The Itsy Bitsy Spider

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Jane had spotted the light of the candle flickering through the trees. Her car had broken down at the edge of the woods as the night began to fall over the road. She was on her way home from the funeral of a great aunt of whom she had no relation to. The only thing she knew of the aunt came from an unremarkable letter, informing Jane of her passing and the address and time of the funeral.

The town was the kind of place that time had forgotten about, stuck in the age that it was founded. It gave Jane an uneasy feeling and she was quick to pay her respects and leave to get back to her home in the city.

Jane was unable to call for help, as this was a time before cell phones and the town where the funeral was held was miles down the road that was quickly being consumed by the night. She made her way towards the light in hopes that it meant someone lived nearby who maybe had a phone for her to use to call a tow truck.

It was a crisp fall evening and the woods were still and quiet, apart from the sound of the dead leaves crunching beneath Jane's sneakers and a storm charged breeze shaking boney branches on naked trees.

Jane saw the cabin nesting within the shadows of the brush, the light of the candle flickering slowly from the second story window, beckoning her closer like a moth in the encroaching darkness.

She approached the front door and knocked three times.

Nothing stirred inside the house.

She tried to knock again.

Nothing.

As she went to turn the handle on the door the sounds of thunder grumbled and churned in the distance, like an omen from the void.

She would have listened to that omen and left the door shut if she knew the cabin housed a horrifying past.

The elders of the town had passed down legends of an old hag, a witch, who once lived in the cabin. Some spoke of her being older than the town itself, that the settlers who founded the town discovered the cabin already built upon their arrival. Some said that she arrived with the original colony members, but that no one knew who she was or where she came from; that she wandered into the woods soon after their arrival. The cabin appearing inexplicably. Others swore she had a husband who built the cabin for her, before perishing from a mysterious illness. The native tribes who belonged to the land believed she wasn’t a woman at all, that she was a malevolent and hungry spirit, as twisted and gnarled as the trees that surrounded the cabin.

After the town was established, a series of terrible misfortunes began.

At first it was the screams. Screams that came in the middle of the night, piercing through the trees from all directions, sometimes lasting for hours. Some of the more reasonable settlers thought it could be nightbirds while others believed it was the spirits of lost children in the forest crying out into the night.

Most were convinced that they would be driven mad from the relentless wailing.

Before long, the town began to suffer.

The crops would turn black with thick rot as quickly as they were harvested and when the game that was hunted in the woods was gutted it was found to be infested with swarms of fresh maggots.

The children of the town suffered worst of all.

A terrible disease spread amongst them; Deep purple welts formed in their mouths and on their eyes, amassing quicker and darker with each passing day. Three days after their contraction, the welts burst and masses of brown spiders came pouring from the wounds.

The settlers started to suspect witchcraft was to blame for their misfortune.

Folks began to disappear only to be discovered days later, shriveled from rapid decay;

their eyes, their tongue, their teeth and their ears, gone.

It was believed that she would prey on those who wandered alone, luring them deep into the woods, to the cabin. Like a spider catching prey in its web, feeding on their eyes and harvesting the rest of their bodies for her black magic.

When they went to hunt the witch, they were never able to find the cabin. Many would get turned around, end up back from the point they started from. If they were able to press further, their heads would be filled with the sounds of insects, crawling and wriggling around inside their skulls.

The more they persisted in the hunt, the worst things became in the town.

Until, one day, a mother who had lost her daughter to disease went into the woods seeking revenge on the witch for taking her only child. Her grief and her rage enabled her to charge through the woods and find the cabin of the witch.

But the mother never returned.

Some of the elders who passed down the legend of the witch, say that the body of the mother was discovered in the cabin, after her husband led a search to find her.

Her body and the colonies of spiders who made her flesh their home were the only ones in the cabin.

Others believe the witch turned the mother into a spider before turning into one herself and crawling into the shadows of the woods; the husband and his search party finding the cabin abandoned and that’s how it remained until the present day.

There are some who believed that the cabin was never abandoned at all.

However the story was told, no one from the town ever went into the woods.

But Jane had no way of knowing any of this before she saw the light in the darkness.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” Jane called into the cabin.

No one answered so Jane entered.

The air was thick and stagnant in the room. She pulled a lighter from the pocket of her fleece jacket to get a better look but all she saw when she lit her flame was an empty room with a rotted floor and an old iron hearth.

The sounds of thunder drew closer as Jane walked around the inside of the room. The floor of the cabin creaked beneath her feet while she looked for a way to get up to the second floor. Finally, she came upon a ladder leading up into the top room, the glow of the candle pulsating through the hole in the ceiling.

An uneasy feeling overcame Jane as she stared up at the light.

The same uneasy feeling that she had gotten when she was in town, only deeper within her.

As if her insides were filled with swarms of flies.

But she told herself she needed to find someone to help get her back on the road home, so she hesitantly began to climb up the ladder.

When she climbed into the room, she spotted the candle sitting by the windowsill.

Its flame seemed to dance and flicker quicker when she entered. The rest of the room appeared empty aside from the shrouds of cobwebs that clung to every surface.

A sudden burst of lightning flashed outside the window.

That’s when Jane heard the humming coming from behind her.

Despite the cold rush of fear coursing through her veins, Jane turned around.

She saw a woman standing in the corner, humming a tune Jane recognized as a nursery rhyme her mother used to sing to her.

Before Jane could muster up the courage to ask the woman if she was alright, the woman turned her head slowly around to face Jane.

Jane couldn’t move, she couldn’t speak, she just stood frozen with fear.

Staring into the two dark, bloody holes where the woman’s eyes should have been.

The dark holes seemed to stare directly into Jane's soul.

A smile creeped across the woman's mouth, as blackened blood oozed from the holes where her teeth should have been.

A crash of thunder shook above the house and the candle that had been dancing wildly by the window suddenly went out.

Jane tried to scream but there was no sound.

She felt the spider pouring out of her mouth and onto the floor.

Screams from the forest echoed in her ears before everything went dark.

No one ever found out what happened to Jane.

Some people thought her aunt left her an inheritance that she used to travel the country. Others were sure she was abducted on the road when the police found her abandoned car.

The people from the town told stories of how the witch had claimed her.

But when they went to find the cabin, it had vanished.