The Tower of Brahma: Chapter 39 - The Spiders

07/02/05

The withdrawal effects of spider's venom are draining the rest of my will to stay awake, but I must get this out.

I awake screaming in the agonizing pain to end all agonizing pain. A crawling madness was tapdancing across the miles of raw nerve endings. Through venom-induced nightmares the psychological horror that was befalling me had suddenly registered. I aim to throw myself upwards, reeling and swiping my skin clear of this insanity!

I found my body paralyzed as my eyes began to focus on the large beady arachnid eyes staring down at me. I could feel the thousand other sets of eight legs as they searched out a spot to inject me with their biological poison. The spiders had swarmed my body in the middle of my dreaming, and I fear that this happens every single night.

I began noticing the bites a few years back. One or two here and there. Lower back. Inner thighs. Buttcheek. After that I saw the bags under my eyes, and the constant weariness I felt. The more I thought about it, the further back I could feel the lack of energy, the withdrawal of interest in my life.

As a teenager I slept my sunny, summer afternoons away. My deep, dark, dreamless slumber being that of a person in a coma. For years it seems something within me called forth the spiders, beckoned them to me in my sleep. My parents’ old house was a breeding ground for all sorts of insectoid life. And so the call went out and they answered. Crawling and sliding across my sheets, from out under cracks and crevices, insects of all shapes and sizes nestled upon my chest.

They spoke their wisdom to me through the tapping of insectoid morse code across my receptive flesh. Tapping in the philosophies, cultures, and insight of their existence, I learned the mappings of the insect kingdom. But it was the spider and it's metamorphic venom that unleashed my mind and let it soar into the continuing upward spiral of sentience. This mapping fits across all spectrums of reality. All matter, a slave to its weaved pattern.

Web strands held down the feral canine that beat within my chest. A wounded wolf sitting and dying of the poison in its vein, fresh from the Spider's betrayal, born of the spider's corruption. Red-eyed and snarling, it lay writing in pain until its mind reached across the murky waters of consciousness and was one with the stars spinning in the cosmic skies.

Consciousness makes a desperate leap, seizing the computer in my hands, and I am deliriously spinning about like a lunatic on the frayed edge of collapse.

"Where am I? Where have I been?" I growled.

The words echoed down the hollowed halls of my veins, and the empty response was all the response necessary to bring the entire memory block crashing down upon my back.