by Tom Pollock
‘Wow, that’s some impressive power of observation you got there …’
‘I’m not finding this reassuring, Fil.’
She’d taken to shortening ‘Filius’ to ‘Fil’ – as though being on single-syllable terms could tame this wild boy with the sharp bones and the soot-smeared skin. He’d led her into an ordinary scratched-to-hell BT Payphone on the High Street, picked up the handset and hesitated. When she’d asked him if he needed change, he’d given her a half-smile, as if at her naïveté. ‘That’s not how they’ll want payin’,’ he’d said.
He had put the receiver to his mouth and then somehow imitated the clicks and buzzes that you got on a line with really bad reception. He’d stopped and listened for a bit, then hung up, looking satisfied.
Then he’d led her around the corner into the alley and here she was, eyeball to eyeball with a spider the size of a small car.
‘Remind me why we have to do this again?’ she said. The thing’s eyes were like glittering pits of ash.
‘Communications.’ He didn’t look away from the creature as he answered. ‘There’s no point having an army if you can’t talk to it.’ He edged closer towards it.
‘O-kay,’ Beth said. There was a hesitancy in the way he was approaching the beast she really didn’t like. An uncomfortable prickle ran up her neck. ‘And – sorry if this a daft question – but why are we creeping towards it like we’re scared it’s going to eat us?’
The look he shot her said, You really want me to answer that?
He laid a hand on the spider’s head. It went all fuzzy, like a TV picture with bad reception, then blurred back into solidity and crept down off its wire. Fil visibly relaxed. He beckoned Beth forward.
Proud that she was managing to keep the trembling to a minimum, she reached out to the thing. The spider’s skin was cool and smooth. The voices coming from it grew louder and she could feel snatches of conversation pulse around her head.
‘Love you, honey,’ they were saying, and
‘Good luck today! I’m proud of you,’ and
‘Can’t wait to see you tonight.’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you.’
Dozens of accents, male and female voices, all one on top of another, full of love and affection, thrummed around her skull. Beth felt her heart swell to them. Embarrassed warmth touched her ears and she realised she was smiling.
Dizziness washed over her and she felt like she would fall, but the spider extended a blade-like limb to catch her. It pulled her closer into its abdomen – closer to the voices.
‘I love you,’ they whispered.
‘Hey!’ Fil rapped the spider sharply on its carapace with his railing. ‘None of that!’
The voices faded again to background noise and Beth’s head cleared. She shuddered. ‘What was that?’ she breathed. The spider’s leg sat cool as steel across her stomach. She pushed at it, but it didn’t budge.
‘Fil!’ she protested.
‘Overzealous little—’ he muttered. He leaned right into the spider until their foreheads were touching. ‘Stow that, you little shite-picker. You get me?’
The thing buzzed static.
‘Yeah, I’ll bet you were just trying to relax her.’ He snorted. ‘Do that again and I’ll relax you: permanently. Onto the biggest bit of card I can lay my hands on.’
The creature bent its forelegs, apparently in submission.
He looked up at Beth. ‘You okay?’
Beth met his gaze. Her heart was thundering and she felt like she was going to be sick, but all she could hear were his words, back at the bridge: Is there any way you wouldn’t be a liability? She wouldn’t show fear. ‘I’m fine.’
Fil leaned close to the spider and whispered to it, and a forelimb coiled around him too. When he didn’t struggle Beth steadied herself. For an instant, she glimpsed her face, distorted in the curve of the spider’s massive exoskeleton – and then the giant spider carried them away, scuttling up and over the phone lines at a speed that left her last breath stranded behind her in the air.
Houses, streets, factories, cars, all streaked past below them: distorted light and roaring, rushing noise. Filius, across from her, became grainy and faded away, and Beth felt her own body fizzing and saw her hand dissolve into pixels. She was breathless, but moment by moment she grew less afraid. The pulse of the spider soothed her.
All sense of motion dissipated. Time changed. The city lost definition, became dark and blurry. What was real, what was vivid, was the web: cables twisted between the shadowy buildings and ran underground, shining as they crisscrossed the urban darkness, alive with chattering voices.
A shape rose on the horizon: a slim steel tower, all blazing light and sound, rising from a hill in the south of the city. The strands of the web converged on it. It grew steadily, shining, blotting out the sky, burning her sight into nothingness. The murmur of a million conversations swelled to a roar—
—then there was blackness. The light was extinguished like a dowsed match; the voices were silenced. Beth lurched forward and caught herself on a metal banister. Chill air buffeted her and she groped around as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. She was up high.
Really high.
She was standing on a platform on a metal tower. It took her a second to recognise the interweaving metal struts of the Crystal Palace radio mast. The city, hundreds of feet below, glimmered like a firefly army in the darkness.
‘I’m on Cryst—’ She fought for breath and her skin tingled at the sheer lack of anything between her and the drop. ‘I’m on Crystal Palace Tower? That’s—That’s actually beautiful.’ Hysterical laughter bubbled out of her as she realised how far they’d come.
Spiders no bigger than you’d find in your house flickered in and out of existence all around her, crawling everywhere, fussing at bales of wire and satellite dishes with their sharp limbs. The spider that had carried them shivered and then splintered into hundreds of smaller eight-legged bodies, which quickly vanished into the teeming mass.
Beth shuddered at their skittering movements and the wagging of their tiny glassy heads. As her ears adjusted, the wind began to sound more and more like voices, submerged in static: waves of crackling conversation.
Fil rubbed feeling back into his limbs. He peered upwards into the tower’s upper reaches. ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘She don’t know you, and you won’t wanna know her.’ He hesitated, his face pinched, worried-looking. ‘Be careful, right?’ he said. ‘I got us an amnesty with the Motherweb for the chat, but the kids here’ – he indicated the milling arachnids – ‘they can be a little keen. But they only eat voices, so keep your mouth shut and you should be fine.’
He tested a strut with his bare foot, and then he began to scramble rapidly up the inside of the structure, as surefooted as a spider himself, until he was lost to sight.
Beth hugged herself. A sense of freedom went through her like a chill. She thought of the people she knew in the city below, and she wondered if she’d ever see them again. You were warned this could kill you, B, she reminded herself. You already said your goodbyes.
She faltered. B. Why had she called herself that? Only one person ever addressed her with that kind of lazy familiarity. And then she was thinking of Pen, and there was an ache in her chest, a longing, a desperate desire to share this view, this sight that no one ever saw. She hurriedly shoved it down.
The height was making her queasy, so she turned to look inwards – and noticed the bundle. It was about five feet high and maybe three across: a bale of steel wires, hanging down from a strut above her like a fat metal wasp’s nest. Something thin dangled from the bottom of it. She frowned and stepped in for a closer look.
It was a shoelace.
A tightness gripped Beth’s chest and she became aware of the bundle’s dimensions in a new and horrible way. She reached out and her fingertips brushed it, set it swinging in empty space.
The spiders chittered and i
gnored her.
Swearing softly, she grabbed the struts and began to climb towards the bundle. Her hand slipped on rainwaterslick steel and her stomach lurched, but she pulled herself tight to the metal again.
Easy, Beth, she admonished herself. You’ve climbed worse than this to tag a bloody rooftop.
As she drew level with the top of the bundle she saw a few strands of red hair poking between the wires, drifting like seaweed in the breeze. There were gaps between the metal threads and Beth made out a face: a girl, not much older than she was. The collar of her coat was street-stained. Cobwebs were matted over her eyesockets. A fat cable extruded from her mouth, and Beth almost gagged at the way her throat stretched around it.
Tinny voices bled into the air, as though leaking from the wires stuffed into the girl’s ears:
We love you. Home, safe from harm. Safe. Never, never hurt you.
The red-headed girl’s eyes were not quite shut and her eyelids flickered in time to their words.
They eat voices. Beth remembered Fil’s words as the spider-calls swirled in the air. The cable in the girl’s mouth flexed obscenely, as though milking the sound from her throat.
Beth reached out and grasped the cable. Everything became nightmare-slow as she pulled it free.
The girl’s eyes snapped open. As the end of the cable left her mouth she screamed.
We love you we love you we love we love you we love you we love you we love we love you we love you …
The spiders turned instantly, order emerging from their chaotic motion. They swept over the metal in a glittering wave. Before Beth could even think they were crawling on her knuckles, through her hair, their needle-feet pricking her scalp and the skin over her breastbone. She lost control and shrieked, but a pair of pincer-jaws pierced the skin of her throat and the sound in her throat dried up as though it had been siphoned off.
The spiders marched over her shoulders towards her ears. Beth could see them spinning out threads of wire from their abdomens. Their static-voices swelled to fever-pitch.
We love you we love you we love we love you we love you …
Their stolen words pulsed around her mind, suffocating her terror like morphine. Desperately, she tried to hold onto her fear, the true emotion, the only sane thing to feel, but she could feel it being drowned under the love of the spiders.
She waved her free arm desperately, slapping at them, crushing a handful, which vanished in a crackle of static.
We love you, the voices snapped viciously, but you made everything worse.
The thought pierced her like a lance. She sagged, dizzy and exhausted, against the metal. Her terror felt like a very distant thing now.
Something flickered in the air: a grey shape dropped through the tower’s hollow core towards her. A bony arm took her hard in the gut and she plummeted, barely aware of herself, barely conscious of the fall.
Beth looked up in a daze to find Fil holding her. He was shouting at her, his face livid—
—but no sound came out of his mouth.
We love you we love you we love you we love you: that was all she could hear. Worse, worse, worse.
He sprang from strut to strut, slowing their descent, Beth’s body jolting at every impact until at last they tumbled into the wet grass at the tower’s base.
He leaped to his feet and jabbed his finger at her angrily. At first there was no sound, then his voice began to crackle in his throat. ‘Thames and Riverblood!’ he swore, ‘when I said amnesty, I didn’t mean you could go pulling the plug on their pissing food supply!’
Beth gaped at him. She rose, unsteadily, onto one knee. The spiders’ voices were fading, giving way to nausea as the fright washed back. The red-headed girl’s screaming face blotted out everything else in her mind. ‘There’s someone,’ she gasped, ‘up there—’
‘The ginger girl?’ he said. ‘Yeah, I know. Thankfully, despite your clowning around, I think they’ve managed to reconnect her, so I’ve probably still got a deal with ’em.’
‘A deal?’ Beth yelled at him, her terror sliding into fury. ‘How can you make deals with those things? We have to help her, she’s a prisoner!’
‘Is she?’ His voice was a parody of shock. ‘Way I saw it; she didn’t start screaming until you pulled her loose.’
Beth was incredulous. She opened and closed her mouth a few times before she could find words. ‘You mean she wants to be there?’
‘Why not? Her brain spends every minute sunk in love now, flooded with it. She used to be alone – they always are. That’s how the Motherweb chooses ’em: finds ’em on the street, lost, lonely, cold, last bit of change in their hands to make their last phone calls to people who don’t care. Their desperation’s a kind of beacon to her: she homes in on it, and she offers them her choice.’
‘What happens if they change their minds?’
His face stiffened, but he didn’t look away. ‘It’s a oneoff deal. The Pylon Spiders don’t change their minds.’
Suddenly Beth was seeing her dad, the teeming hive of his grief. She could imagine him weeping with gratitude as a team of spiders dragged a cable to his lips and stuffed his ears with their calming song.
‘That’s crap,’ she snapped. ‘It doesn’t matter how bad it gets, how far down they are: people heal. You can’t just let them bury themselves like that. You can’t let those creatures offer them that choice. They’re just taking bloody advantage!’
The Urchin Prince straightened slowly to his full height. His words burnt with disdain. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘thanks be to Mater Viae that she sent us you to teach us the error of our ways.’
He spat at the ground. ‘Why is it you who gets to decide how much people can take before they want out?’ he asked. ‘Besides, even if you’re right, what about the spiders? They’re an entire species – you think they can’t feel? And think? And bloody love? They can’t eat nothing else, Beth; no matter how you or I might wish they could, they can’t. They need a voice; they don’t get it, they starve. That’s not their fault, and it’s not mine either, so you can stop looking at me like that.’ His voice was flat. ‘There’s more lives at stake here than just the flesh-and-blood ones, the fourlimbed ones, the ones that look like you. You’d better learn that, fast, or you’ll kill our army before Reach even gets his cranes in gear.’
Beth bit her lip and looked down. She could still hear the echoes of the spiders’ sibilant stolen voices. Everything worse. Her mind felt dirty, scraped raw.
He stared at her with narrowed eyes. ‘What did they say to you?’ he said at last. ‘It wasn’t just the usual love songs, was it? What else did they say?’
Beth bit her lip and refused to meet his gaze. She didn’t answer. Dawn was breaking over the distant stubble of the city. He turned and stalked away from the tower without another word.
‘Whose fault is it, then?’ Beth called after him. ‘If it’s not yours, and it’s not theirs, whose fault is it that I’m those things’ prey?’ She leaned bitterly on the word.
He paused. ‘The one who made them that way,’ he said at last. ‘Mater Viae. My mother.’
CHAPTER 12
‘I wondered if I might speak to Parva, please.’
Pen glanced through her bedroom doorway. From her bed she could just make out the open front door downstairs, and a man with a spam-pink bald spot, standing on the top step.
‘I am very sorry, sir,’ her mother said in her sing-song English. ‘She has been very ill. She has not been able to get out of bed.’
Pen looked slowly around her room. She’d been stuck in here for three days now. It smelled like a hospital, and was starting to feel like one too. She’d taken to stashing the lamb samosas her mum had been bringing to her under the bed. ‘Aap ki pasandeenda,’ Mum had said every time, ‘your favourite!’ Pen’s long-fought-for vegetarianism was dismissed in a stunning display of strategic amnesia now that she was trapped at home. She could smell the pastry and the fat in the meat congealing together into one artery-bustin
g torpedo.
She hadn’t read any poetry in days. (Her dad would smack her one if he ever found the copy of Donne stitched into her biology textbook. With typical awkwardness, he’d probably grasp just enough of the old-fashioned English to understand the dirty bits.) She was starting to feel genuinely ill.
‘Could I … Could I possibly nip up and see her then? I wouldn’t take …’ The man’s voice tailed off. He sounded scared – given the face that her mother was likely to be making to such a suggestion, Pen didn’t blame him.
‘Goodbye.’ The door slammed hard.
Pen sat for a few moments, picking at the skin on her fingertips and on the palms of her hands. Her skin barely hurt any more as it curled away like pencil sharpenings. The lower layer was shockingly pink against her normal tea colour. Soon there would be no skin left that had touched anything the week before. Of course it would have rubbed off and become dust eventually anyway, but it made her feel a little better helping it along.
She heard the whine as the vacuum started up and above it, her mum singing contentedly to herself as she prosecuted her one-woman jihad against dirt. Pen’s mum had wardrobes full of dresses still in their original plastic. ‘They are only new once, my sweetheart,’ she would cluck happily; ‘I am saving them for a special occasion.’
That was exactly how Pen had felt when she’d come home from school in the middle of the day claiming to feel sick, when her mother had welcomed her greedily, no questions asked, and tucked her up safe in bed: Saved for a special occasion. Sealed up like a dress in plastic, gathering dust.
Pen couldn’t stop remembering Salt’s office. There’d been a harsh disinfectant smell. Pen had sat there, rigid with terror. She’d expected him to shout, but of course he never did. Instead he’d read aloud from Beth’s student file: the minor arrests for shoplifting and vandalism, the fights, the truancy. Her uniform was tatty, he said; he knew she sold paintings at Camden Market at the weekend; he suspected she sold cannabis at school every other day of the week.
Frostfield High had no record of Beth’s father’s occupation, he’d pointed out, and Mr Bradley had never once been to a parents’ evening.