The Spider and the Sibling - 21104.01

By Brodie Codey

The flickering light from the flames cast eerie shadows across the faces of those gathered round it. The alcohol was in full flow, as was the midnight songs of the wildlife located all around them. The gathered Starfleet officers were enjoying a camp fire on a beach somewhere; it could have been anywhere, all of them blurred into one as did the missions.

Brodie Codey was an engineer, the Chief Engineer of the USS Philadelphia, but especially tonight people were more interested in not who people are, but who people were. Getting onto his knees he clapped his hands together.

“Ok, ok guys, my turn,” he said in his deep Australian accent trying to get everyone’s attention, “alright guys settle down, settle down. My story really begins when I was thirteen…”

“Ooh teen drama!” said one of the women present on the far side of the camp fire.

Brodie smiled.

“So it begins with my Grandmother. She was a very old, and very wise woman. She traditionally didn’t like technology, but instead dwelled – some considerable time – on the more spiritual side of things. As you can imagine we got on like a house on fire! So when I was 13, she decided to summon myself, and my twin brother back to the Kimberley Plateau.

“Now my brother is something else. We’ll call him Tristan, because that’s his name, and we look kinda identical but completely different; he has dark hair, whereas I have blonde, he is a lot more of a jerk than I am, and totally anal. He speaks highly of me of course! When he was eleven, he was selected to go to the Vulcan Academy of Science – one of the very few humans to ever get there…”

“Don’t humans always come bottom of the class? That must suck…” came a comment from Brodie’s left.

“I believe, and this is my pride coming through for him now, that he has aced a few Vulcans already!” a smile was shot to the person on the left.

“So, here we are on the plateau and my Grandmother, in her shamanic ways, says we have to do this rite of passage – a vision quest.

“Well Tristan wasn’t having any of it, he kept on saying it was “detrimental” to his development; an argument ensued, which my Grandmother won, we were then stripped down to some sort of loin cloth, given a satchel of herbs and stuff to burn, and sent out into the bush.

“Now I decide to go left a bit, right a bit, straight on, left a bit – bearing in mind it is pitch black now, we can’t even see the flicker of the lights from the camp – and I turn around to find Tristan right behind me.

“Brother,” he says, “what are you doing? This quest is illogical. Nothing of value will be gained by trying to induce this trance-like state. Mother and Father would not have approved.”

“In case you haven’t noticed Tristan,” I replied, “Mother and Father aren’t here anymore – they’re…”

“Missing, presumed dead” he continued with a dead pan expression, Vulcan-esque you might say.

“So I just shook my head at him, continued with my random walking to a nice small sandy clearing, brush on all sides. I sat down, satchel in front of my crossed legs, and looked up to the stars. I can’t quite describe how beautiful everything looked – it was like looking back in time, and seeing the future at the same time; I could see Starbase Alpha, and the tiny pin pricks of blue glow, that was passing starships in orbit, against a backdrop of brilliant stars. I laid out the herbs, and got the stuff out. With a stick from the nearby bush I drew a circle around where I was sitting and began to burn the sage, I think, yeah I’m sure it was the sage – it left a bitter taste in my mouth as without fire, or any light, you had to taste it to tell what it was!

“Anyway, to skip the preparation, which is needlessly boring, I was set. I’m not quite sure how long I was out there, it could have been minutes, or hours, but in the darkness the shadows were starting to come to life. First all I could see were swirls of orange and purple – it was difficult to tell whether it was the pathetic light from the burner, or my imagination, but those swirls began to take shape into animals, and people – like you would find on the ancient African cave paintings etcetera. I began to look around and dingos were circling me along with roos; they were moving to a beat that was like the beat of my heart but I wasn’t making a sound – it was the women on bongos, or some sort of drum. I can recall that I started to breath quickly, and swivelled around onto my knees to see the shapes as they moved, I guess a bit of panic started to rise inside me. A lot panic soon followed. The little light in the burner began to get lower until, and I swear a second before it self-extinguished I felt a wet nose on my shoulder nudging me. It was a real dingo… I wanted to shout at that point, but couldn’t, or rather I didn’t want to; I just looked at its eyes that were reflecting the starlight from above, and it looked back at me.

“We waited there looking at each other for what must have been a few minutes, then the dingo turned and walked away into the shrouds of darkness. I couldn’t follow it, I know most people say “you should have followed it” but I don’t think I was meant to. I was alone, and cold, in the immense darkness, even the stars seemed to have dimmed. Then I heard her, my mother, it was like her voice was being carried on the wind, and my dad’s was on the rustle of the bushes. It was really hard to make them out but they were saying all the usual stuff that you hear about these things – get good grades, be kind to strangers, but then my insides froze. Clear as crystal, it was both of their voices speaking at the same time, same words,

“The end will be at the fourth, and you’ll only be half””

Brodie let it fall silent for a few seconds to allow those words sink in. A shiver crept down his spine again, and the flames from the fire seemed to have lost their heat.

“So, naturally I screamed like any thirteen year old would, I spun round and round, my screams yelling out into the darkness. My heart was racing. My lungs were aching from my screams. My mind was spinning. Then it hit me. Something from the darkness had collided with me. I fell breathless, hitting the hard floor, shoulder first then legs crashing onto the ground. The shadows were still moving, tears were now streaming from my face and I saw them - my mum and dad. At the same time Tristan yelled my name from the opposite direction; I wanted to turn, but couldn’t, what if I turned to Tristan and the image that was now in front of me of my mum and dad just disappeared? The tears froze to my face, literally froze! On that warm evening, water clung to my face in its frozen form, my breath hung in the air before me like mist, and they smiled. Tristan yelled my name again and I turned. All of a sudden the air warmed, and suddenly torches were all over the area searching for me – it was like someone turned up a dimmer switch. I ran to Tristan, and he ran to me, we both collided winding each other, near what must have been the only fairly moist part of the ruddy plateau. I picked him up, and told him what I saw. He wouldn’t let me continue, he told me I was hallucinating, caught up in the frivolous torture of the human senses trying to invoke an experience. We argued. He kept on telling me that I was foolish to take heed of this illusion of the human psyche; I kept on telling him he was a human shell, that the Vulcan school had bled him of all emotion. We then got into a fight. I grabbed him by the shoulders, and he pushed me away, hard. I fell through a bush, and broke up a fragile stack of rocks. Something felt sticky but I pushed myself up. He said “Brother, I won’t fight you, believe what you want” and he walked away.

“I turned and walked back out into the darkness. Now believe it or not I was so hot I didn’t feel it on my skin but then this crushing pain started to filter through on my side. Enter the spider.”

A stifled shriek was heard from a male to Brodie’s right, “I hate spiders!”

“Mate, listen, I’m with you. This bastard was a Funnel Web, and he wouldn’t let go… I looked down and saw this shiny thing clinging to my side. I went to yell, but all that happened was that I felt really weak, fell to my knees and started to dribble from my mouth, uncontrollably. The burning pain in my side reached an all time high, it was still there pumping my abdomen full of venom. I took a swipe, and think I broke it, but it flew off into the brush. I hoped it was dead.

“I can’t really remember much, except that I was getting short of breath, vomit started to come from my lips, and my muscles began to spasm hitting bushes. I couldn’t yell for help, the only thing I could think of, as I lay face down in the dirt, was that I was going to die from the bite, and not drown from the vomit. Everything went dark.”

There was quiet all round the camp fire as eyes looked on towards the handsome engineer.

“Well obviously you didn’t die, so what happened then?” someone asked.

“Good question. Well all I know is what I was told, Tristan raised the alarm that I had gone missing, and he couldn’t find me. They sent up a shuttle and scanned for me, and bought medical help. I never saw the lights of the search, I just felt the relief of the hypospray at the Med Centre as it released all my muscles from the tetanic symptoms – constant muscular contraction. Tristan returned to Vulcan before I was well enough to leave the centre. I went back to Perth, alone.”

That was it. Brodie had done it. He wasn’t too sure how well it had been received but he sat back down, and shrunk away from the light of the flames. A story from his childhood had been told, the story that told of the beginning of the feud between the twins, and of a particularly angry arachnid. Brodie didn’t know it, and still didn’t realise it, but that story also told of the ‘first time’; he had only two more times of evading the end, ‘the second’ would shortly follow leaving only one more chance. He smiled.