Spider

When Jason woke up, he felt dizzy. The energy-saving lamp on the ceiling kept moving in a circular motion. He subconsciously wanted to stretch out his hand to block the blue light on his eyelids, and suddenly felt a tight pain in his wrists.

This sobered him up completely.

He found himself lying on the damp and cold concrete floor with his limbs spread wide. His wrists and ankles were tightly bound by a strong nylon rope, the ends of which were tied to iron bolts on both sides of the wall. It was a gloomy and narrow space. He turned his head and looked around, feeling that it looked a tad familiar until he saw the large, beautifully wrapped package in the corner.

This was the Rice's storage room.

Jason let out a bitter laugh as he recalled what had happened before he passed out. Great. He unsuspectingly followed a baby bunny home, and then was tied up in the storage room like dried meat, posing as the Vitruvian Man, simply a lamb waiting to be killed. Leonardo da Vinci was truly a genius.

The iron door facing the sole of his feet made a light click, and a figure walked in, closing the door with his backhand.

"You're awake. How are you feeling?" The other asked in a soft voice, as if visiting a sick patient in a fancy hospital ward, just short of bringing a bouquet of flowers.

"Not so good. I'm not fond of sleeping on the floor, nor SM."

"Sorry, I can't give you better circumstances, because that would be too unrealistic." The other half squatted down beside him, and the light above his head cast irregular shadows on his gentle features, coloring his visage with abstract and obscure colors. "Maybe I should give you some time to mentally prepare, but you know, many things always arise suddenly, and by the time you react, you're already trapped in them, and at the same time you find that they're far worse than you imagined. I don't like that, but what can we do, we must go by the way things are... No, no, no, don't show that look. This certainly isn't an RPG game; you've got to be serious."

"Oh, come on, another lunatic! There are really so many lunatics in this world! Enlighten me, will you — what the hell do you want to do? You wanna take out your cuckold's grudge on me? What are you going to do next? Imprisonment, beating, or rape?" Jason grimaced in annoyance.

"It seems that you haven't figured it out yet. This wasn't some affair where I lied to you. Rebecca is not my wife, as I couldn't fulfill my duty as a husband — make her happy." Samuel exposed a grieved expression. "So, I'm working on it now."

"Let's begin now, shall we, and hopefully have a different ending than before." He stood up and in a low, slow voice, he began to narrate like a movie narrator: "It's a cold night with light rain, and you're coming home late because you worked overtime. To appease your girlfriend, who might be upset, you go around to the supermarket to buy her favorite fruits. When driving, you can smell the fresh fruity scent beside you and imagine her angry or smiling face — both of which are equally cute."

"This is really the beginning of a romantic night," Jason interrupted, and after receiving an angry look from the other, he swallowed back the second half of the sentence, "Um, please continue.”

"As you pass through a dark, remote neighborhood, a frantic Chevrolet suddenly rushes out of the alley, and you slam the steering wheel to make an emergency brake and avoid a crash, but you still get hit by the bumper at the front of the car. So, you get out to check it out, and the other also opens the door and comes out. They're four men in all, dressed like street hippies."

"Decadence, chaos and violence, as well as the unstable mental state of the youth." Jason nodded in understanding. "They do drugs, fight, or join gangs, with automatic knives in their boots and probably a CZ-52 Czech at their waist. They must be looking nice at your Volvo and want you to pay some insurance money — oh, I forgot again. Keep silence in the theater! Please continue, Mr. Projectionist."

"They surround you with excited and wicked expressions. 'Gentlemen, what do you want? I'll call the police!' You say. 'Hey, take it easy! We're just trying to have some fun.' They laugh out loud. You have a gun permit and a revolver in a lockbox in your car, but you never thought you'd use it one day. You show a nervous look and want to pull open the door and get back in the car, but one of them pounces over and punches you hard in the stomach."

Jason immediately received a heavy punch in the stomach, and he arched his upper body in pain. The nylon rope, however, was tied too tightly and his cervical spine remained at thirty degrees as he coughed vigorously.

"Your eyes turn black in pain, but they apparently think you have enough resistance left in you, so they rush up and punch you hard in your underbelly and nape until you're in so much pain your whole body convulses and is drained of strength."

Jason bounced like a fish out of the water, but his bound hands and feet fastened him firmly to the ground, and his joints rattled within his twisted limbs. He gasped, trying to relieve the severe ache in his underbelly and shoulder socket — he couldn't kick his nape, so he was forced to kick as close as possible.

"Oh, you're acting a lot tougher than before. Actually, you can scream. They like to hear your painful screaming, they call it 'hardcore punk,' and it gives them more sense of rhythm when they go down."

"You son of a bitch! You're actually a fucking pervert!" Jason cursed angrily.

"Don't be so uneducated, that's not who you are! You grew up with excellent grades, sensible and clever, and never did things that disrupt order. You're the pride of your parents. You went to a prestigious university to get your master's degree, graduated, and got a good job without any problems, and rose to the position of mayor a few years later. You're a senior intellectual, an honorable and law-abiding proper citizen, don't make yourself look like a worthless gangster!" Samuel paused for a moment, trying hard to quiet down the sulk, and soon his tone returned to calmness. "We then — they drag you, defenseless, into a small alley, where it's narrow, gloomy and damp, just like here. There're high walls on both sides, and waste cartons and garbage cans are stacked in a mess at the corners of the walls. You're pinned down on the filthy ground and the starless night sky shakes like the Great Rift Valley in front of your eyes. They tie your hands, not this way, of course, but we can’t help it; there're four of them, and there's only one here... and pull out an automatic knife."

Jason looked on helplessly as Samuel fished out a sharp blade from behind, the shiny blade reflecting the miserably wretched light and printing his chest with a tremendous, frightening white stripe. He began cutting his clothes with the sharp tip of the blade, starting at the collar, and rowing all the way down. His shirt was torn with an ear-piercing sound, then his jeans. The buttons at the crotch flew out, knocking against the wall and falling, rolling on the concrete floor. "You should wear blouse and trousers," the knife-wielder frowned. "It suits your identity, and it's easier for them to do it."

"That's enough! You madman! You fucking listen to me clearly, I don't care if you were fucking robbed or raped, what's it to do with me?! You can go to the police or carry a gun and be a lone vengeful hero. It's not my problem!" Jason shouted. He was now absolutely sure that the other had a serious mental problem — he was a psychopath! He was repeating the scene of the violent attack, with the difference of changing his position from that of the abused to that of the abuser, in an attempt to transfer his own suffering to others. Yet the norm of morality throughout his life bounded him tightly in his mind and distorted him into another perspective — he was performing the abuser's atrocities as a bystander!

"How can it not matter?" He asked curiously, "They caught you! Unable to resist and unable to call the police, patrol cars hardly come to such places. The neighborhood is so small that even if they hear any noise, they won't meddle. You've been abandoned by the whole society! When you’re wearing a suit, you’re still a top citizen, after being stripped naked you’re nothing!"

Jason's clothes quickly turned into a pile of rags, which he tore off and threw against the wall.

"'The shape is really good, but the color is too monotonous!' They call out, and then scribble on your body with a knife." He began to trace on his naked body with the tip of the knife, lines, dots, letters... The emotion on his eyes was earnest and zealotry, as if he was creating an improvised street painting. He didn't cut deeply at all, probably afraid that the massive loss of blood would take his life too soon. Even so, blood still dripped along the curve of his body, like swimming with many long, slender, winding red snakes. Jason bit his lip tightly, not daring to let out a little cry of pain. Now the other was in a state of complete loss of control, even the slightest stimulus may short circuit the brain with the wrong nerve line again and have him do something more terrible.

Thankfully, he ended up dropping the knife. As Jason found relief, he began to tear open the large gift box in the corner.

God! He's not going to pull an AK-74 out of it, is he? Jason groaned in despair, as if he could already see his stiff corpse full of bullet holes being carried by the police to the metal bed in the morgue, with two forensic doctors standing next to him with scalpels.

He stared unblinkingly at Samuel's hands until they took out a smaller case from the foam box, which, by its shape, didn't look like it was a weapon. Only then did he put his heart back in its original position.

Samuel opened the small case, and a chill came out and filled the narrow space. Jason couldn't help but breaking into a shiver. He saw that it was a box of things preserved with ice, and because the insulation was good, it basically didn't melt. Samuel grabbed a handful of ice and sprinkled it on his bloodstained and scarred body.

Jason squeezed a hiss out of his teeth. It was just too cold! The piercingly cold sensation even completely covered the pain of the water flowing into the wounds, and his teeth trembled desperately as his muscles spasmed and jerked uncontrollably.

"It's cold, isn't it? It was so cold that night too, and it was drizzling as well, but that didn't hinder their high spirits at all. One guy comes back from your car with a plastic bag in his hand, 'A bag of fruit! This guy's a homebody!' He scoffs up. 'Look, what do we have here? Strawberries, ivory mangoes, cherries... All fucking premium fruit. These trinkets are dozens of times more expensive than beef of the same weight! What a fucking rich man... Yo Link, what's this?', 'It's Malaysian rambutan, you idiot!', 'It’s all imported! Damn right I'll really enjoy it!' He kicks you. 'I have a great idea. Hey, let's feed him, how about that? From that mouth down there..." At this point, Samuel showed a very grotesque expression, like a ferocious, grim, and depraved smile and a weep of pain and despair. He perfectly blended these two very different expressions together, presenting a kind of contrasting and distorted inhuman look with misplaced features, and a strange totem like the intercourse between evil and innocence.

He inserted his hand into the ice-covered case and grabbed a handful of things out.

"No! You can't do this!" Jason cried in desperation. His body was trembling violently, desperately trying to break free from the restraints on his hands and feet, like a beast in its dying kicks. "Listen, I sympathize with you very, very much, but you can't do this. This won't help you take away the pain at all—"

His voice stopped suddenly in the cold atmosphere! As if a vital nerve had suddenly snapped, those emerald eyes instantly widened, and when the laceration-like pain in the back cavity was transmitted to the brain, he burst out a wail of agony.