The place was intensely dark, too warm by ten degrees, as quiet as a cemetery. He took comfort from this lack of stimuli, however. It seemed as if he would be safe here for as long as he chose to remain, no matter what forces pursued him. Yet he could not afford the luxury of a rest, for he had begun to remember that Bitty Belina might be in trouble. She was missing with the others and she had no hope of freedom except that he could bring her.
He crossed the room with both hands outspread before him, searching for a wall which he intended to follow until he found a light switch. The floor seemed alternately hard tile and patches of thick and loosely woven carpet that shifted beneath his boots.
The light came on before he reached a wall, activated by someone without the room. It stung his eyes after so much time spent in gloom. He used a hand to shield his eyes and squinted about. There was no furniture in the place, though there had once been, judging by the broken film of dust on the floors and walls. The chairs and couches and paintings had been replaced with at least three hundred spiders ….
A naturalist could have told the idiot that an average acre of grassland in the northern hemisphere contains between ten thousand and a hundred thousand spiders, though man encounters only one or two during an entire day spent in such places. The average walls and cellars of a house harbor thousands of spiders too. A congregation of three hundred was hardly that unusual, therefore, except that they were not in their natural habitat: walls, foundations, insulation. Such a lecture would have done nothing whatsoever to save Sebastian. The terror bloomed more fully than ever, possessed him with scintillating red blossoms.
He found the door locked and barricaded from the other side. He could not force it open.
Spiders ran across his shoes.
Spiders covered the furniture.
Spiders crawled on his pantlegs.
He felt one scrambling out of his hair, and he mashed it against his forehead.
“Pertos!”
Spiders.
“Jenny!”
More spiders dropped out of the pipe in the wall through which he had entered the room.
He began to stomp on them, squashing them beneath his feet. They pulped easily, though many of them continued kicking even when they were plainly dead.
He tried to kill them as they dropped from the duct.
A spider half as large as his hand fell out of the shaft, black and hairy with the markings of a tarantula. The puppets had found it in a sub-basement full of rotting food supplies where its ancestors had been transported from some southern region many years before, perhaps by a gypsy trucker. Its species had been kept alive here in the north by the constant warmth of the basements and the lack of natural predators, though the conditions were not ideal enough to support more than a few such giants at any one time.
Sebastian staggered backwards, choking at the grotesque sight. To him, the spider was more than an anachronism. It was a sign, a portent, and it boded only ill.
In his haste to get away from the tarantula, he had forgotten about the smaller spiders. They were on his trousers again, and a few of them had gained his shirt where they seemed fascinated with his cold, gleaming metal buttons.
The relatively harmless tarantula sauntered toward him, its thick legs trembling.
Mercifully, he passed out.
Unconscious, he could not see that the huge spider ran from him.
There were six puppets waiting in Belina’s apartment when she came back. They were gathered around the Furnace
with an assortment of tools taken from the dead gypsy’s kit.
“What’s happening?” the rat-tailed girl from Scratch’s play asked. Her tail wrapped around her smooth, coppery thigh.
“We have him,” Belina said. She was grinning widely, though her expression would not have pleased anyone but another puppet. “He fainted when the big spider came through, and he still isn’t awake. He’s tied down in the execution room, ready for us whenever he comes around. As soon as we get this out of the way, we’ll go to him.”