Chương 335: Book Eight, Chapter 2: Crawlspace

I quickly found my way back to the theater seat that I had come from. The others didn't need my help at that point. Camden had taken the lead and had planned the entire storyline, Crawlspace, out with the goal of being able to copy the Carousel Atlas, one of several things that had been on our to-do list for too long. I sat back and watched as Kimberly, Lorne, and Antoine built up stacks of old books as barriers between themselves and the creepy crawlies that were on their way.

"It's a shame we'll have to burn all of these," Pietro said as he watched them work.

"That's another sin over my head."

"If it gives us time to escape, then it will all be worth it," Anna said.

"Maybe we'll get lucky and it will kill them all. I just wish that Professor Maize hadn't been so cryptic. Then none of this might have happened."

"Thanks for that," Pietro said.

"But I knew enough, and I didn't heed the warning." The fact that we had set him up not to heed that warning was our little secret. I decided it was time to make my only real contribution to the movie by signaling for them that it was time to move forward with the final battle, and I did so using Flashback Revelation. It was easy to trigger. Cassie had been sitting on the floor reading the journal that Logan had written in character as their professor.

Apparently, it was quite confusing and filled with useless poems and riddles, but underneath it all there was also helpful information. I triggered the flashback, and immediately, Cassie furrowed her brow as if remembering something I had said.

"Don't worry about Professor Maize. His tests may seem needlessly complicated, but he always leaves just enough clues for you to find the answers," I had told her back before the spiders started eating people. Correction, before the spiders started laying their eggs in people.

"No line is ever insignificant with him." Suddenly, Cassie had a breakthrough realization. She started flipping through the diary until she found a page she wanted.

"Wait," she said.

"Maybe Professor Maize did leave us a clue of how to defeat them after all." The story had the vibes of a Tales from the Darkside short, which I loved. Even the spiders looked cheap. Camden got in close and looked over at the journal.

"What do you mean? I thought it was all gobbledygook." Cassie quickly placed the journal on top of a light table so everyone could see it.

"Look at this," Cassie said.

"When Professor Maize was examining the box, he started writing about the Mid-Millennium rituals and enchantments from the lost city. Here he writes, 'The Hoffi priests didn't have a word for blessing or enchantment. They believed that any spell that was a blessing to one was very likely a curse to another. Thus, all magic to them was a curse.'" Camden thought for a moment.

"I think I understand what you're trying to say." Good for him, because I was pretty sure the audience wouldn't, but that's what Scholars did. They had to seem smart somehow. The fact that he had planned out this whole sequence made it easy for him.

"I don't understand anything," Anna said.

"What's going on?" Anna had a trope that would buff high-savvy characters when she asked them questions during their explanations.

"We can't find a way to undo the enchantment that made these spiders superpowered, right?" Camden asked.

"It's like there's no counter-spell."

"Right," Pietro said.

"When the spider crawled inside the box after I opened it, they took on the powers of the demigods Andu and Teval. They're unstoppable. There is no way to defeat such a power."

"Maybe the reason we think that is because we don't understand magic the same way that the Hoffi did," Camden said.

"To them, a blessing to the spiders was the same as a curse to humans. We can't find a way to remove their enchantment because it would be against their will. But if their blessing is also a curse to us, well, that we might be able to reverse." Is that what it sounded like when I made up nonsense magic plans?

"Wait a second," Anna said.

"Who was cursed?" Camden and Cassie both, at the same time, said, "The person who opened the box." Everyone looked at Pietro.

"Me?" he asked.

"You're saying that I'm cursed?"

"If what Professor Maize wrote is correct, if the magic of the Hoffi really doesn't distinguish between a blessing to one creature and a curse to their prey," Camden said.

"Maybe opening the box was enough to tie you to the magic that caused this whole thing," Cassie added. Pietro thought for a moment. Fear drenched his face.

"That has to be it," he said.

"The box warned of a curse. I just didn't believe it. How could I? I was just so blinded by my desire to finish my thesis. I could never have believed it."

"So now what?" Anna asked.

"Do we get some holy water and baptize him or something?"

"No," Cassie said.

"We need the box. Even if destroying it won't work, we should be able to reverse-engineer a cure… What am I saying? If the poems of the Hoffi epics are correct, then the clue to reversing the curse will be on the box, or they were just really big poems and we're all screwed."

"We just need to know how to look for it," Camden said.

"Where is the box?" The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. Pietro's face went white.

"Where is it?" Cassie asked more urgently.

"The box should still be on the quad under the oak tree," Pietro said.

"You opened an ancient artifact on the quad? What did you take it with you during your lunch break? At least tell me you washed your hands," Camden said. Pietro shrugged his shoulders and lowered his face in shame. After he opened it, he hadn't noticed when a spider lowered itself down into the box in his hands. He was too busy writing notes. Suddenly, people all over campus started to scream after their neighborhood-friendly spiders began growing exponentially in size, so he was probably very distracted.

And now, how many had died, including myself, because of that? After that revelation, Lorne, Antoine, and Kimberly returned fresh from a fight, soot covering their foreheads and green ichor from the spiders staining their clothes.

"Folks, I hope you figured something out, because these things don't seem to care much about fire," Lorne said.

"On the bright side, their bodies are basically just big clay pots full of goo, but there are so many of them."

"The loading bay is our shot at getting out," Antoine said.

"Please tell me you have answers." They must have had answers, but Carousel didn't care for them, as the footage cut right to the group running outside of the library. Maybe it just didn't like the escape sequence, or perhaps it was redundant. Spiders were all over the place. Spider webs covered every physical surface, from the buildings to the trees to the park benches. Large, neatly packed globs of webbing could be found on many of the webs.

They had been students once, but now they were breeding grounds for more giant spiders. From the darkness, a large spider bore down on the group. This one was even bigger than the ones that had killed me, it looked like it could eat a Volkswagen Beetle for breakfast. Lorne stopped running. He turned toward the spider and then yelled back at the group, "Go ahead! I'll hold it off!" The truth was that he had such low Hustle, he had become a liability.

He normally used his Human Missile trope to counter that, but he had already used that trick a time or two. He was running out of options that would still be entertaining. Now all he could do was buy the others time.

"No, Lorne, don't do this!" Kimberly screamed.

"Just get out of here! Whatever you do, make these things pay!" Lorne said.

"Go now!" The others did as instructed, though they showed the requisite hesitation. Honestly, I wasn't sure if it was worth it. That spider venom was painful. Even with Lorne's huge Grit, he was in for a bad time. Lorne began checking his pockets. In the end, all he had was a makeshift spear he had made from a metal bookshelf support bracket and a can of bug spray. He looked up at the spider and screamed, "Come and get me!" And the spider did.

As the others raced toward the quad, Lorne stayed behind to grapple with the giant spider. It tried to dissolve him outright, spraying a stream of digestive acid in hopes of slurping up the resulting soup. But the creature may have regretted that choice because the canister of bug spray Lorne was holding exploded in its face, spoiling its meal mid-splurge. The spider tried to scuttle away, but collapsed dead before it made it more than a few feet.

The others made it to the quad, which was, if possible, even more covered in webs. But the good news was that the spiders here appeared to be resting. They moved slowly and were largely sedentary. Live prey had not been in this area in quite some time.

"How are we going to get through there?" Anna asked. Quickly, Camden knelt down and opened up his backpack, from which he retrieved two large bottles of liquid. Kimberly bent down and looked at them.

"Ethanol?" she asked.

"What are you going to do, light them on fire? That won't last too long, and all these spiders will only get angrier when you burn their webs."

"Ethanol and bleach," Camden said.

"Together they make chloroform gas."

"How is that supposed to help us?" Cassie asked.

"Won't that hurt to breathe?"

"Oh yeah," Camden said.

"But we can hold our breath. Spiders can't." I had no idea if he was making that up, but he sounded very confident. And if it did work, it was a little weird that they let Lorne die like that. I understood it from a Carousel perspective, but from a movie perspective, it kind of just felt like Camden didn't mind losing him. Quickly, Camden took out a container to mix the two liquids in and began creating a concoction that formed a thick white gas. The others moved forward as Camden created a smokescreen for them.

Like most things in Carousel, the chemical reaction was more extreme than it could have been in real life, and soon the chloroform gas started to surround the entire set. Spiders all over started to fall onto their backs as their legs collapsed under them. Funny enough, all the humans had to do was put their shirts over their mouths and noses, and that seemed to do the trick. All they needed was some excuse to allow their Grit to do its job, and that worked by movie logic.

"Get the box!" Anna said. Pietro started to dig through the spider webs under the oak tree, and in the process he was getting covered in small baby spiders, but he persisted.

"I've got it!" he finally said.

"Give it to me," Cassie said firmly. The spiders started closing in, and the chloroform began to fade as Camden was running out of ingredients. Quickly, Cassie shined her flashlight on the ancient stone box that was at the center of all the trouble. A look of joy came across her face as she said, "It's a pun."

"Just get it figured out!" Camden said. He was coughing. It would have been weird if the humans weren't affected by the chloroform at all.

"The price to pay shall be blood—it doesn't mean death itself. It literally means blood."

"You're saying that's not just the punishment, that's the way to reverse the curse?" Pietro responded. He quickly grabbed a fountain pen from his pocket and sliced a cut across the center of his hand, like people do in movies for dramatic effect. He then reached to open the box.

"Wait," Cassie said.

"Maybe you shouldn't open it. You should just use the blood to seal it."

"Right, of course," Pietro said. Pietro used his hand and the blood coming from it to encircle the stone box with blood and write a symbol over the top. In the meantime, the larger spiders were beginning to wake up from the effects of the chloroform and had begun fighting again. Antoine used his baseball bat to try to fight them off, but there were too many. Two of the spiders managed to grab onto his right shoulder and left foot and began attempting to pull him apart.

"Oh, wait," Cassie said.

"Maybe you do need to open the box to let the spider out."

"Right," Pietro said, as he quickly opened the lid and turned the box over so that the small dead spider could fall out onto the ground. Was it weird for me to laugh? The guards in the theater with me were.

"Here we go," he said as he began repeating the seal and the symbol. Cassie began chanting words in the ancient, possibly fictional language of the place where the box had come from, and suddenly all of the spiders around them began hissing and retreating into the night. The spiders were so large that they suddenly couldn't exist under their own weight, and they began falling to the ground dead all over. Those that survived weren't so large anymore.

Antoine sat up on the ground and pulled off a spider that had once been large enough to try and pull him in two, but was now little more than a household pest. The survivors looked on as spiders hissed and screamed in the distance, and gunfire could be heard from humans all over who were suddenly winning.

"You know, I can't think of anything in the world that would be worse to have fallen in the box than spiders," Cassie said.

"No kidding," Pietro said. Right after he was done speaking, a squirrel fell from the oak tree above. It had been wrapped up and killed by spiders, but it landed right on top of the box. All of the players looked at each other.

"We should definitely get this thing back into storage," Camden said.

"Before something else gets in there." And then the camera started lifting up into the air as, all over, giant spiders were falling to the ground and the world of webs started to come back alive. I barely had time to clap before I found myself waking up in a morgue, checking myself for spiders. We had accomplished what we came there by making copies of the Atlas and making contact with a narrator. Now it was time for a throughline.