Monday, April 8, 2013

short story


Sleeping With Spiders
By Alec Rogers




He lived in a house unlike any other. It was a two-story home fabricated entirely out of glass of every color a person could imagine. Mountains upon mountains surrounded the little house. He was 15 years old and loved to explore and always wondered what lay beyond the monstrous mountains that enveloped his family’s house. He was very tall for his age. He had short black hair and eyes as green as the moss that grew on the tree he could see from his bedroom. He and his family had acquired acute hunting skills over the years. They had to in order to survive in their harsh environment. They feasted only on the occasional wild creature that would pass though their area. But despite their living conditions, as a family, they were content with living in the mountains. He had no siblings. Only the boy and his two parents lived in the house and he had yet to tell his parents his secret.
         
Every night a spider would come to him in his dreams. This spider would take him on adventures over the wall of mountains he so wished to climb every day of his existence. His parents always told him that the mountains were too dangerous to climb but the spider obviously had a very different opinion on the subject. It was the same spider in every dream. The spider was massive. Its legs were very skinny and long and were as sharp as daggers at the ends. The spider’s eyes were like two very deep pools of blood. Unbeknownst to him, this would be his last night with the spider.
          
This time the dream didn’t start out in his bedroom, where it had always started before. This time they didn’t travel over the mountains. Each experience was always different, but never this different. This time the dream started off at the foot of a dark and rather forbidding forest full of twisting black trees that came together to create a walkway into the forest. As always, he willingly followed the spider into the woods, trusting the spider’s judgment as he always did. The boy heard a screeching noise in the distance. It was the most terrible sound he had ever heard in his life and it only built in intensity as they made their way farther into the forest. The noise became so unbearable at one point that the boy had to stop in his tracks before the spider saw and forced the boy to push onward. They finally reached the spider’s destination. At the dead end of the forest, there was what appeared to be a well. It was constructed of little red bricks and looked as if it had been there for a very long time. The noise vanished as they started to approach the well and a deafening silence enveloped the two of them. The spider had never had the ability of talking so he only motioned toward the boy and then towards the well as if asking him to go into the well. The boy then hastily replied to the spider’s request with a shake of his head. The spider had always been very convincing but had never asked him do something like this before. It was clear that the spider wouldn’t take no for an answer. The spider took the boy and tossed him down the well. It seemed like forever before he heard the deafening sound of his head crashing against water. And that was the last time the spider visited the boy in his sleep.