Chapter 7: Glass vials rattle as Annalise straps Tom to the operating table with silk restraints—she peels a tarantula from its web with forceps, its legs pedaling frantically before she lowers it onto his bare chest, her scalpel glinting as she murmurs 'Let's see how many segments we can remove before you break.'
The text came at 11:47 PM. No preamble, no greeting. Just an address and four words: Wear something you can ruin.
Tom had learned not to ask questions. The address led him to the eastern edge of the city, where the streets grew narrow and the streetlights flickered with the desperation of forgotten infrastructure. St. Catherine's Mercy Hospital had been closed for seventeen years, its facade a monument to municipal neglect. The windows were boarded, the entrance chained, but the padlock on the side door hung loose, already picked.
He pushed inside. The darkness swallowed him whole.
His phone's flashlight cut a trembling beam through the corridor. Linoleum curled beneath his feet, cracked and peeling like sunburned skin. Wheelchairs sat abandoned against the walls, their vinyl seats split open, stuffing spilling out like entrails. The air was thick with mildew and something else—something copper and old, the ghost of antiseptic trying to mask decay.
Her stilettos clicked somewhere ahead. A rhythmic, confident tattoo against the ruined floor.
"Third floor," her voice echoed down the stairwell. "Surgical theater. Don't be slow."
He climbed. The stairs groaned beneath him, each step a negotiation with gravity and rot. On the third-floor landing, the moonlight found him through a shattered window, painting his hands silver and cold.
The surgical theater doors were propped open with a rusted bedpan. Inside, the room stretched upward into darkness, the ceiling lost in shadow. Rows of tiered seating curved around the central table like the ribs of some enormous beast. The operating table itself sat bathed in a column of moonlight, its steel surface scratched and stained, the hydraulic base still gleaming with the memory of precision.
Annalise stood at its head, her silhouette sharp against the pale light. She wore a black slip dress that clung to her hips, her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail. In her hands, she held a surgical clamp.
"Welcome to my chapel," she said.
Tom stepped closer, his sneakers squeaking on the wet linoleum. "How did you find this place?"
"I have my hobbies." She gestured upward with the clamp. "Look."
He tilted his head back. At first, he saw nothing but darkness and the distant suggestion of ceiling tiles. Then his eyes adjusted.
The ceiling was alive.
Thousands of spiders—no, tens of thousands—wove a tapestry of silk across the entire expanse. The moonlight caught the strands, turning them into constellations of silver thread. And among the webs, the spiders moved. Small ones, large ones, fat-bodied and spindly-legged, their geometries alien and beautiful. The air hummed with the nearly imperceptible sound of their industry.
"Holy shit," Tom breathed.
"Wolf spiders, mostly. A few brown recluses. And my pride and joy." She pointed to a corner where the web grew denser, darker. "That's where she lives."
She reached up with the clamp, and Tom watched as she carefully, delicately, severed a strand of web. The entire structure trembled. Something large and dark shifted in the shadows.
The tarantula fell.
It landed on the operating table with a soft thud, its legs splaying outward, its body the size of Tom's palm. It was beautiful in the way that a loaded gun is beautiful—all potential and menace. Its abdomen was a deep russet, its legs thick and covered in fine hairs that caught the moonlight like frost.
Annalise didn't flinch. She placed the clamp on the table and retrieved something from her bag—a leather case that unzipped to reveal a collection of surgical instruments, each one gleaming and sharp.
"How long have you been planning this?" Tom asked.
"Since the centipede." She selected a retractor, tested its weight in her hand. "You said it was more. I wanted to see how much more you could take."
The tarantula was moving now, testing the edges of the table with its front legs, searching for escape. Annalise watched it with the patient attention of a chess player.
"Come here," she said.
He obeyed. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else, someone who wasn't terrified and aroused in equal measure.
She took his hand, led him to the table's edge. The tarantula had stopped moving, its legs drawn close, its body compact. Sensing, perhaps, that it was being watched.
"Remember the greenhouse," she said. "Remember the kitchen. This is the next iteration. The evolution."
She kicked off her stilettos. One by one, they hit the floor with twin clatters. Then she climbed onto the operating table, her bare feet silent on the cold steel.
The tarantula moved. She stepped on it.
Not a crushing blow—a controlled, deliberate pin. Her right foot came down on the spider's body, not enough to kill, just enough to hold. The tarantula's legs splayed outward, eight hairy limbs twitching against the steel.
She motioned for the clamp. Tom retrieved it and handed it to her, his fingers brushing hers. They were warm. His were freezing.
"Watch," she said.
She knelt on the table, one knee on either side of the pinned spider. Her slip dress rode up her thighs. In the moonlight, she looked like a surgeon, like a priestess, like something older and more terrible than either.
The clamp clicked open. She positioned it over the tarantula's front pair of legs.
"These first," she said. "They're the most sensitive. The sensory organs. They'll feel everything."
The clamp closed. The tarantula's leg bent at an angle it was never meant to bend. The creature's body convulsed, its remaining legs scrabbling against the steel.
Annalise didn't look away. Neither did Tom.
She secured the first leg, then reached for another clamp. The second leg followed the first. Then the third. Then the fourth. With each clamp, the tarantula's struggles grew more frantic, then more desperate, then more resigned.
When all eight legs were spread and pinned, the spider looked like a specimen in a display case—a living dissection, its body stretched and exposed.
"Now the fun part," Annalise said.
She picked up a scalpel.
Tom's mouth was dry. "What are you going to do?"
"Open it. Slowly. From abdomen to cephalothorax." She traced the line with the tip of the blade, not cutting yet, just mapping. "You'll be able to see its heart beat. Did you know tarantulas have open circulatory systems? The blood just… pools. Moves by pressure. Primitive, but effective."
She pressed the blade down.
The chitin parted like wax. A bead of clear liquid welled up, then a seep of pale-blue ichor. The tarantula's body shuddered, a tremor that ran through all its trapped limbs.
Annalise leaned closer, her breath misting in the cold air. "There. Look."
Tom looked. Through the incision, he could see something pulsing. A tube, thin and translucent, contracting and expanding in a rhythm that was almost hypnotic. The heart.
"Faster now," Annalise observed. "Stress response. The body knows it's dying, even if the brain doesn't quite understand."
She cut deeper. The scalpel moved with surgical precision, extending the incision along the tarantula's abdomen. The spider's legs twitched, each one desperate and weak. The ichor flowed more freely now, pooling in the hollows of the steel table.
Tom felt his own heart matching the creature's rhythm. Faster. Harder. The edges of his vision blurred.
Annalise reached for his hair. Not grabbing this time—just resting her hand on the back of his head, guiding him closer. His face was inches from the dissection. He could smell the creature's fluids, sharp and organic, mingling with the scent of Annalise's perfume.
"I want you to watch it stop," she whispered. "The exact moment. Don't look away."
The tarantula's heart beat faster. Then slower. Then irregular—a stutter, a pause, a desperate surge. The legs curled inward, one by one, a slow-motion grasp at nothing.
The heart stopped.
They watched it together, the silence pressing in around them. The web above them stirred in a draft, a thousand tiny legs adjusting, producing a sound like distant rain.
Annalise pulled her hand from Tom's hair. She sat back on her heels, her dress stained with ichor, her skin flushed. She looked at him with an expression he couldn't name—something between curiosity and hunger.
"You didn't look away," she said.
"Neither did you."
She smiled. It was the truest thing he had ever seen.
"I think," she said, "we're not done here yet."
She stood up on the table, her bare feet painted with the tarantula's fluids. She looked down at him, and in the moonlight, she was terrible and beautiful and his.
"Kiss me," she said.
He did. The taste of her mouth was copper and salt. Above them, the web trembled, and something else began to fall.