spider in the Azka

The spider in the Azka is the living parasite hidden within the charm that Leland Gaunt gives Polly Chalmers. Its concealed presence turns the charm’s apparent relief of Polly’s painful hands into a predatory bargain: the creature feeds on her while the charm suppresses her pain. When Polly breaks the Azka, the spider emerges and grows, forcing her to confront the cost of the relief and destroy the thing that has been feeding on her.

Concealed in the Charm

For a time, the spider remains entirely hidden inside the Azka, which Polly wears close to her body. The charm’s effects seem beneficial because her chronic hand pain recedes, but that improvement conceals the creature’s presence and its dependence on her blood. The relationship between object and parasite is therefore not an ordinary cure: the Azka contains the spider, while the spider’s feeding is bound up with the relief Polly experiences.

The danger becomes visible after Polly throws the Azka against a wall in anger. It splits open, and a small spider crawls from the crack. Its emergence makes the charm’s hidden contents concrete, replacing the promise of a harmless object with evidence of a living threat. Polly understands that the creature has been feeding on poison drawn from her body, and that now it is no longer confined within the broken charm.

Growth and Threat

The spider grows as it moves through Polly’s room. It is first no larger than a beetle, then reaches the size of a mouse; later, as Polly confronts it in the bathroom, it has grown to the size of a cat. This rapid enlargement turns the revelation inside the charm into an immediate physical danger. The creature that had been concealed against Polly is now loose, and its growth makes delay increasingly perilous.

Polly tries to strike it with a bathroom plunger, but the creature climbs onto the tool and then toward her. The encounter also restores the pain the charm had suppressed: without the Azka around her neck, her hands hurt sharply, making it harder to defend herself. The spider’s escape thus takes away the apparent benefit at the same moment that its size and proximity make the threat harder to evade.

Polly’s Fight and the Creature’s Death

Polly’s response shifts from trying to keep the spider at a distance to fighting it directly. She grips one of its legs and bites down, then holds on as it struggles to pull away. When it lunges, she catches its body between her forearms and squeezes before throwing it against the tiled wall. The action is driven not only by fear and revulsion but by anger at having been used and at the bargain she made involving Alan Pangborn’s life.

When the spider is still alive, Polly takes up the plunger again and drives its shaft into the creature. The spider becomes motionless. After briefly nearing a faint, Polly brings herself back by clenching her hands together and concentrating on the pain; she then looks into the tub and sees that the creature is no bigger than her little fingernail and is dead. Its final smallness contrasts with its alarming growth during the fight, but does not undo the reality of what happened.

Significance

The spider embodies the hidden cost beneath the Azka’s apparent healing power. Polly’s relief and the parasite’s feeding are linked, so the charm functions not as a cure without consequences but as a device that masks an infestation. Breaking it reveals both the creature and the pain the charm had held at bay; killing the spider ends the immediate threat but leaves Polly confronting the bargain and its consequences.

The episode also gives Polly an active role in breaking that arrangement. She recognizes that the creature must be killed and persists despite her painful hands and fear. The spider’s death therefore marks more than the removal of a monster: it is Polly’s refusal to let the concealed price of the charm continue to govern her.