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They were everywhere.
Jon never noticed them before. He didn't know if they only now showed up, or if he was just now seeing them.
Everywhere he went.
No matter what he did.
Spiders.
_____
His grandmother set out the pile of books in front of him and told him to look through them.
He didn't want to, but obliged.
He picked up a book about animals. There was a fuzzy panda on the cover. He flipped through it quickly and set it to the side. It seemed like it might be interesting. Probably not all of it, but there was a section on each animal and there were a few he hadn't seen a lot about before.
He continued, picking anything that he hadn't seen before that looked good.
He still had a book to finish, so he spent his time reading that before he started any of his new ones.
Half an hour later, he picked up the animal book. Jon looked through the table of contents and flipped to a chapter about bats. He read through the book happily, eager to learn something new.
There was a noise outside. Jon got up, book in hand, to go look out the window. He peered through the curtain and saw a small child, probably around five, on the sidewalk crying next to a fallen over bike with two adults attempting to comfort her.
Nothing to worry about.
Jon flipped the page and intended to go back to where he was sitting, but before he could walk he had to finish the paragraph he was halfway through.
He threw the book across the room.
There was a spider. It was large, larger than a spider should ever be, and it was eating a bat. It was stuck in its web, which was also way too big. All of it was too big, and it shouldn't be there. This was about bats, why would there be spiders in a chapter about bats?
The ringing in Jon's ears nearly drowned out the noise, but the book had hit a table and some things had fallen off. The noise of items falling over and bouncing off the floor reminded him of a horrible sound.
𝘒𝘯𝘰𝘤𝘬. 𝘒𝘯𝘰𝘤𝘬.
_____
Between throwing the book at the table and needing to occupy his time in some way other than reading, Jon had gotten in quite a bit of trouble in the past week.
At some point his grandmother had thrown all the books he hadn't touched yet in an old box from the basement and put the box in Jon's room. She told him to get his act together and go do something in his room since he couldn't be trusted to roam the house.
Jon wasn't happy about this is the slightest. He grumbled for hours. He kicked things, tried to do puzzles but inevitably got bored, and once even tried to reread a book he knew had nothing to do with spiders. That went as well as you could imagine, he put it back down after one page. He was effectively stuck, only leaving his room for lunch and to use the bathroom.
A little bit before dinner he cracked. Surely he wouldn't find something about spiders in a book with nothing to do with animals? There were plenty of things in that box that he should be able to read. He was just overreacting.
He kneeled on the floor next to the box and reached for something. After a bit of rummaging he pulled a book out that he'd remembered from when he originally looked through the pile about how early weapons were made.
He flipped the book to read the back of it again, and there was something else there.
He dropped the book into the box again and scrambled away.
It had tried to crawl on his hand.
Why were spiders everywhere?
_____
Jon's issue with spiders never changed. No matter how many lectures from Martin about them being important to the ecosystem, nor the teasing he's gotten from so many has changed how he feels about them.
They were horrible, but they seemed to show up less the more time passed. He now only saw them in normal amounts, not the several times a day he did for the week after he saw Mr. Spider.
Things got a bit worse now that he was in the archives. Old boxes, statements, artifacts, and just the building made spider sightings more common than most other places.
One night he slept in the archives and woke up with one on his face.
He'd never admit how loudly he screamed.
Every time he sees one, he relives it. At least now he had the self control to not throw things across rooms.
He didn't know if things ever would change, but it wasn't important enough to try to fix. A few small moments of terror didn't matter in the end, right?