Chaper II
Big Bad Voodoo Lou awakens. He groggily falls out of bed and stumbles to the bathroom. Still on automatic pilot, he aims and fires the same as he’s done every morning for who can remember how long - until he feels warm spatters on his legs and feet . “Hey!”, thinks he, “Who put the toilet lid down? I always leave it up.” Lou chalks it up to midnight roamings (little does he know) and clumisly cleans up the mess. “I’ll get the rest later” he mumbles and begins to move towards the hall. He bounces off the bathroom doorjam, possibly breking his little toe in 4 places, careens into the hall wall and hits the ground with a thud. “Crap!” he cried (because this is a family story). “That’s gonna hurt when I wake up”. Lou’s sleep adled brain senses something is amiss - but what? “Didn’t I use the coffee table to crush a gargantuan spider last night in this very hallway? Didn’t I leave said table upside down on top of also said gargatuan spider?” Lou is confused. The table is not there, nor is there any sign of a spider, gargantuan or otherwise. “Must have been a dream” he muses. “who kills a spider with a coffee table, anyway? From now on, no more anchovies at bedtime”.
Our hero picks himself up off the hall floor and limps his way to the living room. “What the…” Lou thinks outloud. There is the coffee table. It’s upright and in the right room, but it’s not where it should be." Slowly, Lou looks around. The whole room has been rearranged, and quite tastefully at that. Lou scans the room. “Not bad” he muses, “not bad at all.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
Lou spins around at the sound of the strange voice. He spots the source, but his brain doesn’t immediately register the speaker. Lou takes a deep breath and focuses. There, sitting in his lazy boy, dressed in Lou’s best housecoat and smoking a pipe (“A pipe?” Lou thinks incredulously, “where did that come from?”) is one huge spider. One might even say gargantuan. Natty, in a hairy, leggy sort of way, but gargantuan all the same.
The spider’s eyes were fixed ominoulsy on Lou’s. Lou briefly considered a staredown, but tossed that idea aside as just plain silly. He was, afterall, outnumbered 4 to 1 in the eyeball department. For a fleeting moment Lou found it humorous that 6 of the spider’s eyes appeared to have shiners.
“I so hoped you would be pleased with my handiwork” said the spider, smiling a somewhat menacing smile. “You see, I had a lot of time to think last night. That table was very nearly my end. While I recovered sufficiently to move the damn thing I was able to come up with this floor plan. Very efficient and asthetically pleasing as well, if I do say so myself.”
“You see,” continued the spider “it gets quite tiresome living on a web all the time, what with you humans constantly ‘cleaning them up’. I thought maybe I’d try living in a house for a while. Not a web in the house, mind you, but the house itself. Not only will it be more comfortable, but less rebuilding means more web for the really important things - like wrapping food. Do come closer, dear human,…”
