The Doom Doom Knock Knock Spider

Someone recently asked me the question, "What is the Doom Doom Knock Knock Spider?"

It didn't surprise me they didn't know. To be honest, very few people do. And the few people that do know about it are often hesitant to say much of anything on the subject. It's the same kind of superstition that makes baseball players never change their socks and causes country road drivers to drive down the middle of the road at night for fear that something might emerge from the darkness.

It seems obvious enough, but people sometimes forget that you can't hide from something unless it doesn't know you're there, and that our words can drive even the most reclusive creatures to seek and find us. That's why no one in my house talks about the Doom Doom Knock Knock spider anymore. Even in writing these words, I can't be sure what it will mean for me.

Unfortunately it came to visit me first, and ever since, has returned to me most often. I'm not sure why; if I've done something to deserve the creature; if we all have. Without fail though, every night it comes. Whether it be to my room, to my house mate down the hall, or to the couple who share the space above us, it always comes.

The first night I saw it was no special occasion. I had just settled into bed after a day like any other, having just finished tinkering with a short story I was working on. The house was the same kind of quiet you could expect of most houses at two in the morning: all dripping faucets and clicking furnaces. The same kind of cold that you can feel in old, broken bones and scars too deep to ever truly heal.

Laying in my bed waiting, that's when I first heard it. A knocking, not very loud, but loud enough that you would hear it in a room with no one moving, or speaking, or breathing very much. It was a sound that seemed to come from nowhere, yet somehow demanded an answer. I could feel it as much as I could hear it, and what I felt made me very much uneasy, especially because I could tell it was coming from somewhere inside my room.

I didn't have any cats or dogs to speak of. Not even a turtle to knock against the side of his glass container. So I was puzzled at first, and then a bit worried about what it might be.

It wasn't uncommon for field mice to find their way into the house, especially when winter was right around the bend. But mice didn't knock in rhythm. They didn't tick in your ear like the tick, tick, tocking of a clock sitting by your bedside.

I sat up, confused and searching for the light switch, but when I flipped it on, the knocking went away.

I was sure then that it was some kind of animal, scared by the light or by me getting to my feet. But what could I do about it? None of the mouse traps around my house had caught anything in months, and I wasn't about to dig through all my worldly possessions in the middle of the night until I flushed the thing out. So, I turned off the light and went back to bed, hoping I had scared it off for good.

Then, just as I had begun to settle I heard a knock knock, knocking, louder than before.

A single light from my blacked out computer screen blinked on and off, illuminating my cluttered desk and room. The dull blue shadows of half read books and old childhood toys came and went almost in sync with the knock, knock, knocking. And more and more I began to worry about what might be crawling about my bedroom floor.

Then, a single silhouette cast from an unfamiliar shape appeared against my desk wall. I had never seen it before, and was not sure where it had come from. It disappeared and reappeared with the light like any other shadow, but each time it returned something had changed about it. At first I couldn't be sure if my eyes were just playing tricks on me in the late hour, but the more I watched it the more I was sure. It was moving.

At first they were only small movements, like a sleeping dog waking after a long nap, except with the sinuous rise of a snake. It moved back and forth, seeming to reshape itself as it came and went closer, then further from the light.

Then, out of the corner of my eye another shadow I had never seen before appeared. This one was somehow thicker and darker than everything else around it with a multitude of limbs that fanned out on all sides of it, and just like the first silhouette, it was growing larger and larger with every turning of light.

Things around me were shifting. Each shadow was starting to become something unto itself. Each blackened shape was stretching and growing taller. Each littered article of clothing moved and changed into something else. A swarm of silhouettes crawled over my walls and ceiling. A face I had never seen before appeared in the doorway of my closet and turned to watch me as I watched it. And all the while the knock, knock, knocking hammered away against the wood, and painted, and unpainted plaster.

That's when I saw it, seeming small at first compared to everything else around me. I watched it scale the face of my book shelf, moving under, and over, and behind pictures, and books, and knick knacks. I saw it rise high above all the other creatures; each shadow turning to watch as it climbed.

Then, as it reached the top of the book shelf, I saw it change, unfold itself unnaturally, like a hand with many fingers, breaking bones with the stretching of its palm. It's skin pulled and became more and more thinly as the knuckles of it's legs multiplied and their length expanded. It's body seemed to cave in on itself, flattening, then contouring into a shallow bowl with swelling knots of skin boiling to the surface.

It lifted itself up onto two legs, standing high above me with it's others six legs feeling at the air around it, all covered in hair and spined like wires.

It stood, watching me as I watched it, and I saw that it's eyes were no longer the eyes of a spider or any creature I had ever seen. They stared with the anger of a great beast that had been burdened into looking down upon me, and in them I felt the fear of something that was not death but could not be understood.

Then, I saw then it reach out, and with one of it's many legs I watched it make that sick, tapping, terrible sound; that knocking that tells me nothing but demands an answer.

So night after night I listen for the knocking, and I wait for the Doom Doom Knock Knock spider to come. Even the nights it doesn't come for me, I still stay up waiting and listening for some hint as to what it wants or to what it's trying to tell me; if there's something I've done wrong or something I have yet to do right.

It's been too long now since it started, and to be honest, I'm scared of what will happen when it does stop. Because I know that sooner or later I'll have to answer, and someday it won't just knock.