Spider Time

 The silence in Blackwood Manor was not empty; it was heavy, textured, and vibrating with the sound of a thousand tiny, chitinous legs.

Elias sat in the high-backed velvet chair, his body pinned by thick, translucent silk that anchored his skin to the rotting upholstery. He had stopped screaming hours ago. His throat was a raw, blackened cavern, shredded by the desperate, jagged sounds he’d made when the first of them crawled out from the weeping plaster of the ceiling.

They were not like the spiders of the meadow or the cellar. These were pale, translucent things, the size of dinner plates, their abdomens pulsing with a rhythmic, sickly bioluminescence. They didn't just bite; they curated.

Elias watched, his eyes darting in terror, as a spindly, multi-jointed leg pried his left eyelid open further. The spider moved with the rhythmic grace of a tailor. It didn’t want to kill him—not yet. It wanted to hollow him out.

A sharp, needle-like pedipalp pierced the soft flesh of his forearm. Elias gasped, a wet, bubbling sound, as a viscous, acidic fluid was injected beneath his dermis. It didn't sting like a bee; it burned like liquid cold, turning his veins into conduits for the spiders' nursery.

Beneath his skin, he could feel them. Dozens of them. They were scuttling through his muscle fibers, shredding the connective tissue to make room for their brood. His arm jerked rhythmically, an involuntary puppet dance as the spiders inside him pulled at his nerves like harp strings.

"Please," he whimpered, a tear carving a clean track through the grime on his face.

The Queen emerged from the shadows of the mantle. She was the size of a carriage wheel, her obsidian eyes reflecting the moonlight that bled through the shattered windows. She clicked—a sound like dry bone tapping on marble—and the smaller spiders froze.

She didn't rush. She climbed onto his lap, her weight pressing the breath from his punctured lungs. She tapped his chest with a hairy, serrated limb, testing the tension of his ribs. Then, with deliberate, surgical precision, she sank her fangs into the center of his sternum.

Elias felt his ribcage snap. He didn't die; he remained trapped in the wreckage of his own anatomy. The Queen began to weave, her spinnerets pulsing with a dark, tarry silk. She stitched his chest cavity open, pinning the skin back like curtains in a theater box.

He looked down, his vision tunneling into a red-rimmed blur, and saw his own lungs—pale, translucent, and laboring—being draped in white webbing. They were using him. He was no longer a man; he was a living scaffold, a hive-in-waiting.

The last thing Elias heard was the sound of his own skin tearing as thousands of hatchlings began to push their way through his pores, a soft, dry tearing sound like parchment paper being shredded.

As the life leaked out of him, his last sensation was the feeling of a hundred tiny legs walking across his tongue, claiming the final, dark territory of his throat. There was no light coming for Blackwood Manor, and there was no one left to hear the wet, skittering symphony that played on into the suffocating, spider-filled dark.