Bad Glass

A mirror! I grasped at the possibility. It explained what I was seeing: my own face—half in the hole, half out—reflected in something down below.

I reached in and ran my hand across my cheek, moving it in front of my teeth, but there was no corresponding movement on the face. The teeth and lips, sheared in two, remained clear, unobstructed.

I felt dizzy, the blood in my head rushing and pounding behind my temples. No, I chided myself. None of that fainting shit!

I scrabbled for my camera, slinging my backpack off my shoulder and digging through it one-handed. I did this blind, keeping my head in the hole. I just couldn’t look away—I couldn’t—afraid that if I took my eye off that face, it would disappear. Just some transitory phantom, caught, for a moment, in the fragile juncture between eye and world. I flicked the lens cap off my wide-angle zoom and brought the camera up to my face. The light was horrible here; almost nothing made its way in through the hole. I cranked open the aperture and tried to hold the camera steady. I took a couple of wide-angle shots in the dark, hoping to capture that line of light in the distance, then flicked on the flash. My hands were shaking as I focused on the face. It was male, I saw. Its hair was black … his hair was black.

I twisted the lens from wide-angle to telephoto, filling the viewfinder. The camera focused, and I found myself staring at a close-up of that quivering eye.

Then the eye stopped quivering—its brow steepled up.

Suddenly, there was sense there, in that eye. And surprise.

I heard a click behind my head and realized that the sound that had drawn me here—those sandpaper whispers and horsehair brushes, that crackling record player—had grown louder in the last couple of minutes, while I’d been focused on the face down below. It was behind my head now, between the walls. And there was movement in that sound. It wasn’t getting louder, it was getting nearer. I braced my hand on the hole’s ragged edge and turned to look.

There were dark shapes in the gap up above. A jumble of moving limbs—large and tentacled things, just inches away. Something brushed against my cheek—just the barest, lightest touch—and I immediately recoiled, my skin prickling in a wave of gooseflesh.

My hand caught on something at the hole’s edge, and there was a brief burst of fire across my palm. Then I was free, stumbling back. I slipped my camera’s carry strap around my neck and took a half dozen steps back. My legs were weak, and for a moment I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep them beneath my body. The sweat on my cheeks was freezing cold.

And there was movement at the edge of the hole. At first, it was just a tiny blur of black—at one spot along the top of the hole, then, a moment later, at a dozen more, all around its perimeter. Then a black, finger-thick tentacle reached out, waving, snakelike, up toward the wall, touching and repositioning itself, as if trying to find purchase. It was a dark, jointed stub bristling with whisker-thick hair.

I was holding my breath. I thought about the camera hanging against my chest, but I couldn’t break my paralysis, I couldn’t lift my hands and start taking pictures. Not now. I was transfixed by that hole—consumed—just standing there on weak, shaking legs, watching as it gave birth to … whatever.

To something dark. And bristling. And wrong.

Then more of those dark limbs reached out, and a form heaved itself through the hole. Considering its initial, tentative movements, it moved fast, skittering on a bouquet of long limbs. A spider, I thought, suddenly flush with relief. Just a spider! But it wasn’t a normal spider. At least, it wasn’t like any spider I’d ever seen. It was huge, about the size of a small cat. And its limbs were surprisingly long, out of proportion with its body. It moved in a quick, rhythmic lurch, hauling itself down the wall in drunken uneven spurts. But fast.

And by the time it reached the floor, a half dozen of its ilk had made their way through the opening.

Now that I could see what they were—or at least I could comprehend their form—I broke my paralysis and grabbed for my camera. I started taking shots, the motor in the lens whirring as I tried to keep focus on the skittering things. I got wide shots of the spiders swarming through the hole—there were dozens now, crowding the wall. I zoomed in on one, filling the frame with a single black spider against the dirty gray carpet. I even got a series of shots of one spider crawling over another; the latter was an undersized specimen, spinning in a circle. There was something strange about the smaller spider, but, caught in its tornado of motion, I couldn’t see what. I lowered the camera from my eye and activated the display, scrolling back to the start of that series.