spiders crawling under our skin - SCP Foundation

CONTENT WARNING: Spiders, eye/body horror, ugliness/unrealistic beauty standards, depression, addiction/implied overdose, death, bullying/gaslighting, child neglect.

“Miss Elgert! Are you paying attention?” asked the teacher. She was very stern and pinched, lines etched into a taut mouth and a greying widow's peak.

But, one could argue that the Teacher - Miss Taylor, was her name - had great right to be gnarled and horrible; she was quite old. Miss Elgert was eleven years of age, and had no such excuse. She was greatly intelligent, though in no way that could be quantified proper to the schooling system. Her tests came back marked with red, so she ought to be quite stupid they thought.

She was a horrible girl, with black hair in clumps and tangles that fell down her back and in her face like vines. Her skin was gaunt and pale, and her eyes looked like bruises, with deep bags and purpled veins on the lids. Her lips were a faint blue, like she had been strangled, and her voice was hoarse, like she’d been screaming for years. Yet, she didn’t talk much.

Blinking oddly and opening and closing her mouth like a fish, she tilted her head before croaking out awfully. “The Spiders. You were talking about the Spiders.”

The class laughed at her, cackling hyena snarls. Miss Taylor narrowed her slanted eyes. “Insolence! Of what Spiders? Spiders are fantasy- figments. Tales like unicorns and hippogriffs. This class does not teach unicorns and hippogriffs, and it does not teach Spiders. Open your book and read!”

Miss Elgert, who’s first name was long and unpronounceable, drew a Spider on her hand in response.

To her they were very real. Not just dangling in taunt from webs, but everywhere. They were sin, despair, fear. Gwenythiliandron Elgert had begun seeing them when she was five. At first, she was very frightened, as any child would be.

But, since no adult saw her very-real terrors, she was mocked until she realised that there was no reason to speak about it, because she was a horrible little girl with a whore mother and eyes like bruises, and no one would believe her ever.

“Tell me,” whispered a girl sitting next to her, whose face was sour but who wasn’t a lost cause like Gwen. “Are there any Spiders on me now?” she wiggled fine fingers, sneering up her sour little girl face.

Gwen turned her dark, sunken eyes detachedly the girls face. A large, spindly legged Spider crawled out as she opened her mouth, scuttling it’s black legs over her face and around to the base of her neck. Gwen nodded. “On your neck.”

A flash of panic crossed the girls face; she looked to her neck. But as there was nothing there to her, she sneered, then laughed.

Gwen looked away, hoping she would disappear for infinity if she looked at the ceiling hard enough.

Frequently she dreamt of her departure. The shadows in her mind would finally take her, their hands closing around her throat and gently placing themselves over her eyes, where she would sink down until there was nothing more in her disintegrating mind but an echo. Oblivion.

They departed for recess, and dispersed out into the playground. Gwen stood at the edge of the playground, her gnarled toes kicked out of her two-sizes-too-small shoes, patchy and worn. She looked out on a forest, where grey pines stretched for miles into the sky. She imagined climbing them, the scratchy branches tearing through the papery pale skin on her arms. Blood, thick and black dripping down them as she reached the top and looked over the world at the people who’d ruined her.

They were not allowed into the forest, and somehow people followed the rule. It seemed the kind of place that you might die in. And not in a thrilling sense. But in a sombre, fatal sense.

The same instinctive logic that left Gwen friendless, fatherless, and futureless.

Spiders crept at the forest edge, entangling themselves in the branches of trees. A fly flew into one, and the Spider running it pounced, sinking fangs into its neck and clicking its forelegs.

Gwen took a few seconds, fancying herself the fly, and the world the Spider, and then turned to go back inside the school.

The most Spider-ridden place was the run-down trailer-house just off County Lane. The mailbox was dented from an event involving drunken teenagers and a Chevy Traverse doing 80 on the town roads. The gutters were clogged, the vinyl siding falling off and chipped. The shutters hang barely onto rusty hinges.

The front porch was covered from head to toe in cobwebs, and nearly black with squirming, writhing bundles of Spiders. Spiders liked fear, despair, anger, and sin.

It should’ve been expected that the trailer home was where Gwenythiliandron would live. The porch steps creaked as she walked up them, and opened the door, which had long lost its ability to lock.

Inside, lay a woman on the paisley couch, her blonde hair still clinging to a few curlers that she didn’t take out. A pair of rhinestones glitter off of sunglasses, which she might wear to pretend her eyes weren’t red and dilated, or perhaps she’d taken something that had made the light unbearable.

A cigarette hung prettily from her cherry-red lips.

“Hello Mam,” said Gwen, taking off her backpack and leaving it by the door. Her Mam snored, groaning. Leaning over, Gwen took the cigarette from her fingers, stubbing it and tossing it to the ashtray that had been nearly upended atop the side table. “It’s good to see you. I had a good day at school, so I’m going to make us dinner.”

In her head, she calculated the amount of beer cans empty on the floor, and decided that the blonde woman would not be awake for at least six more hours.

Dinner would be just for her tonight - toaster waffles and canned green beans, eaten on the couch next to her unconscious Mam as the telly flickered some documentary.

Tonight, the only channels available were playing the news. It was a bad episode - a black widow skittered from the reporter's eye. Gwen didn’t know all the Spider’s meanings, but knew that meant cheating on someone. It was the first Spider she’d seen, from her father’s gnarled mouth.

Grey widows always represented a sort of anxiety, and wolf Spiders were a sign of isolation and fear. After dinner, Gwen tried to sleep. Even in her dreams, Spiders would not escape her. She dreamt feverishly, of being caught in a dark hole, her mouth open in screaming when she awoke. She did not sleep for the rest of the night.

In the morning, Gwen’s mother had still not awoken. Her face was a bit paler than usual, though Gwen chalked it up to not having eaten more than smoke and whatever else she’d been taking. Her Mam had a car - a red Honda that was a tad buggish in Gwen’s opinion. Gwen wasn’t big enough to drive it though, so she walked to school, her falling-apart shoes hitting the driveway at 6:30 in the morning.

She arrived early, as usual, and tried the door. It was unlocked. Her teachers found it unnerving, her habit of being in their classrooms before they had privy to settle in. Perhaps that was one of the reasons she was so horrid and hated. No one could do proper work when she was there, bruised black eyes staring at you with such a haunted look. Normally, she watched the Spiders crawl across Miss Taylor’s face. She had a good amount - the ones that lonely people bore, or people with that deep, unexplainable sadness that Gwen knew her mother had.

Miss Taylor was not adulterous, Gwen knew, as there were no widows on her. Then again, Miss Taylor had no one to be adulterous to. You would think that eventually, Spiders would drop off you, falling to the floor as you moved on with life.

This was not the case. Instead, they just multiplied, crawling forever over your skin until your face was a swampy mass of writhing legs. This morning, Miss Taylor was already there, Spiders gnawing at her neck and eyelids. Sometimes, Gwen had the sudden, horrible thought to take her Mam’s carving knife, and carve along the outline of her own purple-veined eyelids. They would then come off, and she’d lean forwards, as her eyes fell out of their sockets. Then, with the knife, she’d cut out the threads attaching them to her skull, and set them outside for wandering animals to eat.

Then, she would stand in the mirror, not watching the blood dripped on her cheeks, or the Spiders that crawled out of the black, bloody sockets left behind. In fact, she would never see the Spiders again.

In these visions, she always smiled at her unseen reflection. She imagined that with her eyes gone, with the Spiders gone from her sight, her curse would lift and she would put on her Mam’s shades and walk through the town, and everyone would stare and wonder who that beautiful girl with glowing gentle skin, glossy black hair in waves, and a brilliant smile was.

“Stop staring at me like that, Miss Elgert, it’s horrid,” scolded Miss Taylor, frightened by Gwen’s pallid face as it stared gloomily at her. She thought the girl must be imagining her dead.

“Sorry. I was thinking about my eyes,” replied Gwen, in her throaty, strangled voice.

“Your eyes?” replied Miss Taylor incredulously, raising an eyebrow. Gwen bobbled her head in some sort of affirmative.

“Of course. Your eyes,” said Miss Taylor, looking in disbelief at the dark, sunken orbs that resembled eyes only in that they saw and blinked slowly at everyone they stared at. “Vanity will be the death of your generation, you know,” she admonished, wondering how anyone could be vain about looking like that. Perhaps she was a fan of modern horror. Perhaps her parents left her to watch all sorts of unsuitable, profane movies, and she fancied herself a real-life Samara or Bloody Mary. One could never know.

“I’m sorry,” said Gwen.

“Go out to the playground where the other kids are waiting, for His sake.” Miss Taylor wondered why she’d never thought to send Gwen off before.

“Okay,” said Gwen. She got up, her two-sizes-two-big sweater hanging over her hands, so she looked like a small ghost.

No one was at the playground.

It was cold, and very lonely. Like she’d entered a dimension where she was all alone, and no one would ever show up at the playground, because there was no one left to.

All alone, the forest seemed tempting. The bits of faded twilight had left the trees looking a greyed greenish-blue.

It still seemed the type of place you might die in, but Gwen was fine with that.

She climbed up the iron chain fence, kicking off her shoes and letting her gnarled, calloused toes hook between the bars. They were cold, but she didn’t notice much. Dropping down, she let the pine needles dig into the underside of her feet. “Ow,” she said, listening to her voice be so small and ragged in the enormous forest.

Gwen walked until she found the biggest tree - it stretched on and on, blue-grey-green branches covered in pine nettles above her. Touching the bark, Gwen began to climb. Slowly at first, then quickly, like in her fantasies. Her small hands latched onto the branches, pulling her onto them and hoisting her high, higher, up, farther, away and away into cold grey morning air.

Eventually, she paused, leaning onto the branch and catching her breath. Closing those purple-veined eyelids.

When she opened her eyes, something was choking her. Spiderwebs. She opened her eyes, and saw them - all around her, the Spiders had gathered, trapping her into the tree in a sort of bubble. Black and yellow orb weavers stretched their spindly legs out, like slots on a chain link fence.

She was stuck.

The morning air was foggy and dense.

Looking between the webs, she glanced out at the view she’d always dreamed of. Her town in all its glory. She couldn’t help but find the tiny trailer where her Mam lay, not breathing. Gwen had noticed, after all.

Yet even here, atop her world, she was stuck with them. Spiders had followed her to the tops of the trees.

Crawling forwards, she set a hand against the fabric of the web. It was just strong enough that it took some force to break through. Enough to support her weight. It occurred to her for the first time that she’d never seen a Spider on herself.

Certainly, she was sad and anxious. She couldn’t be above claiming Spiders, could she?

Gwen imagined everyone she knew, the kids in her class and Miss Taylor and her Mam and her Father, without Spiders. It felt right. And then she imagined all of the Spiders disappearing. A world without them.

A world where she was happy, and lovely.

And it became quite apparent, she thought, as she leaned against the web prison. Opening her mouth, she whispered the words.

“You’re not real.”

The spiders, and all of their webs disappeared from under her fingers.

Closing her eyes, she smiled, as her body pitched forwards, meeting the air like a kiss, as the town sped by her, closer and closer. A spider-free ground. She breathed in. She breathed out.

And there was a crunch, as a small girl hit the forest floor.

That evening, a hunter found what appeared to be a writhing black mass on the ground. He screamed, and phoned the police, who came and investigated.

Below the strange creatures, who were spindly legged and something out of a horror story, was the body of a little girl. Her sleek black hair fell around her in a pile, and her soft eyelids were closed. Blood from tree branches slashed across her arms, and legs. Her eyes lay a few feet away, and were carried off by the putrid black creatures. “Spiders,” said a policeman. “My Mom used to tell me about things like these. They’re spiders.”

The spiders scuttled off, in different directions. No one wanted to dare touch them. Later, a schoolteacher would identify the body reluctantly, as Gwenythiliandron Elgert. And in a week, the body of Judy Elgert would be found in her house, dead of alcohol poisoning.

A funeral service was held two weeks later. The classroom was all quiet as they marched to the gym for a memorial service. On the way back, one girl screamed, and the class all stopped to check she was okay.

On her arm, now skittering off her hand and onto the floor, was a fat black spider.

~End~

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