Free Creeptych by John Everson Page B

front door.
    She tiptoed across the cool sand to the side and squatted to do her business in the shade of a heavy-leafed green bush.
    She couldn’t see the legs that approached as she released a long, long stream of pent-up piss from a fucked up day.
    She couldn’t see how the warmth of her release called to a hoard of spiders like a brilliant red homing beacon, until the branches of every bush and shrub around her hung low with the bodies of eight-legged purple mouths, waiting to feed.
    She did feel a slight tickle when the first brave spider crept up the inner skin of her thigh to follow the warmth. But she thought it was just her own water trailing aberrantly down her leg.
    Until something bit her right where she normally only let Billy’s teeth roam.
    She tensed, and began to rise, though she wasn’t completely through peeing. She reached between her legs with a hand to still the bite/itch and drew her palm back with the remains of a purple spider there, against the damp.
    “Bastard,” she groaned. Her face twisted in disgust at the creature she’d crushed against the folds of her labia. “Fucker!”
    She shook it off her hand and began to stand.
    But at that moment, all of the spiders began to jump.
    They landed in her hair and on her back and shoulders. They skittered down her waist and leapt up from the ground to cover her ankles and shins. They were everywhere. Like a swarm of ants over a spot of grease on a summer sidewalk. They fell from the darkness onto her mouth and crawled around her neck to tickle the lobes of her ears.
    They covered her body like a deep violet skin, and they didn’t care when she maniacally batted and slapped and crushed dozens of them with her alarm.
    There were hundreds more to take their place.
    Casey screamed as the spiders covered her naked body like a skin, creeping with delicate but pointed legs across her breasts and kissing with tiny mouths against the pores of her pubes. But as she screamed, they entered her, from below and above. Her mouths both nether and normal, filled with the chitinous legs of spiders, and she tried in vain to spit them out.
    They kept coming.
    Time To Go
    Mark woke to Billy’s hand on his shoulder. Shaking his shoulder.
    “Have you seen Casey?” Billy demanded.
    His friend’s face looked haggard; his beard had grown overnight, and his hair curled in strange and wild tangents. The Blue Lagoon loincloth tilted half off his hip, but instead of looking provocative, it looked retarded. Billy’s body was not going to win any modeling contests at the moment; its skin was riddled with swollen red hives where he’d been bitten by spiders.
    Mark opened his mouth, yawned and finally spit out one word.
    “No.”
    Jess moaned next to him and rolled over to see what was up. Billy caught a dark shadow of nipple before she slapped a hand over her chest to hide herself. Strangely, he wasn’t tantalized in the slightest.
    “When I woke up, Casey was gone,” he said.
    “She probably just woke up and took a walk,” Mark suggested.
    “Yeah,” Billy snarled. “Great idea when the island is overrun with fuckin’ man-eating bugs.”
    “She’s not a man,” Mark suggested.
    “Smartass.”
    “Alright, alright,” Mark laughed while stifling a yawn. “We’ll look for her. She probably went back to the tents to get some stuff.”
    Jess rolled out of bed and straightened her scanty outfit as Mark rolled out of bed and stretched next to her. The room glowed with the reflection of the light of morning from the one window in the main room.
    Together the three of them stepped out of the door to the jungle floor. Jess headed towards the path to the beach where they had docked the day before.
    “I can’t believe she would go back to the boat without us,” she said.
    Mark didn’t follow her. He caught a glimpse of something red amid the foliage, and stepped around the side of the hut.
    “She didn’t,” he called, in answer to Jess. His voice sounded thick,