by Ali Sparkes
Jenny.
Screaming.
Raising her gargantuan right hand, in which was grasped a titanic sandal.
Jenny’s scream came out incredibly slowly in a weird rumbly voice, as if she had a very sore throat.
“AAAAAH! SPIIIIIDEEEERRRRRSSS!”
Her blonde ponytail swung sideways in a huge slow swoop. Her eyes were large and round and shiny. Her vast gaping mouth looked like a terrifying gooey red tunnel.
Even though everything she did was in slow motion, the sandal was now halfway into Bathtub Valley and heading straight for them. They were about to be pulped.
“Danneee!” screamed Josh. He pulled his brother toward the drain. At last Danny’s eyes opened. They started to roll up again as soon as they clapped themselves onto Josh. Josh cuffed Danny’s mandibles with a spare palp and said, “Cut it out! Don’t you dare faint again! We’ve got to run!”
Now the sandal was casting a deadly shadow over them. Josh could smell its rubber sole. He and Danny ran for it. They zipped across to the huge round black well. Then they teetered out on its metal crossbars for just a second before the sandal smashed down right next to them. A gust of rubbery wind knocked them both over. One second later, they were falling down the drain.
“AAAAARGH!” bellowed both spiders.
They were plummeting, legs flailing wildly around them, into a dark, dark hole. Who knew where it ended? wondered Josh, frantically. It smelled like soap and old water. Spinning and tumbling, Josh wondered what it would be like to suffer eight broken legs. Or maybe have one come off altogether. Spiders were always losing legs. That had to hurt!
But the next moment he landed with a thud on something quite soft and springy. The moment after that, his brother landed on top of him.
“Where are we?” Danny whimpered.
“Down the drain,” said Josh. He shoved one of Danny’s legs off his face. “Obviously.”
“But…where down the drain?”
Josh looked around. His eyesight was pretty good considering how dark it must be. But of course, most spiders were nocturnal. Out and about hunting by night. Danny had scrambled up onto his feet now. He was also staring down.
“Oh—oh yuck!” he said. “You know what this is? What we’ve landed in?”
“What?” Josh looked at the soggy matter underneath them. It looked like a rather sticky, oozy pile of tangled cables.
“It’s Jenny’s hair! That’s what it is!”
Both boys shuddered. “All those times Mom told her not to let big clumps of hair go down the drain after her shower,” said Danny. “She always said it plugged up the pipes. And now we know she was right. Yeeee-uk!”
“Good thing Jenny didn’t pay any attention to Mom,” said Josh. “Her hair gave us a soft landing. She saved our lives.”
Danny shuddered as he looked at Josh. “Am I really a spider? Just like you? Or am I dreaming this?”
“Yep. You’re just like me,” said Josh. “And I think this is real.”
“Oooow…” wailed Danny. “I was really hoping this was a dream! How can this be real? How can it?”
“Shhh!” said Josh, looking up into the dark. There was a gurgle above them.
“Ulp,” said Danny.
“She might have saved our lives…” said Josh. There was a splosh.
“But she’s trying to kill us again now!” he screamed. “She’s turned on the FAUCET!”
The water hit them in a big lump. It knocked them off the shelf of hair and on down through the dark pipe. Plunging down in a whirling, spinning cascade, Josh felt his legs flapping about in all directions. He prayed that a leg wouldn’t snap off. Then there was a brief, brilliant flash of light. They shot out of the end of the downpipe that ran along the outside of the house. Then all was dark again as they were carried on down into the pipes that led to the sewer.
Splat! Danny hit a brick and lay draped soggily over the edge. Splodge! Josh landed on top of him. They were on a ledge of some kind. Above them the dark round hole of the pipe dumped still more water on them, but it was now a light shower. Then it dwindled to just a few drips. Jenny must have put the plug in to fill up the bathtub, thought Josh.
Groaning, they gradually untangled their limbs. They got up into a sitting position. Below them was a sort of canal through which water slowly flowed. It smelled a bit rotten eggy to Josh. And not in a good way. It was dark, but a chink of light fed down from the world above them. He knew that spider sight meant they could see much better than they would have as boys.
“I don’t like this,” whimpered Danny.
“You don’t say!” muttered Josh.
“Look,” snapped Danny, “it’s bad enough that you’re a spider without being sarcastic too!”
“WE are spiders. Not just me!” grouched back Josh. He stepped over a toenail clipping the size of half a bike wheel.
“But—but how? How can this be happening?” gulped Danny. His eight eyes were wide and scared.
“It must have been that yellow stuff,” said Josh.
“It’s done something to us.”
“And now we’re stuck in a sewer with six more legs than we ever wanted,” groaned Danny. “And I’m scared to death—of me!”
“There are other things you should be scared of, mate!” came an unfamiliar voice. Danny and Josh spun around to look. Then all the screaming started again. Towering over them, with glittering black eyes and sharp yellow teeth, was a huge brown hairy monster.
“Oh, do give it a rest,” said the monster. “We could hear you screaming all the way down the drainpipe. You should hear yourselves, honestly.”
Josh and Danny stopped screaming. They just gulped and gasped a bit instead.
“My name’s Scratch,” said the monster. He held out a clawed paw. Danny stared at it. Josh carefully put out a leg to shake.
“And this ’ere is my missus—Sniff.” Another, smaller, monster put her head around the furry shoulder of the first. She smiled kindly. “We live under your shed.”
“Hello, love,” Sniff said. “Don’t look so scared. We won’t bite.”
“But…but…don’t you want to eat us?” squeaked Danny.
Sniff made a face. “What—spider legs? Stuck in my teeth? I don’t think so!”
“We’re rats,” went on Scratch. “We have more refined tastes. Don’t you know? Now, a nice bit of cake—oooh yes!”
“Chocolate cake,” sighed Sniff, dreamily. “With no frosting.”
Rats! Of course. Now that they were slightly less terrified, Josh and Danny could make out the rodenty shape of Scratch and Sniff.
“And anyway—you’re not regular spiders, are you?” said Scratch. He narrowed his beadlike black eyes.
“Can you tell?” gasped Josh.
“Oh yes. It’s the smell,” said Scratch. “And all the talking. Spiders aren’t normally so chatty.”
“You’ve been got, haven’t you, love?” said Sniff. “By that mad scientist—Petty Potts.”
Danny and Josh scuttled around. They exchanged sixteen blinks of surprise.
“Oh you needn’t be surprised. We rats know a lot about what humans get up to!” said Scratch with an airy stroke of his whiskers. “We’re your closest cousins, don’t you know? Nobody else in the animal world more like humans than rats. We’re omnivores and scavengers—just like you!”
“O…K,” said Josh. “But what can you tell us about Petty Potts? Exactly what has she done to us?”
“It’s her S.W.I.T.C.H. spray,” said Scratch. “She’s been working on it for years in that secret lab of hers. We pop in from time to time for the sandwiches (she never finishes a cheese-and-pickle sandwich!). Anyway, she finally made a breakthrough a few weeks ago. And she started to S.W.I.T.C.H. things!”
“Switch things?” said Danny.
“S-W-I-T-C-H,” said Scratch. “It stands for…now…let me think…”
“Serum Which Instigates Total Cellular Hijack!” said Sniff. She suddenly sounded like a chemistr
y professor.
“Um…what?” said Danny.
“It’s a serum. That’s what she calls it,” went on Sniff. “It forces all your body cells to be different kinds of cells. Like each cell has been hijacked by another cell, you see? So—Serum Which Instigates Total Cellular Hijack! We’ve only heard her say it about a 150 times! She spent ages trying to come up with a smart-sounding name. She was going to call it Serum To Initiate Process Of Morphing. But STIPOM just doesn’t roll off the tongue so well.”
“How do you know all these words?” gasped Danny. “I mean…you’re rats!”
“Danny!” Josh poked his brother with one hairy leg. “Rats are very intelligent!”
“Well, we watch a lot of TV,” said Sniff.
“Hear a lot of public radio too,” said Scratch.
“Anyway, at first she was just doing little things with this S.W.I.T.C.H. spray,” went on Sniff. “Insects. A bee into an ant. A beetle into a spider.”
“Not an insect—an arachnid,” pointed out Josh.
“Is he always like this?” Sniff asked Danny.
“Yes,” Danny sighed. “He’s a freaky little bug geek.”
“So,” went on Sniff, “just tiny creatures at first. We thought that was all there was to it. But only this week she was saying she wanted to try the S.W.I.T.C.H. spray on bigger things. Reptiles, perhaps—maybe even mammals! We kept well out of her way when we heard that!”
“Good job she talks out loud to herself,” added Scratch. “Or we might never have known. She had her eye on us, I can tell you! In fact, she was just setting a rat trap for us. Then your little dog came in and peed on her floor.”
“So she was trying to S.W.I.T.C.H. Piddle into a bug? Horrible woman!” said Danny.
“Yes—but she got you instead,” said Scratch. “We saw it all from under the sink in her lab. That’s why we came to find you. We heard you up in your bathroom. Then we heard your big sister shrieking about two spiders in the bath. We put two and two together. It doesn’t take long for the spray to work. Sometimes it goes off in seconds! We worked out where you would’ve ended up—down the drain!” Scratch chuckled and shook his head. “And as your closest cousins, well, it was only right to try and help.”
“Well…er…thanks,” said Josh. He resisted the urge to correct Scratch. Apes were actually their closest cousins. But it seemed impolite to say so. “But what do we do now?”
“Well, get out of here for a start,” said Scratch. “It’s not safe. Get on our backs, and we’ll swim you out of here.” Doubtfully, the brothers looked at the rats’ backs. Scratch and Sniff shimmied down low to let the spiders climb on board.
“Go on, love,” Sniff encouraged Josh. “Just hang on to my fur, and you won’t fall off.”
Josh went for it. He just ran up Sniff’s back. He found it surprisingly easy. There were clever little hooks on the bottom of each of his feet. They anchored him tightly onto her fur. Danny ran up onto Scratch a moment later. Then, with a whoosh of rotten eggy air, Scratch leapt into the slow-moving stream and began to swim along the sewer.
The dark water surged up. Danny ran up onto Scratch’s head, alarmed. It was quite flat on top between his ears and easy to hang on to. Behind swam Sniff, her nose held daintily above the water. Josh was also anchored between her ears.
“Oh no—we’re not going down to the bit where the poos come out, are we?” fretted Danny. But a moment later they came out into daylight. They were swimming through the small stream in the little overgrown gully, which ran along between the backyards on their road and the next road. “Phew! No poo!” sighed Danny.
“I should think not,” sniffed Sniff. “We do have our standards, you know!”
“Thank you,” said Josh. He ran down Sniff’s soaked back and onto a large stone at the edge of the stream. “Now can you tell us how we get back to being humans?”
Scratch and Sniff shook the water out of their fur on a tiny beach of pebbles below them. They exchanged worried glances as Danny joined Josh on the rock.
“You don’t—you don’t mean to tell us…that we’re like this for good?” gasped Josh.
“Well…er…no,” said Scratch. “We don’t know that for sure. And in fact, I know that one of the bees turned back into a bee after just a few hours as an ant…”
“One of them? What happened to the other ones that Petty Potts got with her S.W.I.T.C.H. spray?” demanded Josh.
“Well—they might have changed back…if there had been time,” said Scratch, looking rather awkward. “Only…well…most of them got…”
“Got? Got what?” squawked Danny. He stood up high on his legs like a very unattractive ballerina.
“Eaten,” sighed Sniff. “Most things get eaten. I mean…a lot of things get eaten anyway. But when you’re an ant or a bee or a beetle or something, you get to know how to look out for yourself. If you’re suddenly S.W.I.T.C.H.ed into something else you get…well…confused. And if you’re confused, you’re…well…lunch!”
“Josh,” said Danny. He edged toward his brother even though he was still terrified of his legs.
“I don’t know about you—but I’m confused. I’m very confused.”
“Me too,” gulped Josh. And that’s when the icky, sticky pink thing suddenly ickily stickily stuck to his shoulder. And he was yanked high into the air.
The worst thing about being a freaky little bug geek was knowing too much.
And the worst thing about being a spider was being able to think so much faster than a human. Josh had read, in his many wildlife books, that everything moves so much faster in the world of spiders and insects that they must think quickly to survive. And now he knew it was true, as he flew through the air, stuck to the pink thing. He had time to figure out quite a few things.
He figured out, first of all, that he was stuck to the tongue of a toad.
Then he figured out that he was probably not going to unstick himself.
Then he figured out that he was probably going to be eaten…ALIVE!
He knew that toads eat their prey alive. They don’t mind at all if their lunch kicks and complains as it goes down. For the first time ever in his life, Josh wished he hadn’t read so many wildlife books.
As he flew helplessly toward the toad’s gaping mouth, Josh twisted around. He got ahold of some of the long, long tongue, drove his fangs into it, and squirted some venom in. The tongue didn’t let go. There was no hope. He was toad takeout.
That’s the end of me, thought Josh. Funny. Only felt a little bump! He opened one eye. Then six or seven more. The sticky tongue was still attached to his shoulder (or thorax, if he was being correct). But the other end was no longer attached to a toad. It lay flattened under a giant black boot.
Someone had stamped on the toad! STAMPED on it!
Behind him Josh could hear anguished cries from Danny and Scratch and Sniff. They must think he was done for. Josh stood up. He found all his legs were shaking with fright. Then he ran away before whoever it was could stamp on him too. The tongue followed him. Eeewwww! It came away from the edge of the boot. It snaked along behind him like a weird scarf. It skipped and bounced over the rocks and fallen trees, which had once been just twigs and pebbles when he was a boy.
As he reached Danny and their rat friends, Josh yelled—for the first time ever—“GETTITOFF! GETTITOFF! GETTITOFFMEEEEE!”
Scratch leaned over. He tugged the half a tongue with his teeth. It squelched and popped as it finally came off.
“We thought you was a goner, son!” said Scratch. He spit out the tongue and hustled them all beneath an old log. “We thought you was lunch! Nobody’s ever got away from Gripper. Not ever! If he hadn’t just got stamped on, you’d be down his throat by now.”
Poor Josh gulped. Danny went to put a comforting arm…er…leg…around him…but just couldn’t make that work somehow. (Whoever got comfort from a spider’s leg? he wondered.) “We’ve got to find a way to get back to being humans again,” he said. “Or we’ll never m
ake it to dinnertime.”
“Well, I hate to say it,” said Sniff. “But Petty Potts is most likely the only one who can help you.”
“But how will she know it’s us? She might just stamp on us like someone just stamped on that toad,” squeaked Danny. He looked around, anxiously. The owner of the boot, who had been screened from view by the leaves of a large bush, seemed to have gone.
“No, she wouldn’t stamp on you. She never wastes insects,” said Scratch.
“Arachnids,” corrected Josh. Everyone gave him a look.
“And didn’t you see? It was Petty Potts who just stamped on Gripper,” added Scratch. “She was probably after him for another one of her experiments.” Scratch peered out from under the log. “She’s made a gap in her back fence so she can get down here and kidnap innocent creatures for her lab! Can’t see her now though. She must have gone back in with Gripper’s gooey bits. I think we should take you back there too. Maybe she’ll help you. Maybe you can find a way to show her who you are.”
“Well, at least let’s check for any more toads, before we go,” said Josh, with a shiver.
He edged out from under the log and looked all around. Then he ran up a tree. Yes! He ran right up it so fast he shocked himself. “Look at me! Danny! Look at me! I’m up the tree!” he yelled, excitedly. He forgot to be afraid.
Danny lost no time in catching up. He was the athletic one, after all. He wasn’t going to be beaten to the top by Josh. “Woo-hoo!” he called, overtaking Josh. “I’m a superhero! I can walk up walls!!!”
“Steady now,” called up Scratch from the lower part of the trunk. He was scrabbling a little way up. “Lots of things up there looking for lunch! Best come down.”
But Josh and Danny had now run along to the tip of a high branch. They were staring, amazed, at the view. From here they could see across their yard and into the yards on either side. Everything lay below them like half the country, seen from an airplane. So incredibly colorful and interesting and BIG! Butterflies flapped past them like giant kites. Bees and flies zoomed in all directions, sounding like helicopters and never bumping into one another, as if they were being guided by air traffic control.
