This Book is Full of Spiders

Walt.

Stop that. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. Thirty people had climbed right into that tunnel ahead of me, men and women from age eighteen to early sixties. I’d be damned if I couldn’t do it.

My legs would not move.

Brick and mud. Cockroaches skittering along every surface. Spiderwebs spanned the gaps between rusty pipes. It stank of mold and mildew and rot. It stank of the grave. Water dripped from the cracks in the bricks overhead.

The shuffling of knee shoes was completely gone now, not even the echoes reached me. I had stayed behind too long. It was just me and the utter silence and the utter darkness. I remembered a video I had once watched of a wasp outside of a beehive, patiently beheading each bee that emerged from the hole. It accumulated a pile of hundreds of heads before it was done. I imagined a huge wasplike creature on the other end of this tunnel, silently and efficiently ripping the heads off of each muddy, exhausted person who emerged from the other side, tossing them into a pile.

Stop it.

I put my hands on either side of the tunnel. I said, out loud, “Here we go.”

But my legs did not move.

I started to whisper words of encouragement to myself, when a massive hand landed on my shoulder and spun me around.

Owen said, “And where do you think you’re going, bro?”

* * *

Owen pinned me against the wall. Racist Ed strolled past me and started dutifully stacking boxes in front of the tunnel entrance, which made me think maybe he didn’t fully understand the plan from the beginning.

Owen said, “Dude, you are a piece of work, you know that? What is that, a tunnel?”

“Let go of me.”

“Where does it go?”

“We don’t know. Out. Out there somewhere. We got no idea what’s at the end of it but we decided whatever it was, was better than being stuck in here with you.”

“How many people went in?”

“Fuck you.”

He slammed me against the wall. “How many?”

“About… thirty.”

“Thirty. And you had no idea what’s at the other end. Nobody scouted it first? Nobody crawled through to make sure it was even open at the other end?”

“We—we didn’t have time. I—”

“Right, you didn’t have time because you were afraid of being discovered. Because you had to keep this your little secret.”

Racist Ed said casually, “Well, I know where it goes. It runs right out to the old asylum.”

We both turned toward him.

I said, “You mean the—”

I was interrupted by echoes of gunshots, cracking through the tunnel.

Gunshots, and screams. Faintly, from the other end, I heard an unfamiliar voice scream, “THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE WALLS! THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE FUCKING WALLS!”

The Massacre at Ffirth Asylum

Amy was bouncing in her seat, muttering, “Come on, come on, come on.”

The gun cam was in the old cafeteria, trained on the door to the hallway. The other two guys—Flashlight Guy and Donnie—ran past. The camera swung around to find Donnie helping Flashlight climb up through the basement window.

To Fredo, Amy said, “They’re almost out! Get ready!”

It was taking forever. Flashlight guy was stuck in the window for some reason, his legs kicking but not making any forward progress. Josh kept swinging his gun/camera back to the door to see if they were being pursued.

Shrieking.

Not screaming—this was the kind of noise babies make, when they don’t know how to put their pain into words. It was Flashlight Guy. His legs were thrashing in the window. Something had him from the other end. Josh and Donnie grabbed his legs, trying to pull him back into the classroom. They pulled and pulled, and whatever had Flashlight from the other end finally let go. Of his legs, anyway.

Josh and Donnie found themselves on the floor of the classroom, with the lower half of Flashlight Guy twitching in their lap. Everything from the waist up was still laying in the basement window. If Josh and Donnie hadn’t had earmuffs on, they could have heard Amy scream from the RV.

Josh scrambled to his feet. He trained the gun cam on the window, and the twitching and now-silent pile of meat that was Flashlight’s torso. It appeared that something was ripping away at his guts from below, something coming out of the grass, like it had emerged from the earth itself and torn him in half. Josh shot at it, the Roman candle shells blowing Flashlight’s guts apart and sending fire streaking into the night beyond the window.

Amy flinched—she and Fredo saw the glowing projectiles streak across the windshield from the side of the building.

The view on the monitor was chaos. Donnie and Josh were arguing. Then Josh yelled, “THE DOOR! WATCH THE DOOR!” and more shots were fired, sharp reports that echoed through the night air.

Donnie screamed, until his screaming parts were ripped out of his throat.

The gun cam raced toward the basement window—which was still blocked by the ravaged remains of Flashlight Guy. The view flew through the window—Josh tossing the gun through ahead of him—and it spun around in the grass until Amy found her video feed was showing the very RV where she was sitting in the distance, weeds partially obstructing the view.

Through the camera’s mic, Amy heard a sound like a sponge being wrung out in a sink full of water. Josh screamed and then made a series of harsh grunts. The gun cam was still sitting motionless in the grass. Amy looked over the laptop at the building, then back down at the camera feed, back and forth, looking for something. Anything.

On the laptop, the camera view suddenly moved, being dragged backward through the weeds. The view swung around. Josh’s face came into view, laying on the ground, blood pouring from his mouth. He was grabbing the gun by the barrel, pulling it toward him. He was doing something with his other hand, reaching around. His mouth was wide open, making choking noises. Something came up in his throat. His eyes got wide, and Amy had a split second to see a fist-sized wad of Josh’s own intestines push out between his teeth before he pulled the trigger and blew his own head off.

Amy jumped to her feet, the laptop clattering to the floor of the RV. She had her hand over her mouth.

Fredo had heard the shot.

“What? What’s happening?”

“We have to go, Fredo, we have to go and we have to go now. We have to go. We have to…”

“What? What happened?”

“GO! Fredo! They’re dead! They’re all dead! Go! Please!”

“YOU DON’T KNOW THAT! We don’t leave men behind!”

Fredo threw the RV into gear and floored it. Instead of backing out onto the street, he plowed forward, across the lawn and toward the building. Amy stumbled back up to the passenger seat.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

“Look! They’re still alive! They’re moving!”

The RV skidded to a stop outside the basement window. On the ground, in the shadows, something was in fact moving.