The Spindlers

by Lauren Oliver

  I don’t understand. Is this an earthquake?

  It’s the queen. Her nocturna’s voice was grim. She is furious that you made it past her traps. She is tearing down the nests.

  For a moment Liza’s heart stopped beating entirely, and in that moment she could feel the nocturna’s vibrations, which were nestled like a shadow on the other side of her heart.

  What do you mean?

  I mean she is planning to bury you here, at the Web of Souls.

  Crash! Another boulder landed not four feet away from Liza. Panic rose inside her and she scrambled to her feet, tipping and dipping as the floor continued to sway.

  Quick, Liza! You must work quickly.

  Liza sprang forward and reached for Patrick’s soul. Her hands were shaking as she tried to detach the tiny glowing shape from the threads encasing it.

  But it was like trying to pull an egg through the narrow bars of an iron cage without breaking it; the spindler web bit painfully into her fingers and hands and would not allow her to wrestle Patrick’s soul free. Rocks continued to crash down all around her, tearing holes in the web, crushing souls beneath their weight.

  Hurry, Liza!

  “I can’t!” Panic and terror made Liza shout out loud, and turned her clumsy. The next buckle of the ground sent her tumbling away from the web. She landed on her right wrist and felt it twist painfully underneath her. “His soul is stuck! They’re all stuck!”

  We have to go! More rocks; more red dust. You’ll have to leave him!

  “I can’t leave him!” Liza was screaming now, over the echoing and the crashing and the sounds of splintering rock. She crawled back toward the web. The ground was a bull trying to buck her off its back, and she could barely climb to her feet. She tore at the web, trying to break apart the strands, mindless of the terrible pain in her hands, but it was like trying to rip apart pieces of metal. She could not hope to break through it.

  And then there was another rumbling: a tumbling, swelling sound, as of distant thunder, terrifying, growing louder.

  Liza! We have to go now!

  I. Won’t. Leave. Him! She continued to work fumblingly to tear Patrick’s soul from the web, knowing it was hopeless.

  Liza … the nocturna’s voice sounded warningly, as the thunder grew louder.

  No—not thunder. Feet. Something—many somethings—were coming toward her, and Liza allowed herself one fearful look over her shoulder.

  And then, suddenly, the rats came swarming out of the darkness. Thousands and thousands of them, a roiling, mobile mass of black: and at the front of the herd, wearing not a single stitch of clothing, or a single spot of makeup, was Mirabella.

  “Mirabella!” Liza, amazed, stepped back from the web. The rats rushed past her. They sprang onto the web; they swarmed it, they leapt and climbed and swung up its steep architecture. They nibbled and tore at its strands with their sharp teeth and their claws, and the cavern was filled with snapping and cracking, as the web began to come apart, and the souls began to loosen from their cocoons.

  Mirabella paused briefly in front of Liza. Her eyes were full of regret.

  “I was a terrible friend,” Mirabella whispered. But now that she was without the odd clothing and the face powder, the strangeness of her voice did not seem so strange; she sounded just the way a rat should. “I am sorry, Miss Liza. Will you forgive me?”

  She did not wait for Liza to answer. She sprang for the web, heading straight for Patrick’s soul. And she set to work chewing and nibbling her way around it, so that the strands encasing it, keeping it locked into the web, began to break away.

  Crash! Crash! Liza ducked as more stones came raining furiously from above. A rock the size of a grapefruit hit her on the elbow, and she felt the impact through every nerve in her body. The nocturna’s whirling had become so fast, and the pounding of Liza’s heart such a furious echo of it, she was sure she would have a heart attack and die right there.

  “Call up the nocturni!” Mirabella yelled. “The souls are coming loose!”

  They’re coming, Liza’s nocturna said. They don’t need to be called.

  As the enormous, vaulted cavern fell to pieces around them, and the rats worked to free the souls in the web, and Liza stood amazed and terrified, and the ground continued to heave and roll as though the stone had been turned to frenzied ocean, from all over the dark corners of Below, the nocturni heard the sounds of souls released from their webbed cages, and they came.

  They came out of the mist and the shadow—they were shadow—and in the middle of all the chaos and destruction even the rats stopped to watch. The nocturni floated and glided and seemed to materialize out of nothing; and as the souls began to drop from the web, like apples shaken from a tree, they were quickly taken up by their nocturni: eternal pairs, bonds that would never be broken.

  Nocturni swooped through the air, carrying souls of different sizes and colors on their backs, between their wings. They disappeared into the mist again, so the air pulsed with the twinkling colored lights of souls receding into the distance. The nocturni would bring them home, Above, where they belonged.

  Snap! Mirabella tore through the last threads keeping Patrick’s soul pinioned to the spindlers’ massive web, and his soul was released. Liza stretched out her arms to catch it as it floated—surprisingly gently, as though it weighed no more than a feather—toward the ground. Before she could grab it, however, a nocturna materialized out of the air and swept Patrick’s soul neatly onto its back. Patrick’s nocturna was slightly smaller than Liza’s, although its wings were larger, and shaped almost like palm fronds.

  Patrick’s nocturna turned a circle around Liza. She could hear its voice beating to her through the air, but only faintly.

  I’m sorry, Liza, Patrick’s nocturna whispered. I should have been keeping watch. It will never happen again.

  “That’s all—,” Liza started to say, but broke off as another rock came hurtling toward her from above. She fell to one side, rolling to safety, coughing up dust.

  Let’s go! Liza’s nocturna screamed, as from above the remains of the web began to teeter, and groan, and tip, like a great metal tree about to be felled. Boulders continued to crash on all sides of them. Liza scrambled to her feet. The web is falling! The nests are caving in!

  Liza could no longer see the way out. The rocks had made everything unfamiliar, and she could not remember which way she had come, or see any kind of door. She ran blindly, panicked, as black shapes swooped around her head and bits of the web—sharp and thin as needles—began to splinter off and crash all around her, a terrible, piercing rain. She went tumbling to her knees again as the ground gave another tremendous buckle.

  “Here, Miss Liza.” Mirabella was next to her then, and holding out a paw. “Get on my back. We’ll move faster that way.”

  Liza took her paw gratefully and slid onto Mirabella’s furry back, keeping her arms and legs locked tightly around the rat’s body so she would not fall off. The other rats were a moving, pumping blur of bodies around them; and above them, the dark cloud of nocturni swept through the air.

  Hurry! Hurry! She’s coming down!

  With a thunderous noise, the remains of the web came crashing to the ground, sending daggers of hard thread spinning in every direction. Liza felt them whizzing through the air like arrows. An enormous rock was blocking their way. They would never make it; they would be pierced to death by sharp metal points.

  “Hold on!” Mirabella cried.

  At the last second the rat leapt. Liza grabbed her fur tightly, and then they were soaring, skimming over the rock, and slamming down on the other side, sliding into a dark, narrow tunnel. The cavern receded behind them as the last bit of the Web of Souls came crashing to the earth.

  Liza looked to her left; Patrick’s nocturna was flying next to her, with Patrick’s soul nestled safely between its wings; and she could feel her own nocturna flying close to her right shoulder, its wings just brushing her skin. They were surrounded by black ever
ywhere: rats, nocturni, all in a panic, drumming through the tunnel. This, too, was shaking and trembling and coming down around them; Liza knew the queen did not intend to let her leave the nests alive.

  “Light!” roared Mirabella. And then, “For lumpen’s sake, this is no time for formality! Illuminate! Illuminate!”

  Greenish light filled the twisting tunnel, as the lumer-lumpen began to emit their pulsing radiance. In the light, the black backs of the rats looked like a tumbling river of oil.

  That was when the moribats came.

  They came screeching, filling the tunnel with their terrible noise, talons extended, eyes bloodshot and glowing red against the pallor of their featherless, beaked faces. Liza saw that they were diving for the souls; they clutched at the glowing, colored shapes, swatting at the nocturni with their enormous wingtips. Liza watched, horrified, as one nocturna was sent, skittering, against the cavern wall; the soul it was carrying fell and cracked on the ground like an overripe fruit, revealing a glittering purple interior. Then it was stomped to pieces as the rats swarmed over it.

  As the moribats came flapping through the tumbling-down tunnel, dodging old stones and stalactites shaken loose by the rolling, buckling ground, more nocturni rose up to meet them. They formed protective clouds around the soul-carriers and helped to beat the moribats away, so the air was filled with twisting black and white shapes, blurring together. Liza watched as a spinning cloud of black enveloped an attacking moribat; then the moribat was falling, lifeless, with a thump, and they were running past it.

  Thump! Thump! Thump! Nocturni, working together, began to take down the moribats one by one.

  The tunnel widened, and opened into the cavernous room where Liza had met with the queen. This, too, had begun to collapse, and was filled with crumbling mounds of rock, enormous hills of shale and glittering quartz, and mist. There was no sign of the spindlers. They were gone.

  The screams of the moribats, and the thumping of the dead, receded behind them—and still Liza saw colored shapes bobbing up and away, as the soul-bearing nocturni flew up into the swirling mist and darkness. She hoped they would make it safely Above.

  A narrow tunnel was lit up with a greenish glow on Mirabella’s right.

  “Hang on!” the rat screamed, and veered sharply toward it at the last second, nearly sending Liza flying. Mirabella’s claws screeched against the stone as they slipped and slid into the narrow space.

  Is the rat sure about this? Liza’s nocturna panted out, and Liza could hear that it was tiring.

  Liza folded Mirabella’s large ear back toward her and spoke into it as though into a megaphone. “Are you sure this is the right way?” This tunnel was so narrow, Liza had to press herself nearly flat and keep her head ducked low to keep from bumping against the globe-encased lumpen suspended from the ceiling above her. Her nostrils were full of the musky smell of Mirabella’s fur.

  “The lumpen always show the correct path,” Mirabella panted back. Liza could feel the rat’s muscles straining underneath her.

  For a brief second, Liza allowed herself to wonder whether she ought to be trusting Mirabella. She thought of what the queen had said, that a rat is a rat, and nothing more, and nothing ever changed.

  But no. Something had changed. Mirabella had come back for her; Mirabella had freed Patrick’s soul.

  And, in fact, the narrow tunnel appeared to be sloping gently upward, and from ahead came the unmistakable singsong voices of the River of Knowledge. And as the tunnel around them gave a terrible shudder, and large cracks began to form, weblike, along its sides and ceiling, Mirabella, Liza, and the two nocturni burst out onto the muddy banks of the river.

  Liza slid off Mirabella’s back as the rat collapsed, exhausted, onto its haunches.

  “You did it!” she said, and once again wrapped Mirabella in a tight hug. The rat’s whiskers tickled her neck. “You saved us!”

  “Not so fast,” rasped a voice behind them.

  Liza whirled around. The queen of the spindlers dropped clumsily to the ground from above the mouth of the tunnel, where she must have been waiting for them to emerge.

  Two of her legs appeared to be broken, and she was coated with a thick black substance that looked like blood. She had not escaped the falling shards of rock unharmed. Still, she swelled herself to an enormous size, towering above Liza, Mirabella, and the two fluttering nocturni, casting them all in dark shadow.

  “That soul belongs to me,” she gasped out, raising a trembling finger. “You will not take it from here. You will not escape; your soul, and his, will be my feed.”

  The queen swayed, shut her crescent eyes, and then regained control. When she opened her eyes again, they were full of a black, burning hatred, and Liza was so scared she couldn’t move, or breathe.

  “Stay away from Miss Liza,” Mirabella said gallantly, puffing out her chest, although her voice cracked and squeaked with terror.

  “Shut up, you useless creature.” The queen swatted at Mirabella almost absentmindedly with one of her enormous arms and sent the rat flying. Mirabella thumped to the ground with a groan and a whimper, twenty feet away. She tried to stand, then collapsed into the dirt again.

  “You must let us go!” Liza cried, stuttering a little. “I passed through the rooms. I beat all your stupid tests. I won Patrick’s soul back, fair and square.”

  “Fair?” the queen parroted shrilly. Black venom dripped from her fangs. “Fair? You sniveling little idiot—nothing in the whole universe, either Above or Below, is ever fair.”

  “But you said—,” Liza began. She was cut off by the queen’s raucous, hoarse laughter.

  “I know what I said.” The queen sneered at her.

  “You lied to me.” Liza balled her fists. She could feel Patrick’s nocturna hovering behind her, and Patrick’s soul emitting a faint heat, and it made her feel brave.

  “Are you so eager for the truth, then?” The queen swelled and swelled, towering, looming. “All right then, dearie. Here is the truth: Your souls belong to me, now and forever.”

  At that moment, the queen sprang. At the same time there was a tremendous cracking—like a thousand thunderbolts sounding at once—and Liza closed her eyes and prepared to die. Strangely, in that moment, she was not even afraid. She heard a scream and a cascade of tumbling stone; she wondered for a confused second whether it was she who was screaming.

  Perhaps I am already dead, she thought.

  Don’t be ridiculous, her nocturna spoke. Of course you’re not dead.

  Liza, surprised, opened her eyes. Where there had once been a tunnel opening there was now an enormous pile of stone and rubble, and the only sign of the queen was a single, twitching hand, which protruded from underneath the rock.

  The tunnel had collapsed, burying the queen of the spindlers underneath it.

  That was close, Liza’s nocturna said.

  “I think,” Liza said, tearing her eyes from the sight of the fluttering fingers and the sharp nails, “I very much think it is time to go home now.”

  From farther down the embankment, she heard a moan.

  “Mirabella!” Liza cried. Mirabella was sitting up, rubbing her head. Liza ran to her, dropping to her knees in the black sand and gripping the rat tightly by the shoulders. “Are you all right?”

  “No need to shout,” Mirabella groaned, although Liza was speaking at a perfectly normal volume. There was a large, circular bump forming just between her ears.

  “Come on,” Liza said. “Let me help you up.” She stood and offered her hand to Mirabella: Palm to paw, she got her friend to her feet.

  “Can you walk?” Liza asked. “Have you broken anything?”

  Mirabella felt her ribs gingerly, then examined the length of her tail. She shook her head.

  “You’d better lean on me, just in case,” Liza said.

  So Mirabella slung one arm over Liza’s shoulder, and Liza helped support her as they made their way slowly, painstakingly, out of the underworld: the rat, the girl,
the two dark shapes of the nocturni, and a small soul glowing among them, giving them light.

  Chapter 22

  THE RETURN

  Liza woke to the sound of voices downstairs. She was in her own bed. Sunlight was streaming through the thin paper blinds that covered her windows. It was another beautiful spring day.

  “Are you sure you couldn’t have left them at work?” she heard her mother say, and she knew her father still had not found his glasses.

  His glasses! Suddenly it all came flooding back: the spindlers, the journey to the underworld, the long and winding way back....

  She sat up, and the room seemed to seesaw. There was the taste of sand in the back of her throat; she must have swallowed a half gallon of water when she had almost drowned in the River of Knowledge.

  She stood up, testing herself on her feet. She examined herself for bruises. But no—everything looked fine. Even her clothes appeared undamaged, and very clean. She patted her pockets and felt her heart sink. Her father’s glasses were gone. For a second she was horribly and bitterly disappointed, thinking that the whole thing—all of Below—had been a dream.

  But no. It must be real. She remembered the end of the journey in bits and pieces—she remembered supporting Mirabella and then, at a certain point, growing tired herself. She remembered a large barge hung with lights, and her nocturna’s voice saying, It’s okay, Liza. Go ahead and sleep. We’ll take you up the river.

  She did not remember coming up from the basement. She did not know how long she had been away. And she did not know what had happened to Patrick’s soul.

  Quickly Liza went to the door and stepped out into the hallway. She could hear a clock ticking. She could hear no sounds of sobbing, no indication that her parents had spent sleepless nights waiting for her to return. Was it possible—was it remotely possible—that she had gone Below, and returned, in only a single night?