The Manifestation of All Things Evil

Due to us being in no mans land with no clue as to where we were going we followed Gail and Dave (Tarz’s mum and partner) to Tumut with Melissa and the boys behind us (Tarz’s sis and kids). Dave was giving it to the Harley Davidson and I did my best to keep up. As we approached Tumut we came through small town called Adelong. Well Adelong could be a metropolis for all I remember because as we started leaving the towns outskirts my worst nightmare became a reality.

We had just hit the 100km speed zone and I was winding the ute up trying to keep pace with the Harley. It was a hot sunny day and as the drive wasn’t too long I had the window half down instead of the sir con on. Out of nowhere Tarz says to me in a very worried sounding voice, “How about you do up your window?” Given the heat and the fact that there was no apparent reason for the window to come up I instantly knew what was happening.

I glanced quickly at my window and saw some monstrous hairy brown legs crawling through. Now in the ute, you sit a little higher than in a car and my face was about 8cm from the huntsmans face with a billion eyes. Anyone who knows me knows full well that I completely lose the plot if even a harmless Daddy Longlegs spider comes near me so this was absolute hell for me.

I don’t really remember much about the next few seconds. I can remember thinking two things and only two things – I had to get out of that ute ASAP and I had to make sure the handbrake was on before I ran. I was absolutely terrified. The huntsman was centimetres from my face and I was almost crying with fear and panic. Tarz was doing the same but it was probably more fear of me crashing the ute as opposed to actual fear of the spider.

Without thinking I ran the ute off the road (luckily there was a side road), reefed up the handbrake and got the hell out of there. Gail and Dave had seen us run off the road in their rear view mirror and swung the Harley around to see what had happened. By the time they arrived, Tarz was yelling at me to find a stick to get the spider with, I was screaming that there were no bloody sticks and I didn’t want to take my eyes off the spider anyway – if I lost sight of it before it died then there was no way I was getting back into that vehicle of arachnoid pleasures.

Gail calmly walked over, asked what had happened, removed her helmet, caught the spider in it and then stomped it dead. It almost looked too simple. Some 20 mins later when talking about the incident with Tarz I found myself covered in goosebumps and a cold sweat. Even thinking about it now makes me shudder.