“Give me a sec,” I yelled to Marie, and then hustled inside.

Jeremy was stretching himself out on the couch while I dug through the hiking pack I kept my hall closet. I grabbed my hatchet and headed back out the door.

“See you soon,” Jeremy called to me as I left. “I hope.”

By the time I got back outside, Jason and Natalie had already left. I held the hatchet up to show Marie.

“Do you think we’ll have to kill it?” she asked.

“Be prepared,” I shrugged. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah, I mean,” she patted her pockets. “Not like I would know what else to bring anyway.”

We ran down the street, towards the park. The deserted street lit by a combination of the moonlight and the colorful cascade of the mysterious glow. We covered the few blocks in only a couple of minutes. We stopped at the entrance of the park and caught our breath for a moment, scanning the darkness for any sign of the arachnid.

“Do you see it?” Marie asked me.

I shook my head. The park, like the rest of the neighborhood, looked deserted. There was an uncanny familiarity to the scene. Jungle gym, slide, monkey bars, and a few empty picnic benches built upon islands of wood chips amongst a sea of grass. The old oak tree next to the swing set, lit almost as if by the moon’s spotlight. It looked almost exactly like you’d expect a kiddie park to look at this time of night.

“There!” Marie pointed to the canopy of the oak tree.

I focused my gaze and gave my eyes a moment to adjust. Clinging to the oak tree’s trunk, perched just below the leaves, was the shuddering, fuzzy mass of the monster.

Marie, for some reason, started to step forward. I grabbed the sleeve of her coat and pulled her back.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Shouldn’t we go see it? Isn’t that why we came here?”

I mulled it over. She had a point. Dangerous or not, we had to figure out what was going on. Standing at the edge of this park and staring at a spider in an oak tree wasn’t going to solve any of this puzzle.

Unease tickled the base of my spine as we stepped forward. I felt, through suddenly sweaty palms, the rough wood handle of my hatchet. Shoulder-to-shoulder, we walked down the little cobblestone trail towards the swing set, toward the oak tree. We took each step with our eyes glued to the shadow bulging out from the oak tree. We moved past the slide, and the monkey bars, until—heartbeats pounding in our ears, bowels trembling with horror—we saw the thing move. Marie and I screamed and froze in place. My hatchet fell and clattered on the stones by our feet. I grabbed her hand.

The thing moved with a fury, scuttling down the trunk and onto the ground faster than we could blink. It was, suddenly, right before us, out of the shadow of the oak tree and lit by the glare of the moon. Dozens of eyes in the center of its body flashed bright, mangy patches of fuzz hung from the chelicerae of its mouth. It reared back on its rear sets of legs and raised itself menacingly in front of us.

“Fear me not,” it rumbled in strangely accented English before crashing back down to the ground. “Or return to where you’ll always go.”

I heard Marie whisper breathlessly into my ear, and I was reminded of a happier moment. “What should we do?”