by Various
“Hello,” he said. “What are you, then?”
The figure cocked its head as if to say, “You know what I am,” and a crack appeared in the head a few inches below the rudimentary eyeholes. As Alan watched, the crack widened, pulling apart tendrils of muck and noodles, and then a thin clear drool began to run out. After a few moments, that was followed with some noises.
“Ggh,” it said. “Rgh rgh.”
“Oh?”
The figure of pulp and clay wriggled violently, as babies sometimes will when you’re holding them, and began working its way to the edge of the table. Alan stepped forward, ready to catch it if it fell, but by then it seemed to have understood the use of its limbs and it climbed down awkwardly on to the wooden chair. Where it had rested were blobs and smears of grease and dirt.
“Rgh hurgh, fft.”
Settled on the chair, it banged its little fists on the table and Alan felt an icy band squeeze his heart. Katie had once sat there, had once punished the table for her hunger. The thing was disgusting and misshapen, and drool continued to run from its mouth, but he went and fetched Katie’s cereal bowl anyway and filled it up with her favourite snack. When he placed it in front of the figure, it pressed its sticky clay fingers to the rim and made more of the strange stunted noises but it didn’t attempt to eat the cereal. It seemed confused by the food, as though it had once known what it was for but had now forgotten. Pulpy arms crashed into the table sending the bowl flying, but Alan just laughed.
“Spider-daughter-spider,” he sang softly to himself, remembering snatches of Katie’s old nursery rhymes. “With a spider’s heart inside ‘er.”
For the next few days Alan watched Spider-Daughter’s progress around the house with great interest. It moved around in a waddling little half-run, propelling itself from the sofa to the coffee table and back again. Once or twice it blundered into the television and Alan had to steer it away gently.
“You’re drying out,” he told it, but he still rubbed his hands on his jeans with a frown.
It drooled continually and had an apparently insatiable need to put things in its rudimentary mouth, but any food Alan gave it would just come out again, significantly damper. One evening he sat on the sofa watching telly while the Spider-Daughter sat next to him, its little toes of ash pointed at the ceiling. When a commercial break came on the Spider-Daughter began to chatter excitedly and wriggle in the seat.
“What is it?”
“Fgh! Hurg en eh eh!”
“Do you like the adverts? Well, you’re the only one.”
“Rggh en!”
As they sat in the twilight of the sitting room, Alan felt a small semblance of comfort settle upon his heart. In the flickering light of the telly, it was possible to imagine that the small shape pressed to his side was Katie.
“Would you… would you like to read a book?”
He knew he would get no intelligible answer, so he reached down between the cushions and pulled out the picture book he knew was there. He’d spotted it before but hadn’t the heart to remove it. Opening the book on his lap he began to turn the stiff cardboard pages, naming each colourful farm animal as he had once done with his daughter.
“There’s the cow, see? With her black and white hide and her pink udders. And there’s the duck, with his orange beak. What does the duck say?”
“Grrghh!”
“There’s a good girl.”
That night, instead of shutting her in the kitchen where she couldn’t cause too much damage, Alan carried Spider-Daughter up to Katie’s room, and tucked her into the small bed. Spider-Daughter thrashed around, kicking off the covers and creasing up the under-sheet, but Alan smoothed them both back out again, pressing the edge of the duvet into the small gap between the bed and the wall. After a few minutes of repeating this process, Spider-Daughter seemed to get the idea, and lay still. Whether she slept or not, Alan couldn’t tell; she had no eyes to close, after all. But when he got up and turned off the light, she didn’t stir.
The next morning Alan woke with a sense of purpose. He had a long, hot shower, shaved the salt and pepper bristles off his chin, and then set to tidying up the house. He gathered together all the accumulated rubbish of takeaway dinners and cheap lager cans and by the afternoon he’d filled up four bin bags worth. In the kitchen and living room he wiped down all the surfaces, taking care not to look too closely at the smears on the kitchen table, and retrieved the vacuum cleaner from its dusty home under the stairs. When he’d finished the place wasn’t exactly sparkling, but it no longer resembled a fetid cave.
He ventured back upstairs and went into Katie’s room. Spider-Daughter was awake and apparently feeling energetic. She had pulled down all the toys from Katie’s shelves and all the clothes from her miniature set of drawers. These items were now strewn across the floor, many covered in a thick layer of drool. Alan smiled indulgently.
“What have you been up too, you cheeky monkey?”
“Rghh hfhf.”
The liquid that ran from her mouth looked thicker today, more sluggish.
“Would you like some lunch?”
Alan cooked them both toasted cheese sandwiches with ham and brown sauce. Spider-Daughter mashed hers into a kind of paste and spread it across the table, pushing the yellowish material through her ragged fingers. It reminded Alan of how he had made her, but in truth thinking about that now made him feel ill, so he concentrated on pouring himself another glass of orange juice.
“Oh, lovely spider-daughter of mine, on toasted cheese this day you shall dine.”
“Hogh. En eh. Ees.”
“That’s right. There’s a good girl. Eat it all up now.”
After that they watched telly on the sofa, until Spider-Daughter got restless and rolled off the cushions to scurry about on the floor. In the evening Alan decided to give her a bath. With Katie this had always been something of a battle, and he or Pamela would emerge soaking wet from a spirited campaign of splashing, but when he lowered Spider-Daughter into the moderately warm water she began to shriek in a way that made all the hairs on the back of Alan’s neck stand on end. It was a terrible, tearing sound that held no resemblance to any noise he’d ever heard a human make, and he hurriedly lifted her back out again, cursing.
Once he’d placed her stubby feet back on the tiles she ran off into the hallway, making harsh coughing noises. The water in the bath contained swirls of dark, oily dirt, even though she had touched it very briefly. He pulled the plug and watched the water drain away. No more baths, then.
The next morning her toys were once again scattered here and there across her bedroom floor, but when Alan bent to retrieve them he found that her drool had partially stuck them to the carpet. The blue plastic pony he was trying to rescue only came away from the floor with a soft sucking noise.
“You must be more careful with your toys.”
“Engh hurg hfft.”
He carried her downstairs in his arms, gently stroking the back of her greasy head.
“Spider-daughter, daughter-spider,” he sung under his breath. “The soul of a spider nestled inside ‘er. Who would have known it could bring her alive-a? Spider-daughter, daughter-spider.”
Pleased with himself, Alan put her down in the hallway, where she immediately ran to his shoes and began to drool on them. The saliva was now thick enough that it looked almost white, like the stuff that he used to see on privet bushes as a kid. His mother used to call it “pigeon spit”.
“What was that?” he said to the back of Spider-Daughter’s head. She didn’t acknowledge his voice but instead continued trying to cover his best loafers in drool. “I mean, I don’t think it actually was pigeon spit. That’s just one of those things you hear when you’re a kid that you don’t think about properly, isn’t it?”
Eventually he removed her from the pile of shoes before she could ruin them all and took her into the living room to watch telly with him. An hour or so later, the phone rang in the middle of a crime drama he’d bee
n looking forward to. Alan snatched up the phone irritably and was surprised to hear Pamela on the other end.
“How are you?” she said. Her voice was pinched and tense. Alan sensed that she didn’t want to be making the call but had talked herself into it, probably believing it was the right thing to do.
“I’m brilliant,” he replied, and a great deal more bitterness seeped into his words than he’d intended. “Best I’ve been for a long time. In fact, I can hardly recall when I’ve been this happy.”
“Alan.” Her voice was suddenly free of strained good intentions. “Do grow up. I’m just calling to…”
“To what? Tell me you’ve made a big mistake? That you’re coming back?”
“Alan…”
“Because unless it’s that, I can’t see what we could possibly have to talk about.” On the sofa Spider-Daughter was looking up at him. Or at least, her face was turned toward him.
“Jim called me and said you hadn’t been into work. Your sick leave only covers so much, and he’s starting to get worried.”
“Jim! Jim’s worried about me?” Alan could feel bile rising at the back of his throat. “So worried about me he’s phoning you up. What about Katie? Is Katie missing her daddy?”
The sudden change in direction flustered Pamela. He could hear it in her indrawn breath.
“Don’t say that, Alan, this is hard on all of us. Katie most of all, and I won’t have you emotionally blackmailing…”
“Chance’d be a fine thing! I don’t even get to see my daughter anymore. How is that fair, Pam?”
“I can tell there’s no point in talking to you when you’re like this.” In the brief seconds before his wife put the phone down, Alan thought he could hear Katie laughing somewhere in the background, but he no longer knew for certain.
The next day he found he couldn’t remove her toys from the floor at all, at least not without using some sort of solvent and potentially ruining the carpet. The saliva had hardened into a sticky covering the colour of watery milk, so that several unrecognizable white lumps now clung to the floor like limpets. He noticed too that the frilly pink curtains were also covered in the stuff, turning them into stiff discoloured folds. The windowsill was out of reach to Spider-Daughter’s outstretched arms, so he wondered how she was getting up there to drool on the curtains at all.
That evening he found out.
They were crowded on the sofa again watching a film that Alan had seen at least twice before when he decided to treat himself to another beer. When he came back from the kitchen with the frosty bottle in one hand, Spider-Daughter had left the sofa and was now crouched in the upper corner of the living-room wall, her small dirty hands pressed to the ceiling. She peered down at him through sightless eyes and made a high pitched chittering noise in the back of her throat. He hadn’t heard her make such a sound before.
The cold from his beer bottle seemed to travel rapidly up one arm and down the other, waking goose-flesh all across his back and shoulder blades. In some distant, well-ignored part of his mind something was writhing, demanding to be heard, but he pushed it away firmly.
“Come down from there,” he said. “You’ll get the walls dirty.”
It was around three days after the phone call from Pamela that Alan noticed the hamster was missing.
He’d been putting more food into the little cage in the hallway every day, and had changed the water when he remembered, but the creature normally ignored him and hid inside the colourful plastic house. It was only when he noticed that the sunflower seeds, normally Pika’s favourite, were still all in their shells that he thought to pick the little house up and give it a shake. The hamster wasn’t in there, nor in the glass jar it urinated in, nor in fact anywhere else in the cage.
His first thought wasn’t that Katie would be upset when she realised her pet had escaped, although that was in the back of his mind. He was more concerned with how the animal had got out. He was normally very good at remembering to close the door on the cage.
From the sitting room he could hear Spider-Daughter moving about, making the small guttural noises that passed for her attempts at speech. Every now and then he would catch her on the walls and ceiling again, and once he found her on top of the French dresser, covered in cobwebs. She had been sitting there with the soft grey material draped across her face, not brushing it off with her hands as anyone else might, but simply tolerating its ghostly touch and watching him.
Now, in the shady hallway, he thought of her scampering across the ceiling, the dry whisper of feet touching plaster that had never been touched by feet before. She was a marvel, really.
Leaving the bag of hamster food on the telephone table, Alan walked swiftly up the stairs, not stopping to think about anything too closely. He opened the door to Spider Daughter’s room and paused.
It looked a little like a cave now. The thick milk-coloured mucus covered most of the surfaces, turning the bedcovers, carpet and curtains into something alien; stiff and misshapen. The delicate and cheery pastel shades of the room were overwhelmed with the stuff, turning it gloomy and dark. Even the window wasn’t immune from the substance, and only a little light could penetrate the smeared glass. Deep inside Alan a voice was shouting, trying to be heard over the pillowing silence of the Spider-Daughter room; he ignored it easily.
“Spider-Daughter, Spider-Daughter, if you weren’t so quick you’d never have caught her.”
There was movement in the room. By the bedside table, a shape about the size of a crisp packet was hanging suspended between the lamp and the bedpost on a slimy network of fibres, and it was vibrating irregularly. He was just reaching out for it when Spider-Daughter appeared next to him, clambering across the bed on all fours. He hadn’t heard her come up the stairs, but then she probably hadn’t used them.
“Hergh nn enh.”
“What’s that, honey?”
As he watched she reached out for the trembling parcel with soot-ash hands, and began to peel away the thick mucus strands. There was something that had once been furry inside, and when she put pieces of it in her mouth, she swallowed them without any difficulty.
“Well. That’s solves one mystery at least.” Unable to look away, Alan watched her consume the rest of the family pet. “Spider-Daughter, Spider-Daughter, my little girl don’t eat what she ought-a.”
That night Alan lay in bed staring at the ceiling. There were soft chittering noises coming from down the hall and he could hear Spider-Daughter scurrying about the walls. When he was little, he’d lived in a very old house in the countryside, and when he tried to sleep he would sometimes hear the scratching of rats in the walls behind his headboard. It had never made for a restful sleep, and as he lay there in the dark he felt like the rats were nesting in his heart, biting away little pieces until it was so much easier to let things happen and to not care about anything.
When he awoke the next morning, bright sunshine was streaming through the windows, caressing his face with warm hands. Feeling cheerier than he had in days, Alan knocked on Spider-Daughter’s door as he passed.
“Come on sleepy head, it’s breakfast time.”
There was a series of growls and coughs in response.
Downstairs, Alan was halfway through cooking a big pan of scrambled eggs when the doorbell chimed. Turning the heat off and whistling a song under his breath, Alan walked down the hallway. He was in such a good mood that he didn’t pause to look through the peephole, and he swept the door open carelessly. Pamela stood on the doorstep, with Katie at her knee. Katie was wearing her little purple rucksack, the one she took with her when they went on holiday.
“Hello, Alan.” Pamela looked pale and the rims of her eyelids were red.
“Pam?” Alan felt like his brain had stalled. The sight of his wife and daughter on the doorstep seemed utterly improbable.
“I’m not here to reconcile,” Pam held one hand up; palm outwards as if warding her husband off. “I just think Katie needs a bit of time with her Dad, all r
ight?”
“But…”
“Or have I come at a bad time?” Just like that the ice was back in her voice, if in fact it ever went away.
“No, of course not.”
Alan looked down into his daughter’s upturned face. She looked strange with eyes.
“Then I’ll pick her up tomorrow morning.”
Pamela gave Katie a gentle shove and the little girl walked into the house swinging her rucksack by the strap. Alan closed the door.
“Hello, Daddy,” said Katie.
“Hello S- Katie.”
There was a period of silence.
“Can I go up to my room and play?”
“How about a bit later?”
Katie stuck out her lower lip, and Alan was struck by how much she looked like her mother.
“I want to play with my toys. Mummy said I could bring some more home with me today if I wanted.”
“This is your home.” Katie’s frown deepened.
“That’s not what Mummy says.”
In the end, Alan carried Katie up to her room, singing a little song under his breath. Katie told him that she didn’t like songs about spiders, but he just nodded and smiled. When he opened the door both Katie and Spider-Daughter went quiet, regarding each other for the first time. Katie hung back, pressing into Alan’s legs, but just like her Mum he gave her an encouraging push forward, and pulled the door shut behind her.
“Rgh hurgh, fft!”
“Spider-Daughter, Daughter-Spider, keeps her dinner in sacks, keeps her dinner inside ‘er.”
Alan rushed down the stairs. The eggs would be ruined.
The End.
On the Horizon
Gary Fry
In exchange for a sticky lolly, John tossed a coin at Patrick. It landed on his groin, causing him to jerk extravagantly.
“Ooh,” he said, rubbing parts that bulged and squirmed. “I won’t be doing it with no girls now!”
For Gareth, the conversation had just taken an arousing turn. To combat this, he considered correcting his fellow pupil’s grammar, but that would surely only hinder his attempt to make new friends. Then he heard his mum’s voice in his head: When people behave badly, it’s often because they’re not aware of an alternative. So tell them what that is!