Snake Eyes

By the time he reached the lift shaft he’d opened a small distance between them but he didn’t believe it was enough. He smashed on the call button. The elevator was right there but the doors opened too slowly. As soon as he could squeeze through the opening, he hit the icon for the third tier, the way out, followed by the ‘close doors’ button. As the steel panels laboured shut, he saw the army of spiders seething along the corridor like a flood. The first ones reached him and leapt through the narrow opening as the doors met and the elevator began its final upward journey.

Three of them made it through, one already biting his neck. He smashed the one climbing his chest against himself with a fist. He tore at the one needling his neck and flung it against the wall of the elevator, the impact crushing it. The third spider’s fangs probed his ankle. He kicked it against the wall and it slid, wet and broken to the floor.

Their venom took its toll.

He couldn’t allow himself to black out; not without first detonating the explosives he’d placed throughout the facility but doing so before he reached the level of the third tier would kill him. He waited as long as he could, the blindness of sleep settling onto him, smothering his consciousness like a blanket. He knew there was a strong chance he’d die from his bites even if he survived the explosions.

Out of time and out of choices, he depressed the detonators.

Far below him a deep rumbling began.

Chapter 2

The spider dream clung like web to the corners of his mind, running a thread into other less exciting reveries about his day to day life, until at last he was no longer dreaming of spiders but instead of his role as a family man. When these wraithlike visions became fantasies he could control and he felt the pressure in his bladder, he knew he was awake.

It was the morning after his thirty-fourth birthday, the day Robert Johnson first became aware of his tube. It was such a shock to him that he forgot the spider dream until a long time later.

The evening before had been a quiet affair; a bottle of Chardonnay shared with Angelina after the kids were asleep. Love, made a little clumsily, on the sofa. Whispered memories of other birthdays—their own and the children’s, hushed talk of birthdays yet to come and all that would arrive with them.

“Matthew is going to be a great sprinter. None of the other boys his age run anywhere near as fast.”

“What do you care about sports, Bob? You never played any.”

“I played Table Tennis. The trophy’s right there in the tall boy.”

“That doesn’t count and you know it.”

They had laughed.

“Truth is, I’d be proud of a sporting son. Being able to do the things I never could.”

“You should be proud anyway.”

He knew Angelina was right. His own father had tried to make a sportsman of him. It had caused of a parting of minds that was never resolved—unless Johnson’s sporting failure could be considered an end to the matter.

He’d stroked her hair as they lay half undressed on the sofa.

“Rebecca will be an astronaut.” He’d announced.

“She will not.”

“A fighter pilot, then.”

“Baloney.”

“A mime artist?”

But Angelina wasn’t laughing.

“She’ll be a woman before we know what hit us.”

He’d squeezed her to him.

“I know it.”

Johnson had been able to forget for those few hours, not completely but enough, about the grind and increasing pressures of his accountancy job. The sheer anonymity of his contribution to the turning of the world scared him at times, but on that night he was, for a few snatched hours, almost content.

He was not used to drinking—occasionally, he had a beer or two at the weekend—so the wine gave him a headache. It also caused him to rise earlier than he normally would on a Saturday morning to take a leak.

In the bathroom he flicked on the dimmer of the two lights. Standing in front of the toilet, he squeezed the head of his penis to unglue the opening of their dried-on sexual fluids. He knew better than to cause Angelina extra work by sending his first squirt all over the bathroom.

It was at that moment, his eyes becoming accustomed to the dull glare, that he felt a movement from the top of his head. It was as if someone had very softly pulled a few hairs. He turned around expecting to see Angelina but he was still alone. The tug came again, slightly harder. As he pissed, he reached toward the bathroom cabinet and pulled open one of the mirrored doors. That was when he saw the tube for the first time.

In a moment of frankness, had he been asked off the record, Johnson would have said that until it had started to ‘pull at him’ he’d never really been aware that it was there at all. But, now that he was looking at the thing, a black pipe about half an inch in diameter that protruded from the top of his head and extended upwards beyond his mirrored reflection, he felt as though it had always been there.

It looked very…familiar.