Shadowland
Spider World 06
by Colin Wilson
Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One
Part Two
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgments
My friend and editor, Frank DeMarco, should certainly be at the head of these acknowledgments.
Spider World was started in the early 1980s, and its first part, consisting of The Tower and The Delta, was published in two volumes. The publisher suggested a sequel, and I began The Magician, which was published in 1992. But I must admit that I felt myself beginning to flag, and decided to take a break before I launched myself on the conclusion of The Magician, Shadowland. I felt like someone who has just returned from a trip to the North Pole, and that I needed to recharge my batteries.
In fact, I became absorbed in the question of the age of the Sphinx, and found it a relief to write nonfiction. From Atlantis to the Sphinx was followed by Alien Dawn, a book on the problem of UFOs, followed by another study of the age of ancient civilization, The Atlantis Blueprint. When people asked me when I intended to finish The Magician I said: “Perhaps never.” I was afraid the book had gone cold on me.
Then Frank DeMarco, who had published my Rogue Messiahs and Books in My Life, asked me if I felt like writing a fantasy novel in a new series he planned. I asked him if he had ever read Spider World and he said no. So I sent him the three volumes I had published so far. To my delight he liked it, and gave me the go-ahead.
After a decade, I felt a little nervous about returning to the world of the giant spiders, recalling my sense of flagging imagination. But I found that the well had refilled itself in the ten years since I had finished The Magician, and I was soon writing with all the old sense of not knowing what was going to happen next.
So in a very real sense, this is Frank DeMarco’s book as much as mine. He has even encouraged me to brood actively on its sequel, New Earth.
This book also owes a great deal to my son-in-law Dr. Mike Dyer, an expert on wildlife conservation, to whom I turned whenever I wanted to know something about birds, animals, or fish.
I also feel I should again express my gratitude to Roald Dahl, who in 1975 said to me casually over dinner: “You ought to try writing a children’s book.”
Cornwall, March 2002
Introduction
Niall is born into a world dominated by gigantic telepathic spiders, who breed human beings for food. His family belongs to the small number of humans who are still free; they live in an underground cave in a waterless desert, continually on the alert for spiders who float overhead in silken balloons, probing the desert landscape with beams of willpower. Other humans live in an underground city called Dira on the shores of a dead sea. While visiting relatives there, Niall is captivated by the charms of the ruler’s daughter Merlew. But when he overhears her referring to him as “that skinny boy” he decides not to accept her father’s invitation to remain in Dira.
On the way home, Niall and his father take shelter from a sandstorm, and Niall finds a telescopic metal rod, a relic of the remote days when men ruled the Earth. By accident rather than skill or choice he uses it to kill a spider whose balloon has crashed in the storm. In doing so, he has committed an offense for which he and all his family could die a horrible death.
Soon after their return to the desert, while Niall is absent, their cave is discovered by spiders. Niall’s father is killed and his family taken captive. Niall finds his father’s body when he returns to the cave. In trying to follow the trail of his family, he also is captured and taken to the spider city. Upon his arrival he learns that all the inhabitants of Dira are also prisoners. Merlew’s father, King Kazak, a natural survivor, has now entered the service of the spiders, and urges Niall to do the same. Rejecting the thought of betraying his fellow men, Niall flees to the white tower in the center of the city, and enters it with the aid of the telescopic rod. There he learns that it is a time capsule left by former men, and through a supercomputer called the Steegmaster, he learns the history of humanity on Earth. He also is presented with a device called the thought mirror, through which he can achieve a high degree of concentration.
On leaving the tower, Niall takes refuge in the slave quarter of the city, and is appointed overseer of a contingent of slaves, whom he leads to the nearby city of the bombardier beetles. The beetles, as intelligent as the spiders, love explosions, and Niall has arrived in time for one of their great annual celebrations, Boomday, organized by their chief explosives expert, Bill Doggins. But the festival culminates in disaster, destroying the complete stock of explosives. Niall agrees to lead Doggins to a disused barracks in the slave quarter, where they expect to find gunpowder.
They find more than that: Reapers, the deadliest weapon ever invented by man, which fire a beam of atomic energy. They use these to shoot their way out of an ambush by the spiders, and escape back to the city of the bombardier beetles in stolen spider balloons.
The ruler of the beetles, the Master, is furious that they have broken an ancient peace treaty, and is inclined to hand over Niall and Doggins to the spiders for punishment. Only the treachery of the Spider Lord, who decides to preempt the decision by trying to strangle Niall, leads the Master to decide to allow Niall to stay after all.
Nevertheless, Niall is dismayed by the Master’s decision that all the Reapers should be destroyed — dashing all hopes of using them to free his fellow men. So Niall, Doggins, and a group of young men decide to travel to the Delta, perhaps the most dangerous place on Earth, because Niall has concluded that the Delta is the source of a powerful living vibration that is responsible for the abnormal growth of simple life-forms, including the spiders. His aim is to destroy this source, known to the spiders as the goddess Nuada.
The Delta proves to be even more dangerous than they expected; its perils include octopus-like plants that lurk just below the surface of the ground, and humanoid frogs that can spit a stream of poison. Niall and Doggins are the only ones to reach the heart of the Delta, and there they discover that the “goddess” is actually a gigantic plant that forms the summit of a mountain.
Since Doggins has been blinded, Niall is forced to press on alone. In the night that follows, in telepathic communion with the goddess, he learns that she is indeed the source of the giant life-forms. She came from a distant galaxy, transported to our solar system in the tail of the comet Opik, which came close to destroying the Earth.
Another long and dangerous journey brings Niall and Doggins back to the city of the beetles. There the Master agrees to the Death Lord’s demand to hand him over. In a final confrontation, only the direct intervention of the goddess saves Niall from an appalling fate. But the “miracle” also convinces the Spider Council that Niall is the emissary of the goddess, and to his own bewilderment, he finds himself exalted to the rank of ruler of the spider city.
The Spider Lord agrees that there should henceforth be peace between human beings and spiders, and that they should regard one another as equals. However, many spiders secretly regard this treaty as a betrayal. Among these is Skorbo, a captain of the Spider Lord’s guard, who — with six accomplices — continues to trap and eat human beings.
One snowy morning, Niall finds the dying Skorbo in a corner of the main square; he has been struck down by some tremendous blow. Following the trail of blood to the garden of a deserted house, Niall discovers that Skorbo has been the victim of an ingenious booby trap: a young palm tree had been bent to the ground and then released by cutting the rope that held it. Human footprints indicate that three men were involved in Skorbo’s murder.
Concealed nearby, Niall finds the swollen corpse of a man who has died from spider venom; Skorbo apparently had succeeded in killing one of the “assassins.”
In the roots of the palm tree, Niall has found a heavy metal disk, engraved with a birdlike symbol. When he returns to the garden, this disk has vanished. Niall deduces that it has been taken by one of the “assassins,” and that they have been able to remain undetected in the spider city by masquerading as slaves. Niall is able to track one of the bogus slaves to a building used as a hospital. The man is subdued with the aid of a glue spider, but immediately kills himself.