Giant spiders had devastated the Earth. The first spider had actually originated as a toy from a cereal box, a rubber novelty item that grew and divided as soon as it was removed from the wrapper. The spiders had been allowed to multiply and grow beyond control until they had taken over everything everywhere entirely. There was a flimsy vinyl record that had been attached to the back of the cereal boxes. The record was supposed to be played to send out a signal that would cause the spiders to shrivel up and vanish once you were done playing with them. Someone had neglected to play the record that came with their box, and they had let their batch of spiders get completely out of control.
I hunted everywhere through the wreckage, looking for a cereal box that still had one of these records attached to it. In a pile of garbage left behind in the basement of a ruined building, I finally found one, coated in dust and dirt. I knew where I had to take it. I made my way across the city to the old stadium down by the bay, and I went up to the announcer's booth, where there was an amplifier that would broadcast the signal for miles around. I flipped the main breaker, set the record turning on the turntable, and flipped all switches to light up the board and send the signal out over the loudspeaker. Then I climbed up a ladder to a hatch that led up onto the roof of the announcer's booth. From there, as the first pops and cracks in the static began to issue from the speakers around the stadium, I had a view of the whole destroyed city around me.
The sky was dark and red like a stew of blood broiling in the air, and there was a mist that had settled over the landscape, penetrated by a glow from somewhere low to the ground to the west in the ruins of the city. The buildings were torn apart, only half their remains still standing, some of them leaning on their foundations about to topple, jagged ligaments and girders exposed against the skyline like splintered fragments of broken bone. And far off, I could see glimpses of those long terrible legs slowly moving here and there in the mist, their webs spun between the masts of the fallen buildings. And tangled up in the webs, I could see skulls separated from half-devoured carcasses that were dripping loose wet chunks onto the streets below.
But then this scratchy xylophone music began to play from the speakers. The signal that would shrivel up the spiders was embedded at a subsonic level, beneath the music. I looked up and there was a slight opening in the dark red clouds above me, and I began to see the high noon sun peek through. The hole in the clouds widened, and I could see that old amazing bright blue sky behind the clouds. As the clouds receded, things began to change on the ground as well. The water in the bay was so clear and blue again, you could see the sunlight playing off the rocks at the bottom. There were crowds on the beach with their red and white umbrellas and their towels laid out on the sand. There were crowds in the stands of the stadium around me, cheering a football game in progress down on the field below. There was traffic on all the streets and bridges that wound around the buildings, and the buildings were all restored. And on a piece of land where the city jutted out into the smooth waters, I watched this colossal statue reform before my eyes, stone upon stone, until the massive arm was extended again, holding a torch to light the way.
Not only was all the damage undone by playing the record, no one seemed to remember what had happened. It was like the whole experience had been reset in everyone's minds. I was the only one that still remembered. I tried to explain it to people sometimes, the buildings reshaped and clean, that beautiful blue sky showing through, all the life returned to the city and the crowds of people all around. But their heads would just wobble and nod and their eyes would drift and they would scratch their cheek and trace a finger around the edge of their ear as they tried their damnedest to understand.