Once...

by James Herbert

  ‘DonbeafraidThom.’

  The elf’s voice was calm, reassuring, but the words a gabble.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, Thom,’ Rigwit said again, continuing to climb.

  Spiders entered Rigwit’s mouth and he turned his head to spit them out, casually, as if they were no more than apple seeds.

  Thom tried to move away from him, for Rigwit was bringing more of the spiders with him, a troop-carrier for the enemy.

  ‘Stay, Thom. Don’t try to escape them. They really can’t hurt you. At least, they can’t hurt your body.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Thom pushed himself upwards, kicking out, feeling the prickle of their legs on the skin of his stomach, his chest, his arms, his clothing dark with them from the hips down. He slipped again, jarring his elbow. ‘Help me!’ he pleaded.

  ‘I will, Thom, I promise you, I will.’ The camouflaged elf was just below him. ‘But you must listen, you must hear me . . .’

  ‘Make them go!’

  ‘. . . you must obey me.’

  Thom slumped, a paralysis that had naught to do with his illness taking over. He was rigid with revulsion and shock, like a rabbit frozen in a car’s headlights, a gazelle shocked into stillness by a stalking lioness. He lay there helpless.

  But Rigwit had climbed high enough to lean close to Thom’s ear.

  ‘You have to be brave,’ the elf told him firmly without the slightest trace of excitement in his voice. Which did not exclude a grim urgency.

  ‘Rigwit, make them go away! Use your magic!’ Thom had turned his face to the stairs, an arm raised to protect his eyes.

  The elf shook him by the shoulder. ‘Only you can do that. They were sent to you, only you. Quickly, tell me how they arrived here. Were they in a sealed container?’

  Rigwit persisted in shaking his shoulder, but more vigorously now.

  Thom felt things running up his spine and he shuddered violently. In desperation, he looked at the elf.

  ‘Oh Jesus . . .’ he gasped.

  Barely an inch of the elf could be seen, for his entire body including his head and shoulders seemed to quiver with a dark scabrous bustling.

  Thom buried his head in both arms, but Rigwit would not let him be. Using two hands, disturbed spiders dropping from them, he wrenched Thom round, and before he could turn away again the elf wiped his own face, clearing most of the teeming layer.

  Looking a little more like himself once more, if only for a few moments, he said sternly: ‘You’re the only one that can make them leave this place. The spell was meant for you and only you can break it. Can you feel them nip you, Thom? Can you feel their bites and stings?’

  Before Thom could reply – and he was about to say ‘Yes’ – Rigwit jumped in. ‘You can’t. You can’t feel a thing. Be honest with yourself. Now, can you feel anything other than their presence?’

  Thom hesitated. He wanted to scream, wanted to tell the elf that, yes, of course he bloody well could feel them eating him, but he couldn’t. He could feel their sickening bodies and legs brushing against his flesh, but there was no pain, no sharp stabs, nothing to cause him real harm. Surprised, unsure, he looked down at himself.

  Which was a mistake.

  For the moon outside provided enough light for him to see that webs were being spun over half his body, the silken strands creating a fine mesh over which the spiders continued to work, some of them spitting tiny jets of gooey substance – presumably a glue of some kind – to bind him. If he allowed it to happen, it would not take long for them to encase him in a tight cocoon of silver strands. And if he froze with the trauma, then they would spin their webs over his face and head, bind his eyes, seal his mouth and nostrils; they would stop his heart with the sheer horror of it all.

  ‘Thom, Thom, you’re thinking too much,’ Rigwit insisted, a slight rise in his voice now, as if he was afraid he might be losing the battle. ‘Lookit, lookit, see that they’re nothing.’

  He picked off a particularly large spider from Thom’s neck and crushed it in his tiny fist. ‘See? They can’t hurt you. Let go of the fear and fight back.’

  In fact, it was maintaining the fear that galvanized Thom – the fear of slowly being suffocated by these insidious thriving creatures. He kicked out, his left leg not nearly as agile as the right, but easily breaking the threads. He beat his body with hands and fists, slapping and punching, then brushing, long sweeping movements, ridding himself of the spiders and their clinging companions, sitting up on a step to make it easier for himself.

  ‘Good lad!’ encouraged Rigwit. ‘Y’see how they’re nothing. It’s only their features that stop you from loving ’em.’

  Even if he heard, Thom did not appreciate the humour. He was too busy shedding the rising cocoon, shaking, beating, flattening all that he could reach. He spasmed again when he felt them in his hair, then quickly swept his head with his right hand, his left too difficult to raise. Close to exhaustion, his actions became slower, more clumsy. He wanted to crawl further up the stairs, make it to the bedroom, seal the bottom of the door with bedsheets, only dimly aware that they would follow and enter anyway through other cracks and holes, relentless in their pursuit. As he turned, rising to one knee, Rigwit caught hold of him.

  ‘It’s no good running.’

  Thom tried to pull away, but the elf’s grip was surprisingly strong.

  ‘There’s only one way to defeat them, Thom, so you have to tell me – how did they get here? Was it in a box?’

  Thom glanced fretfully over his shoulder before looking at Rigwit. ‘In a jar!’ he blurted out. ‘They were in a jar!’

  ‘Ah! And where is the jar now, lad?’

  ‘I don’t . . . the kitchen! It’s in the kitchen.’

  ‘Then you have to go down there.’

  ‘Are you fucking insane?’

  ‘Just a bit. But you already asked me that.’ His light tone had no calming affect on Thom whatsoever. He smiled, thinking it might help, but a bug shot into his mouth. As before, Rigwit coolly spat it out and continued his conversation with Thom. ‘We’ll go together, but it’s you that has to pick up the jar and throw it out.’

  ‘I can’t go down there!’ Thom heard his own hysteria and wasn’t proud. He started moving up again.

  Rigwit caught him by his sweater, then hopped up two steps to get closer to Thom’s face.

  ‘Will you please listen. They cannot harm you unless you let them. Pretty soon you will start feeling their bites and stings, but it will only be because your own mind is allowing it to happen, and that’s because it’s what you expect. You have to fight your own thoughts as well as them. Come now, Thom, come with me. I’ll be with you all the way.’

  Thom felt a little hand grasp his and gently tug. As if in a dream, he allowed himself to be pulled, rising on trembling legs as he went.

  ‘Close your eyes if it helps,’ Rigwit advised.

  ‘You must be kidding!’ The stairs below looked as if they were covered in bubbling oil. With his free hand, he reached for the centre post and quickly withdrew it when the wood stirred and little bodies with long legs ran up his arm. The spiders were less dense on the curving wall to his left, but that freedom made their swift scuffling runs even more frightening to watch.

  ‘I can’t do this!’ he shouted, shaking and thrashing spiders off his arm. He tried to turn back, but Rigwit, his arm and body stretched high, grabbed Thom’s hand again.

  ‘Y’can and y’will. Keep walking and think of pleasant things.’

  Thom was in no mood for irony, but he could compare himself with this little man who clung to his hand like a toddler out for a stroll with his daddy. If the elf wasn’t scared of the spiders, then why should he, a full-grown man, be? The logic of it failed to work. Thom felt the panic rising again, a volcano of panic, just waiting to erupt.

  As if sensing Thom’s thoughts, Rigwit uttered some soothing words. ‘On the count of three, run like hell for the kitchen! One—’

  Thom was gone, racing down the remaining
steps, praying he would not slip and fall into the fermenting mass and not for a moment understanding why the elf’s last words had prompted him to take this course. Perhaps it was because fundamentally and deep down he knew there was no other way. There was no escape, neither in his bedroom, nor the roof. There really was only one course of action.

  He imagined he could feel the crunching and splatting of their horribly tiny bodies and, at the bottom of the stairs, in the small landing where the doors to the bathroom, cupboard and kitchen were, the pile seemed to feel inches deep. It was both sickening and terrifying at the same time, and he tried not to dwell on it – not that there was time to do so anyway. Thom struck the big latch of the kitchen door and pushed hard, surprised there was no resistance, somehow expecting the multitude of spiders on the other side to shore up and hinder the door’s progress.

  The glare (compared to the moonlight his eyes had become used to) from the kitchen’s ceiling light dazzled him at first, but he quickly acclimatized.

  And almost became a gibbering wreck at the sight that greeted him.

  They were everywhere. Literally, everywhere.

  They coated the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the windows, every surface available. They even clung to the ceiling light, avoiding the bulb itself, which obviously was too hot for them. The sink, taps, chairs, ornaments, fireplace, the kitchen table, every possible piece of furniture, utensil, or object swarmed with them so that the room was decorated in a living, jostling motif.

  And even so, spiders continued to rush from the jar’s open neck, fanning out, the speedier of the species climbing over the back of the slower ones, the bugs, the millipedes, dominant larger ones – the raft spider, with its distinctive yellow ochre stripe and long hairy legs, the common garden spider with great swollen abdomen as if ready to give birth – pushing lesser ones aside as they rushed through the mob, while others dripped from the ceiling like the first heavy drops before a downpour, and still more hung from invisible threads, trapeze artistes swaying in the mild breeze created when the kitchen door had been opened.

  Thom bent over and retched, a dry sound, the kind a dog makes before it vomits. Only silky drool fell from his parted lips and it soaked the backs of the tiny beasts thronging around his feet.

  ‘Keep moving!’ he heard Rigwit’s command from behind. ‘You mustn’t stand still, not for a moment!’ Little hands prodded his calves.

  When Thom straightened, his first instinct was to run out of the front door a few feet away, run out and keep running, into the forest, escape to somewhere they couldn’t follow, but the elf seemed to have read his mind.

  ‘Don’t even think about it, lad!’ Rigwit yelled. ‘You’ll never be able to return here unless you do as I say. Now get the jar, it’s on the table. Get it and throw it out the door as far as you can. Do it now!’

  Thom moaned. The upturned jar was covered with spiders, as was the book next to it, as was the whole kitchen table, legs and all! ‘I can’t,’ he wailed. ‘I can’t do it!’

  ‘Sure you can. Just remember, they can’t hurt you.’

  ‘They’re an illusion?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. But believe me, Thom, they can’t hurt you unless you let them. Focus your mind on the glass alone. Try not to think of anything else.’

  Something dropped on to Thom’s head and when he lifted his arm to sweep it away, his hand contacted something much more bulky than he had expected. He sucked in a noisy breath and swept the spider away, using both hands to rake his hair, and stamped his feet like a child having a tantrum. He glimpsed the grey body and thick legs of a hunting spider falling into the bristling mass as he executed his unintended war dance. Again, he was spurred into action, his fear hiding behind a thick layer of revulsion and panic. Forgetting that his left arm and leg were supposed to be debilitated (the wonderful power of panic and adrenaline combined), he ran for the table, frantically sweeping his arms before him to knock away the hanging spiders in his path, skidding once and almost going down, but mercifully regaining his balance and rushing on.

  It wasn’t much of a distance between door and table, but it might have been a hundred miles as far as Thom was concerned, a gauntlet run that would have tested the bravest of men. He reached the table in no time at all – given the odd hundred years or so – and froze, his hands poised to grab, but his mind not quite prepared. Spiders crawled and slipped over the glass jar, the jar itself merely the entrance or exit, whichever way one chose to view it, of an endless tunnel through which tiny denizens of an underworld fled out into the light.

  He could feel things dropping into his hair again, almost as light as snowflakes, as he considered the overturned jar, but his concentration for the moment was too fixed to swipe at them. Blunt needles scraped at his scalp. A tickle ran down his cheek.

  ‘Pick it up!’

  Not only was Rigwit’s vexed shout in the room, but it was also inside Thom’s head. As if mesmerized, he looked round to see a small kinetic structure made up of teeming black shells and minuscule brown bodies and thousands of moving threads, all in the shape of his little friend Rigwit. Only the slanted eyes that blinked and dislodged clinging spiders and the moving lips gave indication of any life beneath it.

  Crawling things wriggled into the elf’s mouth as he shouted, ‘Throw it out, do it now before it’s too late!’ The words were only mildly distorted.

  Once again, galvanized, Thom leaned forward, flicked off as many spiders as he could, then picked up the dirty glass jar by the upper rim of its opening.

  Spiders – hundreds, vile, loathsome things – continued to spill from the top, but he took no notice of them – why should he? He was sharing a room with millions – and holding it out before him as though it exuded a nasty odour, he made for the front door. It was awkward to hurry across the piles (by the way his light boots sank into them, there had to be more than one layer) of crawling shells and bodies and his fear, among so many other suppressed fears, was that he would fall and land among them. What chance then? They would smother him in seconds, weaving their webs around him so that eventually he would be bound tight, unable to move, unable to swat them away . . . He forced himself to stop that line of thinking, tried to go numb, halt his imagination in its stride. Not easy . . .

  Thom made it to the door and, with the glass vessel now in the crook of his arm (he shuddered and shuddered again until it became a constant shiver, for the spiders were still climbing over the rim, from there dropping to the floor or scuttling up his arm) he turned the key in the lock, grabbed the door-handle, and pulled. It jarred in its frame. He had forgotten it was bolted top and bottom.

  He yelled in frustration and immediately two, three – God, it felt like a whole scrum! – maybe four spiders rushed into his mouth. Disgustedly and weepingly, he spat them out, not in the easy, cool manner that Rigwit had, but in a convulsive hawking, jettisoning them all like mushy pips, save for one which got caught between his tongue and the back of his teeth. He tasted its blood and the slop that was its juices and gagged, wanting to throw up but the vomit inside refusing to budge. Anyway, there was no time.

  He reached up to the top bolt and lumps fell into his eyes so that he shied away, ducking and rubbing the lids before blinking them clear again. He was in a nightmare, only this was real and his mind knew it was so. No other choice but to keep on, keep moving, do what had to be done. Thom located the bolt beneath the rummaging infestation, closed his eyes (he felt drops of rain on his eyelids – drops of rain? He wished!) and yanked back the bolt. The door moved a fraction inwards, the top pressure off.

  Wasting no time at all and refusing to believe his body was now entirely covered in jostling spiders – accepting that fact was the sure way to madness and again, he had no time for that – he sank to his knees and grabbed what he hoped was the end of the bottom bolt. His grip crushed the little bodies smothering the bolt’s upright and he pulled hard so that the bar flew out of its supports. The door moved a barely perceptible millimetre, fr
ee of its restraint.

  Something tickled the inside of Thom’s ear and began to venture further. Thom stuck in a finger and mashed it, then dug it out with the nail. It was hard – oh God, it was so fucking hard – for Thom to maintain the numbness of mind, but really there was no choice, he had to move on.

  He rose and pulled the door open, all in one movement, and it was good, so good, to breathe the warm summer air, to see the brightest of bright stars, even if he had to blink away irritating distractions just to clear his vision. It was invigorating, exhilarating – my God, it was bracing! – just to feel and look upon the outside world, the reality instead of the nightmare. But it wasn’t over yet.

  A stinging in his back. A bite to his neck. Pincers digging into his arm. They were becoming real! They had evolved from the phantasm to exist in the honest world, despite what Rigwit had told him. He realized that the longer the invasion had gone on, the more his belief in the normal had been weakened, so that the real had withered, finally giving in to the unreal. He was feeling pain, and if he didn’t follow through quickly, then it would be too much too bear.

  Thom grasped the jar in his other hand, his right hand, ignoring the spiders and bugs and God knew what else that scrambled from its opening, drew back his arm and threw.

  The glass jar described a perfect arc, bodies spilling from it like a jetstream all the way, and landed almost at the forest’s edge. All his strength and determination gone, Thom sagged against the door-frame.

  And watched the hurrying creatures as they fled the cottage, forming a rippling stream that funnelled back into the dirty glass jar.

  THOM AWOKE with a start, and overwhelming panic almost seized him yet again. He sat up in the bed and saw that he was alone in the bedroom and that it was daylight. The night was over, finished with; he was safe. The sight of the chest of drawers pushed up against the door reminded him of what had taken place the night before, the invasion of spiders, walking among them, throwing the carrier out of the cottage.