This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Edgar Cantero
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle
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eISBN: 9781542090421
Cover design by Belief Agency
The phone buzzed somewhere inside the bundle of Ian’s clothes across the room. Noah looked up from his book.
“Are you gonna get that eventually?”
Ian’s head popped up from the bed above, upside down—the only time black curls didn’t block his sight line.
“Hmm, no, I don’t think so. Which one are you reading?”
Noah offered him a glimpse of the spine. True fans should be able to tell each Harry Potter book apart by thickness only.
“Why do y’all Hufflepuffs like Goblet of Fire so much?”
“Ravenclaws wouldn’t understand,” Noah replied, returning to his reading. The phone buzzed again with impeccable timing. He sighed, peering back at the dark confines of his bedroom, hardly discerning the pile of clothes by the door. “You know, it could be Sam.”
Ian grinned his perfect goofball grin. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Seriously? That’s how it’s gonna be?”
Buzz.
“If you don’t get it, I’ll get it.”
“No, no, don’t get it,” Ian said. “It’s probably Sam. I don’t want to speak to her.” Then he added, upon Noah’s already huge eyes widening at the insinuation of a schism in the pack, “She’s been chasing me all day, trying to get me alone, you know? I feel she’s asking me for something I’m not ready to share with her yet.”
“What—like your third secret Tumblr blog?”
“Yeah, exactly that.”
Buzz.
“I’m getting it,” Noah decided, pulling the sheets away.
“No, don’t!”
“I gotta pee anyway.”
“There’s a giant trapdoor spider under your bed!”
Noah stopped dead, like a god had slammed the universe’s “Pause” button. He stayed there for a second, contemplating the hideous mental picture those words had conjured. His right bare foot hung in midair, inches above the fuzzy carpet.
He gazed up at Ian’s inverted face spying from the upper bunk.
“There is,” Ian elaborated. “It’s dark brown, hard-shelled, hairless—you know, not the bulbous-bodied, flimsy-limbed kind, but the sturdy, compact one with thick legs, sort of like a tank with eight knees. The worst kind. And it’s six feet long, three feet tall—”
“How does it fit under my bed?”
“It dug a hole. And if it senses you treading on the carpet, it will jump and snatch you with its forelegs and drag you under the bed, and it will devour you alive in the dark. It’s a fact now.”
There was a deep-space silence after that, one that not even the phone dared break. A silence in which the room, lit only by the flashlight Noah was using to read, seemed to nod in agreement with what was spoken, grave and appalled.
“It’s a fact now.”
Quietly, Noah pulled his foot back onto the bed. He looked up at Ian, who was now shrugging—upside down, so sort of pulling his shoulders down to his head—like this wasn’t his fault.
“Why would you do something like that?” Noah asked, nonplussed.
“Well, you’re safe while you stay on your bed.”
“Oh, great—so gracious of you! Do you think it’s comfortable sleeping directly above a giant spider, separated from it only by a foam mattress? It’s like the sickest thing you could wish for a friend! It’s not even a smart move—you’re trapped in your bunk too!”
“Oh, no, I’m not. The spider can only reach so far. I can easily jump beyond its leg span from up here.”
“Well, no, you can’t,” Noah argued. “You can’t because the shadows in the room are antimatter, and if you land on them, the atoms in your body will be obliterated instantly, and all that’ll be left of you will be a stupid puddle of neutrinos on the floor.”
Ian tautened up to survey the room from his watchtower. The bunk bed stood in the corner against a window, and the full moon, plus the security light outside mesmerizing the moths under the eave, provided ample light on both decks, as well as some of the desktop to the left, but it cast a slanted labyrinth of gray-and-black polygons on the floor, meticulously drawn by the bunk bed, the desk chair, a paper bin, Ian’s bag, Ian’s sneakers, and several other things that he should have put away before going to bed. It was like his own lovable, chaotic good nature had been turned against him.
“Okay. Good play,” he said, retreating back into his sheets, making sure his pillow was under the blessing of the security light. “Congratulations. I’m not the one who has to go pee anyway.”
“Fine, I guess I’ll just wet the bed,” Noah complained. “Maybe the spider will move out when it notices the ceiling’s leaky.”
He waited for Ian’s comeback, but there wasn’t one. A few seconds later he heard the rustling of sheets above—Ian going to sleep.
His first intention was to continue reading, but as he rolled onto his chest again, he became aware of his own belly just a few inches above the giant trapdoor spider’s face (or its back—he didn’t know whether the spider would be just lying flat under his bed or burrowed vertically, looking up). He couldn’t possibly read a word like that, with his abdomen suspended a few centimeters above large, venom-dripping chelicerae, ready to slice through the skin on his chest as if it were warm butter. He couldn’t see the print on the book; he couldn’t see the book. All he could see was the mattress beneath him, like a gauzy veil sparing him the vision of a dark cave beyond, choked with a single gigantic animal, hard and cold and hungry. He tried lying on his back. It didn’t feel safer. He sat up against the window with the book on his lap and resting the flashlight on the windowsill. He wondered what would happen if the wooden slats under his mattress gave way now. He would fall into the burrow, probably behind the spider. Maybe the spider was too big to turn around in its hole. Maybe he would live just long enough to appreciate the inside of a trapdoor spider’s lair.
Something moved on the other side of the mattress. The one above.
“Hey.” Ian’s voice came from the upper deck. “Would you like to come sleep up here?”
Noah repressed his first, impulsive answer. “Why would I want to be with you now?”
“Look, I’m sorry about the spider, okay? I never meant to—aw shit!” Ian shouted, without really catching Noah unprepared, because during that em dash between never meant to and aw shit, something remarkable had happened: the security light had turned off.
“Shit! Light! LIGHT!”
Noah rushed to grab his flashlight and point it at the left side of the bed. Ian was already hanging down, long legs dangling in the air, searching for the edge of the lower bunk, timestoppingly close to the carpet. His hands released the rail just as Noah grabbed him and pulled him in, both crashing against the wall.
“Shit! Ah! My hair! Check my hair!”
“It’s okay!”
“No, it’s on fire!”
“No, it’s okay! Ian! You’re okay! It only burned through the ends—I would’ve felt the gamma radiation!”
Noah was holding him by his shoulders, shaking him. The flashlight only accented the panic in Ian’s face, freckles flushed off his cheeks by the sheer panic.
“You’re okay,” Noah soothed him again, remembering then to check the lights outside—or absence thereof. “The power’s out.”
“The power’s out?” Ian parroted. “Well, that’s no big deal, is it? It’s not like someone decided that the shadows were antimatter!”
“Well, the shadows won’t last forever, will they, because the sun will rise! How are we gonna get rid of your spider? What are you doing now?”
“I’m creating a safe space,” Ian replied, reaching up to pull the quilt from his former bed, then leaning out to tuck it into the edge. “Hold me.”
“Why do I have to hold you?”
“Because if you don’t hold me and I fall off the bed, the spider I created will devour me, ’cause I’m an idiot! There! Happy now?”
They fell silent, gawking at each other. Noah wasn’t happy. At all.
Still, he clutched Ian’s waist with both hands while Ian tucked the quilt between the bunk and the mattress above. The quilt hung like a screen, offering the flashlight’s beam a surface to bounce off and scatter warmly inside their fort. It didn’t add much to the full moon’s light—except for maybe a cozy yellow hue when combined with the gold brown of the bedposts.
It felt like the interior of a nest box. Once he was done, Ian sat back against the window and tried raising a hand and waving at the quilt. The moonlight only cast a blurry shadow, too dim to mean any danger. If he did it directly in front of the flashlight, the shadow was somewhat invigorated.
Noah sat next to him, wondering whether the extra weight would be inconveniencing the spider downstairs too much.
“Why did you have to make it a spider?” he moaned.
“I don’t know,” Ian said, slowly taming his breath. “Don’t you like spiders, a little?”
“Oh, it was a present, you mean? That’s nice—did you keep the receipt?”
“No, but seriously, you kinda like bugs, don’t you? Beetles and stuff.”
“Yeah, beetles and stuff, not spiders. Spiders are monsters.” He wiped his dry mouth. The full moon illuminated the goosebumps on the back of his neck. “Do you know that in the Amazon rainforest there are spiders so big they eat birds? Like, that’s their name. Bird-eaters. Can you picture it? A bird being eaten by a huge spider? Those two animals are not even in the same league. It’s atrocious.”
“Well, being eaten is no one’s cup of tea, I guess.”
“No, but especially for a bird, being eaten by an overgrown invertebrate, that’s not right, man. What can eat a human being? Say, a tiger. So, okay, I get eaten by a tiger; it’s terrible, it’s painful, but . . . I look up, and I see the tiger’s face; I see big cat eyes, a snout, whiskers, the long, sharp fangs sunk into my flesh . . . and I understand all that. I see the features of a hunter. It’s a mammal feeding on another mammal. That’s logical, that’s the circle of life. I can accept that.”
“That’s a very zen attitude toward being eaten by a tiger.”
“But a bird,” Noah resumed, unruffled by the commentary. “Imagine you’re a sweet little bird, a sparrow or a bluejay. Maybe a young one, one who just fell out of the nest and is learning the mechanics of flight. And you’re hopping along in the thicket, and then out of nowhere, four hairy arthropod legs close upon you, venomous pincers sink into your chest . . . and you look up and you see that . . . that alien face. The claws concealing the mouth. No nose, no ears. Only eight beady eyes, but dead, like black orbs, with no pupils. Just dark porthole windows into that evolutionary excuse for a brain, nothing more than some ganglia knotted into a killer instinct, unburdened by intelligence or mercy. And that’s the last thing you see, for hours of agony, hours of a nightmare you can’t wake from, while the alien mouth vomits digestive enzymes into your bleeding wounds before it can start sucking on your liquefied organs.”
He turned to Ian, both hugging their knees.
“Think of that,” he added. “Imagine if you were born a little bird, a beautiful bird, and look me in the eye and tell me that monsters don’t exist.”
The night, the moonlight, the air felt like ice water, soaking them to the bone.
“Well, when I hear spider I tend to think of a Spider-Man doll I had when I was in kindergarten, but that’s ruined for me now, I guess,” Ian said resignedly. He grabbed Noah’s pillow and squeezed it tight in his arms while he gazed at the empty quiltscreen before them, guessing at the outside world they were not allowed to enjoy anymore. “I’ll understand if you have to wet the bed.”
“Well, thank you, considering it’s my friggin’ bed!”
“Okay, Whiney McCrankson. Jeez.” He couldn’t stop the joke before it came out of his mouth. “Someone got up on the wrong side of the bed today.” The grin barely flashed in his face before he àproposed from that: “Wait, that’s a good point! Just pee over the side of the bed!”
“What, into the antimatter below? I’d better not, the radiation would blind us.”
“Well, keep your eyes closed. Or if your pee falls close enough, the spider might pop out, and we’ll get a good look at it, see how big it is.”
“You said how big it is: six feet long, three feet tall.”
“Yeah, but I was only guessing; it might be smaller. Look, if this is one foot . . .” He measured the distance between his heel and his big toe.
“Actual feet are longer than your feet.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. And also, I should’ve said this before, but we won’t get a good look at it because our eyes will be closed so the radiation doesn’t blind us. Your plans have so many flaws I have trouble keeping up.”
“Gosh, you’re insufferable today,” Ian sighed. “Okay, don’t pee on the antimatter; just taunt the spider out from under the bed. You know, like Harry Potter in Prisoner of Azkaban.”
“What—the part where Harry stands up on his bed and starts peeing over the side? I must’ve missed that.”
“No, the part where Harry catches the Monster Book of Monsters hiding under his bed by baiting it with a shoe and jumping on it as it comes snapping out. I’m not saying we jump on the spider,” he reassured Noah. “I’m just saying we give it a look and reassess.”
Noah considered the plan, yearning for objections, his eyes inventorying the available objects they could use instead of a shoe. There was only the flashlight, which was out of the question, the pillow, or his copy of Goblet of Fire.
“The pillow is too light; the spider may not sense it,” Ian said, reading his thoughts. “It’ll have to be the Goblet of Fire.”
He lifted the quiltscreen, flipping it up onto the top bunk. Moonbeams redrew the roomscape—a shattered pool of light in the middle, like a deadly calm inner sea in a continent of shadow.
The boys stood on their knees on the edge of the bed and leaned over. There was no sign of predators. Exactly as the presence of predators would indicate.
“If it’s small enough, I may jump on it,” Ian announced. “Like, really small, though. Like, just one foot or . . . no, maybe three inches.” He imagined a regular trapdoor spider scuttling out from under the bed, like a clueless old lady tricked by teenage pranksters ringing the doorbell. He imagined the sound of it squishing under his weight, imagined the crunchy exoskeleton bursting under his bare feet, the feeling of thick white innards oozing out and touching his soles. “I probably won’t jump either way.”
“I thought so,” Noah, said, holding the Goblet of Fire over the carpet, eyes fixed on the landing spot. He barely noticed Ian extending a preemptive arm in front of him, grazing his chest, to stop him from falling forward.
“Remember n
ot to hit the shadows,” Ian reminded. “Count of three, okay? One.”
Noah craned over a little farther, managing to get just a glimpse of the crawl space under the bed.
“Two.”
He tried to make out something in the pitch black of that space. The glint of a dark orb. The rustle of pedipalps feeling the air about them.
“Three.”
The book thudded on the floor.
The girls crashed through the door, shouting, “Stay away from the mirrors!”
“STOP! The shadows are antimatter!” cried the boys.
Sam and Rina froze on the threshold—Rina quickly retracting a peppermint stripe–socked foot that had almost trodden into the bedroom.
“Mirrors!” Sam repeated. “Are there any mirrors here?”
The boys scanned the room, like they had to make sure. “No.”
“Good. Because the mirror people are rebelling; if you pass a mirror, your reflection will try to kill you.”
“Okay,” Noah agreed as he factored that into their own scenario. “No risk of that here, but you can’t touch the shadows; they will disintegrate you.”
“Right,” Rina nodded, reckoning the length of the shadow stripe ahead. “We can jump onto the chair and roll all the way to the bed; we’ll take my bunk.”
“No, you can’t take the upper bunk—it’s flooded with antimatter,” Noah told her, and he could immediately feel his sister’s glare, lit only by the window at the end of the hallway.
“I offer you boys my bed for the night, and you flood it with antimatter?” Rina said icily.
“It was an accident! Why do you think Ian’s in my bunk?”
“How can you have an accident involving antimatter?” asked Sam.
“Look, it’s a long story, okay?” Ian deflected. “We’re dealing with some serious shit here!”
“You’re dealing with some serious shit? I almost got killed by my reflection in the bathroom!”
“Oh, big surprise—a Gryffindor making everything about herself!”
“Well, I did ask for help, but I guess Ravenclaws are too charmingly quirky to answer their texts right away!”
At that moment, somewhere, somehow, something made of glass broke.
There's a Giant Trapdoor Spider Under Your Bed (Dark Corners collection) Page 1
