Hello again, R. L. Stein Story Club members. I'm Ivy, your ghostly host, and custodian of those creepy tales from the hidden vault of R.L. Stein. We'll explore the weird, the scary, and everything in between.

Today is another chilling tale.

So get ready, story club members.

This spine-tingling story will give you the creeps

and make you want to crawl into someplace safe.

It's an unsettling little tale I like to call,

10,000 tiny feet.

Darcy Briggs clobbered a big black spider with her thick schoolbook.

Gotcha, she thought. She didn't like spiders. They gave her the absolute creeps.

One of her first memories of spiders was when she was about two years old. Her mom had taken her to a park and sat her down on a blanket.

While her mom was busy preparing a milk bottle from the bag, Darcy encountered what she found out

years later was a wolf spider. There are a large predatory spider that carries their young

spider-rettes on their back until they're old enough and strong enough to fend for themselves.

Darcy had put her chubby little hand on the spider and a hundred baby spiders crawled up her

small arm. She screamed, as two-year-olds are known to do. It was one of her earliest memories that

seemed like yesterday, even though it was nine years ago. Since then, Darcy couldn't even so much as look at a picture of a spider without going into complete shock.

She would suck in her breath, her muscles would spasm, and she'd break out in a sweat.

Doctors called it arachnophobia, the fear of spiders.

She didn't feel so bad to learn that she wasn't alone,

that many people have this particular phobia of eight-legged fuzzy things that spun

webs and were often found in bedrooms and bathrooms uninvited. As she grew up, people who heard

of Darcy's phobia would try to tell her that spiders were a beneficial creature. They were

...