it looks at them, and they look at it

(I’m not sure if I ever posted this one publicly; back when I still had a patreon it was there, but now … well, here it is. 2.1k words of trauma and spiders)

Kids on one side of the glass, the spider on the other. There are three of them there on that sticky summer day, Grace and Florence and Ash, set adrift in the zoo’s carefully curated expanse while their three sets of parents get drunk and reminisce about old times. They’re all old enough to be left alone—and more than old enough to insist that they’d rather not have an older teen disinterestedly keeping an eye on them—but not old enough to be left to downtown’s tender mercies. There are kidnappers about, everyone knows that! And worse things too, lurking in the shadows and blasted across every news channel lest anyone might forget that the world is a dangerous place.

And so: the zoo.

Tickets are more expensive than they used to be, on account of the fact that this zoo plays host not only to a wide variety of creatures cruelly plucked from the world’s edge but also to a handful of things stolen from places beyond it. Like the spider. But it’s educational, so their parents paid with a minimum of fuss. Florence and Grace have a bit of extra money for treats and (small) souvenirs; Ash does not. Her father is forgetful and her mother is dead, and the other two don’t mind that she’ll inevitably have to borrow some money that she’ll never be able to pay back. They’re friends, after all, as they stand there looking at the spider.

“It’s really big,” murmurs Florence, and when the other two are done tripping over themselves to say “that’s what she said!” they agree: it really is big.

There’s a plaque right next to the glass.

“Michelinie’s Spider,” it reads, “was retrieved from its home in a parallel earth by the heroic efforts of NPWA’s 25th expedition team. It is named for its first known victim in the 22nd expedition team.”

The plaque continues on at length, with detailed information about the spider (and the fact that it’s not actually a spider in the sense that earthly spiders are. It just looks like one), but none of them have read that far.

“How many people do you think it killed?” asks Ash.

“Must be hundreds! Look at the size of those fangs!” Grace’s bedroom is plastered with posters of alien fauna instead of ambiguously gendered pop stars. Sometimes her parents worry about her.

“And all those eyes …”

It has far too many eyes, spread all across the chitinous expanse of its face and even spreading down onto the edges of its mandibles. Most of them are pitch-black orbs: two big soulful ones the size of the kids’ heads ringed by layers of smaller, carefully spaced ones. But everywhere between them—everywhere else on its face—are other eyes. Irregularly placed, asymmetric, disturbingly human. Eyes that swivel in their sockets, eyes with delicate irises ringing their blown-out pupils and big green fields around dots so small that the kids can hardly see them, eyes that definitely, definitely don’t belong on the spider’s face. Eyes that stare with more intelligence than any alien beast should be allowed to have.

“It’s so cool! You know that they think the extra eyes develop with age, right? The smaller ones that they killed didn’t have any of them!”

“I don’t like it,” Ash says. “It’s yucky.”

“Can we go sit down? I feel weird.”

“But just look at it! Do you think it’s going to turn around? I want to see its spinnerets.”

“I, I really—”

Florence is as curled up as she can get without lying down, hunched over, arms wrapped around her stomach. Making herself small. There’s something squirming inside her as her stomach clenches and her bladder screams for mercy, something that she knows shouldn’t be there, and all of the spider’s many eyes are fixed on her—

She makes it halfway to the restroom before she throws up, a big splash of undigested candy-colors staining the concrete walkway and pooling against the lip of one of the zoo’s many sunken enclosures. The rest of her retreat is punctuated with a series of smaller puddles, full of frothy yellows and greenish-blue specks. Ash follows after her, doing her best to help; other zoo-goers look on in disgust or sympathy.

Grace can’t bear to step away from the spider, not yet, as its eyes swivel to look at her and its head tilts to the side just enough for her to notice. There’s something about how it looks at her, as it sits there inside its glass cage: something that she can’t get enough of.

Six years later, with the three of them on the cusp of adulthood, the NPWA is shut down and the portals it dug through reality’s walls are destroyed. It’s a terrible scandal. No one seems clear on exactly why it’s a scandal, but it definitely is one. Everyone involved is embarrassed, disgraced, deeply regretful; the scope of resignations threatens to bring down the government.

The three of them don’t really pay attention to that, though. They’re too wrapped up in their own lives! Bright-eyed, barely legal, looking forward to all the promises the world seems to offer—Grace’s acceptance to Stanford’s xenobiology program, Ash’s latest boyfriend’s plans to spend a year backpacking across Europe, and Florence’s …

Florence hasn’t had a good time of it.

She started pulling away from the others just a few months after the spider. Stopped talking to people in school, stopped wanting to go outside, started skipping school and wearing the sorts of clothing that one wears when they don’t want to be seen. Just spends all day curled up in her dark bedroom, staring at who knows what on her desktop’s flickering CRT and clogging up the phone lines.

Her parents don’t know what to do about her. Neither do any of their friends, though they keep on suggesting increasingly contrived reasons to push the three of them together again. They were such good friends when they were just girls, you know? And maybe, just maybe, Grace and Ash could convince Florence to open up, right? It can’t hurt to try.

It does.

There’s just something wrong about Florence. The others can smell it (and smell her, musky-sweet and faintly dusty, a thick smell that pools in her room and lingers in their nostrils whenever they can’t find the right excuse to avoid seeing her). She’s not the sort of person that any upwardly-mobile young woman wants to be friends with, and definitely not the sort of person that they want anyone to know that they’re friends with. They tell themselves it’s tough love, but it’s just toxic.

They don’t stay in contact after Ash and Grace leave town.

Nine years after the zoo, and Grace is back home for a few weeks: one semester has just ended and her summer program (an internship at one of the few labs which was allowed to keep its old NPWA xenofauna samples) hasn’t quite started. Her head’s buzzing; she can’t stop talking about how excited she is, about how frustrating it is that Stanford keeps on talking about eliminating its xenobiology program entirely, now that the creation of new portals is banned by international treaties. It’s so unfair!

And then Ash is back too, coming off another bad breakup, kicked out of her new boyfriend’s place and crawling back home to lick her wounds and wait for him to come back to his senses. She can’t quite decide whether she’s angry or moping or excited to share stories about her time overseas—the architecture! The food! The people! Everything just feels more real there, or perhaps less; it’s where she was meant to be.

It’s only natural that they’d meet up again, and from there it’s only natural that they’d remember Florence—poor Flor, whatever did happen to her? Why did she, well … why did she do that with herself? Surely it would be a good idea to drop in on her. Surely.

Their parents encourage it.

Florence isn’t living with her parents any more. Something happened, probably, though no one seems to know exactly what and anyone who does know isn’t telling.

“Do you really think we should?” asks Grace, sipping a mocha latte.

Ash sips her own drink absentmindedly, more concerned with glancing around the cafe than the taste. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to see us. It’ll be just like old times, I’m sure.”

“She just sort of dropped off the face of the planet after we left, though. Maybe she doesn’t want to see us …?”

“We dropped her, Grace. And, look, if she doesn’t want to then no harm done, we’ll have tried.”

It’s an apartment building in one of the worse parts of town. The sort of place where people can’t afford to own their own houses and landlords don’t carry enough to make repairs and politicians pontificate about how urban decay is a disease eating at the heart of their communities, and there’s the ugly truth waiting beneath all of those pretty justifications, isn’t there? Dogwhistles thick enough to taste the fact that they’ve always been bullshit.

Florence is on the third floor. Easy to get to, even with the elevators out. The hallway to her door stinks just like she used to, thick with regret and broken promises.

Three knocks and two minutes later there’s an eye at the peephole and a weary voice trickling out through the door’s cracks. “What do you want?”

“Uh,” Grace and Ash glance at each other, “we were told a friend lives here? Florence?”

“… Ash? Grace? why are you …”

“We want to come see you! It’s been absolutely ages,” Ash lays it on far too thick, “and, well. Why not catch up? Since we’re all in town.”

“Oh. Sure, I guess.”

It takes a long time for Florence to open the door. Too many deadlocks, too many keys. When she finally does they’d almost rather that she hadn’t. She doesn’t look well: a frail, spindly body swathed in layers of oversized dresses and hoodies, somehow seeming so much older than them. Deep, dark circles under her eyes, a rasp in her voice like something has gone wrong in her throat. Her gaze is dull, though it sharpens once she’s ushered them inside and taken a few long drags from a badly rolled joint.

The room is badly lit, and the apartment has no interior doors: there’s nothing separating the little bathroom or the bedroom’s unlit mystery from the tatty little couch where Ash and Grace have no choice but to sit except for a few feet, so easily crossed. Grace’s eyes keep on darting to that darkness; Ash tries to fill the room with conversation instead.

It doesn’t really work. Hard to keep things light and friendly when, well … so it doesn’t last. Things get heavy.

“What happened, Flor? After that day at the zoo everything just seemed to—”

“We never went to the zoo.”

“What? But we did, back in the summer before high school.”

“No. We didn’t. You two insisted that we had every time I tried to talk to you about it, every time I thought you might be able to understand.”

Something shifts in the corner of the room, something with too many legs and too many eyes, but it’s gone by the time Grace’s eyes flick over to stare at it.

“But … you threw up everywhere, remember? And then you cried in the restroom and we had to go find your parents to take you home early.” Ash nudges Grace. “You remember, right?”

“Yeah, of course I do. How could I forget the Michelinie’s Spider?”

“See? I don’t—are you okay, Flor?”

She sighs. “Of course not, but my memory is fine. That happened, just … not at the zoo. Your family always hated the zoo, Grace, why would they have sent you there?”

“They … huh. It was a treat, wasn’t it?”

“No,” Florence shakes her head, “no, it really wasn’t.”

“So, what? You’re telling us that we both invented everything we saw there?”

“Not everything, just—”, something shifts in the darkness of the other room, large enough to make the building tremble. A dry, dusty smell fills the air. “… no, you should both leave. Please. You don’t need to know. Just. Go home and forget this, okay? Forget me.”

“But …” Florence stands, and Ash reflexively stands with her; Grace is fixated on the darkness, but she stands too when Ash nudges her shoulder. She’s still staring as Florence pushes them out the door, craning her neck to catch a last glimpse of the darkness as the door slams shut.

The last thing she sees is a face with too many eyes, all looking at her.