“Look!” said Samuel. “It’s that Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley.”
“He doesn’t look very happy,” said Constable Peel. “Then again, half of his doll department is in pieces on the ground floor.”
Sergeant Rowan stood up. He unbuttoned the top left-hand pocket of his jacket and from it removed his notebook.
“Oh, he’s in trouble now,” said Constable Peel to Samuel. “Once that notebook comes out it’s not going back in the pocket without someone’s name being written down.”
Sergeant Rowan coughed and licked his pencil. It hung poised over the notebook like the Sword of Damocles.42
“Right you are, Mr. St. John-Cholmondley,” said Sergeant Rowan. “I’d appreciate it if you’d join me here for a moment and explain just what’s going on.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley. “The answer you seek can only be found by moving higher into the store. The truth lies on the top floor.”
“Well, sir, we don’t have time to be running around chasing answers and truth. We’re policemen, not philosophers. I think you should come down with us to the station and we’ll have a chat about it all over a nice cup of tea in one of the cells. Why don’t you just open the doors and stop all of this nonsense, there’s a good gentleman. In the meantime, I’m going to write your name in my notebook as a ‘person of interest.’?”
Sergeant Rowan was just about to do that when he noticed that his pencil was gone.
“Here, who’s made off with my pencil?” he asked as his notebook was yanked from his hand and disappeared into the shadows on the ceiling, leaving only a sticky residue on Sergeant Rowan’s fingers. He pulled at it, and saw that it was spiderweb. He looked again at the ceiling, and noticed that the shadows on it appeared to be moving.
“Ah,” he said. “Right.”
Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley smiled at them from the stairs, then skipped up to the next floor. Samuel barely noticed him go because another figure was moving toward them. It was coming from where the cardboard model of Miss Muffet used to be, except the model was no longer on the wall.
What appeared before them was not Miss Muffet, the beloved figure of nursery-rhyme fame.43 Either this one loved spiders an awful lot or she hadn’t run away fast enough when the first one appeared, and it had brought lots of friends along with it for company. She was dressed entirely in black, and wore a veil over her face, a veil that, as she drew closer, was revealed to be made, not from fabric, but from spider silk. The little black spiders that crawled across it, and the dead flies trapped in it, gave the game away on that front. More spiders poured from her sleeves and from beneath her skirts: brown ones, black ones, red ones, yellow ones. There were webs between her fingers, and webs under her arms. Beneath her veil of black spider silk her features were almost entirely concealed by sticky white strands, with only the vaguest of holes torn in them for her eyes and her mouth.
A small black spider descended from the ceiling and dropped onto Sergeant Rowan’s shoulder. He quickly brushed it away, but another fell, and another. He got rid of them, too. One of them scuttled toward Lucy. She stamped on it. When she lifted her foot, it was still there. It looked slightly flatter but was otherwise unharmed. Lucy tried again, but was still unsuccessful in killing it. This was clearly no ordinary spider.
“Ugh!” said Lucy loudly. “How horrid!”
Little Miss Muffet’s head turned in her direction. It was one thing trying to crush her pets, but obviously quite another entirely to describe them as horrid.
“Not horrid,” said a soft voice from somewhere behind the silk. “Beautiful.”
Miss Muffet was having trouble speaking properly. She sounded like she had hairballs caught in her throat. The spider strands around her mouth trembled, and a fat brown spider emerged from between what might have been her lips. It was quickly followed by another, and another, and another.44
Sergeant Rowan backed away. Above them, ranks of spiders moved across the ceiling, forcing the humans and Boswell to retreat farther to avoid having the spiders drop on them. More of the nasty creatures were spreading across the floor. There was a sense of purpose to their approach. The spiders were herding Samuel and the others, moving them closer and closer to the stairs.
In case they needed any more convincing, a massive shape disengaged itself from the darkest corner of the room and moved steadily toward them. A beam of moonlight caught it, causing the eight black eyes in its head to gleam. It was the size of a small car, except small cars didn’t have eight legs and long poisonous fangs that dripped venom as the enormous spider detected the presence of prey.
“My pretty,” said Miss Muffet, stroking the dense hairs on the spider’s head. “Pretty is hungry.”
“You know,” said Sergeant Rowan, “perhaps we should see what’s upstairs after all.”
So they ascended to the next floor, and the spiders, thankfully, did not follow.
41. “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” was written in 1944, although why anyone would want to wake up in the early hours of Christmas Day to find Santa Claus performing some makeshift implant dentistry on them remains to be seen, and would be likely to result in long-term trauma. What next? “All I Want for Christmas Is My Appendix Removed” or “. . . My Nose Broken and Reset”? What’s wrong with a train set, or a doll? Some people are very complicated.
42. Damocles was reputed to have been a courtier in the court of Dionysius II, a tyrant ruler of Syracuse in the fourth century B.C. Perhaps unwisely, Damocles suggested that Dionysius was quite the lucky fellow to have such a nice throne, and lots of gold, and all of that power, so Dionysius invited Damocles to take a turn on the throne, just to try it out for size. Unfortunately, as with most tyrants, there was a catch, for Dionysius arranged for a big sword to be hung over the throne, held in place by a single hair from the tail of a horse. Not surprisingly, Damocles didn’t care much for sitting in a throne under a sharp blade that might, at any moment, drop on his head with unpleasant consequences, and after a while he politely asked Dionysius if he might be allowed to sit somewhere else instead. Dionysius, having had his fun, agreed. The moral is that those in power are always in peril, too, especially if they’re tyrants whom nobody likes. The Sword of Damocles is thus very famous, much more so than the lesser-known Onion of Unhappiness and the Custard Tart of Doom.
43. You know the one:
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey,
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.
Or alternatively:
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey,
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
We lose lots of Miss Muffets that way.
44. If swallowing a spider sounds unpleasant, it should be noted that most of us consume bits of spiders and insects every day. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has even published a guide to the level of insect fragments permitted in food. Frozen spinach is allowed fifty aphids or mites per one hundred grams, peanut butter can have thirty insect fragments per one hundred grams, and chocolate is allowed to have sixty. Don’t worry, though: insects are an excellent source of protein. So eat up, they’re good for you.
Incidentally, in 1911 a scientist named C. F. Hodge calculated that if a pair of houseflies started breeding in April and continued until August, their offspring, if they all survived, would cover the Earth forty-seven feet deep by August. So by accidentally eating the odd fly here and there, you’re saving the Earth from being buried in them. Well done, you! Try them with ketchup. They’re tasty. (Warning: May not actually be tasty.)
XXVI
In Which Constable Peel Is Reduced to Tears of Unhappiness
