The Jadedvisalian

We stepped into the darkened room and the walls lit up. Several computer monitors turned on. I noticed the sound of humming machinery. This was not an ordinary tomb. Sure, bones stuck out of the walls, and an occasional rat scurried in the shadows, but this place was state of the art. Collette wasted no time in getting on one of the computer terminals. In moments she found maps of the city, contingency plans, and information on all manner of spiders.

“How did you get all this info so fast?” I asked.

She said there wasn’t even a password on any files. More digging found files on dark magic and mind control. It all had something to do with spiders and old bones.

I asked if there was a map on how to get out of here before someone found us. She started looking. I started looking around the room. I found a door opposite the one we entered. It was metal and appeared sealed with a keypad lock. All around I saw bones, leg bones, arm bones, rib bones, almost every kind of bone imaginable. In a corner lay a ornate coffin. Unlit candles stood all around it. I lit one with my trusty lighter. The word “Eighlegs” was carved onto a metal plate on the lid. I thought about opening it, but it just seemed like a bad idea, the kind of thing that would get me yelled at if I was in a horror movie.

“Hey, I think I found something.”

I walked over to Collette and asked what she had found.

“This scan appears to be from one of documents in the library.”

She pointed out that the paper was in a plastic sleeve with a library label on it. I had never seen it. It showed several different pair, each containing a different bone and a spider.

“This might be what they didn’t want us finding out. It says here that …”

Collette yelped.

“Something just bit …”

I staggered when she shoved me backwards away from her and the computer screen. She came at me, grabbing at my throat. I leaped backwards and hit the wall. Something snapped. I looked at a small bone that stuck from the wall. It’d snapped it in two, and tiny spiders crawled out, scattering all over the wall. I quickly jumped away. Collette lunched again but I dodged. I saw the back of her neck. A small bone spider, very ornately carved, rested there. I grabbed at it, but missed. She picked up a rock and swung. It knocked the hard hat from my head. I stumped and fell against the table the monitor sat on. I noticed a cracked skull paired with an inverted spider symbol. I rolled as a rock crunched the keyboard where I had just been. Maybe I could just run back the way I came in. I recalled the broken ladder the same time I saw a figure darken the doorway. He held out a hand and Collette stood still. I pulled my gun. The figure waved his hand and Collette leaped. The gun fired off a round when she knocked it from my hand. I skittered across the floor towards the casket. The figure walked in, it was the man who wore the black leotard with spider print.

He told me how I could not stop him, he held the power of the spider. He said something about revenge for his family being ruined, and the Baron being killed by some action of the past residents of Visalia, and the ultimate insult of the desecration of his resting place. Really, all I cared about was stopping him. He asked if I was ready to die. I said I was not. He laughed and gestured. Collette picked up an old bone and chipped it on the rock she still held. She moved with speed that seemed impossible when she leaped and stuck me with the sharp sliver of bone. When she cracked the bone in two, spiders crawled out and fell to the floor. The rushed after me with uncanny swiftness. I staggered towards the coffin, towards my gun. Spiders crawled from under the coffin and carried it away. I felt them on shoes, crawling up my pants, crawling inside my pants. I wanted to make a joke about a first date, but I was just too terrified. I could feel them biting. I wondered if they were poisonous. I thought I was dead. I would just curl up and … that’s when it hit me. There wasn’t a single skull in sight. The picture of the skull and the inverted spider. The spider was curled up and dead. Tiny points of pain flared from over my whole body. Even if cracking a skull would kill them, there wasn’t …

With every ounce of energy I had left, I lifted myself off the ground and stumbled towards the coffin. I heaved on the lid. Whoever the spider man was, he made loud protestations, something about desecrating his ancestors. I pushed open the lid and it crashed to the floor. There he was, Baron von Eighlegs, from his toe bones to his skull. I pulled out the skull and most of the spine and ribcage came with it. I slammed the skull onto the ground. The bait continued, but the biting stopped. Collette shuddered and I saw the bone spider fall from her neck. She looked dazed for a moment, then she did what she was becoming a pro at. She bashed in the spider man’s head with a rock. I managed to get to my feet and made sure she was ok.

As we made out way out, dead spiders fell down my pant legs.

Stan Prolongo by David Avila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.