The Carpet Store

A woman is out shopping for a new rug for her bedroom. She's wandering around a warehouse store, searching. She's looking for something exotic, something imported perhaps. She inspects some carpet samples and brushes her hand across a stack of rolled up rugs at the end of an aisle. Just then she feels a sharp pain in her finger, as though a pin or something was embedded in one of the rugs . . . but when she looks she can't see a thing. Sucking her finger, she leaves the store and heads back home.

A few hours later her neighbour discovers the woman lying dead in her kitchen. The police are called and the body taken down to the morgue. A pathologist examines her thoroughly, and eventually determines the cause of death. The woman was killed by the bite of an exotic spider.

It's a week before they track the woman's movements back to the carpet store she visited that day. And it's a week more before they discover the offending carpet. Imported from the Middle East, the thing is riddled with the husks of venomous spider eggs. The spiders themselves, however, are nowhere to be found.

The carpet is hauled away for further inspection, but the detectives know it's already too late. The spiders have spread already, and it's only a matter of time before the hatchlings start laying eggs of their own.