Sean E. Britten

All There in the (Monster) Manual are stories based on creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Over 2022 I released a different story fitting the theme every single week and I’ve now expanded to Dungeons & Dragons’ Monsters of the Multiverse and even the Pathfinder Bestiary. Could be fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else entirely! Check them out on the main page of the website.

This Week’s Inspiration: Phase Spider

Seth is being stalked by a giant spider only he can see, that appears and vanishes without warning. As his world unravels, is it all in his head or could the spider represent a very real danger?

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Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

– Zhuangzi

Seth shrank against the headboard and watched the enormous spider leg emerge from beyond the foot of his bed. As long as a pool cue but as thick as his calf at its base, it tapered to a blunt tip. Sandy brown and furry, bristles poked off of it like porcupine quills. Slowly, with exaggerated care, it bent and prodded at the mattress. He could see the blanket dimple at its touch. Wracked with terror, as quietly as he could, Seth drew his feet away and pulled his knees to his chest.

Morning sunlight streamed through the bedroom curtains. It made the spectacle feel all the more wrong. Such horrors were better suited to the dead of night, when they could be attributed to the misfires of a primitive imagination that was starved of real threats and had to invent its own. Outside, Seth could hear birdsong and people talking in muffled voices. The spider’s leg tap-tapped its way across the bedspread, inching closer. A second limb joined it from beyond the bed, stretching and beginning to search. He couldn’t even cry for help. All he could manage was a rasping reassurance which he directed back at himself.

“It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real.”

The legs flinched. They could hear him! For a moment, they held horribly, terribly, awfully still. With renewed purpose, they began to feel their way forward again. Seth could sense the tangle of more limbs behind them. He could hear their dry bristles rubbing together. He felt the presence of a huge, humped, predatory shape. Like a child, he slammed his eyes shut and hugged his knees.

“It’s not real, it’s not real!”

When Seth opened his eyes, the spider was gone. Nothing else about the room had changed. Sunlight beamed through the window. Birds and muffled conversation filtered in from outside. But the spider had disappeared and left not a single trace of itself. He couldn’t convincingly tell if the imprints in the bedspread were marks from its feet or just wrinkles.

xXx

“Is involuntary commitment really a thing?” Seth asked.

“What do you mean, is it a thing?”

“I mean if I tell you something crazy, genuinely crazy, you can’t just-, pick up the phone and they send someone with a straitjacket to lock me up in a mental asylum for the rest of my life, right?”

Dr Walding, Katherine, studied Seth with practised neutrality. “If you’ve committed a crime or are thinking of commiting a crime, I’m duty bound to report it. If I think you’re a danger to yourself or others, I could arrange for a twenty-four-hour psychiatric hold, but it’s hardly as simple as picking up the phone and telling someone to lock you up. And we don’t use the word crazy here.”

Seth sat on the edge of a couch across from the psychiatrist. Between his fingers, he peeled strips from a single tissue and dropped them on the table in front of him. Katherine was a small, solid woman, eyes owlish behind a pair of glasses with thick frames. Not a strand of her greying auburn hair out of place. Her office reflected a warm but professional feeling.

“I’m seeing things,” Seth said.

“Hallucinations?”

“Full, like, visual and I guess audible hallucinations.”

Katherine gave a small frown. “How often?”

“I’m not sure, but it feels like they’re getting worse. Maybe once, twice a day. I think at first I dismissed them. I’d see something behind a door just as it was closing, and think I imagined it. Or I heard something scratching at the wall and put it down to something normal. But they’re escalating as well as becoming more frequent. They’re becoming more and more real.”

“What kind of hallucinations? Scratching, what else?”

The tip of a long, tapered leg crept out from behind the psychiatrist’s chair, and Seth stiffened. Waving, it seemed to taste the air. Had he called it here? Had he summoned it by speaking of it aloud?

“Seth? What kind of hallucinations?”

“Spider,” Seth choked, looking down.

“Spiders? You’re seeing spiders, exclusively?”

The leg stretched to its full length and began to curve back toward Katherine’s face. She didn’t react even as bristles appeared to brush the side of her head. The psychiatrist sat in a wingback chair large enough that a man, or something roughly man-sized, could easily hide behind it. Another couple of legs began to poke from the other side of the chair like skeletal fingers.

“One spider, one big one,” Seth said. “Does that mean anything?”

“What does it mean to you? Do spiders have some special meaning to you in particular?”

“Not-, not that I can think of.”

“Are you afraid of spiders?”

Seth shrugged weakly. “Not specifically, I didn’t think. Not any more afraid of them than anyone else.”

Four spider legs extended from behind the chair and curled around the doctor possessively. Feeling her out, the tips of different limbs brushed her arms, and the side of her neck. Katherine reached up and scratched at the spot on the side of her throat unthinkingly. Surely just a coincidence. She can’t feel it, Seth thought. She’s totally unaware.

“A lot of people are afraid of spiders, but most of them are harmless to us,” Katherine said. “They can represent a lot of things. A fear of death. A fear of the alien, the unknown. But they can also be creative and industrious, builders and artists when it comes to their webs.”

A low, sibilant hiss started to fill the room. Seth felt his blood pressure rising. The head of the spider had to be just behind the top of Katherine’s chair. The bulk of its body clinging to it. But she wasn’t aware of it at all. Of course not, it’s not really there. No matter how much he told himself that, the legs looked completely real. He could make out every bristle and hair. It looked every bit as real to him as she did.

“Seth, are you seeing this spider in the room with us right now?” Katherine asked.

Seth kept his face lowered and squeezed his eyes shut. Each breath he took, in and out, grated against his ribs. The remains of the tissue he’d been carefully dismantling scrunched between his fingers.

“Seth?”

When Seth looked back up, the legs were gone. Carefully, he scanned the rest of the room, even glancing behind him to make sure the spider hadn’t slunk off to one of the corners. It was just the two of them, of course, he and Katherine. There was no sign of any giant arachnid.

“No, no, it’s not.”

xXx

Seth felt shaky and sick as he left Dr Walding’s office and made his way down to the street. Adrenaline had flooded his system and then receded after the encounter ended, leaving him cold and exposed. Encounter, it didn’t feel right to be calling it a hallucination. The spider had felt as real as the psychiatrist or anything else in that office. But he’d shut his eyes and concentrated and it had vanished into thin air. What else could it be other than all in his head?

They talked about what Seth had been seeing for the rest of his session but he left with the feeling that the psychiatrist didn’t believe him. He’d originally started talking to Katherine as a way of dealing with the body dysmorphia issues that had plagued him since he was a teenager. Nowadays, they spent most of their fortnightly sessions unpacking anxieties about his career and relationships. For him to suddenly come to her with vivid hallucinations of giant spiders, it might be easy to think the more likely explanation was a patient lying for attention rather than actually seeing such things. Katherine had suggested, however, that the cause may be medical rather than psychological. The thought of a tumour pressing on some part of his brain and causing the visions, especially at the rate they were escalating, was more terrifying than the spider itself.

Walking down the sidewalk, Seth felt conspicuous. Like he had a neon sign flashing over his head announcing to the world everything he’d told Katherine. He usually felt that way after a particularly personal session. No one paid him any special attention of course, but Seth couldn’t help casting some suspicious glances around. Cars and taxis and buses filled the street. Hundreds of pedestrians brushed by him, going about their own business. On the corner of the block, construction continued on a mostly complete glass office building. Men descended the sides wearing harnesses and orange hardhats, lines stretching from overhead. The comparison to spiders was inescapable. Seth watched every gap and hiding place for the hint of a spidery limb. His ears strained amidst the noise of the city for a hiss or the sound of bristles rubbing together

Seth breathed deeply, and closed his eyes. For a moment, the noise of the city drained away, the vehicles and chatter and construction, as if it were a soundtrack he could simply turn down until it disappeared. No one jostled him. And for a long second when he opened his eyes, he was completely alone. The streets and sidewalks, and all the surrounding buildings remained but there were no people at all, no vehicles, just stillness. Lines of what looked like sunlight gleamed around him. And then, just like that, it returned, sound and colour and noise all rushing back at him like a shock of cold water.

When Seth reached the entrance to the subway, he hesitated at the top of the escalators. They descended into darkness. Down there, he might be trapped with nowhere to run. Seth shook with frustration. If he couldn’t manage the subway, where could he go? He certainly couldn’t go home, or back to Dr Walding’s office, where he’d already seen the spider. These hallucinations or encounters or whatever they were were ruining his life. Several other commuters backed up behind him. Steeling his courage, Seth hopped on the escalator and let it carry him below.

On the subway, Seth stood in the entryway as people filed on and filled the seats. Lost in his thoughts, he hardly took notice of them. If Katherine was right, he needed to book an appointment for a medical consultation. Get some kind of scans done. His mind rebelled at the thought. If he was really dying and the spider was a sign of that, maybe he’d be better off not knowing. To just let it happen and be as happy as he could be until then in his ignorance. But that was stupid, if it was a medical problem then there was always the chance it could be survivable if caught now. Or maybe it wouldn’t even be that serious, and he could get rid of the spider and weird moments like whatever happened on the street just then by taking a pill.

After a couple of stations, the train stopped and stayed at the platform for longer than it should have done. The doors remained open although all the waiting travellers had either gotten on or off.

“Apologies for the delay, we are waiting for a signal before we can move,” a voice crackled over the train speakers. “A little bit of congestion ahead, we won’t be long.”

Seth leaned into the pole in the entryway rather than finding a seat, although the platform was empty now and only a few people remained in his carriage. Lost inside his own mind, he took a few moments to sense something out of place. As soon as he looked up, his heart seized.

Bristly footpads stroked the edges of the carriage entrance. Seth could see nothing through the nearby windows but several spidery limbs extended from beyond the doors. They curled around the frame to explore and then grip, hauling its body, still out of sight, forward with inexorable care.

Seth wanted to flee, but he couldn’t. He wanted to take off running down the carriage but his feet remained rooted to the floor. His hand glued to the pole he was holding. Struggling to even draw breath, all he could was watch.

Close the door, he thought. What was taking so long? Close the door and go so it couldn’t get inside!

The spider’s legs pulled it forward. It seemed every bit as real as the train and everything else around it. Even more real if anything, as the rest of the world fell away. Its bristles rasped against the metal of the doorframe. A shadow fell across the gap between the platform and the entrance. Seth could even smell it, a strangely dry, dusty smell that nevertheless awakened panic in some place deep down in his chest.

The top of the spider’s head appeared, and Seth got his first look at the creature’s face. Eight pitiless eyes, like shark eyes, peered at him from a sandy brown dome of a head. Glistening like pools of sump oil. Close the door, close the door. They fixed on Seth with merciless intent. Totally alien, no emotion, no cruelty, nothing that could be reasoned with, just hunger. Twitching pedipalps relentlessly and compulsively groomed its mandibles. Two fangs curved like scimitars emerged from the sides of its mouth.

Seth felt a phantom pain in his side, like a sympathetic reaction to the sight of those horrible fangs. Both were a handspan in length and big enough that he could see the holes at the tip of each one like a hypodermic needle. Drops of poison sparkled inside each little pipe. Seth imagined it boiling inside of him. Imagined those fangs puncturing his side and injecting him the way spiders did to their prey, turning his stomach and guts to slurry for it to slurp up like soup.

The spider kept coming, eyes fixed on Seth. He still couldn’t move. Finally, the doors began to slide closed. No one else had reacted to the spider but a few glanced at the sliding doors. The spider flinched and withdrew, pulling its legs back before they could be caught. It got its footpads clear just before the doors snapped closed. Although the doors were largely made up of glass panels, as soon as they closed Seth could no longer see any sign of the spider clinging to the outside of the train. It simply vanished.

The train jolted and started to move, wheels grumbling over the rails. Sagging, Seth breathed a sigh of relief. The phantom pain he’d felt at the sight of the spider’s fangs and the dry smell of it in his nostrils, however, stayed with him.

xXx

Dr Walding’s detached professionalism was usually reassuring. Making everything feel like it had an order to it which could be categorised, boxed, and handled as needed. But sometimes, Seth needed someone who could match his energy even if that energy was a spiral of anxiety and stress.

“That’s insane!” April said.

“It is insane, right?” Seth said. “It is insane-insane.”

Meeting in a coffeeshop down the road from Seth’s apartment the next morning, April sat and listened as he spilled his crazy story about the spider hallucinations. Her jaw dropped as he finished on the last encounter on the subway the day before. Their coffee went cold between them.

“This is really crazy,” April said.

“I’m almost relieved to hear you say it because, I don’t know, I know it’s crazy! But crazy people don’t know they’re crazy, right? So it can’t be me, it must be something that’s happening to me.”

“You need to see a doctor.”

“I saw Doctor Walding.”

“No, like a hospital! You need a medical doctor.”

“I know, but part of me doesn’t want to know if there is something.”

“You sure you didn’t take anything?”

“No, nothing! And what could I take that would last this long?”

April lowered her voice and looked down at her coffee cup. “What if someone is dosing you?”

“Dosing me?”

“Like LSD, maybe that’s why it’s getting worse, because they’re increasing the dosage. Could be snuck into your food or what you’re drinking?”

“Who would do something like that?”

“Would any of your exes do something like that? Or a stalker?”

Seth shook his head violently. “No, there’s nobody that would do that to me! That’d be crazy.”

“Well it’s all pretty crazy, feel like we established that. Is it in here now? Can you see it?”

April had been such a good distraction that Seth hadn’t even looked around since he started talking. Careful, he cast a suspicious gaze around the cafe. Honied light filtered through the big front window. People teemed around the other tables, chatting animatedly among themselves. A line of customers stretched all the way from the counter to the doorway as the baristas hurried to fill orders.

“No, no, I can’t see it,” Seth said.

April looked a little disappointed. Surprisingly, Seth felt a little disappointed himself. He wanted to be able to point the spider out to her. To say, there, there it is, even if there was nothing for her to see. He wasn’t sure what that would prove but regardless, in spite of what they’d been talking about for the last half an hour, the spider hadn’t appeared.

Seth closed his eyes for a moment. He held the image of the spider in his mind, wondering if he could conjure it. The shape of it, the smell, the sound. That phantom pain it caused in his side. He concentrated and breathed deeply. For a moment, the noise of the coffeeshop fell away. He opened his eyes and it flickered, April, the customers and baristas, the whole store disappeared and was replaced by nothing, only for a brief moment, and then it all came rushing back.

“Seth? Seth, you okay there?” April asked. “You looked like you went somewhere for a moment.”

“Yeah, I’m alright, I’m alright.”

April reached across the table and took one of Seth’s hands. “See a doctor, Seth. I’ll even come with you if you want?”

xXx

The chamber of the MRI machine swallowed Seth as its narrow bed moved under his back. It had all been explained to him how it worked, how long it would take, that it was completely safe. He couldn’t stop his heart from thundering in his chest though, so hard it almost made him feel sick. He only wore underwear, socks, and a thin hospital gown under the sheet they’d piled over him. A pair of headphones covered his ears.

“We’re going to start in just a minute,” the technician said. “These are all normal noises, okay?”

The MRI was a big, white brick of a machine, the front of it square and taller than Seth. It sat in the centre of a room largely devoid of other equipment, a safe distance from the walls, with the technicians watching through a window on the far side of the room. A narrow tunnel ran right through the middle of the machine, open at both ends. The bed fed him into the tunnel and jerked to a stop. Seth’s shoulders rubbed against the confines of the chamber. Claustrophobia was inevitable, and he strained to control his breathing. The roof of the machine was less than a handspan from his face.

Seth felt trapped, completely trapped. Thankfully, he hadn’t seen the spider since his conversation with April. As his blood test and other tests came back clear, and the spider didn’t return, he began to feel foolish. Some of the doctors he’d seen had been openly sceptical and it was only Seth’s obvious desperation that meant they’d kept testing. If the MRI didn’t come back with anything, Seth was going to give up on medical tests for the time being.

The MRI machine hummed to life. Over the headphones, the technician reminded Seth to relax but also to stay as still as possible. When the machine really fired up, he couldn’t help but flinch. Klaxon howls and bangs emanated from deep within the machine. It was muffled by the headphones but the sound was still an assault. Seth settled into it, abandoning himself to not being able to move or speak or even think. The first scan went on for several minutes.

“Okay, doing well so far,” the technician said. “Holding still, right?”

Surrounding Seth, the machine picked up in pace and pitch again. Some of the noises were so genuinely bizarre it was hard to imagine what possible purpose they could serve. It went on for long enough that in spite of the tight confines he began to drift away.

But then, Seth heard something else behind the wall of sound. The low, sibilant hiss he associated with the spider. It should have been impossible to hear over the MRI but then hallucinations didn’t really work like that, he supposed. The strange noises fell away as if happening in another room. Closer, Seth could hear the hiss and the sound of the spider’s legs rubbing together.

In spite of the instructions to lay still, Seth raised his head so that his forehead touched the roof of the chamber. Craning his neck around, Seth couldn’t see much beyond the length of his own body and his own feet clad in bright red hospital socks. Just a narrow half-circle out of the far end of the machine. But that was enough to spot a spidery brown shape picking its way toward the MRI, its body at least as big as he was but with long legs spanning half the room. The harsh hospital lights cast wretched shadows over the tiled walls.

“It’s in here! It’s in here with me,” Seth said. “Hello?”

As before, the spider didn’t feel like any kind of hallucination. The MRI dropped back to a dull, steady thumping, like a heartbeat. Seth knew the technician could see and hear him but no response came from the other room. He heard the spider’s feet padding closer. He smelled it again, that dry, papery stink of it.

“I’m sorry, can we stop? I’m having one of the hallucinations, and it’s here! Can we stop?”

Still no response from the technician. Darkness filled the end of the MRI’s chamber. The spider was climbing inside the machine! Seth got glimpses of its legs, eyes, and those scimitar fangs. He was trapped. Seth thought of the way spiders prepared their meals, binding them in silk, tighter and tighter, suffocatingly so, until they couldn’t move at all. Then they would sink those fangs right into their victim and pump it full of acid until its insides were soup. Inside the chamber, he felt like he was already served up on a plate for the creature.

“Hello? Sorry, can we stop?”

No response. Could the spider have gotten them? That was insane. Seth tried to tell himself that it was all in his head. Falling back, he slammed his eyes shut and kept repeating it.

Something reached past Seth’s foot and brushed his ankle. The bristles weren’t as soft as they looked, they were stiff and sharp. Seth cried out and automatically yanked his leg back. Something else prodded his other foot. He still didn’t understand what the spider was, whether it was a hallucination or something real that only he could see, but he couldn’t just lay there and let it take him.

The MRI continued pounding around Seth. He didn’t have much room to manoeuvre but the chamber of the machine did go all the way through to the opening above his head. Seth pulled his legs up as high as he could and felt the spider batting at the far end of the bed. Struggling, he threw his hands over his head. There was hardly enough room to get his arms past his face. He couldn’t see anything but his hands found the opening and he grabbed for either side. Seth hauled himself up with all his strength. His sheet and gown rucked around him. Something in his shoulders felt like tearing. Crying out, he wormed and wriggled and writhed. As his head and shoulders came free along with his arms, he sucked at the air like a drowning man. The machine kept howling. Inside, he felt a couple more batting sensations at his feet. Wrenching free of the MRI, there was nothing for Seth to land on so he dropped straight to the floor in a tangle of limbs. The back of his head ricocheted off the linoleum.

“Hello? Hello?”

The MRI machine kept throbbing in the middle of the room. Not having much of a choice, Seth circled around it toward the control room and the exit. He was cautious, expecting the spider to suddenly pounce at him. Drawing level with the front of the machine, however, he found nothing. The spider had disappeared on him again. He should have been relieved but part of him felt like crying. This just dragged on and on without resolution or answers. As the machine kept going, he turned toward the control room.

“Hello?”

The window into the control room was dark. The computers and equipment in there were all still running but Seth could still see there were no people. They hadn’t responded to him because they were gone.

Seth tested the door he’d entered through and found it unlocked. It led into an empty hallway with sterile white walls. In the quiet, he could hear the steady buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead. His hospital socks had grips on the bottoms and squeaked on the linoleum. Every few metres were posters about covering up when you coughed or the importance of handwashing, along with open doors, abandoned wheelchairs, and empty beds.

Following the hallway back to the radiology department’s waiting area, he found it abandoned. No one sat behind the reception desk. Chairs that had been occupied were empty, a few books and magazines left folded on their seats. Fear twisted in Seth’s stomach.

Wandering into the main hallway of the hospital, Seth found it empty as well. Windows into a courtyard lined one wall. The lighting appeared dim and strange shadows patterned the floor and walls. They looked like cracks in the glass, or spiderwebs draped over every surface. He headed deeper into the hospital at random in search of people.

“Hello, is anyone there?”

Something scuttled down the end of the nearest corridor. Seth got an impression of spidery legs at the corner. He was all alone, except for the spider. It kept coming, teasing him. He imagined those pitiless eyes, and fangs dripping poison.

“What do you want?” Seth shouted.

The hospital hallway paled, almost as if its colours were fading. Seth had no idea if the spider could understand him. It only ever acted like an animal, but with the way it came and went he couldn’t be sure.

Something hooked Seth by the wrist. It didn’t hurt, but it pulled at his shoulder. Looking down, he saw a thick cable of gossamer thread wrapped around his right wrist. He yanked at it, he couldn’t even tell exactly how he’d gotten caught, but it was glued to his skin. He tugged and tugged, unable to free himself, and then felt something catch his left foot. Another sticky thread. The two of them pulled him into an awkward position. Seth looked up and saw the whole corridor was filled with them.

“No, let me go! Let me go!”

As Seth thrashed, more threads caught him around the back and chest. They held him, not painfully but firmly, too stretchy to snap, too sticky to let go. In his flapping hospital gown, he felt very vulnerable. Somehow, his feet left the floor and soon he was just dangling there.

“Help! Someone help me!”

The spider appeared at the end of the hallway, picking its way over and through the shiny threads. Its movements were careful but effortless. The rest of the world dropped away so the spider appeared realer than real. Its eyes fixed on Seth with no emotion. Its pedipalps and mandibles worked with hunger.

The more Seth struggled, the more he got trapped. Skinny legs kicked from his barrel of a body. His wings beat against his back. He tried to scream but nothing came out, he no longer had the ability to make such a sound. The hallway and the hospital and the world as he knew it fell away leaving only a spiderweb in a sunlit meadow, stretched between towering strands of dewy grass. His head swivelled in confusion, as if waking up from a dream.

The spider got close enough that he could see himself reflected in the bottomless black of the spider’s eyes. A fly, only a fly, trapped in a web. Knotted in gossamer thread, his wings buzzed and his legs kicked but quickly lost strength. A fly that in the dying seconds of life dreamed it was a man. With an almost tender touch, the spider, much larger now, gathered him in its arms. Its spinnerette worked as it began to turn him, and smothered him in its web.

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Sean: I’m sure, given the reveal at the end there, I don’t have to explain to anyone why I named the character Seth. Jeff Goldblum, what a dreamboat. Kind of harkens back to another spidery tale and my decision to name the main character in that one what I did, although that one was a little bit more obscure.

Oh, I’ve had many, many MRI scans by the way. They are very claustrophobic and inevitably you do start to think to yourself, what do I do if zombies, or maybe a giant spider, attacks me while I’m in here? You do get used to them though and the last few times I had one, years ago now, I just fell asleep. It was inevitable an MRI was going to end up in a story from me at some point but I think this is the first time I’ve actually found a reason to include one!

Been tearing through some stories that you’ll see in the not-too-distant future, including one for this year’s edition of Dractoberfest! Last year, I managed five dragon stories for the five weeks of October. I’m not promising one dragon story a week this year but I’ve got one I’m really looking forward to releasing because… well, it’s just fucked. It was super fun to write.