Arrak’s revenge by: Brendan Palmer       31/10/2020

Johnny’s mind was barely functioning, numbed by the neurotoxin that had entered his body. His eyes glued open he watched in horror at the events unfolding before him in the living room of their house

A flashback  to the previous year sparked the realisation that the last two days were a culmination of events that began when his wife Mary had read an article from the local freesheet newspaper.

A Noble False Widow spider, the size of a two €uro coin, had been found in one of their neighbour’s gardens, feeding on the flesh of their pet lizard, who was over three times the size of the spider and trapped in its huge spider web

“Listen to this” she shouted, becoming more and more freaked out as she re-read each piece out loud

“The Noble False Widow spider is a non native invasive species that is beginning to colonise the gardens around Dublin, wiping out the native spiders and while they can’t kill people, they can bite causing serious pain and for some people a dangerous allergic reaction

“And listen, listen to this”, she shrieked

“In addition to its venom possessing a powerful, vertebrate specific neurotoxin, it can produce very strong spider silk that allows it to entangle large prey. Owners are being warned to be on the lookout for these spiders as they could endanger their pets.”

“Johnny, I saw one of them in our hedge yesterday you have to get rid of it”

Johnny just laughed and said “get a life Mary, it’s only a spider, they’re more afraid of us than we are of them”

“What about Scamp” she screamed? referring to their miniature chihuahua

“OK, OK, calm down Mary, I’ll deal with it”

That was at the end of November the previous year and Johnny regularly searched his garden for signs of false widow spiders, in fact, any type of spiders, capturing them in a spider catcher he had bought online, crushing them with his foot and leaving them on the lawn for the birds

The Covid-19 lockdown the previous March placed major restrictions on people’s movement and with the huge reduction in traffic and all transportation services severely curtailed, nature exploded in the newfound cleaner environment.

For the first few weeks of lockdown, Johnny kept busy doing stuff around the house and garden but he soon got bored and began to spend more and more time in front if the television, waiting for five o’clock to come around so he could crack open his first beer.

By the time that first lockdown had finished, the garden he had neglected was totally overgrown and infested with the Noble False Widow spiders. It was just about possible to keep them from infesting the house and the garden continued to be ignored.

As the summer progressed, Mary became more and more obsessed with the spiders, insisting that they were getting bigger every week and by the time mid October came around, Johnny had to admit that she was right. The last two he had caught and killed were at least twice the size of the first ones and one of them had created a web in their garage which he had great difficulty in breaking up, not only because of the strength of the web, but because the spider silk  was so adhesive he found it impossible to remove it from the knife he had used to cut it down.

A second Covid-19 level five lockdown had begun a week before Halloween and, as he did not work in an essential service job, Johnny was permanently at home again.

Bored and irritated with Mary’s continual complaints about the spiders, he went online to find out more about them and get some suggestions for dealing with them.

The first piece of information listed that caught his attention was “How false widow spiders kill their prey”, where he discovered that they pierce the skin of their prey with their fangs and then squeeze out venom, injecting the prey with enough neurotoxin to paralyze, or kill, depending on its size.

A follow on, “How spiders consume their prey” made his skin crawl. He discovered that as spiders have no internal digestive system, they inject an enzyme into the flesh of their prey to dissolve it before consuming it as a thick liquid. Sometimes larger prey, because of their size, are only paralyzed, effectively being dissolved and eaten alive.

Continued searches informed him of their prolific ability to multiply. A female false widow spider can live for up to seven years and produce one egg sac with two hundred eggs every two weeks for four months of the year. Sixteen hundred new spiders every year. By comparison, ordinary spiders in Ireland usually live for one or two years and produce thirty to fifty spiders per year.

The following day he decided to clean up the garden and went on a major hunting expedition, eliminating every spider he came across using a combination of the catcher, bug spray and a small blow torch to burn them in their webs. A few times he thought he heard a small scream as a huge spider singed and burned. He just laughed and told himself he was imagining things.

Last evening, after a traditional Irish Halloween dinner of Bacon and Colcannon, Johnny and Mary were dozing in their respective armchairs, spaced diagonally across the room from each other so they could both watch the television and converse at the same time. Scamp was curled up sleeping on Mary’s lap.

The small nest of tables beside johnny’s armchair contained his glasses and two remote controls, one for the television and one for the set top box. He always had control of the remotes when they watched television as a couple.

As he dozed, he dreamed that there was a huge False Widow Spider, bigger than anything he had seen or killed, sitting on the table between his glasses and the remote control, looking at him with eight, big, black eyes. Its mouth was moving as if speaking to him and he could hear it’s low gruff voice saying “Hello Johnny,  my name is Arrak, it’s my family you have been trying to wipe out for the last week, I am not happy”

Two more huge spiders appeared on each arm of his armchair, all staring malevolently into Johnny’s face. Arrak emitted a high pitched sound and the four spiders launched themselves onto Johnny’s neck sinking their fangs into his arteries, spraying venom into his bloodstream, causing an intense burning pain and he realised that this was not a dream. He tried raise his arm to swat them away but he couldn’t move, his arms and legs were bound to the armchair by spider silk. The bottom half of his face below his nose was also wrapped. His mouth was sealed and his eyelids were glued open.

He looked over at Mary, she stared back at him with terrified eyes. She was struggling and trying to scream but she had also been cocooned in spider silk. Bound tightly to her chair, her mouth completely sealed.

On her lap, the chihuahua was a writhing ball of black false widow spiders. The consumption of its dissolving flesh sounded like a thick milkshake being sucked through a straw.  It took them half an hour to strip it to a skeleton.

Leaving the pile of bones in her lap, they started on Mary. It was half an hour before she stopped moving and six hours before all that was left was a skeleton inside the clothes she had been wearing.

During the spider’s feast, Arrak sat on the nest of tables bedside Johnny staring intently into his terrified eyes.

Their feeding on Mary finished, the spiders crossed the room while thousands more streamed in from every gap in the house and started on Johnny.

The last thing he heard was, “You should not have tried to wipe out my family Johnny”

 

 

 

Epilogue

When she had not heard from Mary for three days her friend Joan called the police expressing her concern.

Breaking into the house, they found Johnny, Mary and the dog as the spiders had left them. There was no sign of the spiders but the house was covered in false widow spider webs. It was three days before the coroner gave a verdict on the probable cause and the circumstances of their deaths.

The newspapers and social media exploded with the horror of what happened and there were calls on the Government to do something about the spiders. A task force to investigate was promised but before it convened for its first meeting, reports began arriving on a daily basis from all across the city of people being attacked and killed while they slept.

The death toll from false widow spider attacks grew faster than those from the worst days of Covid-19 and people were afraid to sleep.