It was a ratty, big thing, one that had been written halfway through before he had come to town. He had had it for when he could remember the scarce dream, here and there, in the desert of his dreamless nights. This bothered him deeply, as he could remember a time in which he was quite skillful at lucid dreaming, which once broke him from the awfulness of his dull, lifeless practice, but that had waned without warning one day, years ago. They were replaced with an outbreak of nightmares, which were, in turn, caused by anything that frightened him. Dr. Paul was brave during the day, and to some he was even harsh, but at night, he wished he knew someone romantically, so that she could wake him from the awful things.
The dream diary was more of a way to try to keep the fear away from his sleep than to memorize the happy ones, as they simply ceased to happen. If it worked to keep the fear away during the night, he did not know, and he clung to it, hopelessly, like it were his only sanctuary.
He grew to hate the drunkard that had come into his practice on his first day of work, as the human spider had caused him a lack of much sleep, even weeks after hearing about the abomination. In his dream journal there was entry after entry involving pale, scarcely clothed corpses scuttling after him as he walked home past some dark, empty graveyard, or something grabbing one of his ankles from behind him while he tried to ascend the stairs from his empty basement.
It got worse for him, much worse, when he happened to flip through some of the earliest occurrences of his nightmares that he had managed to record, back when he first received the journal. At some point he had described something comprising of a grotesque head that looked entirely broken from its neck, entirely gray skin, and was naked, save for what looked to be like far too loose men's black trousers hanging like elephant's skin from around its waist. He described how it moved, the clicking noise it made as it dashed madly about, only moving quickly when its presence was discovered, and otherwise how it slunk deplorably low to its knees, to its disfigured elbows. Its eyes were the worst, shaped weirdly, almost perfectly rectangular, as though they had been carved to perfectly match each other.
Paul locked the journal up in an unused drawer and decided to go about trying to cure his nightmares without the use of his writing.
Things only got worse – going from night terrors into the light of Paul's daily life. His manner around everyone, not only in his personal life, but also at work, deteriorated into rubbish. His growing phobia soon translated into an obsession with learning about everything dealing with the local legend. He pulled out his old dream journal, threw out all of the pages that he had written in before, and he started to keep a collection, loose only at first, of everything he heard about the human spider.
Things began to come together, to synchronize, into a coherent story that seemed to happen again and again.
One of the stories he collected went like this: A woman who lived alone at the edge of town was walking alone after she had gone fishing. She was in a good mood as she walked home, enjoying the sun and the shade from the trees' canopies, the way the leaves left pretty speckled shadows on everything in the forest path.
She heard a noise, turned around to look at where it had come from, and screamed, dropping her fishing equipment where she left it until she and her neighbor got it the next afternoon. There was nothing more that was particularly interesting about her story, save that two weeks after the incident a serious fire burnt down her home while she was held up in the grocery store. She said that she felt that if she had not had trouble in the store, and had come home those extra ten minutes early, she would have been trapped in her house.
The other interesting thing about the woman, her story, was that she was later found, unconscious, next to the same spot where she had dropped her fishing equipment. She was taken to the hospital, where she lived for a day before she died.
In Paul's estimation, nearly everyone who saw the thing was going to die, but if they didn't die the first time that their stroke of “bad luck” kicked in, then they died in a more excruciating way somewhere a little further down the line. They never lasted past a month to the day that they escaped death. Paul became more than a little afraid of going outside after hearing of the fishing woman's story, and he began to find ways to stay inside as often as he could. To him being outside was what brought the human spider to its victim.
Paul convulsively gathered more and more information, never discounting any story that he ever heard of that rang of the same elements of all of the others. He stopped taking pride in his work professionally, finding perverse pride in his mastery of the thing of his nightmares, in the cataloging of its habits, its anatomy, and its secrets.
He tried to perfect a drawing of it, the first attempt at its sketch falling apart when the number of erasing that had been done on the paper tore holes through the work. He ripped the ruined page out of the journal and continued to sketch on a fresh sheet, trying to discover the fearful perfection that made up its eyes.
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