Sir Trevaricus 2: A Pox Upon Thee, Spider Queen

“Shelob! You shall meet your death you hellish creature!”
“Trevor, put the sword down, it’s just a spider!”
“My name tis not Trevor, and tis not merely a spider, it is Shelob, queen of the spiders and envoy of the damned.” He screamed, swinging his sword above his head and arching it downwards, burying it a few centimetres deep in the coffee table. Where the hell did he get a real sword?
“Trevor! Put that thing down!” My wife screamed, while my daughter Susie jumped up and down on the sofa, screaming and pointing at the tiny spider as it swiftly dodged Trevor’s sword. It began to climb up the dull steel it while he tried to dislodge it. I sit and watch this all unfold, wishing I had some popcorn.

The spider gets close to Trevor’s hand and all colour drains from his face, so he looks like a big stupid moon wearing a suit of shitty armour, he squeals like a girl and starts into another tirade.
“Shelob’s venom can kill even a hardy warrior wizard such as I! Get back, you multi limbed hell spawn.” He tries futilely to get the sword out of the table, sweat running down his face, rather than let go of the sword or anything, which would be the obvious move of any half intelligent person in this situation. The tiny spider touches his skin, and he… faints. My wife squeals and runs to his aid, and Susie stops screaming about the spider and starts laughing at Trevor. At least I raised one of my children right.

Trevor lies there on the carpet like the bloated corpse of a whale and I turn back to the TV to see if there’s anything good on. The room is filled with my wife’s screams and Susie’s laughing and I wish that I had worn a condom, and wonder how my seed could have turned so badly to produce something like Trevor.

“Do something!” my wife screams at me. I pick up the flower vase from the coffee table that still has his sword lodged in it, and empty the flowers and water over his face. He coughs, splutters, then sits bolt upright and screams “Arwen my love, I will come for you!” At which point I retort, “The only thing you’ll come for is a fat Goth girl in armour made from cornflakes boxes.” Then laugh to myself. My wife screeches with relief (god, does she do anything other than scream?) and hugs the giant man baby tightly. Trevor eyes me with what he probably thinks is a severe and challenging look but he just looks like he’s squinting or having a stroke.

The rest of the day passed without much incidence. I was off work so I drank too much and did very little. I passed out in my chair and woke up to find Trevor staring at me from behind one of my wife’s plants. He was wearing a duvet over his head and seemed to think that I couldn’t see him. I started at him groggily, and he started muttering to himself,
“Don’t worry, he can’t see us. This is our cloak of shadows. This will do till we get the ring, our precious… back.”

He spent a lot of time talking about rings lately, I started to worry he might be gay again. Lord of The Rings did sound like the title of a bad porn film to be honest. Why did I ever buy those Blu-Rays? I should have bought him fireworks or a pocket knife or something. I need to work on my parenting skills before I fuck up that big sack of crap’s upbringing. I’d been doing so well so far as well.

That night, I was sitting at the foot of my bed, with my head in my hands. My wife was snoring gently in the bed behind me, and I could hear Trevor grunting like King Kong as he breathed in and out laboriously, his asthma making it sound like a desperate struggle for breath and life at every in and out. I couldn’t sleep; I was having some sort of emotional crisis, which was entirely alien to me because as far as I was concerned emotions were something that my friend Jack Daniels took care of.

I stood up off the edge of the bed slowly, aware of how loudly the old thing squeaked and the problems it caused for our sex life because of this, and I crept into Trevor’s room. I slowly opened the door and the funk of stale sweat and Tangy Cheese Doritos washed over me in waves that make me feel like I was going to pass out. I walked towards his bed, not at all surprised to see Lord of The Rings on the TV playing muted on the background, like he was a baby and it was his fucking night-light.

I reached into the pocket of my pyjama pants and pulled out a big, nasty looking rubber spider that I found in the garage in a box marked ‘Hello-ween Dekorashuns’ (I’m rubbish at spelling). I dangled it over the boy’s head, right over his yawning hippo gape of a mouth. Drool ran down his cheek and pooled on his pillow, and if he rolled over I bet he would drown in it.

I was poised to drop it in his stupid moon face when I stopped and looked at him, and something strange happened in my heart that made me think I was about to die. My eyes started to water, but that could have just been the smell in his liar. When he was asleep like this, he looked years younger, like when he was a baby. He looked the way he did back when I still loved him. I decided to give him one last chance, and put the spider in his little sister’s room instead.

Now I can sleep. I dreamed of a giant spider, it had eight legs that ended in little hairy hands, and in each hand it held a bottle of Jack Daniels. It had me wrapped up in a web made of pink thread, and Trevor was locked in battle with it, his crappy armour now perfectly forged, and his body all rippling muscle underneath it. Instead of his stupid glasses he was wearing a visor like Cyclops from the X-Men comics did, and he was screaming “Watch out, there’s ghosts!”

Goddamn it, that’s it… no more drinking in bed, unless it’s before bed time.