Dawn of the Spiders: Special Edition

by O'Gorman, Brian

  Dawn

  of the

  Spiders

  By

  Brian O’Gorman

  Text © 2016 Brian O’Gorman all rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is a coincidence. Of course the odds of that actually happening are pretty slim.

  Dedicated to the memory of

  Gemma O’Gorman

  1942-2013

  “I could eat something nice…”

  For Zoe, the wife that just keeps on putting up with me. Our ship will sail one day, and you bet your arse we will be on it kiddo…..

  Contents

  An introduction (to the new edition)

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  Epilogue

  An introduction (to the new edition)

  You might be one of the many people that took the time to read the original Dawn of the Spiders and for that I am always grateful. This new edition retells the same story but in a more coherent and logical fashion. I did the same thing for my very first published novel Pharmacon and I am very happy that I did it. You have to bear in mind that Pharmacon and Dawn were both written over a six-month period. So obsessed was I with getting something out there that the editing and proof reading fell by the wayside somewhat. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, I was able to look at both novels with fresh eyes more than twelve months since they both went to market. Pharmacon nagged me from the moment I read it again. It was good, but it wasn’t my best, the same goes for Dawn. So why have them out there if they aren’t my best shots at telling the story? Well, I didn’t have to, all I needed to do was invest some time in a re-writing session that has now gone on for the last eight months. The new editions of both books are the visions I had for these stories originally, so that means I am a happy man and you, as a reader are getting a much better product. Basically everyone wins.

  With Dawn, I have cut out a few excess characters that contributed nothing to the overall picture and the main body of the story has been streamlined to make it a less confusing read. Some of the continuity between Dawn and Land might have been compromised, but it is a sacrifice worth making in my opinion. All you need to know is that the spiders are big and gruesome and the protagonists want to get out of it alive.

  Read, enjoy and let me know what you think. I’m always open to suggestions….just be gentle with me, after all I am your guide through the dark days you are about to live through again.

  Until we meet again……

  Brian O’Gorman 2016

  1.

  Nancy Wilson was definitely NOT a morning person. The very act of having to open her eyes and force herself out of bed every day of the week was against everything she believed in. In fact, she had a philosophy that the human body should be allowed to wake up under its own steam rather than being forced to do so by her stupid shitty phone playing that nauseatingly happy music first thing in the bloody morning. She cursed herself every day for not taking the time to change the ringtone into something infinitely less irritating but the logical part of her mind that was far more active during the latter part of the day would reason that if the ringtone wasn’t irritating she would likely sleep right through it. Her husband Jimmy was a post man. His alarm would start screeching at three in the morning, giving him just an hour to be at the sorting office. In the ten years they had been married, he still hadn’t been able to master the art of getting ready for work quietly so she could go back to sleep. No matter how many times she would gently remind him about it, he would still whistle whilst he was getting changed, he would still nudge the bed half a dozen times and he would still forget that she had a job too. Once his little ceremony was over and he had gone out of the door, she would try as hard as she could just to grab a few more hours before the dumb music began playing, signaling another day working in the hospital coffee shop. She had really wanted to be a nurse, or indeed, a doctor but had never actually plucked up the courage to apply for the training course, or even take it past the stage of an initial enquiry on the internet. There was always something nibbling away at her that made her think that she might not be able to handle all the blood and guts that came with the territory. She thought that it would probably be something that would get easier as time went on. Perhaps she would become immune to it after a while, she didn’t know. But, the coffee shop was good enough for now and she would spend a good portion of her time listening to the patients or visitors bitch about the services that were provided. At least all of that gave her something else to think about.

  Today was a Friday. Nancy loved Fridays. She knew that tonight it was going to be a no cooking night as they would always have a takeaway and she also knew that by nine in the evening she would be the darker side of a few cans of strong lager. She habitually didn’t drink during the week, only because it was hard work trying to maintain a cheery and outgoing attitude to the general public when you had a stinking hangover. Even though Jimmy would be waking her up whilst he crashed about getting ready for his Saturday morning shift she would be able to flop around the house in her scruffs until the headache and nausea passed over.

  This Friday wasn’t like any other Friday she had ever experienced. She had silenced the alarm for the third time and she was very seriously considering taking the day off and pretending to be ill, just so she could lie in this warm, comforting bed for just a few more hours. She closed her eyes for a moment and relished the genius of her plan when suddenly:

  Click-click

  Click-click

  Her eyes popped open. Had she imagined it? Had she been dozing and perhaps dreamt it. She hesitated a moment. There was only silence in the room and she began to relax again. She must have been still half asleep, she must have…..

  Click-click.

  It was real alright, and it was in the room. She scrabbled for her bedside lamp switch. The morning sun was well and truly up, but she had blackout curtains fitted and the room was still plunged in darkness. Her fingers found the switch and snapped it into the on position. The bulb lit up, flooding the room with artificial light. Her eyes darted around the room, looking for the source of the sound. She felt her whole body readying itself to bolt out of the room. She was certain that it was a rat. There had been rats on this street before. They had come out of the sewer and made a home in the garden of the house two doors down. That was the one that belonged to the old hoarder Mr. Benson. He had been dead six months now and it had taken the council three weeks to move all the shit out of his house and his garden. They had come knocking on the door to warn them that there had been rats and there was a small chance that they could get into their garden, or indeed their house. She had been on high rat alert ever since and on this morning she was absolutely certain that one of them was sharing her bedroom right now. The moment she saw it she was outta here and then she would be back with Jimmy’s old tennis racket to give the little furry bastard a headache it would never forget and then…..

  Click-click.

  Her eyes darted towards the sound. It was coming from the corner of the room. She had her hands on the edge of the duvet, ready to throw it off her so she could bomb out of the room. Instead, her hands gripped the duvet,
her eyes widened and her heart felt like it had frozen in her chest.

  It wasn’t a rat that was in her room, it was a spider. It wasn’t like any spider that she had ever seen before. The house had seen its fair share of large house spiders during the autumn months and Nancy had always relied on Jimmy to catch them in a glass and put them outside in the garden. This one was much larger than any of the house spiders. It looked, from where Nancy was sat, that it was the same size as one of the rats that she had suspected in the first place. The legs of the spider looked like they were much too large for it. The front set were squashed up in the corner of the room and the rear set hung halfway down the wall as if they didn’t have any feeling in them. The spider’s abdomen was twitching rhythmically and it looked to Nancy like it was swelling up a little every time it twitched. She probably only looked at the spider for less than two seconds, but to her, it felt like a lifetime. She had never seen such a vision of horror in her life before.

  Click-click.

  The spider tried to move but it lost some of its grip on the wall. It slid half and inch down the wallpaper and then managed to get its grip back on the paper. Nancy’s paralysis broke. She let out a blood-curdling scream and leapt out of her bed. Just before the panic completely enveloped her mind, she was able to have enough self-control to grab her phone off the bedside table. She ran out of the room and pulled the door shut behind her. She didn’t stop there. She charged down the stairs, grabbed her coat off the hook next to the front door and fumbled the front door open. She had made it down to the end of the front garden and through the gate in her night wear and bare feet before she began to scream for help.

  2.

  Laurence Johnson wasn’t a happy man. In truth, he hadn’t been a happy man for a very long time. Laurence Johnson was stood in his kitchen sinking his third beer of the day. Yes, it was only four in the afternoon, but Friday was his day off, surely he deserved a drink didn’t he? Surely he deserved a little extra on a Friday, right? He swigged from his can and felt the foamy goodness run down his throat. He didn’t think there was a finer feeling in all of the world, except for the incoming drunkenness he was beginning to feel, now that was a feeling that he couldn’t ever get enough of. He was pretty much a slave to that feeling anyway. He had been getting that fine feeling pretty much every day since he had begun working at Mason’s print works. He was one of the best machine runners of them all. His work was always the best quality and he was always the man who got his orders finished first. His secret to his success was the fact that he knew his machine so well. He knew every inch of that Heidelberg Speedmaster 6K. He knew how to get that machine cranking faster and more efficiently than anyone else in that factory. He had been trained by Brock Roberts, the last senior printer that had worked there. His training had started when he began working for the company at the age of twenty. Brock had been a cantankerous old bastard on his good days and almost impossible on his bad, but the old fucker knew how to turn out the work. It was a rare day when Brock ever fucked anything up, a very rare day indeed. Once the machine had thrown a gripper bar and torn up half a dozen sheets of expensive gloss card before Brock had managed to hit the kill switch. Laurence had tried to intervene but Brock had gripped him and shoved him on his arse whilst growing at him to leave it the fuck alone. Brock had reached over to his table, grabbed his freshly made cup of tea and tipped the lot into the machines central oil chamber. Then he had come back to the table, opened up his bag and a moment later he had returned to the oil chamber with his sandwiches. He had stuffed the sandwiches into the chamber, bellowing curses at the machine. Oil, pieces of ham, bread and mayonnaise began to cascade down the sides of the chamber and onto the floor. After a few moments of this sideshow, Brock began to regain his composure. He walked over to Laurence and told him to get the supervisor to call maintenance and tell them the machine was broken. Then he grabbed the rest of his stuff and left for the day. It took three days for the machine to be flushed out and brought back up to operating standard. Brock never said a thing.

  But Brock taught Laurence and he taught him well. Brock was impressed by the fact that Laurence didn’t give him any shit and he was willing to listen. By the time Brock retired Laurence was ready to take the reins. Now, nineteen years later, Laurence was the number one guy. He worked hard and he also like to drink hard. Every day, when five o’clock came around he would walk over the road from the factory right into the Nag’s Head. A lot of the other guys would make their way home to their respective families. Some would join Laurence, but it didn’t really matter to him. He was just as happy shooting the shit with the raft of regulars that normally frequented the bar. He would generally roll his arse home to his wife Lorna at around nine in the evening. He would take whatever shit she wanted to give him and then they would sit and eat together before sitting in front of the television for an hour. Then it was time to go up to bed and try for a baby again. They had been trying for about eight years without any success. However, the last few years had been down to Laurence’s lack of ability in the bedroom rather than the lack of co-operation from Lorna’s ovaries. Laurence’s increasing ingestion of alcohol had rendered his cock almost useless. Many a night, during the height of Lorna’s ovulation cycle, she spent the best part of half an hour flogging at Laurence’s limp member in an effort to get any sign of life from it. The last time she bothered to try, she had stopped when she had heard snoring sounds coming from Laurence’s wide open mouth and then she hadn’t even bothered to try anymore. It was four days later that she joined the local gym.

  Laurence knew about the gym. He had actually encouraged her to go, knowing that she would be out doing her own thing and that would be his free pass to continue doing what he was doing without it being questioned or having to endure another fight with her. She had told him about it on a Saturday lunch time, expecting him to kick off about it, but he hadn’t. He had told her that she must do something that would make her happy, because he knew that he couldn’t do it anymore. She had put her hand on his and he had been hit with a huge wave of sadness, almost as if he knew things were starting to head towards the end of their marriage. It was a rare sight for Lorna, seeing him look so very vulnerable and her heart had gone out to him. Just for that moment he reminded her of the gentle and funny man that she had first met all those years ago. She had put her arms around him and held him close. He had slipped his arms around her slim waist and held her tight. It was at that point when Lorna felt something pressing into her hip, it was mini Laurence. Mini Laurence was making a one-night-only appearance. Lorna felt a huge buzz of sexual arousal and began to rub his inflamed member through his jeans. She whispered in his ear that it would be a shame to waste it and he had nodded his agreement. He took her upstairs and they had the most vigorous and satisfying sex that they had ever had over the course of their entire marriage. Lorna had come three times, twice underneath him and once with him behind her. Afterwards they lay in bed, Lorna dozing on his chest. They both were thinking the same thing but neither of them said it out loud. They had just said goodbye to each other.

  That had been three months ago. The gym visits had started at two times per week but had progressed to five times a week. Laurence had begun spending less time in the Nag’s and more time sitting at home with a collection of beers and whiskey from the off-licence at the bottom of the road. His mind was full of crazy, paranoid thoughts. He had a pretty good idea that she was getting more than just a workout when she was supposedly at the gym. Then one evening, when the alcohol had fueled his paranoia to a point where he could take it no more, he decided to follow her. He had been slightly disappointed to see that she was indeed going to the gym and there didn’t seem to be anything out of place. That was until he had peeked through the window and saw that she had a personal trainer. The personal trainer was a young looking and well-muscled blonde guy who looked like he had been plucked right out of a shitty old Mills & Boon book. He watched him helping his wife to stretch and then showing her a go
od weight for her to lift and all that shit. As much as he wanted to go in there and rage about her sniffing round that behemoth, he had to admit in the logical part of his mind that there was nothing going on, other than his wife was going to the gym just like she said she was.

  But, this week had started a little differently. Laurence had come home from work as usual and made his regular stop at the off license. When he came into the house he put his bags down so he could go and empty his bulging bladder. He ran up the stairs two at a time wondering if this was the day when he would actually piss his pants before making it to the bathroom. He burst into the bathroom and reached down to lift the toilet seat. His hand paused for a moment and something clicked in his mind.

  The seat was already up.

  He paused for another moment as he took the information in and then his bladder cramped painfully again. He whipped out his dingus, urinated and then flushed.

  The seat was up.

  He certainly hadn’t left it up, he never did. It had been instilled in him from a very early age that leaving the seat up was just not acceptable. In fact, it was downright bad manners. He couldn’t have left it up. He wracked his brains to see if he could find any memory in his head from earlier that day where he might have forgotten to put the seat down, but he couldn’t. There was only one thing for it. There had been another man in his home and Lorna had let him in.

  That had been the beginning of everything all going fuckup. He had begun to drink his beer whilst sitting at the kitchen table. He was waiting for Lorna to get home, with a million thoughts racing around his head. She must have brought a man home with her at some point today. Perhaps she had done it before, only this time she had got careless. Perhaps she had got too comfortable lying to him and covering up the evidence to the point where it had become second nature. But this time she had slipped up. Or perhaps it was even worse, perhaps she had wanted him to find out and had on purposely left a clue to see if he would pick up on it. There could have been a million different variations of the same thing, but it all boiled down to one absolute fact that he was sure of. Lorna had brought another man into the house and that arsehole had the bloody nerve to piss in his toilet before he left. Not only that, he didn’t have to observe the same rules that Laurence had to. So that was an established fact and as the alcohol began to get the better of his blood stream he began to wonder just exactly who it was that had been pissing in his bowl, so to speak. He tried to make a mental list of every male friend that Lorna had. Did they even have any male members of staff at the nursing home where she worked? He certainly couldn’t think of any. He didn’t really know any of the people she worked with. He had been to the works Christmas party a few times with Lorna, but they usually had a free bar and Laurence would take full advantage. In fact, he would not even remember how he had got home most of the time from a party such as that and Lorna would never tell him either. He guessed that there were some things that were best left unsaid. But, did he remember any male members of staff? He didn’t think that he did. He remembered some of the other bored husbands that had come along for the free bar just as he did. He could remember propping the free bar up with a fellow called Lionel. Lionel had stood and shot the shit with Laurence whilst all of the women had ploughed through several bottles of wine and laughed uproariously at one innuendo after another. Laurence and Lionel had both ended up feeling pretty surplus to requirements. Could Lionel be the phantom pisser? He didn’t think so. He had been a balding, scrawny guy who looked like his days of getting behind a girl were long behind him. Most of the guys that her work colleagues were hooked up with fitted into that category. So, he had to think again and it didn’t take him long to realize that the pretty boy personal trainer was the only possibility left. Could it really be true? Could that muscled up boy have been porking his wife? Could he have been giving her everything she needed in the bedroom, all that he couldn’t give to her anymore? He began to stew in his own alcohol poisoned juices. His mind was setting up nice little scenarios for him to think over. He could see the muscled meat head bending Lorna over right there in his bedroom and him crashing against her naked buttocks whilst she moaned her pleasure. The rage started to build in his guts. He wished he had a gun, or any sort of weapon, just so he could go down there and show him who he was messing with. He would smash the bastards face in, smash it right the fuck in and then he would teach Lorna a fucking lesson too, he would….