By D. Matthew Urban
From room to room of the couple’s house I trawl, killing spiders. They’re in every corner, along every molding, the whole place sheathed in webs. My hand grows a gossamer shroud as I slide it along the crease where the wall meets the ceiling.
The couple trails anxiously in my wake. The tall one’s voice trembles. “Thanks so much for helping us out with this. We’d do it ourselves, but…”
The short one grimaces. “Too many legs.”
“Too many legs.” The tall one shudders.
“Don’t mention it,” I say. “My pleasure.” My hand kills and kills. Through its thickening web-glove, I feel the little bodies burst and come apart.
The tall one steps forward, opens the door to the next room. Passing through, I flash an acknowledging smile. The tall one’s not bad to look at. Smooth skin, little teeth. Delicate.
This room looks identical to the last, but that’s an illusion. The webs disguise everything. As I clean them away, the real room shows. There’s no resemblance at all. The other room was nice, with hardwood floors and walls painted a tasteful arctic blue. This one’s floor is laminate, the walls and ceiling blotchy white on cerulean. A room for a stupid child who loves the sky.
The short one’s nose wrinkles. “Ugh.”
“I kind of like it,” the tall one says. “Peaceful.”
I wipe the last scraps of web from the firmament. My hand is buried, a gray mitt smeared with lymph. Broken legs bristle from the wreckage.
“I can fetch you a towel,” the tall one says.
“Nah, it’ll just get like this again.”
This time it’s the short one who steps forward. A stumpy arm sweeps toward the doorway. “After you!” The short one’s not as good to look at as the tall one. Wonky hair, crazy teeth. Nice eyes, though. A faintly mocking gleam, as if there were a mind in there somewhere.
The next room looks the same again. Another mirage to annihilate. Two big spiders are crouched in a corner. When I raise my mitt, they stir, scurry in a ring, wave their legs in what must be a signal. The gray edifice shivers as little spiders pop from cells and crannies, rushing to join the big ones in their ring dance. Roiling bodies swarm the webwork.
“Wow,” the short one says from the doorway. “They really love you.”
I brandish my encrypted hand. “It’s not me. It’s this thing. Like my grandmother always said, the more inhuman, the more irresistible.” The patter slides from my tongue as smoothly as if it meant something. All part of the job.
“What’s going on in there? Let me have a look!” The tall one’s face appears around the edge of the doorframe, hovering above the short one’s wonky hair. Seeing the wild revel on the web, the tall one’s foolish eyes bulge. The smooth skin blanches, the lips peel back from the small teeth. The face disappears from the doorway, replaced by the sound of retching. An odor billows from the sky room, sweet and verdant. I think the tall one’s been eating flowers.
The short one retreats into the sky room. I hear a hand stroking fabric. “It’s okay, dearest,” the short one murmurs. Maybe the hand is stroking hair…silky, beautiful hair. “It’s okay.”
“I hate them so much,” the tall one sobs. Another heave and splat, another petal-waft. “Those little monsters! Those ghouls, those cannibals!”
“Now, dearest.” A tinge of consternation in the murmur. “What do you mean cannibals? Ghouls, if you insist, but cannibals?”
“They eat each other! I’ve seen them do it!”
“Even so, dearest, why fuss about it? Their crimes are notorious enough, no need to pad the indictment with frivolous nonsense. After all, isn’t anything a cannibal for eating anything? It’s all the same stuff, protons and electrons and…”
“Don’t you give me another lecture about protons and electrons! If I hear one more word about protons and electrons, I’ll…”
I stop listening. It’s a private conversation, none of my business.
The festival has consumed the entire wall. Thin legs wriggle around bulging abdomens; maddened pedipalps flail at cephalothoraxes. I think of my grandmother’s house in central Texas, thickets of daddy longlegs quivering on its sides like living pubic hair. I thrust what was my hand into the heart of the throng, withdraw the sopping web-wad, thrust again. Spider bodies crack and crunch. Gouts of lymph spatter my coveralls.
I sweep my arm left and right. As webs tear away, fresh swaths accrete around my ex-hand, absorbing the glop. At last, the room shows itself. It’s worse than the sky room, oatmeal-colored carpet between walls papered in a garish pattern of elephants, clowns, lions, acrobats, more clowns. A playroom for the sky child’s even dumber twin. The couple walks arm-in-arm around the room, the tall one ooh-ing and aah-ing while the short one’s eyes roll.
As the couple saunters past me on their circuit, the tall one touches my shoulder. “We really can’t thank you enough.” The delicate hand lingers.
Post-vomiting, the tall one is even better to look at. A sheen of sweat makes the skin look smoother; a swollen tongue diminishes the teeth. Meanwhile, the short one is wonkier-haired and crazier-toothed than ever, but the eyes’ mocking gleam has deepened into a calm, all-deprecating radiance that puts me in mind of a scalpel slicing through a pulsating brain.
The tall one steps forward, opens the door on the far side of the clown room. “Shall we?”
Another indiscernible chamber. Once more I scour the resemblance from the teeming walls, the slop-glutted web-strata now extending past my wrist and almost to my elbow. Revealed, the room is the stupidest yet. Orange shag on the floor, walls and ceiling totally obscured by posters advertising a protein powder called Bulk Sludge. I could almost wonder if it’s worth killing spiders to lay bare this idiocy.
The tall one flexes hunky biceps in front of a poster as if it were a mirror. Stalking across the shag, eyes fixed contemplatively on the ceiling, the short one runs a stubby finger down my arm from shoulder to elbow. A radiant eye swivels toward me, winks, flickers away. The finger strokes the edge of my arm’s cowl, sets the quasi-hand swinging, and the weight of webs and smashed bodies pulls me staggering toward the open door where the short one stands, crazy teeth bared in a sly grin.
We pass through room after room, all the same at first, each ultimately more dogshit than the last. The doll room, the celebrity mugshot room, the teratoma room, the third-wave ska room. My entombed hand hacks and thrashes, gathers substance to itself, more webs, more glop, more bodies. The death-sleeve crawls up my arm and along my shoulder. Rags of web flutter around my ears, squirm down the back of my coveralls. The couple runs their hands along the lumpy gray cylinder, the tall one guffawing in delight, the short one sagely nodding. The heavier the non-hand grows, the less work I have to do. The thing moves under its own power, dilapidating roomfuls of web with a single swipe.
“Momentum and inertia,” the short one says. The tall one spews a geyser of petals and sepals.
The couple’s curious hands explore beyond the conquered arm, roving along my flanks, up my neck. Stubby and delicate fingers prod my waist, twine in my hair. The tall one preens, leers, performs feats of strength while the short one unspools a mesmerizing discourse on vacuum decay and cosmic ekpyrosis. Torn between dueling ravishments, I swing and slash, a whirlwind of demolition. The web-glob swallows my collarbone.
“Okey-dokey,” says the tall one, slinking to the far side of the freshly cleared Nils Bohr beefcake calendar room. “Just one more to go.”
The dead web-arm drags me toward a doorway opening onto a dark, empty space. As I approach, the darkness resolves into a churning static of legs and chelicerae. I plunge into the thicket.
Spinning and gyring, I lash the chaos of spiders that swirls around me in festal abandon. Bodies on bodies accrue to me, webs on webs, a slurried agglomeration encasing my torso, my legs, my face. I can’t see what I’m doing, what marvels of arachnid architecture I’m obliterating. It all turns to mush. Silken compost smothers me.
When the destruction is complete, I’m fully encased in a self-moving bulk of Ozymandiac dimensions. The monster strides around the room, vast limbs swinging in a boundless abyss. I’m curled inside the thing’s stomach, my eye pressed against a rent in its outermost layer.
Peeping through the belly-hole, I watch the couple enter the nothing room. The tall one does handsprings, long legs waving in the void like shapely antennae. The short one’s limpid eyes beam pure intelligence, twin infernos of truth.
Reflected in those hellholes, I see my gigantic web-crypt. Its form is exactly my own, only huger, cruder, even more brutish, pustules of crushed spiders pocking the coarse gray skin. My effigy teeters in the emptiness, rocking from foot to foot like a nervous child.
The couple falls on their knees before the me-shaped trash-heap. “O colossus,” they intone, “your task is accomplished. As payment for your labors, we invite you to share in our eternal rule over these chambers. Furthermore, you may choose one of us as your consort.”
Cocooned, I shudder with terror and revulsion. I can’t imagine a worse fate than spending the rest of time in this dumbass house, this garbage body, shackled to one of those two.
In the short one’s eyes, my hideous mock-self lifts a massive hand. It strokes its chin in pseudo-thought as its eyes’ gray globes swivel from the tall one to the short one, back to the tall one, back again. “Just squish them both and get out of here!” I try to scream, but a clotted rush of lymph-soaked silk fills my mouth. I gag on my new flesh.
The couple gazes up at the me-thing. The tall one’s lips dribble lilies. The short one’s crazy teeth flash. “What is your choice, O behemoth?”
A seething hole opens in the gray face—my mouth, enlarged and crowded with writhing bodies. The swish of innumerable legs resolves into the semblance of a voice. “I choose…” My voice falters. My spider-crammed mouth gapes. Second thoughts even flimsier than the first wrinkle the webs of my brow. Secreted in myself, convulsed by horror, I await my mindless decision.
D. Matthew Urban hails from Texas and lives in Queens, NY, where he reads weird books, watches weird movies, and writes weird fiction. His stories have appeared in Tales from Between, Fraidy Cat Quarterly, and Split Scream Volume 4 (Tenebrous Press), among other venues. A collection of his stories is coming in early 2025 from Cursed Morsels Press. Find him on Twitter @breathinghead or on the web at https://dmatthewurban.com.