Jacuzzi

"One hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight."

Alright, brain, let's be nice to our new friend and take this seriously.

"Ninety-seven. Ninety-six."

Let's stare into that candle flame and get hypnotized.

"Ninety-five. Ninety-four. Ninety-three."

A candle? Does she need to make it so voodoo? Hey, stop that. We're taking this seriously.

"Ninety-two. Ninety-one."

Is she really gonna count all the way to zero? No, that's fine.

"Ninety. Eighty-nine."

What if I fall asleep? Or am I supposed to?

"Eighty-eight. Eighty-seven. Eighty-six."

Is this working?

"Seventy-five."

My house. No, this isn't my house. It's some big brick house, out in the boonies. It's one of the houses I looked at before I moved into town. It's the most memorable one. The rent was so low, it was well worth the commute. Why didn't I get this one?

"Seventy-one."

Anna, the affable old real estate agent who showed it to me.

"Fifty-two."

Where am I?

"Forty-eight."

Anna drives me out there in her company car. The city ends abruptly, and we're driving through a pine forest. We talk about my plans, my family, my new life in a new place... We reach a dirt road, the last leg of the trip. I check my phone and am shocked to see we've been driving for forty-five minutes. But the place is so cheap, it's well worth the gas. I just have to figure out how much my time is worth...

"Forty-four."

It's a brick house. Ivy almost completely engulfs the walls. Anna takes me around the exterior. Without her grey hair, her age would be hard to see. She only has a few wrinkles, mostly smile-generated. All of her facial features are small, physically. Small mouth, small eyes. But there's so much energy and cheer in them, she makes them bigger. Her bright red suit looms large on her small frame. It doesn't hang, it seems to burst from her.

The property is huge. There's a shed, a barn, another shed. It's mostly covered with deciduous trees. Their canopy is a valley in the surrounding pines. The ivy fades around the windows and doors, as if it were trimmed a while ago. I don't know how fast ivy grows. But it's creeping back. Most windows are touched by a few leaves. Only the north-facing back wall is vine-free. It features the outside basement entrance: a set of massive double doors in the ground, held shut by a massive chain and massive padlock.

She takes me inside. We talk about all the things I could do with these rooms. I don't really know what I'd do with them. Make food in the kitchen, go to the bathroom in the bathroom, I guess. I kind of like the idea of having this big place all to myself, but I really don't know how to use it. And she tells me that all this floor space is doubled by the basement.

She leads me to the basement door. My body follows her merrily, but my mind knows something's wrong. Why can't I stop myself? She leads me down the basement stairs.

I bolt up from Sarah's bed, screaming. I run out of air, breathing heavily. The candle is still burning, but it's half gone now, sitting in a solid pool of wax.

"It's okay! You're okay! You had a bad dream."

"Where am I?" I say.

"You're in my room. I hypnotized you. But you're awake now. You're safe."

My face blank goes blank. I lock eyes with her, and whisper, "You're not."

I run all the way to my car and peel out of the parking lot. What just happened? I got hypnotized. It must have triggered something. What was that dream? I should probably slow down. Where am I going, anyway?

The Basement

It's one big, sunlit, grey room. It's empty except for a few features: Thick wooden columns. In the far corner, a big, round, beige hot tub with a matching rubber cover. A wide ramp in the wall, with stairs in the middle, leading to the massive outer doors. Three very long ladders hanging from the ceiling by unknown means, running from right over my head, all the way to the corner with the hot tub. Everything in here seems unusually big, and stands out starkly in the big empty room.

"The hot tub works," said Anna. "We have some guys who can move it outside if you'd like."

"Wow," I say. She leads me to it. A pile of snakes falls on my head and shoulders. The world switches to slow motion. The memory is flooding back. It's flooded back a few times before. I have memories of the memory flooding back. Each time it's more vivid, and I feel more detached, like an observer in my head.

My body is frozen stiff. The snakes slither down my chest, under my blouse. I scream, try to pull them out. I can't even slow them down. They're stuck to my skin. Too soft to be snakes. Their bellies are packed with squid-like suckers. They lift me up, and I see where they're coming from. I try to scream again, but I'm out of breath.

Six gigantic hairy spiders hanging from those ladders. They're as big as people. Each tentacle comes from a spider's rear end, lifting me up by sucking on my chest. Both of my hands are gripping one tentacle, fruitlessly trying to pull it off. I'm frantically kicking the air. Anna doesn't say a thing. She moves in to help me, deftly dodging my legs before I think to stop kicking. Her face projects calm confidence as strongly as it projects everything else. I finally manage to speak. "What is this?!"

She unbuttons my pants, unzips the fly, and pulls it apart with purposeful tug. I'm starting to control my panic. She seems to know what she's doing. She just might be able to get me out of this. She grabs my waistband and panties at the hips, and pulls them, jerking me side to side, down to my ankles. She pops back up and looks over my naked waist as if her job is done for the day, and walks off. I begin to realize that she did nothing to help me.

The spiders crawl along the ladders, carrying me like a crane. They look like wolf spiders, with shorter, thicker legs. They're brown with grey stripes, just the right shades as if they're designed to blend into these exact ladders and ceiling. I've caught my breath enough to start screaming again.

They bring me over the hot tub. There's Anna. She pulls back the rubber lid. They lower me in. I whimper. I can't see the water, don't want to. I pull my knees up, try to keep any part of me from touching it as long as I can. In the fetal position, my naked butt is the first thing to hit water. More tentacles come for me, from inside the tub. They coil around my limbs and torso. I fight, flail, splash. Gallons of water spilling over the sides. The spiders' tentacles release me as the new ones pull me down. My flailing is suppressed, but I'm still squirming enough to make waves. One slimy black tentacle darts out of the roiling surface, straight through my gasping mouth and down my throat. They pull me under.

They're going to tell me that the line between symbiosis and parasitism is blurred by the frenzy of change. That only time will make it clear which they are. Well, it's clear to me now. These things couldn't be more parasitic if they tried. The coils tighten. The black breather kisses my pharynx. It forms a seal on my windpipe and starts pumping air into and out of my lungs. But my lungs aren't moving. I'm still under the impression that I'm drowning. The tentacles around my midriff slide up in a corkscrew path, under my blouse, around my chest. Their suckers grip my skin. The expand and contract my chest for me. Other tentacles shackle my limbs. They hold me in place at the center of the tub. These are the biggest of the parasites. They keep me alive and immobile for the others.

The processors are thin little two-inch long dark green worms. There are hundreds of them. They're going to enable me to digest cellulose. I'll be starvation-proof, no longer dependent on human civilization's delicate agricultural system. Quite an advantage, if you don't consider who or what might become be dependent on me. The naiads look like splotchy pink and white, one-to-two-foot long eels, with trilobites for heads. They number about thirty, and most of them are going to attach those heads to my skin. They won't use me for any purpose of their own. They're assistants, working for the other parasites.

And the boss parasite, the one they're all here to assist, is the midlarva. A three foot long smooth white round worm. It wraps itself around my right thigh. Its tapering head is indistinguishable from its tapering tail except for the fact that it's going in first. It has a short, warm, wet life, that midlarva. It begins in a spider's abdomen, lives a while in a breeding pool, and ends in a woman.

This isn't real this isn't real this isn't real...

I'm breathing. That's it! I can breathe underwater in dreams. It's a dream. That explains a lot: How I seem to know what these things are up to, why they they're doing such emotionally valent things to me... I hope I wake up soon.

Why can't I see anything? Oh, I'm squeezing my eyes shut. Makes sense. Should I open them? I already know what's going on in this dream, don't think I need to see it.

Just a dream just a dream just a dream...

Anything's better than this darkness. Okay. Eyes open. Yep, that's what I thought was happening. It's not so bad though. It looks like a coral reef. Like I'm a coral reef. Kind of cool. Just focus on the visual instead of what it represents. I'll be awake before I know it.

It looks like I'm tangled in a mess of thick grey tentacles. Each lined with round white suckers. The thick black cable in my mouth curves off to the left, out over the side of the tub. It's less tentacle-like; round and sucker free. My blouse is alive with tubular bulges squirming around inside. It feels like they're pumping my tits like a cow. And are they...? Yes, they're diddling my... No. Focus on the visual. Down at my waist, it looks like I'm wearing the remnants of a skirt that was dissolved in bleach. A colony of pink-white strands swaying in the water, anchored to me by segmented domes, all over my thighs and butt. The naiads. A few more swimming in to join them. And down at my ankles, there are my pants.

There's something else in here. Thin green worms, all around me. They're all swimming through the water, like a wiggling 3D vector plot, toward the same point. Somewhere between my legs, it seems. I don't remember what these things are supposed to do. I hope it stays that way.

Something stings me. I try to scream, but can't. It's not just muffled, it's nothing. My vocal cords are pinned. The thing that stung me, it's the same thing that had been pushing on my butthole. Now it's inside, and now it comes back out. It pushes again. It gets in faster this time, hurts less. This goes on over and over. I think they feel thinner coming out than going in.

Another sting, from the inside. That thing down there, one end wrapped around my thigh, the other buried between my labia, one of the issues I was trying to forget about. I can't possibly ignore it now. The terrifying sensations are stacking up faster than I can keep track of them. This doesn't look cool at all. That was the dumbest thing I've ever thought.

I see one of the naiads bend around behind me, feel the poke at the back door, the insertion and release, and see it pull back out. I'm starting to suspect something, wishing I could forget it. Some of those naiads have tufts of dark green hair at the tips of their tails, the rest have a smooth round hole where that tuft would be. One of them with hair goes in, and comes back out with an empty hole. My guts are filling up, I can feel it. They're moving inside me. My butt crack is filling up with something, too. I lean my head down to see what it is. Behind my vagina, I glimpse the top of a gently swaying green hairdo, like the tufts on the naiads. Those little worms. Bunched up around my anus, crowding the door, trying to get in. A naiad scoops up a bundle of them, and sticks them inside.

I scream so hard that it breaks the seal, and bubbles escape my lips around the breather. I push my palms into the bottom of the tub, and fling myself up. My calves hook over the side, and I sit up to get my head out of the water. I tear out the black breather with both hands. I take one big, natural gasp. The tentacles lazily retighten their grips on my limbs, as if they know I'm not going anywhere. Something stabs my cervix, the worst pain yet. I fall back, slamming my head and shoulders into the water. I look down. With my ab muscles relaxed, now I can see the cause of the pain. A tubular bulge in my belly. That white thing uncoiling from my thigh, wiggling deeper into me. The bulge hooks, curls around into a disc. The white worm's flailing tail gets shorter as the disc expands. I scream my throat raw as it disappears inside me. I slip out of consciousness.

I find myself in a familiar situation with my eyes shut and activity happening all over me. I feel hazy, more distant than ever, as if I've run out of fear. I'm back underwater with the breather in my throat. That much, I can feel. As for the rest, I open my eyes. Of course. Now the giant spiders are fucking me. Just one of them, it seems. Hard to tell with all those legs. No confusion about the fucking part, though. It's clearly thrusting between my legs. It's got a thing going in and out. They've been up there on the ladders since they lowered me in, watching everything. Now each one lowers itself into the tub, fucks me, and leaves, one after the other. They fuck me for hours, days, weeks... They're still fucking me.

That can't be right. I'm driving a car right now. Alright, they serially fucked me. That happened. But only six times. Each one had a turn. I remember. Each one had its own style, its favorite position. It's my first time getting to know them as individuals.

It doesn't go on forever. The last one is done now. He leaves me floating. What's next? I don't want to look down and find out, but can't stop myself. Another swarm of creatures are swimming into my vagina. No, it's only a cloud of semen. What a funny thing to take comfort in. There's a lot of it. It's floating out in one big strand with pieces breaking off, waving in the water, like white seaweed growing between my legs. I feel nothing but numbness down there. The disc-bulge is still present. I try to take stock of all the new things inside me. How long before I'm more things than me?

There's Anna. She peers in at me, her face broken up by ripples on the surface. This whole thing has been going on in a hot tub, with the outside world, dry land, and a human being, just feet away. She pulls the cover back over the tub, sealing me in darkness.

Breeding Pools

The memory feels so real. more than real. More than real? What does that mean? It sounds like something a crazy person would think.

Ancient monsters lurking in the world's shadows. Not necessarily a scary thing, and I don't think that just because they make me. They want to keep a low profile. They don't want to mess with us. Not unless they're backed into those dark corners. Ancient monsters facing an sudden threat to their power. That's when they get scary. But I seem to be driving right back into their countless arms. And still too fast. Am I trying to get pulled over? This highway is crawling with cops. Just infested with them.

It can't have been be real. I signed the lease that same day. I've been living in that place for months since. The story doesn't even work within its own logic. How did I glean all that information about them? Maybe the house has been driving me stir crazy. Maybe Sarah's hypnosis triggered some kind of breakdown. Still doesn't quite explain my rush to get back there. But it's my best theory for now. I'm out on my own for the first time. Moving into Creepy Manor in the middle of nowhere was too much for me. Now I've got imaginary spider friends and a tub of terror under my floor. I never had the monster under the bed anxiety. I could be making up for that.

My spider friends don't have names, at least not the kind that we have. Humans have universal names that we keep for life. The spider People believe this makes us take our individuality for granted. Their monikers for one another are more like titles, but extremely numerous. Each individual has in his mind a full set of unique titles, at least one for every other individual he knows. And the titles change over time, as their relationships change. It's not very efficient. I can say to a human, "Isn't that the guy who did that thing five years ago?" And thanks to names, we could answer that question pretty easily. For spider People in the same situation, finding such an answer would be quite a project.

There are many such contrasts of efficiency in the basic ways we do things, and they go both ways. The spider People are inefficient at figuring out who an individual was five years ago because they never care to. But when they face a question that interests them, their powers of inquiry are godlike. And those powers are teachable. They're teaching them to me.

They're giving me powers. Sounds crazy, but this is where it gets plausible. My powers are objectively verifiable. I'm getting top scores in every class. My teachers think I'm a genius. I'm making friends effortlessly. I fixed things with my sister. We were both wrong, as it turns out. Whatever is going on, it has benefits. It's beneficial to them, too. Being smarter makes me useful. I'm finding that a major motivation to study for classes is to hear them tell me more about themselves. They won't indulge me until I'm caught up on school work.

We even argue sometimes. Our arguments always follow the same pattern. I realize I'm hearing an abstruse rationalization for their actions. I usually find those fascinating, but sometimes they pop like overinflated balloons of cognitive dissonance. "Bullshit!" gets thrown around. Fundamental questions about our situation get asked. Questions like how these creatures can be so noble and civilized when they're dipping ladies into pools of rape worms. And then they say something humbling that saps my will to argue.

I remember our last argument. "Better you at our mercy then us at yours," they're saying to me, and the balloon pops.

"I never raped anyone!"

"You have done worse."

"Bullshit!"

"You eat animals without their consent."

"How is that worse?"

"Would you trade your place here for that of one of the livestock you feed on?"

"I'm not an animal!"

"You are to us."

And then I just want to go to bed. It reminds me of some other feelings I get, the same pattern working at different levels. A violent shift into a new frame of thought. I can almost physically feel my brain getting slammed into gear like an overworked transmission. I have a few identities in my head. The spider People have multiple identities too, but I think mine are more of a side effect than edification. Mine are a little dissonant, sometimes even a little dissociative. I gave them names.

The Screamer knows that they own me. She twists and thrashes to cry out, but I don't make a sound. It dawns on her that she's her own trap; a prison disguised as a recruitment center for thoughts of resistance. Her existence is always brief before she makes herself forget.

The Sympathizer can't deny the benefits of what they're doing to me. Sure it's against my will, but what does my will know?

The Observer knows that there is no true self, only approximations. She knows that the least motivated knowledge is the truest. But even that thought biases me toward a certain course of action—toward relaxing and letting things happen. But what can I do? Perfect objectivity is impossible.

The Receptacle is the Sympathizer's hot, sweaty id. She's the Screamer's polar opposite, but she's allowed to scream, and makes the most of it. She dreams of becoming one of them.