CreepsMcPasta Creepypasta Radio - "My wife underwent exposure therapy to cure her arachnophobia, but it worked too well and now she’s freaking me out" Creepypasta

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

CHECK OUT THE AUTHOR'S BOOKS-►https://a.co/d/gsVoBVj►https://books2read.com/moreteethCREEPYPASTA STORY►by ChristianWallis:   / my_wife_underwent_exposure_therapy_to_cure...  Creepypastas are the campfire tales of the internet. Horror stories spread through Reddit r/nosleep, forums and blogs, rather than word of mouth. Whether you believe these scary stories to be true or not is left to your own discretion and imagination. LISTEN TO CREEPYPASTAS ON THE GO-SPOTIFY► https://open.spotify.com/show/7l0iRPd...iTUNES► https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...SUGGESTED CREEPYPASTA PLAYLISTS-►"Good Places to Start"-    • "I wasn't careful enough on the deep ...  ►"Personal Favourites"-    • "I sold my soul for a used dishwasher...  ►"Written by me"-    • "I've been Blind my Whole Life" Creep...  ►"Long Stories"-    • Long Stories  FOLLOW ME ON-►Twitter:   / creeps_mcpasta  ►Instagram:   / creepsmcpasta  ►Twitch:   / creepsmcpasta  ►Facebook:   / creepsmcpasta  CREEPYPASTA MUSIC/ SFX- ►http://bit.ly/Audionic ♪►http://bit.ly/Myuusic ♪►http://bit.ly/incompt ♪►http://bit.ly/EpidemicM ♪This creepypasta is for entertainment purposes only

I don't like spiders. I don't like it when they bunched themselves up so their legs look like tangled wires. I don't like it when they spread themselves out like the radio spokes on a wheel. It was bad luck that when I met my wife, we discovered we were both scared of them. As the man, I just kind of wound up taking over spider-killing duty. At first, this meant squealing or trying to lob a shoe at one of them from a distance. But, as the years went on, I kind of just got tired of the stress and anxiety. Fear is exhausting, so is the pageantry of it, jumping up and shouting and lots of running around.

Over time, I found myself having less and less of a fear reaction to them. Don't get me wrong, I don't want one crawling on my face, but it wasn't like they had me running away in fear every time. Lily was never great with them either, but it wasn't what I'd call worthy of therapy. For the first ten years I knew her, she was a fairly run-of-the-mill arachnophob.

Things only got bad after this one night when we'd just come back in from an evening with friends. There'd been a storm outside, windy as hell. I remember putting the keys down on the table by the door, and when I looked back, she was pulling down the hood of her coat. She led out a sigh, ran her hands through her hair, and she looked a little puzzled by what she felt. When she lifted her hand away,

there were thin black legs poking out from between her fingers. It took a second for her to react to what was all bunched up inside a cupped hand. Then she screamed and threw it onto the ground. I saw it for only a second. It was so fast. Then it was off, under the nearest door, and my number one concern became comforting my wife, who was having a full-blown panic attack.

Get it off, get it off, get it off! She screamed while slapping at her neck and hair. I hugged her tight, checked her hair, and then checked it again when she asked me to. Then she stripped her top off to make sure nothing else was clinging to her clothes, before I took her into the kitchen, and we had a cup of tea while she kept scratching at the back of her head. Little asshole, she half cried, half laughed.

I can't believe it. Did you see it? It was huge. One of the biggest yet, I said. Truthfully, I only had half-glimpse memories of it scuttling away, but it had been big, large enough that a pint glass wouldn't have fit over his darting legs. Just seeing it had left me feeling anxious. But at the time, I ignored my own discomfort.

After all, I'd hardly been the real victim. And it got away, she cringed. Oh God, it's still in this house somewhere, isn't it? I wanted to lie, but thought better of it. Somewhere, yeah. I said, but we'll spider-proof the bedroom tonight, and I'll go looking in the morning. Thank you, she smiled mournfully. Geez, I just know I'm going to have a hard time sleeping tonight.

She made me strip the bed before she got in, and all night she kept flicking at a fringe and the hair on the back of her neck. I felt so bad for her. If that had been me, I can't say I would have reacted much better. Neither of us slept that well, but I was mostly just worried about her. When you love someone, it's tough to see them suffer. But it wasn't just that one night. The second one was much the same.

The third, fourth, and so on. It petered out a little in the second week. Then she saw a spider on some TV show, and the anxiety came back full force. Every night was the same. I had to strip the bed of everything, lift the mattress and check for spiders. She even got rid of a bedside table, so there'd be less hiding places for one. In the meantime, I was on hunting duty. In her own words, I had to find the monster, or she'd never feel safe in that house again.

It's funny, but, in hindsight, I can't really say what I see what I should. I saw ghosts scuttling under that doorway that first night, but I do know I didn't try all that hard to find it. I remember finding some webs under the living room sofa that were real odd, like the fake stuff they'd bring out on Halloween, and I had to peel them off the carpet like Velcro. I found a couple of these nests throughout the house, but I never mentioned them.

One of them hidden a hole in the floor that really should have alarmed me, but I just ignored it I ignored a lot actually I found dead mice spun up in cocoons and something bore a hole through one of the kitchen cupboards and filled it with silk nothing normal about that but I covered it up with some cans and moved on

a behavior I find out to explain in hindsight maybe my attention was elsewhere Lily wasn't in a great place and she was slowly getting worse. She cried a lot and any little thing that touched the skin would result in lots of panicked yelling. She could need a meal

without slapping her arms and neck every few seconds. Things got real bad when I came back one night to find a shaving a head. She told me she got tired of mistaking the feeling of her own hair for a spider so this was the simplest way to feel clean and safe. If you've ever lived with anyone who's had a breakdown, there's usually this moment where

your heart sinks as you realize that what you're dealing with has transcended the norm. It's quite frightening, actually, reminded me of when my mom found a lump. It's a very isolating sort of fear. I remember lying awake in bed that night and just thinking about how I'd found Lily bent over the bath, shave her in hand, with a patchy head. like that dull from Toy Story. When she looked over her shoulder at me and smiled, and her eyes was so wide,

I felt like I wasn't looking at my wife anymore. Have you ever missed someone while you still live with them? May them coffee and breakfast and chatted about your day. But it's like nobody's there. Every day was the same. I'd tell her about work, and she'd tell me about how she scrubbed the bedroom top to bottom looking for spiders.

or started pulling up the bathroom tiles to check for nests. At one point I realized she'd taken a lot of time off work, but she wouldn't give me a straight answer, so I had to call her office. They wouldn't even answer my calls, which I had to take as a pretty bad sign. It came as a relief when she got sectioned. Everything came out all at once.

She tried putting a hammer to do. one of the walls to find what was behind it, not realising that it was just the neighbour's living room on the other side. I was at work during all this, but things clearly escalated pretty quickly, and the police arrived to find a partially bald woman screaming about spiders in the walls. By the time I got home, they'd already taken her to be assessed at the local hospital. I rushed to visit her, but in the meantime, I had to call her parents and a... It was, well, because I wasn't alone anymore.

Other people knew what was going on, and that made it a little easier for me to navigate. Until then, I'd been afraid to mention it to anyone. I guess I was a little embarrassed, or maybe just not sure what the etiquette was for discussing someone else's mental health. She was only gone about a night, not even 12 hours really. The neighbours agreed not to press charges if I paid for all the repairs and Lily got therapy. Lily's parents are quite well off, so they helped us out with that. They found this clinic that she stayed at for a couple of weeks.

It specialised in exposure therapy, which really just means getting a person used to their phobia. Don't like water, spend hours every day in a pool. Don't like moths. Step into a room with a thing. thousands of them. This is oversimplification, of course. It's a special program that involves gradual increases in the nature of the exposure. First night she called me and told me they'd had her looking at pictures of a spider

while talking about her experience. They were literally just cartoony drawings, but she told me she found it hard anyway. She cried and I cried too. She was only a few hours drive away, but I didn't want to be away from her, and everything had happened so suddenly. It was only six weeks between that night with the storm and her ending up in that clinic, but in that short period of time, I felt like the ground had fallen from beneath my feet. Two weeks she was in there.

I don't remember them well. There were phone calls every night. she was getting better, she told me, and the doctor confirmed as much. Hardgoing, for sure. They had to sedate her the day she graduated from cartoons to actual photos of spiders. Apparently, she scratched an awedly up real bad. My time in the house was lonely. A little weird, too, if I'm honest.

I woke up at one point with cobwebs in my hair, and at some point I realized that I hadn't seen. seen a spider in my home for a long time, not even a little money spider. I briefly wondered about what the hell had been leaving cobwebs around the place, but never followed up on it. It's hard to get my thoughts straight. I do remember finding more dead mice all webbed up in the back of that kitchen cupboard. One morning I came down to find a starling cocooned on the outside of the kitchen window. No sign of what did it though.

I just stared at it and sipped my coffee. Then I left for work, and when I came back, it was gone. Probably not a good time to tell you. I was diagnosed with a kind of dementia some time ago. I guess that's supposed to help make sense of things right. I don't know. It doesn't feel like it makes sense to me. It's not like Alzheimer's runs in the family.

They say the neurons of a human brain with Alzheimer's, look like a cobweb that has holes poked in it. That's a good way to describe how my mind feels to live in. Thoughts travel along a given route and then just... Drop off. Lily's therapy progressed nicely though. I remember that quite clearly. The phone calls and the sound of a voice.

Real vivid. Geez, I missed us so bad during this time. I hate being overly sentimental. but it had been a tough and lonely six weeks, and hearing her sound increasingly happy and confident with each new phone call was like a shot of pure happiness right into my veins. I missed her and I wanted her back.

And when she told me, giggling with joy, that she held a spider on day 10, I burst out crying right with her. I felt pride at her accomplishment and I felt relief that things might be getting back on track for us, like the nightmare was finally going to be over. It wasn't so simple when I saw her in person. She came back looking like the war wounded.

I should say she looked beautiful, but I want to be honest. I smiled when I saw her, but it didn't reach my eyes because the woman who got into the car looked like a lifetime apart from the woman. woman who'd been living with me just a few months ago. She was thin as a rake, with ashy pallid skin and a shaved head that made her look like a matchstick.

And her eyes, the look in them wasn't right. But she was smiling. So I swallowed the funny feeling I had in my stomach and pretended everything was okay. There was no work for her to go back to, and I managed to get some time. off after speaking to my boss. It was just us, and that can be a weird feeling for a couple used to working nine to five. I was on edge, didn't know what to expect. She smiled a lot, tried her best to reassure me, and I asked a lot about what therapy was

like, and she told me it was fantastic. Show me photos of her sitting next to big house spiders, some as wide as a palm. had to fight back my own fear while looking at them. She told me that was day 13. But when I asked what happened on day 14, she said it was mostly packing up and saying goodbye. There was a dark and uncomfortable truth to relationships, and it's that time only flows in one direction.

My wife hadn't done anything wrong, and I didn't really feel any ill will towards her. But a distance had been placed. between us. All the best will in the world couldn't undo it. She changed, being changed, I guess. At the time I didn't know how to understand any of it, but I wasn't sure how to treat her. When I kissed her, it was on the cheek. When I held her, it was like hugging a female co-worker. I didn't know what my own feelings were, and I wouldn't, until I found her. her one morning in the kitchen, tapping away at a pint glass and giggling like a toddler.

It wasn't the light and airy laughter of a woman I was used to. It was more like the laughter of a bunch of kids, egging on a fight or cheering on her nasty bully. She didn't speak when she looked at me. She just turned back to the glass and kept laughing, flicking it gently with her fingers. when I walked around the table and saw it under there. A very large house spider. I don't know what is normal for people around the world, but a UK house spider is big if its legs are wider than the palm of your hand.

This thing was even bigger, with legs bundled up against the side of the glass like spools of segmented wall, and seeing it made me jump way back. I realized I hadn't seen another spider since the night of the storm, and that thing, all culled up with legs as thick as hairpins, was a real shock to my system. I cried out, and my wife, she started howling with laughter.

I mean, it was like a toddler discovering cartoons for the first time, manic and weird, and just so damn happy, but in a way there was a little alien because I didn't understand the thoughts and feelings that went into their ear-splitting cackle and it was all wrong coming from her I waited for her to say something

but she didn't she just laughed until something in her got tired and she slowly stopped giggling but she still didn't say anything even after she'd gone quiet in the end it was me who broke the silence.

I didn't have a clue what to say. The whole time she was staring at me with a patchy hair and gleeful, teary eyes, and I got so desperate to break the standoff that I stammered out the words. He's a big one, ain't he? Her face relaxed. Her shoulders slumped. She slipped out of the crazy, like it was only ever an outfit. They'll get bigger.

She said. And then she lifted the glass, snatched the spider up, and stuffed it into her mouth. I didn't see it, not fully. But I stood frozen in terror and watched the muscles in a boldly shaved head tense and relax as a jaw worked away, crushing those hardened legs. Jeez, the sounds were bad enough. But when she was done, she looked over a shoulder at me, and smiled, and her teeth were smeared green and black, with little bits of legs and kighting that still stuck between the gums. I'm not entirely sure what happened next, but now I knew

why I had felt so different around her since she'd come back. I was afraid of her, like a kid around an abusive parent. I just didn't know what I was going to get. There was always this energy in the room that had me on edge. I'd sit there watching TV, but I wasn't really watching. Couldn't have told you what was on half the time. Instead, every ounce of my being was focused on her. Every breath, every motion. When she got up to use that toilet, I watched her intensely to see what she was going to do. The fact that she rarely did anything except carry on as normal was all the more unsettling, because I knew something was wrong, and I couldn't stop remembering the way she'd laughed with that thing onto the glass. Nights were bad.

A lot of the time, I'd wake up and get the feeling she'd just been watching me, but she was usually fast asleep, or at least that's how it looked. Sometimes there were furtive movements like she just rolled over. I got used to it, thought it was probably just in my head. But then one night I woke up, and she was right there, face inches away from mine. I cried out, I couldn't help it, shuffled backwards while trying to avoid touching her and wound up falling off the bed. When I looked up from the floor, she had a completely blank expression.

She was just looking at me like a cat watching a fly. What are you doing? I cried out, unable to stop the irritation from bleeding into my voice. She shrugged. Just watching. Then she rolled over like nothing had happened. That night, I slipped on the sofa. She didn't ask why.

Didn't say a word as I grabbed my things and left the room. I wasn't sure I would manage to fall asleep after that. But I did. and when I woke up, I had cobwebs in my hair. I was lucky if I slept more than a few hours a night after that. It came fitfully, if at all. I woke up too many times to the feeling of something tickling my face and chest, a sensation like someone running a feather over me.

Every time I'd come to in a panic, but I never found anything, except nearly invisible silk clinging to my skin. Life without sleep was difficult, and I struggled to hide my dislike for Lily. Over time, our habits and routines diverged even further apart. I stopped going upstairs almost entirely, just didn't need to.

I had work in the sofa and the kitchen, and the days when I came back and barely saw Lily at all were full. find by me. I preferred being away from her, something that kind of broke my heart, if I'm honest. There were times I wanted to reach out, but looking at her gave me the funniest feeling in my stomach. I didn't want to change things, didn't want to get closer. If anything, I wanted to run away, and I don't mean that I wanted to flee my life and adult responsibilities in some abstract way. I mean, I felt a powerful urge to quite literally run away from her. It was horrible feeling that way about my wife, and just trying to understand those emotions was enough to give

me a headache most days. I became real forgetful during this time, and it was a long time before I realized I'd forgotten to pay for the repairs to the wall. I think it slipped my mind, Emphasis on think Because I don't remember What I have and haven't forgotten I just nailed some plywood over And left it And three months later

One day out of the blue It occurred to me I should probably have done something more about it I did find a toolkit in the kitchen That wasn't mine I might have called someone out for a quote I don't know But when I remembered

That I'd never actually fix it the hole, I was filled with this shame and embarrassment, and I decided the best thing to do was to face it head on and go apologize to my neighbor. I never knew a lot about the guy. He was an alderman who liked his football and had a nose like a tomato, and spent most nights in the pub. I knew he lived alone though, and when I knocked his door and there was no answer. It wasn't too strange. At least it didn't seem out of the ordinary, until I went back inside my house and heard footsteps on the other side of the wall. So, I went back and knocked a couple more times, figuring maybe he hadn't heard me. But there was still no answer. I found this weird.

He didn't seem like the kind of guy who would avoid the neighbor he didn't like. He'd just open the door and tell you to get lost. I went back and looked but couldn't see anything through his windows and all I could see looking through his letterbox was a grey sheet across the opening. When my fingers came away covered in sticky thread

I had this terrible feeling in my stomach. I couldn't have possibly explained how but I was convinced that Lily had done something. After all it was him calling the police who'd gotten her into trouble. But it wasn't like I could kick his door down to check, and I wasn't going to go scrambling through any half-open windows. Fortunately, we shared a fence in the back garden.

It was easy enough to jump, and from there I'd check the windows on that side of the house. He left the kitchen blinds open, and at first, what I saw baffled me. For a moment I wondered if he was decorating because everything inside was covered by a thin, translucent

sheet but I only had to pay close attention to realize that didn't make sense. When painting a ceiling you don't throw tarp over half-drunk cups of coffee and plates of mouldy food and the material

that covered everything was cloudy and made of thread and obviously some kind of silk It took a lot of effort to control the urge to just hop the fence back and pretend like I never saw a damn thing. But if he needed some kind of help, then I knew I had to at least try. I looked briefly at the stoop by the back door.

There was a lighter on the ground where someone had dropped it. It was strangely conspicuous and made me think that whoever had left it there had done so in a hurry. Didn't make sense that someone was. would drop it there and not notice, not unless they'd been otherwise occupied. I picked it up and winced when it came from the floor with a sticky tearing sound. It was covered in barely visible silk threads. God, I wanted that back door to be locked.

Couldn't think of anything worse than having to push ahead, but I tried the handle and it went down. The door popped open with barely any effort, and I got a good look at how every last inch of that place was covered in pale cobwebs. They got thicker and thicker as my eyes drifted deeper inside the house. I couldn't help but wonder if they were strong enough to trap a person. Was my neighbour in there somewhere? Somebody was. I knew that much from the sounds I'd heard, but I couldn't see him in the kitchen. I wanted to cry out for him, maybe even go marching into the house and look for myself. But the hallway out the kitchen had been turned into a web-lined tunnel.

No straight lines, just the dark, silky womb, whose rounded funnel walls fluttered gently in the breeze. I stared intently into that darkness, trying my best to see if there was the shape of a man's corpse cocooned somewhere in that pale white silk. I leaned forward, my head and shoulders just moving past the doorframe, when the blackness in the tunnel grew legs.

Dark caribus and segmented limbs exploded towards me so fast. It was almost in the kitchen before my heart had time to skip a beat. And then it stopped halfway into the room, standing perfectly still and brazen in the fading daylight. A bundle of legs, the size of a horse. A real life. Monster. I didn't move.

Jeez, it took me another minute for my brain just to process what I was looking at on a conscious level. My nervous system was quicker, sure. It was like a blanket of disgust and terror was thrown over me. My stomach plunged to the floor. My skin crawled. My heart felt like it was going to again. explode. But my actual mind was blank, white noise and static. The creature was huge, so big its legs could just about fit in the hallway behind it. But in the kitchen, with a little more room,

those front limbs and mouthy feelers spread out like tendrils and gripped the doorway. It was ready to pounce on whatever had sent disturbances throughout its web. I've read that spider's can be a little like Venus fly traps. They don't always pounce on a single trigger. They need multiple hits. When I looked down at my feet, I saw that I'd taken just one step inside. But that was all it needed to be alerted.

Now it approached the initial alarm and, half blind, it waited for another hint of something trapped inside its web. I had to wonder, with lifting my shoe count. Did I have a choice? I couldn't stay there, looking at the damn thing was bringing me closer and closer to a full-blown panic with every passing second.

I had to do something, and I had to do it with some semblance of control. I slid my foot backwards. The spider didn't move. As soon as both feet were outside, I let go of the door, handle, and felt something sticky detached from my palm. It feels like an exaggeration to say that lightning moves slower.

I'm not sure I have the words to describe how fast it was. I'm sure most of you have seen a nature documentary with one of those fish, or maybe even a trapdoor spider. Oh damn, that was quick. But this thing. Maybe it was just because it was coming right at me. I've never seen anything like it except for when videos get edited

All of a sudden it was just there And before I knew it Thick woolly paps were pinning me to the ground And I was looking into a pink slit of a mouth Framed by fangs as long as my forearm They moved independent of each other And something about the sight of all those wheel-spoke legs And segmented joints clumped together in its thorax

sent my mind reeling. I said at the beginning of this that a lifetime of exposure had helped curb my arachnophobia. But there are limits. I blacked out. When I woke up, it was dark all around me. I didn't know it at the time,

but the belly of the beast was my neighbour's former living room. It wasn't actually pitch black, but it did take a few terrifying minutes for my eyes to adjust well enough just to be able to see my own body stuck and wriggling beneath me. I was wrapped uptight, and if you've ever heard the refrain that spider silk is stronger than steel and doubted it.

Well, trust me, it's true. A few thin threads doesn't give you a proper sense of it, but I was wrapped in what must have been half an inch of the stuff, and I felt like I was wearing 10 layers of Lycra that was too small. It was a tiny bit of give, enough to let me move fingers or toes, or even bend the knee just a fraction. But that was it. It was horrifying.

I'm not exactly claustrophobic either, for what it's worth, but given the circumstances, I found myself panicking as I tried to get some purchase. I kept thinking if I could get a finger hooked into it, then maybe I could see that I could start tearing away. I was desperate, but the more I fought, the more I realized, it was hopeless. The silk was elastic and strong and covered in a thick, stodgy glue that only further limited my movement as everything I did spread it around until it was gumming my legs and hands together.

Wasn't until exhaustion caught up to me, and I was forced to take a short break that I realized I wasn't alone. There was another cocoon beside me. My neighbour had been a big man in life, podgy with a large pot belly and a head like a thumb. But in the dim light of that room, he looked like a skeleton wrapped in skin that had been found half decayed in an ancient forgotten tomb.

So thin and desiccated, you could hug a finger under the tendons in his neck and jaws. I nearly cried when I realised I'd risked everything to save a dead man but that wasn't actually true the error in my thinking became apparent when he opened his eyes and glanced at me with pure unbridled terror he opened his mouth and I was convinced he was about to scream when instead he coughed and gagged

and something wet and brown dribbled out of his mouth. It flopped down his chin and came to rest on the floor between us. It resembled a hairband encased in bile and vomit, and I was momentarily stumped until I saw a thin brown leg unfurled from the tangled mess. It's okay. My neighbor's entire body relaxed, his face vacant and confused, as Lily knelt down beside me and stroked my head. Lily, you've got to get me.

Shh, she said, pressing a single finger to my lips. It's okay, it's going to be okay. Behind her, a shadow appeared. It had legs as thick as my wrist, and they reached from the floor to the ceiling. It won't be much longer now, she added, as the dothold. darkness behind her grew.

Probably best just to keep you here. Lily, what the hell? I told you they get bigger, she said, nodding towards the spider my neighbor had just spat onto the floor. He won't be any real help. She touched my neighbor's head, but he barely responded. He just gazed vacantly as she rolled him over so that he was facing away from me.

For such a clever animal, she added as she parted his hair, I'm always curious about just how much you miss. Something was clamped around the back of his head, a throbbing bulb of mottled brown skin and hair. It looked like a spider without legs. That's what I thought it was, until my wife ran a finger playfully along its back, and my neighbour let out a gut-wrenching squill of pain. Slowly, the shape seemed to wriggle and writhe And a long, thin leg emerged from beneath its body And I realised I was looking at a spider

Wrapped tight around his skull Its legs buried beneath the skin and muscle of his scalp For a moment, it playfully curled the leg in the air Before returning it to the incision And sliding it back into place Every inch disappearing with a gruesome wet sound, It displaced muscle and hair, and when it came to rest, I realized just how misshapen his skull had become from all those legs wrapped tight around his head. What the hell?

I gasped. Do you ever find it weird that you can't remember what it looked like, the thing that came running out of her hand? She asked before reaching over to stroke my head. Her hand came away covered in cobwebs. Something about a touch revolted me It sent strange shivers Causing through my body A deep primordial need to get away came over me

That strange revulsion all over again The same one that had taunted me Over and over again Over the last few weeks Without even meaning to I found myself convulsing and panicking My body trying to thrash violently But with every limb constricted

by that silk, I could do nothing except ride around on the floor. I tried with everything I had to move my hands to get some purchase on the silk and tear away at it to free myself. But there was no use. I could do nothing except glare at my wife and the enormous shadow behind her, the one that towered above us both, its great legs clustering around the floor and ceiling. At some point I grabbed onto my trousers and clenched my fist and felt something small and hard. The lighter, I knew there was a great risk in using it, but I had no choice.

I managed to wear my hand into my pocket and find it with my fumbling fingers. My wife seemed oddly aware of what I was doing and she seemed to tilt her head like a curious dog as I clenched my fist around the small object and used every ounce of willpower I had left to fight the violent seizures that racked my body and thumbed the trigger.

The web went up in flames immediately. It must have been the glue, but the flames exploded across the silk like they had been soaked in kerosene. Before I even realized that it had weakened enough for me to free one arm, the tongues of fire were already spreading across the floor where they found my poor neighbor.

The burning sensation that crawled across my legs and chest hurt like nothing I could imagine. But I was finally free. I rolled over and began to push myself up, already desperately patting at my body to try to put out the flames. And when I looked around me, my wife and the shape that followed her were gone. For a moment, I considered helping my neighbour, but his body thrashed too violently. And although his eyes were wide open, spiders were pouring from his mouth, and I could not summon the courage to take another step towards him. All I could think of was escape. The house was going up like a tinderbox.

It wasn't far to the kitchen, but the fire had already beat me there. Smoke billowed upwards and, trapped by the ceiling, started to fill the air with choking sut. The only escape was the back door, and I stumbled towards it, but was stopped at the last moment by the sight of my wife standing there. You really are just a fascinating speck, I bowled past her, but to my surprise, she offered no resistance. I merely emerged into the open air, my lungs gasping desperately for clean air as I collapsed onto the long, unkempt grass. I looked over my shoulder and saw orange tongues of fire were already leaping out the windows on the upper floor. Left uncontrolled, the fire would rage and consume the entire row of terrace houses. I felt a moment of remorse, but there were already sirens in the distance,

so I knew someone had noticed and done the right thing. But it wasn't over. Lily was sitting on the fence. I don't know how she got there, but she looked completely undisturbed. I never once imagined that when the wind blew me into your home, I'd find such an interesting pair of people, she said. What a fun mind to sink my legs into. I really had no idea what I was going to find.

Let her go, I gasped. I have, she said with a shrug. I did, months ago, as a matter of fact. There were some incompatibilities, and it just made sense to move homes. She pointed at me and smiled. I've enjoyed living inside your head quite a bit, struggling to make sense of her words, but still somehow aware of their terrifying implications,

I placed one hand on the back of my neck, and felt it, felt her. The mere touch was enough to fill my mouth with a coppery taste while my vision blurred at the edges. Something beneath my skin shifted and I felt a terrible pressure behind my eyes. I had to get rid of her and I only knew of one weakness. Oh well, she said as she watched me fumbled desperately for the lighter. Not every relationship has to last forever to be meaningful. I lit my hair on fire.

My last memories were of the heat and the sudden release of pressure. I couldn't possibly describe it. Not really. Something slid out of my skull and Lily waved at me from the fence before she seemed to blink out of existence. And then... Nothing. Not even darkness.

Just took. total absence. I wouldn't regain a sense of self until the hospital several weeks later. There was nothing left of either house, but they did manage to control the fire before it spread to the others. I'm sure there was still some damage, and to this day I feel guilty about it. I think I was charged with arson, maybe more. I vague memories of being wheeled into a courtroom. The doctors have agonized over me for a long time and one mentioned amateur trepination.

He said I must have practiced it on my wife, at least based on the body they found in my neighbour's house. But I can't really be sure of anything. I am forever dipping in and out of reality. Writing this down has been difficult. I'm not entirely aware of where I am right now. One doctor told me I might make some kind of recovery if it was just normal brain damage,

but he never seen anything like it, so he couldn't be sure. Feels like it's a different doctor every time I see them. Then again, I don't always recognise myself when I look in the mirror. Of course, that could just be the burns, but I reckon even then I still look a fair bit older than I should There is one Audley who stuck around long enough to get to know me

He knows me by name Smiles a lot when he sees me Talks to me about all sorts of things He seems genuinely interested in me And what I remember I called him in once to get rid of a spider That had spun a web on the window outside And he did so with a warm smile

I told him I was deathly afraid of them and he said he already knew that but I shouldn't be worried because he was going to keep an eye in me and make sure nothing bad happened I'm glad he's around ever since he started working here I haven't seen many of the nasty little things

hanging around my room I guess he's not that bothered by them at least not If the cobwebs in his hair is anything to go by.