Something like Consciousness

Asleep. Dead perhaps with how still I lay. The air sticky with heat, my skin cold throughout; blankets needed for warmth. Beneath I cooked, melting away through the cherry wood flooring adding to the moistness surrounding my chill. Around my corpsine slumber laid nothing of note, I cannot even be certain walls held up a roof; is this even a dwelling at all or something else? Just keep my nose warm, it drips on my shivering skin. Please, cover my nose.

Strange it seemed to sleep with eyes open, all white, sheets drawn past the crown of my head. An odor-- lime and sulfur it must have been--clung to the wrappings with no hopes of escape. The wait for sleep weighs heavy even for the sleeper; crushed on that hard surface pressing my skin onto the enameled flooring before becoming an abandon blastie. Day and night swim over me; falling light, growing dark, time nothing to me as I slept watching the covering sheet.

Voices. Several voices. Accompanied by mild shadows; the smell of flowers; fresh overturned dirt; damp air after a rain. Cool. Clean. Regenerative. Apart from conscious life, yet withholding from the ephemeral; osmotic penetration dropping the temperature through my clammed flesh.

That is when I saw it: the demon.

Watching is all my rigid body would allow, straining my eyes side to side to catch what fell into my peripheral. And from there it came, tickling pricks piercing the taught skin of my right cheek. Moving with cautious

determination, multiple legs make their way across my cheek bone and underneath my right eye out of sight, pausing on the lower eyelid. Protective instinct forces my eyes shut--the most movement I can recall since passing into sleep--terror rippling in goose-pimpled waves throughout. Nothing of my corpse-like flesh moved, not even a skin twitch to frighten the devil from off my face. I felt everything, nerve sensory heightened under my skin; tremors fluctuate through the marrows causing aftershock vibrations in motionless appendages. But my skin kept calm.

A sharp piercing echoed out a scream I did not hear from me as if my eyelid had been cut with a pair of fingernail clipper. Such pain unexpected, nor anticipate I could feel during dreams or reality; intense burning and an itch inconsolable even if it was possible to attend to them. Tears gathered in the ducts of my eyes, but came no further. The ends of my fingers curled into the hard earth responding to the fire scorching my vision. Already paralyzed with unconsciousness, my eyes began to slacken with the injected fluid deteriorating the surface of my face.

While I struggled in agony, this fiend lay in wait, patient for the poison to do the work needed for whatever torturous feat it wanted to pursue. And so it came: a slow numbing around the eye (penetrating deep into the internal works on my skull) followed the pain and my tension subsided; finger tips and clenched eyes relaxed; even tears trickled through linked lashes.

The horror began--the demon started to move. Climbed atop my closed eye and inserted two hairy arms between my eyelids scratching the sclera's

surface. Unwilling, my eye opened; the beast in full view, that minion of Satan: covered in small brown hairs with dark brown skin, six large eyes clustered in pairs, staring into my one. Out of my control the entire situation became, the useless muscle structures limp from exhaustion; the hellish creature forced the lid completely open.

I saw it: the spider.

And it saw me, into the very darkest reaches of my soul, to places which even I was unaware existed. For time, a frozen plain of grass and water in that instant, waited as those six eyes gazed in concentration through my pupil, searching for what I assumed be fear-- something I gave free in abundance to its taunting stance.

Weeks dripped from its glare to my core; all the while I slept, or lived, or died; perhaps I was nothing at all, a mere imagining of another, an ulterior reflection, a creation that--hidden in time--would uncover a light of truth that in my constant state of fear, wondering at my situation, could alter their own existence in that space. I the square searching for Edwin's sphere, hoping this predicament was greater than what I had become in my eternal slumber. Grant in me some afflatus if it be thy will. Make me no more your nightmare. There was imagination in me, imagination that along the walls of creation laid there a chance at my constructing out of this experience. Abnegation of the circumstance proved no lack of desperation, neither help nor destruction. To end hell's fire is to stop heaven from saving the pure. If it comes by me that this be how things must develop, then so be my inability to

determine my own outcome from what I cannot understand.

What that spider saw in me I cannot know, and I in it saw not but its face: fangs hidden below palpuses for attack (hidden daggers); those penetrating eyes never moving, focused in permanence upon my eye; that treacherous sucking mandible, incapable of chewing anything--I knew it meant to drink the melted tissues once decayed to expected fruition.

I cannot say how long we lay there, together in sight of each other, but a time came when my vision failed me; a milky cloudiness encroached the outer most visible sectors of sight, crawling like a determined fog blanketing the morning coast. It did not stop. Soon, even the spider faded from view and all was cream and empty. It started to move on me; this moment (waiting for) to strike when I could not even see the attacker. If my heart beat--which I was uncertain of--those palpitations ceased at sensing the motions of that hellion.

First came the legs, bayoneted feet; dentist's Novocain stuck in my eye with each step, a piercing sensation expecting pain, but only a fierce pinch then gone, left to wait for the next insertion. I readied to lose that eye, for the spider's slurping vacuum; but it never came. Something far worse, unimaginable. The very gates of hell burst open I heard the howling laughter of damnation from within, this arachnid, with those hairy palpus hands, lifted the flesh around my eye--near ducts now after expelling all the tears contained laid empty and dry--and with slow precision, slid one of its scruff legs inside. I yearned to yell in horror, disgust,

fear; anxiety welling up past believability. I wanted more than anything to rid myself of this frisson. Not even so much an escape, as to react to the invading insect; something; anything; show some sign of life. More than lying hopeless to its probing legs.

One after another it breached the seal my moistened flesh made with the wetness of my eyeball with brown prickling legs. If any movement at all remained in my hollow carcass it expressed in the high-pressure pulsing veins in that right eye. Each leg scratched of sandpaper, roughing my orb like a once polished crystalline sphere after years of weathered neglect. The shear improbability of that spider forcing itself in under the tight and plump flesh securing my green eye in place astounded me; the sound of stretching skin, ripping minute lesions to allow room for the ripe abdomen to squeeze through. If the devil himself came to me, demanding my very soul, I would have traded against suffering the sight of that spider.

Even the torture of Shelob's cavernous abode is inconsequential to the dreaded burrowing fiend brought to me. Scraping and scratching, etching bloody fishers across the ball; once a frictionless surface now my own skin caught against its roughness. Not that I blinked--if every muscle in my body connected in such a way that flexing any particular cluster would snap those lids shut, still--but even if I wanted to close my eyes, if no other desire dwelled in me save to cease seeing, still nothing; not paralyzed as they were; not sleeping as I was; caught in a dream, or a death unable to rouse.

Long after I thought the bastard dug forever against that defenseless orb, when those eight wanderlust legs made their final insertion past salted tear duct and into my face. Imagine thorny rose stems strumming across your optic nerve; or perhaps a thousand and one paper cuts on the back of your delicate eye tissue, severing the nerves; an intolerable, excruciating sting--only paralysis hindered screaming out right, plucking the lacerated organ from my skull, and crushing the demon-spider. But nothing; I lay in helpless agony its needle legs crawling deeper inside. (why do I not awake?)

Malicious; it wanted more. Obstructed by dense sinews and damp tissues, nothing hindered; a fierce caustic acid dissolved my face's inner meat, the spider drinking mutilated remains making its way through to my skull's core.

All at once everything became clear: feeling those pincer feet gripping gossamer gray matter of my brain; laying eggs in me! In sleep I know of spiders positing babies in ears, noses, hair, even attempts in opened mouth. But these octopods invading unseen inner corridors of humans. Here, now, tearing apart the inside vessels for blood and motion, that damned spider melted away brain tissue; then perched. Minimal space between bone and brain for movement, though the spider's sporadic undulations came all the same. Up and down like a child jumping on a pool filled with stale Jell-o:

Up and down. Up and Down. Up. Down. Up. Down.

?

Nothing. Pressure. Its hardened minute exoskeleton persisted, squished between brain creases.

Hours became timeless misnomers awaiting the spider's reanimation. I presumed it finished secreting its young, but once complete made no move for escape. I considered, not knowing the course for reason as to why a virile person drew death with breath, formed an indurate corpse laid end under soil. Try, memories escaped me; empty save the spider's giving face, all six dripping eyes unblinking, waiting for the precise moment where inflicted blindness overtook. Still my left eye watched the sheet wondering, too, the circumstances. It saw beyond whiteness and spider legs, fangs, hairs, the terror of invasion; it saw worlds, unimagined creations, peoples and faces I knew nothing about. I have heard it said that true sight can transport one out of time and space, even out of dimensions--interplaner travel between universes. But, each detailed story laid a man, waiting death (such as I now must accept being my fate if I am to proceed) while some arachnid begins the decay process of their body.

None escape.

Something vibrates. Immured in my head, a small tremor from which a low hum emits. Time: they are hatching. Like Pop Rocks crackling against my skull: begin feasting upon the mother spider — whether dead or still living.

It is not long before the parasitic offspring begin to grow, filling in hoary crevices indented upon my brain, taking up all available space; expanding, consuming, destroying. But there is no room for them all; my chilled brain cannot be digested quick enough, slurp as they might. If possible, the very fragments of calcium and minerals collecting to form my skull pulse then begin to stretch.

At this I sit up, screaming, the sheer weight of pain pushing against my eardrums unmanageable. I cannot stop those mordacious fiends; I cannot release the pressure.

No stopping; if before I was paralyzed by sleep (or death), I now am incapacitated with adolescent venom, abnegating control of my nervous system to their hunger.

I cannot think; the only ability I keep in this sleeping hell is fading. Grow spiders, and come out. Almost, what, can I say it? How? There they are, here am I; eat, children, you need your nourishment. I must see you. Come, see your father, here waiting. Come, make your erumpent escape.

~~OOO~~

Before all quiets, two distinct pops . . . hard to concentrate; blood and spider splatter to the floor . . . my ears . . . will lose consciousness here . . . the world of wakefulness. And there, one eye . . . seeing . . . fogged and useless . . . millions, miniscule spiders devouring . . . skin . . . flesh . . . vein . . . blood . . . tissues . . . left . . . bloodstained bones. ...