Yes, of course I’ve heard what the superstitious locals say: “Stay out of the mountains! There’s no shelter on those harsh peaks, and every last combe and glen is infested with killer spiders!”. They say there’s no way to safely cross that mountain range – anyone trying to rest high up on the peaks will die of exposure, lashed by cruel icy winds. Better that, though, than to risk seeking shelter in the forested vales.
The Crawling Death, they call it. Great glossy black eight-legged fiends, some small enough to creep between the rings of your maille, some large as a splayed hand and quick as a cat, and some – so they say – the size of dogs. Or swine. Or cart-horses. The tales have been exaggerated in the telling, of course, since hardly anyone dares venture far into the gullies and ravines that lace between the majestic peaks (most certainly not at night, when the Crawling Death make their appearance, silent as a shadow).
Even if they’re not quite as large as people say, they’re certainly no less deadly. The king’s physicians, who had the unenviable task of tending to the survivors of the last failed expedition, wrote down in stomach-turning detail the precise symptoms of that merciless venom. Erupting blisters the size of a hen’s egg. Flesh blackening, rotting, and sloughing away from the bone. Sweating, drooling, trembling, nausea, vomiting, ranting and raving and spasming like a creature possessed until death seems like a mercy. Others were gripped with a pain unmatched by any wound of war, paired (curiously) with an erection hard as any standing stone.
And yet, in spite of all this, I’m planning an expedition into the mountains. It’s true, I haven’t the equipment with me to safely shelter from the bitter cold above the tree-line, out of the reach of skittering legs and poison-slick fangs. I have no blessing from the gods, and no miracle of alchemy intended to keep the Crawling Death at bay. What I do have, though, is a map. A map from a past age, a more enlightened age, where the cartographers had a decent understanding of the sciences, rather than the encyclopaedic knowledge of rumour and superstition that seems to be the requirement for a mapmaker these days. And from this map – and the journals that I found with it – I have deduced one particularly salient fact, that I am convinced will allow me to make the journey through the supposedly arachnid-infested ravines in perfect safety.
The superstitious peasants might say every last one of those valleys is crawling with deadly poisonous creatures, but in fact, most of them are utterly empty and safe! However, my map has revealed the source of this rumour: Spiders Gorge, which contains over ten thousand spiders, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.
i feel you deserve some sort of prize for this
Tag: creepy probably //
The very thought of that is fucking terrifying.
if people dont start drawing grimdark tavros now im going to be so angry
Some of my favourite urban sights:
- Bricked-up windows
- Upper-storey doorways that open into empty space
- Staircases that lead nowhere
- Clean, working, fully stocked vending machines in obscure and inaccessible places
- Detailed graffiti on surfaces with no obvious spot for the artist to stand, like the underside of a high bridge, or ten metres up a bare wall
- Machinery left to rust because there’s no use for it anymore, but it’s in a weird or precarious location and there’s no way to safely remove it
(I’m sure there’s a theme here…)
I’ve been rereading Unknown Armies again recently and there’s a part of me that wants to find occult significance for this sort of nonsense. But then, I kind of enjoy looking for occult significance for a lot of nonsense.
I’m not convinced that there isn’t some occult significance to some of these. The vending machine in particular stems from what’s definitely one of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had.
First, some context: I don’t know if it’s like this everywhere, but major Canadian cities tend to have a lot of underground infrastructure – particularly in their downtown areas, where train tunnels, parking garages, underground shopping malls, and hotel basements often connect in such a way that you can easily walk for miles without ever seeing sunlight. The interconnections typically aren’t public, or at least not advertised, but a surprising number of them are accessible if poke around; I once followed a maintenance tunnel in a shopping mall parking complex and emerged in the basement of a nearby casino!
Anyway, I was snooping around in the maintenance tunnels below one of the larger local hotels – legitimately, mind you; I was working for the local telecom at the time, trying to track down an errant network cable – when I rounded a bend and noticed that the corridor a few dozen feet ahead of me was brightly illuminated by something. On top of being filthy and difficult to access, the tunnel was also unlit (I’d been navigating by flashlight), so this really stood out.
I couldn’t see any obvious light fixture to account for it – the light seemed to be emerging from an alcove off to the side of the tunnel – so I went to investigate, and discovered… a Coke machine.
Spotlessly clean, fully stocked, and apparently in full working order; the illumination was coming from its interior display lighting.
In a grimy, unlit maintenance corridor twenty feet below ground level.
In retrospect, I’m kind of glad I didn’t have any change on me at the time, because I’d have been sorely tempted to buy something, and who knows how that would have worked out.
if you’d had that coke, in accordance with the laws of food and drink consumption in the otherworld, you probably wouldn’t be here to tell us this story.
For years, Seattle has had one of those mystery Coke machines: http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mystery-soda-machine
this is amazing. im inclined to think of those soda machines as some kind of anglerfish-esque organisms waiting for someone to be attracted to their light.
queerhomestuck 