She followed me along the airport terminal towards the hour of my doom. The tiled floor was spotless, shining with the fluorescent lights reflecting off of its waxed veneer. Crowds hurriedly moved past us in the opposite direction. Down at the end of the half mile stretch of straight corridor, I could see that the lights were beginning to flicker out, sparks jumping from the ceiling panels like dancers. Beyond the flickering lights there was only darkness.
“We must turn back,” Larissa said.
“No.”
Slowly things began to morph into darker colors; tiny mounds of swamp mud protruded from the corridor floor, now covered with a light film of slime. The white walls started to transform into vines and thick foliage before disappearing altogether. The fluorescent lights flickered out completely, leaving us in a dark gray haze of wandering, barely able to see our own steps or what was underfoot.
Soon the mud was up to our ankles as we navigated the near total dark, stumbling together over wet roots and bog muck, our hands outstretched in front of us so as to prevent a forward fall into the grime. Large shapes of creatures almost entirely unseen slipped across our path, and somewhere out in the abysmal blackness beyond us we began to hear human screams. Amidst the suckling and clicking of mandible mouths, prey caught in pairs of grasping spiked forelegs shrieked and squealed, sudden bursts of screaming cut off by low groans, bubbling gasps of breath as the half-dead victims disappeared beneath the mire.
“Please don’t do this,” Larissa said. “They are eating your guests.”
“They won’t eat me.”
“She promised they wouldn’t eat the guests.”
“I’ll speak to her.”
“What about your children, what are you children going to look like if you do this?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
We came to the rim of a shallow rectangular pit, where the wedding guests waited in the blackness, nothing more but barely visible shapes silhouetted against a darker backdrop. Three crooked wooden stairs led down into the pit, where small pools littered the dirt floor of this nightmare arena, the water in them deep and terrible.
For a moment I knelt beside one of the pools, my hand held gently over the bubbling, boiling water, the fumes stinking like ragged meat, like rotten bones.
“She’s down there,” I said. I reached into my tuxedo pocket and pulled out a cigarette. “It’s almost time.”
Larissa turned and carefully joined the other guests, who could not be seen in that deep black dusk. Silhouettes and shapes of strange creatures slithered along the rim of the pit; the wedding guests were kept silent by these unknown keepers of awe, terrifying them into stillness.
I stepped away from the bubbling pool and watched as my bride to be emerged from the reeking liquid, thick rivulets of foam and foulness slipping off of her skin. Her body was the hairy bulb of an enormous spider, the legs like eight tentacles searching the ground, their puckers popping with a sick sound. At the end of each withering leg a giant claw violently thrashed at the air, as she snailed back from the pool into near-total dark. I couldn’t see her face. I turned to where Larissa and the other guests waited patiently at the other end of the pit, but I could not see them.
My spider bride cackled, her mouth sucking and spitting, clicking gratuitously. She went to submerge herself again in the water, and again I saw the thick leathery thorax, the huge shaggy circle of body, the hair long and tangled and full of smaller insects. Slowly she began to disappear down in the water, and I knew the ceremony had been completed. The slithering unseen guards of the wedding pit began to disperse back into the marsh, back into the swamps.
I knew more of my guests would be eaten alive on the way back to the terminal. Larissa appeared out of the black shroud, and together we went up the wooden steps and began our journey back through the hellzone.
“It’s done,” I said. “This is my home now.”
“You’ve made such a terrible mistake.”
And there in the murky stadium of darkness all around us, I began to scream.
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