by Jason Davis
John leaned forward so he could get a better look into his nostril. He had a sudden itch, forcing him to quickly start rubbing his nose. The itching grew stronger, a tickle becoming like fire and nearly bringing tears to his eyes as he rubbed both inside and out of the nostrils. He tried to wipe the sleep from his eyes as he peered through the darkness.
He could barely make out what looked like a hair sticking out of his nose. It was a long, black hair that stuck out at an odd angle. He reached up, readying himself to pluck it out and the sharp pain that would follow.
As he prepared to grip the hair, it twitched and started to move. He pulled his hand away and watched it pull itself back into his nose, disappearing into the darkness of his nostril.
“What the…?” John whispered as he leaned closer to the glass. The itching sensation grew so unbearable, he wished he could just rub it until it bled and the skin was raw, peeling away.
He was tired. He just wanted to get back to his mattress and the model who had been sexually assaulting his dreams.
John let a smile start to spread across his face as he pulled himself back from the mirror. He reached down and flushed the toilet. As he got ready to turn out the light, he glanced in the mirror, seeing the hair had reappeared, longer this time. It moved, shifting, then pulled itself back into his nostril.
Then the owner of the hair emerged. A small spider crawled out of his nose. John stood there, watching, his hand hovering just above the light switch. He was too afraid to move or pull his hand back as the spider perched on his upper lip.
John stopped watching it through the mirror and tried to look down at his upper lip. His eyes burned from the strain of focusing on an object so close, and all he could make out was the large black shape.
How had the thing been in his damn nose? How long was it up there? How had it survived when he had been squeezing and rubbing his nose when it itched? Ugh, even worse, what would have happened had he squashed the damned thing while it was in there? His stomach turned at the thought of it and he had to stifle a gag.
Keeping his eyes focused on the spider, John lowered his hand away from the light switch and moved back to the mirror. He could feel the spider's legs on his upper lip. It shuddered as he moved, as though it were trying to surf him like a wave.
John looked back at the mirror, the black shape still sitting on his upper lip. A fucking spider. He could barely fathom how it had come out of his nose. He leaned over the sink, figuring it was time to try and knock the thing off and wash it down the drain.
He turned on the faucet and fumbled for the stopper so the sink would slowly fill with water. He didn’t turn the water on too fast because he didn’t want the sound of it to be too loud and scare the spider. With his luck, it would start crawling all over his face. However, so far, it seemed to be content with just sitting there.
John started to raise his hand, getting ready to shake his head and knock it off at the same time. He rocked back and forth briefly to get himself prepared, then swung.
The spider quickly ran back into his nose. It was again on fire with the itching sensation. However, this time, he could actually feel it moving around in his head. It ran deeper into his nose, and he could feel it forcing its way back into his airway.
John coughed, the lump moving up and down his throat. He gagged, trying to get it out. He put his finger down his throat to try and force himself to throw up, but the spider fought against him. It kept running around his throat. Tears came to his eyes as he tried to cough as hard as he could. His throat burned and became raw, but still nothing.
John dropped down to his knees in front of his toilet and reached his arms out, as though he had been drinking and was now praying to the porcelain gods. He tried to heave, but nothing came up. He could barely breathe and couldn't make himself gag anymore.
Leaning onto the toilet, he wanted to cry. His body felt like it was burning up. He imagined he could feel the heat emanating off him. He was too hot. He looked at his arm, expecting it to be red. It was still pasty and pale.
He thought about the pot he had smoked earlier in the night. Damn, he hoped someone hadn't laced his shit. The last thing he wanted to worry about was that.
Please, he thought to himself, let it just be one hell of a motherfucking bad trip.
A lump formed under his arm near his elbow. It just seemed to appear from nowhere, but protruded out grotesquely. It was nearly three-quarters of an inch in diameter and a half-inch tall, pulling the skin tight and making it red.
Suddenly, the lump broke through the skin. Another spider appeared, crawling its way out of the skin and onto his arm. Blood dripped from the hole as the spider started to run down his arm. John quickly started to claw at the spider with his other hand, trying to kill it. He nearly got it a couple times, but it was quick and kept dodging his attempts. It turned around and quickly ran back into the hole it had made in his arm.
He clawed at the hole, trying to tear away at the skin and get the spider out. His long, dirty nails pulled at his arm, but the spider continued to run underneath his skin and toward his hand. When it made it to his wrist, John quickly felt around above the sink, trying to find his razor. His arm, blood running down from his efforts to claw out the spider, was draped over the toilet.
He could barely see above the ceramic porcelain of the sink to see where he was reaching, but he heard things falling as he felt around—his toothbrush, the large heavy sound of the shaving cream splashing into the water filling the sink.
John finally felt his hand clench around the plastic handle of the razor. It was a cheap dollar shaver, but he hoped that if he dug enough, he would get the damned spider out. Damn the things. He wanted them out. He hated spiders. More than anything else, he hated spiders.
He brought the razor to his wrist and was about to start tearing away at the flesh when he noticed there were no longer any lumps, anything moving. His skin was clear. An unhealthy pale cast to it, but it was clear of anything hiding beneath it. He still had blood trickling down his arm, but the spider seemed to be gone. Same with the spider in his throat. He didn’t feel as though something was blocking his airway.
He reached out to the sink and used it to help him stand.
He still didn’t feel quite sure of himself and felt like he might still be trapped in a nightmare somehow. That he never truly woke up or he might just be caught on a bad acid trip.
He looked at himself in the mirror. He still looked like death warmed over. He was tired and wanted to go back to bed. It was calling for him, like a siren song reeling him in.
His ear tickled. As he reached up to pick at it, he felt the familiar sensation of the spider’s legs on his skin. He shook his head, trying to get at it as he felt it starting to crawl toward his face, its legs leaving small stinging sensations along the unshaven roughness of his skin. Then, after one big shake, he felt its release and saw it land on the floor.
It just lay there. Before it could regain itself, John quickly stomped down on the cursed thing. Strangely, he expected it to squish between his toes, as he was still barefoot. Instead, he barely felt anything. He pulled his foot away, seeing black dust where the remains of the spider should have been.
Chapter 2
Marty shifted the selector to “P” and felt the slight shift in his car as the brakes applied. He sat there in the parking lot of a chain of cheap apartments that had long ago been nicknamed “Cardboard City”. Each unit joined to the next with walls so thin, a neighbor could hear a mouse fart in the apartment next door. There was also the time the roof of one of the buildings had blown off and landed in one of the cornfields. It hadn’t even been a tornado whistling through town, but only a strong wind. Those were the stories anyway. In the small town, it didn’t take much for the little apartment complex to be known as the harbor of trailer trash, without the trailer.
The apartments sat on the outskirts of town, past any of the rows of houses and nearly tucked back into th
e entrance of a cornfield. The wind here was fierce. During the winter, it would bite at a person as soon as they stepped into it. Marty felt a breeze as he opened his door, dirt from the fields hitting his face. He tasted it in his mouth. It felt like a dry film as it seemed to coat his insides like cellophane, tight against the skin, choking him.
Why in the hell am I here? he wondered again. Why did I let John talk me into getting up and coming over here in the middle of the night? It was almost three. He was supposed to be at work at ten. Before he got the call, he had just nuzzled into his pillow for a long, lustful sleep with the hooter models from his calendar hanging above his bed. What was so important that John needed him to come now?
John and Marty had been best buds since the fifth grade when John was Johnny and his parents had just moved to the small little town. Small being relative, as they had moved from a town with only seven thousand people, so moving to Hammond, with nearly fifteen thousand, made him feel like he had moved to the city. Hammond wasn’t that large, but it did have two strip malls…although one of them was mainly a shell of closed stores…a post office, a doctor’s office, a lawyer’s office with a dentist in the back, and twice as many bars as there were churches. Having more bars than churches was something John had always said defined it as a true city.
Briskly, Marty walked the short distance to the front door. The doors were always unlocked, open to anyone walking in at whatever hour they wanted. Marty doubted most of the residents came in before dawn and typically could barely stand when they did. He didn’t pay any attention to the mouse that scurried away from the entrance when he walked in. He quickly made his way to the stairs and the second floor.
He worked hard to ignore the smell of mold that seemed to radiate off the walls. The building smelled like wet, sweaty old socks that had long since gone foul, making him wonder how anyone could ever live here. He didn’t know how John could stand it, but knowing him, Marty felt like he should fit right in.
He reached the door and lightly tapped on it, not wanting to wake the neighbors. Last thing he needed was “Big Bertha”, as they called her, from across the hall coming out and yelling at him. A sixty-year-old fat woman, who could probably wrestle him down and sit on him, he thought it best to just stay away from her.
“Hey, John, open up, man. You called me out of bed, so you sure as hell should still be up to let me in,” Marty whispered as he leaned close to the door. When his skin touched the wood, it felt soft and rotten against his flesh. His nose wrinkled in disgust. There seemed to be a smell coming from either the door or whatever was on the other side of it.
He listened, hoping to hear some sound or movement from inside. Everything was nearly silent, other than the whistling howl of the wind as it passed by the window at the end of the hall. Even the mouse from downstairs had gone silent, as though waiting for an answer.
Bastard sure as hell better not have gone back to sleep, Marty thought. The wind blew even stronger against the window, making it rattle loudly. Marty knocked on the door again, a little louder this time, trying to be heard over the banging of the window and the howling wind.
Still, only silence answered. Marty was starting to get pissed. In his dreams, he had been relaxing at some resort surrounded by Double D’s. The last thing he had wanted was a phone call from his best bud telling him that he needed his help and to get over there. John had sounded pretty messed up on the phone, worse than Marty had ever heard him. He wasn’t going to leave him hanging—unless he didn’t open his damned door.
“Hey, you son of a bitch! I hope you didn’t drag me out of bed in the damned middle of the night just so you could fall your ass back to sleep,” Marty said, pounding on the door. Sleep began to filter back into his mind. The drive had woken him a little, but it was now replaced by the stench and warmth of the hallway. He just wanted to get himself back to bed. If John wasn’t going to answer the door, there was no reason to stick around.
Marty reached for the doorknob. He figured it was probably locked, but he had come all the way across town. He should at least try the knob. Even if John had passed out somewhere or just fallen back to sleep, it would be better to crash on his nasty couch than driving back across town to his bed. He turned the knob and, with a satisfying click, the door swung open.
He was instantly assaulted by a foul stench—the sour odor of maggot-infested meat, mold, and dirty socks. It was in such a high concentration, it was overwhelming, nearly knocking him back. His stomach twisted and was ready to release its contents onto the filthy hardwood floor.
He could have sworn it wasn’t this bad just last week when they had all been over for the Twin Peaks annual marathon night. Marty, John, Bob, Ramrod… They had all been there, watching the old VHS box set John had. They'd been doing it for ten years. Every year on June 10th, the day the show ended, they got their popcorn, their tape recorders, a little vodka, and enjoyed all the additional scenes from the European versions. It was their tradition, and they always did it at John’s. But the place never looked this bad. It was always clean when they came over. Plus, Marty was over more often than just for the annual event. In fact, he had been over just…
He tried to remember the last time he'd been there. He struggled, thinking about the inventory he had been working on at the grocery store, the dinner with his parents, then there was the night out with his sister celebrating her twenty-first birthday. So maybe he hadn’t been over since last week.
John had really let the place go since then. It was trashed.
He kicked over a pile of pizza boxes as he stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. He didn’t want to be trapped in with the smell, but he didn’t want it to drift out into the hallway, either. The smell was bad enough out there as it was. It didn’t need any help from John’s trash heap of an apartment.
Marty reached for the light switch. Light flooded the room, cascading over the mess that would have been better left to the dark. He heard scurrying noises as small creatures moved to hide in the darkness. Marty didn’t know what they were, although he had an inkling. He didn't have to see the roaches, didn’t want to see them, didn’t want to think about them. It was easier for him to ignore them and imagine they weren’t there, rather than try to ever sit on John’s couch again and watch crappy horror movies.
Marty looked around, taking in the full extent of the damage. He had to be careful not to step on a broken beer bottle near the door. It looked like it had rolled from the couch and through the papers and other miscellaneous garbage thrown throughout the room—paper plates stained with food of unknown origin, soda and beer cans, various magazines with scantily clad women on their covers.
Marty stopped looking at the mess when he saw John stretched out on the couch. He looked to be in worse shape than his apartment. His skin and lips were pale, nearly as white as the wall behind him, and his eyes were dull. None of it was natural. Albinos had more color than his friend. Marty couldn’t understand how skin could lack color. While Marty never knew what color John’s eyes were, he did know that they were usually not as faded as they were now.
Marty stared at what could easily be mistaken for a corpse. And maybe he was. He wasn’t moving, was he? He couldn’t see John’s chest moving. Maybe his friend had died in the time it took for him to get there.
If he were dead, that would make him an ass for screaming at the man for not opening the door. And here he was, worrying about his damn door etiquette and his crassness, not even thinking about his friend possibly being dead. What should he do? Call the paramedics?
John’s chest rose with a sudden raspy intake of air. Marty jumped in surprise.
There was a soft wheeze as a long, slow breath slipped out of his friend. It ended in a cough and John came to life. He rocked with a seizure-like motion, which spread throughout his body. He sat up slightly, coughing, black chunks spraying out onto the couch around him.
Marty stood near the door, not really sure what the hell he sho
uld do. He wasn’t a damn doctor. John needed a doctor, or at least an ambulance. When Marty was sick, he went to the doctor. He didn’t call his damn friends to have them come over to watch him cough out a lung.
He wondered briefly if it was John’s lungs that were those black chunks landing on the couch. They were probably black enough, as he knew his friend was up to two packs a day. Basics. He saw an empty pack lying next to John on the couch. He had probably just finished up another one before Marty had walked in. He thought he could smell it, but with the stench in the room, it was hard to tell. What did it matter anyway?
John tried to reach out and pull himself up more. It looked more like a turtle lying on his back, rocking back and forth as he tried to find something to grab onto.
Marty reached out and started to lift John into a sitting position. He smelled like he had sweat a lot throughout the night. Marty pulled him up so John was sitting there, still not completely erect. He doubted he could even stay straight if he wanted to.
“What…the hell you doing here…in the middle of…the damn night?!” John growled. The words came out in a mixture of spitting and coughing up blood. Marty was scared for him. He had never seen a person cough up so much blood.
“Hey man. You called me. Got my ass out of bed to hurry over here, so don’t even start with that shit. You kept screaming something about being attacked by spiders.” Marty took another look at his friend. Damn, he wished he knew a thing or two about medicine. “And, well, you sure as hell look fucked up.”
John tried to speak, but when he opened his mouth, it turned into another spasm of coughing and more black specs flying to the floor.
“We should probably get you to the doctor,” Marty said, lowering himself into the recliner next to the couch. He had to sit on the edge because of how much unknown crap was piled in the chair.
He turned back around to see John looking at him, those pale, glazed eyes staring into his. A thin smile creased his lips, then it was gone, the hunger that had seemed to take hold fading back away. His face went back to looking lost look as John blankly stared back at him.