This postI’ve mentioned my roommate’s pet tarantula before — Consuela is her name (I think). Last night in my dream she somehow got out of her cage (which had oddly ended up in my bedroom on the other desk) and was crawling around, occasionally hopping up and down. As a result, I slept through my alarm and woke up two hours later than usual. ~sigh~ (It also had to do with the fact that I heard a steady knocking on the front door at 2:45 a.m. I got up and looked out the window. I thought I saw my roommate’s face, so I turned on the lights and opened the door. No one. I closed it and locked it. Three seconds later, my other roommate walked in. Confused, I checked the other bedroom — yup, the roommate I thought I’d seen was sound asleep in bed. I’m no longer sure the knocking wasn’t in my dream.)
Every few days little baby slug-like creatures scamper about on our bathroom floor. Never more than two or three of them at a time, but they’ve come out quite often. They’re fast little buggers, too. Imagine my surprise when I opened the silverware drawer this morning and found one in the (thankfully empty) fork compartment! He is now swimming through the pipes underneath our sink. :) (I should’ve given him some more bang for his buck and turned the disposal on as he went down the drain…)
Now, considering the evidence, I have no choice left but to conclude that the tarantula is telepathically trying to send me signals — “Let me out!” — and that there is an army of midget slugs gathering in the wall between my bathroom and kitchen in preparation for a full-scale onslaught against the spiders. We now digress into a flight of fancy along these lines…
Consuela heard a tapping on the glass behind her. Turning around, her many eyes caught sight of a tiny wolf spider. “Consuela! Psst!”
She scanned the room — no one in sight. “What is it?”
“I’ve got a message from headquarters. The enemy’s on the move. We’re going to get you out of here — can you be ready in an hour?”
“What? How?” The glass was impermeable — she’d tried several times to chip it away with her fangs, but the pieces that came off were microscopic — and the purple lid was too heavy to push up.
The spider’s eyes glistened. “You’ll see. In an hour, okay?”
“Okay,” Consuela said, and the tiny messenger climbed back up the wispy thread it had let itself down on. The hairs on her legs stood up straight. On the move? Last she heard, the slugs had been defeated once and for all, sent back far under the ground where they belonged. That was before she was caught and imprisoned, of course. How long had it been? She’d lost track of time — several molts ago. Things change. Why would they be in such a hurry to get her out? It’s not like she was a military genius or anything. Unless the slugs were coming for her.
No, it couldn’t be. Could it?
She looked over at the kitchen floor. Quite bare. The human had swept it earlier that afternoon. It was nonsense, she told herself. The slugs didn’t know she was the captain’s daughter. If there were any slugs — she hadn’t seen any in months.
Then she saw a flicker of movement on the ground. All six of her eyes locked into position as she sat still, legs poised. There it was again. It stopped in plain view this time: a scout slug, clammy grey in color. A minute shift in its weight told her it knew she was there, watching it. It then disappeared into a crack in the wall.
So the wolf spider was right after all. Consuela shivered.
Time dragged on. The clock on the wall seemed to be broken — surely the minute hand couldn’t be moving that slowly! She paced the cage heaven knows how many times, with the creakings of the cage startling her every few minutes. It was unnerving, maddening, mind-bendingly frustrating, but she could do nothing. Stuck in a cage. She didn’t even dare to climb the glass walls now that she knew the slugs were watching.
Five more minutes. It wouldn’t be long.
On one of her five-second laps around the cage, she stopped short in her tracks. There on the kitchen floor, where the scout slug had been, were five slugs. And then ten. Fifty. Out of the crack in the wall they came, joined by another stream of slugs moving in from the front door. There had to be at least five hundred now. Thousands. Each was less than a centimeter long, but altogether they looked like writhing mass of snakes.
They gathered into a mountain next to the wall. One at a time, they climbed up towards Consuela’s cage. The first wasn’t more than six inches away now. She glanced up at the clock — two minutes.
The slugs surrounded her cage, forming a solid line extending out three inches in every direction. A queasy feeling sank in her stomach. One minute.
Then the army of slugs began to climb up the walls of the cage, suctioning themselves to the glass as they squinched and stretched their way to the top. Consuela tried to go through the defense techniques she’d learned when she was younger. She could handle a few of them — they were small — but thousands of them? If they got the lid off, there’d be too many for her to deal with. And she couldn’t climb the walls if they were covered with slugs.
The purple lid began to jiggle back and forth. It lifted up, just barely, and a wave of slugs started to pour over into the cage.
…to be continued…
