Unexpected Body (Patreon)
Content
Woman: Fame Girls Ella
Spider: Crysta Stock
The ad appeared five days before Halloween. Geraldine, her money at an end, answered the ad for a housekeeper position by email as quickly as she could get her resume attached. The pay was average but the benefits sounded great: room and board free! She needed those kinds of benefits if she was ever to pay off the debt of her deadbeat ex-husband. Her interview, three days later, was at a mansion well out in the moors. She was wondering whether she could afford the taxi to get there when she noticed that her potential employer would be sending a car.
The mansion, in the centre of a huge estate, looked old but not decrepit. She hoped they had WIFI for her off hours. The interview went as expected: a review of previous employment, a few questions to decide her suitability, etc. She was surprised when she was offered the job at the end of the interview. Of course she accepted. Her new employer immediately phoned a moving company to pack her few belongings and told her she'd be living in the gate house.
The gate house was empty but spacious. It seemed a bit quaint and Geraldine's few belongings would seem lost in this two floored mini-mansion. Geraldine was relieved that it had all the modern amenities including WIFI! A few moments later, text message from her new employer gave her the WIFI password! He thought of everything almost before she had to ask. The text also told her she'd be staying in the main house in one of the empty servants rooms until her belongings arrived and she could move into the gate house.
She didn't start until the following Monday so she prowled around the grounds. The grounds were well kept and beautiful but oddly devoid of people. For some reason, even the gardeners seemed absent. This didn't concern Geraldine too much. It was the weekend after all.
After half a day walking about, she headed back to the main house. Letting herself into at the servant's entrance at the rear, she discovered a few employees: a couple of maids, the cook and the butler. They assured her that the master had recently come into a lot of money and was busy repairing the estate. There would be, they assured her, many more employees in the future.
Geraldine discovered that much of the main house was under construction. All that was left undisturbed were the kitchen (recently renovated), a handful of servants rooms (also newly renovated), the main entrance, the dining hall, a pair of upstairs bedrooms and a washroom in the servants quarters and one upstairs. Though there weren't any workmen about, she was sure this would change come Monday.
She retired to her room earlier than expected. For some reason, she was extremely tired. That night, her sleep was troubled with odd dreams. It was the morning that brought the real nightmare. Geraldine found herself bound hand and foot spread eagled on a strange table. Odd bits of scientific looking apparatus stood on stands and hung from overhead. She began to scream for help. The master of the house entered in a lab coat and busied himself with adjustments to some equipment in a corner. A low hum filled the room. Geraldine felt an unusual calm descend upon her. She was still afraid but, for some reason, could no longer even think to protest her situation. In this strangely detached state, she watched as the master pressed a series of buttons and the equipment in the ceiling began to glow.
The strange equipment passed a strangely glowing beam along her arms. With each pass, they became shorter and furrier. She felt a tingling in her fingers that was replaced by an odd numbness. It wasn't that she couldn't feel her fingers and hands any longer, it was more as if they had changed and were no longer fingers and hands. A tickle at her neck revealed she no longer had arms at all. Instead, she now had strangely jointed arms that ended in an odd claw. Her arms or whatever they'd become were covered by a dense dark fur. For a moment, this revelation almost broke through her unnatural calm but the odd hum increased and her panic faded.
The next pass of the machine was focused on her hips and legs. Once more the strange numbness spread downward until she could no longer feel her toes. Experimentally, she tried to lift her leg fully expecting she was still tied down. Instead, a furry jointed leg rose into view. It looked like some kind of strange spider leg, she decided in her numbed state. She felt an expansion at the base of her spine and watched as her new legs were pushed forward and apart by the growth of a huge bulbous sac of some sort. Once more her rising panic was stifled by an increase in the hum of the unseen machine.
Over the next hour, joint by joint, six new legs were added. She discovered, without surprise or panic, that she could move them all. For a moment she was puzzled. She couldn't be a spider. Spiders only had eight legs. Almost as if sensing her puzzlement, the master stated that spiders also have a pair of pedipalps and that's what her arms had become.
The next hour was spent with her abdomen bloating and growing a dense dark fur. For some reason, Geraldine found the dark lustrous fur elegant though she couldn't even begin to fathom why. Eventually, the overhead equipment shutdown. Only the background hum remained. The master moved the overhead equipment to one side and brought another strange piece of equipment into her view. Once in place, this was activated and Geraldine noted with detachment that the world was growing. After a few moments, she decided calmly that she was actually shrinking. She'd heard about this kind of dimensional transformation. It had been in the news a few years before and been invented to miniaturise already microscopic chips even further.
When her dimensional transformation was finished and only the background hum remained, Geraldine decided to flip over. She wasn't comfortable on her back for some reason. Before she could get too far with that thought, she found herself in the master's hand. He was carefully holding her by her new thorax and examining her.
"Excellent!" was his only comment.
Geraldine found herself moving down a corridor still held firmly by the master. As she left the room, her detached calm slowly faded. At the end of the corridor, he pushed open a door, walked across a room, and placed her on her belly in a huge terrarium. Replacing the cover, he stood outside and waited. Geraldine pushed herself up on her new legs and made a few tentative steps about the terrarium.
As her mental fog faded, new emotions asserted themselves. First, Geraldine felt a detached curiosity. This lasted only long enough for her to walk slowly about the terrarium for about half a meter. The next emotion to surface was anger. She pushed herself up on four of her legs and waved the other four threateningly at the master outside the terrarium. She wanted to shout or bite him. She lunged at him but was brought up short by a collision with the plastic sheet of the terrarium.
"Very amusing," was the master's response. "You're far too small to be any creditable threat. But ... nice try!"
Geraldine's anger faded to be replaced by a mix of shock and fear.
"I don't want to be a spider!" she shrieked in a strangely high pitched voice.
"That's nice," was the master's response as he replaced the light on the terrarium and turned to leave the room.
Her fear grew as she looked about the room. She hadn't been the first to be caught by that too appealing job advertisement. Around the room, in dozens of other terrarium, were other victims: part human and part something else. Geraldine's high pitched scream was dampened by the plastic terrarium walls and only she heard it's full anguish. Whether she liked it or not, she was now a spider in her master's collection.