Shadowsmith

by Ross Mackenzie

  They came closer and closer, and just when it seemed they were going to swarm him, they stopped, each and every one of them, as if an invisible wall was preventing them from moving any further. The spiders gathered in a ring around him, prodding at the air with their legs, twitching angrily.

  Despite the icy fear in his chest, Kirby looked at the hazel twig in his hands and laughed. He kissed it, grasping it so tightly his knuckles turned the colour of bone.

  Thank you Amelia Pigeon!

  All at once there was an angry rushing sound, a blast of cold air, and spiders began to pour in from the window, hundreds of them: a waterfall of inky creatures flooding his room.

  Kirby yelped and jumped inside his little circle. He could do nothing but watch, his hand over his mouth, his eyes wide, as the tide of spiders rose. They crawled over everything – his bookcase, his bed, his computer desk – and they clambered on top of each other, layer upon layer, until his entire room was coated in a seething black mass.

  All but a little island of carpet, on which Kirby Simpson stood stranded, alone in a sea of nightmares.

  Alone in the Dark

  Kirby’s first thought was to yell for his dad, but he quickly got over that. He would not put anyone else in danger.

  His second thought was Amelia Pigeon. She knew about the spiders, knew how to deal with them. Maybe somehow she’d know he was in trouble. Maybe she was on her way to help.

  “They won’t come inside the circle,” she’d told him. “Whatever you do, don’t step outside it.”

  Kirby nodded to himself. “Stay inside the circle,” he repeated over and over.

  It was more difficult than it sounded. The ring of spiders was tightly wrapped around him. He wished he’d drawn a bigger circle, one in which he could at least sit comfortably. As it was, there was barely enough space to sit cross-legged.

  The second problem – quite a biggie when you thought about it – was that Amelia Pigeon hadn’t told him what to do after he was inside the circle. Was it a case of waiting the spiders out? Hoping they’d lose interest? He stole a glance up at them; they stared intently back, green eyes blazing. Somehow he didn’t see that happening.

  Should he ask them what they wanted? Try and negotiate? That’s what the police would do in the movies he’d seen. But they weren’t dealing with a horde of nightmare spiders, were they?

  As a multitude of thoughts passed through his mind the spiders watched and waited, and Kirby clung desperately to his knees to stop himself toppling out of the circle. He lost all sense of time in the dark. Each tick of the clock was a forever.

  And then, as the night grew darkest, the dry scratch of the spiders’ legs became a whisper, and a voice as arid as a desert spoke to him.

  “She’s leaving you,” it said.

  At first Kirby did not understand. But the voice went on, “Your mother – she wants to leave.”

  “Shut up,” said Kirby.

  “If she wanted to stay with you, why is she lying in a bed letting it beat her?”

  Kirby’s throat clogged with anger, his eyes began to burn. “She’s fighting as much as she can.”

  “Not enough,” said the voice of the spiders. “You’re angry at her, aren’t you? Angry that she’s going away…”

  “I’m not!” said Kirby. But anger was bubbling in him. The spiders were right: part of him, the selfish part, had been upset with Mum. Why couldn’t she just wake up? What was stopping her? Didn’t she want to come back to him?

  “Your dad doesn’t know you. He’ll never understand a silly boy who’s scared of the sea. You’ll be a big weight round his neck… you’ll drown him…”

  “Go away!” yelled Kirby. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to make me leave the circle. I won’t!”

  “We’re telling the truth,” said the voice of the spiders. “You know we’re right.”

  The words were like broken glass, stabbing at Kirby, making him wince. He wiped the tears from his eyes, and as he did he noticed the first rays of dawn squeezing through the gap in his curtains, splashing on the floor.

  A wave of anger crept through the sea of spiders.

  Kirby looked from the spiders to the sunlight and back. “You don’t like the sun, do you?”

  Daylight was creeping further into the room. Kirby heard his dad, who was always up with the sun, moving around in the bathroom.

  “This is not finished,” said the spiders. “You are ours, Kirby Simpson. It’s just a matter of time.”

  Kirby blinked, and the spiders vanished.

  He dropped to his knees and closed his eyes. “Thank you.” He lay on his belly and kissed the small patch of carpet that had been his island. “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank—”

  The bedroom door creaked open.

  Kirby looked up, his lips still puckered.

  Dad stood in the doorway wearing an expression that said, I wish I understood my son.

  “Toast’ll be waiting, pal,” he said, and he turned with a shrug and walked away.

  An Invitation to Certain Death… Maybe

  The toast was indeed waiting, piled high on a plate on the kitchen table. Kirby searched through the blackened slices for a piece that was less burnt than the others. The quality of toast in the household had gone downhill since Mum’s accident. He spread some raspberry jam on what was basically a piece of charcoal, took one bite, and quickly washed it down with a glug of orange juice.

  “Have you phoned the hospital yet?” he asked.

  Dad looked up from his toast. There were dark circles around his eyes, and Kirby thought he looked much older than he had a few weeks ago.

  “Aye. No change. I suppose no news is good news though, eh?”

  They sat in silence for a while.

  “So,” Dad pushed his toast around his plate, “are you… you know…” He shook his head, struggling to find the words he wanted. “How are you, Kirby?”

  In his head, Kirby said, How am I? How do you think I am, Dad? Mum is in a coma and we don’t know if she’ll ever wake up. I probably have more in common with the lobsters you catch than I do with you. Oh! And by the way, I’ve just spent the entire night trying not to be killed by some sort of talking, mutant, man-eating spiders!

  Out loud he said, “I’m fine. Really, Dad. Don’t worry.”

  Dad stood up and squeezed Kirby’s shoulders with hands that felt like stone. He shrugged his bodywarmer on.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll only be ten minutes. Putting an ad up in the post office. We need someone running the boat until… until Mum wakes up. Lobsters aren’t going to catch themselves, are they?” His face crumpled, and in that moment Kirby could see his dad was struggling to hold everything together, to run the house, and his lobster boat, and be there for Mum, and for Kirby.

  Maybe the spiders were right. Maybe it was too much. What if he didn’t want to look after Kirby by himself? What if Kirby was nothing but a big weight around his neck, choking him? Kirby wanted to run over and hug him, to explain all of his fears and hear his dad say everything would be OK.

  But he didn’t. He just let him go, and watched from the kitchen window until Dad disappeared round the bend, up the steep winding road towards the main street. Then Kirby turned to look the other way, down the hill to the harbour, and saw an unmistakable yellow raincoat coming round the corner. Amelia Pigeon waved at him cheerfully as she walked up the hill.

  Kirby rushed to the front door to meet her.

  “Oh good,” she said. “You’re still alive.”

  “Yeah. Hello. There are some questions I really want to ask you.”

  Amelia’s eyes widened. “The spiders came, didn’t they?”

  “How did you know what would happen?”

  “Somebody has to know.” She looked quite pleased with herself. “Guess what else? I found the nest!”

  Thinking about a nest full of those things made Kirby itch.

  “We should tell someone. T
he police… or the army. They could torch ’em with flame-throwers! Blow them up with missiles…” Kirby stopped when he saw the pitying look on Amelia Pigeon’s face.

  And then it dawned on him. It was obvious, really, when he thought about it.

  “Nobody else can see the spiders, can they?” he asked. “Just you and me. That’s why they want me gone.”

  Amelia’s eyes lit up, large and green. “You’re beginning to catch on.”

  “So why can I see them? I’m mental, aren’t I? I knew it…”

  “You’re not mental,” said Amelia. “Just tuned in to the right channel. Or the wrong one, depending on how you see it.” She half closed her eyes again, like she’d done the night they met, and looked him up and down as if she was measuring him. “I’m going to get rid of the nest. You want to come?”

  “How are you going to get rid of it?” said Kirby.

  “Let me worry about that bit. But I might need you to bring me back. Sometimes it takes a lot out of me.” Amelia looked very serious, and her eyes seemed to grow older, deeper. “The spiders,” she said, “are just the start. There’s worse to come. Things you couldn’t imagine, not even in your worst nightmares.”

  Kirby stared at this strange girl in her yellow raincoat. “Who are you?”

  Amelia smiled. “You know all those stories about phantoms and bogeymen and things that go bump in the night? They’re true, Kirby. They’re real. But even monsters have to be scared of something. And that something is me.”

  Kirby felt a strange sort of charge in the air as she spoke.

  “Well, whoever you are, I don’t know how you think I’ll be able to help,” he said. “I’m nothing special. I’m just me.”

  “Ha!” said Amelia. “‘Just me’ indeed! I know all about you, Kirby Simpson.” She poked his chest with a finger. “I see what you’ve got in there. And I know you’re hurting. I know you’re having a hard time of it. Maybe an adventure isn’t the worst thing that could happen right now, mmm?”

  It was a glorious day. The sun was climbing through the endless sky, shattering in fragments upon the waves. The clean air filled Kirby’s lungs, tasted of salt and, this morning, of something else, something far away and exotic, something that made his heart beat faster, made him stand taller.

  Adventure.

  “I’ll get dressed,” he said.

  Into the Dark

  Twenty minutes later they were walking past the harbour, pinching their noses at the stink of lobster creels cooking in the summer heat.

  “Where’s the nest?” asked Kirby.

  “Not far,” said Amelia in a bright voice. She was marching just ahead of him. Kirby stared at the back of her head.

  “Just now, at my house, you said you know I’m having a hard time. How do you know?”

  She shrugged. “Just do. I know stuff. For example: Mrs Coppershot, the old lady who stays on Harbour Street next door to you? Talks to her garden gnomes.”

  Kirby scoffed. “She does not!”

  “And she has names for them all. The one with the orange hat is Mr Wibbles. The little one with the fishing rod is Fishy McSqueak.”

  “Are you serious?” said Kirby through a laugh.

  “Cross my heart.”

  Kirby’s smile vanished. “So you know about Mum then?”

  Amelia slowed so that they were side by side. She fixed him with bright green eyes and nodded. “I know she was hurt during the storm.”

  “She works in the library,” said Kirby. “It’s a really old building. The roof fell in on top of her. Can you help her?” The question spilled from his lips before he could give it any thought, and he felt foolish.

  Amelia smiled at him, but the smile was sad around the edges. “There’s some journeys must be walked alone, Kirby.” She was quiet for a moment. “But she’s not gone. Not yet. You remember that.”

  On they walked, through the hole in the harbour wall, down the rough rock steps to Ruby Cove, a crescent of steep red cliffs towering over a thin strip of sand. They followed the beach as far as they could, to where the foot of the cliffs stretched out towards the sea in a vein of craggy red rocks. Everything smelled of sunshine and sand. Amelia climbed over the rocks and dropped out of sight.

  On the other side of the rocks the sea was lapping against a small rowing boat covered in peeling red paint and hardened gull droppings. Amelia was already inside, sitting with an oar in each hand.

  Kirby stared at the boat. His stomach shrunk to about the size of a grape. “I don’t like the sea.”

  Amelia looked all around. “Ha! You picked the perfect place to grow up then, eh? Can you swim?”

  “Yeah,” said Kirby. “I mean. I’m OK down the leisure centre. But the sea… it’s big and deep and you never know what’s swimming under you.”

  “Well you won’t have to go in the actual water.” Amelia frowned. “Unless they chew a hole through the boat. Hadn’t thought of that.”

  Kirby hoped she was joking, but suspected not.

  “I’m leaving in ten seconds,” she said, “whether you’re on this boat or not.” She reached down into the boat and tossed him a life jacket.

  “How far is it?”

  “Seven seconds… six…”

  Kirby scrambled into the life jacket, wondering why he was even thinking about going along. His fear of deep water was one of the things that sometimes made him think there’d been a mix-up at the hospital, and that he secretly belonged to another family.

  “Three…

  two…

  one…”

  Kirby leapt off the rocks, landing with a thud in the boat, which bobbed and rocked under him.

  “Good,” said Amelia with a bright smile. She untied the boat from a crag in the rock and off they set.

  She was a surprisingly strong rower, cutting through the water with ease. “Nice and calm today.”

  “Is it?” Kirby was fighting the urge to vomit over the side.

  ***

  They’d been out for maybe twenty minutes when Amelia looked over her shoulder and nodded. “There.”

  It was a sea cave. The entrance was narrow, but Amelia had no trouble guiding the boat in. She stopped just inside the mouth. “You OK?”

  Kirby stared past her, into the blackness. Memories of the spiders scuttled across his mind. He began to shiver. Amelia let the oars rest on the boat and took his hands.

  “You listen here. Being brave isn’t about not feeling afraid. Being brave is admitting you’re frightened, and standing up to it.”

  The touch of her hands was warm. Kirby sat up a little straighter. “What do we need to do?”

  “Just get me out of here once it’s done. Don’t panic, don’t try to wake me if I pass out. Got it?”

  Kirby nodded.

  Then Amelia Pigeon picked up the oars and began to row, and they were swallowed by the waiting dark.

  Pest Control

  “Here,” said Amelia, handing Kirby a torch. He flicked it on, and a reassuring beam of clean light cut through the cave.

  The winding path of the cavern led them deeper.

  “How far back does it go?”

  Amelia did not answer. A change had come over her; her eyes had taken on a deep, serious quality again, a fierce look of wisdom and confidence. The air around the boat seemed to crackle.

  As Kirby shone the flashlight around, things scurried on the cave walls.

  Around another few bends, Amelia slowed, letting the boat drift and bringing the oars up. “Switch the torch off,” she said.

  “We’ll be blind.”

  “Switch it off, boy.”

  Kirby gripped the torch tight. A familiar sound filled his ears, dry and creeping, like dead leaves in the breeze, and the stench of rot was thick in the air. He flicked the torch off, and to his surprise he could still see. Amelia had steered them to an underground chamber, bathed in a faint green glow.

  The nest was hanging above them.

  It was huge and spherical, constructed fr
om strands of webbing that gave off a sickly greenish light. Something inside the nest moved, something very big and very heavy, causing the nest to quiver and swing.

  “What’s inside?” he asked.

  “Hopefully we won’t find out. Now be quiet and let me think.”

  All around the nest, criss-crossing in uncountable tangles and knots, were glowing webs, each belonging to a spider. There were thousands of them. Tens of thousands. They flickered and seemed to change shape constantly, flitting between spider form and something else, something squirming and hungry.

  There were things caught in the webs. Things from the world Kirby knew: bats and birds wrapped in glowing silk, half eaten.

  The dark was shattered by a short burst of sound, a screeching scream coming from inside the nest. It made Kirby cover his ears, made his legs buckle.

  Silence.

  He stared up at the nest and almost fell back when he caught sight of something shifting inside, something huge and many-legged. Its shining eyes, hundreds of them, sparkled in the glow of the nest. Whatever the spiders were, and they were not spiders, not really, this thing in the nest was the worst of them.

  “What now?”

  Amelia reached into her yellow raincoat and pulled out her hazel twig. She leaned over the edge of the rowing boat, dipped the tip of the twig into the water, and dragged it all the way round the boat.

  As soon as she was done the creatures came.

  They dropped from their webs, all glowing and flickering. They hung around the boat in a pulsing curtain of silk.

  Kirby screamed, and the twitching curtain closed in. His heartbeat was pounding in his ears, his body numb with fear and cold. He tried to breathe, found himself choking, gasping for clean air.

  Amelia grabbed him by the shoulders. “Don’t let them into your head!”

  Kirby looked into her eyes, and felt a spark of relief warm his chest. She wasn’t frightened – she could handle this.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “Just don’t do anything stupid, like fall in the water.”