‘Hold still’, Adam cried each time he laid more eggs in my mouth. My surroundings grew more and more nightmarish each time – a great swirling, tearing void that stole the soul. I tried to avoid looking at it. Sadly, this meant I had no option but to look at Adam, who was suspended in front of me.
‘Hold still’ he cried, each time he spun a new web covering my face, providing a cocoon for his freakish offspring – it was an intricate construction, cleverly woven, with supports plastered to my ears, nose, cheeks and forehead.
Each time I would wait patiently, for hours, days, weeks, even – time had lost all context by this point – until there was a tickling, questing sensation of thousands of tiny legs in the back of my throat, and within minutes his children would spill from my mouth in a display that made me weep and cringe in fear. I hated Adam, and I hated his children.
Infrequently I would reflect upon the frankly obscene Freudian interpretations that could be drawn from this dream. I assumed it was a dream.
And each time Adams eggs hatched and his demonic children were sent forth unto the world to do his bidding, I asked him – ‘why me?’.
And always in the same cold, genteel British accent that hinted at barely repressed rage and arrogance as old as the sun, he would reply – ‘does there need to be an answer?’
Years later – although maybe it was minutes – I would realise that he never actually answered my question.
And once he had replied he would, invariably, clamber across my body in the deeply disturbing, scuttling motion so unique to arachnids, and once again lay eggs.
And all the while the shifting, ethereal hellscape of blood-red sky and twisting mist would contort about me in patterns frightening to the eye.
For decades, or seconds, this continued, with my mind growing gradually more unhinged, and Adam becoming bloated and fat as his progeny covered the earth.
And then I awoke – to find hundreds of spiders on the wall, staring at me.
