Eight reasons I hate this job

[Cowardly Leon]

Hello again.

Sorry for not being online in a while people but I've been off-grid for a bit. The people I work with have been dragging me all over hell's half acre checking out leads on a few things... sometimes it feels like the literal Hell's Half Acre too. For example...

Recently I was in Mexico playing the part of stupid white tourist on vacation.
I know, All I gotta do is act naturally, right?

So there I am in khaki pants and shirt, on a bus, in the middle of the freakin' jungle with a batch of other tourists on my way to see one of those old Mexican pyramids. The kinds with the steps and steeped in blood sacrifice since before the conquistadores. I was hot, miserable and trying to keep my mouth shut the whole time so people would realise I really didn't want to be there at all.
According to Sammy, our resident scientist, a fair number of tourists were vanishing on some of these excursions. The local cops passed it off as just not checking that your tour guide isn't a bandit first and said the investigation was ongoing. Our group thought it might be human sacrifice so they stuck me with bait duty. This always gives me a bad feeling.

So there I am. In the middle of Nowhere Mexico walking around with a batch of clueless tourists at the base of a creepy piece of architecture that had a long bloody history behind it. Oh yes... and no sign of my backup who were supposed to be tailing us the whole time. Nothing could possibly go wrong, right?

HA!

After some basic history and some photography I make a discovery that this area is a dead zone. No Electronic connections to the outside world whatsoever (and that's weird because I've crammed my Jitterbug with more tech than NASA has in a space suit.) . Carlos, our tour guide, offers to show us the secret burial chambers within... and despite my vote to stay out in the bright sun we all went inside. The cool air was a great relief from the hot humidity outside but every one of my survival instincts were screaming at me to get out. But we kept pushing in further, brushing aside curtains of cobwebs as we went deeper.

Unlike the others I came better prepared for this kind of thing. While they were lighting the way with their Cell-phones and I-pads I cracked a few glow rods and used the infared setting on my video camera.

Eventually we entered this area where it just opened up on us. It had large sarcophaguses and there were skeletons everywhere draped with heavy webbing. Carlos pointed out how the skeletons were once sacrificial victims, hearts ripped from their still beating chests before they were taken in here to rot. Now I'm no bone-doctor but I can recognise the difference between a two-hundred year old skeleton and pretty fresh one. The lack of skin and organs was really unnerving but it was still pretty fresh. That and one of these skeletons had a really modern wallet clutched in a deathgrip. I know things decay faster in the jungle than in the city but this seemed really wrong to me. Then I did the worst possible thing for my sanity...

I used my video camera to look upwards.

Oh god help me it was huge.

I had never been so glad to have already out my bodily fluids otherwise my bladder would have let go right then and there. Bastard was the size of a Volkswagen beetle... and it had legs.
Eight of them.
Each as thick and round as a sewer pipe and longer than a sedan.
It's black body gleamed in a wet way like crude oil except for it's marking. It had a skull-like marking on it's ass end.

It was a giant spider. I was almost directly under a giant spider. I was too scared to scream, but managed to slowly shuffle my way towards the entrance. I think it must have noticed me because It reached out and deliberately shook it's own web. It wasn't pennies from heaven that fell, but a hail of spiders. Every. Bloody. Kind. Of spider you can imagine fell down on us.

The others screamed and ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, I was fortunately not in the middle of the room so the spiders didn't land directly on me and the ones that tried to climb up me quickly fell off. (I was in the middle of a jungle full of tropical diseases. I preacticaly SWAM in DDT before getting on the bus) Carlos just stood in the middle of it all, arms upraised as if god himself were blessing him.

I almost made it to the doorway when the thing intercepted me. Just, out of nowhere it planted a leg right in my path, leaned down and... and god as my witness... spoke to me.

I think I'm still in shock but while my fellow tourists' screams began to peter out in the background it said I was somehow different from them. Something about the webs of fate and that I had a destiny of some kind about me. It didn't know what but I had gotten it's attention, not just because of some mystic mumbo-jumbo but because unlike everyone else I seemed to actually know what I was doing (which is news to me) by wearing a powerful insect poison and carrying inextinguishable light sources. It then said that people of destiny always made the most satisfying meal.

Needless to say I turned and ran.

Not very far though. I tripped over the fresh corpse of a fat insurance salesman from Ohio and fell flat on my face. Granted doing so saved my life because one of those huge legs came down right where I MIGHT have been had I kept running, crushing my camera in the process. The force of the blow cracked the stone floor and caused a Texan housekeeper's purse to fall open right in front of me giving me a weapon.

The woman had two things that made her stand out. One was that she was always adjusting her massive 50-ish beehive hairdo , the other was that she was a chain smoker. I snatched up one of her spare cans of aerosol hairspray and her zippo and sent a gout of flame right into all eight of it's big red eyes. While it screamed and recoiled in pain I set fire to the massive web above our heads and ran for the outside world.

It was only when I got outside that I found my friends there. They had gotten a flat tire and had to track me by the path the bus left behind. Carlos burst out of the pyramid, covered in burning spiders and cursing me in Mexican. He lunged with this golden knife but fortunately Elvis put him down with one punch to the jaw.

They quickly grabbed their gear and the guns they had... found after coming to this side of the border and went in there loaded for bear while I sat by the bus shivering like I had been skinny dipping at the arctic circle. Ten minutes and a shot of whiskey later and I was informed that the big nasty had vacated the premises... which was impressive because there were no openings anywhere big enough for it to have used. Also unfortunately there were no survivors, other than Carlos whom we left handcuffed to his own tour bus steering wheel with his keys on the hood.

We made an anonymous phone call to the authorities who no doubt wanted an easy scapegoat. Turns out we were right, he was scooped up and put on trial in a day and sent to one of their worst prisons for his part in luring tourists to a place filled with deadly spiders and looting their bodies.

Meanwhile our research heralded this particular pyramid as not being part of the Aztec culture but some strange variant that worshipped spiders. The locals called it Templo de los Ocho Patas and the carvings on the walls are creepy as hell. We got some 'souvenirs' out of this. Carlos's sacrificial knife, photos of the temple, the crushed pieces of my video camera... it could have been better, it could have been worse.

Of all the things though, that spider telling me that I had a destiny freaks me out more than anything else.

[Gotham Witch]

It's difficult to believe anything a spider tells you. They have a certain affinity for getting into people's heads to mislead or fill with doubt or apprehension. Still, you made it out alive and did so in a manner that left you mostly intact. That's a good day in most people's books.

As to the spider worshipping culture, there could be a few of those. The Aztecs weren't the only kids on the block down there. The proposed Great Goddess of Teotihuacan, a precursor to the Aztec in the Basin of Mexico, is depicted as a spider. The Moche, Lakota, Hopi, Navajo (amongst others) also depicted and paid homage to spiders.

Creepy, I know.

[Holister]

Howdy,

Got 2 questions

1) How far north do these things go...

2) How big do these things get

3) Do they come in any color other than black?

Well ok, that was 3 questions, but still curious?

[Shang Li]

Everyone has a destiny, few go willingly to meet it.

The being you encountered sounds very much like one I met under the platues of Tibet and Nepal.

She guarded a narrow passage to a nearly unreachable valley inhabited by many beings who have achieved enlightenment. She correctly claimed I was unworthy, and attempted to bar my path. To my good fortune, her webs could not hold up to my blade, and her attempts to turn me away from my path were but a test.

I am glad of this, it would have been a pity to have to choose between destroying one so old and dying myself. I am still not certain which I would have chosen.

[Hannah]

My dad fought something similar in a cavern underneath a lunatic asylum once.

Hannah Knight