Paul had heard about the thing on the day that he came to live in town. News of it had come to him while he was in his office. As a foot specialist, he was being kept busy on his first day at work, caused in no small part by the facts that the town had had no local podiatrist for the last ten years as well as the fact that he had begun unpacking that day as well.
The first patient of the day had been a backwoods local who had told the nurse that he had “broke his foot real bad” and who had an impromptu brace attached to the injured leg. He said he had to do it himself, because he had to drive himself to the clinic.
He was taken into the examination room huffing in pain, and in his haste to go into the room he ended up whacking the harmed leg against the door frame. Howling, he nearly crumpled to his knees in pain, and then waved Paul off of him when he came to help him up, stuttering out, “Sorry, sorry, new on this thing.”
Trouble continued from there, as the man refused Paul's help in hopping onto the examination cot, taking a full minute in doing it himself. Paul would wonder, four weeks after this meeting, if it had perhaps been the man's bull-headedness or his clumsiness that had contributed to his falling down a steep hill, resulting in him cracking his head open on those train tracks they would later find him on. After he managed to get the brace off of the man's leg, Paul was able to see the extent of damage that he had sustained.
“You hurt your ankle and shin pretty badly. How'd you manage it?”
The man was silent for a moment, looking as though he was struggling with what to tell Paul, then muttering, “I was runnin'.”
“A relay race?”
The man grimaces. “That's for high schoolers. I was runnin' from something.”
“What kind of a something?”
The man looked away before speaking in a voice frank in its fear. “Something I never seen in those woods before.”
“Why'd you run from it?”
The man turned to look at Paul then, his eyes surprising him with the amount of unbridled fear in them. “Youda run, if you saw it.”
Paul, thinking of how often the good 'ol boys in town must drink, suppressed the urge to chuckle at this assertion. “Well, what did it look like?”
Looking down at his hands, the man said, “I couldn't actually see it – I thank God almighty for that – but I know that it was a body.”
“Body? Like, what kind of a body?”
“Like a body, in a graveyard.”
Paul, unable to help himself, started to grin. “So, a zombie, then?”
The man bristled in anger, his voice tight as he spoke. “No, I wasn't that drunk... It crawled all around, like a spider, or a crab. Except it looked like a person, but... different.”
The words weighed eerily on Paul's mind, and he hurried through the rest of the initial examination before rushing the man into the x-ray room to get his foot scanned.
The words stayed with him – like a cuckoo dropping its egg into a doomed sparrow's nest. It didn't help that the daily doldrum of the town only increased its growth in his mind, and it kept crawling back to Paul.
The memory of the hick's recounting of the human spider came back into Paul's dreams, and, subsequently, into his dream journal.
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