It was an amazing, miraculous sight to behold. The dragonflies were the first of the ants’ allies that could actually do any real harm to the enemy, and this time, they saved our literal butts. Besides saving our lives, they also allowed our ants to charge through the still-raging battle and into the maple tree coliseum. Our ants charged through the hallways at a fast, six-legged gallop. I don’t know if the others saw it, but I saw a human hand sticking out of a shallow grave in one of the hallways with the carved shelves. It was Grandpa. I was certain of it. How could it be anyone else? How many other humans had ever come to this world? How many other humans had ever been the size of ladybugs? The ants had very reverently buried Grandpa in these halls alongside their other heroes. If I could have, I would have stayed. If I had time, I would have cried. That cry would have been very short lived, because a dozen or so ant steps later, I saw what I still believe was a different human hand buried under a thin coat of dust and dirt. I can’t say for sure, but I swear it was human. Before I had time to take a second look, we passed through a doorway and entered the major chamber of the coliseum where the war raged more fiercely than ever before.
Here, wrapped inside the spiritual solemnity of this special chamber, the number of spiders was tremendous. It was more than tremendous; it was horrendous. As soon as we entered the cathedral, spiders intentionally clogged every possible exit. None of us could get out, and by their massive numbers alone, nothing else could get in. This place was clearly the center of the battle. Here, ant after ant succumbed to the spiders’ attacks. Their poison and their ferocity were overpowering. In every corner, on and under the altar, adjacent to the orb, under the towering Stonehenge columns, against the walls, and on the ceiling, ants died. Then, I saw it. The largest, black, bulbous spider I had ever seen was headed directly toward the altar. He had warriors clearing the path of ants before him, and a following of minions behind. Regal, king-like, this giant spider walked on a carpet of death, and now I could see why.
The altar and the orb were directly to his front. They were his destination. I saw the orb. It didn’t take a genius like Thomas to figure out that something was different. The orb floated in space like it always had, but the stone inside glowed a strange, golden hue. The closer the giant spider got to the orb, the more it changed color. Golden to red, the stone spun inside the orb like a slot machine. Flashing gold, red, gold, red. The spider stepped closer. Red. Red. Closer. Red again, maybe to gold. The spider placed one foot on the altar. Red. Red. Red as Grandpa’s blood. The stone spun wildly. The monster stepped closer. Every behavior of the orb signaled that something was different; something was going to change. Then, what should have always been obvious, hit me. Evil was about to serve greater than good.
The spider stared at the orb and its now red stone as if that spinning thing were a god. All around this giant, ants and spiders were in a constant state of fighting and dying, yet the giant spider could not remove his eyes from the jewel. How do I describe the way a normally cold, emotionless spider looked at this this symbol of indescribable evil, the foreteller of unspeakable devastation? Admiration comes close. It was more in the way that he fondled it, as if the orb and its stone were sacred. The spider behaved more like a priest carrying the Blessed Sacrament during mass. Reverent and filled with biblical awe. The more I think about it, admiration or awe might not be adequate words to describe this spider’s behavior. Addiction might be a more accurate description.
That spider was clearly bent on retrieving the orb, but for a reason I didn’t understand, it apparently wasn’t ready. The spider walked slowly but purposefully around the altar and kept circling the orb. The altar was kept clean of ants by any of a dozen or more smaller spiders that actually fought the war before and behind their lord. Those laid out a thick, red and black carpet of dead ants. The beast had only one focus, to retrieve the orb when it was time. Some ants broke through the spider’s defenses, yet ant after ant that charged the giant spider from the side, or even from above, failed to kill it, failed to rip open that huge abdomen with their steely ant mandibles, failed to so much as slow the spider’s unswerving, trance-fixed stride. The black monster simply tossed those aside like last week’s garbage; tossed them aside to dozens of jumping spiders that waited for those cast-aside morsels; tossed them without even looking, without even breaking his concentration or his focus. Suddenly, inexplicably, I spoke from The Book of Paths.
When evil serves life greater than good
Then life to death will come.
And gift or not, you’ll learn that fact
When love …..
Thomas must have been captured by the same thoughts. Before I could finish the words, I heard him yell, “The orb! It’s evil! He wants to replace good with evil! Stop him! Stop him!” Now, it was certain that all of us knew what was going on, but we had been in these jaws before, I had seen those giant, black spiders before, and I knew there was nothing we could do to stop that beast. We all knew it was impossible to escape from the ants that carried us, and even if we could have, we all knew that our chances of survival were almost nonexistent. Nevertheless, Debbie, we tried. We all tried.
I watched Thomas and Sarrah struggle with all their might against the ants’ jaws, but they couldn’t win. They hit. They squirmed. They tried to lift themselves, tried to squeeze themselves like toothpaste out of those jaws. But nothing. The ants were far too strong. I watched Brian, too. He did nothing but stare, and I had seen that look in Brian before. He stared at the huge spider. He stared at the ants. He stared at the war. But more than anything, he stared at the orb. He wasn’t fighting, but he wasn’t indifferent, either. I looked at him again, and I immediately discovered an even higher level of fear. Brian was focused and concentrating. He was perfectly silent, unmoving, learning, as addicted as the giant spider.
For whatever reason, the ants that held us would not release us. After I had a chance to think about it, I came to believe that they had to know what was going on. They had to know that evil was about to serve greater than good. It’s probable that the ants assumed the inevitability of the spiders’ attacks. This sacred chamber had become a death pit, and for some reason, we were being held prisoner and being forced to watch. The strange fact is that both the spiders and the ants were allowing us to watch. The ants wouldn’t let us fight, and the spiders didn’t rush to kill us.
We all heard it, but we have no explanation. It was a moan of sorts; ghostly, to say the least. Then the screeching sound of brakes, of steel grating against steel, when the orb, the stone, and all around it turned black, as it had cast a beam of blackness onto the altar. We could make out the large spider as it began to dance in jubilant victory. At that exact moment, when some underling plucked the orb from its nest, I felt the world change. I can’t explain how I knew, but I could feel the world get cold and dark. I sensed the sky fill with clouds, and I felt the sun became as dark as my heart. The lesser spider tossed the orb to his king. He didn’t set it down or show it respect. He tossed it like some unusable piece of junk. The orb clunked to the ground in defeat, nothing more than a colored rock, the solid thud of its fall a drum beat, a heartbeat, a reminder of the last breath of fallen warriors. The darkness lifted as if some magical switch had been toggled. The orb had changed, too. It no longer resembled a living sun, and it no longer had the blackness of death; it more closely resembled a cold moon: pock marked, gray, lifeless. Everything had changed.
Six barely living ants crawled toward the orb in a futile attempt to protect it. Those heaped themselves onto the stone-like thing, but their efforts were basically meaningless. The king spider tossed those ants aside to grab hold of the orb, and he held it with two giant arms high in the air. You and I both know, Debbie, that I don’t go to church often, but that action reminded me of a religious ceremony. If you remember the Disney movie, think of that scene where the monkey held the lion cub in the air, and all the animals in the jungle looked on in solemn hope. That’s what this moment was like. Every s
pider in the coliseum looked up at the stone. Every one of them had hope in its ugly eyes. That was their one moment of united reverence; it was the end of the battle, and it was the beginning of their destiny.
In one sudden, spine shivering second, the giant spider killed that underling who had tossed the orb so irreverently. Snapped the head off that little spider with a single move of one arm. Then, the giant spider replaced the orb back onto its nest. The orb began to glow black once again. Its outer shell became translucent; the inner blackness began rotating again, became solid and alive again as it once had been. But different. There was no goodness. No warmth. No feeling of pleasure. No light. No color. I sensed, once again, a change in the outside world, like the passing of a storm cloud. But my heart grew even darker. The giant spider was fully aware of what he had done. He raised his two front legs in the air and waved them like ceremonial flags, and then he reared his head and opened his mouth parts in a venom-soaked, very surreal, very silent roar.
Brian began to fight, slowly at first, as if he were waking up from a deep sleep. Two seconds later, he was fully awake and beating his ant on the head, stabbing, kicking, screaming. It was the first time I had seen him react this way since Grandpa died. Brian knew what was going to happen. So did I. We were about to see life returned to the dead.
*****
36. The Dead Shall Be Given Life
There was a creepy silence in the coliseum, save for the hum of the changing orb and the clicks of a few ants that still hadn’t died. The orb rotated on its nothingness just like it did before: frictionless and gravity defying. Its black glow intensified. We could see swirls, like miniature black holes taking form as the globe became stronger and more active. Suddenly, along the side of one edge, the globe began to change colors. White! Perfectly, brilliantly white. The orb’s new radiance spread slowly across its circumference from one horizon to the other. It was eclipsing, or rather, un eclipsing. Before long, the radiant eclipse was total. The large spider pranced around the altar, showered in luminescence. He took a single victory lap to display the joy of his success. He took a second lap, slower than the first, to soak up the admiration of the other spiders in the room. He took a third, even slower, to motivate the crowd, to excite his minions, to gain their interest and their support for what was to come.
Every lesser spider in the chamber faced the one that was now king. They formed a jumbled crowd around the altar, but the king’s encouragement definitely worked. Every spider began to stomp one foot to the ground in perfect rhythm with the one on stage. They may have looked like a jumbled crowd, but they sounded organized, and they sounded strong. The black spider stopped; he hovered next to the sun-globe. The others continued their rhythmic stomp. The king raised his two front legs high in the air. The spiders increased the pace of their rhythm and the volume of their stomp. The king raised his second row of feet, and he directed them, both at the same time, toward the globe. His movements were slow, deliberate, designed to incite both excitement and reverence. As the hairs on his feet touched that globe he froze; he simply stopped moving, and the stomping ceased, too. The minions crushed tightly around the altar, so tightly that I thought some would surely be squashed. They focused every bit of their attention onto that globe. The entire show was more than scary; it was heart stopping. This entire population of spiders was locked in a trance. They gazed far deeper into the jewel than its mere surface; more likely, they stared straight into the depths of hell. Every spider was held captive by the hypnotic magic of the orb and by their anticipation of a near and certain future.
Three new spiders separated the crowd and marched to the center of the chamber. As one, the three raised a dead spider in offering to their king. The giant spider reared and stood horse-like on its four hind legs. The thing waved its front legs through the air and beckoned the crowd’s support while his third and fourth legs nestled the orb. A strange sound filled the chamber. It’s a hard sound to describe, maybe like thousands of hairy sticks being rubbed together. The king had what he wanted—their confidence. And more—their craving for total victory. His head swayed back and forth in a dreamy, fluid motion, and with still flowing arms, the king gestured to the three with the dead spider. By simple motion alone, the king directed the others to deliver the dead spider to his altar. They did. The giant spider lifted the lifeless lump and held it directly over the radiant orb. Ribbons of light jettisoned from the orb. Those penetrated the dead body like spears of solid light, passing entirely through the dead spider. Soon, the body of that lifeless spider began to glow as the orb had originally done. The dead spider rose from the arms of the king and floated weightlessly in mid air, appearing to be supported only by the power of those strange lights. The spider’s body turned over and over as if it were on a barbeque spit; it was rolled by some unseen force ever so slowly from its stomach to its back, back to stomach, stomach to back, again and again. Thirty seconds later, we saw the dead thing’s abdomen expand and contract a single time, as if it had just received the breath of life. The dead spider’s legs began to move, stiffly at first, then rhythmically as if it were walking on air. The light beams lowered the newly living spider to the altar, and then, with a weird sound straight out of some scifi movie, the lights were slurped back into the orb. The once-dead spider took its new place among the living as if nothing had ever happened. Except for the glow. There was a definite, visible aura that surrounded the living dead. It was the yet another indication that something was not right, not normal, not good.
Brian’s attempts at freeing himself started again, this time with more strength and ferocity than ever before. He had seen what he needed to see. Something else had changed.
*****
37. Insurrection
The spiders’ celebration abruptly halted. The sounds arrived first, the scraping and clicking of thousands of ants cascading through narrow passageways. Silence then. The calm before the storm. The spiders were clearly confused, not knowing what to expect, or where, exactly, to expect it from. They walked in circles, both on and around the altar, as if preparing to defend from every direction. The reek of the explosion brought every living thing to its knees; even the spiders lost their footing and dropped to the bulk of their bodies. Caustic chemicals blasted through the doorways like the superheated exhaust of rocket ships. Every spider that had been protecting the main entrance was ejected through the air. The stench was more than mere nose wrinkling, and the burn of this chemical attack was remarkably painful, especially to our human eyes and lungs. Thomas and I were closest. Both of us covered our mouths and noses, I with my hands, Thomas with his stretched t-shirt. Nothing worked. Whatever it was nearly choked us unconscious with something that smelled and felt like a really bad fart mixed with pepper spray. Our eyes filled with tears; our lungs practically ripped themselves out of our chests, but through the pain, and through our tear-blurred eyes, we could see two giant beetles tank their way through separate entrances. The largest portion of the ant army had strategically placed themselves behind the beetles like tiny, six-legged infantrymen tromping behind their armored cover. With the entrances open, and with cleared paths into the coliseum, the ant torrent kicked into high gear.
The first arrivals headed directly for the glowing orb, still being protected by the giant spider. There were too few of them, but they were also being assisted by the beetles. Those huge and powerful creatures had bullied their way into the room and were able to heave every opposing spider out of their way. It was an unbelievable spectacle. The beetles pushed like bull elephants against tiny enemies and smashed them against walls, against the altar, against whatever was in the background. There were only two, but the effect of their combined attack was mindboggling, especially to the spiders. They were unstoppable. Several spiders attacked the beetles with their venomous fangs, but those simply broke off against the thick armor plating of the beetles’ wing coverings. Spiders by the dozens crawled over the beetles, but, at best, they were only able to slow their progress. T
he beetles shrugged, and the spiders scattered. What the beetles didn’t handle, the ants finally could. With numbers turning against them, many spiders viewed running as a viable option. Hundreds faded through cracks and holes that I never knew existed. The battle’s tide definitely turned, and it did so within seconds after the spider retreat began. Thousands of ants sealed off pathways and cracks; hundreds, if not thousands, remained to kill the king spider, any of his henchmen, and the one other that didn’t retreat—the one that was the living dead.