‘Maybe that’s why she’s so mean,’ she continued. ‘Because she’s sad. Everyone she loved is dead and left behind.’
Nicholas stopped. The trees around them now were more shadow than substance. Even Hannah’s face was a grey mask, as featureless as the sandy bottom of a deep pond.
‘I think we have to turn back.’
Hannah blinked. ‘We can’t. If we don’t get her today. .’ Her voice trailed off with a shudder.
Nicholas nodded.
‘Hannah. .?’ A voice as thin as smoke wended from the dark belt of trees up ahead. Nicholas watched Hannah’s eyes widen and her face tighten like a fist. His own heart began to gallop.
‘Haaaannahhh?’ A girl’s voice. A pained voice.
Hannah’s eyes darted between the woods and Nicholas.
‘It’s Miriam,’ she whispered.
Nicholas saw goose bumps on his arm. He shook his head. ‘It’s not.’
‘It is! She’s not dead! They were wrong!’
She started forward. Nicholas snatched her arm and wheeled her round. He grabbed her chin and made her focus her wild eyes on him.
‘It’s not your sister, Hannah. Think about it.’
Hannah blinked. She nodded.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Stay here.’
He looked around to orientate himself, then cocked the shotgun and stepped into the deeper gloom.
‘Haaannnahhh? Help me, Hannaaaahhh!’
The voice was a keening tapestry of pain and sorrow. It made Nicholas’s skin crawl. What was it doing to Hannah?
He moved as quickly as he could, but the trees were wide and old and huddled tight as conspirators. The spaces between them were filled with even older stumps that rose from the rustling ground like the broken teeth of titans. It was growing so dark. Nicholas suddenly realised what a stupid thing he’d done. He’d left Hannah alone.
‘Hannah?’ The voice was no longer scared; it was relieved and cheerful. A shadow shifted between the gloomy trees ahead of Nicholas.
‘Miriam?’ he asked, carefully swinging the gun barrel up towards the movement.
‘Hannah!’ replied the voice delightedly. And suddenly the shadow jolted forward.
It was a spider at least the size of Garnock, a widow with gloss black and hairless legs, each as long and thick as a cricket stump. They moved a shelled body as big as a water-filled black balloon. Yet the spider jumped from tree to tree with amazing speed; one moment swaying like a ready boxer, the next leaping and landing with eerie silence, so fast that Nicholas barely had time to thumb the hammer back.
‘HHHaaaaaa!’
The voice changed from human to something utterly alien as the spider’s fangs lifted and it pounced. Nicholas pulled the trigger. The blast was loud but was squashed instantly by the disapproving trees. The spider jerked, but its momentum carried it right at him — he scrambled sideways and the spider hit the tree behind him with the wet crack of a giant egg smashing. It slid lifeless to the dark leaves, its long finger-bone legs quivering in death palsies.
Nicholas turned and ran.
‘Hannah!’
He sprinted downhill, dodging between trunks and jumping over spiny branches, sliding and falling and rising and running. Ahead, he heard Hannah scream in terror.
‘Hold on, Hannah!’
He thumbed back the shotgun’s other hammer and jumped over the last log into the clearing.
Hannah stood shaking, eyes locked on something hidden from Nicholas’s sight by a wide trunk.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
She pointed, and he stepped closer to see what she faced.
He felt his own legs turn light as dust.
If the last spider had been big, this one was huge. Its body was the size of a sheepdog, squat and dense, bristling with sandy brown hairs. It was reared up on six legs; its front two pawed the air, tasting it. A cluster of red eyes stared out from a nest of ugly grey hair. Its fangs shuffled noiselessly.
‘Kill it, Nicholas.’
He raised the gun, and squeezed the trigger.
And as he did, he noticed the straps tucked in the folds where the spider’s tubelike legs met its thorax. Hannah’s knapsack! As the hammer fell, he jerked the gun aside. The blast shook a sudden hole in the bush beside the spider, which jerked in silent pain. As it moved, its horrible appearance melted away, becoming Hannah on her knees, her hands tied behind her back, and a tiny red circle of a single shotgun pellet hole in her calf. Her mouth was gagged with rags.
Nicholas whirled, nauseated that he’d been so stupid.
The other Hannah stood behind him, grinning. She stepped forward lightly and Nicholas felt a sting in his arm. He dropped the gun and blinked. The smiling Hannah held a syringe in her hand and, as she stepped back, her limbs lengthened and her hair grew. Rowena Quill, young and blonde and beautiful, stood in front of him, smiling as only one truly pleased with herself can.
‘Hello, my pretty man.’
36
Gavin was explaining why he’d cheated on her. ‘It’s not because I don’t love you,’ he said, smiling his charming, lopsided, I-can’t-help-being-me grin. ‘What attracts me to them is what attracts me to you. It’s not a choice thing, angel. It’s just what happens. It’s what happened when I first saw you. When I still see you. I want to stop it, I do. But I’m just afraid that if I stop being attracted to other women, I’ll stop being attracted to you, too.’
Behind him, in an airport lounge, sat a group of long-haired, long-legged women, speaking quietly amongst themselves with the sweet whistling of trapped birds. As Gavin fell silent, they all turned to look at Laine. And they all smiled the same pretty, sympathetic smile. Gavin smiled, too, and offered her a pumpkin seed.
‘Laine?’ called one of the pretty sing-song women.
‘What?’ she snapped. She’d intended the word to sound steely and tough, but it came out small and wounded.
‘Laine!’
No; it wasn’t any of the women calling. It was someone else. Someone farther away. . yet strangely closer. Then she heard the screen door bump shut.
Laine sat suddenly upright in the bed.
The bedroom door was silently swinging open. And into the room stepped one long, bristled leg, placing its hooked foot stealthily on the floor. Then another followed it, moving with completely inhuman fluidity. The legs belonged to a squat, solid spider as large as a fox.
Laine felt her exhaling breath flute down to a whisper as her throat tightened with terror.
At the sound, the spider hunched and adjusted itself with unbelievable speed to face her. Two large, black hemispherical eyes were orbited by six smaller ones, all sitting on a grey-haired bump of a head that would feel, Laine knew, as hard and alien as a bristled watermelon. Between the spider’s two front legs was a pair of fangs, sharply pointed and hard as polished ebony. The fangs curled in, wet themselves on the glands tucked under its crablike mouth, then extended again, glistening wet with poison.
‘Hello, Garnock,’ said Laine with a forced pleasantness that defied her nearness to the cliff edge of total panic.
Her left hand was farthest from the spider, and it crept out from under the bedsheets, hunting for a
