Don't Wake Up

‘Can’t wake up...”  he thinks, but something is bringing his consciousness to light. Wakefulness slithers up through the many layers of sleep and bits and pieces are coming back to him.
The pain.
As the word echoes dimly across the horizons of his thoughts he feels the flare of it growing. 
Pain.
And with the pain comes a blaring flash of remembrance. 
He was standing in a moonlit glade, his flashlight in his hand. He was angry and frustrated. The coolness of the night air and the sweat on his face chilled him and he longed for a jacket. And he had to come here to find his keys, which he’d somehow dropped, earlier during the day.
Then, the terrible thing, huge and horrible swinging down and the pain.
That was it. That was before.
Now there is pain rising over comprehension to an exquisite ringing in his mind. With it comes a fierce overwhelming sense of panic. His brain is trying to move arms and legs, trying to open his eyes.
‘No! Don’t open your eyes!’
But he cannot help it. 
And then he sees.
Hears.
Smells.
Feels.
He sees the legs first. Hairy and arching. He sees the eyes. Eight eyes, some part of his brain remembers. The body, familiar but monstrous. A tiny thing rendered huge in iron and rust.
He hears the clicking and whirring of it’s mouth parts. A strange guttural gibbering.
He smells the death around him and the acrid stench of venom.
He feels the slow bobbing, like a hammock made from bungee cords, as the terrible thing moves around him.
Now, the first tentative tap against his bundled body. Testing. The whirring increases to a high keening wail. He feels his heart beating faster. Another tap, this time harder. The wail raises to a shrill vibrato. The part of his mind that is removed, collating and distributing cold facts says, ‘A feeding song. And now the little ones will come.She’s singing to them. Dinner’s ready.’
And they do come.
He feels the pressure of hundreds of pencil sized needles sliding into his abdomen, his legs, his back.
No pain, now. Just pressure and the sinking realization, clear to him, as the horrible giant thing of iron and rust settles over him, that darkness is swallowing him too. The horrible thing that should not be real.
As his consciousness begins to fade, the voice in his head says coolly, ”Don’t worry. You’ll wake up soon...’