"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.
