When a predator targets a lonely young girl, eight strangers can either fight to stop him, or face the wrath of the spirit that tied their fates together.
Is life a series of random events, or are we all connected by invisible threads of fate? Well...
[Each chapter of Octagon corresponds to a song that inspired the shape of the character arc and/or story arc. You can listen to each chapter's "song" to gain further insight into the world-building of Gossamer Loom and the people who live there. I definitely had fun listening to these songs while I was writing the novel. Chapter 16's "Formation Song" is "You'll Never Get Away from Me" by Tony Bennett.]
Deep beneath the polished floors and sterile walls of Kane Hospital, past layers of soil and clay, were remnants of dark history. And within that soil, deep, deep below the surface, those remnants were stirring. Tiny traces of what once was were shifting in the ground.
Traces of dust, bits of ash, that had once formed the Weaver's cottage were still there, mingled within the soil...
As were the smallest fragments of the Weaver's own incinerated remains...
After all, Kane Hospital was erected at the center of Mill's Edge. This was the very ground where she had been murdered. The hospital's foundation dug deep into her grave...
And from that same dirt, they were crawling themselves into existence.
Spiders.
An army of tiny creatures, each one pulling itself into the the world with silent determination, joined to become something greater than the sum of their parts.
A myriad of legs, bodies, small and enormous, hairy and sleek, crawling up through the soil, writhing forward as though the earth itself was spitting them out.
They did not move in chaos but as one, united in ancient blood—a sea of spiders, a river of black and brown and red bodies pouring from the ground. They knew where they were going. They knew who they were going to find. As they slithered through roots and stone, across exposed pipes and crevices, their many minds pulsed with a single thought: The Weaver's blood returns to the living, and it is waiting for us.
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Their legs, thousands upon thousands of legs, carried them over the damp soil, past the decaying walls of the hospital and across the highway. They moved with purpose, some crawling faster, others creeping slower but steady, forming a dense, crawling flood of movement. They felt the vibrations of her footsteps in the ground, the trembling pulse of her presence, drawing them forward.
They reached the edge of the woods, their many eyes reflecting the glow of the moon. And there she was—the Weaver's blood in human form, Caroline, her eyes glazed, her body tethered to the earth while her mind drifted somewhere distant. She stood like a figure in a trance, staring blankly as an enormous bear—monstrous, otherworldly—charged toward her, its eyes glowing with malice, a beast possessed by something far darker than hunger.
The spiders surged forward in one silent wave, spilling out of the forest and descending upon the bear like a shadow come to life. They crawled over each other, a writhing wall of bodies, an army of fangs and pincers, descending on the creature with a singular hunger. Mandibles sank into flesh, jaws clamped down on tendons, pincers tore into muscle. They tasted blood, felt the warmth of life slipping away, felt the creature thrashing as their bodies consumed it whole.
The creature was powerful, but it was no match for the countless spiders enveloping it, tearing it apart with meticulous, unfeeling precision. The last bit of flesh was stripped, and all that remained were the gleaming, bare bones of the creature, the faint steam of its warmth still curling into the night. They turned their many eyes to her then, the Weaver's chosen one, willing at last. The one they had been waiting for. Her body was still, her face expressionless, but her presence thrummed in the air.
