Doctor Eliot Meister was crazy. He was fine with it. If that was what society wanted to call him. He had different ideas against the norm, but since the norm always changed, crazy eventually became sane. He would wait. But if he got tired of waiting, he would make the norm change to better fit his crazy.
His doctorate was received in dentistry, but he hadn’t practiced in years. Part of his brain told him that staring into all those open mouths was like staring into the abyss, and the patients had led to the madness of the doctor. His latex-gloved fingers poked, prodded and excavated into mouths, and he saw comparisons between himself and archaeologists. He wanted to study other disciplines. Dentistry had had its day. His bank account was healthy; after all, as the old dentist saying went, “There’s no such thing as a dentist without a yacht”.
He bought a small farmhouse pushed far back from a dirt country road. One hundred acres of ground allowed to lie fallow, for weeds to bloom and take over the land. Copses of trees dotted his land, small pools and a thin stream, the tracks of unknown animals formed paths, and an occasional mammalian skull lay tipped on its side, one eye hollow staring at the bright Milky Way.
Eliot Meister felt himself to be just another animal, not necessarily of a dominant species. He didn’t want to tame or corral anything, which included not growing himself a garden. He believed that tomatoes screamed when you cut them from the vine. To swat a fly was murder. Flies collected along the base of his windows, between glass and screen. He wrenched off the screens and tried to scoop flies into his hand to hold them long enough to run them outside. But he could never get them all. Fly corpses built up over the summer, and the good doctor buried them in mass graves.
A television sat in the living room, but wasn’t hooked up to any cable or satellite service. There was a VHS player and a stack of nature videos if Eliot ever felt like seeing nature not outside his grime-covered windows. Sometimes he watched videos of the planets, solar system, and the universe. But mostly the TV went unwatched, stayed a dead grey window.
Dust gathered. If it became too much, he opened windows if he could them unstuck, as well as the front and back doors. Whatever wanted to leave or enter could do so of its own accord. The house had a second level with three bedrooms, but they became frozen in time; Eliot mostly slept in his recliner.
He had to eat. At the grocery store, in the nearest town, he paced the aisles with a plastic basket, disappointed that most food was based on animals, fish or plants. Anything that was a natural product that came from an animal, he decided, was acceptable. Not eyes, however. Milk and cheese and honey were allowed.
Six foot tall, thin and soft-spoken, he drew attention from the locals. But they considered him harmless, just a touch eccentric, lonely. Needed a wife, most likely. All a bachelor ever needed to turn his life around. The weed-strewn farmhouse could use a woman’s touch. Then Dr. Eliot would put on a few pounds, wash his dusty and dirty plaid shirts and green workpants, and learn how to stop and share gossip with the friendly townsfolk. Without a wife, a lonely man could go mad.
But he wasn’t lonely, just alone. There was a big difference. Eliot allowed all of nature to live with him, but he would never be able to tolerate the intrusion of another human being. His farmhouse was Eden – he needed no Eve, or God, or serpent. Just knowledge.
He allowed himself fruit, but only from the trees on his property, and only after it had fallen to the ground. He was sure there was a religion with adherents who did the same, but couldn’t think which one. He had no time for religion, didn’t consider it real knowledge. Just myth and superstition that tried to make itself real. A tree was a real thing, not a symbol it had been turned into by manipulating Mankind.
From the hardware store, he bought seeds for apple and pear trees, plus corn. Again, anything the trees or stalks grew had to drop before Eliot would consider it as food. If it didn’t drop, then it would always belong to the plant and not to him. He wouldn’t own any living thing. That was slavery.
The former owner of his house had left an antique wooden toolbox filled with old tools – hammer, pliers, screwdrivers, wrenches – all of them rusted. Eliot left them in the basement crawlspace where he had found them, vowed to never to touch such things. Naturally, he bought no tools to break the ground, wouldn’t scratch out a proper garden. Checking patches of exposed earth for pre-existing life, if he found none his fingers would press in a seed, cover it, give it a cup of rain water, then the seed would have to wait for a heavier rain to fall. Other seeds he threw and let them fall where they may, hoped they would survive. Added to the seeds he scattered – vegetable, peanuts, grasses – burying enough of them to give at least some of them a chance at survival. He didn’t need much to eat, and what he didn’t eat he would preserve to last the winter.
Electricity was a problem. Black cables leading from the road to his home emitted residual static that he was sure he could feel and hear. And which likely affected the natural world of his property. The town wouldn’t let him dig up and remove the cables, but he could stop paying his bill and have the power shut off. Pioneers had never needed it. Still, the doctor was a modern man. Electricity was also natural, in lightning bolts, in sunlight, in the human body. He had enough of an unspent fortune to have solar panels line his roof, their electrical lines weaving down into the house. A lightning rod was attached to the rooster weather vane that topped the house, and its cables threaded down into a series of batteries in his basement, able to store electricity whenever a storm rose. Storms were gifts to him and to nature. Every time it rained, he sat on his porch and watched the storm shatter the night, delighted by its display.
Off the grid and staying off. No phone or computer could reach him. In the fireplace he only burned broken twigs and brittle logs and fallen brown pine needles. Used a magnifying glass to start a flame, or if he wanted a fire at night, he rubbed two sticks or banged rocks together. Layers of blankets were usually enough to keep away the cold. For added insulation, he used dry Fall leaves sewn into burlap sacks and wedged into windows and lined along seams between walls and floor where he could feel a draught. Unafraid to bring nature inside, he found it aided his existence instead of hindering it. Handful by handful, he gathered soil in which nothing had made a home, and piled it against all sides of his house, blocking two basement windows, rising up to form a berm around the residence. Earth was an excellent insulator.
Stone, too, had its purpose. It formed a wall to keep the earthen berm from eroding and spilling away. Stones were piled under the porch to prop it up as the timbers rotted. He wouldn’t buy any wood or harvest from the trees, but his insane mind was able to think up other solutions to his problems. A low wall of stacked only (not mortared) stones was built to circle much of his house, to block cold wind. In winter, he gathered dead stalks of straw and tied them together to add a second insulating wall to the one of stone. He had learned much from remembered child fairy tales.
Doctor Eliot Meister was happy. Not only because he had seen to his needs, but also because he had not interfered with nature to do so. He had a rusted bicycle that took him to and from town, regretting only that its tires were rubber. A plant product, yes, but it held a grey area in his mind. Like maple syrup. Made him feel as though he was drinking the blood of the maple tree – if he had ever allowed himself pancakes.
A storm came and he watched the rain darken the stones of his wall and release the sweet scent of hay. Plants and trees and grasses fed on the rain and a barrel at the side of the house caught it until the rain brimmed and spilled over.
He had stopped showering and going to the toilet. Some things that came with the house – electricity, plumbing, the septic tank – couldn’t be removed, but it could be ignored. He washed with rain water or the dust of the ground, though as a very relaxed habit since he didn’t care what he smelled like, and didn’t care if the townsfolk were repulsed by him.
A bedpan sat covered in a corner of the living room, but mostly, if he could, he would relieve himself outside. Scattered across the property so as not to build up too much in one area and to give himself – his body’s product, not body waste – to as much of the vegetation as possible. It was a practice that had been done around the globe for eons. The toilet was a relatively recent invention, meant mostly for cities, like Ancient Rome. People in the country were closer to the land, closer to their fellow animals. To shit outside was normal and sane. To sit on a stool of porcelain was mad.
Seeing more and more to his needs meant he went into town less and less. People had begun to forget about him, and were surprised the few times when he showed up. They thought he had moved or was dead. He communicated with them as little as possible, trying to answer any questions with a smile or a shrug, nodding or shaking his head, letting few if any words escape his pale lips. When he spoke, it was mostly to plants as he inspected their growth, or to the sky and clouds and stars as he strolled his acres. He often slept under the night sky, seeing no reason to have a roof over his head if he didn’t need one.
One night, sitting in his battered recliner, he stared at the dead television, thinking. A spider the size of a dime climbed up his arm to his neck, then further up to rest on his cheek. A praying mantis was slowly making its way across the plush head of the chair, looking for the spider. Eliot wasn’t in the mood for any video he had watched many times before. Instead, his eyes blurred in and out of focus, watching a gauze patch of dense cobwebs attached to half of the TV undulate in an unfelt breeze.
He was thinking about starting a diary, and was trying to find a way to get paper and ink. Both were forbidden. Unblinking eyes looked away from the television and moved across the walls. No decorations, no paintings, or photographs covered the walls. They were blank. The house itself, he realized, was a book waiting to be written. And in the fireplace were sticks of charcoal.
Eliot smiled, impressed once again at his genius. He must surely be mad. It felt good.
Stooping knees onto the hearth, he picked through old cold ashes to find solid pieces of coal. Gathered a few nuggets in a palm and cradled them as he stood in the center of the living room.
Looked at the ceiling, thinking of the upstairs bedrooms and unused bathroom. Where to start? He decided not to venture too far to begin the diary. Once he got deeper into it, he could write the book on the walls of the stairwell, cover the unused rooms, even scratch his words in the attic.
And when the inside of the house was full of his tiny black writing, he would write outside. He would ornament his home with the scribblings of his mad mind. It would either be terrifying or beautiful, but it wouldn’t be for him to decide.
Beginning beside the front door, he wrote:
“I was once a dentist, and I excavated into the heads of my patients. They opened their mouths for my penetrating fingers. Though my hands were gloved, fingers touched canines, molars, bicuspids – the writhing wet worms of their tongues. I tore out their tonsils and they thanked me. I found cancer and gave them fear. A light shone double-reflected in my glasses as they looked up, saw the mirror of their mouths in my eyes. I looked down at them – men, women, children, all ages, poor and rich, every color and ethnicity, smelled mint and bad breath, looked up their nostrils and saw fear in the movement of their Adam’s apples – I always looked down at them all.
“I hated the kind of person my profession had forced me to become. Do lawyers hate themselves for being forced to become compliant in the confidential confessions of their clients? To keep the secret of a murderer or a rapist, and to never tell all that was spoken, especially if the lawyer wins the case and the killer he fought for goes free – does that make the attorney a killer too? What about a cop? A psychiatrist? A prostitute? A politician? Each holds the secrets of others – friends and enemies alike. Which is harder? To protect your friend’s secret for your entire life, hating if he outlives you, or grateful you take the secret to your grave – not because it proves your faithfulness to a friend, but because only under the earth will you finally be unburdened. If there are ghosts, you will be happy to be one, looking down on your friend as he outlives you, watching the remainder of his life unfold, hoping he will finally burden someone else. And they’ll tell. And he’ll be killed by his harbored sin.”
That was enough for one night. Eliot put the pieces of coal on a nearby window sill, wiped hands on his pants (reminded himself to do a load of rain water laundry in the morning, standing naked before nature, no soap naturally), and returned to his chair to sleep.
#
The next morning he saw his words and was reassured that it wasn’t a dream. He had started a diary and it had started the right way. He wasn’t interested in telling the walls his life story – childhood, schooling, dead parents, lost loves – if it wasn’t relevant. Who, after all, would ever read his walls? The house would hold his secrets until he was dead. Once a person was dead, as he had alluded to in the diary, the secrets died with him.
That is, as long as no one read the confession.
Eliot looked at the rough letters of the words drawn in powdery black and asked himself, “Is that what I’m writing? My secrets? Is that why the idea of the diary came to mind? It is now time to confess? But, as with a priest, the confession should go nowhere beyond these walls.”
His gaze scanned the living room, the ceiling. Something seemed different about it. It looked somehow more lived in. If that made any sense. Such a feeling should’ve already been apparent – he had been in the farmhouse for three years. Was that really why he had allowed nature to wander through the door, why he had intentionally carried it in? Calling leaves insulation gave it a purpose, and himself a reason to be inside? Was it natural to bring nature into a human dwelling? Didn’t people pick flowers and arrange them in a vase? Of course it was natural. He was still sane.
No it wasn’t the inclusion of nature that made the house seem finally a home. It was the words on the wall. They were Eliot; he was finally putting himself into the house instead of excluding himself, pushing his life outside, sleeping and shitting under the stars. He felt himself to still be an animal amongst animals, but now he felt he had a right to live under a man-made roof.
For the first time in a long time he plugged the television back in, blew off the dust, wiped away cobwebs, and put in a documentary about how shifting tectonic plates had created the continents, literally moving the world.
He had seen the video many times before, but this time he was more fascinated. Not just white noise and flashing images – glaciers crumbling, earthquakes toppling cities, an animated map of Laurasia and Gondwanaland moving across unnamed oceans – this time the scientific information fed his brain. Only an hour long, he needed to watch it again. Found himself smiling at the screen and leaning forward in the recliner.
A spider had climbed its way onto the back of his hand. He swatted a palm flat to it. Looked at its corpse. Realized what he had done.
Eliot wept.
Snapped the TV off, the video spools still turning in the VCR, and rushed outside, holding out his hand as though it was on fire. Rushed into the tall weeds, batting them aside, until he dropped to his knees and clawed at grass-covered soil. A finger scraped the spider off his hand and into its grave.
Back in the house, he rushed upstairs to the bathroom, twisted the cold water tap but no water came out. Carrying one hand in another he sped down the stairs, tripped and fell down the last five steps. Couldn’t navigate the staircase in the dark. Ignored his pain to rush outside and plunge both hands into the rain barrel. One hand scrubbed the other, then they switched. Which hand was worse – the executioner or the chopping block?
Out of the barrel, he scrubbed his hands with dirt. Black sat between every line in his palms. The corpse was gone but he felt he deserved blackened hands. Sitting in the dust, tears wetting his cheeks, he looked around the tall weeds, tried not to let himself assess the damage he had done in his panicked rush to bury the evidence of his kill.
Eliot knew he didn’t deserve nature. The outside would be forbidden to him. He would stay inside the house like a normal person.
Nightmares woke him repeatedly that night. He moved from the living room recliner to one of the beds upstairs. It had been so long since he had slept lying down on a soft bed. He couldn’t get to sleep, and when he finally did he again woke constantly. But, thankfully, waking was from discomfort, not terror.
In the morning, he wander sleepily into the bathroom but the taps were still dry. He sat on the toilet to relieve himself. It flushed but didn’t refill. Closing the bathroom door behind him, he realized that that room was once again off-limits to him and his method of living.
He had shut out modern conveniences and shut out nature. Standing in the living room, he smelled himself. Tore the shirt off his body and threw it out the front door. He couldn’t go outside to retrieve it – ever – not even when the rain finally came again and washed it. But he needed water to drink, to live. Perhaps he could hold a cup, a jug, an emptied bedpan out a window and wait until rain filled it.
His scientific mind had to think of new solutions. There was no such thing as a problem that couldn’t be fixed. His genius would solve all dilemmas, remove all obstacles. Eliot was a man, not an animal. That was why he had a name and animals were nameless.
If he had a wife she could go outside and bring back what they both needed to live. But no. He had had one of those once. Seemed like a long time ago.
Taking a piece of coal from the window sill, he knelt facing the wall to continue the diary where it left off.
“My fingers were spiders in their mouths. Blue latex limbs crawling, prodding, digging under their tongues, sticking steel prongs into the soft flesh of their gums. Some of them bled. No, many did. Minute lines of red traced the rounded forms of their teeth at the gumline. Their saliva turned pink before I stuck in the steel suction wand to take it out of them. I put things in their mouths and took things out. I pulled teeth by the root and they felt nothing. Flesh ripped, blood as dark as ink, rose into the cups of the hollowed-out gum, the bloody tooth held in my grasping tool, and they dreamed or smiled at the cartoon figures stuck to the ceiling. Some wanted the souvenir tooth, some didn’t. Cheeks bulging with gauze and porous foam pockets, they were helped to their feet by my assistant and walked swaying from the operating room.
“My fingers were spiders …”
The coal had dwindled to dust in his cramped hand. Time to stop. Rest. Eliot sagged to the floor, holding his twice-blackened hand – earth and coal – and fell asleep where he lay.
#
He woke in the night. A full sky of stars and a crescent moon like a cupped hand seen low on the horizon through the front screenless door. Crickets and frogs sang to him, a witch’s familiars, tempted him to exit but he still didn’t feel worthy of the outside. Closed the door and locked it as he sat in his chair.
The VCR still on, tape stopped. He looked at his hand as it rested on the arm of the chair, and leapt up, recalling the spider.
Pacing the room, he fought back fresh tears. He had to pee, but recalled the forbidden bathroom. The whole of the upper floor was off-limits to him, he decided. There was nothing there for him since he had shut it out a long time ago, diminished it to his method of living.
The TV and videos were no escape. If anything, they were a wicked distraction that led him to kill. He wouldn’t watch TV ever again, would let the grey screen gather webs. And, of course, the recliner had to be abandoned. The floor would be his throne and his bed. The windows were opaque with years of grime. (Was grime a living thing? The product of his life? Surely he must’ve thought so once. The windows would never be cleaned. The stacks of leaves inside and the earth and stone outside would stay blocking any chance at a view, any needling sunlight that would attempt to pierce its way into the house.) When it was dark he would be asleep; when it was light he would be awake. That was natural. But with windows and doors keeping out the outside there would be more darkness than light in Doctor Eliot Meister’s world.
To force light into the room and to manufacture more writing coal, he began to break up furniture into sticks and pry up pieces of cracked floorboards. The room felt smaller and smaller the more empty it became. Which didn’t make sense, was against science and sanity. He couldn’t explain it, didn’t have time to try. He still had to see, if for only a little longer There was still so much wall space left – he hadn’t needed yet to tear those down – and so little diary written.
He may have to skip a few years. The confession kicked to come out. He wasn’t worried – no one would read it. No one knew where he was. They all thought he had moved away, or died.
Soon … soon …
Letting the ashes cool, he picked through the dead fire to find fresh coals. Continued the diary on a wide piece of wall not broken by door or window. A blank page for sprawling black words.
He wrote:
“He was a man like me, a doctor. Physician of the feet, whatever that profession was called. He did the feet, I did the mouth, the head. I was still above him. Though he had teeth, I felt instantly insulted by him. Did he expect me to tangle my fingers into his mouth, repair what he couldn’t repair himself? He was a doctor, a scientist. I had no need of his expertise; why did he have need of mine? I expected more of him, a man meant to be better than most who sat in my chair. Reclined and comfortable, making small talk about our medical professions, before I plunged into him.
“Put a needle in his cheek and he accepted the reasoning behind the spike. The thickness of a human cheek reminds me of a wedge of purple liver. Always wanted to cut it out, expose a hole in the sides of many faces, showing teeth from the sides, skeleton beneath the skin. Teeth and bone are the only parts of the body shared by the living and the dead, the rest fallen away. Teeth are exposed bone, with which we smile and growl. I held the emotions of all human beings in my hands.
“His face frozen, I intentionally jabbed a hook into his gums where they met the molar. Asked if he could feel it. A tear ran off his eyelashes as he nodded. I offered a deal, since we were both medical men. I could give him gas, knock him cold, and perform my duties painlessly. Wake him when he was problem-free? Scraped steel along a tooth and let it slip again to the swollen, bleeding flesh. Of course he nodded ‘yes’.
“A body asleep in your chair – so much one could do to it. Dentists before me had been caught by disheveled clothing or nosey assistants. I locked the door. Wouldn’t touch a thread of his perfect shirt or pants. I’ve never been attracted to the sexuality of our species, see it as the rutting of swine, the sharing of filth. Human beings are an unclean species. I was clean. Of course, now I can see the attraction of dirt. As long as it’s natural dirt – earth, dust, pollen, the corpses of flies.
“Put several thick towels around his neck to soak the spill, then spidered into the black orifice with surgical pliers. Clean steel.
“He woke groggily to feel the void of his mouth unhindered by any teeth. I had pulled them all. Gave them to him in a spit cup. Smiled and said, “There now, all done. You’ll feel better once the anesthetic wears off”.
“In no stable mood to call police at the time, he left, and I imagine he had a difficult time getting home. He really should’ve had someone drive him, but he was a doctor of the feet – he could walk anywhere. We doctors have great access to debilitating narcotics. Isn’t it wonderful. Pure power. They helped me get my wish. To never see another maw again.
“Of course, the police came to my home. I had packed a bag and held a receipt to pick up a plane ticket to Buenos Aires at the airport. The taxi was late. The cruisers arrived first.
“A long sensational trial, my expensive attorneys against his. But, of course, I had to accept a plea deal. Insanity, clearly. Was still a young man when I went into the concrete box, came out a senior citizen. A little less mad. But I had become accustomed to loneliness. The wife divorced me during the trail, naturally. When bad luck rains, it pours. I couldn’t blame her. Still can’t recall her name, if she ever had one.
“I assume he filled his mouth with false teeth. Couldn’t see the problem – so many elderly men have them buried with their corpses, so they were inevitable. If they have themselves burned, the mortician plucks them out, throws them in a brimming bin. Science has progressed nicely: the false ones work as well as the real, and never get cavities.
“He really should’ve thanked me.
“Alas, why did I do it? Our kind always needs to know why. But all too often there just isn’t any explanation. There just isn’t. Can’t that be enough? Call me crazy, thank you, but I think it is.
“The room is shrinking. My hand is cramping. The words have become black spiders marching in ever-dwindling circles around these walls. A tightening maelstrom.
“My confession is confessed. Now I can live a normal life again. It sometimes takes a lifetime to transform from spider back to human.”
The townsfolk hadn’t seen Doctor Eliot Meister in six months, longer than his average absence of two weeks. Someone needed to check on the house to see if the doctor had moved quietly in the night, or was dead. Concerned neighbors who wanted to see but not to appear as snoops. The man who had installed the solar panels elected to venture down the dirt road, ask the doctor how the panels were holding up.
The property ran riot with grass, weeds, rotting fruit and vegetables, and a crumbling wall of stones. Clouds of insects hovered in the air. The man spat out flies as tiny as black dots, walked through invisible spider webs, stepped in feces, animal and human.
Knocked on the rattling door, but it was open anyway. Nature clogged the inner house. The man’s eyes had to adjust to the dark, and he couldn’t stop retching from the stench. One plaid shirt arm across his mouth, the other tossed aside bags of leaves, batted at flies. Squinted at the black walls, got close to see that it wasn’t grime and dirt, but language.
Curled into the fireplace, sitting on a bed of cold ash, was the nude and decaying body of the doctor. A pair of rusted, bloody pliers by his foot. In one hand, crumbs of charcoal; in the other, every tooth in his head.
THE END.
[bctt tweet=”OCTOBER TERROR 2018 Short Story Award – Entry #26 ‘Spider in Hand’ by Rob Bliss – Enjoy all this terrific, disturbing material you have in your hands, lots of horror stories at your disposal for your dark delight and vote!” username=”theboldmom”]
On October 23rd we’ll close submissions and open a poll for the readers to choose their favourite one! You’ll have a week to make your choice and on October 31st we’ll announce the winner!!!
