Spiders Web

ittle did I suspect, of the horrors which would soon confront me when I arrived on a cheerful Sunday afternoon to start my degree in Coventry. I was thrilled by the unique architecture which would inspire great horror and nightmares later. So much so that I have had to take to a supply of mind numbing drugs to keep the disquieting thoughts at bay. God knows what I will do when my small supply is gone and I'm prey to the horrific realisations about the universe which totally upset the old, stable theories.

I arrived at Coventry, and took a garret room in J block of Priory Hall. A peculiar place, separated from everything else by long winding passage ways and dark eerie corners. However, it was a pleasant, airy room with the afternoon sun streaming through the windows. A cheerful place which was the home of many happy parties. However, it was in total contrast to my neighbour, John (I will change his name here to preserve his good name). David's room was dark, dust haunted the corners, no matter what cleaning occurred. And the corners, corners beyond measure, which drew the eye and seemed to be calling you to take a journey. A journey through time and space.

How this room was constructed was a total mystery. Any engineers we asked were confused and left in a daze. The only person not transfixed by the angles and endless corners, was an economist, who always left with a content, faraway smile on his face.

How David managed to work and sleep in that room is beyond my comprehension, your eyes are always forced to the angles. We delved into the history of the room and had limited success. About five students in the past twenty years had committed suicide and most of the inmates had complained of nightmares and the inability to concentrate.

The first tenant was a girl called Isabella Kellison, who mysteriously disappeared, soon before she was to be questioned about cheating in exams.

Soon after the first week, David started to dream. Dreams so vivid and spine chilling that he had to confide with me. He dreamed that a scabby, deformed old crone had come to his bed from the worst, zodiacal corner of the room, in a radiant blue glow, whilst a shrieking rat thing with a human face cavorted between her feet. The crone approached the bed, it would be better to receive this account from David's own hand, because he wrote it down the morning after and will be clearer on more points than I. 'She remorselessly approached the bed and bent a beckoning finger toward me, which I was powerless to resist. She opened her blood encrusted lips and uttered the immortal words "Hullo luv, you're a handsome one aren't you! A tasty morsel!" in a tone of lustful blood lust. This dream occurred night after night with the crone getting ever closer to the bed, and eventually she started to caress my body.'

What worried David was that things were moved about his room while he slept. Then came the fatal morning when the stone figure appeared in his room. I again put David's account in here, as it is all I have left of him but his memory.

'As she started to caress my body I rose from my bed and glided with silken steps beside her towards the corner. We were surrounded by a blue, rainbowed infusion. Suddenly we were standing on a windswept oozing plane, stretching for miles behind us. In front of us rose a monumental city, mortifying in the damp and warping in the suns light.

Towers of paper with hordes of shuffling, unspeakable inhumans clamouring all over them. In a ring around the buildings, if I dare call them that, were a group of statues of such grotesque, perverse position that it made me nauseous just viewing them. The cone drew me to the stones and reached into the dark grass and withdrew a hideous rock, which she placed in my hands, and stroked them. The horrifying object d'art in my hands cut and ripped my palms, but I didn't release my grip, so beautiful did I find it, so compelling, as if it were trying to draw my life force from my body. Then the glow surrounded us once more, and I awoke, clutching a hideous statuette in my hands.'

The next night David dreamed again, this time he travelled to a point in space, overlooking a decomposing, debased, pseudopodia mass around which danced mindless parasitic creatures dancing to unearthly music. The crone sat beside him, laughing and breathing harshly in his left ear. It was after this that I started to sleep in the same room as David, to calm his shattered nerves and to try to help him in other ways. The dreams stopped immediately!

Just in time I considered, as the witch had started to fondle and caress David with a dry, remorseless touch. For a few weeks David talked in his sleep, ghastly, infernal poems of love and nonsensical words about angles and corners representing a gate through time and space. In addition, a thought which brought me to the brink of lunacy and made me lose my trust in the natural, stable laws lain down by Einstein and others. A thought which is too excruciatingly dire to consign to paper, lest the paper refuse to accept it. But I will try for the sake of humanity.

David was in love with the witch!

Eventually the fateful night arrived when I neglected to sleep in David's room. I was woken, by what I do not know, but I soon perceived a shuffling and then a scream of blood curdling torment emanating from David's throat. I rushed to my door and flung it open, to be confronted by a gigantic rat-thing with a demonic human face. Saliva and mucus dripped from its fangs and a mad gleam reflected through its gold rimmed glasses. Then it jumped, dirt encrusted talons extended, reaching and wishing to rend, only to be met in the futility of my stout door. The scrabbling continued outside for a while and then the gnawing started.

A beastly sound which I knew spelt my doom. Then I heard the monstrous sounds from my neighbours room, a wailing and moaning, which made my veins throb and my gut twist in turmoil.

I seized my heavy anglepoise lamp just as the rat-thing thrust its matted head through the hole in had created. I struck at it and dealt it a blow with the elbow of my trusty lamp and the creature disappeared, dragged into a glowing blue limbo, screaming with a mans despair. I rushed to David's room and flung his door wide and stopped wide eyed and gibbering at the sight of an old crone getting off David and placing her withered hands to her midriff and pushing. A stagnant, sickly smell erupted and upon the floor in a syrupy mess lay a squalling bestial baby. The haggard crone turned to the staring, stiff corpse on the bed and hissed

"You bastard, you didn't use a condom!"