8 Legs Up

8 LEGS UP

C. W. Clark

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Smashwords Edition

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Copyright 2011 C. W. Clark

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work, in whole or in part, in any form.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations and products depicted herein are either a product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

Chapter One

There are dreams of a better life, and there are dreams of children walking hand in hand together. There are dreams of fame and power and sacrifice and fancy, and then there are dreams of black pudding. That last one was mine. This particular topic may not have been truly a first for me, but I can say with a great deal of confidence that it wasn’t my usual fare. I reserved that honor for more important things like heroics and seducing women with my undeniable machismo. But on this occasion, it was a rolling sea of black pudding that captured my subconscious and undulated around me in gooey swells. I was lying atop the creamy, dark ocean, kept in place by the dense substance and a raft of pudding skin that had formed beneath me. I rose and fell with the peaks and troughs, simply being, or just as likely ceasing to be. The pudding finally tired of supporting me and soon after my rubbery float disappeared beneath the surface, I was called down into its depths. It beckoned me with promises of butterscotch and banana at the bottom, but I resisted my fate. I thought buoyant thoughts and felt myself regaining my place at the surface. The ocean threw all manner of enticements at me but I refused to succumb to the temptation. I willed myself to stay on the surface and enjoy the convenience of breathing air.

Angry at my defiance the pudding yielded to eight long cylinders of scorn that pushed up past the tension in the surface to tower over me. They were long and segmented and curled around my still form with a slow certainty. The world flipped and my pudding ocean leaked down around me in long, spiny strands. I looked wildly from side to side, unable to see the entire picture, but getting enough of it to form an image in my mind. I was held fast to the underside of something huge and furry. In the distance, a pair of long, black fangs as large as mountains hung down past the horizon of fur. They seemed too curved toward me, too much like they were reaching back toward me with those hollow points glistening with a luminescent green fluid. There was a lurch, and I felt myself jerked upward, my ass and one of my feet having been absorbed into the flesh of this thing. Another lurch and then another drew me further in. I could only watch helplessly as the light from that world disappeared as I was slowly, inescapably drawn inside the body of the beast.

****

Dude, you were dead.

Yeah, that makes plenty of sense since I’m talking to you right now.

Maybe you’re a ghost, Marty said as he pushed his finger into my shoulder, rocking himself back with a little shove. He was built a bit like a weeble, with his center of gravity firmly ensconced around his midsection. His long, spindly appendages seemed like they were an afterthought of his construction. Nope. Not a ghost. But you were dead. I checked with the mirror and everything.

You were baked out of your skull, man. You were latched on that bong like a third lung.

Nah, man. I can hold my weed. I saw you dead, and now I see you alive. You’re fucking Lazarus, man!

Right. And for my next miracle, I’ll turn Old Milwaukie into Guinness. Face it man, you just got some bad weed. Someone cut your shit with lawn clippings. Hell, last night was the first time I blacked out on that stuff. You need to find a new dealer. Marty fidgeted in place on the seat beside me like it was on casters or something. There’s nothing worse than smoking ragweed when you’re just looking for a good mellow. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he was still riding the green wave the way he was playing solo twister over there.

You think so? Do you remember that spider?

I remember a dead spider. And that was about the last thing I did remember from last night’s little blowout. We were feeling pretty tuned in to Mother Nature and ran across some big brown thing all curled up under the bed. Marty launched into some long-winded discourse of how it was obviously an Homo Arachnis, cause it’s a spider that lives in the home. He had a hell of a documentary accent, so I went with it. To the best of my recollection, last night’s stimulating conversation went something like:

"Too bad it’s dead. I would love to see this thing running free. I mean, eight legs, all moving at once."

"I know, Marty had said I only have two hands and they’re like all over the place."

"I bet we can bring it back to life. Too bad I don’t know any insect CPR."

"Dude, only one thing you gotta know. Google."

He was right. Google is the second brain we all wish we had on permanent standby. We did some searches and found this really cool website with recipes for bringing dead things back to life, as well as one for some killer peanut butter chunk brownies. The recipe, the one for raising the dead, involved drawing all these shapes around the deceased, which we laid out reverently on the kitchen linoleum. On top of that, we had to utter a jumble of words that sounded like an Aborigine reciting the Gettysburg address backward. I remember pronouncing them in all their guttural glory and they came out easy, which is odd since I have been known to have trouble with some of the bigger words in English. Somehow these damn things just about spoke themselves. It was toward the end that I blacked out, but not before getting a cramp in my stomach that felt like someone was trying to pull an octopus out of my bellybutton. Then there was nothing.

What did you do with it? The spider? Throw it away?

No, man. You don’t remember? It fuckin got up and walked away. You brought it back to life, and then you were dead.

You’re such a retard, I said, stopping the truck in front of a blue dumpster that had been tastefully covered in graffiti penises. I toyed with the idea that maybe, just maybe, some punk kid was trying for a rocket ship motif, but if so, they put the airbags in the wrong place. What kind of messed up kid thinks slapping willies on a dumpster will make him cool? I flicked the lever to my right, and the lifts rolled down in front of the truck to get ready to embrace the trash box. I felt a little bad for the truck at having to touching the filthy thing at all. Maybe I should invent some lift-condoms or something for just such an occasion.

Dead spiders don’t get up and walk again, and neither do dead garbage men. I caught myself staring at a speck that slowly made its way onto the dash from the ceiling. It dangled and then thumbed its nose at gravity and floated back to the roof. It was just bad shit last night. Bad shit. I went ahead and pushed the lift forward. Just sitting around is for suckers. If you’re not doing, then you’re getting done, and I’m not ready for anyone to do me. Well, not guys at least. Or ugly women. Well, really ugly women, anyway.

****

You hear stories of the old age express and all the baggage cars of memory it leaves behind as it gains speed toward the great train station in the sky. You think, that will never happen to me, and then find yourself asking what will never happen? Mine must have jumped the track and plowed into an oil refinery or something because my memory for the rest of the morning was moth-eaten and ragged. The afternoon was damn near completely gone. I must have been operating on autopilot because I had made it back to my apartment, but I’d be damned if I could tell you how, why, or if I ran over anyone on the way. In fact, the first thing I recalled after the dumpster of shame was standing in the kitchen of my apartment and staring at the floor. It was, at one point, such a nice floor. It was a faux white tile design that had been lovingly glued down to the subfloor just before I moved in. I liked to theorize it was to cover up the blood stains of the previous tenant, but that was all conjecture. Now, an intricate network of big sharpie figures squatted on the linoleum like bloated tattoos. Each design was drawn at one of four points around a central circle as, from what I could recall from the depths of the weedy haze, an oh-so inspiring website demanded that each one be precisely aligned with the four corners of the globe. Of course, this had led to a huge debate about how a sphere could actually have corners, so we settled on lining it up with a compass. Since we couldn’t find one of those, we pretty much rock-paper-scissored our way into where east was and filled in the rest.

At the top, the defacto north, was a symbol that looked an awful lot like a robot snowflake. It was all crossing lines and right angled shapes at the tips. To the east was an ornate cross that looked like it was being scaled by a moose or reindeer. Watching this spectacle were two crude figures, one with a spikey sun for a head and another that just might have been a duck. I wasn’t really clear on that one. At the bottom was a circle with black and white figures of a bear, a turtle, a buffalo and a fish all drawn with jagged arrows through them. And the west was something that looked an awful lot like a lump of crap being sprinkled on by flowers. How quaint, it even had stink lines. Between those were little dancing stick figures, performing acts I’ve only seen while flipping through the pages of the Kama Sutra book as a teenager and then later as an adult and probably sometime last week. I can’t remember if those were from the website or something Marty and I thought would spruce the whole thing up. Geez, I’ve got to stop smoking that shit.

The circle itself was decorated at intervals with alternating lines and squiggles. All in all, I found myself fairly impressed with what we were able to do while baked like a loaf of French bread. The total design space took up about three square feet and completely and utterly ruined any chance I had to get my deposit back. I pinched the bridge of my nose with a thumb and middle finger and closed my eyes forcefully. I still didn’t feel right. Something felt like it was missing, or I was missing something, or something was missing me, or, oh hell, I don’t know. I opened my eyes again and saw this hazy after image of the design turned forty five degrees. The blue-white figures faded slowly, but not before it registered that the stick figures were all wrong. They were no longer in pairs, and there were no longer just eight of them. I mourned the death of monogamy as I counted another six figures enjoying little stick orgies before the afterimage disappeared for good. I tried squeezing in the same place again, but all I could muster from that was a bit of a headache and a sore nose. I couldn’t ever get that ghostly blue porno to come back. Ah well, what do you expect for free? One thing I knew for sure is that there was no longer any dead spider in the center of the circle. Whether it got up and left on its own or Marty and I taped its legs to toothpicks and pretended it was a cross-country skier, I couldn’t recall, nor did I particularly care at this point. I was tired and felt like weasel crap. I needed to find my bed.

****

I dreamt of a woman, neither old nor young. She was a mother, or at least really enjoyed hugging children that looked an awful lot like her, and was dressed in light beige animal skins with blocky bird shapes sewn in around the hem. Long tresses of golden hair hung down freely to her waist. The children she held all had dark hair, braided down the back with tanned skin drawn tight over their cheekbones. The woman’s skin was the same, and they all looked completely famished, surrounded on all sides by a desolate landscape without food or game. Her children, sons, were perhaps in their late teens or early twenties, but they were small and weak from hunger. She drew them close to her, and they shared their sorrow together. A man plodded unhappily toward the group, his spear dragging the ground and burdened not by game, but by his own shame.

The woman pulled herself away from the children and embraced her husband. She then faced her sons and husband and told them what they must do to survive. Her sons were speechless, and her husband was outraged and ashamed. They knew she was far wiser then they and was powerful and special - a favored of the gods that walked the earth. And so they had to obey.

She was slain with mercy and love and stripped of her clothing. They formed a line in the field, the youngest son with a spear, the oldest with a rope tied to a large, wedge-shaped rock, and then the husband, with his wife’s body. The youngest son moved forward, breaking the crust of the earth with the tip of the spear. The eldest son then followed him, dragging the rock in the groove made by the spear and churning the dirt out each side. Then the husband followed, dragging his wife’s body along this trench. This continued for row after row, the family weary in heart and body, but refusing to fail their mother by not honoring her sacrifice. As her body dragged along the earth, pieces of flesh were snagged by rocks and old roots, and fell off into the grooved channels, until finally nothing was left of her at all. Even her hair, bleached white by the sun that day became one with the ground. Why I was tormented with this gruesome spectacle was beyond me. I couldn’t think of any mother issues lingering in my subconscious. We were close enough, for a mother and son, but she passed away years ago, and I never once felt like spitting on her grave. Nevertheless, the dream ran its ugly course, and I continued to watch it all.

Her family abandoned the spear and rock and got down to their hands and knees on the earth. With their hands, they filled in the grooves, burying their mother and allowing their sorrow to be fully unleashed. There was wailing and sobbing and even singing as their tears dampened the earth they pressed on top of their mother’s remains. When all had been done in the field, the exhausted family returned to their tiny home.

The dream showed me glimpses of the days that followed. The first morning, there were green shoots in the once barren earth. A few more days and those shoots were higher than a man and boasted long, flat, green leaves. Even more days passed, and the plants had birthed ears of corn, complete with the same pale hair as the woman. The kernels of the corn were not uniform by any means, at least not the yellow ears I was used to, but different hues of red, brown and black, ghostly reminders of their origin. But to the People, this was life, and the family rejoiced and sang praises to their mother’s spirit. Time moved on, and other families moved in to share in the bounty of food during this hard time. They were taught to praise the Corn Mother, as they called her now, and to replenish the earth with her seeds. The corn brought birds that had travelled wide and far, and they in turn brought other seeds that grew grass and trees. This brought the plant-eaters, so the people could hunt and grow strong, and…

I opened my eyes with a bit of a start. That was most definitely not the dream about the bored housewife with an unhealthy fascination for the trash collector and his incredible Velcro pants. It wasn’t even one of those random dreams where I found myself battling a mountain of alien cannibals for the last yellow Twinkie on earth. And don’t ask me why I should fear alien cannibals or why they would want a Twinkie anyway. It’s just a dream, after all.

I pulled off the covers and staggered to the kitchen. Dreaming about matricide really worked up an appetite. I was famished and set about pouring myself a bowl full of Frosted Woman Flakes as quickly as I could. Normally, I’m not too keen on eating human flesh, even if it’s soaked with milk, but somehow this felt okay. I scooped a spoonful out of the bowl and lifted the golden, crunchy flakes to the sky in an offering of thanks before popping them into my mouth. They’re gr-r-r-r-reat.

I turned away from the counter with the notion of sitting down at the little two by two card table, which had been unceremoniously shoved off to one side of the kitchen to make way for the magic graffiti, when something changed my mind. Directly in the center of the table sat a brown and white house spider of impressive size. Normally, the sight of a plump spider wouldn’t faze me a bit. I was okay with them, they were okay with me. There was a miniscule chance that the sight of a plump spider in the middle of my table might trigger some primal instinct to give me a minor case of the creeps, but that wasn’t the case. It was the sight of a plump spider in the middle of my table giving me the finger that did the trick. Okay, fine. Spiders don’t have fingers. But it was certainly giving me the leg. My new friend was about the size of a half dollar, and it stared at me with every one of its eight tiny eyeballs. It stood stock-still with a single forelimb extended theatrically into the air.

I set the bowl down on one corner of the table and dragged out a chair. It made a horrible noise as it sputtered across the linoleum, but both of us kept our eyes locked in a mortal embrace. He, I was only guessing here since I didn’t take the time to turn it over, refused to flinch. Could this be the dead spider from the other night? I had no way of really knowing. The last time I saw that spider, I thought it had about twenty legs, so my memory wasn’t that much help. It could have been. The thought of a zombie spider was ridiculous, and unless this was an arachnid messiah, coming back from the dead was impossible as well. More than likely, it could have been just playing dead or hibernating for the winter when we found him curled up and dry on the floor.

I sat down on the chair and reached out with the back of my hand to shoo him off the table. He immediately crawled onto it without any hesitation. The tiny legs tickled my skin as he perched contentedly on his new roost.

You’d better get off little fellow. I’ve got to use this hand to eat, and I don’t think either of us wants you near my mouth. To my astonishment, the spider hopped off and repositioned himself in the center of the table. As shocked as I was to think it was flipping me a bird, I was double that when I embraced the idea it actually understood me. I daresay that I entered stroke territory when it followed up understanding me with its next trick. It began to pivot on its legs so its abdomen could wag freely in an excited motion. I was eating breakfast with the world’s smallest puppy.

Visions of mental institutions began to dance in my head. Something was definitely either wrong with the world or wrong with me. Black-outs, crazy dreams, and dancing undead spiders all pointed to a single, unhealthy conclusion. I was nuts. I began to hyperventilate before willing myself to calm down. There was a logical explanation for everything. I was simply hallucinating. That’s all. There were millions of chemicals out there that could cause these. Whatever they used to cut that weed, it was still running around in my skull. That made me feel a little better, but even so, if it didn’t stop soon I was going to end up in the hospital or the psych ward. I wasn’t sure which one I’d have preferred.

The green numbers on the microwave told me that without a doubt, I had to get to work. All right Scruffy, you be a good boy today, I said, embracing the hallucination with a dismissive humor. I retrieved a grey button up shirt and pair of jeans from the half-dirty pile on the floor and put them on. I tended to save the fully dirty pile for weekend wear. Stepping into my muck-waders and dragging on a baseball cap completed the ensemble, and I looked back over my shoulder at the obedient arachnid.

Stay put, I’ll be back before too long. Oh, and if you need a fly or something, there are plenty lying around. He gave me the leg again as he watched me leave. I was beginning to get the impression that it wasn’t a hateful gesture, rather an arachnid version of a wave. I looked back one last time and instantly regretted it. I imagined I could see his little black eyes quivering with sadness. I refused to feel guilty for leaving my imaginary pet spider home all day long. It wasn’t rational. It wasn’t sane. Guilt rode me like rodeo champ all the way to the office.

****

My main responsibility at work was to drive the truck that picked up the garbage and to make sure that we didn’t miss any of our appointed rounds. Usually, this job took a CDL class A and B license, nerves of steel and a keen eye for time management. We all had the license, but the other criteria were in short supply. They picked me because I had, so far, actually managed to keep the truck on the pavement for the entire route. Not a ringing endorsement by any means, but the alternative would leave the city full of rotting trash and angry citizens. Marty tried driving the truck once before and only narrowly averted lawsuit by Waffle House. He did not keep the truck on the appropriate section of pavement and apparently the proprietors of Waffle House 451 took exception to this. Who would have thought bringing the dumpster inside the restaurant through the kitchen wall and turning the front tire into a giant onion ring would cause such a stink? There was the usual shouting and pointing of fingers as well as some looks from the patrons that seemed to say I wonder when that will be on the special. Thanks to Marty’s choice of parking spaces, it took half a day to extract ourselves from the deep fryers. It only took about half a minute to extract Marty from his driving privileges. After that I drove the trucks.

I arrived at the depot on foot after six blocks of arduous walking and removed the padlock before sliding the gates apart to the P-U corral. There was a yard full of mint green haulers arrayed before me, all decorated with their own patterns of splattered filth. Through chemical reactions and a failure to properly wash the trucks, the refuse had eroded into the paint to form intricate markings that were as unique as fingerprints. I paid homage to the zebra truck, the melting cow, and screaming orca before stopping in front of the painted lady. This had been my ride for as long as I can remember. She was a magnificent hauler, decorated by a matching pair of purple and orange paint stains in the back shaped conspicuously like giant boobs. I was, however, brought up a step or two short by a newly installed hood ornament. I had to search back in my memory to make sure, but I was fairly certain nothing was perched in front of the driver’s side of the windshield yesterday.

As thoughtful as it was for someone to decorate for me, I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with the new décor. Seated on the hood was something that looked an awful lot like a pre-teen girl, dressed from head to toe in a bipolar outfit of red and black. Even her hat was split right down the center. She was reclining against the glass with her dark hair spread out in a fan behind her. Her legs weren’t long enough for her feet to make it over the edge of the hood, but luckily for the sake of all that was decent, she had them crossed. She was way too young for the Basic Instinct shot. Her legs, arms, and face were all well-tanned, but her most striking feature was the two huge brown eyes that bored into me when she looked up.

"So, you are the Daddy-Long-Legs-Man I’ve heard of. Can’t say you’re entirely what I expected, but then