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It’s Halloween. You’re expecting spooky things. Plastic insects, cotton cobwebs--these things don’t bother you. Except, there’s a huge spider, right in front of you. Or maybe it’s on you? It’s big, and fast, and has a strange marking on its backside. You’ve never seen it before, and even the internet can’t tell you what it is. Eight evil little eyes are planted on you, and judging by those little leg twitches...it’s getting ready to attack…
It was pretty late on Halloween night and most of the trick-or-treaters had already gone home. Jack was busy cleaning up the extra decorations he'd put up in addition to the ones his family had already adorned the outside of the house with. Since he had opted to fill a cauldron with dry ice and a bunch of assorted toys, he didn't think much of it when he dumped out the remaining treats and found a spider among them. After all, many of the toys had been realistic-looking plastic or sticky creatures like snakes, insects, and arachnids. Some had even wiggled, vibrated, or skittered about when they were turned on or wound up. It was for this reason that Jack remained so ignorant for so long, even when he reached for the spider to put it away and the thing moved away from him.
When it moved away from his hand a second time, however, and then raised its front legs to rear at him viciously, the red-head finally understood this wasn't one of the toys he'd stuck in the cauldon. He yelped and scuttled back on his hands and knees, crab-walk style, knocking over his bowl of empty candy wrappers in the process. To his great horror, the spider pursued him.
He made a grab for the bowl he had knocked over and upturned it over the arachnid so as to keep it in one place - at least until he could find a better place to contain it. The teenager pushed himself to his feet and scrambled to the kitchen. In a few minutes, he was back with a glass jar and newspaper. Unscrewing the lid of the jar, he placed both the lid and the jar off to one side so he could focus on the paper and the bowl. Slipping the newspaper under the bowl, he stuck his hand under the newspaper before swiftly righting the bowl so the spider couldn't crawl up its sloped sides. At least, he hoped it couldn't.
Before he could find out if he was wrong, he picked up the jar in one hand and used the newspaper to coax the spider into the jar from the bowl. It took a little tricky maneuvering, but he eventually managed to get it in there. With the spider safely inside, he put the lid back on the jar and screwed it closed - not so tight that air couldn't get in or out, but enough that the creature wouldn't be able to remove it on its own.
Jack put the jar aside and proceeded to clean up his mess of the bowl, candy wrappers, cauldron, and all the other toys he'd dumped out of it. This time he was more wary of what he reached for before he made a grab for it. When he was finally finished putting everything away, he changed out of his costume and put on his pajamas. While brushing his teeth and preparing for bed, he caught sight of the spider in the jar again and took it to his room. It was skittering about the bottom of its prison in futility and he had begun to feel bad for it.
Once in his room, he closed the door so as not to frighten his parents if they chanced to peek in on him before turning on his computer. Jack spent the next couple of hours trying to identify the spider, especially when he got a good look at it because he realized it was one of the strangest arachnids he'd ever seen. The thing itself was the size of his palm - maybe nine inches long - with four pairs of large, black eyes lining its head. Jack thought he could hear a high-pitched whistle emit from its mandibles. He thought it might have been a tarantula except for the fact that bright red fuzz and a hook pattern made of yellow dots covered its thorax. It almost seemed familiar, but how could it have been if he'd never come across one of these before? The thought wouldn't leave him alone, nagging at him even as he began to fall asleep still researching.
It was during the strange period between wakefulness and sleep that he recalled why the spider had seemed so familiar. He hadn't seen it before with his real eyes, but imagined it with his mind's eye when he had been reading a book a while ago. It had been called Capt. Hook: The Adventures of a Notorious Youth, by J.V. Hart, the screenwriter of the movie, Hook. The book had been about young Captain Hook when he had been known as James Matthew Hook attending the famous British College in England called Eton. Jack had loved that book because of the moral ambiguity throughout, including the quote on the cover that 'Even the darkest of villains can have a hero's heart'. There was also the wit and cleverness of the author to appreciate, including many little details like why James Hook signed his name as 'Jas.', how James had an unusual color of blood, or why he had reason to harbor a vendetta against the Darling family. The young Hook portrayed in the book was a far cry from the comical version Dustin Hoffman had played in the movie and Jack found it difficult to reconcile the author of the book and the author of the movie's script as one and the same.
For some reason, James Hook in that book had befriended a spider described exactly like the one Jack had captured in his little glass jar. He'd claimed it was a rare variety of Lasiodora parahybana, the Brazilian salmon pink bird-eating tarantula, from the Amazon which might have explained why Jack hadn't seen or heard of it anywhere else but that book. Could the species that Jack had thought was fictional have really existed after all? It was astonishing, but not impossible. The red-head examined the spider in the jar before coming to a conclusion. He would keep the spider safely captive rather than turn it loose in a world of spider-haters and murderers. Assuming it was a kind of tarantula or related to them, he could look those up and try to take care of it the same way. Perhaps he would re-read his Capt. Hook book and take notes about how James Hook had cared for it there, too. Perhaps, like James, he could 'befriend' the spider and keep it as a companion. If he couldn't befriend it, then at the very least he could keep it to learn more about it. After all, as James liked to say, 'knowledge is power', and both were things Jack was rather fond of.
Responsibility wasn't something he had a particular liking for - after all, who did other than ignoramuses who didn't know what it consisted of? - but Jack knew as well as any power-lover that power came with responsibility, so he figured he could accept taking care of one little arachnid. After he'd read about the trickster, Anansi, spiders had become pretty cool in Jack's book anyway, so long as they weren't attacking him. "Guess I'll name you after the spider in the book since you look just like her and all," James told his new friend cheerfully, looking up a site on his computer and jotting down a list of things he would need to keep a tarantula. "Electra it is."
