The Haunted House Tour 3: The Cannibal's Kitchen

The room we were ushered into was cavernous and dark, except for a few well-lit patches. Barnes herded us toward one of these oases of light. "This," he announced, "is our exhibit, which we call 'The Cannibal's Kitchen'." The name seemed appropriate as the décor was heavy on severed human limbs and a male torso, with an incongruous cloth wrapped round its hips, turning on a spit over the glowing coals that were the main source of light in this area. Barnes told us a tale of Sweeney Todd like character who had made a business of kidnapping 'ladies of the night' and recycling them into sausages. This explained the strings of sausage-like objects dangling from the ceiling of the room among the arms and legs on meat-hooks.

As the butler figure came to the climax of his fiction, the last of the girls, who stayed behind to commiserate with Bernice, came through to re-join the tour. She shut the door and came towards us. Most of the group were waiting to hear what had happened the sausage-maker, and paying no attention to our late arrival. Barnes told how he had been found with his arm stuck to beyond his elbow in the meat grinder, seemingly having bled to death.

This last bit was interrupted by an abbreviated scream from our late-comer and a skittering noise. We turned just in time to see the young woman being dragged into the other fireplace and up the chimney by what looked like a giant spider. One of the other girls screamed as the spider's prey disappeared up the chimney. A couple of braver (or more ghoulish) souls rushed forward to see if they could help (or see the young woman's fate).

We were soon looking at the hearth and up the chimney. The chimney was filled with webs which appeared to be a lot older than the recent occurrence should allow, because they were dusty and not fresh. While we inspected the site of the latest incident, we heard some muffled appeals for help coming from a pantry door a few yards along the same wall. I went to see what this was about.

I opened the door slightly and peeked in, ready to slam the door shut again if there was a spider waiting to pounce on me. The room beyond had the appearance of a deserted pantry, with shelves along the sides and far wall at knee, hip and shoulder height with a scattering of sundry dishes and canisters. There was a feature of this room that was not part of the original design; this was a huge cobweb that spanned the room from the ceiling near the back of the small room, to the floor near the door. This web was composed to shiny ropes the thickness of my little finger. Centrally in this web was a cocoon of silk threads that jiggled and emitted the increasingly desperate cries for help.

Being sure that there was no giant spider in the room, I flung the door open and cautiously stepped forward to within reach of the silken bundle. The leg of my trousers brushed against one of the ropes of the web and the stickiness of the web tugged at the fabric. I reached for the cocoon and ripped some of the threads away, to show the terrified face of our companion who we had seen dragged from the kitchen by way of the hearth. Careful not to nudge the web too much for fear of attracting the return of the fearsome giant spider, I cleared the silken shroud from the tearful girl's head then stepped back, hoping that Barnes would take charge of the situation.

Someone in the crowded peering through the door asked what happened. The girl sobbed as she told of how she had been crossing the room to join the group, having made sure that Bernice was ok with her seeing what else the haunted house had to offer in the way of scares and horrific tales, when she had been bowled over, trussed up and dragged to the fireplace. She said that part way up the chimney she had seen that her assailant was a spider and frozen, because of her extreme fear of them, compounded by the unusually large size of the beastie that had her in its grip. Next thing she knew was being wound round with sticky silk until she was immobilised and could not move if she wanted to. She was then placed where she was now and had started to call for help.

Barnes asked how she was feeling and if she had been bitten or stung by the spider. The girl, who one of the other girls called Tiffany, said that she did not remember being bitten or stung, but she was not sure that she had been conscious throughout her ordeal.

Tiffany complained that she felt peculiar and nauseous; we all stepped back, we did not want to make an already bad day worse by being vomited on. The cocoon of more thickly wounded threads behind her head began to twitch. Her face took on a grimace of pain. There was a ripping noise and something looking ominously like a spider's leg sprouted from the tear in the silk. The leg reached about until it found one of the ropes of the web, then it stopped and flexed shaking the cocoon some more. More tears appeared in the cocoon as another seven spider legs emerged from the silk and quested for somewhere to stand.

"What's happening?" asked the girl in the cocoon.

One of her friends answered, "You seem to be growing spider's legs where your shoulders should be."

The legs flexed causing Tiffany's face to bob about; but at this stage the movement of the legs did not seem to be well coordinated. As we watched horrified and entranced the cocoon began to split and as the rent in the silk reached the far end of the bundle, the legs gave a shake and the cocoon fell away. What was left was the body of a huge spider, but with Tiffany's head, instead of a spider's head. The legs all grew from a hard chitinous thorax about eighteen inches long and a foot in diameter at the base of her neck. Behind that was the spider's bulbous abdomen, fully three feet long and covered in disturbing shapes, chief among which were some skull-like shapes.

The legs tensed again and I felt myself being dragged backward into the kitchen room and the door slammed and bolted behind me. While I regained my bearings and composure, we all heard frantic scrabbling at the door; we could only guess that the new-fledged spider-women had made a bid for me as her first meal in her new form.

It took no encouragement from our guide to move us on to the next room.