I’d been a student-teacher at Rawlings Elementary for two months when I first heard about Spider Baby.
I spent most of my time at the school (every Thursday and Friday except for when I had exams) with my assigned second-grade teacher, Mrs. Pittman. She was an older lady that had taught for over twenty-five years, and my first impression had been that she was burned out and ready to retire. She could come across as gruff and uncaring at times, making harsh proclamations about this child or that, handing out rewards and punishments with the ruthless efficiency of someone running a factory rather than a classroom. But as I got to know her better, I saw the love and respect she had for the children and that they had for her in return. She was also an excellent teacher—I learned more from her in a week than I’d learned in school all semester, and as time went on, I began to understand that I still had a lot to learn.
Part of knowing Mrs. Pittman was understanding that she was unflappable not because she didn’t care, but because she had seen everything already. This was her twenty-sixth group of seven year-olds, and everything that seemed novel and interesting to me was old hat to her. My second week there, a child came back from gym with a broken wrist. The girl was crying and I was panicked, but Mrs. Pittman just took the girl’s other hand and led her down to the office, distracting her with a story that had the child giggling before she was out of earshot. Nothing seemed to trouble her or catch her by surprise.
I think that’s why it caught my attention that day out on the playground. We were watching our class and two others for afternoon recess, and for the last ten minutes we’d been sitting in fairly comfortable silence while watching the kids play and glancing at our phones. That’s when I heard her mutter under her breath.
“Goddamn Spider Baby.”
I glanced up and looked at Mrs. Pittman with surprise. Not because she’d cursed—she frequently talked like a sailor when the kids weren’t in earshot. And only partially because of the oddness of what she said. I had no idea of what a “spider baby” might be.
No, it was because of how she said it. I could hear frustration and irritation in her voice, but it sounded like they were sharing space with something else that was darker and more alien. She sounded a little nervous, or possibly even afraid. Looking at her face, the expression there was thin-lipped and unreadable, and before I could ask what she was talking about, she was on her feet and calling to the kids.
“My class! Get away from there. Come here. My class, come to me right now.”
I looked out and noticed that most of our class was clumped at the far edge of the playground. More precisely, they were ten or twenty feet into the woods that lay at the playground’s edge. Still visible, but in an area that made it more likely they could get a tick or poison ivy. I flushed with embarrassment. I should have been paying better attention. It was notable enough that the class—which normally divided out into several smaller groups at recess—were all playing together, but the fact that I hadn’t even realized that they were drifting into the woods…I glanced back at Mrs. Pittman.
“I…I’m sorry. I should have noticed they were out that far.”
She didn’t look at me, her expression hard as she watched the children reluctantly trickle back into the playground and head toward our bench. “It’s fine. They just started doing this shit last week.” Then, in a louder voice. “I told you about that, didn’t I? You stay out of the woods. You stay away from that dead tree. You didn’t listen, so now you all lose recess today and tomorrow. Get back inside.”
I expected to hear complaints and whining, but there was none. Instead the children just stared at her quietly for a moment before filing back into the building. Mrs. Pittman gave me a look and shook her head before following them in.
“So what’s that you said before? Spider baby?”
I was cleaning the room after school while Mrs. Pittman graded workbook papers with the speed of a printing press. She shrugged without looking up.
“Just some weird make-believe they’ve come up with. It started last week. Colleen and Jasper were the first ones I think. They got most of the rest into it now too. I don’t know a lot about it—they clam up when I get close, but they still talk too loud, the little idiots.” She paused and looked up with a sigh. “It’s something about some kind of little spider monster that lives in the tree. They call it Spider Baby. They want to go out to this dead tree in the woods and feed it leaves and rocks or something. I don’t know. Kids are so weird these days. When I was their age, I wanted to be an astronaut and thought spiders were gross and scary. Still do, as a matter of fact.” She smirked. “The spider part. I think I can stop looking for a call from NASA.”
I snickered and nodded as I went back to sweeping. “So they keep trying to go to the woods and feed Spider Baby, huh?
When she spoke next, I could hear that same irritated anxiety in her voice again. “Yeah. I’ve punished them twice now. Usually that would do it. But this…We’ll just have to watch them close the next few days until they get bored with it or are sick of getting punished.”
That was on a Thursday. The following day, I was walking between their desks while they took a spelling test. Some of the children were industriously writing out the words (or misspelled versions) as Mrs. Pittman called them out. But others…I’d say at least a third of the twenty-four children…were either just staring at her or doodling. Spacey kids aren’t uncommon, but that many all at once, particularly when I knew some of them were the better, more mature students in the class, that was odd. After seeing how many there were, I waited until she was between words and then spoke up.
“Everyone needs to pay attention or you’re going to get a zero. Stop staring off or drawing, okay? Get to work or a note is going home to your parents.” I glanced at Mrs. Pittman and she nodded before going back to reading out the words.
Some of the children seemed to do better, but a couple of them, Colleen and Jasper, as a matter of fact, just kept on drawing. I went to stand next to Jasper, thinking that me staring down may get him to pay attention, but he didn’t even glance my way. Instead, he just kept filling his page with a sprawling black web.
It was impressive in a disturbing kind of way—it was clearly a spider’s web, realized in enough detail that even at a distance I could see individual strands speckled with what might have been leaves or small dead bugs. And in the center, slowly taking shape under his careful pencil, was a dark mound that I assumed must be Spider Baby.
I snatched the paper off his desk. “Zero, Jasper. You were warned.” I looked over at the girl two rows down. “You too, Colleen. Hand me your paper.”
The girl passed her paper to me wordlessly, neither her nor Jasper giving any sign that they were upset that they’d gotten in trouble. That was fine. I’d send home a note. Make sure they had a real fun weekend with their parents. Maybe the next week they wouldn’t be such disobedient little shits.
I caught myself. I was becoming Mrs. Pittman. The scary part was I wasn’t sure it wasn’t a good thing. I glanced down at the papers. They have an easy test, a good teacher who is working hard to teach them, and they waste…
I had a moment of confusion as I looked at the two sheets of paper. They were identical. Not just the test sheet itself, but the drawings that were on it. Every filament of the web, every speck of detritus, even the partially formed mass in its center…they were the same.
After the students were gone, I showed them to Mrs. Pittman. She looked at them for several moments before looking up at me, her gaze uneasy. “Yeah, I saw something like that the other day too. I don’t know how they’re doing it. Maybe copying something they saw somewhere? Kids get up to odd things some times.” She looked back down at the papers, her expression darkening slightly. “Still, this is…well, I need to look into this more. May have to talk to some parents next week.” Letting out a long breath, she favored me with a smile. “But you don’t worry about it, okay? And good job with taking the papers. You have to show them who’s in charge or they’ll eat you alive.”
I gave her a grin I didn’t really feel. “Thanks. Want me to do anything else today?”
She shook her head. “No, no. You go on. Have a good weekend.”
That was the last time I ever saw Mrs. Pittman alive.
I got a call on Wednesday of the following week asking if I was able to substitute for Mrs. Pittman that day and possibly the rest of the week. I said sure—I had a class that day, but I could skip, and I was more concerned with why they needed me. They said Mrs. Pittman hadn’t been at work since Monday—they’d called and texted her, but no luck so far. When I asked if they’d checked on her, they said they had, but she didn’t answer her door and her car wasn’t there. The woman on the phone sounded concerned, but I sensed it was at least partially about getting a sub on short notice. A lump growing in my stomach, I told her I’d be there in thirty minutes.
When I got to the classroom, I knew right away that something was wrong. Everything was too quiet. Too still. The children, even the ones that had acted normally last week, were all sitting in their desks silently with folded hands. When I came in, they turned and looked at me—some even smiled. But it was still off…it was all off.
I told myself I was being silly. I was acting as though I was in the Village of the Damned because the kids were well-behaved and their teacher had taken a couple of sick days or…well, I didn’t know what was going on with her. Hopefully she was okay. But still, that had nothing to do with these kids, who were probably just glad a familiar face was here and would start acting up in the next few minutes.
Except they didn’t. We went through the morning as I followed Mrs. Pittman’s lesson plan for the day. She always kept meticulous notes in her precise but pretty handwriting, and it was easy enough to know what to do. I was grateful for it, because I was having a hard time focusing on anything other than my growing unease.
It wasn’t because the children weren’t paying attention. They all focused on me fine…perhaps too much if anything. But they weren’t acting right. By time for morning recess, I decided to keep them in, both to avoid them heading to the woods and to try and provoke a reaction from them. But there was none.
Finally, I just stopped in the middle of phonics and asked them if anyone had heard from Mrs. Pittman. If any of them knew if she was okay. I knew the administration would frown on me asking the kids, but I didn’t care. At most, I expected to get silence or a couple of shrugs anyway.
Instead, they started to giggle and laugh. It started with Colleen, then Jasper, then it flowed out across the room like ripples in a fetid pond. I felt my stomach clench at the sound of it. When I asked what was so funny, they just laughed harder for a moment before all falling silent as one. Then they were back to just sitting there and watching me.
Like little spiders.
I left the classroom and went up to the front office, telling them that something had come up. I needed to go. They’d have to find someone else to watch the class. They tried to argue, but I was already back out the door and headed for the parking lot.
It was as I was on the way to my car that I glanced over at the woods that bordered the school. That was the same patch of woods that ran up to the playground. The same patch of woods the kids kept being drawn to.
Looking back at the building, I turned and started heading across the grass toward the woods. I knew it wouldn’t amount to anything, but if I could see this dead tree they were supposedly pretending had the monster in it, maybe it would help me get control of myself. Prove that I was getting freaked out over nothing.
It was as I drew nearer to the edge of the woods that I saw what looked like tire tracks going deeper in. The ground was softer here, and I could clearly make out twin lines that pushed further past bent bushes and broken branches. Had someone been driving back here? Why?
I looked to my right and couldn’t even see the playground through the green clutter. Coming in from the side like this, I had a new appreciation for how deep these woods went. Many of the trees here were old and enormous, with gray twisted bark and boughs that had survived from times long before this school was even here. I knew there were people and buildings just a few hundred yards away, but as I went further in, I was finding it harder and harder to escape the feeling that I was actually in a remote forest, with nothing around me other than that which called this dark place home.
I almost turned back, but then I saw a splash of blue gleaming amid the green. Periwinkle blue, the color of Mrs. Pittman’s hatchback. Heart in my throat, I walked closer and saw that the driver’s side door was open. I half-expected to find her sitting there, unconscious or dead, but there was no sign of her. The keys were in the ignition and the car was in neutral, but it seemed the battery was long dead.
I started reaching for my phone as I realized what was in front of the car. A gigantic tree of bone-white bark and broken branches that stabbed into the sky like a jagged crown. It was clear that the tree was dead, but judging from the dark fissure in the middle of the trunk, I thought it might also be hollow.
I wanted to call for help, but I needed to look in there first. I had some dim, terrible instinct that Mrs. Pittman might have crawled into the tree for shelter after getting hurt. Crawled, or been drug in there somehow. Either way, I felt this growing compulsion to see. Blood thundering in my ears, I rounded the car and approached the hole.
The breach in the trunk was five feet tall and less than two feet wide. I had a hard time picturing the large older woman squeezing through the space, but I was here and I needed to check. Turning on my phone’s light, I looked inside.
In that inner chamber of dark, my light played off of endless ribbons of silver. Webs stretched tight against the walls and formed a gossamer membrane around the dark mound that lay in the center. It was her, the ruined, desiccated corpse of Mrs. Pittman, supported by the webbing like some kind of terrible marionette. Her expression was horrific—mouth open with lips skinned back, eyes wide and half-sunken in the sockets. On her forehead, three words had been carved in crooked, uneven letters.
Fud for God
Her body was contorted in some endless, horrible pain, her back arched so far it looked as though she might break in two.
In fact, there was already a large hole in her chest—a black crack that matched the larger fissure in the tree itself. I saw no blood coming from the hole—just blackness pressed against a ragged opening of torn flesh and broken bones.
That’s when the blackness shifted.
It turned, awoken by either my presence or the glare of my light. I saw that light reflected in eight eyes. Bright, intelligent eyes that welcomed me. It told me its name I think.
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