Room 15 (standard:horror, 1548 words)
Author: Lev821	Added: Oct 15 2009	Views/Reads: 3213/2041	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A metal detector finds the key to a room in an abandoned hotel. Should it be investigated?

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story


It wasn't on that floor, so he made his way up the stairs again, the dog
racing ahead, panting and sniffing around. There was just enough light 
to see the room numbers, and because the hotel was fairly small, he 
soon found himself standing in front of room 15. There were a few 
wooden planks nailed across it, and the words: ‘Private, do not enter' 
were attached to the door on a torn away piece of card, but it was too 
dark for Jimmy to see that. He set about taking away the planks, which 
wasn't too difficult, as they were easily wrenched away, the cracking 
sound shattering the stillness. 

He could just about see the door handle, and fumbled around for the
keyhole. He didn't know why he was hesitant, but knew he hadn't come 
this far only to turn away. He tried the door first, but wasn't 
surprised to find it locked. He slowly inserted the key and turned it. 
The mechanism hadn't been used in a long-time, and its workings were 
rusty and stiff, but the lock clicked open, and Jimmy pushed the door, 
only to find some resistance. It opened slowly, but whatever it was 
pushing against sounded like a clump of grass that was slowly being 
torn away. Baron raced inside, and within seconds was barking loudly, 
and if Jimmy knew Baron, that was a bark of fear. He thought perhaps 
that a window had been left unboarded in this room, as there was 
daylight, albeit somewhat shady. He walked in only to see his dog 
barking at something he could not see as it was around a corner. It was 
immediate that there was something very strange about this place. What 
appeared to be silky stringed webbing adorned all surfaces, and it was 
quite an effort to join Baron as his ankle boots kept sticking to it. 
It was all over the living room, except for the large hole in the 
middle of the floor, where the daylight was coming from. I could be in 
a giant spider's den, he thought, and when he looked and saw what Baron 
was barking at, he saw that he was. 

A large black Katipo spider, the size of a transit van, was poised with
long spindly legs ready to strike, its eyes obviously staring at them. 
They had wandered right into its nest, and the hole was its entrance. 
Jimmy yelled and staggered back, falling over Baron and into the hole, 
where he fell directly into the spider's tangled webbing, slowing his 
fall. The sticky threads were wrapped around him, but he could see 
through them enough to see that he was in some sort of forest, the 
ground being around ten feet away. Baron continued barking, then gave a 
high pitched yelp, and fell silent. Jimmy thrashed around, but only 
made it worse for himself, and then the Katipo came out of its den, the 
shiny black eyes getting closer. Its legs wrapping more silky thread 
around him, and Jimmy could no longer see the other dimension, a 
parallel universe, a universe exactly the same as the earth, where 
humans had evolved, but the spider had grown to be the top of the food 
chain, the dominant species. Humans were simply their prey, and a tear 
in the fabric of the dimensions, not of the spider's, but nature's 
making, was the small entrance into what the spider called home. With 
the room being sealed, the spider simply saw it as a place to nest, 
where it could put the humans and animals it had caught in storage for 
when they were hungry, which is what it did with Jimmy, cocooning him 
alive, and dragging him back into his own dimension. 

Baron's barks of terror were muffled by the thread wrapped around him,
and Jimmy's screams went ignored. They were blended into the fabric of 
the nest, along with its other victims, ready for when it fed, and when 
it had finished, it saw along the corridor, an open door, a door into a 
new universe. 


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