:38
some purchase on the silk and tear away at it
1:09:41
free myself, but it was no use. I could do
1:09:45
nothing except glare at my wife and the enormous shadow
1:09:48
behind her, the one that towered above us, both its
1:09:51
great legs clustering around the floor and ceiling. At some point,
1:09:56
I grabbed onto my trousers and clenched my fist and
1:09:59
felt something small and hard, the lighter. I knew there
1:10:03
was great risk in using it, but I had no choice.
1:10:06
I managed to worm my hand into my pocket and
1:10:09
find it with my fumbling fingers. My wife seemed oddly
1:10:12
aware of what I was doing, and she seemed to
1:10:15
tilt her head like a curious dog as I clenched
1:10:17
my fist around the small object and used every ounce
1:10:20
of willpower I had left to fight the violent seizures
1:10:23
that racked my body and thumb the trigger. The web
1:10:26
went up in flames immediately. Must have been the glue,
1:10:29
but the flames exploded across the silk like they'd been
1:10:33
soaked in kerosene before I even realized that it had
1:10:36
weakened enough for me to free one arm. The tongues
1:10:39
of fire were already spreading across the floor where they
1:10:42
found my poor neighbor. The burning sensation that crawled across
1:10:45
my legs and chest hurt like nothing I could imagine,
1:10:48
but I was finally free. I rolled over and began
1:10:51
to push myself up, already desperately patting at my body
1:10:54
to try and put out the flames. When I looked
1:10:57
around me, my wife and the shape that followed her
1:10:59
were gone. For a moment, I considered helping my neighbor,
1:11:03
but his body thrashed too violently, and although his eyes
1:11:06
were wide open, spiders were pouring from his mouth, and
1:11:09
I could not summon the courage to take another step
1:11:11
towards him. All I could think of was escape. The
1:11:14
house was going up like a tinder box. It wasn't
1:11:17
far to the kitchen, but the fire had already beat
1:11:19
me there. Smoke billowed upwards, and trapped by the ceiling,
1:11:23
started to fill the air with choking soot. The only
1:11:26
escape was the back door, and I stumbled towards it,
1:11:29
but was stopped at the last moment by the side
1:11:32
of my wife standing there.
1:11:33
Speaker 2: You really are such a fascinating.
1:11:35
Speaker 1: I barreled past her, but to my surprise. She offered
1:11:39
no resistance. I merely merged into the open air, my
1:11:42
lungs gasping desperately for clean air. As I collapsed onto long,
1:11:46
unkempt grass, I looked over my shoulder and saw orange
1:11:50
tongues of fire were already leaping out of the windows
1:11:52
on the upper floor. Left uncontrolled, the fire would rage
1:11:56
and consume the entire row of terrace houses. A moment
1:12:00
of remorse, but there were already sirens in the distance,
1:12:03
so I knew someone had noticed and done the right thing.
1:12:06
But it wasn't over. Lily was sitting on the fence.
1:12:10
I don't know how she got there, but she looked
1:12:12
completely undisturbed.
1:12:14
Speaker 3: I never once imagined that wind blew me into your home.
1:12:17
I didn't meet such an interesting pair of people. What
1:12:19
a fun mind to sink my legs into. Really had
1:12:22
no idea what I was going to find.
1:12:23
Speaker 2: Let her go, I have I did months ago.
1:12:26
Speaker 3: As a matter of fact, there were some incapabilities and
1:12:28
it just made sense to move homes.
1:12:30
Speaker 1: She pointed at me and smiled.
1:12:32
Speaker 2: I've enjoyed living inside your head quite a bit.
1:12:35
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm. That explains his forgetfulness, not remembering things and
1:12:42
all that. Huh, Struggling to make sense of her words,
1:12:46
but still somehow aware of their terrifying implications. I placed
1:12:49
one hand on the back of my head and felt
1:12:51
it felt her. The merrored touch was enough to fill
1:12:55
my mouth with a coffee taste. While my vision blurred
1:12:58
at the edges. Something beneath my skin shifted, and I
1:13:01
felt a terrible pressure behind my eyes. I had to
1:13:04
get rid of her, and I only knew of one weakness.
1:13:08
Oh well, she said, as she watched me fumble desperately
1:13:10
for the lighter.
1:13:12
Speaker 3: Not every relationship has to last forever to be meaningful.
1:13:14
Speaker 1: I lit my hair on fire. My last memories were
1:13:17
of heat and a sudden release of pressure. I couldn't
1:13:20
possibly describe it to you, not really. Something slid out
1:13:24
of my skull and Lily waved me from the fence
1:13:27
before she seemed to blink out of existence, and then nothing,
1:13:31
not even darkness, just total absence. I wouldn't regain a
1:13:34
sense of self until the hospital several weeks later. So
1:13:39
I'm assuming that Lily never made it out of therapy.
1:13:41
She was always gone, and the spider just gave him
1:13:44
the apparition of her.
1:13:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know. I'm like, well, let's finish it
1:13:49
and see there was nothing left of either house. But
1:13:52
they did manage to control the fire before it spread
1:13:54
to the others. I'm sure there was still some damage,
1:13:57
and to this day I feel guilty about it.
1:14:00
Speaker 1: I think I was charged with arson, maybe more. I
1:14:03
have vague memories of being wheeled into a courtroom. The
1:14:06
doctors have agonized over me for a long time, and
1:14:09
one mentioned amateur trepanation. He said I must have practiced
1:14:14
it on my wife, at least based on the body
1:14:16
they found in my neighbor's house. But I can't really
1:14:18
be sure of anything. I am forever tipping in and
1:14:21
out of reality writing this down. It's been difficult. I'm
1:14:27
not entirely aware where I am right now. One doctor
1:14:31
told me I might make some kind of recovery if
1:14:33
it was just a normal brain damage, but you've never
1:14:36
seen anything like it, so it couldn't be sure. Feels
1:14:39
like it's a different doctor every time I see them.
1:14:42
Then again, I don't always recognize myself when I look
1:14:45
in the mirror. Of course, that could just be the burns,
1:14:49
but I reckon even then, I still look a fair
1:14:52
bit older than I should. There's one orderly who's stuck
1:14:55
around long enough to get to know me. He knows
1:14:58
me by name, smile a lot when he sees me,
1:15:01
talk to me about all sorts of things. He seems
1:15:04
genuinely interested in me, and what I remember. I called
1:15:08
him in once to get rid of a spider that
1:15:09
had spun a web on the window outside, and he
1:15:12
did so with a warm smile. I told him I
1:15:15
was deathly afraid of them, and he said he already
1:15:17
knew that, but I shouldn't worry, because he was going
1:15:20
to keep an eye on me, make sure nothing bad happened.
1:15:23
I'm glad he's around. Ever since he started working here,
1:15:26
I haven't seen many of the nasty little things hanging
1:15:29
around my room. I guess he's not that bothered by them,
1:15:32
at least, not if the cobwebs in his hair or
1:15:34
anything to go by.
1:15:35
Speaker 2: What a fun endingugh.
1:15:40
Speaker 3: Do you think that the spiders are real or don't
1:15:43
they're just a manifestation in his mind.
1:15:45
Speaker 1: I think that No. I think they're real, because what
1:15:47
started all was the windy day when one blew in
1:15:50
and then got in her hair, and he thought he
1:15:51
pulled it out, but she was actually infected by the
1:15:54
spider that had burrowed into her brain and then his brain,
1:15:59
and now they've got into either I guess the orderly
1:16:02
has it because of the cobwebs in his hair, or
1:16:05
they're back in him. The trepidation thing means that it
1:16:07
like burrows into the skull. That's what the doctors suspect happened,
1:16:11
and that's what led to him like burning down the
1:16:13
neighbor's house and stuff. So I think I think at
1:16:16
the very least the spider that's in his brain is real,
1:16:19
maybe not the giant one in the house. And I
1:16:21
don't think the visage of his wife was real.
1:16:23
Speaker 3: But yeah, her shaving her head and stuff makes me
1:16:28
think that that's what she was trying to get the
1:16:30
thing off.
1:16:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, the back of her head, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
1:16:35
I think, Well, I think she was. And that's when
1:16:41
she's talking about spiders in the walls, because there was
1:16:42
one in her head. But he was also under the
1:16:45
influence somehow, because if she had a shaved head and
1:16:47
he didn't see it, that could be the dementia could
1:16:51
be the thing he's forgetting.
1:16:53
Speaker 3: I think by that time he was already or he
1:16:55
was also infected. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think by the
1:16:57
time he was already hooked.
1:16:59
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure. Gosh, this is a great story though.
1:17:01
That was fa fantastic, dude. I can't remember being that
1:17:05
scared of a story in a while.
1:17:06
Speaker 2: That was one two where I feel like the ending
1:17:10
had a really fun payoff as well.
1:17:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, which doesn't happen a lot. No. Sometimes the ending
1:17:14
and like the explanations kind of sours it. But I
1:17:16
feel like the spider in the brain thing is a
1:17:19
good a good fit there, and I like the neighbor
1:17:22
and then like it's the obviously the webs, everything webbed
1:17:25
up and stuff like that. I think that's all awesome.
1:17:27
I think it's all very well done. Oh okay, well,
1:17:33
excellent spider story. Christian Wallace linking the description the Goat.
1:17:36
Be sure to check out his publications like with Teeth,
1:17:40
and also the Hwall's website has a ton of cool
1:17:42
stories on there. With that hunter, are you ready to
1:17:45
make it even worse?
1:17:47
Speaker 2: As you say, let's did it.
1:17:48
Speaker 3: And it's fun that we're doing another one too, because
1:17:50
the I'm very curious. I love the title of this one,
1:17:53
The Force of a Thousand legs having a double feature,
1:17:56
it's gonna be fun to see. Does this one irk
1:17:58
you as much?
1:17:58
Speaker 1: Too?
1:17:59
Speaker 3: I'm curious if it's just if now that we've read one,
1:18:03
does this one also just is it like, you know,
1:18:05
pins and needles with how your approaches, you're already affected,
1:18:10
you know. Now now it's gonna hit even deeper, maybe.
1:18:12
Speaker 1: Make everything worse. Perhaps. Yeah, So this is by This
1:18:18
is a nine year old story by a user named
1:18:21
Levinsky who it seems they were pretty active in these
1:18:28
online communities like no Sleep and stuff like that. But
1:18:31
this is the only storyed Lisa that I see from
1:18:34
this account. They posted to no Sleep and then they
1:18:37
also posted to our slash Creepy, which I'm not sure
1:18:40
if that's a story or not. It's an off site link,
1:18:43
and then a lot of like creepy art and things
1:18:45
like that, so they're into the creepy But this seems
1:18:47
to be their one No Sleep story. So but it
1:18:51
has two point seven thousand up votes, so to have
1:18:54
one one story that does that, well, it's pretty impressive.
1:18:58
So we're going to see how it goes. I feel
1:19:01
like my heart rates elevated right now.
1:19:04
Speaker 2: I'm just true, you're primed.
1:19:08
Speaker 1: All right, see Levinsky will be and the original story
1:19:10
will be linked in the description. Be sure to show
1:19:12
them some love, and if it's good, Levinsky, hopefully you
1:19:14
decide to write again. I'm already so scared. All right, hunter,
1:19:19
are you ready?
1:19:21
Speaker 4: Lez Lloyd?
1:19:22
Speaker 3: Let's do it, Okay, Little Lucy Lockett ran from her
1:19:26
daddy's frying pan. The force of a thousand legs killed
1:19:29
her and then laid their eggs. God damn, I don't
1:19:32
know if that's a fun poem at the beginning.
1:19:34
Speaker 1: Huh to the point I appreciate that that's a jump
1:19:37
rope run. My classmates used to sing on the playground
1:19:40
in elementary school. It's really screwed up that they sang that,
1:19:43
because Lucy Lockhart was a real person we attended school with.
1:19:47
She vanished when we were in second grade, so we
1:19:50
must have been around seven years old. The rhyme was
1:19:53
loosely based in truth and that The official story was
1:19:56
that Lucy Lockhart did in fact vanish into the Lockhart
1:19:59
Wood fifty yards from her father, Robert's house, but he
1:20:02
wasn't chasing after her, brandishing a frying pant beater with
1:20:06
I was too young at the time to understand what
1:20:08
was happening, and it wasn't until much later that my
1:20:11
mom actually explained it to me. Wasn't a particularly shocking story,
1:20:15
just that I remember the day Lucy went missing, at
1:20:18
least the first day she didn't come to school. It
1:20:21
was Monday. She went missing the friday before. My mother
1:20:24
told me it was a few days before Lucy's seventh
1:20:26
birthday and that Lucy had asked her father if she
1:20:29
could have a birthday party at the house. I remembered
1:20:32
that Lucy and I had been in the same group
1:20:34
of friends, and I remembered her telling us that she
1:20:37
was going to ask her dad about having a birthday sleepover.
1:20:40
I especially remember being annoyed that she wanted it to
1:20:43
be a sleepover because I was the only boy in
1:20:46
the group and was never allowed to sleep over with them.
1:20:49
I was still excited at the prospect of a party, though,
1:20:52
as we all were, because we knew her father, Robert
1:20:55
Lockhart Junior, was a retired entomologist or we just called
1:20:59
him the bug Man, and had lots of pretty preserved
1:21:02
specimens like butterflies and beetles and cases that Lucy would
1:21:05
sometimes bring in for show and tell. Anyway. According to
1:21:09
my mother, Lucy asked her father if she could have
1:21:12
a sleepover for her birthday, and he said no, because
1:21:15
she was going to spend her birthday at her mother's
1:21:17
house while their house was being fumigated. It was a
1:21:20
normal enough reason for a six year old to cry
1:21:23
and storm out of the house, but running into the
1:21:25
Lockhart Wood was a bad idea for any person of
1:21:28
any age without the proper equipment. Here's the thing about
1:21:31
the Lockhart Wood. Some people call it the Forest of
1:21:34
a thousand legs, presumably to make it sound creepier than
1:21:38
it already is. It doesn't need help. There are roughly
1:21:42
four thousand species of spider in America, and the Lockhart
1:21:45
Wood is a phenomenon on its own in that it's
1:21:48
home to all of them. Not only that, but there
1:21:51
are documented populations of some spiders previously thought endemic only
1:21:56
to certain countries, such as the goliath bird eater, a
1:21:59
couple of web spiders, and some species of peacock spiders.
1:22:03
There's that myth that says you're never more than three
1:22:06
feet from a spider at any given moment in this forest.
1:22:10
It's not a myth. It's filled to the brim with spiders.
1:22:13
I think at this point it goes without saying that
1:22:15
if you're a rachnophobic, the story is not for you.
1:22:18
What is a peacock spider. I'm going to type this
1:22:20
in and I'm going to immediately regret it because I
1:22:24
know what those other two are. Oh, I've seen these
1:22:29
guys are cute, that's not scary.
1:22:31
Speaker 2: The goliath birdied are those fucking insane?
1:22:34
Speaker 1: Yeah? Have you seen pictures of people holding those things? Yeah,
1:22:37
they're like you're tired out? Yeah? Crazy, They're massive, and
1:22:41
then the funnel webs are like super venomous. They're the
1:22:43
most venomous spider in Australia at least I think the world,
1:22:46
unless the Brazilian Wonder is considered more venomous. Now, yeah,
1:22:51
peacocks are front, Peacock spiders are cute, Jumping spiders are cute,
1:22:55
and velvet spiders are cute. They don't bother me. I'd
1:22:59
have a pet one of those, I think. But yeah,
1:23:04
the uh, Like I said, as long as the story
1:23:09
doesn't mention any.
1:23:09
Speaker 2: Orb weavers, we're good.
1:23:12
Speaker 1: We'll be fine. I'll get through it. I'll be okay
1:23:15
because I'm stronger than my fear. My fear does not
1:23:18
control me. I control it. Forest is naturally of great
1:23:21
interest to biologists and arachnologists, but Lockhart Wood is private
1:23:26
property and restricted. Guided access to the forest was hard
1:23:29
to come by even before Lucy Lockhart's disappearance. Afterwards, nobody
1:23:34
could go in. Obviously, anyone could get into the forest
1:23:38
if they wanted to. It's not fenced off or anything,
1:23:40
but there's a steep fine if you're caught trespassing. And
1:23:43
nobody's exactly clamoring to delve into a forest full of
1:23:46
venomous spiders anyway. You need the right kind of boots, clothes, gloves,
1:23:50
first aid kits, and knowledge of the forest to step
1:23:53
past the tree line. The most common spiders at the
1:23:56
edge of the forest are jumping spiders, various wondering spies,
1:24:00
and orb weavers. Most people who emerge from the forest
1:24:03
have a number of banana I'm so freaked out from
1:24:08
the previous story that just descriptions that these are bothering
1:24:11
me now and I hate it so fun I'm so
1:24:17
freaked out right now. We have banana spiders all the
1:24:23
time around here. They're also like a kind of or
1:24:26
We have to check the ceiling stuff. Most people emerge
1:24:30
from the forest have a number of banana spiders clinging
1:24:32
to their hair and jackets, startled by the destruction of
1:24:35
their webs. If visitors are allowed deeper into the forest,
1:24:39
the spiders get bigger and they lurk on the ground.
1:24:42
According to my mother, Robert Lockhart Junior lived with his
1:24:45
father in that house for a long time. They were
1:24:47
a father son duo of entomologist from Alabama, but Robert
1:24:51
Lockhart Senior had focused on a rachnology. He had bought
1:24:55
the house and the forest specifically for its spider population,
1:24:58
which also made it super affordable, and he usually worked
1:25:02
from home. Robert Lockhart Junior did a lot of work
1:25:05
at a university three towns over. He married a professor
1:25:08
there who taught evolutionary biology, and the three of them
1:25:12
lived in the elder Robert Lockhart's house until Robert Senior's
1:25:15
sudden passing during his study on tarantula hawks. Lucy Lockhart
1:25:19
was born a year later, and Robert Junior was able
1:25:22
to retire from teaching and live as a stay at
1:25:25
home dad, while Lucy's mother continued teaching at the university.
1:25:28
He still worked collecting and preserving specimens, mostly butterflies and moths,
1:25:33
and had reports published in the entomology scene, and very
1:25:38
very rarely led guided tours around parts of lockhart Wood
1:25:41
for a price. My mother only got to know Robert
1:25:45
Junior once Lucy and I became friends. She said he
1:25:48
didn't talk about the forest very much. She got the
1:25:51
feeling that he was afraid of it. When he and
1:25:53
his wife divorced, my mom suspected part of their irreconcilable
1:25:57
differences was lockhart Wood. She never really pried into it.
1:26:01
After all, she and Robert Junior only spent time together
1:26:04
because Lucy and I spent time together. Although I remember
1:26:08
hoping they would get married so that Lucy and I
1:26:10
could be brother and sister. Robert Junior hated the forest
1:26:13
he owned and made sure that anybody who stepped foot
1:26:15
in it was dressed and prepared for the occasion, which
1:26:18
is part of the reason why my mother never believed
1:26:21
he killed Lucy when he was the prime suspecting the investigation.
1:26:25
When Lucy ran off into lockhart Wood that evening, my
1:26:28
mom said Robert Junior gave Chase without hesitation, sock, sweatpants
1:26:33
and a T shirt. He must have received a dozen
1:26:35
bites of veri and severity the second he went in.
1:26:38
He was in there for four hours. My mom was
1:26:41
working a night shift at the hospital when he was
1:26:43
brought in, delirious and swollen over. There's no telling how
1:26:47
many bites he'd received, and to this day my mother
1:26:49
doesn't know how he survived. He needed an anti venom that
1:26:53
no hospitals in the United States could offer, and when
1:26:56
he had dragged himself back home after desperately searching for
1:26:59
Lucy in that four worst, he could only self administer
1:27:02
so much. Maybe luck in a developed resistance was what
1:27:05
saved him. Lost both legs below the knee, but he lived.
1:27:10
From what my mom could gather. In the weeks following
1:27:12
Lucy's disappearance, the investigation was chaotic. Search teams entered the forest,
1:27:17
but they never spanned at all. Two officers in the
1:27:20
initial search team were bitten by what was most likely
1:27:23
a Sydney funnel web spider, and unfortunately both died. After all,
1:27:28
the Sydney funnel webspiders, otherwise found only in Australia, don't
1:27:32
have that anti venom at the ready here in the States. Anyway,
1:27:36
The search of the forest lasted maybe a week before
1:27:39
branching off elsewhere. My mom says they couldn't maybe wouldn't
1:27:43
search the whole forest. More than one officer who searched
1:27:47
lockhart Wood left the forest and subsequently skipped down. Those
1:27:51
who didn't leave might as well have. They don't get
1:27:53
out much anymore. My mom doesn't want to know what
1:27:56
they saw in there. Lucy never turned up take long
1:28:00
for suspicion to fall on her father, before he was
1:28:02
even discharged from the hospital. My mom says there was
1:28:05
a point where he was handcuffed to his hospital bed
1:28:08
even though both of his legs had been amputated for
1:28:11
a while. She couldn't tell if he was totally lucid
1:28:14
because he would spend hours sobbing the forest.
1:28:17
Speaker 2: God, he those spiders got my baby girl.
1:28:21
Speaker 1: There's no evidence to convict him of kidnapping or murder.
1:28:24
My mom and the parents of Lucy's other friends in
1:28:27
mine were involved in the trial as witnesses, and they
1:28:30
all insisted that they never had any reason to believe
1:28:32
Robert Junor was abusive towards Lucy or that he would
1:28:35
be driven hurt her. I didn't know any of this
1:28:38
at the time, as my mom responsibly sheltered me from
1:28:40
the details of Lucy's disappearance, but obviously some other kids
1:28:44
we went to school with got wind of some information,
1:28:47
hence the morbid jump rope prime. It upsets me a
1:28:51
lot when I hear kids chaining it during recess. I
1:28:54
was young and I missed Lucy very much. It's been
1:28:57
eleven years since Lucy went missing. It doesn't really upset
1:29:00
me anymore. It's just a sad mystery that I still
1:29:03
think about sometimes. A group of friends that Lucy and
1:29:06
I shared stay close until middle school, and then we
1:29:08
all branched out a bit. I don't think any of
1:29:11
us ever forgot about Lucy. I recently graduated high school.
1:29:15
The original group of us got together at a diner
1:29:18
to discuss an amazement how we were all finally done
1:29:21
with high school forever. At one point, I nudged my
1:29:24
omelet around my plate and said, absently, it's.
1:29:26
Speaker 3: Been years, but I still wish man, I wish Lucy
1:29:31
could have graduated with us.
1:29:32
Speaker 1: You know, my friend Stella leaned her shoulder into mine
1:29:35
and knocked our mortar boards together with an understanding smile.
1:29:38
Speaker 2: Same here, Buden, but she'd be proud of us.
1:29:41
Speaker 3: For doing it.
1:29:42
Speaker 1: Conversation drifted elsewhere, but the poignant thought of Lucy stuck
1:29:46
with me for a long while after that evening. Wasn't
1:29:49
until the day before I went off from my freshman
1:29:51
year at college that I told my mom I wanted
1:29:53
to stop by the Lockhart House and sort of say
1:29:55
goodbye to Lucy if Robert Junior would let me. Well,
1:30:00
she shrugged over breakfast.
1:30:02
Speaker 2: I guess I couldn't hurt. You don't ever get over
1:30:05
losing a child.
1:30:05
Speaker 3: But all things considered it, he seems to be okay.
1:30:09
He might oblige you.
1:30:11
Speaker 1: So later that afternoon, I drove across town towards that dark,
1:30:14
looming force that stretched into the sky on the horizon.
1:30:18
I hadn't been to the Lockhart House in over a decade,
1:30:20
but the sight of it instantly made me happy. I
1:30:23
no longer mourned Lucy. I only cherished the brief time
1:30:26
we knew each other as children, and I had lots
1:30:28
of fond memories in that house. As I pulled into
1:30:31
the gravel driveway, I saw the curtains in one of
1:30:33
the front windows shift, so I knew someone was home.
1:30:37
He might not want to let me in, but there
1:30:39
was no harm in trine. I went up to the
1:30:41
front porch steps and found a wooden hanging of a
1:30:43
Luna moth adorning the front door. It had no sign
1:30:46
of grime or weathering, and the pale green paint still
1:30:49
had its glossy finish, so I guessed it was fairly new.
1:30:53
I didn't know what I expected from Robert Jr. Maybe
1:30:56
that he was too far gone after the loss of
1:30:58
Lucy that he wouldn't bother decorating anything. But it had
1:31:02
been more than ten years, and recovery is possible. I knocked,
1:31:06
and he answered a few moments later, crowning curiously, is
1:31:09
at me from the cap in the door.
1:31:11
Speaker 2: Hey, mister Lockhart.
1:31:13
Speaker 1: I floundered a little stupidly because I hadn't planned on
1:31:17
how I was going to talk to him.
1:31:19
Speaker 2: I'm Aaron. You know my mom Jane at the hospital.
1:31:22
Speaker 1: You know it's funny. Did you see how they have
1:31:24
Levinsky like that in brackets?
1:31:26
Speaker 2: Yeah?
1:31:27
Speaker 1: That's because on no Sleep you cannot give the full
1:31:30
name of a fictional character. So originally this was posted
1:31:35
with like a fake full name, but you can't do that,
1:31:38
so they just inserted their user name for the last name.
1:31:46
Speaker 4: Well, you get.
1:31:47
Speaker 1: That's dosing. You can't talks this person in the Giant
1:31:49
Spider story.
1:31:50
Speaker 2: Tell me why I'm fake.
1:31:52
Speaker 1: His name is leading Eleaded. I don't care about the
1:31:56
quality of writing or art or anything like that.
1:32:00
Speaker 2: Their name is Butch Cassidy.
1:32:05
Speaker 1: God. Yeah. The door eased open a bit more, his
1:32:11
face relaxing with recognition.
1:32:13
Speaker 2: Jane's boy. Yes, you're one of Lucy's little friends. Weren't
1:32:16
you come in? Wipe your feet? I'm surprised you remember
1:32:19
we were friends.
1:32:20
Speaker 1: I admitted stepping inside and wiping my feet on the
1:32:23
floor mat looked like a monarch butterfly.
1:32:26
Speaker 3: I remember all you kids, Robert.
1:32:27
Speaker 1: Junior said, with a wave of his hand, leading me inside.
1:32:30
His prosthetics clicked on the linoleum.
1:32:33
Speaker 3: It was Lucy, you stella. There was two little girls
1:32:36
named Mahanna, wasn't there. You're the one that cried a
1:32:39
lot because you never got to stay for sleepovers. Yes, sir,
1:32:42
that was me, You gay son?
1:32:52
Speaker 1: You gave on him the top rope?
1:32:55
Speaker 2: Are you gay?
1:32:57
Speaker 1: Immediately, I didn't realize that Junior was actually mister Widemouth.
1:33:11
Speaker 2: We have mister Weidemouth.
1:33:12
Speaker 1: You're way creepier than the spiders. I like the idea
1:33:22
that like mister Widemouth is like he's no longer homophobic.
1:33:25
He simply just informs people that they are homosexual.
1:33:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, I.
1:33:32
Speaker 1: Just wanted to let you go. Really not even bisexual.
1:33:38
Speaker 3: Humble, that's excellent Spanish.
1:33:43
Speaker 2: Mister Whitemouth, he's.
1:33:47
Speaker 1: Like six ft ald where like a bath of robe,
1:33:50
like only coffee. It was a startingly straightforward question tossed
1:33:55
over his shoulder as I followed him into the house.
1:33:58
There wasn't anything accused of in his tone, though, so
1:34:01
I said yes.
1:34:02
Speaker 3: He grunted, knew you'd be fine to sleep on with
1:34:05
the girls. Could have spared you a lot of wining
1:34:08
and crying.
1:34:08
Speaker 1: Oh, so he was right. He was immediately right for
1:34:11
the gay thing. It's funny. He took me past numerous
1:34:15
framed bugs specimens as we made our way to his
1:34:17
living room. It was a big room, cluttered with bookshelves
1:34:20
and work benches with papers strewn about. Dozens of terrariums
1:34:24
of various sizes dotted the room and lined the wall
1:34:27
like trophy cabinets. The only gap where the den opened
1:34:30
into a kitchen. A bright desk lamp illuminated the whole room,
1:34:35
and the light bounced off a magnifying Advisor headset and
1:34:38
a laptop screen. It looked like he had been dissecting
1:34:41
a large beetle before I knocked on the door. It
1:34:44
was good to see that his passion for bugs hadn't
1:34:47
been destroyed after losing his daughter to the Lockhart Wood.
1:34:51
Speaker 3: So what brings you here, schooner?
1:34:53
Speaker 1: Yes, going into the kitchen to retrieve something from the fridge.
1:34:56
Speaker 3: Well, we graduated in May, and I'm leaving for school tomorrow,
1:35:00
and I just kind of, I mean, I still think
1:35:03
about Lucy a lot. So I was wondering if you
1:35:05
had kept any of her things over the years that
1:35:07
I could see and sort of, you know, remember her
1:35:10
by if you're okay with that, Sir.
1:35:13
Speaker 1: Rubbert Junior came back over to me with a shrug
1:35:15
and two beers. He said, ain't.
1:35:17
Speaker 3: Much a little girl has to do her name, but
1:35:19
a Hello Kitty bed sheet and beaty babies, Oh man,
1:35:22
beanie babies.
1:35:24
Speaker 1: I got to help a grant at the memory That
1:35:26
was always.
1:35:27
Speaker 3: My go to gift. I give her a bunch of mine. Well,
1:35:29
you want them back or something?
1:35:31
Speaker 1: Off my startled look of chagrin, he chuckled and handed
1:35:34
me the second beer.
1:35:35
Speaker 3: I'm messing with you, boy, rooms this way.
1:35:38
Speaker 1: He led me down a long, familiar hallway, down which
1:35:41
Lucy and our friends and I had sprinted recklessly over
1:35:43
a decade ago. I recognized a few framed insects specimens
1:35:47
that we had knocked from the walls in our rough
1:35:49
house and fits. We went into Lucy's bedroom at the
1:35:52
end of the hall, and it was virtually unchanged from
1:35:55
how I remembered it. Else were still pale pink and
1:35:57
decorated with pastel colored cross stitch work made by Lucy's
1:36:01
late grandmother. The canopy bed was neatly made Hello Kitty Betting,
1:36:05
crisp and unfaded from years of disuse. The shelves upon
1:36:10
shelves of stuffed animals, with an army of beanie babies
1:36:13
gifted by me populating their own full shelf, and surprisingly
1:36:17
long terrarium against the wall with an enormous black spider
1:36:21
sitting motionless underneath a black light. Before we get into
1:36:26
the spider detail, there's something so heartbreaking in all these
1:36:32
stories about like and it's true in real life too.
1:36:36
When you know Apparent loses a kid in the room
1:36:38
is left exactly the same way, you know, and it's
1:36:41
understandable as to why, but there's such a misery to
1:36:45
like the waiting for someone who never comes, you know.
1:36:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it's yeah, it's a completely frozen time capsule
1:36:52
that's just there so you can I think it's a
1:36:55
big part too, basically so you don't lose the memory
1:36:58
of them or like who they were, you know.
1:37:00
Speaker 1: Or something so heartbreaking about a parent tending to an
1:37:02
empty room. You know, I recognized that spider. No way,
1:37:07
that's not. Robert Junior flipped on the lights, which turned
1:37:10
off the terrarium's black light. The massive spider retreated into
1:37:14
a hide with the twitch of its long, slender legs.
1:37:17
He grunted, that's her. What do you mean by that's her?
1:37:21
Speaker 3: But he said it because I think that's the uh,
1:37:24
that's the the.
1:37:27
Speaker 2: I thought that was the spider or whatever?
1:37:30
Speaker 1: What what I mean? It is a spider? What do
1:37:33
you mean you think it's the spider. Lady Legs was
1:37:35
a type of huntsman that Robert Lockhart Senior had discovered
1:37:38
in the Lockhart Would and kept for ten years before
1:37:41
Lucy was born. There were plenty of live specimens in
1:37:45
the Lockhart House over the years, but Lady Legs was
1:37:48
the only one that Lucy seemed to cherish as a pet.
1:37:50
Robert Junior had said in the past that some tarantulas
1:37:53
can live to be twenty five years old, but Lady
1:37:56
Legs wasn't a tarantula, and if this was the same
1:37:59
Lady Legs that time, this would make her over thirty
1:38:02
years old.
1:38:03
Speaker 2: Huntsmand spiders live that long.
1:38:05
Speaker 1: I asked, incredulously, moving to the terrarium with a fascination
1:38:08
I hadn't felt in years. Robert Junior stood in the
1:38:11
doorway with his arms crossed and an expression of distaste
1:38:14
greasing his features as he looked at Lady.
1:38:17
Speaker 2: None that we know of besides that one. She's even
1:38:20
bigger than I remember.
1:38:21
Speaker 1: I murmured, my breath fogging up the glasses. I tried
1:38:24
to peer into the spider's hide at an angle that
1:38:26
I couldn't see her.
1:38:27
Speaker 3: As far as I can tell, her size depends on
1:38:30
her enclosure. She won't get no bigger as long as
1:38:32
she's in that tank.
1:38:34
Speaker 1: So do you think that there's like a single giant
1:38:37
one of these spiders in the woods and that's what
1:38:39
people are freaked out by?
1:38:40
Speaker 2: Yeah?
1:38:42
Speaker 1: Also, have you seen Huntsman spiders before.
1:38:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, when I was googling some of the things earlier,
1:38:47
I saw them. It's crazy. Yeah, they're terrifying. They are
1:38:50
super fast too, and they they run at people a lot.
1:38:54
Speaker 1: They'll like chase you outside like that. They're awful. I
1:39:00
was talking to a buddy of mine in Australia and
1:39:03
he was telling me about he was in his car
1:39:04
one time and he flipped down the visor and one
1:39:06
of those that was like bigger than his hand just
1:39:08
landed on him. And those people are just okay with it.
1:39:13
They're like, yeah, you know what happens. It's like, what
1:39:16
cow free? What kind of animal?
1:39:20
Speaker 2: Are you?
1:39:21
Speaker 1: The golden or we were the thing that freaks me out.
1:39:23
I was talking to him too, He's like, oh yeah,
1:39:24
they're all over my parents' place. My parents have a
1:39:26
garden and there's like hundreds of them. It's like, dude,
1:39:30
I would drown. I would drown myself before I dealt
1:39:34
with what you go through every day. That is absurd.
1:39:38
Speaker 2: Okay.
1:39:38
Speaker 1: You know earlier at the beginning of this video, I
1:39:40
said I'm a little rectophobic. Maybe I'm just rectophobic. Yeah, yeah,
1:39:46
I think I'm just freaked out. I think I'm a
1:39:47
scared boy. I saw a lady legs move in the hide,
1:39:51
then turn my head to look out Lucy's bedroom window.
1:39:54
It faced the deep gray green mass of Lockhart Wood.
1:39:58
I stood absently, tracing my fingers through the condensation on
1:40:01
the bottle in my hand.
1:40:03
Speaker 2: Lady came from the forest, didn't she? How big are
1:40:06
they get in there?
1:40:07
Speaker 1: Robert Junior didn't respond. I looked over at him. He
1:40:11
was down in nearly his entire beer. He finished it
1:40:14
with an angry sounding hissed and said, finally, ungodly big.
1:40:20
Speaker 3: Anyway, take your time in here, do what you want,
1:40:24
look at what you want. I'll be down the hall.
1:40:27
Speaker 2: Okay. Thanks.
1:40:28
Speaker 1: As he started to leave, I remember the drink in
1:40:30
my hand and held it out to him awkwardly.
1:40:32
Speaker 2: Oh hey, I'm not twenty one.
1:40:35
Speaker 3: Ain't nobody gonna snitch on you.
1:40:38
Speaker 1: He left the room and I hissed open the beer.
1:40:40
I don't know how long I spent in there, meandering
1:40:42
around fondly, maybe an hour. Took a spider beanie baby
1:40:47
off the shelf and held it as I looked around.
1:40:49
I stood over the dresser, looking at the frame pictures
1:40:52
on top of it. Most were of Lucy and her parents.
1:40:55
A few of Lucy from toddlerhood to age seven, holding
1:40:58
the dark ganst Win, lady legs and comparatively tiny hands.
1:41:02
I was in a couple of pictures too, group pictures
1:41:05
of us and our other friends at birthday parties, our
1:41:07
messy little faces smeared with cake. I found an old
1:41:10
elementary school binder from the first grade class Lucy and
1:41:14
I had together, where the first activity of every day
1:41:17
was to make an entry in our journals following a
1:41:19
single prompt given by the teacher, and then draw a
1:41:22
picture to go with it. Naturally, lots of Lucy's entries
1:41:24
were about Hello Kitty, playdates with me and our friends,
1:41:28
and bugs. Some of them made me laugh, like her
1:41:31
outrageously mangled spelling of the word centaur, and several entries
1:41:35
about herself and Lady Legs, the spider lady Cintaurs. After
1:41:40
a while, I just stood at Lucy's window, looking out
1:41:43
at Lockhart Wood as I finished my beer. I'm a
1:41:45
lightweight when it comes to alcohol, so I was pretty buzzed.
1:41:49
The forest of a thousand legs never looked so eerie.
1:41:52
The angle of the late afternoon sun didn't penetrate the
1:41:55
darkened woods, but it glistened on countless spider web suspended
1:41:59
along the train line, emphasizing how dark the forest was.
1:42:02
Beyond that, it was strangely inviting in a predatory way,
1:42:07
like the lore of an angler fish out it swallowed
1:42:11
Lucy up. Movement outside the window caught my eye. I
1:42:15
looked over and saw Robert Junior standing under the car port,
1:42:18
facing the forest down in another beer, a backpack hanging
1:42:22
from his shoulder. He was dressed in different clothes and
1:42:24
the flannel shirt and cut offs he had been wearing
1:42:27
when he left me inside. He was wearing a heavy
1:42:30
jacket and a hat with a different set of prosthetics
1:42:33
that had shoes. He looked like he was dressed for
1:42:36
going into the forest. I left Lucy's room, crossed to
1:42:39
the other end of the house and threw the screen
1:42:41
door off the kitchen. Robert Junior didn't respond to the
1:42:45
wooden rattle of the door banging shut. You're going in
1:42:48
It wasn't a question. I was incredulous.
1:42:51
Speaker 3: Ain't been in there since I lost Lucy. Think it's
1:42:53
about time before I go back one last time before
1:42:55
I torch it.
1:42:56
Speaker 1: The sun was hidden behind lockhart Wood not quite set,
1:43:00
casting the house and us in shadows. Before I could
1:43:03
stop myself, I asked, can.
1:43:05
Speaker 2: I go with you?
1:43:06
Speaker 1: I like this setup because it establishes so much like
1:43:08
his expertise is the father's longing with it, but also
1:43:11
that he very very rarely ever took anyone, so it's
1:43:15
like this, and he hasn't been in it since Lucy died,
1:43:18
so it's this very forlorn moment. It's a very like
1:43:22
special moment, but it's also terrifying, so it's like, kind
1:43:26
of covertly, everything we've learned about him throughout the story
1:43:29
has been building up to this moment of him letting
1:43:31
someone go into the woods with him. Right to this day,
1:43:34
I'm not sure why I wanted to go with him.
1:43:36
Maybe for a sense of adventure, of danger that eighteen
1:43:39
year olds are attracted to and think they can survive anything.
1:43:43
Maybe I had some stupid notion that would find Lucy
1:43:45
in there dead or alive. Maybe I just didn't want
1:43:48
a guy who had lost his daughter the last time
1:43:50
he was in those woods to go in for the
1:43:52
first time since then alone.
1:43:55
Speaker 3: Miss dangerous in there.
1:43:57
Speaker 1: Said, Robert wasn't a no I'd be with you, I said,
1:44:01
dumb and optimistic, But in my defense, he let me
1:44:04
go with him. Neither of us mentioned it, but I
1:44:07
know he didn't want to go in those woods alone either.
1:44:09
Speaker 3: You don't need to be dressed, right, was.
1:44:11
Speaker 1: All he said. And the next thing I knew, he
1:44:13
was shamming a hat on my head, layering me in
1:44:16
protective clothing the size too big, and cramming my hands
1:44:19
and feet into clothes and boots the size too small.
1:44:21
Speaker 3: Not a perfect fake button close enough.
1:44:23
Speaker 1: He said, tucking my baggy pants likes into my boots.
1:44:26
I had zipped the jacket most of the way, but
1:44:28
he yanked the zipper all the way up to my chin.
1:44:31
Speaker 3: It was my gear back when I was a little
1:44:32
older than you. Well, my daddy bought this place.
1:44:36
Speaker 1: He strapped a headlamp to my hat, did the same
1:44:39
for himself, and shrugged on a backpack that he had
1:44:41
filled with the first aid kit and a cold pack
1:44:43
for andy venom. I watched him put it all together,
1:44:46
fascinated as I nursed another beer. It was hard to
1:44:50
believe he hadn't ventured into the forest in more than
1:44:52
ten years. The speed and certainty with which he prepared.
1:44:56
Everything was like that of someone who explored lockhart Wood daily.
1:45:00
It gave me a set of strict, reasonable rules, basically
1:45:03
telling me not to leave his side and not to
1:45:05
thrash around if I walked into a web, and to
1:45:07
always watch my step even when I was wearing boots,
1:45:11
and to watch my step even though I was wearing boots.
1:45:15
I could change my mind at any time in the forest,
1:45:17
so if I wanted to leave, he would guide me
1:45:19
out of the forest. I said a quick lie of
1:45:21
a text to my mom, telling her that Robert Junior
1:45:24
had invited me to stay for dinner, and then zip
1:45:26
my phone into a breast pocket. By now, twilight was fading,
1:45:30
the purple sky soon to turn an inky blue, and
1:45:33
we set off. The trail leading into the forest was
1:45:36
rough and overgrown from years of seeing no foot traffic,
1:45:39
but not completely hidden. The first thing I did when
1:45:42
I entered the forest was walk right into a web
1:45:45
that Robert Junior had subtly avoided. I started to flail instinctively,
1:45:49
but Robert Junior caught me with an arm across my chest, saying.
1:45:52
Speaker 3: Don't thrash her.
1:45:53
Speaker 1: Soon after, he assured me the web didn't belong to
1:45:56
anything venomous. I carefully picked the web from my face
1:45:59
and hand, following him deeper into the wood. It was
1:46:02
darker than I anticipated beneath the trees. There were a
1:46:05
few spots of visible death in the trees, suffocated and
1:46:08
deprived of sunlight under thick layers of web wrapped around them,
1:46:13
but most of the forest looked healthy, supporting the spider
1:46:16
population symbiotically, Robert Junior and I switched on our headlamps
1:46:21
pretty quickly. When the scant moonlight didn't light our way sufficiently,
1:46:25
I looked down at the ground, casting a wide circle
1:46:27
of light at my feet, and immediately frozen place, my
1:46:31
skin crawling horribly. Spiders the size of half dollars were
1:46:35
screwing away from my boots and troves, not quite as swarm,
1:46:39
but enough to be uncountable.
1:46:41
Speaker 3: You're right, son, those ones ain't gonna hurt you.
1:46:44
Speaker 1: Robert Junior hadn't looked back at me, but he must
1:46:46
have heard me freeze behind him.
1:46:47
Speaker 3: You want me to take you back.
1:46:49
Speaker 1: Pride swelled higher than the fear in my chest, so
1:46:51
I said no, I'm fine. One off the spiders crawled
1:46:55
slowly over my boot, slong legs probing curiously at my laces.
1:47:00
I wrenched my eyes away from the ground, shook the
1:47:02
spider off violently, and pushed forward. I've never been particularly arachnophobic,
1:47:07
but it was impossible not to feel itchy all over
1:47:10
imagining hundreds upon hundreds of unseen eyes creeping into my
1:47:14
protective clothing, slipping down the collar of my shirt, and
1:47:18
edging along my scalp into my hair. I just I
1:47:21
got so cold. With the description of the shirt collar,
1:47:27
the tiny spiders became less of a presence. However, when
1:47:30
we came to a fork in the trail and Robert
1:47:32
Junior dropped to a sudden crouch, grabbing my sleeve and
1:47:35
yanking me down with him. Look at that, whispered his
1:47:38
head lamp, fixed on a spider not two feet away
1:47:40
from us.
1:47:41
Speaker 3: This year's a nasty one.
1:47:43
Speaker 1: A spider the size of my hand stood strangely before us,
1:47:46
with two sets of thick, hairy legs thrown in the air.
1:47:49
Oh it's a Brazilian wandering spider, they do that. It
1:47:52
might have looked silly if not for the vivid, violently
1:47:55
red jaws on display, pulsing angrily in our direction. Worse still,
1:48:00
The spider continued to move, swaying gently with its rosy
1:48:03
callisserra throbbing almost obscenely, inching infantismally closer with its side
1:48:08
to side motions. Wide eyed, I whispered back, what is it?
1:48:12
Infuriated at the sound of my voice, the spider lunch closer.
1:48:16
This time I could see its fangs protruding from the red,
1:48:19
quivering with rage and clinting with wetness.
1:48:22
Speaker 3: Brazilian wandering spider. Be fair, it looks like, but it
1:48:26
can be hard to say without a closer look. Well,
1:48:29
live in South America except for this place, you know.
1:48:32
Speaker 1: He ends up two pockets and withdrew a large pair
1:48:34
of gloves to slip over the ones he was already wearing.
1:48:37
Speaker 3: That might be the dead last in the world.
1:48:39
Speaker 1: Instinctively, I shrank back, but then took hold of Robert
1:48:43
Junior's jacket sleeve with popping eyes. When I saw him
1:48:46
reach towards the spider, don't spider struck at his two
1:48:50
fingers with lightning speed and a force that made a
1:48:53
sharp snapping sound pierce the dark woods around us. In
1:48:57
the blink of an eye, it struck twice, brown blur. Horrified,
1:49:02
I tugged frantically at Robert Junior's sleeve. Relax, he said,
1:49:06
pulling his hand back and showing me his intact glove.
1:49:09
Speaker 3: As can't quite bite it through these.
1:49:11
Speaker 1: The spider darted out of our joined headlet beams and
1:49:13
off the trail into the woods. Robert Jr. Removed his
1:49:16
bulky second pair of gloves stowed them away.
1:49:19
Speaker 3: He can't do much delicate handling with gloves like that,
1:49:22
but anything else in those things will go right through.
1:49:26
Speaker 1: So Brazilian wondering spiders they do this thing where they
1:49:29
throw their front legs up and they like whip them
1:49:31
towards you. It's like a defensive posture. I remember seeing
1:49:35
a video of a dude camping and one of them
1:49:37
did that and like chased him into his tenth I
1:49:43
hate him.
1:49:45
Speaker 2: I just looked up the I just looked up a
1:49:47
picture of it. It's fucking crazy.
1:49:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're huge too, and super venomous. They actually, uh
1:49:53
there's if you ever heard old like legends of spiders
1:49:57
getting shipped to the United States and bananas and like
1:50:00
biting people, that's the ones who those stories are about,
1:50:02
because they hide in banana clusters. He stood suddenly leaving
1:50:06
me crouched and trembling, clenching and unclenching my fist, unpleasantly
1:50:11
aware of how thin my gloves were now, I stood slowly,
1:50:15
my headlamps slid up the trees in front of me,
1:50:17
where the bark seemed to shiver and shift with the
1:50:20
traffic of smaller spiders oozing up and down the trunks.
1:50:23
I turned my head to see where Robert Junior was looking,
1:50:26
and my light fell on his back several meters away
1:50:29
as he moved down the left path in the fork. Wait,
1:50:32
I squeaked, Rushing after him, I stumbled over tree roots
1:50:36
and ran, haltingly, skidding awkwardly to step around more than
1:50:39
one fat, lumbering turanchela. As I made my way back
1:50:43
to Robert Junior's elbow, our head lamps bobbed in the darkness,
1:50:46
and my gaze was drawn farther up, where the lamp's
1:50:49
beams lit up fast labyrinthian webs high overhead, where nothing
1:50:54
on the ground could destroy them, blinting white gold in
1:50:58
our light. They shuddered in an imperceptible breeze. This is
1:51:02
going to be the golden orb Weavers, and I I
1:51:05
hate it so much.
1:51:06
Speaker 2: Huh. Okay, go ahead, those webs are way better high
1:51:09
up there.
1:51:10
Speaker 1: I said, with a breathless chuckle, trying to shake off
1:51:12
the anxiety from the Brazilian wandering spider.
1:51:15
Speaker 2: We won't walk into Indie down here.
1:51:16
Speaker 1: Robert Junior walked briskly, barely acknowledging me with a grunt. Well.
1:51:21
I looked all around me, casting my headlamps lights to
1:51:24
and fro Robert Junior hardly moved his head, focusing steadily
1:51:27
on the twisting path down which he let us. Occasionally
1:51:31
he would stop so abruptly that I would collide with
1:51:33
his back, and he would gaze up into the ever
1:51:36
thinking in treetops at the spider webs overhead, which were
1:51:39
now so large and thick that massive sections of leaves
1:51:42
had suffocated and died. I could see clusters of spiders
1:51:45
creeping in every which way, and the stuff all more obscure.
1:51:49
Movement shifted on the other side of the web, so
1:51:52
thick that I couldn't see what it was. My depth
1:51:55
perception was off in this environment. What I'm getting lightheaded
1:52:03
thinking about?
1:52:05
Speaker 2: Maybe I have to take a breath.
1:52:07
Speaker 1: Good God, I'm willing to admit I have a problem
1:52:09
m My depth perception was off in this environment. What
1:52:13
with the distance between myself and the webs and the
1:52:15
number of different sizes of spiders, I could see everything
1:52:19
looked bigger up there from where I was standing.
1:52:21
Speaker 2: Communal webs, said Robert Jr.
1:52:24
Speaker 1: Pointing at the massive net of silk.
1:52:26
Speaker 3: No spiders live alone, but some are social. A bunch
1:52:29
of different spiders taking care of the same babies, sharing
1:52:32
the same food.
1:52:33
Speaker 2: They must catch a lot of prey.
1:52:34
Speaker 1: It's sad. Move my head limp over the vast web.
1:52:37
Speaker 2: It's huge.
1:52:38
Speaker 3: Wouldn't be surprised that they make a regular meal of birds,
1:52:41
squirrels too, maybe if any wondering this far.
1:52:45
Speaker 1: I looked at him, bathing his stubble shadowed face and
1:52:48
yellow light and said, slowly.
1:52:50
Speaker 3: That's that's kind of big for a spider, isn't it.
1:52:52
Pete Blondie in South America has been known to eat birds.
1:52:56
It's the biggest spider in the world, at least outside
1:52:58
of its god forsaken forest placing like the rest of
1:53:00
the world.
1:53:01
Speaker 1: He paused, muscle jumping in his jaw, then said.
1:53:04
Speaker 3: But they don't make webs.
1:53:06
Speaker 2: They live in burrows, so watch your step.
1:53:09
Speaker 1: I remember seeing a video one time, because in some
1:53:11
parts of the world they will harvest spiders like this
1:53:14
to use the silk for stuff. M And there was
1:53:19
a I remember a video I saw one time with
1:53:23
these guys in Southeast Asia who harvests these spiders for
1:53:25
a living. And they have these long poles and they
1:53:29
would reach the poles up into the trees and get
1:53:33
a bunch of them on the stick, and then they
1:53:35
would pull the stick down and dump them all into
1:53:37
a bag and for the camera, he opened the bag. Dude,
1:53:43
it is It is like a Walmart bag full to
1:53:48
the brim of these giant spiders crawling over each other.
1:53:52
Speaker 2: I uh, I don't care for that.
1:53:55
Speaker 1: I think about that video so off the way their
1:53:58
legs were tangled on each other and they were all
1:54:00
writhing and moving, and yeah, they're so scary. Their bodies
1:54:04
are so fat and their legs are so skinny. It's
1:54:06
so okay. I resisted the urge to clamp onto his
1:54:12
arm like a child as I swept my head lamp
1:54:14
over the edges of our path. Spiders littered the forest floor,
1:54:18
screwing busily, but the irregularly spaced holes along the path
1:54:22
nestled between tree roots what made me nervous. Now the
1:54:26
biggest holes looked like it could swallow my leg. We
1:54:29
continued to walk uninterrupted by webs for the most part,
1:54:32
but there were a few low built ones that I
1:54:35
would walk into when I was staring off into the woods,
1:54:37
and Robert Junior wouldn't tell me to duck. Unerved as
1:54:40
I was, I was starting to get used to the sensation,
1:54:43
hardly jerking back when the sticky feather light string snuck
1:54:47
up on me. My pulse would still spike when it happened,
1:54:51
though pounding loudly in my ears as I carefully brushed
1:54:53
the webs from my face. But then Robert Junior took
1:54:57
us down a second fork in the path, and I
1:54:59
distractedly collided with two webs of surprising density in a row.
1:55:03
I finally focused on Robert Junior ahead of me to
1:55:05
complain about not warning me, and a tangle of silk
1:55:08
lit up in my headlamps centimeters away, just in time
1:55:11
from my face to crash through it. Even though it
1:55:13
was my fault for not watching where I was going,
1:55:15
I said, testily.
1:55:17
Speaker 2: Come on, mister Lockhart, at least give me a heads up.
1:55:19
Speaker 1: So I dragged my gloved hands down my face, raking
1:55:22
the web from my skin. Robert Junior said nothing. I
1:55:26
looked up over his shoulder in front of me and
1:55:29
saw why the trail ahead was entirely choked in web,
1:55:33
A glistening haze like morning fog, stretching farther ahead. Shapes
1:55:38
twitched within it. Different from the shifting masses of hundreds
1:55:42
of smaller spiders in the first communal webs we saw,
1:55:46
these were heavy, singular, with sharp angles plucking at individual
1:55:50
lines of silk. I couldn't quite make sense of what
1:55:53
I was seeing. Something crunched under my boot. I looked
1:55:57
down at the wispy, stringy gray floor. Brittle old bones
1:56:02
of some animal I could have identified. Lay there. Among
1:56:05
the bones lay the aged, empty remains of a huge
1:56:08
tarantulis skeleton and exoskeleton locked together in death, and they fought, died,
1:56:15
tangled with one another. Jesus, I said loudly, just as
1:56:19
Robert Junior breathed softly. Jesus, he wasn't looking I feel sick.
1:56:28
I felt like I'm going to gag. He wasn't looking down,
1:56:32
he was looking directly up. I looked up to and
1:56:36
froze our head our headlamps joined and lit up the
1:56:43
webs that swallowed the understory, washing over the enormous spiders
1:56:47
that moved within them, things the size of fish bowls,
1:56:51
with fat, round abdomens. And I feel sick right now.
1:57:00
Speaker 2: How I like?
1:57:03
Speaker 1: Ugh, Next week we're reading about snakes. We kind of
1:57:08
balance them.
1:57:08
Speaker 2: It's only fair.
1:57:09
Speaker 1: At this point, clusters of eyes reflected like back at us,
1:57:15
and the movement of their heavy bodies made meaty, organic
1:57:18
clicking noises. These things weren't what Robert Junior had commented on.
1:57:28
The creature slowly descending from its web by a thread was.
1:57:33
At first, I thought it was a spider with a
1:57:36
squirrel or a rat or something in its jaws, But
1:57:41
a small logical corner of my mind reminded me that
1:57:44
that's not how spiders eat, not even tarantulas who don't
1:57:47
wrap their prey and silk. The rodent appeared bisected as
1:57:51
I couldn't see its back legs, with ugly gray skin
1:57:55
visible around its mid section like it had mange. Its
1:57:59
back half was impossibly the swollen bulb of a spider.
1:58:03
It looked it looked like some gruesome mockery of a centaur.
1:58:13
The limp torso of some parasitic rodent bursting forth from
1:58:16
an unwitting host. There was no way that thing could
1:58:20
be real, or if it was, it couldn't be alive.
1:58:23
But the thing spiterets kept pumping a hearty silk line,
1:58:28
two spiny back legs touching a delicate tips as it
1:58:32
worked its way down, and the rodent's head twitched, its
1:58:35
furry front legs extending, paused grasping. I saw its face,
1:58:40
a squirrel with too many beady black eyes extending up
1:58:43
the front of its head, blinking gummily down at us.
1:58:47
I could see its long yellow teeth to its mouth
1:58:50
walled open, most distantly, aware of my body moving weakly
1:58:54
grasping Robert Junior's jacket sleeve and yanking on it. Movement
1:58:58
in the corner of my eye some how managed to
1:59:00
pull my attention from the abomination above us. My eyes
1:59:04
were drawn down to the edge of the trail on
1:59:05
which we stood, and for a moment I thought the
1:59:08
ground had dipped down an embankment, and we were simply
1:59:11
elevated on the path. But I soon saw that it
1:59:15
was a massive hole in the ground.
1:59:17
Speaker 4: A burrow.
1:59:19
Speaker 1: I continued to tug mechanically on Robert Junior's arm.
1:59:22
Speaker 4: What the fuck?
1:59:24
Speaker 1: A face peered out from the burrow, ghostly pale against
1:59:28
the darkness within, and seemed to drift up and out
1:59:31
closer to us. It was a human face, too many
1:59:36
eyes clustered across the bridge of its nose, glittering black
1:59:39
and blinking slowly. It ducked its head, long dark hair
1:59:44
hanging from its lank tangles as a woman's bare moon
1:59:48
white torso emerged slowly from the hole in the ground.
1:59:51
A hulking, hairy mass of a spider's at him, in
1:59:54
the size of a Volkswagen Beetle followed connected at her waist.
1:59:59
Her eight branch thick legs crunched in the leaf litter,
2:00:03
audibly thumping with the weight. Robert Jr. And I staggered backwards,
2:00:09
upsetting more spider webs in the underbush. The creature's legs
2:00:14
were striped with wide at their joints, and I thought
2:00:18
of Lady legs back at Robert Junior's house and what
2:00:21
he said about her species size in the wild, ungodly big.
2:00:26
Robert Junior's thoughts were also back in his daughter's room,
2:00:29
because as his hand gripped my arm and return. I
2:00:32
heard him say, Lucy, I knew as soon as it
2:00:36
mentioned the like the squirrel, that like things that dian
2:00:39
here becomes spider hybrids, that it was going to be
2:00:42
his daughter. But that is so messed up. Imagine losing
2:00:45
your kid and you find them as like a spider
2:00:47
thing out here. My eyes flew back to the creature's face,
2:00:51
it's unnatural addition of eyes surrounding the originals, and as
2:00:55
it tilted its head, I recognized her too. Her mouth
2:00:59
dropped open, lower lip dripping with something too viscous to
2:01:02
be saliva, and her rail thin arms spasmed once before
2:01:06
lifting up, sending a painful jolt of electric fear at
2:01:09
my spine. Her white, long fingered hands took hold of
2:01:12
the squirrel spider dangling between the two of us and herself.
2:01:15
The thing squeaked and convulsed it's likes, thrashing horribly, and
2:01:19
Lucy brought it to her mouth. I ran. I thrashed
2:01:23
my way blindly through web after web, back the way
2:01:26
we came. I heard Robert Junior call my name unexpectedly
2:01:30
close behind me, and suddenly felt him crash into my back.
2:01:33
I hit the ground hard face first. I barely had
2:01:35
time to registered the bright starburst of paint as my
2:01:38
nose broke and began to bleed, or the scattering of
2:01:40
spiders millimeters in front of my eyes before Robert Junior
2:01:44
yanked my bodily back upright and whirled me around. I
2:01:48
thought he was slapping me, but realized he was swiping
2:01:51
away spiders that I picked up his passengers from the ground.
2:01:54
Don't you run off in here, boy, Robert Junior hissed
2:01:57
my face, shaking me hard so the nuts will kill you,
2:01:59
before the enormous creature loomed behind him, creeping down the
2:02:02
trail after us. I started to yell, but Robert Junior
2:02:06
clapped his hand over my mouth. Spinning to face her.
2:02:09
He forced us into a sort of half crouch. His
2:02:12
body weighed me down to keep me from running again,
2:02:14
and I stared with bulging eyes, struggling to breathe throughout
2:02:18
my bleeding nose as Lucy bore down upon us. Okay,
2:02:23
Robert Junior said, but he wasn't talking to me. I
2:02:26
could feel him shaking against my back.
2:02:29
Speaker 3: It's okay, Lucy here, you're okay.
2:02:31
Speaker 1: She came closer the precise movements of her vast spider
2:02:35
body and stark contrast against the limp, feeble movements of
2:02:39
her human torso. Her face seemed alert, even with six
2:02:43
bleary eyes that looked affected in their unnaturalness, but her
2:02:48
arms hung listlessly at her sides, her posture hunched. Venom
2:02:53
blunts live flowed slowed down her chin. All that remained
2:02:58
with the squirrel spider. I could hear her breathing, see
2:03:01
her pale throat throb as she swallowed.
2:03:04
Speaker 3: That's a girl, girl, that's a good girl.
2:03:06
Speaker 1: Baby, said Robert Junior, his voice low and soothing despite
2:03:10
his violent trembling.
2:03:13
Speaker 3: Dad didn't know you lived here, Lucy. We didn't know
2:03:16
we'd see you here. You did such a good job
2:03:18
here all by yourself, didn't you, baby.
2:03:20
Speaker 1: Daddy's proud of you. He was slowly inching us back
2:03:23
as he spoke nonsense to the thing in front of us.
2:03:26
The spider shifted minutely, almost moving after us, but not quite.
2:03:31
Lucy's dark, wet mouth drooped open in a voice that
2:03:35
sounded like wind in the leaves. She hissed, yeah, oh.
2:03:40
Speaker 2: Man, that's so.
2:03:45
Speaker 1: Oh. The idea of your poor daughter being stuck in
2:03:47
this state for years. H Robert Junior laughed wild and
2:03:51
terrified in my ear, pulling me another step back, the
2:03:55
palm of his hand still crushing my lips against my
2:03:57
chattering teeth.
2:03:59
Speaker 2: That's right, baby, daddy's here. Daddy didn't think he'd see
2:04:03
y'all grown up in the woods. Huh baby, Good girl Lucy.
2:04:07
Speaker 1: She didn't move after us as we backed away, although
2:04:10
her eyes followed us with a laser focus, again, her
2:04:14
voice hoarse and vacant.
2:04:17
Speaker 2: That's right, Daddy's gonna take your friend back home. Okay,
2:04:22
you remember Aaron.
2:04:23
Speaker 1: I'd grown behind his hands, sick with fear, as all
2:04:26
eight of Lucy's eyes shifted on to me, she didn't
2:04:29
say my name. Wildly, in the back of my head,
2:04:32
I wondered if she recognized any of the things Robert
2:04:34
Junior was saying to her, certain that she was all
2:04:37
spider like this, that the two words she'd said were
2:04:41
empty repetitions preceding her final attack, And still she stood motionless,
2:04:47
watching our retreat.
2:04:49
Speaker 3: Thatddy's going to take Aaron home? Is that?
2:04:50
Speaker 1: Okay? Baby?
2:04:52
Speaker 2: Will you let me do that? Lucy?
2:04:54
Speaker 1: She was silent for a long moment.
2:04:56
Speaker 2: Then, good girl, Lucy, we're going away, good girl.
2:05:04
Speaker 1: Another long stretch of silence as we moved steadily away
2:05:07
from her, She still didn't follow, merely watching us. Voice
2:05:12
I'm prompted this time shook me to my core. When
2:05:16
it next cracked through the night. See the noise Robert
2:05:23
Junior made was something of a strangled sob and a laugh.
2:05:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, hi, baby, I'll come see you. I'll come see you.
2:05:33
Get just let me take erin home and Daddy will
2:05:36
come see you. Kid.
2:05:39
Speaker 1: We were several meters away from her by now I
2:05:41
was sure we were nearing the bend and the fork
2:05:43
in the trail we had taken slowly. Robert Junior lowered
2:05:47
his hand from my mouth and I culled deep, shaking breath.
2:05:51
Speaker 3: I can't get it out of your backwards, but I
2:05:55
need you watching behind us. You hang on to me
2:05:58
and I'll walk you out. You tell me if she follows.
2:06:01
Speaker 2: Can you do that?
2:06:02
Speaker 4: Sun?
2:06:02
Speaker 1: Why? Noted, and unable to look away from Lucy's figure
2:06:05
down the trail, I nodded.
2:06:08
Speaker 3: You, sir, Oh careful.
2:06:11
Speaker 1: Now his hand had circled my wrists tightly, and with
2:06:13
a firm tug, he took us around the bend. I
2:06:16
struggled to walk in reverse, my legs like rubber, and
2:06:19
my pulse roaring in my ears. Lucy didn't follow us.
2:06:22
Once I lost sight of her. Robert Junior navigated us
2:06:25
back through the forest, avoiding all webs this time around.
2:06:29
I don't know how long it took to get out
2:06:31
of the woods. For all I knew it took days.
2:06:34
But eventually we broke through the tree line, and the
2:06:36
unobstructed moonlight was blinding. I felt separate from my own
2:06:42
I felt separate from my own body as I brushed
2:06:44
harmless jumping spiders and orb weavers from my hat and jacket. Distantly,
2:06:49
I heard Robert distantly. I heard Robert Junior chuckling. Weakly
2:06:54
turned around to look at lockhart Wood. Almost casually, I
2:06:58
leaned over and threw up on the grass a few
2:07:01
yards away. Robert Junior did just the same, coughing and
2:07:04
laughing harder. When he was done fuck, he gasped, hands
2:07:10
on his face. I watched him stagger and fall, heaving
2:07:13
onto his ass, giggling maniacally. Dazed. I went over to
2:07:17
him and sat beside him on the grass, staring at
2:07:19
the forest. I spat remnants of bile on the ground
2:07:22
between my knees. I fumbled with my head lamp, turned
2:07:25
it off through my hat. Aside, I appeared at Robert
2:07:28
Junior's tears, shrieked, laughing face vaguely concerned.
2:07:33
Speaker 2: I can't tell if that's good laughter or bad laughter.
2:07:37
Speaker 1: Christ possibly hyperventilating you and me both.
2:07:42
Speaker 4: Fuck.
2:07:43
Speaker 1: He pressed two fingers to his neck, checking his own pulse.
2:07:47
Speaker 2: What are you gonna do now? Shit's good?
2:07:50
Speaker 4: I don't know.
2:07:51
Speaker 2: Probably visit my daughter every now and then.
2:07:53
Speaker 1: Damn scrubbed his hands over his face, groaning deeply. My
2:07:57
head swam. I flopped back, staring at the night sky.
2:08:01
The stars looked like a little white spider leans. I
2:08:05
thought suddenly off my mother back at the house, And
2:08:07
for whatever reason, all I could think to say was.
2:08:10
Speaker 2: Hey, yeah, so I was thinking you should give my
2:08:13
mom a call some time. She's not seeing anyone.
2:08:16
Speaker 1: I don't remember getting home that night. I don't remember
2:08:19
getting settled on campus the next day, but I think
2:08:22
I'm going to change my major to biology. I'd like
2:08:25
to see Lucy again, and I think maybe a study
2:08:28
in her achnology might be a good place to start.
2:08:31
Speaker 2: Man, what a wonderful way to end that it's weird.
2:08:33
Speaker 3: It's it's horrifying, but at the same time it's very sweet,
2:08:36
you know, like it's like a very kind of like no,
2:08:38
I don't know's tragic. Yeah that the daughter like I
2:08:45
don't know, it didn't attack them.
2:08:48
Speaker 2: It remembered who it was and then she said, come seebee.
2:08:51
She obviously has like sub ribbits or a bibery there.
2:08:54
Speaker 3: But it's it's, uh, I don't know, it's it's like
2:08:56
cathartic in a really weird way. It's it's horrifying because
2:08:59
obviously the child has been i mean like transformed. Now
2:09:03
that being said, do you think that it had had
2:09:05
anything to do with the spiders in the woods or
2:09:06
do you think she was just this creature that was
2:09:08
born to like change with her?
2:09:10
Speaker 1: What with that?
2:09:11
Speaker 2: Do you think?
2:09:12
Speaker 1: So?
2:09:12
Speaker 2: Okay, she was talking about the centaur before.
2:09:14
Speaker 1: She was talking about the centaur before because she had
2:09:16
that spider that her father had discovered in the woods.
2:09:20
The spiders said that the father said that the spider
2:09:23
grows as big as the you know, aquarium is, so
2:09:27
in the woods they get on godly big. So that's
2:09:29
why Lucy had dreams of like the centaur spider and
2:09:32
stuff because.
2:09:33
Speaker 2: She was with but I don't think the legs.
2:09:35
Speaker 1: And then she's like, oh, well, become spider centaurs blah
2:09:38
blah blah. So maybe that's like an idea. Yeah, but
2:09:40
I don't know how the landed by the spider.
2:09:42
Speaker 2: Does that translate?
2:09:44
Speaker 3: How does that translate to it being a morphed creature
2:09:47
half spider or half whatever?
2:09:48
Speaker 1: When she runs understand like the same thing that happened
2:09:51
to the squirrel, it creates like biology hybrids. I see
2:09:56
like it turns, it turns whatever DNA it finds into
2:09:59
like spider creatures.
2:10:00
Speaker 3: Basically a sad and heartwarming ending at the same time
2:10:04
of like a girl being transformed into.
2:10:07
Speaker 1: That. You see your you see your kid out there
2:10:09
as the giants spider thing with the venom mouth and
2:10:12
stuff like that. That is not heartwarming. Your your daughter
2:10:16
is now like Gargameth, the destroyer of world.
2:10:19
Speaker 3: It is a crazy, crazy monster. But there was a sense,
2:10:22
there was a sense of, uh, like a cathartic feeling.
2:10:25
I'm killing the dad and then killing my kid. Yeah,
2:10:28
I don't know, there's something. There's something to it. I
2:10:30
don't think it's it's not it's not a happy ending.
2:10:33
I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that it must
2:10:34
be cathartic, being like you get to talk to your
2:10:36
kid again in whatever form. Uh, it's kind of interesting. Also,
2:10:41
she's not just a brain dead, like just monster. She
2:10:44
remembers you and has like a cognitive ability to speak,
2:10:47
even if it is like a fucking demon.
2:10:49
Speaker 2: But I don't know that that was fun. Two great stories.
2:10:52
I'll be honest.
2:10:53
Speaker 3: I was going into this being like, spider stories can
2:10:55
come off as kind of cheesy, but I think both
2:10:57
of these really really did.
2:10:59
Speaker 1: Both these and they were scary in different ways. Like
2:11:02
the first one scary descriptions of like spiders in the
2:11:05
home kind of thing, and the second one was like
2:11:08
a monstrous spiders. I mean, obviously there's monstrous spiders in
2:11:11
the first one, but the second one, like the focus
2:11:14
of the horror was like how big these things can get?
2:11:17
The unknown woods and stuff like that. They were both
2:11:21
very well written. I mean, obviously we know Christian Wallace
2:11:23
is a great writer, but I'm sad that Levinsky or
2:11:28
Lozinsky this is the only thing they posted to No Sleep.
2:11:31
If they're out there, please write more. That was fantastic,
2:11:34
But both those stories are great. Both of them were terrifying.
2:11:37
I can't This is like in the running for the
2:11:40
most scared I've been. I didn't think I'd be scared
2:11:43
by reading about spiders, but here we are, so.
2:11:46
Speaker 3: Listen to you just like dry Heaven be like. Uh
2:11:50
was quite the trip for me. So it was definitely
2:11:54
a story that has deeply hit you to your core.
2:11:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's hit me somewhere, all right. These are
2:12:02
the kind of stories so I'm glad I read them.
2:12:03
They were terrifying. Never gonna look at him again, yeah,
2:12:06
I'll never never peek at him again again? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:12:11
Speaker 2: Well, guys, that's our episode this week.
2:12:14
Speaker 3: Thank you for being a little spider with us and
2:12:16
hanging off your web and you know, hopefully another spider
2:12:20
euphinism that I can think of. I do appreciate you
2:12:23
guys listening on Apple, Podcast, Spotify, all the audio platforms.
2:12:26
If you haven't done it, try checking it out next time.
2:12:29
I swear it's a lot of fun. Be sure to
2:12:30
give us a good rating there. Also, thank you to
2:12:33
our patrons who supported us today. We appreciate you. If
2:12:36
you're want some extra content, we are reading the chatting
2:12:38
in the woods right after we're done with this recording,
2:12:41
So if you want to get in on that little
2:12:43
extra sauce, feel free.
2:12:44
Speaker 2: Otherwise, until next time, guys, we will see you in
2:12:46
the next one.
2:12:47
Speaker 1: Stay creeped, We'll see you in the next one. I
2:12:49
just want everyone to know. One of the top comments
2:12:51
on that last story is damn is Lucy single, which
2:12:57
is not only insane, but she's also seven, so someone
2:13:01
should probably call someone about that. Guy Bye.
2:13:07
Speaker 2: Hit the road jack and don't you come back?
2:13:09
Speaker 4: No more, No more, no more, no more.
2:13:12
Speaker 6: Hit the road jack and don't you come back no more.
2:13:16
My wife's a spider.
2:13:18
Speaker 2: Hit the road jack, hit the road jack, and don't
2:13:21
you come back?
2:13:21
Speaker 4: No more, No more, no more, no more.
2:13:24
Speaker 6: Hit the road jack and don't you come back no more.
2:13:28
My wife's a spider.
2:13:30
Speaker 2: Hit the road jack, hit the road jack, and don't
2:13:33
you come back?
2:13:33
Speaker 4: No more? No more, no more, no more.
2:13:36
Speaker 2: Hit hit the road jack, and don't you come back?
2:13:39
Speaker 4: No more, No more, no more.
2:13:41
Speaker 6: No more, hit the road jack and don't you come
2:13:44
back no more? My wife's ay spider, hit the road jack,
2:13:48
hit the road jack, and don't you come back? No more,
2:13:52
No more, no more, no more hit the road jack,
2:13:55
and don't you come back no more?
2:13:58
Speaker 2: My wife say, Spider hit the oh jack. Did you
2:14:01
come back no more?