Fear that man

could see the red eye watching. They never blinked. No lids.
        I reached the side cave where Crazy was trapped, dirt packed so tightly under my fingernails that they ached. I hacked away the web, balled it up, and stuffed it behind him. I didn’t want to drop it down the main shaft for fear the jolt would bring the spider plunging upward, stomach open. When I had his head free and his arms loose, he was able to help himself. In short time, he had stripped away the remainder of the sticky thread.
        “You first,” I said. “Can you make it up?”
        “These hooves give perfect balance.” He kicked out of the egg pocket and started up the incline as if it were just another walkway through some charming garden. I waited until he was almost out, then launched myself on the climb. But all this action had shaken the mother spider to action. I could hear the scuttling of her feet coming up fast.
        “I can’t shoot, Andy!” Lotus shouted. “You’re in the way!”
        I started to say something (something probably better left unsaid) when the furry legs touched me around the waist, pulled me loose. It was hardly any use fighting the tremendous power behind her grasp. But she wasn’t prepared for all of my weight. She wobbled under me, collapsed, and we both crashed down the slope, twisted around a bend-all her legs kicking furiously-and dropped twenty feet onto a cavern floor.
        I was on top of the spider.
        She was screaming. God, the screams. They boomed from the walls. Even the echoes threw themselves back and reechoed. Then, despite the pounding of my heart, I saw that this place seemed to be a nest and that more than one spider, judging from excretion, inhabited it. We were alone now, but her screams would soon draw others.
        I felt something wet, scrambled for a handhold on the flailing Beast, looked down. My foot was dangling inside her gut! She had rolled onto her back in the fall, and I was mounted on her deadly underside. The mandibles quivered. I jerked my foot back, discovered the knife still clutched in my hand. I was shaking violently-so violently that I feared I might drop my only weapon.
        The head reared up as she tried to throw me off. I struck for the eye as Lotus had done earlier, pulled back the blade, was rewarded with gushing blood. She screamed even louder than the impossibly loud screams already filling the cavern, rolled about in fury. I was tossed free, thrown against the wall where I found a large boulder to crawl behind.
        The spider did her death dance, flashing legs awkwardly akimbo.
        I remained hidden in the rocks, holding tight to an aching arm as if the pressure of my hold would drive the pain off, afraid to look at my wound until I saw the Beast was dead and would never again be rushing me. It took her some time to die, but when she did expire it was with a great deal of thrashing and frothing. When I finally looked at my arm, I could see the reason for the pain: a small piece of white bone sticking through the flesh, white and spotted with blood. Head spinning roller-coaster mad, I felt more than a thousand years old-older, indeed, than the universe itself.
        Above, from the tunnel that the spider and I had fallen through, came a noisy scuffling. My head spun even faster, my flesh burned with fever, and visions of the Beast’s mate swam through my head to magnify my fears. I got to my feet with a bit of difficulty and felt as if I were walking on a thin cushion of air instead of the rock floor. My eyes were flaming coals someone had dropped into raw sockets, while my head was made of ice-and melting. I staggered out of the large cavern, moving to a tunnel that glittered with light at its end, hoping that this-in some way-would lead me out. Light meant goodness, did it not? Light meant freedom-or is there a brilliant light at the end of death?
        The stones seemed to melt and re-form around me. My teeth chattered in my ice head; I perspired.
        The end of the tunnel was a branching-off place where the walls became glass and wound erratically under the floor of the vast Harrisburg Crater. Turquoise and crimson ceilings flashed over me, reflecting me as colored mirrors might. The walls threw my image back at me in various shades and sizes, shapes and textures. It was much like a mirror hall at a carnival. Reality was pushed even further from my mind, and delusion and fever grew stronger. I moved to the