Spiders and Snakes

Spiders and Snakes

I dragged myself out of bed with a well-deserved headache. Everything was blurry, as though I didn’t already have my glasses on. My mind was foggy, but that was nothing less than reassuring after last night.The slow, eerie beats of Phragments and Korinth’s Mysteries of the Greylands followed me to the living room, never diminishing in volume, a static specter over my shoulder, heralding another delightfully grim and hopefully swift interlude between attempts at writing.I think I crawled across the tiled floor to the kitchen, with no vestige of pride in appearances. I thought I saw a cat chasing something: a thin streamer of green light. I rubbed my eyes and stood up when I reached my kitchen stash of uncaffeinated hangover sodas.

My head almost brushed against the web then; a misty brown gossamer haze suspended against the pantry doors like an ethereal hammock. In the late afternoon light, I could barely discern the only relatively chunkier shapes drifting in its midst. They were tiny house spiders, and there were more of them than there were last night.

There was another spider spinning a gauzy shroud over a bottle on the cutting block. Ever the arachnophile, I picked up the bottle and carefully wiped its web against the flying spider city above. I would have to make a note to haul the whole mess of webs outside after I found and removed whatever megalopolis of even smaller bugs they must have been eating.

I turned to follow the music back to my lair, to find a way to puzzle out what should happen in the next chapter, and the full extent of the unblurried webbing hit my eyes. The spiders had formed a faintly visible loft which stretched from window height to the ceiling at the corner where it met the higher wall. It spanned the kitchen and most of the living room, like the ghost of a threadbare sheet, hung out to dry and billowing in the wind.

I saw the streamer of green-yellow light again, as it darted from behind a cardboard box toward a pair of gloves on the floor. It was a baby snake, no bigger around than a chopstick, and considerably shorter.

Relieved to see it wasn’t already bleeding or mangled from feline depredations, I set about catching it with my hands. A family member walked by me then, and the snake appeared again, as if blown by a mercurial gale only it could feel. It reared up, the mighty serpent Jormungand compressed into the cutest little ribbon of a body, and hissed with unlikely volume for its size.

I grabbed at it, missing as it flowed back under the gloves. My hands found it then, pinning it gently to the floor by the glove material. I scooped it up, struggling to keep it from flowing like water between my fingers. Its head was larger than its body now, I noticed, nearly the size of a flattened walnut; it was growing, its head becoming froglike, with bulging eyes, and the tail was now a diminutive tentacular afterthought of an appendage affixed to its head.

The snake’s head was large enough now that I could hold it firmly in one hand. I was becoming concerned about its possible bite; though it had looked anything but harmful on the floor, it was rapidly becoming weird. Its greenish head held red eyes, and elongated black pupils within which stared away from me with no trace of what we recognize as intelligence, no emotion to connect to, only a spreading, growing, unfathomable alienness.

I felt something sharp slip through my fingers, almost catching my skin. It was as though a stinger had emerged from the underside of the snake’s head, and only by some miracle missed me.

This isn’t a snake at all, I thought.

Then I noticed the thing’s tail. What had before seemed to be a normal, gently curved tapering end, was a vicious hollow enamel barb, which slammed into my bare stomach before I could think to move my hands away.

Everything went gray, and the air went out of me as I fell to my knees. I never even felt my face hit the tile.

Amusingly, perhaps especially to anyone with deep prior knowledge of mythology, this is a dull but oddly accurate retelling of Hercules’ end — a story which I do not remember hearing until I looked up a certain flavor word. I still don’t believe that the fear of some animals is genetically ingrained, but this story, with its unintended relation to the Hercules tale, is unlikely to sell my viewpoint.