by Jeff Gelb
But when I saw the entrance—it was almost covered by the exposed roots of a huge tree, and as if in warning of what was to come, the roots were festooned with spiderwebs—I wasn’t sure for a while that I could even force myself to go in there. For quite a long time I crouched near the entrance, taking much more time than usual to put carbide and water into my lantern and spilling both because my eyes were fixed on a big black and yellow argiope spider that sat like a sentinel in the middle of a near-circular web right above the cave’s entrance. Kentucky legend has it that if an argiope—locally, a “writin’ spider”—writes your name in its web, it means you are doomed. Naturally, no one living can recall seeing their name written in a web; but I could’ve sworn I could see the letters of my name in the band of silk down the center of that spider’s web that day. Feeling like a soldier about to throw himself onto a live grenade to save his friends, I ducked down to miss the argiope’s web and entered the cave.
As usual, the spider population—and virtually all other populations of wildlife except for the normal cave fauna—vanished after I’d covered fifty yards of this first passage. What the acetylene flame of my lantern showed me was familiar, comforting; the twisting passage way was high enough that I only had to crouch occasionally, and it was of a generally squarish shape, looking almost man-made. The centerline of the floor was grooved by a narrow trickle of water, a trickle that had, over centuries, carved the whole passageway; here and there pale humpbacked cave crickets sprang away from the unfamiliar brightness of my beam. Moving as quickly as possible—I knew that I wasn’t going to move fast once I reached that dreaded room—I made my way on down the corridor, slowed twice by rockfalls that had been noted on my map, places where an ancient collapse of the ceiling caused the tunnel to go up and over loose slabs of limestone. All the way, I was looking for, but not seeing, the innocuous white cave spiders; I couldn’t help but think that this was somehow the calm before the storm, and the thought caused me to grind my teeth in mental agony.
I suppose that in some way—whatever part of my personality it was that felt obligated to take responsibility for Carol’s plight, whatever had forced me into this cave—I wanted to get to the room under the chimney as soon as possible. Another part, an older and more archaic part, was secretly hoping that I’d find the way blocked by a new rockfall, that I wouldn’t be able to get to the room at all—even if that meant that the girl died in the hole like the unfortunate Floyd Collins.
But there was no fresh rockfall, and soon enough I had reached a point where I could stand and peer into that awful—awful to me, anyway—room. It was largest at the end where the corridor joined it; the floor sloped upward toward the spot, some hundred yards distant, where the chimney had been formed by another.collapse of rock. Whereas the walls and ceiling of the tunnel had been relatively smooth, all the surfaces in this room were literally covered with cracks, nooks, crannies, crevices, pits; as I turned my head and the beam from my carbide turned with me, multicolored reflections like millions of tiny mirrors flashed back at me. I knew what those little star-like images were; I knew all too well how the eyes of spiders reflected light.
At that moment, I almost turned tail and ran. Tony and Carol, I told myself wildly, did not know who I was; I was just some guy who’d been wandering along the trail, they didn’t know me, they couldn’t tell any of my friends or relatives about how I’d fled, how I’d left Carol to suffer and die. I could go, I could leave, I didn’t have to go back up on top, I could run down the trail and leap into my car and go, go, leave, never come back here, ever. You do not have to put yourself through this, I told myself, you don’t. Nobody can force you to be a hero.
Nobody but yourself. Or perhaps nobody but your father, drumming notions about your responsibility to your fellow man into your head when you were a child, when you were at your most vulnerable. I could almost hear his voice at that moment, and, just then, I hated him passionately. He was forcing me somehow, forcing me from his grave like some malignant ghost; his voice rang in my head and shoved my right foot forward into that nightmare of a room.
I took that step, and I took another; right now the ceiling was six feet above my head. I was not close to any wall, but I was already quivering in terror, my head snapping around to both sides and jerking up and down as well; I felt sick, my bowels were threatening me, and the crazily dancing light from my carbide was disorienting me and making me even more nauseous than ever. There was webbing everywhere I looked; all around me I could see groups of stars, the little constellations that marked the faces of the spiders. Now and then a wolf spider, brown and hairy with a four-inch leg span, scurried away from my boots. Each time one ran, I jumped hysterically. Even then I couldn’t help but notice that they never ran far; often they would stop less than a yard away, sometimes posing with the first pair of their legs lifted and the body tipped back, the spider defensive posture. As if they weren’t even afraid of me, as if they’d lost their fear of humans over the generations they’d been living down here in isolation.
But they weren’t all that was living down there. Focused as I was on my terror of the spiders, I’d forgotten all about the rattlesnakes—until one of them chimed out a warning a few feet from my left leg.
Freezing in place, I turned my head and shined my light down on it; it was a big timber, dark chevrons on a yellow-gold background, six feet or more in length. Its strike range, I figured, would be about a yard, which was just about the distance from its flickering black tongue to my calf. I actually smiled. Snakes held no terrors for me; knowing that timber rattlesnakes are not particularly aggressive, I started drawing my leg away, slowly and carefully. The snake drew its head back a bit more and rattled loudly, but it made no stroke.
“You’ve got to pay attention,” I said aloud. My words seemed to echo hollowly around the cavern. “You have to. You can’t afford a snakebite down here, that’d be a total disaster.” Trying to ignore the ubiquitous spiders, I scanned my path toward the spot where I presumed the base of the chimney was. Although I couldn’t see over the top of the rockpile right under the shaft, the floor along the way looked clear—of both snakes and, far more importantly for me, spiders. Carefully, still twitching uncontrollably, I started making my way over there. My eyes suddenly felt very dry; I realized I had not blinked for quite a while.
I made the rockpile without incident; standing up on my toes, I looked up atop it as far as I could and shuddered anew. There weren’t any snakes, but the whole damn thing was covered with spiderwebs, and what looked to me like a whole milky way of stars shined back as my light struck the spaces between the loose rocks.
My knees turned to water and I almost fell. “Naturally,” I said aloud, my voice cracking and a sob escaping from somewhere inside my chest. “Naturally, of course they’d congregate there. That’s where stuff falls in. Like you, Carol whoever you are, you dumb bitch.” Knowing that there was no way I was going to be able to step up on that talus, I started looking around for some sort of tool, some way to chase them out. Luckily for me, insects and rodents and unwary young women were not the only things to fall in the hole; a few feet off to my right I located a sizeable tree branch. After inspecting it to make sure it was free of spiders, I picked it up and poked the top of the rockpile with it. A few stones tumbled free. I grinned, sure that would scare the little devils out of hiding.
My ploy succeeded—almost too well. As those stones fell, all hell broke loose. Spiders, hundreds if not thousands of them—it seemed like millions to me—exploded from the pile, racing off in all directions. Naturally, a lot of them were coming straight for me.
I ground my teeth, but I didn’t panic; there may have been a lot of them but they were down on the floor, under control as far as I was concerned. The first to reach me, a big funnel web, fell victim to my right boot. I did a little dance as the swarm came tumbling onward, the faster ones running over the backs of the slower, and crushed dozens. Not one managed to gain so much as a toehold on my boot
s.
After they were gone, I poked the pile again, several more times, with my stick. A few more came running out, including the largest and ugliest trapdoor spider I’d ever seen in my life, but there wasn’t another mass exodus like there’d been originally. Finally—my teeth chattering as if it was freezing cold in the cave—I forced myself to approach the pile. There were still masses of webbing all over it, but the residents seemed to be gone; only in one place did reflections flicker from my light, and that was deep down among the stones. Relaxing just a little—a fraction—I clambered up on it, using my boots to knock out footholes and touching it with my hands as little as possible. Once on top of it, I shined my carbide up into the shaft.
In one way, things weren’t too bad; I could see Carol‘s feet and legs, the soles of her sneakers barely eight feet above my head. In another way, what I saw there was a new nightmare.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. She’d become wedged just above the chimney’s narrowest point, and it was there that the majority of insects and such that fell in would first touch the walls. It was a prime place, perhaps the prime place, for the spiders to spin their webs.
And spin them they had; again, by the hundreds. The whole of the shaft was swathed in webbing, as if spun by a single man-sized giant. Blankly, I stared up into it, at the webbing, at the multitude of bright new stars flickering back. The reflections were not all I could see now, though. In dozens of places, huge spiders of various sorts sat in their webs, turning themselves toward me—toward the light, really—as my carbide beam struck them. I stared at Carol’s legs and feet; they weren’t covered with spiders but there were several on her pants and shoes. One, a brown and cream araneid with a bloated half-inch abdomen, was currently spinning a web between her dangling legs.
I had a new problem, there was no question of that. The shaft here was only eighteen inches wide or so; climbing up using a standard chimney technique—pressing the arms and feet against the sidewalls—presented no problems.
On the other hand, there was no way I could bring myself to do that, not with spiders all over those walls. They’d be all over me, and I was sure, I was positive, that I couldn’t tolerate that.
But I couldn’t tell Tony that, I couldn’t tell Carol that. Not when the girl was dangling within reasonably easy reach and was probably being slowly asphyxiated by the pressure of the rocks. Gingerly, without thinking much about what I was doing, I poked at the thick mass of webbing up there with my stick.
The results were immediate and for me, hideous; the spiders, evidently already on the alert because of my light, began dropping from their webs instantly, their tracklines glistening in the light. I was right under them; all I could see for an instant was hundreds of hairy wriggling legs, falling toward my face. I could see their eyes, too; it was like a whole heavenful of stars was falling on me.
My control was as tenuous as theirs; I screamed and tried to scramble backwards. Beneath my feet the loosely-piled rocks gave way and I tumbled backwards, hitting the floor hard. The strap on my helmet broke, it rolled off my head; I saw it for an instant before it tipped over onto the face of the carbide lamp and extinguished the flame.
The darkness rushed in. My control evaporated; I howled, gibbered, wept; urine soaked my pants and my ever-threatening bowels turned loose. Thousands of tiny running legs touched my hands, my legs where my pants had pulled out of my boots, my face. I could feel them in my hair, I could feel them forcing their way up the legs of my pants, I could feel them slipping inside my shirt, front and back. I flailed, rolled, squealed like a dying pig; with my hands I tried desperately to find my hard-hat and my carbide, but all I found were more spiders, more, everywhere. They were not innocent, either; they were biting me, biting my fingers, my legs, my arms, biting everywhere. I felt like I was on fire, like I’d been plunged into flame. In a frenzy I vomited all over myself and while my mouth was open some unseen monstrosity tried to stuff hairy legs into it.
I swept that one away with my hand, but my limbs were starting to feel leaden; possibly because of the cumulative effect of their venom but more likely just because of the intensity of my panic, I felt myself becoming paralyzed. I wasn’t afraid of dying; I think I wanted to die, I wished I could die, anything to escape this situation. I could feel my heart pounding wildly; it felt heavy in my chest and at the same time felt as if it too was trying to escape, trying to tear itself out of my body and find its own way out of this terrible hole.
I suppose that in a peculiar sort of way, it was one of the spiders that rescued me; at that point I was becoming numb, my movements were slowing, I was sinking into a shock that I might well not have recovered from.
But one of the spiders—some large one, a spider large even by the exaggerated standards of this place—had found its way all the way up my pants leg to my groin. Trapped and pressed beneath my jock strap, it sank its fangs into my penis, down near the tip.
I’m not sure if it was the pain—though that was bad enough—or merely the insult that rejuvenated me. In any case, that bite stood out starkly from all the others; I sat up abruptly and brought my fist down on my own groin with all my strength. I felt the spider crush against my genitals, but a new pain, the waving and flowing nausea of traumatized testicles, almost caused me to lose consciousness. But I did not, I stood up. All I could see, then, was a couple of trickles of light from the chimney, light filtering past the trapped girl’s body. Like a zombie I moved toward it; like a mechanical man I started up the chimney, ignoring the spiders now, overcome by my experience, operating on automatic. After a moment I felt Carol’s feet against my shoulders; I didn’t stop, I just pushed with all the strength I had.
After a moment, I’d pushed her free; she groaned, made a coughing noise, then cried out in pain. I could hardly hear her; I just kept climbing, pushing her out of the way and on upwards as I went. I wasn’t even thinking, then, about the fact that I couldn’t get through the narrow passage either; I just pushed on, seeking the daylight like some deranged plant. Distantly, from far above, I could hear Tony’s voice; he was apparently pulling Carol up, because her weight seemed to lessen. Not that I cared; I really wasn’t very aware of her.
I was aware, though, of a strong sheet of horizontal webbing that I was just then pushing my head through, a sheet Carol had managed to miss both on her way down and on her way back up. With glazed and filmy eyes, I saw that the resident of that particular web had not fled like the others. I also saw that I was wrong in presuming that none of the spiders down here would be black widows—because that’s what this one was. She was huge, she was prancing right toward my face, and she was so close already that I could not focus my eyes on her, so close I could see her fangs working back and forth as she came.
I screamed again; with a strength I didn’t know I possessed I tore an arm free from the entanglements of the rocks and of Carol’s legs. I’d left a good deal of my skin on that rock, too, but I didn’t know that then; tearing my fingers so that my blood spurted out I ripped a piece of loose limestone free and pounded the widow back into the rock wall. Pulling the rock away, I saw scattered black legs and oozing green and yellow liquid; it wasn’t enough for me, I struck again and again until the stone disintegrated, howling my fury each time I struck that spot.
Pounding the wall was accomplishing something else, as well, something I only then became aware of. I now had my shoulders stuffed into the narrowest part of the chimney, my arms above them; I wasn’t able to go farther and was about to be faced with the prospect of going back down and out the way I’d come—which meant I’d have to find the carbide in the darkness down there, by touch. I couldn’t face it; but, fortunately for me, my frenzied pounding had shown me a fracture in the side wall, a fracture I then wedged a stone into. A couple of hard pushes and it gave way, allowing a big chunk of the soft limestone to break up and fall free; it almost took me down with it but I managed to hang on, and its absence left the chimney wide enough—barely—for me to squeeze on
through.
Finally, spent, I started to climb again; by that time Tony had managed to pull Carol on out, and he helped me negotiate the last dozen feet of the pit.
“My God, man!” he cried when I was out. “What happened to you down there?”
I couldn’t explain, not then; all I could do was mumble and sob, “spiders … spiders …” over and over. That, of course, he could see; there were still more than a few clinging to me, and he knocked them away, back into their hellish pit.
Eventually, I managed to get to my feet; Tony helped Carol up, she thanked me profusely in a weak voice, and we took a few tentative steps along the trail back to our cars.
I didn’t get far, though, not far at all. Less than twenty feet back down that trail, I came upon another of the big black and gold argiopes sitting proudly in its oval web in a grove of mountain laurel. It was identical to the one I’d seen at the cave’s mouth, the one I’d imagined had written my doom in its web.
I stopped and stared. “I didn’t die, you son of a bitch,” I told it softly. “Look at me, I didn’t die, I’m alive! God damn you, I’m alive!”
Something, some new emotion, swept over me. While Tony and Carol stood and watched wide-eyed, I snatched the spider from its web with my bare hand. It bit me, sinking glossy black fangs into my fingers, but I ignored the bite.
I brought it up near my face. “I’m alive … “ I said softly.
Then I stuffed it, still living, into my mouth. It bit my tongue, too, but that availed it nothing; I bit it, too, crushing it between my teeth, luxuriating in the satisfying crunch of chitin-enclosed legs, exhilarated by the squirt of thick oily fluid into the back of my mouth. In near ecstasy, I chewed it carefully and swallowed it, every morsel.
Carol turned away; it was her turn now to vomit. “My God, man!” Tony shrieked again. “What are you doing?”