Spiders in the Rain

Posted On May 21, 2021

Excerpts from the diary of Ruth Wilson as read by Gale Sawyer

The Trial of Robert Stuart Hammerstein

Bob Hammerstein did not have a trial, he was shot in the right ear less than three hours after I met him.

If you subtract the thirty-minutes we made love and the two phone calls Bob made in another room of the suite. I really only got to know Bob for two hours, if you don’t count the intense and physical, the sexually gratifying time Bob and I spent together without words.

In the two hours we spent talking and getting to know each other, Bob smoked at least ten Dunhill cigarettes that his long slender fingers would elegantly retrieve from his gold cigarette case engraved with the letters SITR. Those fingers were beautiful, yet frightening. I often wonder if he played the piano with those magnificent fingers.

Bob really knew how to use those fingers. This is one talent I know he had and should be marked down for. Have you ever had a man light your cigarette and make you feel that you are perfectly on fire? Bob could do that. I have Bob’s cigarette lighter in my purse. I take it with me every place I go, but I have no one to light my fire. It is all so very depressing!

At the cocktail bar before we made it up to the room. Bob started to tell me a story about a time when he was a young boy. He was with his father and grandfather and they were all on horseback. It was a hot Southwest summer day and a storm was brewing when they came upon a silver circular object that looked like a UFO. It was right infront of them on their own property, a humengous ranch that they owned out in the wild west where Bob spent many summers of his youth when he wasn’t at boarding school.

The adults knew that they had been unwise and frankly stupid to get caught in an afternoon thunderstorm. They normally understood the weather.

By the time they had dismounted from their horses, the sky was pitch black and even more ominious. The grandfather Wilken Stuart Hammerstein shook his head in astonishment that he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen such a furious storm blow up so quick.

it was on them before they could take their next breath. They were not only qetting pelted by the extreme rain, but also hail. The horses were getting nervous and starting to snort, so without further delay, they got the horse up against the silver circular object that would provide the horses with some protection from the storm.

Bob went on how he was able to get some shelter himself from the worst of the storm by sliding under a slight extrension at the bottom that the design of the unusual object provided.

It was at that moment that he said his world changed forever. Under the craft he spotted three figures unlike anything he had ever seen before. They were round and not moving, with eight legs, just like a spider, but at least 50 times larger than any he had ever seen. They were going off and on with flashes of light and like an x-ray machine you could see the inner working of all three with each flash of light.

As quick as the storm had come on, it stopped abruptly. Bob said It was like someone had a remote control and was controlling the weather. The spider like figures stopped illuminatng and became very hard to see. His father was soon pulling Bob up and getting him back on his horse. They didn’t explore their finding at all, not even an additional pause was allowed to look at what was surely was a UFO or to listen to the boy about the spider creatures that he had saw down below.

They rode directly back to the house and shortly after he could hear his father yelling over the phone for at least an hour, angry and condesending to the people he was speaking with.

The incident was never mentioned again in their househould. At least as something that actually happened. The young Bob would draw pictures of the event all the time and wanted to talk about it, but his family would only say Bob, this is when you were sick, when you had that really bad fever, even Dr. Stun was worried. We thought we were going to have to put you in the hospital. You had us all worried. Not once did they ever admit the experience Bob had was real.

Many times Bob returned to the spot where he saw the UFO. It was always the same, he could never find anything to validate his experience. He said he even returned last year, 40 years after the incident. What he expected to find he never knew. Not even with all his adult business connections with powerful people in the know, had he been able to find a trace that the UFO and the spiders in the rain existed.

That was it, that was his story. I knew more about him as a child than I did him as a man. He had finished his third double martini and we headed up to his room. Soon we were making love and what a lover he was. For someome I assumed was a very busy man, he sure hit all the right buttons.

It has now been three months and I am trying to get my thoughts down daily in this diary and hope to answer some of the questions my friends have, especailly Bev, who provides almost daily support.

Today I am back at the Plaza and in the Oak Room for the first time since the incident. I am sitting at the exact table Bob and I sat near the Oak bar. It seems a little spooky, but I am doing OK, the alcohol helps. Nobody seems to have noticed me, except probably the wait staff, but they are too trained to reveal that. It helps that I am wearing my hair darker and in a different style, plus I wear my sunglasses most of the time I am out.

It is hard to constantly try to understand what happened while simultaneously feeling and reliving the terrible painful moment. I know I have to keep processing what occurred, but how can I keep doing this. How long can I?

Bob was already dressed and back in his elegant suit and was leaning over to put his shoes back on when the door opened. A man dressed in black with dark slicked back hair entered the room, fired once with a silencer, Bob fell over and died instantly. The man was gone and hasn’t been found, as if he never existed.

I won’t fill the pages about the blood and brain and the ashen Bob and all the commotion, questions, accusations and money in Bob’s wallet. Maybe on another day.

These last three months have been horrible. Questions from every last investigator that you can imagine. Federal, state, local. Supicious people with unusual questions. Even military people who do business with Hammerstein companies wanted answers.

Everybody is on the case, but no one knows who did it and why.

What I know now is that Bob ran a pretty big corporation and comes from an old family of wealth and prestige, real industrialists from Philadelphia of all places. Everybody that is close to me must know how much I hate Philadelphia because of the pilot I dated from there. I even went to Bali with him. What a dumb move that was. Too bad he wasn’t the one that got shot, that arrogant bastard!!!

I wouldn’t of mind traveling with Bob, if he would have lived. Probably wouldn’t have been possible. He had already buiilt a family with a wife and four children, I have learned.

Now the rumor and I better not tell anyone. Bob was possibly an agent for a foriegn country, possibly an European or even one for Russia.

The Release

Ruth Wilson had just finished her third double martini when her friend Gale Sawyer arrived, delayed by a Madison Avenue photo shoot.

After pleasantries, Ruth headed to the opulent ladies room off the Oak Room, while her friend tried to catch up a little and watched Ruth’s purse, diary and a book about prominent families of Philadelphia of the 19th and 20th Century.

Sitting in the same African blackwood, lavatory cubicle that she always used, Ruth felt the warm relief coming after holding in the liquids for far too long. The release produced a sensation that went all the way up her spine to her neck and to the back of the head, she grasped with the sudden pleasure.

It happened quickly, from above she felt the first two and then four squeezing on her head until she was paralyzed and couldn’t catch her breath, then there were eight foreign objects moving over her body, squeezing into her tight. She felt herself being moved, taken away and devoured, as the lights in the cubicle flashed on and off. Then there was darkness.

Ruth regained consiousness in a cocoon structure that was as big as a house. It was soft like cotton with webs of silk everywhere. She was dazed and thirsty, completely unsure where she was.

The wounded moans and groans in Ruth’s screams became louder as the spiders moved closer to her. Her tears fell uncontrollably down her face and she thought in the distance that she could hear the voice of Bob.

Gayle frantically banged on the hard African blackwood door, asking her friend repeatedly if she was OK. The Plaza security was there and ready to break down the door if needed.

The black spiders had gone invisible again, no one else could see them when they broke into the cubicle.