Felix Takes the Stage

by Kathryn Lasky

  My goodness — a courtship thread! Oh, I’m much too old. A widow with three kids. Then it struck her. The single word formed in her mind, each letter dropping slowly into place. M-I-M-E-T-I-D-A-E — pirate spiders!

  It was an attack.

  “NO!” she screamed. “Abandon ship!”

  The pirate spiders used an old ruse. Send out a courtship thread, reel the victim in, and then with one quick bite to the leg, in goes the poison and …

  Edith couldn’t bear the thought. Felix had just grown a new leg!

  Pirates were one of the few spiders Edith knew, aside from black widows, who specialized in killing their own. How cunning they had been in their mimicry of brown recluse vibrations. They had obviously been in the store the entire time. Most likely they had been hiding out on the Kon-Tiki raft that hung above the Constitution.

  “Get out, kids! Get out! Pirates!” Edith yelled.

  She could now see the distinctive spinelike hairs that lined the long front legs of the pirate spiders. Four pirates crawled onto the deck and up the rigging after Julep and Jo Bell, who scuttled toward the crow’s nest. Felix was on the foredeck. They’ll be trapped!

  Edith looked around wildly, but her son had disappeared. “Felix, where are you? Felix!” she screamed.

  Fat Cat bounded over, teeth bared.

  “Don’t get near them!” Edith shouted. “They’re almost as toxic as we are!”

  Suddenly, there was a glittering flash from the mizzenmast. It was Felix swinging by his fresh new leg. In his forward appendages, his pedipalps, he grasped the miniature cutlasses.

  “Felix!” Edith exclaimed.

  “Mom, catch this!”

  The curved blade sailed toward her on a high quality, number one grade silk thread. It was catch or be killed! But Felix’s aim was perfect. Edith caught the cutlass and slashed the so-called “courtship thread.” Felix quickly suspended himself over the nearest pirate. With a quick flick of the cutlass, he separated the spider’s head from its body. “Bye-bye,” he said as the spider’s head tumbled to the deck.

  The other three spiders were stunned. Then they began to argue.

  “He said it would work!”

  “He said it always worked!”

  Unnoticed by the arguing spiders, Edith scuttled up the ratlines, the small ropes between the shrouds of the mast. She sliced off another pirate head.

  “Go, Mom!” Felix yelled.

  “No, they’re going! After them!” she cried.

  This attack was definitely planned. Edith realized that the pirates had worked to create a highway of silk toward the front of the store. They were headed that way — straight toward the Uxbridges. Seconds later, there was a shriek from the figurehead. “My babies! My babies!” It was Mrs. Uxbridge.

  The two remaining pirate spiders were climbing up the lovely neck of the figurehead toward Mrs. Uxbridge.

  “Your wife or the egg sac — what’ll it be?”

  Now, shouldn’t we discuss this as civilized spiders?” Oliphant Uxbridge replied. His voice sounded unnaturally calm.

  The two pirates started to laugh. “Who said anything about civilized!” one said. He moved toward Oliphant, waving his spine-studded front legs. “Keep watch on the missus, Seven Eyes.”

  “You bet, Cap,” Seven Eyes replied. The second pirate was missing an eye. Unlike brown recluses, pirate spiders had eight eyes, arranged in two rows.

  Edith and Felix had suspended themselves from a dust-encrusted ship’s lantern opposite the figurehead. The egg sac glimmered softly in the reflection of the streetlight outside. This is terrible, Edith thought. A hundred innocent lives cut off!

  She and Felix exchanged glances, a cross fire of desperate looks from their dozen eyes. They were not in a good place to attack. Oliphant Uxbridge would be no help. His wife was growing hysterical as he continued to converse.

  “Oliphant! He’s coming closer to the sac! Oliphant, do something!”

  “I think we could make an arrangement of some sort. My wife, she is lovely, I admit. But, well … I guess I could find anoth —”

  “Are you nuts?” Edith screamed. “You lousy good-for-nothing!”

  At that moment, there was another tiny glimmer above the ship’s figurehead.

  “Hi, guys!” said Julep.

  Edith was stunned. How in the name of silk and venom had her daughters gotten there so quickly? But there they were! The two girls were swinging from silken threads attached to a block and tackle used for hoisting sails.

  “Ahoy there!” cried Jo Bell, wiggling a dragline.

  The two pirates launched themselves toward the sisters. But blinded by the streetlight outside, they had not seen the kill trap that Julep and Jo Bell had spun. They were caught! Julep and Jo Bell perched in opposite corners of the kill trap, paying out binding silk as fast as they could.

  “Make it tight. Steer clear of their fangs, girls.” Edith paused to look at her three children in awe. “Brilliant, just brilliant,” she murmured.

  “Thank you!” Mrs. Uxbridge gasped. “I don’t know how to thank you. Your courage, your kindness.”

  “Yes, we cannot thank you enough,” Oliphant chimed in.

  Mrs. Uxbridge swung herself toward her husband and glared.

  “What do you mean WE! You mealy-fanged, gutless, pompous ass. As soon as the eggs hatch, I’m out of here. And you get out now, on the double. Find yourself another figurehead to spin a web in. And find yourself another mate, as you suggested when you were about to hand me over to those thugs!”

  “You can’t mean it, dearest.”

  “I do mean it, and don’t dearest me.”

  Fat Cat meowed, “Bravo, madame!”

  “Mrs. Uxbridge, you are welcome to move onto the Constitution with us,” Edith said.

  “My dear, don’t you want to reconsider?” Oliphant persisted.

  “No, Oliphant. I don’t. But I do owe Mrs …. what is your name?”

  “Edith, just call me Edith.”

  “I do owe you an apology, Edith. You are not vulgar at all. And you may call me by my first name — Glory.”

  “Oh, my! My!” Edith murmured to no one in particular. “Let’s go back and get settled. It’s been quite a night.”

  Julep, Felix, and Jo Bell exchanged glances. The S word again. Whenever Edith said the word “settled,” they knew she was anything but. However, they followed their mother back to the Constitution.

  Despite Edith’s worries, life was settled for a while. Oliphant Uxbridge moved to another ship’s figurehead. He lost no time in taking up with another orb weaver. Glory’s egg sac hatched, but unfortunately the proprietor of the store left the door wide open on the very day the spiderlings arrived. A fresh breeze swept into the shop and all one hundred twenty-two little Uxbridges blew away, out of the shop and onto the winds to find their own way in the world. Glory was very upset and often dropped in to visit Edith.

  “Imagine losing a husband and one hundred twenty-two children all within such a short time.” Edith shook her head in sympathy. “But I know I’m better off without him. I do miss the spiderlings, though. I hardly got to know them before that fool owner opened the doors. How would he like it if someone decided to air out the place where he lived and all his babies were swept away!” To emphasize her feelings, Glory plucked the filament from which she suspended herself through the hatch into Edith’s cabin. Her visits were brief, and she never accepted an invitation to settle into the web for a nice long chat. She seemed to prefer rappelling down through the hatch and hanging on the end of the silk thread for a bit.

  “Well, humans usually just have one child at a time, sometimes two or three. But never one hundred twenty-two,” Edith offered.

  “It doesn’t matter — one or one hundred. You miss them all the same.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  What worried Edith more than Glory Uxbridge’s sadness over her spiderlings was the shopkeeper’s sudden interest in cleaning. It did not bode well. Edith pre
ferred a certain amount of dust, clutter, and downright filth. It was never a good sign when humans became too particular about housekeeping. She began having a vague premonition that she and her children were on the brink of another move. It was this fear that caused her to seek out a globe, not the dented globe where the leucauge spiders lived but one in better shape.

  “Follow me, children. I want to show you the precise spot where the Constitution encountered the HMS Cyane and the HMS Levant in the War of 1812.”

  “But we know that,” said Felix, resting on the chart in the cabin. “You showed us, remember?”

  “Oh, yes, I did,” Edith answered. “Well, how about I show you where the Constitution is right now?”

  “It’s still around after all these centuries?” Jo Bell asked.

  “Absolutely!”

  “You mean the real ship and not a model?” Felix asked.

  “Positively.” An idea, like the tiniest little flicker, began to glow in Edith’s mind — Boston!

  “Boston!” She blurted out the name of the old city where she had once lived with her mother after her father had died.

  “Boston?”

  “Yes, Boston! What a fine old city it is. Come quickly.”

  “To Boston?” Julep asked.

  “No, to the globe so you can see it.”

  Two minutes later, Edith began to release some silk from the very tippy top of the globe. It was what her children called a “speaking thread.” She suspended herself over the Arctic land mass and then rappelled down over the North Atlantic. At the fiftieth latitude, she swung east toward the coast of Newfoundland, continued her descent over Nova Scotia, Maine, and New Hampshire, and fetched up above the state of Massachusetts. To be exact, for Edith was a precise sort, her position was 42° north and 71° west, the latitude and longitude of the city of Boston.

  “All eyes on me, please,” she said.

  Her three children, gathered near the Arctic Circle, looked down.

  “I am dangling right above the coastline of the New England state of Massachusetts. This is Boston, home of the finest and the oldest public library in America! As I told you, my mother and I spent a very happy time there.”

  “But the E-Men came, right?” Jo Bell asked with a sigh.

  “No, no.”

  “Then why did you leave?” Felix asked. There were several endless seconds, or so it seemed to the children, when Edith grew very still. “Well, Boston was where your grandma died, and I … I felt … so … so …”

  “Lonely?” Julep asked, thinking how lonely she would feel if her mother were gone.

  “Yes, there were too many reminders, I suppose. We passed so many happy hours in the children’s room.”

  “Mom,” Felix said when they had returned to the Constitution. “Is there any art in Boston? Any music?”

  “Yes, dear. A wonderful symphony orchestra, and the Museum of Fine Arts and the library. The library has magnificent murals.”

  “Hmm,” Felix said. He glanced quickly over at the Uxbridges’ web, in all its spiraling glory.

  Edith’s fears of being unsettled became real one afternoon when Glory came to visit. It was an odd time of day for Glory to stop in, and as soon as she dropped through the hatch, Edith knew it was bad news.

  “Don’t tell me. He’s cleaning again, right?” Edith asked.

  “Worse.”

  “E-Men!”

  Glory nodded.

  “No!” Edith gasped. She took a deep breath and tried to compose herself. “Run that by me one more time, Glory. What were the owner’s exact words?”

  “The owner was on the telephone and said, ‘My wife and I are having a baby, a blessed event. We’ve decided to sell the store, but we really have to clean it up.’ Then he paused for almost a minute while I suppose the person on the other end said something. And then he said, ‘Yes, we know about the brown recluses at the philharmonic and we realize they might be throughout the neighborhood.’ Then he said, ‘Yes … yes.’ And then there was a part I didn’t quite understand, something about ‘so you have to tent the store.’”

  “Tent the store! Oh, mercy! That’s the worst!” Edith exclaimed.

  “What does it mean, Mom?” Jo Bell asked. Every hair on her eight legs began to tremble.

  “It basically means that they are going to suffocate us. It’s the most complete form of extermination. We have to get out of here fast! We must sound the alarm for every creature in this place. Fatty, get over to that ship bell and start slamming the clapper. An announcement must be made or we’ll all die. Then get ready because we’re going now. This is a real catastrophe!”

  “It is a most unblessed event!” Fatty replied. “Let’s get the show on the road!” He leaped to the ship’s bell and began ringing it.

  “The road to where?” Jo Bell asked.

  Felix and his mom looked at each other, a dozen eyes between them all picturing one place. “Boston!” they both said at once.

  “But how will we get there?” Julep asked. “It’s the other side of the country.”

  “Bus!” Fat Cat said. “There’s a bus stop at the corner. If we switch at Sunset and Vine, we can catch a number four, ride it to the end of the line, and get to the terminal for buses headed cross-country.”

  “Fatty, you’re a genius!” Edith exclaimed.

  “Not at all. Just a well-traveled old theater cat. I know transportation — from my days with a traveling Shakespeare company.”

  Minutes later they were standing on the corner of Yucca and Las Palmas Avenue. Glory Uxbridge was perched on top of a fire hydrant and had begun to pay out the first of several silk threads. These lines were made of balloon silk, a special type of silk that gets caught by the wind. The spider would rise into the sky like a tiny kite.

  “Before I pay out any more silk, I want to thank you all. In this breeze, I’ll be off before you can flick a fang.” She paused and looked up. “Look who’s leaving now.” She waved one leg toward a streetlight, at Oliphant and his new mate.

  There were hundreds of orb weavers, more than Edith had ever imagined lived in the shop. Sunlight caught the spiders’ silken threads, turning them a bright, shimmering gold. For a brief minute, it seemed as if a golden canopy were suspended over them. Edith and her children looked up in awe at the sight.

  “Radiant!” Felix whispered. “Absolutely radiant!”

  “Mom, why don’t we balloon?” Julep whined as she watched Glory rise softly on the billows of wind.

  “Hush, Julep. Here comes a bus. Okay, I want you all to line up next to me, and when the bus stops, just swing up. But don’t go by the stairs — you might get squished. Get ready to cast a line and hoist yourself.”

  “I have a better idea,” Fat Cat said. “All of you get on my back and I’ll climb up on the rear fender.”

  “You’re sure, Fatty? You’re sure you can jump that high?”

  “It’s not that high. I am a veteran bus rider.”

  Fat Cat was as good as his word. They were soon all aboard the bus. Minutes later, as they rounded the corner on Yucca and Highland, Jo Bell called back to them with wonderful news. “Hey, he’s back!”

  “Who?” Edith called up.

  “Leon Brinsky, the conductor. He survived! There’s a big sign welcoming him back.”

  “Now, that is a blessed event!” Felix sighed with relief.

  “I hope Felix will be exonerated,” Edith called back up.

  “What’s exonerated?” asked Julep.

  “Not blamed.”

  “What does it matter, if my musical career is finished?” Felix sighed.

  “Not necessarily, dear. There is more music out there. Remember, we’re going to Boston. There is music and art in Boston.”

  “But we’re going to the library and not a symphony hall.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  Felix hated it when his mother said “we’ll see.” Even worse was “we’ll think about it.” Because all she really ever wanted to see or think
about was a dimmer, darker, more remote place to hide.

  And a hidey-hole was exactly where Edith’s musings were taking her. Someday, she thought, they would find everything they ever needed and wanted. And the Boston Public Library was a vast and wonderful place to start. She had left because she could not bear to be there without her mother. But now she had children of her own. If she were ever to find clues to the Place Where Time Has Stopped, it would be in the soft glow of those reading rooms filled with thousands upon thousands of books. There was so much to be explored, so much to read. And so many lovely places to hide.

  After they had boarded the bus, Felix cast a line to the roof and skibbled off to explore. He was back in a few minutes.

  “Hey, you should see what’s on the side of this bus,” Felix called out.

  “What is it?” Jo Bell asked.

  “It’s an ad for a movie — about spiders!” Julep and Jo Bell scurried over to have a look. There was an advertisement running the length of the bus that showed an enormous spider with fangs the size of dinosaur teeth fighting a brawny man with a safari hat and a long whip.

  “What in the name of venom does that fool think he’s doing — a whip? Like a whip is going to help him. Why doesn’t he just have a fumigation tank like other E-Men?” Jo Bell exclaimed.

  “He’s trying to be a hero,” Felix said. “Movie heroes have whips, not fumigation tanks.”

  “That’s not even a real spider! Look how they messed up his eyes!”

  “Well, that’s Hollywood for you!” Felix said.

  “He is kind of handsome,” Julep mused. “The man, that is.”

  “He looks like a jerk to me,” Felix replied.

  “What’s the movie called?” Julep asked as the bus pulled up at a stoplight.

  “‘Kentucky Jones and the Spiders of Doom,’” Jo Belle said, reading upside down.