by John Wyndham
Soon we were back in spider frontier territory where bands of them hunted on the ground, and sheered off as we came near.
A few hundred yards further, and we were free of them. Another quarter of a mile or so, and we were back at the spot where the Islanders had surprised us.
We agreed to turn off the beaten path there and make our way back by the route we had come. We had seen no signs of the Islanders so far on our journey, but we had little idea where the track led, nor what was at the end of it. To follow it when there was an alternative seemed like pressing our luck too far. It meant rougher going along the path we had hacked, but the further we got from their track the easier I became in mind. At length we rejoined the track along which we had started, and which would bring us out on the beach.
It did. And the first thing we saw as we emerged into the open was a small boat beyond the reef, with sails set, making towards the north-west.
“That’s odd,” said Camilla. She pulled the glasses out of her haversack, and looked at it. “It looks like our boat – only I’ve never seen her with the mast stepped. I can see several heads.” She turned the glasses along the shore to the point where the boat was usually drawn up. It was no longer there. She turned them further, on to our makeshift quarters.
“Not a soul in sight,” she said, in a troubled voice.
We turned and walked along the beach. As we came closer to the tarpaulin-covered piles of stores I gave a hail. There was no reply. Nobody appeared.
“They must all be working on the settlement,” I said, without much conviction. I hailed again…
We approached more closely. Still there was no sign of life. The place seemed entirely deserted. We went on, in silence. Twenty yards short of the encampment Camilla stopped suddenly, and pointed. Ahead of us a patch lay on the sand like a brown shadow. It began to move towards us.
“Oh, no – no!” Camilla exclaimed.
I walked on. The band of spiders came scurrying towards me, but stopped short of my feet. I went on, round the corner of the stacked cases. From there I could see into the tarpaulin-roofed space which had served as the men’s dormitory.
It was difficult to make out anything in the shadow at first. But then I did…
I turned away. I was able to take four or five steps before I folded up, and was horribly sick.
Camilla began to approach. I waved her off.
“Don’t go in there,” I was able to warn her before the next paroxysm struck me.
When I had recovered myself I went round the corner after her. I found her standing close to the blank side of the stack. Three troops of spiders were watching her keeping a foot or two away, but she took no notice of them; her attention was entirely taken up with what she held in her hands. It was a coarsely woven bag such as the Islanders had been carrying, but empty now; split from top to bottom by a single gash.
Her head turned, and her eyes met mine. I knew she was remembering, as I was, a similar sack that had lain beside the path; but that one had been full, with a content that moved slightly.
I looked around. Ten or twelve such discarded sacks were strewn about, each similarly gashed.
“Now we understand what he meant by ‘helping the Little Sisters’,” she said, unsteadily. She looked at me. “Are they all – all – ?” she asked.
I nodded. The silence, and the glimpse I had had inside the encampment left no doubt of it.
“They must have come in the night, and – ” She shut her eyes. “Oh, horrible – horrible!”
For the first time since I had known her, her composure broke down.
I stood helplessly by.
The white sail on the horizon had shrunk to a dot. The Islanders were on their way home, mission fulfilled. The men who were to be like gods had met their match in Nakaa, the Judge. The Lawgiver had upheld Nokiki; the tabu on Tanakuatua had been preserved.
Eight
It was about a week, or it may have been ten days, later – we rather lost track of the calendar – that the aircraft came.
Camilla and I were up at the settlement site working on the first nearly completed building, attempting to make it spider-proof.
We had got ourselves clothing out of the stores and re-equipped ourselves with spray guns and insecticide. The insecticide was less effective than the extract the Islanders had used, but it worked well enough, and we had several drums of it. Our first move, after using it on ourselves, had been to spray a zone about one yard wide all round the building and then wipe out all the spiders we could find inside it. That was only partially successful. For one thing, it was necessary to re-spray the barrier every day, and for another they would succeed from time to time in floating a strand of silk across it from some bush or tree, and then they had their bridge.
We could have moved northward along the coast into parts that were not yet infested, but that would have meant first cutting a path, and then humping all our supplies along it on our backs. Nor did we know how long it would be before the spiders overran that part, too. Furthermore, we had little idea of when the weather could be expected to break, but knew we should need shelter when it did. So, in the end we decided that the best course would be to finish the building, block every cranny that could admit a spider, net all the windows, fit double doors, and do all we could to assure ourselves of at least one place where we could relax in safety.
During those days we lived in a state of siege which got on my nerves. Whether it was our movements, or the sounds of our sawing and hammering that attracted the spiders I can’t say, but they came, and they waited. They crowded in a stirring, shimmering line along the outer edge of the belt we kept sprayed. When one went close the stirring ceased. They stood packed as closely as pebbles on a beach, and as motionless. To the eye alone they were inert enough to be dead. It was something more than the eye which gave the feeling of the spring coiled tight, the spark withheld, immobility at high tension. Something more than sight, too, which gave a sense of thousands of eyes watching one, alert for the moment. You could throw a handful of dirt at them, and they stayed perfectly still, crowded against the invisible barrier, heads towards you, watching you unwaveringly while the dirt pattered down on them. I began to have a feeling that they were prepared to wait there until the insecticide should lose its power to deter them, and they could come pouring across the line.
In the meantime we did our best to discourage them. We took to spraying them with petrol in the evenings. They didn’t like that at all, and it created havoc among them. But the next morning there were more, feeding on those that had fallen. So then we started lighting the petrol after we had sprayed. But still there were more next day…
As I said, the constant threat of them got on our nerves, until I wondered whether it would become obsessive – arachnophobia, perhaps. We dared not relax any of our precautions except to shed our veils and hats when we were at work, and in no danger of having them drop on us from above. All the time we had to be on watch, for almost every day they would succeed in establishing a gossamer bridge or two and start coming over, whereupon we would have to drop whatever we were doing, and tackle them with the petrol sprays. We had to sleep under meticulously arranged mosquito netting, and the first task in the morning was to scour the buiding and the ground around it for any that might have infiltrated during the night.
But our work progressed. After five or six days we had every angle of floor, walls, and roof sealed with fibre-glass, every window covered with net held taut by battens, and had devised automatic excluders for the bottom of both inner and outer doors. At last we could feel that we had a safe refuge – though we continued to use our nets at night for reassurance.
With that achieved, we turned our attention to transporting supplies from the encampment on the shore to the settlement site. We were able to use the tractor and trailer for the actual haul, but shifting the cases, opening them, getting the contents loaded, and then off-loaded, made heavy work for two. The full trip was more than we could manage in
a day.
It was at the end of our third haul that we saw it. I had just finished parking the tractor handily to the building and climbed down from the seat when Camilla on top of the loaded trailer gave a cry, and pointed wildly towards the lagoon. I clambered up beside her wondering what the fuss was about, and there it was. A small float-plane resting on the surface of the lagoon with two figures standing on one of the floats, an inflated dinghy bobbing beside them. The noise of the tractor must have drowned the sound of their engines and prevented us from hearing them.
One of the men got into the dinghy and held on to the float, steadying it for the other.
Camilla began to scramble down.
“Quick,” she said, “we must stop them from landing.”
We raced back down the track towards the encampment. At one point it turned to give us a view. The dinghy was already more than half way to the shore. We hurried on all we could.
When we got clear of the trees the dinghy was in only two or three inches of water, and one of the men was stepping out of it. I stopped and shouted but he was too far off to hear me. I ran on. The other man got out, and they came on, wading through the shallow water, towing the dinghy behind them. Camilla and I both shouted together. This time they heard, and spotted us, and one of them waved an arm in greeting. We shouted desperately at them, and waved them off. They exchanged a word or two with one another, and then waved back cheerfully.
They left the dinghy on the wet sand and started to walk up the beach, paying no more attention to us. There was a patch right ahead of them, moving towards them. We yelled, and waved them off again. It was no good. One of them had noticed the brown patch. He said something to his companion, and leant down to examine it more closely. The patch reached his feet, and then swarmed up him without a check. There was a scream. The second man stared in momentary astonishment, and then jumped forward to beat the spiders off. The first man started to collapse, the other caught, and supported him. In a moment the spiders were all over him, too. Then he screamed…
We stopped, and sat down on a case until we felt a bit better.
After a time Camilla, looking across the water, said:
“Can you fly a plane?”
“No,” I told her. “Can you navigate one?”
“No,” she said.
We continued to look at the plane awhile.
“There ought to be a radio on it – oughtn’t there?” she asked.
We walked along to the dinghy, keeping our eyes off the bodies. There was a radio, all right. I put on the headphones, and switched it on. A distorted voice was speaking unintelligible jargon. I waited until it seemed to have finished, pressed a switch marked ‘Trans’, and talked. Then I switched back to ‘Receive’. The same voice was continuing its recitation in the same jargon. I had no idea whether anyone had heard me, or not.
“Do you understand how to use this thing?” I asked Camilla.
“No,” she said. But she tried – with no better result.
We gave it up for the moment, and paddled the dinghy back to the beach. Camilla made towards the encampment while I tackled the distasteful job of finding out something about the two men.
When I rejoined her:
“One of them was a licensed pilot, name of Jim Roberts,” I told her.
She nodded.
“I heard of him in Uijanji. He ran an inter-island service, mostly mails, and hospital cases, I gathered.”
“The other was called Soames. He lived in Uijanji, too. Apparently had a sideline as an accredited correspondent to a news-agency,” I added.
“If only they had come when we’d not had the tractor going…I shall begin to believe in the tabu soon,” Camilla said.
♦
Nevertheless, that evening we were considerably improved in spirit. Someone somewhere must have been sufficiently concerned at not hearing from us to send the plane to investigate, and when that, too, failed to report it must surely lead to a serious inquiry. How soon anything would come of it seemed to depend on whether the pilot had notified his arrival at Tanakuatua by radio, or whether time would be wasted in searching for him at sea. We could only wait and see.
Five days later we had our answer in the form of three whoops from a siren which echoed back and forth across the lagoon.
We hurried down to the shore in time to see a small grey vessel drop her anchor. She had a naval look about her, as well as the white ensign at the stern. Some kind of M.T.B., I judged.
We kept on, past the encampment, down to the water’s edge, and stood there waving. By now the vessel had lowered a small boat, and four men climbed aboard it. An outboard motor started up, but the boat did not come directly towards us. Instead it made for the moored plane, and circled round that once. Then it opened up and headed for the shore. We paddled out into the shallow water to meet it. It grounded gently on the sand, the four occupants staring at us incredulously, three of them with their mouths open.
We removed our hats and veils, but they looked little reassured.
“Are you Mr Tirrie?” the petty officer in charge inquired, dubiously.
I denied it.
“Tirrie is dead,” I told him. “They’re all dead, except us.”
He looked us over hesitantly, non-committally, but curiously. He would, I am sure, have been much easier in his mind if he had found us in shirts and shorts, or even in rags.
“It’s the spiders,” Camilla said.
Perhaps understandably, he did not find that explanatory or reassuring.
“The spiders,” he said vaguely, disengaging his eyes from us, and letting them wander.
They came to rest on the aircraft’s dinghy, and then travelled up the beach to where the bodies lay. They still looked like bodies at that distance to the casual glance, for all that the spiders would by now have left nothing but skin and bone inside the clothes.
“And those two?” he asked, looking back to us.
“The spiders got them, too. We tried to stop them…” Camilla told him.
“The spiders,” he repeated, looking at her hard.
“Yes, there,” said Camilla pointing.
He followed the line of her finger. All he saw was an uninteresting brown patch on the sand. His expression revealed what he thought. As he turned his head he exchanged a glance with one of his companions. The man shook his head meaningly.
The petty officer made up his mind. He got to his feet.
“I’d better have a look at them,” he said.
“No,” exclaimed Camilla. “You don’t understand. They’ll kill you.”
He stepped over the side of the boat.
“The spiders?” he inquired, with a deadpan look at her.
“Yes,” said Camilla. She turned to me. “Arnold, stop him. Explain to him.”
He turned to me with a careful look. It occurred to me that he was now suspicious of us, deciding that we had a good reason for not wanting the bodies looked at closely. I tried a reasonable approach.
“Look here,” I said, “you don’t think we’re dressed up like this for fun, do you? If you must go, at least take sensible precautions.”
I took off my gloves, and held them and my hat out to him.
He looked at them, half-inclined to reject them. Camilla said:
“Please, please, take them.”
With an air of humouring her, he did. He put on the hat. Camilla tied the veil round his neck, then she bent down and tucked the ends of his trousers into his socks.
“And the gloves,” she told him. “You must keep them on.”
The other three men still in the boat were smiling a little, but with a trace of uneasiness now.
“Please get aboard,” the petty officer told us, with a glance at the men which indicated that we were to be kept aboard.
We did so, and watched him splash through the shallow water and start up the beach.
At least three bands of spiders became aware of him, and started on converging courses.
Pre
sently the men in the boat with us became silent. They, too, had noticed them. One of the men hailed him, and pointed. The petty officer looked round, but apparently failed to notice anything unusual. He waved a gloved hand, and went on.
He reached the two bodies, and bent down, examining them.
Two of the brown patches were now quite close. The man in the boat hailed again, but the petty officer took no notice, he was looking down intently at the nearest body. Rather tentatively he stretched out a hand to touch it.
At that moment the first band of spiders reached him.
They simply flowed up, and all over him. He straightened up suddenly, and began trying to brush them off. At that moment the second and third groups arrived. They, too, came swarming up his legs.
For some seconds he stood covered in spiders except for his hat and gloves, waving his arms about in a futile attempt to get rid of them. Then he saw other groups already flowing across the sand towards him, and decided to retreat.
He came running down the beach, jumping one or two groups that were in his path, and splashed into the shallow water making for the boat. A few yards away he thought better of that and swerved aside. He went past us glistening with a carapace of living spiders.
In deeper water he flung himself down, and a lot of them were washed off. He had to submerge three times more before he got rid of the last of them.
Meanwhile, a rating had started the outboard, and we made towards him. He was standing swaying waist-deep in the water when we came up. Two of the men dragged him over the side.
“My arms,” he cried. “Oh, God, my arms.” And he passed out.
We pulled off his jacket. Four or five spiders fell out of it, and were promptly stamped on. Evidently they had got up his sleeves, for his forearms showed a dozen red spots, and were already swelling up.
We made off at full speed for the ship.
Nine
Well, that was the ignominious end of Lord F’s Project, as such. But, of course, there was a certain amount of tidying up to be done. There were interviews for us, for instance. Our first interview, with Lieutenant-Colonel Jaye, officer commanding the combined force at Tracking Station Oahomu, could serve as prototype for the many which were to follow. It was not that he disbelieved us – after all, he had the evidence of the petty officer on his own staff, now in the sick-bay and suffering great pain in his arms – so much as that there is a difference between disbelief and incredulity; the one being rejection, the other, inability to accept. It was the latter which gave him, and others after him, so much trouble.