text: Jane leaned across the arm of my deck chair and whispered something dirty. Kurt squealed on my lap, gasping as the fireworks exploded over our heads. The reflection of the kaleidoscopic colours on Lake Whitemer looked like an identical firework was going off not so far from where we sat, I’m sure Kurt believed that was really the case. He couldn’t talk, but on the off chance he chose this moment to spit out his first word, Jane did not want to chance him drawing a selection from the pool of what she was saying now. “What do you think?” she asked, fluttering her eyelids. “I think whoever’s putting on the big show across the water had better cut it so I can get you to bed,” I replied. “It’s the fourth of July,” she pointed out. “The Americans will keep at it until the sun comes up.” I pulled myself out of the deck chair and passed Kurt to his mother. He made a happy little hiccupping noise as he moved through the air. “Bed time,” Jane said, cradling him. “I’m afraid it’s past both of our bedtimes. Your father is going to spank me if I don’t get to bed soon.” She looked at me when I didn’t answer, half amused and annoyed. “That was the perfect set up. You’re supposed to say, ‘I’ll do it anyways’, or ‘too late’. Something like that.” “Sorry.” I was distracted. I heard something moving around against the kitchen window behind us. A mouse? No, larger than a mouse, maybe a raccoon. When I turned and peered through the window, it was empty. “Miles?” “Hmm?” I turned. The light of the fireworks dyed Jane’s hair green, then white, then the bright cherry red of a fire truck. “Is everything alright?” she asked. “Yeah. I thought maybe I heard an animal inside. Wait out here a second, I’ll check it out.” “I told you, we should’ve had someone come and clean the cottage in May. This is what happens when you’re only here for three months of the year. Something else moves in.” “Yes dear,” I joked. I opened the screen door and it whined on its hinges. I tensed, ready to hear our scuffling guest streaking for the doorway and my unprotected bare feet, or the obnoxious clanging of a pot knocked onto the floor. I heard nothing. “Hurry up,” Jane said in a low whisper. “I’ll be back to deal with you in a minute,” I said, stepping into the kitchen. I groped blindly at the wall to my left, then turned on the light switch. The kitchen was just as we’d left it. If we had a furry house guest, it had abstained from chowing down on the leftover hot dog from dinner. I walked through the kitchen, past the TV in the back half of the open space, and down the hallway. The basement door was shut. Nothing had run down there to hide, and if the mice living down there were hungry, they had not come up into the kitchen. “Coast is clear,” I said over my shoulder, but Jane was already in my ear. “Good. Get in bed.” “Yes ma’am.” \*\*\*\*\*\* I woke up the next morning feeling more rested than I had since I started managing the corporate accounts at BD. I rose carefully from bed, not wanting to wake Jane, and tiptoed across the room to peer into Kurt’s crib. He was sleeping with a stuffed teal elephant tucked under his arm. His little chest rose and fell with hypnotic regular ease, and he barely stirred when I kissed his forehead. Our parents and friends had warned us, in that half joking but *no seriously we know best* way that seasoned parents often employ. They love to council mothers and fathers to be. Loved to warn that we would be getting next to zero sleep once the baby came into our lives. I knew this was a rule, but Kurt was a pleasant and surprising exception. He was good for six or seven hours every night, even when fireworks were exploding like cannon fire across the lake. I tiptoed out of the room and after cleaning up the mess from last night’s dinner, I broke four eggs into one pan and fried bacon on another. Last night’s hot dog was untouched, further proof that I had been imagining whatever it was that I thought I’d heard, and in an unpredicted bout of madness I threw it out the open window into the loose forest outside for some squirrel or other thing. Probably a dumb thing to do, feeding the animals was a surefire way to get them coming back, but I was filled to burst with sunshine and summer air. “Breakfast,” I said when Jane wandered out of our bedroom rubbing her eyes. One of my XL t-shirts hung over her waist like a dress, making me question whether she was wearing underwear. I decided to find out after breakfast. “Morning sweetness,” she said. “How’s Kurt?” “Kid’s a champion,” I said. “Still asleep. I don’t even think he woke up during last night's commotion, and I don’t mean the fireworks.” Jane stopped rubbing her eyes. She frowned. For some reason, she glanced at the couch and the armchair sitting across from the flat screen, then back to me. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Looks like I’m not the only one who fumbles at innuendos.” “No, not that. Where’s Kurt?” My heart dropped, but just a hair. “He’s in his crib.” “No he’s not,” Jane said, with a tone suggesting I cut out whatever bad joke I was making. “You brought him out here when you woke up, right?” “No,” I said, already moving past her back into the bedroom. “Look, he’s right he- “ The crib was empty. I dropped to my knees and looked under the crib, then spun and checked under the bed. No Kurt. I stood and walked across the room to check the closet. Jane was entering the room behind me. She stuck her hands under the flat blanket in the crib and tossed it aside, as if Kurt might have hidden underneath it. “Kurt?” she called across the cottage. She was using her mommy voice but there was an edge to it that I didn’t like. “He couldn’t have gone far,” I said, closing the closet. No Kurt in there either. “He was right there when I woke up.” “How long ago was that?” Jane asked. She was back tracking my trail, opening and closing the closet for herself. “Ten minutes? Fifteen tops.” She left the room and I followed. “Kurt?” she called again. I didn’t really start to worry until we knew for sure that he wasn’t in our bedroom, the unused spare, the kitchen, or the bathroom. Jane had pulled every pot and pan out of the bottom row of kitchen cupboards and was crawling in herself to get a better look when I returned to the kitchen. “I’m going to check outside,” I said, striding past her. She said something about the basement, but I didn’t catch most of it. In a moment I was outside, and the closing screen door snatched her words out of the air. I sprinted to the edge of the lake and scanned the surface. I had a horrible frantic fear that I would spot him, a white lump floating calmly across the water, and I would have to splash my way to collect his drowned corpse. The only thing worse would be having to tell Jane, having to show her. For a second, I saw him there and my blood turned into ice. There he was, my dead son on the water. I blinked. It wasn’t Kurt at all, it was driftwood. The log I had mistaken for my dead child was two or three times as wide around as Kurt, and it’s bark was the deep brown colour of soaked wood, not the pale milk white of drowning. *Keep it together,* I told myself. After a lap around the property, calling out a name that my son could not even say himself never mind respond to, I was about as sure as I ever would be that Kurt hadn’t wandered outside. “Any luck Jane?” I asked returning to the kitchen. I knew she hadn’t found him. She would’ve shouted for me. Jane didn’t answer. She wasn’t in the kitchen. She wasn’t in the bedroom or the bathroom either. “Jane?” I called out, panic rising like a cork up into my throat. *The basement*. She had mentioned she was going to look for Kurt down there. I flew through the basement door, and down the cement staircase. “Jane?” I brushed a spider web out of my hair and watched the owner throw itself across the room to get out of my warpath. “Kurt?” No one answered me, but I could tell Jane was down here. A single tired lightbulb was glowing beside a mountain of old cardboard boxes leaning against the back wall. Jane hated wasting electricity. We both made six figures a year but growing up poor had branded a deep hatred for waste into her skin. “Jane?” I had never properly investigated the basement, even when the cottage belonged to my parents, when my brothers and I had the time and energy to explore. It was dark and dusty down here and spider webs clung to every wall. The basement was for storage; not a fun place to be when the shining lake and boundless woods beckoned outside. I approached the ominous mountain of cardboard. Normally the summit was buried beneath a snowy layer of dust, but there were footprints on the top of a few boxes. Jane had climbed over the pile. Looking closely, I observed that she had pushed boxes aside to clear a path to the back wall. I followed her prints. The tops of the old cardboard gave a little under my weight, but they held. When I reached the back wall, I looked down. A passage had been hiding behind these boxes for god knew how long, but Jane had spotted it in the search for her infant son. The hole in the floor opened to a black staircase, leading to a level below the basement. I wondered what had possessed her to go into the foreboding darkened hall, when I spotted it. Kurt’s teal elephant, shrouded in dust and shadows, lay comatose at the bottom of the steps. “Jane?” I shouted. There was no answer. “Hold up a second Jane, I’m coming.” I ran back to the kitchen to grab a flashlight, and when I returned I took the black steps two at a time. The beam of my flashlight and the barest hint of Jane’s shoes in the dust led the way. I left the elephant to watch my back. There were even more spider webs on this level. They hung off the old dark stone in sticky curtains, the bold shadows cast by my light reminded me of tennis rackets. A few of the webs lay broken along the trail. Jane must have torn them loose on her way. There were spiders hanging in the middle of some of the webs. They had fat brown and orange bodies about as large as quarters, and they scurried into cracks in the stone walls when I aimed the light at them. I wondered what the spiders could possibly be catching and eating down here. The path hooked right. I was beyond the walls of the house now, and I judged the path was carrying me under the lake. I started thinking that maybe I had made a mistake. My family wasn’t down here. What I had mistaken for foot prints had been nothing more than a trick of the light. Kurt had tossed the elephant down the mysterious black staircase, but of course he hadn’t come this far in the dark by himself. Jane was probably in the kitchen right now with Kurt in her arms, wondering where *I* had gotten off to. I was just about to turn back when my flashlight landed on Kurt’s sock. I bent and peeled the sock off the black stone floor. It was light blue with white spaceships soaring across the yarn, hand knitted by Jane’s mother. “Jane!” I shouted. “Kurt!” Something moved up ahead. Jane’s shoe scuffing against stone. I wanted to run down the path towards the sound, but it was hard to find courage in the bowels of the earth, so I walked. I was forced to stop when I came to a wall of spider webs. There was a host in each of them the size of a dollar. They scurried away when the beam of the flashlight burned their blind eyes, and I realized that the path was not blocked by the webbing after all. I was staring at another wall. It was a dead end. I nearly turned back again, but my flashlight happened to drop, revealing a battered old trap door with a cast iron handle. It looked like the sort of thing that would prove to be heavier than first guess. The trapdoor was shut, but it was clear that Jane had been through it. There was a single ginger hair caught on the nearest corner. It was catching the beam and flickering it back at me, ushering me down. I pulled the hair and twisted it between my fingers. The length and colour were a perfect match. Definitely one of Jane’s. The trapdoor opened with a screech that could wake the dead. It was heavy, too heavy for Kurt to get through on his own, and yet Jane had passed this way. Had it been opened up when my son came crawling? Had Jane picked him up and carried him farther into the darkness? I could not fathom what possible reason she could have for doing this, but it was the only plausible explanation for what I was seeing. I peered inside, and my flashlight revealed the top of a ladder. It stretched down into a void of utter darkness. My beam of light ran down the length of the ladder, and I saw that if I had walked blindly forward I would have fallen at least twenty feet into yet another basement level. I shuddered. It was cold down there, and a rotting odour was wafting up through the trapdoor. The walls in the deeper level were made from cracked and moss-covered cobble, and the floor was mud. There were small pools of water scattered here and there, and some of them had clumps of grey algae floating on the surface. The lake was finding its way into the chamber somehow, turning the chasm below me into a shallow swamp. I noticed thin white and yellow mushrooms sprouting from the walls and the mud, and I made a mental note to myself to avoid them at all costs. Spider bites were annoying but poisonous fungus could give you a serious infection. “Jane!” I shouted down. “Jane are you down there?” There was no answer. “Jane? Jane can you hear me?” When no one answered I took a deep breath and climbed down the ladder. I kept the flashlight clenched tight beneath my teeth. There was a huge bang the second after my shoes hit the mud. I looked up and the bottom of the trapdoor greeted me. I had leaned it up against the wall, I was sure, but someone or something had knocked it down. Kurt maybe? Had I missed him in the dark? There was a sound that reminded me of a canoe brushing against dirt and rocks as it approaches shore. Someone was pushing a heavy object over the lid of the trapdoor. Definitely not Kurt. “Hey!” I shouted. My cry echoed a thousand times down the grimy trail ahead of me. *“Hey hey hey hey ey ey ey ey”.* I carried on down the path, shouting for Jane. I did not want to push against the top of the trapdoor and discover I could not get out. I was worried enough as it was. I would cross that bridge when I came to it. “Jane!” I shouted. “*Jane Jane Jane Jane ane ane ane ane ne ne,*” said the walls. My boot brushed against one of the mushrooms. I had not noticed the fungus on my first passover with the flashlight, and the beam was pointed ahead of me, not straight down. With terrible speed, the cap flopped onto my boot and stuck there. It did not come free no matter how hard I shook my foot. “Son of a bitch!” A tapping noise behind me answered. Something was walking through the puddles. Something big with a lot of legs. I spun, and my beam of light just kissed one spider leg as it disappeared into the darkness. The thing was as large as a housecat. I shivered. Good thing I had thought to grab the flash light. “Jane!” “*Jane Jane Jane Jane ane ane ane ane ne ne*.” I continued. The minutes seemed to stretch on and on. “Jane!” I called again. “Miles?” That was her, and not too far ahead. Her voice was quieter than a whisper and it was tough to discern my own name over the layers of echoes, but it was Jane’s voice. That was what mattered. “Jane! Stop, I’m coming!” I ran to her. Light burst from my hand and danced across the mud and stone walls. The trail turned sharply left, and when I was ten feet away, Jane stepped out from around the corner. Her skin was eggshell white. Her green eyes were clouded, and a swirling fog was reflecting on them instead of my own scared face. She looked like a ghost. “Jane are you alright?” “Miles,” she said. “Go back. One got me. I’m done for.” I approached. I had to lower the flash light because she kept flinching away from the light whenever it brushed her skin. “Jane! What are you talking about? What do you mean something got you? Where’s Kurt?” I put my hands on her shoulders and she pushed me off, taking a step back into the blackness. “No time Miles. No time. You have to... run. They got me. It got me.” “What got you Jane? What go -” but I never finished asking my question. In the same instant that I noticed the clear rope growing from the back of her head, it was yanked backward. Jane cried out as she was pulled head first into the darkness. She screamed, it sounded like shattering glass, and then the scream was severed. It cut out all at once, like she was on the phone with me and someone had hung up on her end. Her screaming was replaced by horrible crunching and slobbering sounds, and I brought up my flashlight, my only means of protection. The beam flickered, the battery inside warning me to get back to safety. A spider bigger than a grizzly bear filled the hall in front of me. I watched my wife’s waist, then legs, then the heels of her shoes disappear into its squashing mouth, pushed inside by two hairy tarantula legs. They were four feet long at least. I screamed when the strobing flashlight found the spider’s blind glistening eyes. It scuttled backwards, but as it went, eight pinprick pupils with a lingering shred of awareness found me. They marked me, and gooseflesh burst across my skin. Then the spider was gone, hurrying through pools of stagnant water until it was out of the light. I spun and ran as fast as I could back towards the ladder. I discovered with horror that a cluster of spiders had crowded behind me, had been creeping up soundlessly while my back was turned. Discovered, they dove out of my way and the path ahead was clear. Spiders as large as cats and small dogs hurried out of the light’s dying glare. I was reminded of the scene in the second Harry Potter movie with all of the spiders. Those ones did not look quite so mean, did not have those hateful pink eyes. One creature as large as a great Dane stepped to the side of the path. Instead of fleeing from the light, it was content to step aside and watch me run by. I felt its horrible eyes as I rushed past. I knew it could not see me, those eyes had been burned out by the darkness a long time ago, but it knew about light, and it knew when the light was gone it would be time to feed. Something was coming behind me, something huge. Not the great Dane spider, maybe not even the grizzly bear that had eaten Jane. The thing behind me was titanic. It was afraid of the light, but it was also ravenously hungry. The light was dying, disappearing into nothingness and flicking back to life in the next moment. Each time it came back a little later than the stammer of power before. Eventually, the light would flicker out like a candle and would not come back on. The ladder was just ahead of me. I hurtled on to the first rung and climbed for my life. My worst fear was confirmed when I pushed my flat palm against the top of the trapdoor. It budged, but only slightly. Something was on top of it weighing it down, maybe a fat spider. I shoved again. The door opened and inch, then crashed back down. I shoved with my shoulder, stepping up another rung to put as much force as I could into the hit. I almost got the lid up, but the trapdoor clattered back down after opening maybe a foot. I lost my balance, recovered it, but the flashlight slipped out of my hands. I grabbed for it as it fell, got a few fingers around the plastic stem, fumbled it, and watched my only lifeboat sink to the floor below. It seemed to spiral in slow motion. It exploded into a thousand pieces when it hit the ground, but before it did I got a glimpse of the monster following me. It was a spider the size of an elephant. Its wrinkled skin was the same aggravated purple as a flaring bruise, and it was totally bald. I had a sense that it was older by far than the cottage above it, maybe older than the lake. The creature had been lurking nearly out of sight, not wanting to come too close to the waving flashlight while I tried to escape. Before the flashlight burst, I saw its eyes were locked on me. It was slobbering venom and saliva. It could not wait to have me. Through the darkness, I heard it coming tentatively forward through the puddles, perhaps wary I would produce another light. The ladder shook a bit with each of its gargantuan steps. I was out of time. I felt one of its legs prodding the bottom of the ladder. It did not have the courage to come at me yet, but it would soon. I shoved as hard as I possibly could against the top of the trapdoor, driving it upwards with everything I had. It clacked open at last, flinging all of the way back and staying open. The spider who had been holding it down ran back the way it had come and out of sight. I got my arms over the lip of the cavern and prepared to lift myself onto the higher floor. The ladder gave way. I had managed to haul enough of myself over the edge so that I was able to hold on, and my swinging feet kicked the top of the ladder while it went down. The old spider made a horrible titter noise, like a demon giggling. Thunder boomed from the depths as the purple monstrosity pounced on the ladder. The wood cracked in the beast’s mouth. It had been expecting to find me still attached to the ladder, would be furious when it realized it had been cheated it out of a meal. A scent of rotting fish came up through my nostrils and I knew I was smelling the spider’s innards. I was sweating profusely. I wore a t-shirt, and my slicked-up forearms made it almost impossible to hoist myself up. I pushed straight up on my hands, like an olympic gymnast on the hanging rings. My belly button rubbed against the threshold between cold basement and the purple spider’s domain, and I leaned forward. I brought one leg up, pushed it against the back of the trapdoor, and my knees went from open air to rubbing painfully against the black stone. Then I was on my knees. My feet were hanging over the edge of the chasm and I pulled them back quickly. I was aching with sadness for Kurt and Jane, but the glow of relief was there too. I was alive. Broken, maybe mentally fucked up for the rest of my life, but alive. I scrambled to my feet and ran. I made it a few steps, but something caught my shoe in midair, nearly throwing me face first into the ground. I looked down. A hauntingly familiar white rope was trailing from the bottom of my shoe, the one with the fungus still attached, all the way back to the trapdoor. The spider on the other end of the sticky silk rope pulled once, investigating, and I was jerked backwards onto my ass. A cry of pain shot out of my throat before I could catch it and hold it back. Then I was gliding slowly back down the path, being towed like a fish on the end of a line, towards the open trapdoor. I fumbled with my shoe, trying to pull it off, but my hand brushed the mushroom stuck there and pain seared through my hand like it had been impaled on a spear. The fungus squirmed in joy, and when I yanked my hand away, it spread like a gluey paste across my shoelaces. The chunk on my hand did not let go. The pain was transcendent. I felt the fungus melting through my shoelace, beginning to burn my foot, all while I slid towards my doom. I tried to kick off the shoe my using my other foot to press against the heel, but that only brought on more pain. The fungus stretching from my hand down to my shoe had melded itself to my foot, so that when I pressed I felt a rocket of hot pain shoot up through my foot, all the way up to my hand. It was like a stick of boiling chewing gum, but it was binding my foot and hand together instead of my hair. Then I was at the trapdoor. I screamed. I tried to dig in my feet, but it was no good. I felt my foot being pulled over the edge into the abyss, then my legs and then the rest of me. I was falling, howling, and in the last moments before the spider’s maw cut through my leg, and before its legs stuffed the rest of me into its belly, I heard the demonic giggling one more time. I wonder if I will see Jane and Kurt again in the afterlife, or inside of the monster’s stomach.