My hand reached the door, broke the membrane between two universes, and I began to fold around a corner neither right nor left but a direction indecipherable to my three-dimensional mind. The threads binding me to the hungry, hateful entity snapped, taking with them her crooning voice in my head.
Shear forces wrenched me, spindling my discorporate form and threatening to shred me like the paper soldier I was. I came to pieces and reassembled, miraculously, into one piece as I fell to a sandy surface and lay too weak to move but free.
I lay insensible for a time until a dull roar, coupled with sand and wind and the smell of salt water, told me I lay on the shore of a sea, and light through my closed lids told me I had left Alistair’s dead world. I struggled to roll onto one elbow and shaded my eyes to look around. I had landed in hot sand worn fine as silk. To one side, I made out the sudden rise of dunes. On the other, the roll and tumble of an ocean more purple than blue or green.
As I swayed on my feet, letting the wind dry my sweat and cool my skin, I felt a feather touch on my right cheek, the side numbed by scar tissue which should feel almost nothing at all. A spider-silk thread brushed my right hand and pulled like the weight of a butterfly, a tug so slight I might have imagined it, a touch so much like Mora’s I had to follow it. I let my right hand drift toward the half-imagined pull until it pointed out into the rolling surf. I sighed. Of course the gate would be in the water.
Coming from the deep, dry sand to the water-packed shore nearer the waves, I inhaled the cooler air where the sun no longer reflected so brightly from underfoot and a breeze came fresh off the sea. The butterfly touch of the thread drew me further out until wavelets washed over my boots and foamy surges washed my knees. I moved my knife to my jeans pocket and threw my coat behind me, letting it spread across the surface of the water, slowly sinking. Then I dropped my cane, waded out to the depth of my hips and threw myself into the surf.
With bullets still lodged in shoulder, waist and calf, I could only sidestroke, keeping my head up and following the tug of the thread until I knew I would drown long before I could get back to shore. Once, something bumped my legs, and a torpedo shape as long as my forearm darted away under the surface, surrounded by a school of small bright blue fish striped luminous yellow.
Well out past the breakwater, the thread tugged my arm, then I had barely time to gulp my lungs full before a current seized my legs and sucked me down. I clapped my hand over my mouth and nose to prevent myself trying to inhale. I would at least have the mercy of losing consciousness before I drowned.
The funnel sucked me straight down, feet first. Lights burst and swam behind my lids as oxygen burned out of my lungs, and I fought my own will to hold my mouth and nose shut against the need to breathe.
Then I squeezed through a spinning mouth, folded around and through myself and spilled out on the breast of a wave onto a dust-caked floor.
I inhaled both water and air, coughed, gagged and vomited a mix of salt water and what remained of the water from the black river in Alistair’s world. Then I lay like a rag—shirtless, shoe-less, coatless, wet and cold.
Raising my head from the floor, I opened salt-stung eyes. The surface under me had been a hard carpet once, the kind used in office buildings because it is cheap and durable. Time had stiffened the fibers so they crumbled into dust under my weight.
The room itself was unlit, black as the deepest caves, but like some caves, some bioluminescence gave shape to space. Spiderwebs gave off a faint glow, too dim to show me the floor under my hands, but bright enough to limn the shape of my fingers when I held them up before my eyes. Somehow, I had come back to the home of the siren spider women, arriving this time inside one of the mummified towers. Strands like twine stretched from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, trailing cobweb curtains, which draped the walls of cubicles that cut the room into cells. Ghostly desk-chairs floated around me, having been hauled from the floor by tightening web ropes. Near the desks within the cubicles, I made out the suspended shapes of what looked like old-fashioned cathode-ray monitors. Other detritus littered the webs as if the web spinners had carelessly incorporated any loose items they encountered into the glowing cocoon. I blinked at the shape of a long office stapler sticking from a cottony knot near the floor a yard away.
Ahead of me, at the end of the walkway into which I had spilled, the swathes of web across the wall suggested the shape of a door. I pulled myself up on the corner of the nearest desk and got to my feet. I ducked under a hanging knot from which protruded the wheeled feet of a chair. My head knocked something that rattled, and a bundle of light, hard objects fell on my shoulder and scattered to the floor. I knelt swept my hand over the floor, finding a jumble of nuggets like misshapen dice. I held them under the knot of web.
Gauzy threads strung together a cluster of human foot bones like a jumbled necklace. Several had already crumbled when they struck the floor. The rest broke apart in my fingers, collapsing into fine grit. In the cocoon above me, a pair of leg bones protruded from the silk near the legs of the chair, still supporting the remains of a bony heel. As I watched, the heel bone dropped from the ankle and disappeared into the dark on the floor. I spotted the other foot a few inches from the exposed ankle bones, distinguishable only by the toe of a woman’s shoe. Squinting into the cocoon of light and shadow, I saw, or imagined I saw, the outline of a human frame hoisted into the air over the cubicle, chair and all.
Rubbing the dust from my hands, I stumbled and staggered down the open walkway. Halfway to my objective, I heard the click of chitinous mandibles and the sticky sound of stretching web. High in the corner of the ceiling, a luminescent bundle swayed and bulged. The web parted, and a black silhouette emerged, the heart-shaped head of a caterpillar, its details obscured by the dim webglow behind it. It clicked its mandibles and pulled itself further into the open air. Another bulge formed beside it. To my left, something squirmed in a cocoon under a desk.
I picked up my pace. The caterpillars had ignored us when Alistair and I hurried through their open city on our first trip through this world, but we had not disturbed their home. I wasn’t sure I would receive the same forbearance this time. At the end of the room, I found, as I had hoped, the outline of a door and began to strip away the layer of silk. Despite the size of the strands, I had unconsciously expected the web to tear like the webs of common, earthly spiders, but the stuff resisted, sticking to my hands and the door and the wall and stretching two or three times its original length before breaking. I cleared the door enough to find the crash bar and lean my weight on it. The latch opened, and the door gave way, a sticky curtain of silk stretching on the other side. As soon as I had made enough room, I thrashed my way through the opening and pushed the door shut behind me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I emerged on the landing of an emergency stairway. The spinners had been here, too, sheathing the stairwell in a luminous blanket so uniform that by its light, I could make out the black threads winding around my hand. I sat on the top step to take another look at my injured leg before I tried the stairs.
Salt water had washed some of the blood out of my bandages, but more had already begun to seep through. I needed a better dressing for the wounds. I eyed the cotton-candy mass of web filling the corners all around me. It was full of dust. I stuck my fingers into the nearest mat of cobweb and pulled, stretching the top layers and sawing with my knife until they gave way with a faint sound of peeling tape.
The web underneath looked cleaner. I picked apart the knots holding the last strips of my nightshirt around my calf. Blood began to flow almost at once, a sluggish, dark red trickle. I wiped my fingers on my jeans and pulled out another sheet of web. Holding my breath, I wadded it into a ball and pushed the bundle into the wound. I panted through the pain and repeated the procedure, packing the wound with cobweb before retying the cotton bandage to hold it all in place before I moved on to repeat the process with the other two wounds.
While I had been re-dressing m
y leg, my presence had disturbed the contents of the cocoons hung around the ceiling and the walls. They had begun to bulge and quiver. Satisfied that the knots would hold for a while, I pulled myself up by the handrail. Between my hip and the gunshot, I doubted I would be able to keep on my feet. I leaned my weight on the banister and half-slid down to the next landing.
I thought I had outdistanced the first stirring creatures by the time I had descended four or five floors until I glanced up and saw a caterpillar descending straight down the narrow open center of the stairwell on a new-spun strand of silk. It slowed to a halt in front of me and curled its body to face me with all its eyes. A slick thread of a tongue slid from between the mandibles and flicked the air with a raw, pink tip.
I ignored it and hop-slid down the next flight of stairs.
The caterpillar followed on its thread, and now a dozen more fell from above, matching their descent to mine. At last, the stairs came to an end, and I hoped I hadn’t landed in the sub-basement. I couldn’t bring myself to imagine what might make its lair below ground. I found the frame of the exterior door and peeled back the concealing web.
I looked up just as the first of the caterpillars severed its suspension thread and fell to the floor with a thump and a scrabble of something that sounded like claws. A moment later, several of its kind landed beside it. They reared up on their hind quarters and clicked mandibles at me or licked the air.
Caterpillars stopped on the landing above me, silhouettes in the weblight, and rose like cobras, threadlike tongues fluttering. More rippled straight down the walls and stopped, all watching me. I pressed my back to the door and pushed with both legs.
The first and boldest of the caterpillars made a chattering noise with its mandibles. The rest joined the leader, the collective noise loud and flat, cushioned by the absorbing walls. The leader splayed its top four feet, exposing suckers ringed with tiny, hooked teeth. It rippled closer.
I found the handle of the door behind me, squeezed the latch. It didn’t give on the first try, and I thought it must be locked, but a harder squeeze and a jerk at the handle released the age-stiff mechanism. I turned my back to the caterpillars and pulled. It came open more easily that expected, sticky web tearing around the edges with a crackling, shredding sound. A wall of white web filled the doorway, strings and clumps stretching from the outer web to the surface of the door.
More caterpillars thunked to the floor behind me, and the scrape of insect feet came closer. I plunged my knife into the wall of web and dragged it down, sawing and tearing as much as cutting with the sharpest edge of the shone shard.
Something flicked my leg, and I slashed back and down with my knife before turning to see a caterpillar backing hastily away. It flickered its long tongue in the air. I checked my leg but saw no damage, so I returned to my cutting, keeping half an eye on the clustering caterpillars. A handful of the things crept closer, threadlike pointed tongues fluttering at the air. I feinted at them, and they recoiled but not all the way back to the clustered pack of their fellows.
I had almost cut a tunnel large enough to crawl or plow through if the creeping things would hold off another minute or two. Instead, another tongue licked my leg and stung. Something tugged. I lashed down with the knife, and a caterpillar squealed. I slapped at my leg, feeling a thread writhe and flap. A caterpillar lay bundled on the floor, rolling and thrashing. I took hold of the whiplike thing hanging from my leg and pulled. It stretched and twitched and stabbed like a nail.
The thing was digging deeper into my scarred leg. I twisted the whiplike fiber around two fingers and pulled again, slowly and firmly, and the end popped loose. It flipped and flailed in my grip, and the free end probed at my fingers. I flung it away from me, only recognizing it when the nearest caterpillars tasted the air with fluttering tongues. The caterpillar now staining the floor with faintly luminous ichor had jabbed its tongue into my calf for purposes of its own which I hoped had to do with nothing more sinister than a quick lunch.
The caterpillars were all moving now. Half a dozen gathered around their fallen leader and stabbed their tongues into its twisting body. It writhed another moment, then fell still. The remainder ignored the group doing—whatever it was—to the probably dead one, and came after me, tongues licking the air.
My leg had begun to swell where the first caterpillar had stung me. I had no interest in fighting the rest of them. I slashed and cut at the web, making space for myself on the other side of the door until I could push my way into the mass and drag the door shut behind me, cutting off the encroaching pursuit. That left me momentarily secure, if any security could be found deep inside a tangled cocoon with caterpillars nesting all around me and spider women waiting outside.
Dust irritated my nose and eyes, and I sneezed. I felt for the tickle of my guide, but if it was still with me, I couldn’t feel it beside the heavy strings of web clinging to my bare skin. I turned my back to the door behind me and went to work, cutting, pulling and tearing my way through the web.
I pawed and sawed, imagining caterpillars inching their way through their webby nests. My knife tore through sticky ropes and sheets of silk. I swept them aside. Web wrapped my arm and wound my legs and body, getting in my mouth and tangling in my hair and eyelashes, but with each sweep of my arm, I sheared another layer of silk and took another step away from the building and out toward the open street.
Hard mandibles clicked on every side as caterpillars felt the disturbance I made and came closer—whether to attack a threat to their hive or merely to investigate, I couldn’t tell and didn’t want to find out. My leg continued to burn, and when I felt the puncture where the tongue had punched into me, the surrounding skin felt swollen and hot.
As my right arm grew tired, I added the strength of my left, weakened as it was by the bullet in my shoulder, and continued to cut, two-handed, and bull my way through the cocoon. I passed by a curled body close enough to brush its spongy side with my shoulder. It stirred and pushed against the strands of its nest. I squirmed past it, wary of another stabbing tongue and ready to plunge my knife into the thing if it turned on me.
The sticky velcro sound of stretching web grew on every side as the caterpillars came awake and began to move. I pulled rubbery strings away from my mouth and nose when they began to obstruct my breathing, and blinked bio-luminescent strands from my lashes as I tried to scan the cocoon for movement. Web tangled my legs, and I had to pause at intervals and cut it away.
My heart began to pound, not from fatigue or fear but with the hard, fast rhythm of something like a bad histamine reaction. Poison from the caterpillar sting leaking into my blood. I would have to do something about it soon, and my present circumstances were far from ideal. At which thought, the knife broke through the outer layer of the cocoon into open air.
I twisted and struggled against the tangled sheets and ropes. First my arm, then my head, then my shoulders came free of the cocooned building, and I inhaled fresh air. I scraped cobweb from my face and looked around. No mistaking the world of the siren spiders. Pink light turned the tops of the shrouded towers to cotton candy and painted the sails and billows in the sky between like the tents and banners of a fairy-tale circus. The chill in the air told me I was seeing dawn light, not evening.
I pushed through the last layers of web, falling to my hands on the pavement and pulling my legs free behind me. On hands and knees, I dragged myself away from the cocoon, putting a few yards between me and the side of the mummified tower before I rested my back against a car that had been left mostly unshrouded at the curb. Gauzy sheets and ropes clung to my skin, my jeans, my bare feet. I rubbed my hands together, rolling the web into bundles I could shake off. I finger-combed as much of the stuff from my hair as I could, picked it from my eyebrows, peeled it from my lips, pulled strands from behind my ears, even from between my toes.
My gunshot leg had stopped bleeding in spite of my exertions. I had gambled, and it appeared the spider silk in this world had the same co
agulant and adhesive qualities of the much smaller variety at home. That gave me some reassurance when I looked at my right calf where the caterpillar tongue had punctured me. My skin had turned black in streaks up and down my leg. Thick, green fluid oozed from the puncture. I pressed gently on the surrounding tissue, and more green stuff pulsed out, followed shortly by a thick swell of blood so dark it was almost black.
More cautious probing pushed out the last of the black mess and brought up a stream of bright red that ran like water over my ankle and heel. It was too thin. An anticoagulant venom, I decided. Not the most dangerous poison. It could be a problem if it caused internal bleeding, but at least I knew the standard field treatment.
Unfortunately, the standard field treatment required bandaging. I could sacrifice what remained of the legs of my jeans, but it wouldn’t be enough to give me the right compression. I looked back at the building I had just escaped. Caterpillars moved just under the surface of the web. Their heads bulged the outer layers but didn’t break through. Maybe the rising sun deterred them. Pushing up against the side of the car, I got my balance and limped back toward the building.
Ignoring the movement of the caterpillars, I pushed through the opening I had made and found a layer of web that seemed cleaner than the rest. I pulled out as much as I could and brought it back to the side of the car where I could sit and put myself back together.
I massaged the skin around the wound, trying to push out any pockets of stagnant blood or venom without spreading the venom deeper into my flesh. More green and black ooze spilled out. I worked a wad of web into the pocket of infection under my skin. With that done and the web wicking a steady swell of thin red blood, I finished the job by winding sheets and strings of web around my leg tight enough to immobilize the muscle without cutting off circulation completely. With that accomplished, I leaned my head back against the plastic side of the car and closed my eyes, listening to my thudding heartbeat.
The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption Page 15
