NICOLE’S STORY

FROM EPISODE #72

STOWAWAY

by JORDAN MILLER

It was early afternoon as the tide had begun to recede. It sank further back into the sea and left behind its usual growing border of shells, stones and small creatures scurrying back towards the water. Nicole walked along the beach dreamily when something lying there half buried in sand caught her eye. It was a piece of driftwood about a foot and a half long and the perfect size for maybe a chic wall-mounted coat rack, or possibly carved out into a long shallow serving dish. Not for herself, she didn’t really care for things like that, but a perfect gift for her friend Julia. This wasn’t even the most well natured gift either. Nicole thought if she was going to call a spade a spade, this was a revenge gift, or at the very least a get even gift.

Julia was always giving the best gifts, and she knew it. Birthdays, Christmas, Hanukkah, even fucking Easter she prided herself on her gift giving. She always picked the best possible thing and wrapped it in a way that would make Hallmark cream their pants. If you were part of Julia’s inner circle you had to be prepared to feel the radiant glow of her love every special occasion, and if you tried to keep up you just looked like a fool. It was better to just accept the gift and praise her for her incredible thoughtfulness, just being fortunate enough to bask in those sunbeams of generosity for those few blissful minutes. 

Julia was well off, if you want to say it nicely, and fucking rich, if you don’t. She could afford the best gifts and not bat an eye, and Nicole knew it was her way of trying to spread that wealth amongst her friends, but she wondered if Julia knew how condescending she could be when she did it. Like Santa Claus handing out presents in poortown. 

Regardless of how Julia made her feel sometimes with the gifts, Nicole knew that underneath it all they came from a place of love. Nicole had met Julia when they were little girls in grade school and became best friends almost instantly. They had stayed that way through high school and even when they went to separate colleges they stayed close and met up every chance they got between semesters. 

When they were ten they invented a holiday called Friend Day on which they exchanged some items they bought from the quarter machines you find at the entrance of grocery stores. They chose a date at random and every year they did something to celebrate and exchanged gifts. It was their own thing and they never brought anyone else into it. Even when they both made their sets of new friends at their separate colleges, nobody else was ever brought into Friend Day. Even when Julia started hanging out with Maggie Delarose and Nicole thought maybe she had finally been replaced as a best friend (actually she was sure of it) when Friend Day came Julia was there. When Nicole was feeling too vindictive she tried to remember those times and how special Julia made her feel. Now it was her turn, damnit, and all the sudden Nicole didn’t know what emotions she was feeling. It was like a mix of love and spite, but who on Earth ever said love and spite don’t mix? Certainly not her. There had been a couple missed Friend Days over the years that they made up for later. With how much work Julia has been drowning in lately she was pretty sure this would be one of those years. That’s where she would come in from the flank with her sneak attack gift. For once, it would be Julia who got surprised on Friend Day.

Nicole stared at the piece of driftwood that could soon be a coat rack and thought about the one thing that assured her victory. The hand made element, not to mention the fact she found it on a beach. Way better than finding it in some shop. No matter what extravagant things Julia could find, the one thing she could never buy was talent. Julia loved buying all that artsy decor shit from Etsy but to actually craft something herself was utterly beyond her. She probably couldn’t make a bowl of Craft macaroni and cheese without illustrated instructions. 

Julia was no dummy, and had graduated cum laude from a much more prestigious university than Nicole’s, but arts and crafts were not in her skill set. Nicole, on the other hand, was gifted in that area, even if she didn’t go much for that kinda thing herself.  

With this beautiful piece of drift wood from mother ocean she could make Julia a gift that she could never buy online or find in an aisle of Home Goods. With this hand crafted, heartfelt gift she would win friend day, and since it was the last day of her vacation it had come just in time.

Maybe she could carve the wood into one of those stupid signs people hang in their homes that say Live, Laugh, Love or some other incoherent babble. Maybe she could make one that says Rich Bitch for Julia. It would be perfect. She laughed to herself as she picked up the piece of driftwood and headed back to her rental car. There was a seafood restaurant she wanted to try for dinner before packing and catching a plane back from Florida to New York early in the morning. 

Nicole washed the sand off of the driftwood and wrapped it in a towel for the return trip, tucking it snugly into her suitcase. There it remained through the flight and the drive home until Nicole unzipped her suitcase once again and took it out. Carrying it into the bathroom she placed it on the edge of the sink. She brushed her teeth while looking at the driftwood and imagining maybe a decorative incense burner? That was definitely more interesting than a coat rack. She intended to wash it more thoroughly the following day and let it dry outside for a while after that. Thinking of the look on Julia’s face when she opened her hand crafted, personalized gift, Nicole smiled, turned off the light and went to bed. 

II.

Nicole got up late the next morning and finished unpacking her clothes. She never did it the night she got home, it always felt like such a chore after traveling. She checked on her fish which lived in a rectangular illuminated fish tank on top of her dresser. The last remains of the travel feeder she had dropped into the tank was dissolving away so she unscrewed the top of the bottle of fish flakes and gave them a healthy pinch. Whatever the travel feeder was giving them, she was sure it couldn’t be as good as this stuff. They always went crazy for the flakes. 

With that done she went back to the bathroom to brush her teeth again, a regimented habit she’s stayed strict with her entire life, but stopped after flicking on the light. Her piece of driftwood was destroyed. She picked it up and handled the several broken chunks that were one just last night. There was no fixing this. It was hopeless, but what had caused it?

Nicole ran through the most obvious possibilities. Could the air do something like this? Maybe the change in pressure or temperature? None of those seemed right to her and that’s when she noticed the sink. There was a large mess of wood chips where the driftwood had been resting, but there seemed to be a trail of wet chips heading away from there and down the basin towards the hole in its center. There also seemed to be a good amount of wet hair and soap chunks piled up around the hole’s edge. 

“What the fuck?” Nicole said to herself as she moved closer towards the sink. Her mind searched again for any possibilities and right now a very unpleasant one seemed most evident. Had something been inside the driftwood? Had something broken out in the night and crawled down into the sink? Down where it was dark and wet. She imagined something scurrying down into the sink, burrowing out all the excess hair and chunks of stuff as it went. But the real question was, what was it? Nicole backed out of the room, disgusted by the very thought that she could have brought home something in her own suitcase, and found herself suddenly thinking of anoles. 

One time when Nicole was young her parents had ordered a box of real Florida oranges straight from the source and somehow two tiny lizards had stowed away with the fruit. At first Nicole was scared but her mother calmed her down and actually caught them in a piece of plasticware. 

“They’re called anoles, honey, they’re harmless lizards. They’re cute. See?” Her mother had topped the plasticware with a transparent lid and angled it down so Nicole could see. They were cute. Nicole wasn’t scared anymore and her mother let her keep them as pets. Florida had seemed like a magical, tropical place to her then and it was no surprise that was where she went on her first ever honest-to-god vacation, and once again there was a stowaway.

She thought about those lizards and looked down her drain. Whatever sort of stowaway this was, something told her it was far less cute than those little anoles. She leaned in so her face was close to the hole and could hear something down there. A small sound that was barely there at all. It sounded like a weak high pitched chirping. A pathetic sound almost like a baby bird. There’s no way it could be that, could it? The thought of a bird egg inside some driftwood was ridiculous. Whatever it was, it was not a lizard it was no baby bird and she didn’t care for it. 

Leaning back, she reached out and turned on the hot water and let it run. Watching the steam rise up and fog the mirror, Nicole found herself feeling guilty. It was a living thing after all, she had heard that little chirping sound, but it didn’t belong here and who knows what it was. It could be carrying disease for all she knew. 

Five minutes later she was satisfied and turned off the water. Then she brushed her teeth, spat down the sink, ran some more water, and called it paid. She threw the pieces of driftwood into the trash along with any hopes of one upping Julia in the gift giving department and tried to forget the whole thing.

The next morning the thought of brushing her teeth turned her stomach a little bit, imagining some dead crab or something gross lodged down in her drain. The thought of her foamy toothpaste spit oozing down the drain and running over it’s corpse. It would start to smell soon. Dead sea creatures almost smelled horrible. Opening the bathroom door she expected some of that salty rotten smell, but it was not there.  What was there, however, was another, larger pile of hair and gunk piles around the sink hole. This time Nicole could clearly see a subtle trail of sink debris leading away from the sink and across the floor. Following it, she found it crossed the tile floor and went into the bathtub. 

Inside the tub Nicole was not surprised to see the trail lead straight to the circular drain at the base of the tub. What did surprise her, and then filled her with a sense of shapeless dread was the fact that the metal grating that covered her bathtub’s drain had been pulled out and moved to the side to allow the thing an entrance to the drain. The shower drain was also significantly larger than that of the sink. Had the thing grown that much already? Surely that couldn’t be possible. It’s only been a day.  

Cautiously Nicole leaned close to the drain and listened. Again she could hear the chirping like a small bird coming from inside. It was still a small sound, but she was sure it was stronger and louder than the day before. She was not loving this development, so she put water on to boil and once it was rolling she brought it into the bathroom.

“Sorry, buddy, no roommates,” Nicole said to the tub as she poured the steaming pot of boiling water down the drain. Taking the pot back to the kitchen she put on a jacket and went out to run some errands. She needed groceries but after the way this morning had started, she had added a couple bottles of Drain-O to the list. 

A couple hours later she got home and put the groceries away. The bottles of industrial declogger she set aside. Once the food was taken care of she read the directions on the back of the plastic Drain-O bottle. Pretty simple, she thought and headed into the bathroom. Halfway across the room she stopped and the bottle of declogger fell from her hand and bounced across the floor. Something had already done the Drain-O’s job for it, because what looked like ten years of hair and drainage filth had been excavated out of the shower drain and into piles around it. 

Nicole immediately recognized the signs of another trail leading away from the drain and up the wall. She turned, following the trail and felt her stomach clinch as she realized she knew exactly where it was going. Looking up and behind her, she found her fears to have been justified. The grating over the air vent was hanging by one screw and the trail of debris disappeared inside. 

She found herself mentally going through science books she read in school and all of those magazines about animals she had loved so much as a girl. Was there anything in any of those books about something that could explain this? She wondered if there were animals that laid their eggs in water but survived on land. She thought there were. Frogs did that didn’t they? They were amphibious but their young were born under water. This almost certainly wasn’t a frog, but still means it could be possible.  The trouble was she didn’t know if the thing had been alive in the driftwood the whole time or if it had hatched inside the driftwood and broke it’s way out. Somehow the latter seemed more right. If it had just been hiding in there why didn’t it just crawl back out? Why break the driftwood into pieces?

She thought about how it had dug out the filth from the drains and moved so quickly from the sink, to the tub and then to the vents. It’s growing, she thought to herself and felt her stomach turn again. Whatever it was, she was starting to hate it and she didn’t plan on letting it keep running around in her house for a second longer.

III.

The guy on the other end of the phone tried his best to be patient as Nicole insisted that she needed the extermination to happen that day. The guy, who’s name was Brian, explained that there’s no way they can get it done that day, that all of the tents are currently in use and there’s a two day lead time. When the woman on the other end of the line said she would just call one of their competitors he politely informed her that a two day lead time was standard around this time of year, but that she would be welcome to try. 

Nicole hung up, frustrated, and tried another exterminator.  When they told her the same thing she once again insisted it had to be done that day. Denied again, she made the appointment for two days and hung up harder than she intended to. 

That evening she could hear something scurrying around in the air vents and occasionally it would stop and she could hear a soft chirping like a summer bird. She didn’t get much sleep that night and the next day she decided if she had to wait another day for the fumigation, then she was going to do something to make herself feel safe and cover every air vent in her bedroom. She thought herself fortunate that her bedroom had vents in the floor and not the ceiling, because that would have made things far more difficult.

She flipped her end table over and put it flat side down over the vent nearest her bed. There was one more vent across the room which she covered with a plastic storage bin, with a few books on top for good measure. One more night and tomorrow afternoon the exterminators will come and tent the house, and she imagined herself going to a hotel and by the time she was back this thing would be dead. Really dead this time. She fed her fish a few pinches of their favorite food and got into bed.

As she tried to sleep she wondered why the boiling water hadn’t killed it. She found her mind returning to those old science books and how some creatures could survive deep underwater even in the immense pressure. There were even tubes down there that went right into the center of the earth. Those things spouted out into the ocean at temperatures we can’t even imagine, and yet things still live down there. 

So, how had it ended up in that piece of driftwood? She imagined something deep underwater sending thousands of eggs floating up out of the abyssal darkness, hoping one day one might crawl onto land and build its species a new life away from the blind darkness of the deep. She didn’t think there was anything about that in her old science books, but there was something in there about how humans know more about our solar system than they do our deepest oceans.  That was an idea that Nicole didn’t care for, not in the least.  

Admitting to herself that she wasn’t going to come across any eureka moments of scientific discoveries anytime soon, she tried her best to go to sleep. It wasn’t easy, but better than the night before. She heard the chirping a few times, but no movement. That was good. She watched her fish swim one direction and then another inside the hypnotic blue-green glow of the fishtank. After a while she drifted to sleep and dreamt she was sinking into the ocean, down into bottomless black trenches. 

IV.

She woke up in the middle of the night to a strange sound. It was the chirping again, only it was different now. The quality of the sound had grown pricklier somehow. It was really more of a chittering now, and far less pleasant than any bird. Looking at her fishtank she found it was full of bubbles. Nicole thought it must be a dream, because those bubbles were huge and it didn’t make any sense. Her fish tank looked more like a blue-green lava lamp.

Just in case it wasn’t a dream she decided to get up and check but when she went to swing her legs out of bed found they wouldn’t move. She tried to grab them and found that her arms were being just as stubborn. Sleep Paralysis, she thought, even though it’s something she’s never suffered from. Just wait a minute and it’ll go away. 

Only it didn’t. The only thing that happened was the chittering sound grew louder. She looked across the room and saw the plastic storage bin pushed onto its side, the books strewn about around it. The grating over the vent had been removed as well and now it was just an open hole. That’s when Nicole felt something pull on the bottom of her bed sheet. She looked down, still unable to move, and saw that something was tugging at her sheet. Not tugging, she realized, climbing up. 

Two black jointed appendages rose over the edge of the bed and latched into the blanket and Nicole could hear it’s furious chittering getting even louder. Over the edge of the bed those two appendages pulled up a hulking body covered in slick wet black plating like armor. From its sides more legs latched themselves to the bedpost while more still pushed the thing up the back. She didn’t need to count to know there were eight. She needed only to stare into its row of spherical red eyes to know what it was. It was a spider. It was unlike any spider she ever seen in her life, but that’s what it was.

For one thing this spider had no hair. Usually these things were hairy but this one was slick and looked like the fucker was bulletproof. The other thing was the size. It had to be the size of a small German Shepherd. It had two sets of dripping fangs that wouldn’t stop moving. The more they moved the higher pitched the spider’s insane chittering became.

Nicole did everything she could to move but it was useless. The spider brought up its front two legs and lifted up Nicole’s shirt. Looking down she understood why she couldn’t move. She saw the puncture wounds from where the spider had already bit once while she had been sleeping. 

The spider crawled up and perched itself overtop of Nicole’s body, all the while making that horrible sound. She turned her head away, unable to look at the thing and saw her fish tank again. This time, however, she realized what was inside it. Those weren’t bubbles. Those were eggs. She could see something small moving at the center of each one.  

It was ridiculous to be thinking about it at all, but Nicole thought that she had been right. The spider must need water to lay its eggs. That didn’t seem to make a bit of difference at the moment, but it was something for her mind to latch onto. She turned back to the hellish spider above her and realized suddenly that it did matter after all. In fact, maybe more than anything else in the world. Looking down at the spider’s underbelly she could see it was still fat and pulsing with eggs. It wasn’t done giving birth yet, but the fish tank was full, so where the fuck was thing thing planning on putting the rest of those eggs?

Nicole’s eyes met with the rows of alien red spheres staring out from the spider’s head. There was no reasoning with those eyes, and she knew that the spider understood at least one basic thing that was perhaps stored somewhere in all insect brains. Something that was in just about every one of her old science books. Seventy percent of the human body is made up of water. Nicole tried to scream but found that part of her had been paralyzed as well, or maybe it was just ice cold fear keeping her screams down. In the end, it didn’t matter, and the spider did its work.

V.

That afternoon a truck pulled up with the picture of a dead roach on the side and parked in Nicole’s driveway. Two men got out and knocked on the door. After getting no response they knocked on the door a second time and still there was no answer. They checked their paperwork and called the number they had on file but nobody answered the phone. After trying the door once more they decided to call it, get in their trucks, and leave.

Two days later there was another knock at Nicole’s door. This time it was Julia wearing a wide smile and carrying a small box in her hand. The box was wrapped in a very fine off-pink wrapping paper topped with an elegant store bought bow. Julia waited, her smile fading a bit when nobody answered, and then she knocked again. Her smile widened once more waiting for her friend to open the door and get the surprise of her life. She knew that work had been crazy lately and that Nicole had probably figured she missed Friend Day this year. It had happened before when things had been nuts so it was totally understandable. Julia hadn’t forgotten though, and made sure to get Nicole something extra special. She even decided to hand deliver it this time. She knocked again and decided if Nicole wasn’t there then she would leave the box on her kitchen table with a note and that would surprise her just as much.

Julia pulled the spare key from its hiding spot behind a piece of loose brick and let herself in. She walked inside and closed the door and the first thing she noticed was a smell. There was a strange unpleasant odor like mothballs. The next thing she noticed was the sound. Filling the house was a sound like baby birds. It reminded Julia of when she would go to the County Fair as a girl and go into the room with all the baby chicks. All huddled together under a heat lamp they bounced and chirped away. This sound was like that, but much bigger. Like there were about ten thousand baby chicks somewhere in the house.  

Julia heard a sound behind her like the chattering of tiny teeth and turned around to see what at first looked like a dark blanket covering the inside of the front door and the windows. She looked closer and saw the blanket was moving. Looking closer still she saw it wasn’t a blanket at all but a moving hoard of spiders the size of dinner plates. She looked up and the ceiling was covered with them. There had to be thousands, all chirping like baby chicks at a County Fair. Then Julia heard another sound from behind her. A loud, prickly chittering sound. 

Turning around, Julia saw the enormous mother black spider push its way into the room. It was so big at first Julia thought it wouldn’t fit through the door at all, but then she saw the door frame crack and the drywall give way and the massive thing came through anyway. She dropped Nicole’s present on the floor and something expensive shattered inside. This Friend Day, after so many years, it was finally Julia who got the surprise.