Bad Glass

tried to hold the camera steady. I took a couple of wide-angle shots in the dark, hoping to capture that line of light in the distance, then flicked on the flash. My hands were shaking as I focused on the face. It was male, I saw. Its hair was black … his hair was black.

I twisted the lens from wide-angle to telephoto, filling the viewfinder. The camera focused, and I found myself staring at a close-up of that quivering eye.

Then the eye stopped quivering—its brow steepled up.

Suddenly, there was sense there, in that eye. And surprise.

I heard a click behind my head and realized that the sound that had drawn me here—those sandpaper whispers and horsehair brushes, that crackling record player—had grown louder in the last couple of minutes, while I’d been focused on the face down below. It was behind my head now, between the walls. And there was movement in that sound. It wasn’t getting louder, it was getting nearer. I braced my hand on the hole’s ragged edge and turned to look.

There were dark shapes in the gap up above. A jumble of moving limbs—large and tentacled things, just inches away. Something brushed against my cheek—just the barest, lightest touch—and I immediately recoiled, my skin prickling in a wave of gooseflesh.

My hand caught on something at the hole’s edge, and there was a brief burst of fire across my palm. Then I was free, stumbling back. I slipped my camera’s carry strap around my neck and took a half dozen steps back. My legs were weak, and for a moment I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep them beneath my body. The sweat on my cheeks was freezing cold.

And there was movement at the edge of the hole. At first, it was just a tiny blur of black—at one spot along the top of the hole, then, a moment later, at a dozen more, all around its perimeter. Then a black, finger-thick tentacle reached out, waving, snakelike, up toward the wall, touching and repositioning itself, as if trying to find purchase. It was a dark, jointed stub bristling with whisker-thick hair.

I was holding my breath. I thought about the camera hanging against my chest, but I couldn’t break my paralysis, I couldn’t lift my hands and start taking pictures. Not now. I was transfixed by that hole— consumed—just standing there on weak, shaking legs, watching as it gave birth to … whatever.

To something dark. And bristling. And wrong.

Then more of those dark limbs reached out, and a form heaved itself through the hole. Considering its initial, tentative movements, it moved fast, skittering on a bouquet of long limbs. A spider, I thought, suddenly flush with relief. Just a spider! But it wasn’t a normal spider. At least, it wasn’t like any spider I’d ever seen. It was huge, about the size of a small cat. And its limbs were surprisingly long, out of proportion with its body. It moved in a quick, rhythmic lurch, hauling itself down the wall in drunken uneven spurts. But fast.

And by the time it reached the floor, a half dozen of its ilk had made their way through the opening.

Now that I could see what they were—or at least I could comprehend their form—I broke my paralysis and grabbed for my camera. I started taking shots, the motor in the lens whirring as I tried to keep focus on the skittering things. I got wide shots of the spiders swarming through the hole—there were dozens now, crowding the wall. I zoomed in on one, filling the frame with a single black spider against the dirty gray carpet. I even got a series of shots of one spider crawling over another; the latter was an undersized specimen, spinning in a circle. There was something strange about the smaller spider, but, caught in its tornado of motion, I couldn’t see what. I lowered the camera from my eye and activated the display, scrolling back to the start of that series.

Its leg, I saw. It was damaged or stunted. Congenitally deformed. I scrolled forward, looking for a better view. And I found it. Right there, protruding from the spider’s body: a limb, much smaller than its other legs. But it wasn’t a leg.

It was a finger. A human finger, pale and white.

Something touched my pant cuff, and I glanced down to find a spider climbing up my leg. My skin erupted in prickles of heat—an intense, instinctual revulsion—and I shook myself violently. The spider hung on, somehow managing to continue its ascent. I swept my camera down, striking the spider from my stomach. In that brief moment of contact, I felt bristles scrabbling against my hand, and I almost fell over backward, trying to get away.

I caught my balance and looked around.

I was surrounded. While I’d been lost in the camera, the spiders had continued to swarm from the hole. And now they were everywhere: on the walls, on the floor, swarming around my feet. They were coming right at me, moving with a purpose, a goal. I took a step back and heard one crack beneath my boot. I lifted my foot and saw its legs waving wildly; a greenish ooze leaked from its fractured body. There were more—dozens, hundreds—circling around my feet, hemming me in, moving closer.

“Dean!” Taylor cried, storming into the room. Her jacket was off, and she was thrashing it against the floor, knocking spiders back against the walls. “Your leg!”

Two spiders had detached themselves from the crowd, and they were frantically climbing my right pant leg. One had just passed my knee, heading up toward my crotch, while the other scampered up over my hip. I quickly swatted aside the one on my hip, then swung my camera down, smashing the other against my thigh. I could feel it quivering through the fabric of my jeans, and I quickly swept it back down to the floor, leaving behind a wide streak of spider guts—a sticky, jellylike substance that spread across my jeans, the heel of my palm, and the underside of my camera.

Taylor continued to sweep the floor with her jacket, holding it like a matador taunting a swarm of small, ground-hugging bulls. The spiders kept scurrying, but their movement seemed unfocused now, still fast but aimless.

I noticed a spider crawl back into the hole, clambering up over the wave of traffic still fighting to get out. Then, suddenly, the whole swarm reversed. The spiders on the floor paused briefly, then retreated back to the hole, as if summoned by an inaudible command.

After the rest of the horde was gone, a single spider remained. It was the spider with the finger. The weight of that out-of-place limb kept the spider off balance, and it had to struggle to keep to a straight line, swaying drunkenly as it left the floor and climbed up the wall. The finger flexed along with the spider’s legs, a feeble arthritic parody of those graceful movements. It had a long yellow nail, fractured and jagged at the tip. It could use a manicure, a voice cackled behind my eyes. I shook my head and pushed that voice back down into the murky corners of my skull. It was a bad voice; it was the voice of hysteria. If I listened—if I gave free rein to all the thoughts and words and images tumbling unexamined inside my head—I’d probably break down laughing. And I wouldn’t be able to stop.

Finally, the spider with the human finger pulled itself into the hole and disappeared.

“Did you see that?” I asked Taylor. “Did you see the … spider?” I used the word spider instead of finger. Right then, finger was something I just couldn’t say, not without giving in to that wave of hysterical laughter.

Taylor was panting with exertion, her chest rising and falling. Her response was hushed, breathless. “Yeah. I saw the … spider.” I heard the word finger there, too, left unspoken.

“And there’s something in the wall. Something I can’t …” I shook my head, unable to continue, unable to describe the face.

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said, shivering visibly. “I hate spiders. I’m not getting anywhere near that fucking hole.”

I bent down and examined one of the crushed arachnids. Its legs were still moving, tracing tiny shapes in the air. It was big and its limbs seemed ridiculously long, but there was nothing terribly odd about its structure. It was just a spider.

“And what the fuck did you think you were doing?” Taylor asked. She started to put her jacket back on, then stopped, remembering what she’d been using it for. She shook it out violently, then folded it over her forearm. “You see shit like that, you leave! You don’t stick around taking pictures!”

I shrugged my backpack off my shoulder and set it on the ground next to the crushed spider. I carefully wiped my camera against my leg, adding to the smear of greenish-black guts already there, then set the camera back into its padded compartment. A thin, sticky film remained on the butt of the camera, but a more thorough cleaning