Most people in West Nowhere, Oklahoma have heard of the Spider’s Christ. It’s a silly name, I know, but it’s a name that I have feared since childhood. A name my father spoke of with wild-eyed reverence. A name with a hundred tales unto itself.
Slaughter into wine.
The creep shall inherit the births.
The stories and proverbs were repeated so often when we were children that even if you didn’t fully believe, the mythos had a way of believing for you. It burrowed into your brain. Not unlike the story of the blind man with eyes-of-plenty.
Our Savior fed unto him a banquet of gossamer web. The blind man choked it down and his eyes were dewey with the grace of salivation. The web clung and the blind man retched for he was an apostate, yet beloved was he by the host of eyes and legs that scurried down his gullet. In time, the man retched no more, but slashed was his face with a rictus of serenity. He saw anew with borrowed eyes; eight and eighty and eight-hundred, peering from the hollows of his smiling face. Ωmen.
The children would repeat that story word for word in perfect unison as they did with all the others. The consequence for an impertinent tongue was dire.
My childhood friend, Nameforgotten, misspoke a single word before the idol once. The silence fell across the worship hall like the flies of Sodom. Silence inviting a roiling crimson dread.
They split his arms and legs into eights. One by one between the radius and ulna, the tibia and fibula, slow and meticulous, screaming and howling. His father drew the saw to complete the Octition. And then they nailed Nameforgotten to the oak mullions of the window above the altar.
The mythos believed for us. We let it fester in our minds, inviting infection. Or we were remade in the image of our Savior.
But I escaped when I was twenty-four. A holy age. The age of first freedom.
A mating age.
I like so many others before me was tasked with a pilgrimage of woe. I was to travel out. To cast my web into the wind and catch a bridefly. She would carry a new member into our congregation and then feed the swarm with the bounty of her body.
My father called the brideflies lucky, a sacrificer’s self-deception. But they always screamed. They always plead. They always looked upon their newborns with the same helpless forlorn desperation as they watched them recede into a throng of grasping foreign hands.
The feast followed, blood and muscle and bone reduced to sustenance for stomachs that never once gurgled in want. I remember the red drips falling from my father’s chin after my cousin Caleb’s bridefly met the carving knife. He and Caleb, bonded in zealotry as I shrunk away from offered second helpings. But I ate. I’ll not lie about my sins.
What’s past is past and cannot be undone.
I heard that what befell the groomflies was similarly gruesome, but I never saw it and the women of the congregation rarely gabbed.
It was a monstrous life, but one guided by the collective reaffirming madness of faith. I am truly sorry for what horrors my hands have wrought, but this story isn’t about that.
When I met Lyla, I flirted and charmed as I had been taught. The Spider’s Christ was a beacon at the center of the cosmic web. A charismatic light weaving order from chaos. I was His acolyte. A pupil of the lessons He taught.
Be patient.
Be resolute.
Be attractive and mutable as the sky beyond the web.
Wait for your blessed moment.
Trust in your Savior.
Lyla smiled. She laughed and twirled a lock of dark brown hair around her finger. I smiled back; laughed with her. I played our game of faith at first. I followed the teachings. But something stirred inside of me. Something forbidden. A silent heresy.
We were part way through a pair of cappuccinos, conspiring about a middling performance of an Oscar Wilde play we had seen earlier in the evening. And I felt it. Hunger, or something near enough. Desire? Love.
My escape had been one of happenstance. A surrender to a power somehow greater than myth and ritual. Lyla was a bridefly no longer. But in a dusty chapel near Tulsa, she became a bride and I became…happy.
I didn’t speak of the Spider’s Christ. To her, my father had died suddenly. A tumor whose only symptom was a seizure from which he didn’t recover. My mother had taken her life in grief. I played the tragedies as a raw nerve and buried my living parents beneath a lie I was groomed to tell.
We rented a house on my dwindling allotment from the church. I got a job assisting a carpenter. I walked to work with the warm southern sun licking at my face and I came home to the ease of simplicity.
Six months into our marriage, our life accelerated considerably with a phone call from Lyla’s OB-GYN. She delivered the news with trepidation but when I smiled, I saw the tension melt from her shoulders. I was happy. And in spite of the memory of screaming mothers and tearing flesh and infants swaddled in spider silk, I let myself feel free.
Then in Lyla’s third trimester, the insularity of my self-deception broke. We were in the waiting room of a women’s health center, Lyla cradling a book and I, half-watching a show about home renovation.
A man strode in, lanky and grim with a drab grey sack suit and a stiff posture as he sat. He stared at me or just past. He chewed at his bottom lip.
I averted my gaze with a bit of a grimace and read Lyla’s book over her shoulder for a minute or so. When I looked up, the man was still staring but now had spilled out of his chair a bit. He was leaning forward. Chewing his lip with increasing vigor.
“Can I help you with something, pal?” I asked, trying and failing to conceal my discomfort.
He said one word in response.
“Apostate.“
Lyla asked me about the strange encounter that night but I shrugged as the man’s rimey voice wheezed through my mind.
“Just some weirdo,” I murmured dismissively.
She pulled her legs onto my lap and sunk into the pudgy arm of our sofa.
“In a doctor’s office though?” she sighed.
I rubbed her feet and stared at nothing in particular. “At least there’s just the one. Some places…”
I let the thought drift away. When I broke my gaze with the wall, Lyla was sleeping. I stayed up thinking about how many times I had walked with my wife and missed a spider lurking unseen and watching closely. The church knew.
Our Savior slumbers with six eyes closed, yet ever he watches and ever he knows.
I shivered off the thought and looked over to two sets of drawn curtains. The church wasn’t omniscient. The Spider’s Christ wasn’t real. We could move somewhere distant and get lost in a new life. Together. The three of us.
The dream was easier than the present or my past. It soothed in hazy optimism. My eyes drooped.
“Honey wake up!”
I startled awake, wet.
“Honey, I think my water broke.”
It was early. Two weeks more and I would’ve been prepared, but I changed my clothes and threw a bag together with the expedience of singular focus. Lyla’s contractions had begun by the time we got in the car. I struggled to remember the timing. But it didn’t matter.
Lyla groaned. I drove.
In the delivery room, I tried to be useful but found myself waiting and pacing; an idle foreman to a workforce far more competent than I. In West Nowhere, the elders had delivered the babies, I had just—
With nothing to do, my mind wandered to dark places.
My current surroundings were at least alien compared to my memories. It was a strange comfort; the sterile functionality of medical equipment and the soft accents of a labor and delivery ward. I had only ever seen women give birth on the hard flagstones between the pews. Some of them were held down by rough hands. Lyla wouldn’t suffer as they had. I took selfish solace in that fact.
By the second hour, the nurses’ presence became intermittent. Our baby would come, but not yet. I tried to doze once or twice on a chair that looked more comfortable than it was. Lyla seemed to fare a bit better with the assistance of an IV drip. At 2:59 am, I decided that it was close enough to morning to start on coffee.
I kissed Lyla’s forehead. She woke and smiled droopily.
“Don’t give birth until I’m back,” I warned.
She nodded. “Mmhmm.”
I made my way through sedate hallways, nodded at a nurse with a pink mask to match her scrubs. She looked up from the cool glow of a computer monitor and seemed to smile. Another nurse trudged down the hall, staring at his phone and pushing a cart as his orange Crocs squeaked against the tile.
The coffee wound up being terrible but I was grateful for the task even if I had created it. On my walk back, I passed the nurses station. Pink mask wasn’t there. No one was. It didn’t matter. It was late and Lyla was sleeping.
I pushed open the door to Lyla’s room. I whispered.
“Hey, I got you a—“
No.
I rushed forward spilling my coffee as a can of ginger ale thudded and hissed across the floor. I felt faint, nauseous. Lyla’s blanket was stained an angry red. The stain was too big. Her face was too pale. I had just been gone a minute. Just a minute. How?
EKG leads dangled from a silent machine, the sight of which didn’t click right away. I don’t know what I assumed had happened. In fact, as I pulled back the blanket, I’m not sure I was thinking anything at all. But as I saw what lay beneath, the breath left my lungs.
Her belly was open—cut open and bloody and missing—
Our child was gone. In his place was a writhing mass of spiders. Many floated listlessly in blood or clung to sticky fascia. Others skittered about without direction.
I stared for too long, unable to redirect my focus from the surreal portrait of death. The sight was too anatomical to be personal and I was too distant from grief or reality to see this body as the woman I loved. And then the displacement of feeling equalized. I screamed.
“HELP! FUCK—SOMEONE! PLEASE!”
My wail seemed to echo off the walls and in the silence that followed I heard a word spoken from behind me.
“Apostate.”
I turned slowly at the familiar voice. I saw his face first. Then the scrubs. The crocs. The shopping bag dangling from his fingers, heavy with something wet and red.
“Apostate,” he repeated. My heart thumped. The blood ran from my face. My father scowled back at me and shut the door.
The Spider’s Christ is a legend of my hometown that its people made real through their faith. He is an amalgam, a fairytale, a monster and a messiah. He is written in fear and remembered in children’s screams.
I remember.
The Great Web spoke unto the people of nowhere of a Savior reborn. He will survive where others perish, born in blood and supped on pain. He will grow alone and weave in darkness, never known by His mother, forsaken by His father.
The mythos has a way of believing for you.