“You’re crazy,” Freddy said again.
“Why?” she responded. “Because you’d be afraid to do it?”
She reassures me that she was addressing only the realizer, with no thought of daring me to brave the bite of a creature I perceived as deadly beyond doubt; but with the Imp of the Perverse nudging my elbow, I reached out and touched my own forefinger to the web at a point below and opposite hers on the other side of the center.
“You’ve both got the galloping trollies,” said Freddy.
“Perhaps,” I replied. “Would you book a little bet on which of us it’ll bite? Say, three tridols?”
“Bonkers,” said Freddy. “Completely crinkled. I’m going upstairs for the bug book. That’ll tell us what it is.”
Freddy departed for the upper regions, Angela and I sat with our fingertips on the further ends of an imaginary line bisecting an imaginary circle within the web, and the spider crouched still in the place where the point of our theoretical compass would have rested to trace the circle.
“Three tridols?” said Angela.
“That it will attack my finger first,” said I. “Give the money to my parents.”
“Oh, don’t be silly! I was going to try petting it, but you two got so excited.”
All this while the arachnid hung, slowly stretching and retracting now one leg, now another, now two or three of the eight at once.
Expecting it to jump at any moment—astonished, indeed, that it had not done so already—I inquired, “Do you actually perceive such creatures as pettables?”
“Sometimes,” she replied. “They’re very shy, and usually they run or fly away, but I’ve managed to pet honeybees sometimes. Once even a bumble. They’re furry.”
A tremor communicated itself through my finger to the web. Whether this resulted from an involuntary shudder or an experimental effort to lift my digit from the silk, must remain unsettled. In either case, the viscid filament seemed to hold my skin almost as securely as it would have a insect victim, while the vibration caused the arachnid to quiver.
“You’ve frightened it,” said Angela.
Cold droplets beaded my brow, but I did not again essay to lift my finger—partly, I suppose, in fear lest the attempt prove futile. “It sees whatever catches in its web as prey,” I said. “It’s simply deciding between two choice morsels.”
“Then it’s even odds,” said Angela, “unless you scare it again. Is ‘even odds’ the right betting phrase? It sounds like a joke.”
The spider had let itself down on a few millimeters of line, so that it dangled like the bell in a Christmas ornament, turning slowly as though allowing Chance to elect on which side its forelegs would finally come to rest.
Chance alone determines the fall of inanimate or mindless objects, while with sentient beings the operations of chance are largely usurped by the mutual prerequisites of free will and predestination: by exercising our vaunted powers of choice we so mold our individual characters as to render our future actions absolutely predictable to anyone with a sufficiently shrewd knowledge of our biographies, and only ignorance masks this predetermination as spontaneity. Although philosophers still scruple to admit the possibility of conscious self-determination in the so-called lower orders, a dispassionate observer will frequently notice vagaries of animal behavior which give every appearance of arbitrary choice.
Not that such thoughts solidified in my pre-adolescent brain that afternoon, though they did five or six years later, probably in musing upon this same incident, when I expanded them into a sophomore composition, which netted no more than a passing grade at Lower Wabash University. I had some idea of using them again just now, after a favorite fashion of the Venerable Edgar, to lure the reader into a tale that appears at first an essay, but chose instead to insert them at the dramatic point where Angela and I sit waiting to see if our spider will plot its course by the rules of choice or of chance.
Its front legs had come to rest on the lower edge of its central lair, the edge closer to my digit. It paused, lifted one limb—daintily, gracefully, as though offering up thanks—lowered it once more to the strand, and suddenly, in one of those multi-legged movements which look so smooth and quick to our eyes, its entire body sat poised on the downward-tending filament.
We believe that Angela sighed. I am very much afraid that I, expecting momentarily a leap that must bring the creature to my flesh, made another involuntary jerk. For an instant the web clung, moving outward the fraction of an inch before parting company with my skin and sheering back. In guilty overcompensation, I drove my finger forward again, actually punching a hole in the silken fabric.
For another full minute, possibly two, the spider froze.
Angela breathed no syllable, not even of reproach. I, shamed and penitent, sat scarcely daring to breathe. She sighed again, very softly, and moved her free hand up to support her elbow, all without causing the least new convulsion in the web. We waited.
If this arachnid were of the harmless species Angela believed, and bit me, the effects might nevertheless prove ... interesting. If, on the other hand, it were the Black Widow I perceived, and bit her, her optimistic mind could at best act as mitigation, not as total antidote. Such considerations are well within the power of even younger children, if educated, as were we, from their earliest years in the nuances of fantasy perception. But that the spider might investigate either of us and not bite—that was beyond my comprehension. Thus, the only safe outcome I could conceive was if the spider bit her and were indeed harmless.
At about this moment a moving sunbeam illuminated the web to my vision, making it a golden lace of almost celestial translucence. Some may interpret this as a temporary shifting of my own perception to march in step with Angela’s; but my world, too, includes such scenes of intoxicating loveliness, and in this instance the heavenly beauty of the web threw into sharper contrast the by now, to me, all but diabolic presence at its center.
Seemingly satisfied that the earthquake was over, the arachnid at length turned away from the area of late disturbance, drew itself up to the higher edge of center, and started climbing a filament that led to the friendlier fingertip.
Angela smiled and cooed very softly. The spider, tentative at first in its movements, seemed to gather resolution from the encouragement of its victim-to-be. Passing more directly beneath the sunbeam, it displayed clearer than ever to my gaze the peculiar crimson hourglass blazoned bright on the sable underside. I could not be mistaken.
It had nearly reached her finger. With an exclamation, I swung my hand up and around—the enmeshed forefinger serving as pivot—and struck the spider a glancing blow with my thumb, brushing Angela’s finger away in the process.
I felt its sting—convulsed my hand—glimpsed a small, dark thing falling to the floor through drifting veils of ruined web. I believe I stared an instant at my thumb before falling myself to the floor, among the silken tatters.
Presently, turning my head a little, I beheld the spider coming back towards me, as though from a great distance. Proportions had subtly altered, so that the fragments of web made a landscape of high and feathery gray peaks, upon which flakes of dust, lambent in the dim sunbeam, drifted to rest. The spider itself, as it neared, I saw to be a tall man, robed in monkish black, so that it was the flowing folds of his voluminous skirt which gave the impression of many legs. In lieu of hood or cowl, he wore a red scholar’s cap with two long tassels. But his most remarkable feature was his singular beard: hanging halfway to his knees, it was tied in the middle with a very tight black thread, which compressed it to near invisibility at that point, whilst above and below it frayed out until its lower half covered his skirts like a large apron and its upper edge appeared not only to obliterate the chin from whence it sprang, but to extend from shoulder to shoulder as though growing from them as well. Moreover, this beard was of a deep and vivid crimson color met occasionally in t
he feathers of cardinals or parrots, never save by the wildest hyperbole in the hair of humans. Here, then, I understood with some surprise, was the underlying reality of that red hourglass commonly interpreted as surface pigmentation on the creature’s abdomen.
“Good afternoon,” said the spider.
“Good afternoon,” I replied. (I noted this conversation down very soon afterwards.)
“I regret my parlor is in shambles,” he went on, or words to that effect, “or I might tempt you with a dish of Wheatobix.”
Recognizing the veiled accusation, I apologized for the shambles of his parlor and thanked him for his kind thought, but pointed out that he had little need to tempt me with Wheatobix or anything else, since I lay at his mercy. Unless that brand-name breakfast food, a sort of bran mush, were the medium he must use to poison me?
“Oh, no,” he answered pleasantly. “Glance at your thumb.”
I did so, and found it pulsating, swollen to three times its normal size, and discolored to a purplish black with greenish-yellow veins which radiated out from the crimson hourglass shape of the fang marks. I thereby knew myself already poisoned. Yet some scrap of knowledge gnawed at me, some piece of protocol that was not quite right.
“Someday,” the Black Widow went on, “I may spin my new parlor in the left eye socket of your skull. Still, I must ask you to look over the sample book meanwhile.”
Producing the sample book, he handed it to me, then set about the business of redecorating a parlor of sorts by stretching filaments of a rather crimped and crinkled appearance between the spires of old, broken web. I turned my attention as directed to the sample book, which was about the size of Audubon’s Elephant Folio and bound in antique vellum but otherwise much resembled my Aunt Derry’s needle case as it had looked to me in the first dawning of childhood when my perceptions were still fluid between fantasy and standard reality. Using my maimed thumb with some difficulty to turn the pages, or rather compartments, I found them devoted to twelve-inch lengths of ropes, cording, yarns, strings, and laces in all varieties, from coarse sailors’ line as thick around as my wrist to thin tatting of a delicacy and apparent frailty suitable for handkerchief trim and little else. For all their dissimilarity in size and texture, the samples were a uniform gray in color, save for two or three in turquoise and scarlet. At length, somewhat mystified, and still striving to remember what might constitute the single false note in all this, I inquired the purpose of my examining the sample book.
“To choose your winding-sheet,” said he. I understood him to mean the cocoon-like shroud in which spiders suspend their victims for a time, like gibbeted malefactors of earlier European ages left hanging in their irons. “No,” he corrected my thought, “more like sides of beef hung up to age.”
I tried to move my legs, but finding them either paralyzed or already bound, resigned myself to my fate and pointed out a gauzy rickrack filament almost as fine as a single strand of Angela’s golden hair.
The spider shook his head, the movement enlarging with distance so that the bottom of his beard swept an arc more than a yard wide. “Those thin lines will cut before they’ll snap,” he informed me. “Besides, the drop would kill you.”
I believe that, again bothered by the vague awareness of something askew, I asked why it was necessary to bind me at all, and received the reply that not only was it standard practice, but until the victim was trussed in any one of a dozen amusing attitudes, the poison could not properly begin its work of predigesting the living organs for the predator’s consumption.
“Most flies,” the spider assured me, “find the middle-thickness ropes most comfortable.”
“Ah!” said I. (Or, possibly, “Oh!”—the letter is not quite clear in my notes.) “Of course, if I’m to be tortured to death, I’d prefer it be as comfortable as possible.” I observed, however, that I was not a fly.
“It makes no difference,” he answered with a shrug that caused his beard to sway more widely than ever, its bottom actually sweeping my kneecaps.
“Than does it make a difference,” I cried, thinking I caught a glimpse of what was unnatural about the situation, “that you are no Black Widow, but a Black Widower?”
“None whatever,” he answered, unmoved, “since I am also ...”
At about this moment, I began to feel a trickle of cold water on my forehead.
Freddy Carter had come back with the bug book just in time to witness, from the doorway, my destruction of the spider’s web and the immediate consequences thereof. Ever the practical reality perceiver, Freddy had fetched a teakettle of water and would have overturned the whole on me at once, but Angela insisted on administering it a little at a time by means of her realinen handkerchief.
“Since you are also a common housespider!” I finished for the hominoid arachnid as I woke.
“Oh, the spider’s gone,” said Angela. “It scurried into that hole between the delft tiles and got away.”
Her delft tiles were to me worm-eaten floorboards, but I congratulated her on the spider’s escape. And myself on my own, for I had surely begun to wake of my own volition, and I did not consider, in my innocence, how this might mean that in some corner of my soul I was more realizer than I should have liked to confess.
“That was the stupidest trick I’ve ever seen,” said Freddy, “sticking your thumb in it like that. What were you trying to do, make sure you won your crugging bet? Because a trick like that disqualifies you anyway, so she wins.”
“Oh, the bet,” Angela said inconsequentially. Being a fancier herself, different though our worlds might seem, she understood what Freddy could not. We exchanged a secret, fanciers’ smile and rejoiced again, for Freddy’s benefit, over the spider’s escape.
A PREDICAMENT IN THE BELFRY
A “just for fun” crossover fantasy, heavily indebted to the Edgar Allan Poe stories “The Devil in the Belfry,” “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” and “A Predicament” (I regard the last two as the Venerable Edgar’s self-parody on “The Pit and the Pendulum), this whimsical adventure may also find itself included in some future comprehensive Frostflower and Thorn collection.
It was night in the lonesome October—not, perhaps, of my most immemorial year—but of my third term at Upper Wabash University, when I wandered alone to ponder the lightly wind-stirred waters of the Sparks McFarlane Outdoor Pool. As I stood there, mired in such deep meditations as only eighteen-year-olds can meditate, gazing alternately at the half-clouded moon and the watery ripples which she silvered with her rays, there came a shimmering in the air between me and the upslope. The outline formed of a golden circle, tall enough for a portal, the lowest curve of its rim scant centimeters above the ground, its circumference enclosing a surface like mist and cloud.
I watched, much interested and not a little wistful for the company of some reality-perceiver (of whom, however, there were never many at Upper Wabash, it having been founded as a “Fancy Class” institution of higher learning) while three figures emerged from the mist, stepping through the golden circle, which then somehow shrank in a moment to fewer than a dozen centimeters in diameter. One of the beings, who had seemed to keep a hand upon it the entire time, slipped it into a shoulder bag of brocaded white velvet. In her other hand, she carried a lantern.
I shall describe them as they first appeared to me in the light of that lantern. The one with the white shoulder bag seemed a fair and pale woman, clothed and hooded in shining white. Though of a marvelous delicacy, she looked ageless in that, while still young, she wore an aura of unconscious wisdom: seeming fragile as a dandelion puff, she nonetheless exuded a sense of imperishable strength. For a fleeting moment, until I recollected myself, I could almost have fallen down and reverenced that being as an angel.
Her companion looked to me like some mercenary or guerilla fighter of the last century, black-bearded and clothed in canvas fatigues colored for camouflage. Instead of ha
nd artillery, however, he bore a very long machete and a large hunting knife, the one in his right hand and the other in his left, both unsheathed. This fact took me less aback than the knowledge that twentieth-century guerillas have no place in my own perceptional world, cutting off as it does at 1849 save when it skips forward into the far future of “Mellonta Tauta” or the spirit colloquies.
The third of these beings I saw at once, and correctly, to be a large if otherwise rather nondescript canine.
“D—n!” said the guerilla, glancing quickly round. “I really thought you had it this time.”
“So did I.” With a heart-twisting sigh, the pale lady surveyed her surroundings with greater care, until the glow of her lantern fell upon me, and she gasped. (The dog, I thought, was aware of me at once, but had given no sign save the wagging of its tail.)
“Demonstink and d—nation,” the guerilla observed. “Hey, young Reverence! How much did you see?”
“I have been attempting,” said I, staying prudently back, “to work that out for myself. Is it some prestidigitation or legerdemain you’ve put together for the next student stage show? Have you created your effect with electronic screens, or with the more traditional mirrors and reflecting glasses? Tell me or not, as you choose—you needn’t fear my betraying your trick—but it strikes me as a most remarkable effect, however achieved.”
The angel smiled and nodded to me. “Please come up to us, Reverence. Don’t worry about Thorn. She likes to be ready for danger, but she never strikes unless attacked.”
“You anticipate some danger here?” said I. The last recorded instance of violent crime on or near university grounds had occurred more than a quarter of a century earlier. Nevertheless, for years a large minority of the fantasy-perceiving population has sported various armaments by way of props, and though their guns are not always unloaded nor their blades always dull, little harm has come of the custom. Therefore, I ascended my rocky path.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 62
