And he had brought three friends to help him against the idiot. Three friends: Jenny, Alvon Rudi and Ben Samuels
The black spider ran for the cover of the idiot’s boot, only inches from him. Its long, wiry legs pumped in and out, up and down, flailed at the carpet and propelled it onward.
“No!” he whispered.
He seemed to hear a giggling noise nearby. He looked around but could not see anyone.
The spider came closer.
Sebastian turned and ran.
It seemed to require an eternity for him to open the door into the corridor. The knob weighed at least a thousand pounds and turned as if it had never been oiled. The door itself weighed more than a ton as he shouldered it open. When he was in the hall at last, the door seemed to cling to him as if it were alive and had chosen to side with the spiders. Either his hand would not leave the knob-or could not.
When he had freed himself and run twenty feet down the hall, he remembered that he should have shut the door to prevent them from following him. He turned and went back, just in time to encounter a brown spider at the sill.
Jenny?
He screamed, turned and tripped as his feet locked. He fell and struck the cold, tile floor with his chin, jarring his teeth. He tasted blood, and he was dizzy. He had cut his tongue, and he could feel it swelling in his mouth. Still, he managed to get to his feet again.
He looked behind and saw the spider still on the carpet, as if it were not sure whether it should follow.
He ran.
He almost did not see the other spiders. He was no more than four running steps from them when they caught his eye. Fifty spiders in all, of different sizes and colors, though most were brown and as large as his thumb, barred his flight. Here and there, members of competitive species did battle with each other. Some of them milled from one wall to the other, displaced and confused. For the most part, however, they advanced on Sebastian in a maddeningly quiet run.
In his muddled, terrified condition, with everything suddenly more than itself, suddenly symbolic, he saw that advance as having a greater degree of purpose than it really did. The spiders seemed to march forcefully ahead, almost in unison.
He stepped to the wall and opened the door to Bitty Belina’s apartment. It was possible that he could take sanctuary there; such ugliness would never dare invade the place she lived. Yet it already had . . . . Spiders skittered over the beige carpet just as they did in his own apartment. Fortunately he had the presence of mind to slam the door before any of them could gain the corridor.
He saw, somewhere deep inside himself: two bodies dropped through a round kole, caught up in dark water and swept away; a blond girl with a knife in her belly, bleeding while birds sang nearby ….
He watched the wave of scrambling arachnids closing on him, and he thought he could hear the feather soft thump of their hundreds of tiny feet on the tile.
He turned and hurried the other way. His labored breathing was so loud that it smothered the other sounds that he thought he could hear. The sound of his strained lungs reassured him, much the way a jungle animal’s roar makes it feel secure.
“Please . . . please . . . please . . ” he begged as he ran, though he was not at all certain to whom he was pleading. For a moment it seemed as if the walls dissolved around him and were replaced by the cold, white stars that Pertos had told so many tales about.
He had gone only a hundred yards before he saw that spiders waited for him this way too. More than a hundred of the leggy creatures skittered towards him. They were mostly brown and thumb-sized, quick and determined. There were so many of them at places that the floor was obscured.
Sebastian turned.
Behind, the spiders had come out of his apartment and were blending with the onrushing line that hemmed him in.