Web

by John Wyndham

Naeta’s account as he talked to us beside the fire was confusing, and we made little of it. One thing, however, was clear, and it puzzled Camilla.

  “You have deliberately come to an island that is tabu. I don’t understand that.”

  He nodded seriously.

  “Nakaa understands,” he told her. “He knows that we come only to do his work. To help the Little Sisters. We do not come to live here. So he permits it, and we are safe.”

  “I see – a dispensation,” murmured Camilla. “There is always a way of getting round a rule…”

  Naeta disregarded that. He looked at her intently, and repeated his original question:

  “Now you tell me why you came here.”

  “All right,” agreed Camilla, and she gave him an outline of the Project.

  How much he understood of it was impossible to tell. He listened motionless and expressionless, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on the flames. I, for my part, heard her with a sense of utter detachment. The scheme which had sounded so feasible back home, with all the resources which Lord Foxfield’s money could buy to back it, had become increasingly unreal ever since we landed. Now it was as irrelevant and insubstantial as a pipe-dream.

  She ended by explaining that Tanakuatua had been chosen as a place where the community could develop a life of its own, free from outside interference.

  He looked up as she finished, and shook his head slowly.

  “There is no place in the world like that. No more,” he said.

  “You could be right,” Camilla agreed, “but it seemed possible. This small island, lost in a great ocean…”

  “You know about the tabu, but you did not care. White men laugh at tabu, I know. It is foolish, very foolish. You did not know about the Little Sisters.”

  “You keep on talking about the Little Sisters. Who are they?”

  For an answer Naeta touched his finger to the sign on his chest.

  “Oh, the spiders. No, we did not know about them. Why do you call them the Little Sisters?”

  “Because they are my Little Sisters. Nakaa caused them to spring from the corruption of my father, Nokiki’s body. Therefore they are sisters, and brothers, to me.”

  He paused. Camilla forebore to comment. He went on:

  “They are the messengers of Nakaa. He has sent them to punish the world. As he once turned men and women out of the Happy Land, now he is going to turn them out of the world. It is his vengeance: the Little Sisters are his instrument. Now they are only in Tanakuatua, but he has taught them how to fly. Already they are setting out on winds which will take them to all the corners of the earth.”

  Camilla nodded.

  “Yes, we have seen that.”

  “Where they land, they will breed; and when they breed enough they will carry the tabu that is on Tanakuatua over the whole world. That will be the vengeance of Nakaa.”

  Camilla pondered, and then shook her head.

  “I don’t think I understand – vengeance for what?”

  “For lack of faith,” Naeta told her. “In the old days,” he explained, “the people obeyed the commands of Nakaa the judge, the lawgiver. They honoured their totems, they preserved their shrines, they revered the bones of their ancestors, they performed the burial rites according to his laws in order that when their ghosts came before him for judgement he might not strangle them, or throw them on the stakes in the Pits, but would open the door to the Paradise of the Shades where they would live in happiness forever.

  “For many, many generations upright men and their sons obeyed these laws, and, through their faith, their ghosts went to dwell in Paradise – the others went into the pits.

  “But then the white men came. They brought evil weapons, evil diseases, the evil of money, the evil of greed. But, worst of all, they destroyed faith by showing that these evils were stronger than the virtues. They respected neither the laws of Nakaa, nor the customs of men and women – yet no disaster struck them. With all their evils they remained powerful.

  “Many of our people, seeing this began to doubt. They lost faith in Nakaa’s laws, lost faith in their traditions, lost faith in themselves. They ceased to be a proud, brave people, and in their bewilderment they became humble and weak. They did not understand that Nakaa was testing them by bringing them face to face with evil – and that they were failing in the test.

  “But Nakaa, sitting by the gate of the Land of Shades, watched them. Each year fewer went through the gate, many more went into the Pits. When he heard Nokiki’s plea for tabu on Tanakuatua he made up his mind. The people were worthless. In the beginning he banished us from the Happy Land because our ancestors broke his commands, now he will banish us from the world; so he commanded the Little Sisters to come forth from the body of Nokiki, and destroy the people.”

  “Judgement Day,” said Camilla thoughtfully.

  Naeta shook his head.

  “Nakaa has already made judgement,” he told her. “Now comes the day of Fulfilment.”

  “I still do not understand why you are here,” Camilla told him.

  “There are still some of us who honour Nakaa’s laws, who may pass by the Pits and enter the Land of Shades. We accept the judgement of Nakaa; we do his will in order that when the day comes for us to be judged he will say: ‘You have been faithful servants,’ and open the door for us. That is why we have come here to help the Little Sisters.”

  “How do you do that? They seem to have done very well by themselves,” she persisted.

  “When you met the Little Sisters you would have sent a message telling about them, and asking for help against them. White men are clever,” Naeta acknowledged, “perhaps they would find a way of destroying the Little Sisters here. Or you might have sent a message to bring back the ship so that you would escape the tabu – and the will of Nakaa. We have stopped that happening. We have given the Little Sisters more time to breed, and to fly away over the world. We have made sure that the tabu-breakers shall be punished.”

  Camilla studied his face for some seconds.

  “Do you mean that it was you who smashed the radio?” she asked.

  Naeta nodded.

  “That was necessary,” he said simply. He considered silently awhile, then he said: “Now you have told me why you came to Tanakuatua, and what you planned to do here, I understand why it was the will of Nakaa that we should come here, and help the Little Sisters. It is a good work.”

  “Oh,” said Camilla, noncommittally.

  Naeta nodded.

  “The white men,” he said, “came upon us as a curse. They respected nothing. They destroyed our way of life, trampled on our customs. Their temptations confused our values. Their laws were the laws of their God, not ours. They did not understand things of the spirit, only of the earth. They were evil, yet they conquered, and so faith was lost. Without faith, without traditions, man is no better than an animal. He does not matter. But it is the justice of Nakaa that those who caused him to lose his faith should suffer, too. So it is a good work.”

  Camilla did not look as if she followed this line of reasoning entirely, but Naeta evidently regarded it as the last word, closing the discussion. He got up, and without saying any more retreated into a small shack of branches woven with leaves close by. The other man had already taken himself off unnoticed during the talk. I threw the remaining sticks on the fire, and we lay down beside it to get what sleep we could.

  I awoke to see Naeta and the other man squatting outside his hovel. They were making a meal. It appeared to consist of a coarsely ground substance of some kind mixed to a stiff mush in a cutdown tin into which each dipped his fingers in turn.

  A movement beside me revealed that Camilla also was awake. We watched the two for a few moments.

  “I don’t think I’d fancy that muck if they offered it,” she remarked, “but I could do with a drink of water.”

  Without further hesitation, she got up to walk over and ask for some.

  Naeta hesitated, then nodded, and said something to his
companion. The man leant forward, unscrewed the cap of a petrol can, and poured water into two coconut shells which he handed to Camilla. Naeta watched her take them.

  “Now you go away,” he said, waving his left hand in a gesture which dismissed us both.

  So we went, carrying our coconut shells, back to the place where we had left our haversacks and made our breakfast on our last two bars of chocolate.

  When that was finished, we looked at one another.

  “Well, what do we do now?” Camilla asked.

  I shrugged.

  “If we could get our clothes back some way, we might have a chance,” I said. “The insecticide won’t have lost all its potency, will it?”

  She shook her head.

  “I noticed my belt-buckle in the ashes of the fire,” she told me.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  “There must be a way,” she said firmly.

  We sat and thought about it.

  “A sort of heliograph. Something that would flash in the sunlight,” I suggested.

  “Do you know morse? I don’t,” said Camilla.

  “I know S.O.S. That ought to do,” I told her.

  “If anyone happens to be far enough out on the beach to see here over the trees…”

  “We might light a fire. The smoke would show them that there’s someone here. Then we could try flashing the S.O.S.”

  “What with?” she inquired.

  “There’s the foil the chocolate was wrapped in. Couldn’t we make some sort of reflector with that?”

  She picked up a piece, and smoothed it out, doubtfully.

  “Don’t heliographs have to be aligned, or something?” she asked. “I mean you can’t just waggle them about and hope they’re reflecting in the right direction.”

  “We ought to be able to manage that. I’ll get it mounted. Then you stand so that your head’s in line between it and the settlement. When it flashes in your eyes we’ve got the direction.”

  She continued to be unenthusiastic.

  “It’s so chancy. First they’ve got to notice it. Then they’ve got to find the right track. Then they’re liable to run into the Islanders, just as we did. And even if they don’t do that, and do succeed in getting here they’ll have to tackle these two – and Naeta has the revolver. Besides, you talk glibly about ‘mounting’ the reflector – how are you going to do that? We haven’t even got a penknife between us. Frankly, I don’t think it begins to be on.”

  “All right. Now it’s your turn to suggest something,” I said.

  We sat, and continued to think.

  It must have been about an hour later that we heard branches crackling underfoot, and looked round to see the two Islanders approaching.

  Naeta was in the lead. He wore a belt to support his machete; thrust into it handily was also the revolver. Both he and the other man were carrying short rolls of woven matting under their left arms. The difference between their present appearance and that when we had last seen them was that now their skins gleamed all over as if newly oiled. Naeta’s eyes rested upon us where we sat beside the track, for a moment, but he neither checked his step nor spoke. The other man passed us as if we did not exist. As they went by we caught a whiff of the same sharp odour which had hung around our captors on the previous day.

  We watched them leave the trees and climb the zig-zag path up the crater wall until they disappeared over the rim. I looked at Camilla, she shrugged. Presently she got up.

  “Well, we may as well go and see what we can find,” she said.

  We made our way back to the site of last night’s fire, and poked around there. There was quite a collection of empty tins thrown away, and little doubt where they had come from. I had seen the same brands among our own stores. Also there was an opened case still containing half a dozen cans of corned beef intact. A bag half-full of some coarse-ground cereal, presumably that from which he had made his breakfast, lay just inside Naeta’s hovel, along with a cache of tinned fruit-salad. The petrol can, we discovered, still contained some water, but there was another, smaller can that was empty. It lay on a patch of earth darkened by some liquid sinking in, looking as if it had been deliberately emptied, and then dropped.

  Camilla picked it up and sniffed at it. She pulled a face, rubbed her finger on the soil, and smelled that, too. I took the can from her. It had the same sharp odour that the two men had left behind them. I nodded.

  “Yes, that must be the stuff that keeps the spiders off. They didn’t mean us to have any of that,” I said.

  “No,” she agreed.

  She looked down at the damp patch thoughtfully. The liquid had soaked well in. There was no hope of salvaging any of it.

  “It rather suggests that they’ve no further use for it – they won’t be coming back, don’t you think?” she asked.

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Yes, I suppose it does,” I admitted. “They could easily have hidden the can somewhere if they wanted it.”

  She lifted the can, and sniffed at it again.

  “I wonder what it is. It reminds me of something…”

  “The men we met yesterday all reeked of it,” I said.

  “Yes, I know, but – no, it was like this, but not so strong. I remember half-recognizing it then…”

  “The question is did they get it here, or did they get it somewhere else, and bring it with them in the can?” I suggested. “If they made it here, there must be some traces, which would help.”

  We scoured the neighbourhood, but found nothing. After an hour we gave up, discouraged. While Camilla rekindled the fire, I bashed open a tin of bully, and we cooked it in one of the empty cans. We ate in a thoughtful silence. Camilla broke it.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she announced. “How would they get that juice. It’s an oily stuff. It must have been pressed out in some way. But they can’t have used a press…How else could you do it – with only primitive means?”

  The only way that occurred to me was by pounding: a pestle and mortar system. I said so.

  “But without a pestle or mortar,” she commented. “Therefore you’d need some kind of natural basin – a rock basin?” She looked up at the crater wall. “That’s the only exposed rock. Suppose we go along the path to the foot, and then workout left and right around the wall until we meet on the other side?”

  We did that – with no great hopes on my part. I was beginning, after twenty minutes of searching the crater side, to think that the juice must have been brought in the can after all, when a shout from Camilla which echoed back and forth between the walls sent me hurrying across to her side.

  She had found it, all right. A shallow depression in the top of a rock which projected from the wall about a quarter of the way up. When I arrived she was crouched close to a pulped mass of vegetable debris which lay spilled down the slope beside it. On the ground, at the foot of the cliff lay a part of the stem of a young tree, its fibres furred out at the end.

  I climbed up to look. The natural basin was excellent for the job. It even had a channel through which the juice could flow out.

  Camilla held out some of the debris.

  “What do you think it is! I could kick myself. It’s that heatherlike stuff out on the hillside. I remember smelling it now as we walked through it. And the spiders don’t like it. Do you remember, their webs only came a few feet out from the trees on to it?”

  We spent the rest of the day collecting great armfuls of the heather-like plants and bringing them back to be pounded. It was hard work, and not highly rewarding for the stuff was far from juicy, nevertheless, by nightfall we had extracted some three-quarters of a pint of oily liquid from it.

  “That’ll be enough, surely,” Camilla said as she carefully screwed the cap on to the can representing our day’s labour.

  That night we slept well, untroubled by the discomforts.

  The next morning we woke as the sun rose, and breakfasted on one of the tins of fruit-salad. Then Camilla picked up the can
of precious juice. She poured a little into her hand, sniffed at it, and pulled a wry face.

  “Well, here goes,” she said, and began to smear it on.

  Presently, both shining all over, and with an odour that eliminated all other smells, we collected our haversacks, and set out on the return journey.

  I had, I admit, a nasty moment when the first band of spiders we met came flowing towards us, but it was unnecessary. A few inches short of our feet they stopped, seemed to mill about for a few instants, and then retreated. I heard Camilla let out a breath, and felt consoled to know that she had not been entirely confident, either.

  “So far, so good,” she said. “Now, if we don’t meet any Islanders we ought to get through. I wonder how they came to know about this stuff?” she added.

  “If the totem of your clan is a spider, you probably learn a lot of spider-lore,” I suggested. “It’s enough for me that it works. Let’s get along while it’s still potent.”

  We retraced the path through the web-canopied trees. The silence there, the lack of any living creature, the slow swaying of the discarded shrouds of gossamer made the place seem even more eerie than before now that there were only two of us. Eerie, and infinitely depressing. It would have been daunting to have to travel it alone.

  Camilla felt it no less. She said, in a voice that was instinctively lowered:

  “And there are miles of it like this. Every moving thing wiped out. It’s frightening…As if they had been waiting – waiting patiently in their webs all these hundreds of thousands of years until something should happen which would give them power…and then it happened: such a little thing; such a tremendous thing – the ability to co-operate…It makes you wonder what we could do if we were really to co-operate.”

  “Surely we’ve been destructive enough with partial co-operation,” I said. “This place seems to be a terrifying argument against efficiency. Let’s get on – and out of it.”

  Presently we did. We reached the region where the webs were lower. Where spiders ran along overhanging fronds to drop on us – and drop off again as though they had been scalded. Confident as we were of our protection now, even their presence, seemed a relief after the utter deadness beneath the web-covered trees.