How about a spider story?

Some people have a love/hate relationship with things, but, for me and spiders, it’s hate/hate. I think it was triggered when I was very young, playing in the back yard, opening the swinging door to the crawl-space under the house that we called the cellar, though it wasn’t really, just a crawl-space beneath the house floor, with supporting posts, and areas where you could crawl in, boards over the dirt, where my Father kept boxes and boxes of Life magazines, because he didn’t want to throw anything away and they had to go somewhere. I liked to crawl under there and open the boxes and look at the magazines. So here I was, a very little kid, opening the door, beginning my crawl into the darker space, when I stopped suddenly, my face just inches away from a web across the entrance, a big black widow hanging in the middle, its red hourglass on the abdomen leering at me, just waiting for me, waiting for my face to come the rest of the way, just inches, so it could get me. I could almost hear it. I sat back immediately, stayed there motionless for a long time, shuddering, facing the death I had just barely escaped. I knew that black widow spiders were poisonous, they could kill you. I got up silently, without a word, went inside, got a bottle of alcohol, a spray bottle, a rolled-up newspaper, a box of matches. I filled the spray bottle, I lit the end of the rolled newspaper, I sprayed the web and the spider with alcohol, then used my torch to burn it all, the web, the spider which I watched curl up and burn and die, much to my satisfaction. I burned all the web, then burned around the edges of the entrance, carefully crawled inside to burn anything more, made it safe again, but didn’t go inside for a long time after.

Many years later, grown up and married, I replayed that experience and the memory of it when I had to crawl under our house in Altadena to get rid of a whole nest of black widows living at the base of the brick fireplace which extended below the floor down into the crawl space by the basement proper, wooden beam supports and dirt too much like the childhood memory I was never able to get rid of. I replayed the experience blow for blow, almost word for word, almost exactly the same but on an even larger scale, more spiders, farther to crawl through the dirt as I sprayed with a better bottle yards farther to the bricks, then lighted the fire which could have hurt the house but didn’t, watched the spiders panic unable to escape, watched them crackle and burn and curl up and succumb to the flames which I kept feeding until it was done burning, fire was no longer necessary. I felt the horror when history repeats itself. And almost so exactly. And I felt the same vicious satisfaction. And the realization that I can’t escape my childhood.

And so I wrote a story with many of the same elements, and expanded the range of spiders, and gave them voices and their own perspectives, and I put myself in the story but changed the location, just to keep it from being real.

And the story appeared in Modus Operandi, Vol. 9, No. 10, October 1978, with my autobiography as “Writer of the Month.” And I include it here, partly to exorcise the memories.

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Coming Out

“Come out, come out,” called Big One, hanging and gesturing urgently. The others were already aware, scuttling nervously in their own realization of the crisis.

Small One’s voice cut thinly into the tangle: “Panic, panic.”

House turned in his hovering place, “The light is wrong!”

Jumping Red was caught by the crash of the Universe thrown far and down.

Big One: “We must come out; it is the end of all. Come out!”

The boy sat on the pavement in the cement driveway, prying with a screwdriver and wiping sweat from his eyes.

“Try and finish by this afternoon,” his mother had said.

He had dragged the old red couch down from the side porch and began work on it after lunch. It was ridiculously heavy, antiquated, an impossible relic from a tasteless age, no Victorian involution, no French fragility, just a clumsy red overstuffed sofa with inferior carving on the arms and feet. But it had Presence, and the family brought it when they moved, kept it long after it was comfortable or even safe to sit on. The seat sagged, the springs came untied, a yawning crevasse like a hungry mouth widened at the back – they named it the man-eater, you sat at your peril and arose with difficulty, guests were always getting stuck, leaving dignity behind; a five year old boy lost his jacket in the couch and it wasn’t discovered until two months later when the family tried to fill up the hole with rolled carpet stuffed in. Retired to the side porch, the couch became the domain of the cat, slipped out of the life of the family, and after two years the question, “Shall we save it? Shall we recover it?” lost force.

“Take off the red velvet,” the boy’s mother said. “I’ll make throw pillows out of it. We may keep the frame, or just junk it.”

Sitting on the hot concrete, the couch in front of him, a neat pile of upholstery tacks on his left, two trash barrels standing by to receive the stuffing, the boy pried methodically with a screwdriver and pulled with pliers, extracting the underpinnings of what he began to think of idly as a curious microcosm.

A small black spider crawled from the shredded netting and hanging burlap, startled the boy, who smashed it with the pliers. Should have checked it. He thought while he worked, of his fear and hatred for the black widow spider, the beginnings of unreason early in his childhood when he had once started to crawl under the house, his face stopping by luck or prescience, centimeters short of a sudden great web stretching across the opening. Centered in the web hung a large black widow, the red hourglass winking horribly from the evil stomach.

The spider was watching him, waiting for him. He drew back convulsively, sat abruptly on the ground and shuddered for minutes. Then he got up with determination, went into the house and came back with a bottle. Very carefully he poured alcohol over the spider as if it were a mass of infection. The legs contracted. He set fire to the center of the web and, trembling, he watched it burn. He worried that the poison might seep through the floor boards into the house.

This personal history acted in his mind as he worked on the couch. The steadiness of his rhythm was broken by the stubbornness of the tacks and the growing blister on his right palm, and his thoughts began to wander as he pried, idle speculation filling a picture of webbing and weaving as each layer of material was removed, yards of cotton batting rolled and dumped in the trash barrels, springs cut loose from the back and bottom, burlap piled, each piece of red velvet brushed and neatly folded. “This is like a great creature I’m flaying, a great whale, layer by layer, stripping away to the bones and the great hollow cavity, treasuring the precious hide. But this is the house of spiders, the gathering place from each city it has passed through, holding in its dark interior, territory and domain for each according to its kind, an ark against the floods of civilization and cleanliness and light.

“Random webs and spiral webs like vortices wait and pull me down face to face with myself and all the darkness of the world. And I am Armageddon to them, they call to each other in the vanishing dark, even now the outer layers are tearing away and light is breaking through.”

Filtered and slatted and luminous the world shook onto its back, the mystic disembowelment continued.

“Brothers!” shrieked Big One. “We must come out! Come out!”

“And if my thoughts were to focus on the many spiders who are surely inside hanging in fear and trembling at the cataclysm, and if my own fear were to project a purpose and out of this direction come the seeds of its own destruction dispelling at once their attack and my own terror… Spiders, of course, cannot speak but I imagine and almost see them, animated by the pressure of my thoughts, calling to each other across the lightening spaces, summoning courage.”

Cutting away a spring, in the midst of his musing, the boy was scarcely surprised as first one, then many spiders issued from the couch and crawled quickly toward him. Struggling against immobility, the detachment of dreams, the boy reached the hammer, brought it down on the first large spider, then leaped to his feet and with the thrill of discovered fear wildly danced each life into the pavement. Until there were no more.

He moved the couch further down the driveway, sat in recovered calm to his nearly completed task, speculated, “I shall never know what just happened, whether my own subtlety were at all responsible, even whether my fear is quite gone. I feel, although it would be foolish to do so, that I could crawl under inside the couch and sit as in a ruined cathedral, and nothing there to harm me.”

And he piled burlap, and folded velvet.