Book Eight, Chapter 2: Crawlspace

I quickly found my way back to the theater seat that I had come from.

The others didn’t need my help at that point. Camden had taken the lead and had planned the entire storyline, Crawlspace, out with the goal of being able to copy the Carousel Atlas, one of several things that had been on our to-do list for too long.

I sat back and watched as Kimberly, Lorne, and Antoine built up stacks of old books as barriers between themselves and the creepy crawlies that were on their way.

“It’s a shame we’ll have to burn all of these,” Pietro said as he watched them work. “That’s another sin over my head.”

“If it gives us time to escape, then it will all be worth it,” Anna said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and it will kill them all. I just wish that Professor Maize hadn’t been so cryptic. Then none of this might have happened.”

“Thanks for that,” Pietro said. “But I knew enough, and I didn’t heed the warning.”

The fact that we had set him up not to heed that warning was our little secret.

I decided it was time to make my only real contribution to the movie by signaling for them that it was time to move forward with the final battle, and I did so using Flashback Revelation.

It was easy to trigger.

Cassie had been sitting on the floor reading the journal that Logan had written in character as their professor. Apparently, it was quite confusing and filled with useless poems and riddles, but underneath it all there was also helpful information.

I triggered the flashback, and immediately, Cassie furrowed her brow as if remembering something I had said.

“Don’t worry about Professor Maize. His tests may seem needlessly complicated, but he always leaves just enough clues for you to find the answers,” I had told her back before the spiders started eating people. Correction, before the spiders started laying their eggs in people. “No line is ever insignificant with him.”

Suddenly, Cassie had a breakthrough realization. She started flipping through the diary until she found a page she wanted.

“Wait,” she said. “Maybe Professor Maize did leave us a clue of how to defeat them after all.”

The story had the vibes of a Tales from the Darkside short, which I loved. Even the spiders looked cheap.

Camden got in close and looked over at the journal. “What do you mean? I thought it was all gobbledygook.”

Cassie quickly placed the journal on top of a light table so everyone could see it.

“Look at this,” Cassie said. “When Professor Maize was examining the box, he started writing about the Mid-Millennium rituals and enchantments from the lost city. Here he writes, ‘The Hoffi priests didn’t have a word for blessing or enchantment. They believed that any spell that was a blessing to one was very likely a curse to another. Thus, all magic to them was a curse.'”

Camden thought for a moment. “I think I understand what you’re trying to say.”

Good for him, because I was pretty sure the audience wouldn’t, but that’s what Scholars did. They had to seem smart somehow. The fact that he had planned out this whole sequence made it easy for him.

“I don’t understand anything,” Anna said. “What’s going on?”

Anna had a trope that would buff high-savvy characters when she asked them questions during their explanations.

“We can’t find a way to undo the enchantment that made these spiders superpowered, right?” Camden asked. “It’s like there’s no counter-spell.”

“Right,” Pietro said. “When the spider crawled inside the box after I opened it, they took on the powers of the demigods Andu and Teval. They’re unstoppable. There is no way to defeat such a power.”

“Maybe the reason we think that is because we don’t understand magic the same way that the Hoffi did,” Camden said. “To them, a blessing to the spiders was the same as a curse to humans. We can’t find a way to remove their enchantment because it would be against their will. But if their blessing is also a curse to us, well, that we might be able to reverse.”

Is that what it sounded like when I made up nonsense magic plans?

“Wait a second,” Anna said. “Who was cursed?”

Camden and Cassie both, at the same time, said, “The person who opened the box.”

Everyone looked at Pietro.

“Me?” he asked. “You’re saying that I’m cursed?”

“If what Professor Maize wrote is correct, if the magic of the Hoffi really doesn’t distinguish between a blessing to one creature and a curse to their prey,” Camden said.

“Maybe opening the box was enough to tie you to the magic that caused this whole thing,” Cassie added.

Pietro thought for a moment. Fear drenched his face. “That has to be it,” he said. “The box warned of a curse. I just didn’t believe it. How could I? I was just so blinded by my desire to finish my thesis. I could never have believed it.”

“So now what?” Anna asked. “Do we get some holy water and baptize him or something?”

“No,” Cassie said. “We need the box. Even if destroying it won’t work, we should be able to reverse-engineer a cure… What am I saying? If the poems of the Hoffi epics are correct, then the clue to reversing the curse will be on the box, or they were just really big poems and we’re all screwed.”

“We just need to know how to look for it,” Camden said. “Where is the box?”

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Pietro’s face went white.

“Where is it?” Cassie asked more urgently.

“The box should still be on the quad under the oak tree,” Pietro said.

“You opened an ancient artifact on the quad? What did you take it with you during your lunch break? At least tell me you washed your hands,” Camden said.

Pietro shrugged his shoulders and lowered his face in shame.

After he opened it, he hadn’t noticed when a spider lowered itself down into the box in his hands. He was too busy writing notes.

Suddenly, people all over campus started to scream after their neighborhood-friendly spiders began growing exponentially in size, so he was probably very distracted.

And now, how many had died, including myself, because of that?

After that revelation, Lorne, Antoine, and Kimberly returned fresh from a fight, soot covering their foreheads and green ichor from the spiders staining their clothes.

“Folks, I hope you figured something out, because these things don’t seem to care much about fire,” Lorne said. “On the bright side, their bodies are basically just big clay pots full of goo, but there are so many of them.”

“The loading bay is our shot at getting out,” Antoine said. “Please tell me you have answers.”

They must have had answers, but Carousel didn’t care for them, as the footage cut right to the group running outside of the library. Maybe it just didn’t like the escape sequence, or perhaps it was redundant.

Spiders were all over the place. Spider webs covered every physical surface, from the buildings to the trees to the park benches. Large, neatly packed globs of webbing could be found on many of the webs. They had been students once, but now they were breeding grounds for more giant spiders.

From the darkness, a large spider bore down on the group. This one was even bigger than the ones that had killed me, it looked like it could eat a Volkswagen Beetle for breakfast.

Lorne stopped running. He turned toward the spider and then yelled back at the group, “Go ahead! I’ll hold it off!”