Congratulations on Getting a New House!

You’ve been living a version of the dream for a few years now, but it’s been, at best, a diluted form of it. Sure, you have a wife, two and a half kids (that is to say, two boys and one girl) and a wonderful job where you sell insurance for couches to the couches themselves, effectively tripling your sales because, as it turns out, one in every three people doesn’t really give a shit about their couch. But you’ve been renting this whole time, and fuck that shit!

Three months ago, you put in an offer on a house. A month later, it was accepted. And today, glorious day, you’re going to move in.

You inspected the place very carefully before you made an offer. You’re not an idiot, and you knew the risks. Mold, ghosts, goblins that want to turn your family into plants so they can eat them. You also looked into the schools, the crime, the neighbors. You had your friend, a retired cop with zero morals, go to the home of the neighborhood’s only registered sex offender and murder him with a piece of rebar. You thought you covered all your bases.

And you hired professional movers to handle the whole job, a good call because you’re really ill-suited to manual labor. The whole thing will go swimmingly. You won’t have cable set up yet, but you’ll have gas, power, all the important stuff in place on the day you move in and your furniture will be flawlessly arranged by the obedient, tired looking Mexican dudes who work for the moving company. It’ll seem perfect.

Until about an hour and a half after sunset.

Once the sun goes down, the noises will begin. Gentle skittering sounds within the walls, indicative perhaps of mice or rats. You’ll press your ear to the wall and they’ll stop, only for a moment, before they increase in intensity.

You’ll learn the cause of the skittering an hour later when a spider, a surprisingly large spider, crawls out of your kitchen sink’s drain, looks at you, then crawls back in.

You’ll be a little freaked out at this point. Smash cut to-

Your doors covered by webs, your family cocooned as spiders crawl all over their bodies, biting them again and again and again. You’ll be in the process of being cocooned yourself as the police bang futilely on the door and you speak to your real estate agent on the phone. She’ll calmly explain that:

“Legally we don’t have to disclose any information that isn’t explicitly asked for during the showing and, frankly, I think it was pretty irresponsible of you not to inquire as to whether or not there was a swarm of hell-spiders occupying that particular residence.”

You’ll want to scream at the agent, but when you open your mouth to attempt to it will be filled with web and you begin to feel the effects of the spider’s venom as they bite you, a hundred dozen tiny clicks into your skin that spread numbness and pain out from them, and breed in you a kind of sleepy sensation that still cannot soothe the rage you feel towards the real estate agent.

Congratulations on Getting a New House!