The Arachnitect of Jaala-Ghar

The jungle didn’t stop at the edge of the property line. It simply waited.

Urna stood before the rotting teak doors of her grandfather’s bungalow, wiping a thick layer of sweat from her neck. The taxi driver had refused to bring his Ambassador any further than the dirt crossroads two miles back. He had muttered something in Hindi about ‘bad geometry’ and sped off. Now, she was alone in a clearing where the trees actively seemed to lean away from the roofline, their branches twisted into defensive postures.

Her grandfather, an architect—who built temples that made the eyes ache if you look at them for too long—had lived and died here. The telegram claimed a heart attack in total isolation, but the locals whom she met, and who called the estate Jaala-Ghar (The House of Webs) whispered that something was odd about the home and the old man hadn’t died of age at all.

She pushed the front door. It dragged across the floor with the sickening sound of wet meat being torn.

The moment she stepped into the dark foyer, the door behind her didn’t slam shut. It melted. The teak grain liquefied, bubbling together like hot wax. Urna spun around and slammed her fists against the wood. It was warm and squishy. She clawed at the surface, but her nails found only a smooth, pulse-dead expanse. The seam was gone. The house had healed over the exit.

The air in the hallway smelled like a damp basement where someone was boiling hair and old copper pennies. A low vibration rattled the floorboards, a rhythmic drone of an organ at work.

She clicked on her heavy Maglite. “Gaurav?”

Her brother was supposed to be here three days ago to appraise the estate. He hadn’t called since Tuesday.

Urna moved toward the kitchen first. Space inside the bungalow was deceptive. The hallway pinched in the middle, the walls sloping inward as if the house were trying to squint at her. A door that looked ten feet away required thirty long paces to reach. Her boots sank into floorboards that felt increasingly like sun-baked skin.

She pushed the swinging kitchen door open. The ceramic tiles were spongy. The refrigerator door hung open, but the inside wasn’t lined with white plastic. It was a cavern of woven, grey silk. Something was suspended inside the webbing. It was a mass of hollowed-out bone and dried skin, roughly the shape of an old man.

Her grandfather?

His ribcage had been expanded and fused into a translucent shelving unit, holding clusters of pale, vibrating eggs.

Urna gagged. She stumbled backward, hitting the hallway wall. The plaster bruised under her shoulder.

She ran for the study. She found Gaurav’s suitcase near a warped mahogany table. The leather of his bag was turning into a translucent jelly. Inside, his shirts were fused into a single, damp grey lump. Beside the bag lay their grandfather’s journal. The pages were tethered together by a resinous thread, but the book lay open to a central spread.

She shined her flashlight on the frantic, jagged handwriting.

June 12. The angles are finally right: 54.7356°.

The spiders don’t spin the web; the web spins the spiders.

It needs raw material. It needs calcium for the load-bearing walls. Iron from blood for the nails. I offered the stray dogs. Not enough. It needs more.

A hand-drawn map of the backyard with three small ‘x’ marks was peeking from under the journal. Stapled to it was a note with more of his scribbling:

‘air feels different!’

‘complex web pattern – inspiration!? - foundation design!’

Underneath she recognised the sigil he would draw on the first bricks laid during Bhoomi-Pujan.

“Urna…” a wheezing sound broke her concentration.

She looked up. The ceiling of the study wasn’t plaster. It was a canopy of stretched, yellowing parchment. Gaurav was pinned to the centre of it.

“Gaurav! Oh my god.”

He looked like a grotesque biology specimen. Thick, ivory thorns nailed his wrists and ankles to the crossbeams. The muscles in his thighs had been unspooled into individual bloody fibres, stretched tight and woven into the rafters. The house was using him for structural reinforcement.

His jaw hung dislocated. A grey, pulsing sac occupied the back of his throat, rhythmically pumping a milky sludge into a funnel of silk. His eyes darted wildly. The pupils were gone. In their place were dozens of tiny, black pinpricks that moved independently of each other.

“It… builds,” he rasped. The sound vibrated through the walls rather than the air. “Needs… more marrow.”

The parchment ceiling tore open with a wet ripping sound. The Arachnitect dropped.

While at first glance it appeared to be a spider; it turned out to be a nightmare of butchered human anatomy. It possessed too many elbows and backward-bending knees. Its long, pale legs were covered in a fine, greasy fuzz that trapped the dust. Its head was a twitching cluster of weeping black eyes, and its mandibles snapped vertically like a pair of rusted shears. It didn’t have a thorax. Its body was a chaotic cage of fused human ribs containing a sickly, glowing green light.

Urna screamed and swung the heavy Maglite.

The metal connected with a sickening crack against one of the creature’s pale shins. The Arachnitect didn’t flinch. It moved with stuttering, horrific speed, its legs clicking against the walls like knitting needles on glass. The floor tilted violently, throwing Urna off balance. The house was adjusting its grip, trapping her.

The creature lunged. A heavy front leg pinned her to the floorboards. Before she could swing the flash light again, the sharp, obsidian tip of its appendage slid into her shoulder. It went in as easily as a needle into butter.

There was no pain. There was only a sudden, paralysing frost that leached the strength from her muscles.

In the same instant she saw images flashing in her head: foundation stones with sigils around the country, a portal opening in the backyard, a tiny multi-appendaged creature scuttling into her grandfather’s ear canal.

Urna looked down at her arm. Her veins were bulging, turning a bruised, necrotic yellow. Beneath her skin, she could see the humps of something small and many-legged racing up her bicep, heading straight for her heart. The Arachnitect hovered over her face, its mandibles clicking in a hypnotic rhythm. On its abdomen, woven in silver-black silk, was a perfect, miniature replica of the bungalow.

The walls groaned around her. The floor rippled, absorbing the heat from her back. Urna felt her own bones grow heavy, softening like warm wax.

She couldn’t move her arms.

She couldn’t kick her legs.

The paralysis was absolute, yet her mind remained terrifyingly sharp.

Outside, muffled by the thick, fleshy walls of Jaala-Ghar, she heard a sound.

The crunch of tires on gravel. Car doors slamming. Voices calling out for her and Gaurav.

More relatives?

More raw material!

Urna tried to scream a warning to whoever was outside. She opened her mouth, but the only thing that came out was the first, delicate thread of silver silk.