The Sign of the Spider

by Bertram Mitford

Now, indeed, all stood clear. "The Spider" was no allegorical term, but literal fact. That frightful monster with which he had just come face to face was indeed the demon-god of the Ba-gcatya! It was actually fed with living men, in accordance with some dark and mysterious superstition held by that otherwise fine race. Now the fate of those whose skeletons lay around stood accounted for. They had been devoured by this unimaginable horror. Alive? It was almost certain—possibly when weakened by starvation. Yet a gruesome thought entered his mind. Why had an abundance of food been lowered with him into this hell-pit? Did not the circumstance make as though it was in their full vigour that the monster was designed to seize its victims—and in that event, with what an extent of strength and fell ferocity must it not be endowed?

But what was this thing? Laurence had seen spiders of every variety, huge and venomous, and of grisly size, yet nothing like this. Why, the creature was as large as a bear nearly! It must be some beast hitherto unknown to natural history; yet those awful tentacles—joints, hair, everything—could not but belong to an insect—were, in fact, precisely as the legs of a huge tarantula, magnified five hundred-fold. What ghastly and blood-curdling freak of nature could have produced such a monstrosity as this? Why, the very sight of the awful thing huddled up, black, within the gloom of the cranny, the horrid tentacles—a hundred-fold more repulsive, more blood-curdling than though they actually were so many serpents—moving and writhing in a great quivering, hairy, intertwined mass—was in itself a sight to haunt his dreams until his dying day, did he live another fifty years. What must it mean, then, to realize that he was actually shut in—escape impossible—with the deliberate purpose of being devoured by this vampire, this demon, even as all these others had been devoured before him?

At this juncture of his meditations his mind became alive to two discoveries—one, that he had gained the farther end of the ridge than that by which he had crossed; the other, that immediately before and beneath him, just over the slope of the ridge, lay the body of a man.

Yes—the body of a man, not the skeleton of one. That it was that of a dead man he could see at a glance—also that it was one of the Ba-gcatya. With a shudder he remembered the luckless wretch he had seen dragged away but a day or two before his own seizure—whether for evil-doing or as a customary sacrifice he had been condemned to this, Laurence had not inquired at the time. Casting one more look at the cave, and satisfying himself that the monster had not emerged, Laurence went down to examine the body.

It was that of a man in the prime of life—and wearing the head-ring. It was lying on its back, the throat upturned and protruding. And then Laurence shudderingly noticed two round gaping orifices at the base of the throat, clearly where the great nippers of the monster had punctured. The limbs, too, were scratched and scored as though with claws; and upon the dead face was such an awful expression of the very extremity of horror and dread as the spectator, accustomed as he was to such sights, had never beheld stamped on the human countenance before. And beholding it now, Laurence Stanninghame felt that the perspiration was oozing upon him at every pore, for he realized that he was looking upon a foresight of his own fate; for was he not that most perfectly and completely helpless of all God's creatures—an unarmed man!

He had not so much as a stick or a pocket-knife to resist the onslaught of this blood-drinking monster—no, not even a boot, for it flashed across his mind at that moment that a good iron-shod heel might be better than nothing. He was wearing only a low-soled pair of ordinary velschoenen—hide shoes, to wit. There were not even stones lying about the ground, save very small ones, and he had no means of loosening rock slabs large enough to serve as weapons. There was no place of refuge to climb into afforded by ledges or pinnacles of rock, and even were there, why, the thing could surely come up after him as easily as the common tarantula could run up a wall. Nothing is more completely demoralizing than the helplessness of an unarmed man. With his Express—or his six-shooter—this one would have regarded the situation in the light of a wholly new and adventurous excitement—with even a large strong-bladed knife he would have been willing to take his chances. But he was totally unarmed. It seemed to Laurence that in that brief while he had lived a lifetime of mortal fear.

Then with a mighty effort he pulled himself together. He would return to where he had left his stores ere commencing the exploration. Nobody ever yet improved a situation of peril by starving himself. Yet as he wended his way up the long chasm wherein he had first awakened to life, it was with a feeling of shuddering repulsion. The place bore such a close resemblance now to that other cave; yet here, at any rate, he knew there was nothing.

He opened the corn baskets and the calabash of amasi, and made a fairly good meal. Then, by the glooming shades of the overhanging rock, he judged that daylight was waning. Out into the open once more—the open air might render such a life-and-death struggle with the monster a trifle less horrible than here, shut in by these tomb-like rock walls.

The gray of the brief twilight was upon the faces of the surrounding cliffs, which soon faded into misty gloom. Only the stars, leaping into the misty gloom—only the stars, leaping forth into the inky sky, shed an indistinct light into this vault of horror and of death. He was shut in here—and shut in with this awful thing which should find him out during the hours of darkness. And, marvellous to tell, a sudden drowsiness came upon him—and whether the effects of the drug still lingered about him, or was it the reaction from an overstrained mind? he actually slept—slept hard and dreamlessly.