Crawl by Aaron Redfern (ebook reader computer txt) 📖

briefly entertain the idea of turning out the light, but you do not want to be in this strange house in the dark.

Mike is leaning in the doorway between the living room and the foyer, watching you more than the bugs. After a time, he walks over and sits on the arm of the loveseat, near you. He begins to run his fingers through your hair.

You do not want to be here. You do not understand why you are here. You don’t understand what is happening at all.

Mike continues to stroke your hair. One of the strokes is rough enough to pull your head to the side slightly, but the others are gentler.

A huge moth thing is battering at the other creatures on the window, trying to push its way into the space.

There is a sunken feeling inside of you that goes from your abdomen to your chest. It has been rising up in you for a long time. The house is wrong. The house cannot be here. A part of you is coming to a dawning realization--not the part that used to be a Girl Scout, but a part that you tried to bury. It is not buried anymore; it is free, and it is careening up to the surface of your mind. It knows that what you have been through so far was only a prelude, that something is beginning, something big and unimaginably wrong.

Somewhere outside, there is a sound far bigger than anything you have heard yet. It emerges from the other sounds, grows louder and louder. It is like a huge, chopping hum. It is somewhere south of you, somewhere out the window, near the trees. You cannot imagine anything living that would make a sound like that. It is moving; it starts over the forest, high in the air, and then it comes down and down until it reaches the ground. Then it stops. A piece of the night has fallen silent around where you heard it.

Mike’s hand has stopped. “Was that a helicopter?”

“No,” you say. “No. That isn’t possible.”

“What if it is?” He says. “There could be people out there.” He starts toward the door.

“Don’t!” You hiss at him. “Are you crazy?”

He hesitates, and then he cocks his ear to listen for more sound. After a moment, he seems to reach a decision. “I guess you’re right,” he says. “There’s nobody out there.”

The full symphony has resumed. You try to tell yourself that you both imagined a noise that sounded like a helicopter, but you are not convinced. The lesser creatures, the ones the size of egg baskets and table lamps and lounge pillows, peer in at you, jostling like the crowd at a brawl, creeping relentlessly over the glass.

“I’m going to have a look upstairs,” Mike says. He doesn’t wait for you to respond. You hear his steps track across the foyer and thump up the stairs and fade away.

They are pushing to get at you. Sitting alone on the loveseat, you remember another time, the third-closest you have ever come to being really hurt, to suffering violence. You were at a party, and there was a boy. You don’t even remember what he looked like. You flirted a little, because your friends always told you you were too shy, and because he was charming. You ran into him many times as the night went on--in the room where the bodies were dancing, in the kitchen where they filled their cups, on the stairs. You did not take any of the drink he gave you--there was a part of you that knew not to drink it--and instead you found an excuse to be away from him and you poured it down the sink.

You are back at that party; you remember it like it is now. Later, when he sees you again, he comes straight for you, his swagger deceptively soft, his hands in his pockets, he is coming in close and looming half a foot taller than you. And even though you did not take the drink, you see the way he looks at you, and know that the dancing bodies are not noticing you at all. And you think, This is happening to me.

But someone jostles him hard, and he becomes distracted for a moment. You shove through the bodies and run to your car, and you are gone.

The bugs are outside, separated from you only by panes of glass. Somehow, you know that you cannot stop them from reaching you. You feel as though you are only waiting for them to come.

Once, one of your friends convinced you to go rock climbing on a massive cliff wall in the mountains not far from where you used to live. You hate heights. You have never been able to go far even on climbing walls, because no matter how many times they tell you it is safe, you do not truly believe in the protection of the rope. But somehow, she convinced you to come. She said that it would help you overcome your fear.

A third of the way up the face, two hundred feet off the ground, you realize that you can go no farther. There is no hold above you, and none even to the sides. Your fingers cannot grip the rock ahead of you. And then, looking down--dizzied, your vision wobbling in spirals--you realize that you cannot reach down either. If you lower yourself far enough to catch the foothold that you pushed up from, your fingers will lose the rocks and slide away.

You hang there for two long minutes, your muscles screaming, your fingers beginning to tremble, unable to move in any direction, knowing that you cannot hold yourself up much longer. You are going to fall, the fear is pounding through you like blood pulsing out of a severed carotid artery, you are going to die and waiting to die is the worst thing you have ever felt, and suddenly your fingers slip a fraction of an inch more and you just let them go.

Twenty feet down, the rope catches you and you slam into the rocks. You hang there for what feels like a long time, calling back to your friend as she asks if you are all right, and then when you find the strength to move you begin to take yourself slowly back down the rock wall. You spend fifteen minutes in the car while she climbs the rest of the way down, hugging your knees and shaking. You have discovered something. You have learned that the fear of dying is stronger than the desire not to die.

A part of you wants to run to the door and let them in. But not yet. There is still a part of you that clings to hope, that thinks maybe you will make it out of this after all.

“There’s a bed upstairs,” Mike says from the steps. “Come on.”

You look up at him. He is halfway down the staircase with the light directly over his head. Shadows form dark half-ovals around his eyes.

“I don’t want to go to bed,” you say. “I think I’m going to stay down here.”

His eyebrows furrow for an instant, but then he relaxes them. He says your name almost gently. And then: “You’re only hurting yourself staying down here. We can be safe up there. We can forget about this.”

He is coming down the stairs.

“Please just leave me alone,” you tell him.

“Why? Are you afraid?” He comes down off the last step and moves around the bottom of the handrail. “They aren’t going to get in. It’s going to be fine.”

He is in the entryway.

“You can’t make me go with you, Mike,” you say.

“No?” he says. He is smiling, like everything is a game. “Maybe I can convince you.” He is halfway across the room, and he reaches out to take your arm.

There is a sound from the basement, loud enough to be heard over the symphony of the creatures outside.

SliiiiiiideTapTapTapTapTap.

In the silence that follows between you and Mike, staring at each other in the fading remnants of a frozen moment, it comes again. Heavy tappings, many of them one after another, as though something with far too many legs, each carrying nearly as much weight as a man’s, is crawling over a hardwood floor.

You are out of the loveseat and across the room before you even understand why, and you are standing there with the door thrown open, looking down the stairs into the darkness at the bottom. There is a light down there now, very dim, cast from somewhere out of sight, and it flickers and sways like a lantern held by someone walking down a dark road.

You are going down, one step at a time, and Mike, his steps hesitant, is following not far behind. You are going down, and more of the basement is coming into view with every step. You have had enough. You cannot let the creature crawl in the basement unseen and watch the ones outside batter at the windows and be trapped between them. Something terrible is down there, and you have to know what it is. There is nothing else left for you to do but face it.

It is long-bodied and low to the ground; its legs, thick and hard as the posts of a chain-link fence, are held out to the sides as it moves along the far wall. How many legs? Ten? Twelve? Its head is a smooth, eyeless roundness that seems fused to its segmented body; underneath it, you can see objects in shadow, some convolution that must be its mouth. Near the back, its body curves up into a kind of tail, and on the end of it is a hollow opening that glows inside. It emits a beam of light, and the tail is casting around, tossing the beam back and forth in front of the creature as it moves, searching along the ground.

You stand there in horror and awe. And then, as you take the final step off of the stairs and onto the hardwood floor, a beam creaks.

The creature turns, and the beam of light swivels slowly until it rests on you. The head looks up at you, and even though it has no eyes, you know it can see you.

It begins to move. It is frighteningly fast. It covers three yards in the full second it takes you to react.

(YOU ARE GOING TO DIE IT IS GOING TO RIP)

“Go!” You shout, and you are not even sure if it comes out as a word. You shove Mike ahead of you and run after him. He is stumbling up the steps, and you are pushing after him. The thing impacts something somewhere behind you, and the tapping of its many legs is erratic for a brief moment but does not stop.

The door is open and you are in the