Arachne Revisited

ARACHNE REVISITED

By

Inge Moore

Spiders. I am afraid of these small creatures. Even I realize that this is odd, because I am not afraid of lions or tigers or wolves. I am not even afraid of snakes. Yet I am afraid of these little arthrodpods. That’s all they are, I keep telling myself. Arthropods.  Arachnids. Related to mites and ticks. Not dangerous, not scary.

My fear began when I was ten years old. It began the day the "thing" came.

Something woke me in the night. When I opened my eyes, everything in my bedroom seemed different. The room was bathed in a luminous blue light. I tried to get up and was shocked when I couldn’t move. I tried again. My surprise turned to terror. When I tried to scream, I couldn’t make a sound, not even a squeak. I couldn’t close my eyes either – they stayed frozen wide open.

Unable to escape, I watched helplessly as something oozed through a crack between the wall boards. An amorphous shape, dark grey in colour, it was pulsating, as if it had a heartbeat.

I wanted to scream and run but I was frozen in the bed, unable to move the tiniest muscle.

It rolled toward me slowly, slithering up over my leg, my hip, my crotch, and my stomach to come to rest on my chest. My nostrils flared. I could smell it. Metallic.

I knew that I was about to die. The weight increased until it felt like a big man was sitting on me. Just when I was sure my chest would collapse, the thing started to roll away. 

Slowly, it left me. I watched it go, slithering off of my legs and out the partially open window. Finally I was able to move.  I jumped to my feet to run from the room.

But my path was blocked by a fat orange spider perched in the center of a web it had spun beside my bed. I stopped dead and began to scream. I screamed until my lungs felt they’d explode. My mother raced into the room, but jerked to a stop at the spider’s web, not daring to cross it. She just stood there, tears running from her green eyes. Pushing her aside like a bag of rubbish, my father grabbed the spider in his big fist and squashed it. I could almost feel the squashing in myself, feel my body being crushed in his grip, my guts seeping out. Then he grabbed me and slapped me hard, to bring me to my senses he said. I tasted blood.

“Since that day, I’ve been afraid of spiders,” I finish, trembling with the memory. I can hardly believe I have been brave enough to finally put my horror into words.

Josh laughs. “That’s bullshit,” he says. “How can you be afraid of something the size of a thumbnail?” He sticks his thumb in my face to show me the size of its nail.

“I just explained it,” I whisper, without looking at him as he sits on our couch beside me in our living room, in our home. I have finally told him where this fear of mine comes from and all he can do is laugh.

He flips the channel with the remote. He laughs some more. “You had a dream about a blob-like thing attacking you, you woke up, and there was a spider in a web by your bed. And this scares you forever!”

“I wasn’t asleep. It really happened!” I insist, my voice climbing in a way I hadn’t intended, shrill and strident. A tone I know he hates.

“Callie, calm down. Your ‘thing’ was a little mind trick brought on by sleep paralysis,” he says in his know-it-all tone. “Some call it The Old Hag. It happens to people all over the world and it’s nothing but your imagination making up a story to explain the fact that you are temporarily paralyzed.”

“That’s not it!” I am close to sounding hysterical now. “It was real. The ‘thing’ was there. It was on me and it sucked something out of me.” I begin to shake, beads of sweat tracking down my ribcage underneath my blouse.

“Right!” He is still laughing but his laugh now has that hard edge I know. He keeps his eyes glued to the ball game on the flat screen.

I hug myself tight and edge farther away from him. He doesn’t understand. The thing did take something from me. It took something from inside me. As the spider watched. The spider knew something I didn’t, something I might never know. Now I regret having opened up to him about my fear. I get up and move to the kitchen away from him and his laughter.

“Coming to bed?” I ask when he finally turns off the TV. I have not spoken to him for some time. He watched television alone while I flipped through magazines in the kitchen. I resent the fact that he is so smug, and that he doesn’t believe me. It feels like a sharp hook scraping at my skull. And really, when I think of it, it’s been a long time since he paid any attention to what I said or thought or believed. A long time since he wanted me for anything but quick rough sex.

“Can you check the corners now please?” I ask. He always checks the corners for spiders at bedtime. “And the baseboards. Can you please check them?”

“You know what,” he says. “You can do it yourself. You can flippin’ do it yourself. I’m outa’ here.”

“What? Why won’t you check the corners? You always check the corners and baseboards, even if you’re going out—“

“I thought you said you were scared of poisonous spiders,” he says in a harsh voice. “Even though they’re rare here, that made some kind of sense. I could live with that, as lame as it was. Now you’re telling me some spider watched some blob thing suck something out of you and that’s why you’re scared of spiders. And you have the freakin’ nerve to yell at me about it?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. Please stay. I can make popcorn, we can find a movie to watch,” I plead.

“Not this time, Callie,” he says.

“Where are you going this late?” I ask desperately

“There’s gotta’ be a bar open someplace,” he says. “Don’t wait up for me.”

“Josh, please don’t go,” I call but he doesn’t even turn. The door slams and I shudder. I am alone. This is the first time I will be going to bed without him first checking for spiders in how long? Ten years, maybe more.

Will the thing come? Will a spider come?

I am terrified. And angry at him. For deserting me without checking for spiders. For laughing at me. For not loving me.

I go into the bathroom. I’ll never sleep. I am tip-toeing. I am afraid of the spiders. They could be hiding anywhere. In any corner. Behind a curtain, behind a baseboard, in any little nook and cranny. I brush my teeth and wash my face and then reach into the medicine cabinet. The doctor gave me sleeping pills to take on the nights Josh goes out. I know the usual one or two pills won’t help me tonight so I gulp down about a dozen.  I take all that are left in the little brown bottle. I can’t help it. I can’t endure this fear. My chest is throbbing with the wild beating of my heart. I chase the pills with a swig of the vodka I keep tucked in my bedside drawer. I climb into bed, pulling the covers over my head and cowering, shaking. Finally the pills and alcohol take effect and I feel myself drifting peacefully away.

***

I dream that I am sitting in a big meadow in the springtime. I am happy in the meadow with the sun shining on me, warming my scalp and my shoulders. I am looking down at the flowers all around me: hyacinths, tulips, daffodils. I love the daffodils best because they are a happy yellow colour. The bright red tulips frighten me a little, they remind me of blood. Suddenly, there is a hand on my shoulder. My father smiles as I look up at him. My pulse begins to throb painfully in my temple. I need him to leave, but I’m not sure why. One big hand clasps my shoulder as his other hand moves to my knee, a firm squeeze, then creeps up my skirt. I take a deep breath and steel myself for what is about to happen. When I look past him I see my mother watching, tears running out of her eyes. I reach out to her for help, but she turns as if she hasn’t even seen me and walks away. Her back straight as a knife.

He pushes me down into the grass and flowers and his buttocks pin down my chest. I can’t breathe.  I choke, crying for him to stop. When he finally finishes and goes, I roll over and press my face into the dirt and plant stems, just lie there and cry. When my sobbing stops, I open my eyes and there it is beside me, an orange spider sitting on a fallen red petal, watching me, just watching.

***

I wake panting, shaking, and soaked in sweat in the dark bedroom. Memories wash over me, flooding my conscience. Things I have forgotten, or maybe never knew. I lie in bed for what must be hours until the morning dawns and the sun streaks through the curtains. I force myself to get up. I tell myself that that was then and this is now. That the past was long ago and can’t reach me here. Here and now, nothing has happened, I tell myself firmly. Nothing has harmed me. I’m safe.

I see Josh hasn’t joined me in bed, must have stayed the whole night out again. Well, I’m used to it by now. I slide out of bed and make my way to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee.

When I get to the doorway I see Josh in the kitchen. 

“Shhh,” he hisses, lifting a finger to his lips.  “Shhh.”

I step closer. He is stalking a spider on the counter, trying to corner it and get it to scuttle onto his hand. Finally he succeeds and with a laugh he shouts, “Think fast!” tossing it at me. The fat orange spider makes a graceful arc through the air, trailing a silvery silk thread behind it and lands on my shoulder. I just smile.

“I’m not afraid of spiders anymore,” I say. And it’s the truth. I’m no longer afraid of spiders, or my father, or Josh. I'm no longer afraid of life.  Still in my nightgown, I walk out the door, heading for a sunny meadow. The spider and I. Friends. We won’t let anyone hurt us anymore.

******