The Beneath

Dare we venture to understand what we find inside? Dare we know ourselves completely?

Chris clung to the wheel, white knuckled and red eyed, spinning it frantically this way and that as he battled for control. The highway was busy and somehow he had veered onto the wrong side of the road. Cars and trucks roared past him with fearsome velocity, swerving and sliding to avoid him in a dangerous drug fuelled dance. Chris had no idea how he had not yet been collected, smashed into the dashboard and the windscreen and through the forehead of the oncoming car’s passenger. He could hear the rending metal, the rattling of shattered glass and the final splatter before it all went silent. Forever. Or worse still, only a partial impact, catching the edge of a bull bar and swinging sideways, rolling and tumbling and grinding until the bouncing metal cage was finally still. Then he would find that he was trapped, impaled, his legs pinned and the car on its side. His passenger, his 13 year old sister, Amber, already dead, suspended by her seatbelt above him, bleeding right onto his face. At this point he’d wish for death but death does not rush. It finds him hours later as the firemen try to cut him free, any resemblance to the boy his parents knew smeared on the bitumen.

Yes, this is what happened. Or rather what started to happen. A semi, breaking to avoid an impact, skidded and jack-knifed, jutting out into Chris’ path. He clipped it and rolled. The world spun and the highway was engulfed by sparks, shattered glass and a hail of bitumen. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, waiting for the horrible ride to end. When he opened his eyes the car was on its side, but he was not pinned. Amber was no-where to be seen. Better yet, she was never in the car at all, and the highway had just been an old dirt road round the back of the catchments. Chris nearly passed out from sheer relief. There was no danger. He unbuckled his seatbelt and crawled from the wreck, hugging the soft, dewy grass. His hand found an old bicycle and he strained to free it from the scrub. Dirt and leaves and dried grass fell away as the bike came free, revealing a large insect population. Webs and grubs and ants, bubbling up through holes in the dirt. The removal of the bike unsettled them and caused a frenzy. They swarmed from the ground and found their way onto his skin, crawling up his legs and hands. Biting. Chris flailed and spun and slapped at his skin, swatting them away, but one proved resilient. He ran his hand over it twice, three times, yet he didn’t even touch it. The skin turned a bright red around it, the red of infection. It was underneath the skin.

“It’s underneath the skin!” he shouted. “A tiny spider!”

“Give it here, quick,” the Doctor said. “Tweezers.”

A nurse placed them in Chris’ hand and then hurried off down the hall with the doctor.

“You’ll have to do it yourself. I’m very busy.”

Chris took the tweezers and tore at the skin, pinching and pushing and pulling and bleeding, but he couldn’t get hold of it.

“It’s too deep!” he gasped, sweating. “Get the f**k out!”

The spider was visible, burrowing through his skin. It found a vein and he felt it bite. He felt it all through his body, like the root of each hair suddenly turned to embers. He screamed, and the skin ripped open. The spider climbed out, big as a fist, and dropped to the floor. It scurried away down the hall. Chris watched it go, unable to shake the feeling that it took from him something valuable, something he can never retrieve. And he wondered: what if it laid eggs? Now he thinks of himself as the Host.

Chris, the Host.
Chris, the spider incubator.

Author's Note

This was originally a dream of mine, and now it is an exert from a much longer work of fiction (still under construction). Sorry about the abrupt ending, but hey, thats what happens when you dream.

Reviews

[Silas]

This is very good, and I read it to my poetry club after school today and they all liked it as well. It is a tad rough, but that is how dreams are. Thank you for entering.

[Dark Rider]

That dream would freak me out. *shivers* But hey, it was a great story. I really liked it. I wish one of my dreams would be clear enough for me to write about, but they're just too random and scattered that they wouldn't even make any sense. XD I really liked this. Great job! :)

[Spoon]

Thank you! I often wake with a very vivid picture of about a tenth of a dream, and if I can make it stick in my mind I work on it just like a story, trying to find the missing pieces. This was mostly just the one dream, but with a spattering of a couple of others as well. In fact, I use things from my dreams quite often!
Thanks for the review :)

[Dark Rider]

I wish I could, but like I said, my dreams are just too wierd and random, and I forget them by the time I wake up. XD