Spider Soup

Dread pooled like cold turbid rainwater in Jordy’s veins, a brackish stream of apprehension.  He yearned to be a hero for his lady, yet could not even extricate himself from cobwebs!  The spiders were making him look bad, very bad.

~ from Spider Soup

She had to be strong, Darcy inwardly chided, despite suffering an acute case of Arachnophobia at the moment.  The spiders circulated in the netting, occasionally stepping on her face, traversing eyelids.  The bugglies entered ears, tickled nostrils.  Reflexively the woman sneezed.

~ from Spider Soup

“Whatever they want, I refuse to let them make Spider Soup of us,” vowed Jordy.

~ from Spider Soup

The couple awakened in the same blink of an eye, for there was a disturbance at their household that jostled them from sleep.  Not a noise or intrusion but rather the opposite, as the home was shared by many a creature and apparently it was an inside job.

The evidence extended wall to wall, with every corner a part of the intricate scheme, embroidered into the fabric.  A myriad of fibers had unspooled and been knotted into an exceptionally thick tapestry.  The humans slid along a corridor tugged by rope-like braids, until one’s bare foot connected with the leg of a hall table and tipped a brittle porcelain vase, which smashed to the floorboards and sounded the alarm.

Instinctively both reached to shake the other as orbs widened.  Appendages were restricted.  The pair goggled in amazement, awed by the industriousness of tiny arachnids to achieve this elaborate engineering feat overnight!  When they had gone to bed around Midnight, the house appeared normal.  By Six A.M. (according to the gongs of a grandfather clock) it was crowded by a matting so dense, they could pluck it with fingers and hear a vibrant hum.  Yet it resembled ordinary spider silk.  For some arcane reason, the stuff had been produced in manic quantities — spun and woven with a frenzied burst of collective hyperactivity.  Had Nature triggered a mutation, or was it something more sinister?

The young couple inherited the home from the man’s great-aunt, a sweet lady who wouldn’t hurt a fly.  The spiders she revered and sheltered might.  “They have to eat,” she told Jordy and his wife Darcy during their final visit — before expiring unexpectedly due to a stroke.  Like hunger, grief could be a powerful stimulus.  Did the appetites of the eight-leggers abruptly grow to include people-sized morsels?  Or had the eccentric spinster been feeding her little darlings a special diet and now they were starved?