The Trapdoor Spider

When you read this sentence, whose voice are you hearing?

Is it your own? Perhaps softer, slightly warped like it's gone through too many layers of post-production tinkering. You never can quite hear your own voice as others do. It sounds different hitting an eardrum at a distance than it does springing from your own lips. It's just like the way you've never actually seen yourself. Not first hand, anyway. Only pictures or reflections.

It's not a good idea to look in the mirror at night.

In the darkness, still trying to shake off the daze of sleep, vision can play tricks.

The eye can't process fluid motion. It takes about twenty pictures a second, and your brain stitches them together into a film reel. Perhaps even more interesting, your eyes don't stay still. Even if you're staring straight ahead, they make jerky little micro-movements. Always trying to take in your surroundings. Always searching for threats.

The pictures your eyes take are actually upside down. They flip vertically before you register them.

Trusting your limited senses can lead to half truths and willful ignorance of what might exist in the gaps we aren't equipped to process.

Memory is often unreliable. It can be overwritten easily. Our brains can construct falsehoods that are just as convincing as real recollections.

You don't remember what color shirt your mother was wearing the last time you saw her. Maybe it was a blue shirt? The next time you think about it, you will remember thinking of the color blue. The last time you saw your mother, she was wearing a blue shirt.

When I was a child, I often heard noises in the walls. My mother told me repeatedly that it was mice. Or my imagination. When I think of it now, when I describe it to someone, I say there were mice in the walls. That is simpler.

It's uncomfortable to contemplate the unknown.

The more often you attempt to remember something, the shakier the memory becomes. Like a tape that wears out a little more each time you play it.

I was twelve years old when I heard strange, tinny music playing in the woods.

I lived near the forest, in a small house, with my mother, her mother, and my little brother. I was often left to play alone in the forest, with warnings not to wander off the trails. My mother was practical, she didn't invent monsters or other horrors that might lurk in the shadows. Instead, she told me about wild animals, cougars, bears, hungry wolves ready to snap up any tasty morsel they came across. Even worse, she said, there might be other people out there who would like to hurt you. If you ever see anyone else in the woods, especially a stranger, run.

She never told me about music in the woods.

Auditory hallucinations are some of the most common for schizophrenics. It can be anything from a dim mumbling, to a disembodied whisper in your ear, to agonized screams. It is very difficult to cope with these manifestations. The best way to establish if a noise is real or not is to put on headphones and turn up the music. If you can still hear the other sounds, they are coming from your own brain.

At least, that is what my therapist has suggested.

I always smile at her, and nod, and take the pills, because the shared reality is a much nicer place to exist.

When there is something wrong with a person's brain, it affects all other perceptions. The brain is the hard drive. Applications will not function properly if the base software is unable to interpret commands in the expected fashion.

I am not certain, however, that there is anything wrong with the hard drive.

I suspect that people ignore things they can't explain because to do otherwise gets you labeled as unstable.

When I heard the carousel music in the woods, time slid in an unexpected direction. I stopped walking down the path. Unwilling, or unable to keep moving, and just listened. Eyes wide. Heart racing. I remember the wave of nausea, that stomach-in-the-throat feeling that happens just past the highest point of a roller coaster. The music got gradually louder, but I could not see a source.

No, everything was unnaturally still. No birds. No wind blowing through the trees or pushing dead leaves across the ground. The whole world seemed to hold its breath.

The trapdoor spider is a cunning hunter. It creates a small hatch with hinges of silk. The hatch is covered in dirt and plant debris so that it is indistinguishable from its surroundings. Then, the spider simply waits for its unwitting prey and seems to appear out of thin air to go in for the kill.

Would humans know about a predator that camouflages itself so well it has never left any evidence behind?

Or rather, would humans believe such a thing existed even if an escaped almost-victim tried to tell them about it?

The shared experience is created from mutually agreed upon rules and facts. The only measure of one's sanity is if their thoughts and feelings make sense to others. We are social creatures. We seek companionship and confirmation of our perceptions.

A test subject will shift to harmonize with a group's reality. If the group they are a part of has been instructed to tell a blatant lie, the test subject will agree. The pain of social pressure is more unbearable than adjusting their point of view.

Please specify which of these three lines is the shortest.

The subject picks the line that is obviously several inches shorter than the other two. The rest of the group, however, disagrees. What appears to the subject as the longest line, is the line the group has agreed is the shortest. The subject may struggle with this revelation for a moment. But they will eventually capitulate.

There are mice in the walls. There was no music in the woods. My little brother got eaten by a pack of coyotes. Monsters aren't real. Stop saying it was a monster. Can't you see it's upsetting your mother? Hasn't she been through enough?

When I was twelve, the all-encompassing sound of carnival music in the middle of the woods made my eardrums throb. I became unnervingly aware of my own body, my flesh and pulsing blood. An awful smell filled my nostrils. The smell of an orchard in late October. Decomposing fruit.

I didn't see anything. I couldn't see anything. But I felt a puff of stale breath on my neck.

I got so scared, I pissed myself. Warm liquid trickling down my right leg, staining the fabric of my baggy jeans. The most disgusting part of it was when it hit my sock and started to pool in my shoe like rancid rainwater.

But something about the act of it broke the trance. Or perhaps the force holding me hostage was a picky eater, and it had decided I was a sub-par specimen. Unable to face death with dignity.

As soon as I regained control of my legs, I turned on my heel and ran for all I was worth. Lungs burning, muscles aching, eyes wet with mortal anxiety.

The sickly sweet smell of rotting apples followed me most of the way home.

I didn't go in the woods much after that. My little brother thought I was lying to scare him, the way older siblings do.

The park rangers found his bones, picked clean, about nine months after he went missing. They were only able to identify him by his dental records. No one else seemed to think it was odd that it took so long for the remains to turn up.

No one else heard the scratching in the walls and the taunting whispers of carnival music. No one else sees the shadows out of the corners of their eyes, or smells the perfume of decaying fruit on the wind.

In the shared reality, it's accepted that children have wild imaginations. They invent fantastic stories to cope with the harshness of their surroundings. But they all grow out of it.

A child can say their brother was eaten by a monster. An adult assigns a more rational meaning to the irrational. Incorrectly describes the indescribable.

There is no music in the woods. My brother was eaten by a pack of coyotes.

There is no predator lurking in the empty spaces our minds cannot comprehend.