🕯️ The Nightly Storyteller Presents Marked: Eight Eyes Watching A tale from the Candlelight Library

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📖 The Candlelight Library

The candles burn low tonight. Their flames lean away from me, as if they’ve learned to fear what breathes in this room. The air tastes of iron and dust — parchment, wax, and something faintly sweet beneath it.

Something’s wrong with my hands. They turn the pages, yes, but they feel… borrowed. When the waxlight hits my knuckles just right, I count more fingers than I should. One of them twitches when I speak. My skin feels faintly too tight, and I keep scratching a cold spot on my forearm.

Still, the story must be told. It arrived folded inside an exterminator’s invoice — edges scorched, ink crawling with legs too small to name. We both touched it.

If you’ve crushed a spider recently, I suggest you leave now.  

They remember.

From somewhere in the library walls comes a faint tick-tick-tick — like a thousand claws tap-dancing on bone.  

I tell myself it’s the pipes.  

It never is.

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🕷️ Eight Eyes Watching

His name was Eli Voss, and he built his life on the belief that anything smaller than him deserved to die.

Cockroaches, centipedes, ants, spiders — he sprayed, stomped, and burned through them all. “Exterminator,” his business card read. “No Survivors.”

On his forearm, just above the veins that bulged when he clenched a fist, was a tattoo of a dead spider. Legs curled. Cartoon “X” for eyes. He thought it was funny.

It was.  

Until the joke started laughing back.

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The call came from a farmhouse on the edge of town.  

“Webs in every corner,” the woman whispered. “Big ones. They move when I breathe.”

Eli smirked. Easy money. He loaded his van with foggers, gloves, and poison. As he drove, he hummed a tune he couldn’t place — something rhythmic, like the frantic drumming of an insect trapped beneath a foot.

The house was a tomb of silk. The air was thick enough to chew, sweet with decay and old dust. Webs draped from the ceiling like funeral shrouds.

When his flashlight swept the walls, the strands didn’t sway randomly — they tensed. Each thread vibrated in a synchronized, slow rhythm, like the plucked strings of a massive, shared nervous system.

Something clicked in the dark.  

Not a scuttle.  

A pattern.

Then he saw it.  

A spider, impossibly large. Its abdomen pulsed faintly, like a beating heart. Its eyes — eight of them — weren’t spheres. They were faceted pools of black light, reflecting Eli’s face eight separate times, each one slightly out of sync.

“Sorry, Charlotte,” Eli muttered.  

He sprayed.

The creature twitched once. Legs folded in.

When he stepped closer, the floorboards breathed. Just once — a deep, wet exhaling shift, as though the entire house were a massive, hibernating arachnid that had finally noticed the speck of poison climbing its back.

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That night, Eli dreamed of webs.  

Endless corridors of silk, humming like strings in a vast, invisible instrument.

In the center sat the same spider, alive again. Its eyes reflected not light, but personal, ugly memories — the ant hills he flooded as a boy, the mosquito he tortured under a magnifying glass, the spider he crushed last week while humming that tune.

He woke to rustling. Eight small golden points shone from the corner of his room. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two.

When he blinked, they were gone. But the spot on the wall was faintly sticky.

The next morning, he blamed the fumes. The stress.  

But the eyes followed.

They shimmered behind him in mirrors.  

Waited beneath puddles.  

Glowed faintly in the reflection of his van’s windshield — just behind the seat.

When he checked the back, there was nothing but his equipment… and a single strand of silk stretched across the handle of his fogger. It brushed his thumb, leaving a faint, burning itch that lasted all day.

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🔪 The Cocoon

By Friday, he’d stopped sleeping.  

Something moved inside his walls — something that paused whenever he did.

Then the phone rang again.  

Same farmhouse.  

“There’s more webs,” the woman whispered. “They’re thicker now. And they hum when I pray.”

Eli drove back, nerves raw and pulsing.  

The front door was open.  

The air hung heavy — sweet and sour, like rotting fruit and fresh formaldehyde.

He followed the threads through the house until he reached the crawlspace hatch. The sound was deafening now — a soft, rhythmic tapping, like claws on wood.

He knelt. Opened it.

Below him, the dark shimmered. Hundreds of eyes watched from the void, gleaming like wet coins.

And in the center — something vast, something alive — was spinning a fresh cocoon.

He leaned closer. The thing in the web twitched. He saw skin, hair… but the limbs were pulled impossibly long and thin, adhering to the webbing.

The eyes weren’t open. But on the forearm — right above the veins — the tattoo of the dead spider was no longer ink. It was a raised, black knot of tissue, and its little “X” eyes winked open — slowly, wetly, one at a time.

Eli screamed.  

But the sound didn’t leave his throat.  

It felt snagged — caught in a thousand fine, dusty threads that snapped taut against his lips.

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Three days later, they found his van parked beside the field.  

Empty.

On the inside of the windshield, written in silk so fine it barely existed, were these words:

“We laughed. Keep listening.”

And tucked into the glovebox — a single gold coin, webbed at the edges.

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🕯️ The Candlelight Library — After the Reading

The story ends.

The candles hiss — relieved, or frightened. Hard to tell the difference anymore.

Something brushes the back of my hand. A thread, light as breath. It sticks, faintly warm. I pull away, and a droplet of wax falls onto the page, sealing Eli’s name forever.

I feel the hum in my bones again.  

The walls answer with faint tick-tick-tick.

Sometimes, when I breathe too deeply, the air trembles.  

Sometimes, I wonder if I’m the storyteller at all…  

or if the web is telling me.

Until next time, dear listener —  

keep your lights low,  

your wrists bare,  

and your apologies whispered.  

They prefer remorse.

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We’re just getting started — and things are about to get dark.

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