A Kind of Stillness

As spiders crawl

upon your skin

do you wince

or lie still

awake at twilight

as spindles spin

lacy traps

across your window

and beyond

as spiders nest

inside openings

nooks and crannies

do you wish for death

they hunt for warmth

for breath

for moisture

in your nasolacrimal

they rest

your breath falters

your heart quickens

the clock ticks

toward something

you cannot stop

long the path

to dawn

no saviour comes

only stillness

though you wish

to cry

to scream

you do not move

their razor legs

trace

and bite

your mouth stays shut

you feel the strike

as they intrude

and take you

as their host

say farewell

to day

to night

...

Imagine waking to it.

Not your alarm. Not the light of the new day through your window.

The crawling.

A slow but subtle tingling that spreads across your body before you even open your eyes. Something moving over you. Something alive. Persistent. From your scalp to your toes, across your chest, up your arms, over your face, and down your legs.

You don't move.

You can't.

As much as you want to. Because there is no escape.

You already know.

They're everywhere.

As you try to open your eyes to let light in, you struggle because there are a multitude of black spots distorting everything. As you strain to focus on the black spots, it's clear they are little spindle-like legs tracing careful paths across your watering eyelids and eyeballs. Some are emerging from the nasolacrimal duct, some from your ears, and others from your scalp, waking and marching across the dermal land they wish to poison and inflame.

You feel the weight of something at the corner of your mouth. Something... several somethings slipping along your jaw, down to your neck, pausing before marching onward.

A bite, sudden, with sharp prongs, impacts somewhere soft.

Then another, fangs sinking deep.

Then another.

Your first instinct is to flinch—almost—but you stop yourself.

Because...

Because... everyone knows.

Instead, you don't. You do not touch them.

Not ever.

Not even when they bite. Not even when they crawl the places you don't want them to, the places you'd never want them to. Not even when, inevitably, your body screams in terror to brush them off, to get them away from you.

Because...

Because... if you do, she will know.

And when she knows, she'll come.

...

Tommy was a newcomer. He had only been living in his new home for 24 hours and hadn't been orientated. Hadn't been told about... them.

Unfortunately for Tommy, it's during the second day that newcomers are visited and intruded upon by... them.

Tommy didn't know what was happening when tiny legs started to march across his skin. From his toenails to his calves. From his fingernails to his forearms.

He feels the tingling awareness of something invading him. Many hundreds of something.

First, he gasped. "God, what the..."

Then he slapped hard at various parts of his body. He felt and heard a crunch.

He couldn't see his hands or the entrails and lifeblood staining them.

There was no reprieve, though. There was more crawling, faster and more aggressive. More invasive. The small, sharp legs forced their way into his mouth, muffling his panicked objections.

Then something changed. The marching was less frenzied, more ordered. As if they were lining up, standing to attention.

Then a wail or a squeak from beyond the room.

"Hello?"

Tommy didn't know.

About the Mother.

He didn't know why, but that didn't matter, as he wouldn't know anything anymore.

A large presence was felt in the room, and though he couldn't see, the Mother was about to claim her next victim.

By the morning, the smell had started to settle, and there was a large silken cocoon where Tommy once was.

Over the days that followed, cleaners came to slowly decompose and consume the cocoon. By the end of the third day following Tommy's death, a new neighbour had moved in.

I wonder if they know the rule.

Time will tell.

It always does.

* Thanks for reading! Author's Notes: not sorry.