Geoff finished the dishes and lay back down on the futon. In the evening light, Naomi's body grew still. There was more time to nap now they didn't have jobs.
Geoff tried and failed to fall back to sleep. Instead, he lay awake and watched shadows dance on the mudbrick walls of the shack. The flickering light looked like three men with dead pools of light for mouths and eyes. The shadows moved along the wall, sometimes slipping up and melting into the ceiling.
Geoff had seen a documentary once on sleep paralysis. People afflicted by it described being trapped in their bodies at night, watching strange apparitions dance threateningly around them -- three-dimensional television static warped into humanoid form with black gaping mouths. Maybe it was Geoff's memory of that documentary that had created the supernatural creatures flashing across the walls. Or perhaps it was a previous dweller, someone else who dragged them into the under-earth with them when they died. You could never be sure down here, with so many people sharing common nightmares.
Naomi was so quiet when she slept, even more so now that she didn't breathe. Geoff rolled onto his side to watch her sleep. Her skull was as smooth as her skin had been when they were alive.
Her hands were small but complex. Her back and hips and legs all fit together like the pieces of a puzzle, neatly connected.
It was a wonder how her spine worked. How all the vertebrae interconnected, stable yet so flexible. The machinery of her body was endlessly fascinating. It had been a kind of living nightmare, losing their skin, their hair, their muscles, their lips.
Watching himself rot away, peel off into the dirt had been embarrassing. But it had hurt just as much to watch the lover he knew change in front of him; seeing her soft curves melt away, leaving raw strips of flesh and grisly patches of hair. But now in her place, he was discovering new love, a new body, a bone woman.
The celling burped out a bubble of lava, and for a moment the light in the room flared brighter. Naomi's bones flashed white, and Geoff saw, in that illuminated moment, a dark shape wrapped around Naomi's spine.
It took a few confusing seconds of staring blankly at the lumpy mass before Geoff realised what he was seeing. When he did recognise it, he froze, as still as his sleeping girlfriend.
Laying inches from his body was a huntsman spider, possibly the most unpleasant creature ever conceived. It was wrapped tightly around the spine of his lover, its claws rubbing back and forth along the ridges of her vertebrae, slowly grinding against her. He hoped that he was wrong, he hoped he wasn't going to have to deal with killing one of Naomi's ultimate nightmare spiders. He would have to do so quietly enough that she stayed asleep during the execution.
This spider was the exaggerated undead version of the similar but slightly less horrifying, Australian huntsman spiders that had terrified Naomi when she was alive. There was a lot of messed up stuff down in the bone villages of skeleton city but a giant huntsman, with glowing red eyes, legs twice as long and segmented as any living spider, with a hatred for all humanoids and an evil mission to destroy humanity; that was still a turn off for even the most hardened denizen of the underworld.
The deadly creatures only existed, as far as Geoff could tell, thanks to the nightmares of his peacefully sleeping girlfriend, who had born these lanky demons into the underworld when she moved here. The nightmare spiders made Geoff's sleep paralysis shadows seem like a soothing naptime puppet show.
Any hope of sleeping the evening away with Naomi evaporated. Geoff was wide awake. He had to get rid of the spider, and he had to do it quickly. Naomi was already self-conscious enough about her skeleton. The last thing she needed was a big gaff tape repair job right in the middle of her chest.
These spiders, unlike the ugly, but mostly harmless, above earth variety could crush bone and rock with their pincer-like feet. Geoff was still recovering from the trauma of Naomi's wretched howling from the last time one of these monsters had found its way into the shack. And on that occasion, six months ago now, she had only glimpsed the spider from the other side of the room before it skittered behind the pantry.
He'd never seen one actually come into contact with her before. And this one wasn't just touching her, it was inside her chest, wrapped around her very core. If she woke up and found it, Geoff didn't know what she'd do. It would likely be too much trauma for her to bear. And that would be more stress than Geoff felt like dealing with on a sleepy Sunday evening.
Naomi murmured and smiled in her sleep. She rolled over and rested one arm across Geoff's ribs. He was so close to the spider now. He could see its beady little eyes, all sixteen of them, glowing in the dark, staring at him. They seemed to be daring him to do something. There was more hatred in those pinpricks of light than he'd ever see in a million wall shadow people.
Naomi tilted her head back to look up at Geoff and smiled. He could feel the frantic pounding of his phantom heart in his chest. The memory of blood was pumping through him. His ears were full of deafening white noise. His bones were on fire. If she looked down now, she would see it.
He did the first and only thing that he could think of.
He pressed his face against hers and in one massive clap of force, smacked his hand around the spider, clamping his fingers around its squirming, hairy body. He squeezed it as tight as he could. He tried with all his strength to crush it into dust against her, but even as he clamped his fist tighter, he could still feel the damn thing squirming slowly in his grip. How strong could this demon be? Geoff remembered that he was also quite weak, which probably wasn't helping the situation.
"Well, hello there," Naomi whispered and pushed herself against Geoff. The spider writhed desperately in Geoff's hand. He squeezed harder, and the writhing was slowed but not stopped. He prayed that Naomi wouldn't feel the movement of its furious body against hers.
Geoff's spider hand was beginning to tingle and lose feeling. He added his other hand to the grip, using the strength of all ten bony fingers to crush the thing. But like their living counterparts, undead huntsmen were difficult to kill. He knew from experience that they could withstand unbelievable force to their bodies.
Geoff kissed and squeezed and barely breathed, using every ounce of energy that wasn't going into the kissing to try to complete the squeeze of death. Finally, the bundle of legs stopped moving. Geoff had crushed the spider so tightly and kissed Naomi for so long that both his hand and mouth were sore with a dull ache. If only he could somehow ensure the spider was dead before opening his hand.
Naomi pulled back from the kiss. If she tried to move away from Geoff's grip, he'd be discovered. This was as good a time as any. He pulled his hand away from her spine, holding the carcass of the thing tight in his fist. Now all he had to do was dispose of the body.
"What's that?" Naomi asked looking down at Geoff's hand which was resting non-nonchalantly, but tightly closed, on the edge of his hip.
For a moment Geoff tried to think of an answer. There was a beat of silence. He didn't say anything, didn't move his hand. But it was no use. As if by a sixth sense, Naomi knew.
She leapt out of bed and fell backwards onto the floor. She didn't need to see it. Her spider sense was as subtle as the microscopic belly hairs of a baby huntsman. She scrambled backwards until she was pressed hard against the far wall of the shack. She didn't take her eye's off Geoff's hand for a moment. She snapped her jaw open.
And then just as suddenly, her words came back to her. "Oh my god I can see a leg," she said.
She started sobbing. Geoff looked down, and sure enough, there was one very long leg sticking out from between his index and ring figure. It was twitching. He pinched it with his left hand, right at the base, and with a twisting motion plucked it off. The twitching stopped.
"It's okay darling," Geoff said. "Everything is going to be okay".
"Nothing's ever going to be okay again" Naomi replied. This seemed a little melodramatic, but Geoff kept that thought to himself.
He had learned long ago that sometimes when you found yourself in a seemingly impossible situation, such as being stuck in a small room with a terrifying spider carcass, a terrified girlfriend, and no apparent way to get rid of the former and soothe the latter, the best course of action was distraction.
"Let's go to the shops," Geoff said.
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