Un Lun Dun (36 page)

73

An Unusual Social Ecology

Deeba crept, bouncing, on thick, candy-floss-filigreed darkness.

Hemi was beside her. Jones was ahead, struggling along the tunnel of web. She felt their vibrations. Jones lugged their trap.

They had spent hours making it. It had been complicated work.

“Do you think the straps’ll hold?” Deeba whispered.

“Yes,” Jones whispered back. “Like I did the last six times you asked me. Fing made them out of bits of the web itself, so we know they’ll hold. I was more worried that his loops wouldn’t tighten when we pull, but he said to me, ‘Jones. I don’t tell you how to guard a bus. Don’t tell me how to tie off threads.’”

“The others better not get tired,” whispered Hemi.

Deeba was very scared. Her breath came fast. She wished yet again that she’d been able to think of some other way of achieving their goal. She felt the cord playing out behind Jones from their bait, past her and Hemi, all the way to Skool’s unseen hand. She gave it three quick tugs—
everything’s alright.

Outside, each standing by other funnels in the silk, the utterlings, Obaday, and even the bishops themselves were whacking the threads, sending vibrations inside in an attempt to distract the inhabitants while Deeba, Hemi, and Jones got inside.

Deeba heard faint sounds. A tiny rustling like air. Quiet rattling like twigs falling from a tree.

“What is that?” she muttered. Hemi bumped into her.

“Stop stopping,” he grumbled.

“Hold on a second,” Jones whispered. “There’s a bit of light coming, and…
whoa
!”

The web bounced violently, and Deeba slipped down a sudden incline.

She couldn’t help letting out a little scream. Jones grabbed Deeba in one hand, plucking her out of her slide, and Hemi in the other, pulling them close. He wedged them with him in a little hollow behind a cobweb-smothered ridge. The three of them were absolutely still, waiting to see if they had been noticed.

The cord stretching behind them was repeatedly tugging, Deeba realized. She pulled it three times, to reassure Skool.

Eventually, her heartbeat slowed down, and she looked into the interior of Webminster Abbey.

They were high up in an enormous space. It was dim, faintly illuminated by the light of the UnSun through the silk arcing above them.

The great room was dotted with supports, cobweb-swaddled minarets or trees, jutting at random in the irregular framework on which the web was stretched. In the very center was an ancient, ruined church, dwarfed in the chamber. Its steeple poked up into the cobweb ceiling, which smothered its weather vane.

“That must be where they started all this,” whispered Jones.

Deeba could see black holes around the chamber: the ends of the tunnels that led outside.

“Alright then,” said Jones. “Let’s do this.” He dangled their bait some way below them. Hemi took Jones’s flashlight from his pocket and played the beam on it.

“We’re ready?” said Deeba. She yanked the cord four times to say
stop touching the web.

“Here, window window window,” she whispered. Hemi waggled the light a little, and they settled down, very still, to wait.

A few seconds after their companions stopped vibrating the silk, something began to move.

Deeba saw motion. There were swaying beams of dim light, off in the distance of the darkness. She froze.

Out of the tunnels, back into the shadowy chamber, windows were coming.

There were tens, twenties, untold numbers of them. Crawling into view were heavy, painted wooden window frames, filled with thick, mottled old glass, through which Deeba glimpsed strange lights. From every frame splayed eight wooden arachnid limbs, four each side, clenching and unclenching.

They dangled; they scuttled with horrible bursts of spider speed or picked their way tarantula-slow over the floor. Deeba put her hand over her mouth so as not to make a horrified sound. She and Hemi clutched each other.

A Black Window descended out of the darkness, playing out silk. It twisted on the cord as it came, light from behind the glass rotating like the beam of a lighthouse, the same view, it looked like, shining from both sides. Deeba could see faint shapes beyond the panes of glass.

One or two of the windows trailed broken ropes from under slammed-shut panes. That must be where explorers had attempted to attach themselves, Deeba thought.

The Black Windows were not only clambering over every surface, raising their segmented legs high, through every loop and hole of webbing. They were clambering
in and out of each other.

In some bizarre social interaction, windows pulled wide open, and in seemingly impossible motion, others would approach with furtive arachnid scurries and wriggle inside, the pane closing behind them. Others would open, and wooden forelegs would waver out from inside, and other windows would emerge and creep away.

All sorts of complicated maneuvers occurred. Windows that had just ingested others themselves climbed into yet others. A window opened and emitted three of its siblings, one of which then climbed into another, while the third spat out a fourth. Deeba saw one window emerge from another, then eat its own regurgitator. It was endless.

The web was dim. Noises were hushed. There was a soft clicking from countless wooden limbs.

Deeba saw glimpses through their glass. Through one window she saw a room full of tailors’ mannequins; through another a pit of darkness; through another, frighteningly close to her, what looked like dark water full of weeds.

“What’s that?” Hemi whispered; then his voice gave out.

A skeleton was floating among the kelp, beyond the glass.

There were other dead, Deeba saw. Bodies lying in empty rooms and corridors beyond some of the windows, rope tied around their waists. So this was what happened to the lost arachnofenestranauts.

If they managed to get out of the window they had entered, it might by then have entered another, which itself had entered another and exited a different one still. Even if they avoided the deadly realms that were beyond some of the panes, treasure hunters might roam helplessly through window after window, hunting for food and drink in a succession of alien rooms, never finding their way back to UnLondon.

“You didn’t see what the one that took Rosa looked like, did you?” Jones whispered. Deeba and Hemi shook their heads. They had no way to tempt that particular window back. Rosa was lost.

74

Spider-Fishing

“Make sure you don’t pull the wrong cord,” whispered Deeba. There were two: one took the weight, the other tightened the loops.

Their trap dangled below them.

“No two are alike,” the bishops had explained, and told them of the infinite rooms beyond the Black Windows’ panes. They had glimpsed monsters and gas and mustard-colored limbos, as well as the more tantalizing vaults and stairways and arsenals, the glints of coins that attracted those foolish adventurers.

“We’ve got to get past them, and we’ve still got no idea where the UnGun is,” Fing had said.

“Where do you think it would be?” Deeba had said. “It was put somewhere no one could get at.”

Fing shook his head helplessly.

“It’s
in
one of them,” said Hemi. He and Deeba nodded at each other.

“Maybe…we can trick them,” said Deeba eventually. “No two are alike, you said?”

“All different. We’ve seen a sword, a flame, a coal mine—”

“—the canopy of a tree…But all different.”

“Because we’re looking for one particular window, right?” Deeba said. “And we reckon we know what’s in it. So, if all the windows are different, how d’you think they’d react if they saw one
exactly like them
?”

“They’d hate it,” said Jones.

“They’d
love
it,” said Hemi. “Maybe they’d, y’know…I mean, there are no baby windows, are there? Maybe they’ve been waiting.”

“I agree with you,” said Bon and Bastor simultaneously, Bon pointing at Hemi and Bastor at Jones. The bishops looked startled.

“It don’t
matter,
” said Deeba. “If they’re territorial and they attack, or if they’re lonely and they want to, you know, whatever. Either way, if there’s one just like them, they’re going to come see.”

With tools from the bus, Jones had pulled free a window from an empty building.

Following Bon and Bastor’s description, they’d sawed and hammered, while the locals had ignored them as foolish treasure seekers. They made attachments to the frame, taking care not to crack the glass, and behind it nailed a flat piece of wood, on which Hemi drew exaggerated lines of perspective.

“Now the main thing,” Deeba had said.

From his tool kit, Jones had taken a soldering iron with a grip like a pistol, stuck a length of pipe on its end, like a barrel, and attached it to the wood behind the glass.

The thing was inelegant. Its eight limbs swung stiffly on old hinges. It moved randomly when they jiggled it. Still, it was an eight-legged window with what looked like a gun behind it.

“It’ll do,” Deeba had said. “They won’t have seen nothing like it before.”

The bait swung below them, in the darkness of the web. A long time passed.

Every time a spider-window approached, Deeba gazed into its glass. There was one that contained nothing, one with a room full of lamps. When a third came close, Deeba squinted, and felt Jones’s hand close around her mouth to stop her screaming.

Hammering on the inside of the glass as the Black Window rose was a gaunt, exhausted woman. She was thin, her hair was wild and dry, her eyes staring. She stared straight at Deeba and Hemi as the window passed.

The light was waning.

“It’s evening,” Deeba whispered. “Maybe this isn’t working.”

“Maybe it’ll help,” said Hemi. “It’ll stand out more.”

He shone his flashlight on it, and Jones swung their clumsy window from side to side. Its limbs waggled. Deeba saw several of the Black Windows stop moving, then, to her simultaneous triumph and horror, pick their way towards them.

“Here they come,” whispered Hemi.

From the shadows in the rear of the hall, a window came fast.

“We’ve got something’s attention,” whispered Jones.

The Black Window ran with its unnerving many-legged motion, leaving the gloom. It leapt onto a thread between floor and ceiling, and raced towards them. It plunged on its silk right in front of their bait.

The window hung, its legs wide. Through its glass, Deeba could see a weak electric bulb, the gray of a little room, and attached to a wall opposite, a huge, antique revolver.

“That’s it!” She grabbed Jones’s hand. “It’s the one with the UnGun in it! It’s come to check out its double. Never seen another with a pistol in it.”

The Black Window moved in agitation. Jones swung the bait gently, making its legs rattle. Other spider-windows watched and drummed their limbs.

“Is it angry, or flirting?” whispered Hemi.

“I dunno,” said Deeba. “But it’s interested. Get ready.”

Deeba took hold of the rope that led out of the tunnel, and got ready to send Skool a message.

The bait twitched and jiggled.
Don’t look too close,
Deeba thought. But the soldering-iron-and-pipe gun they’d rigged up seemed enough to fool the agitated Black Window. It drew back its limbs, paused, then pounced.

It gripped the dangling fake window.

“Now!” shouted Deeba, and Jones pulled hard on the second cord, as Obaday Fing had shown him. The loops Fing had woven around the bait all tightened together. It was beautifully precise. The thick silk bonds clamped firmly, and pinned the Black Window’s legs to the ridiculous marionette.

Instantly, everything went mad.

The captured window yanked its body, swinging at the end of the tether, trying to pull free. Jones staggered, was almost hauled off the little ledge.

All the other Black Windows began to run towards them.

“Quick!” yelled Deeba. “Help!”

Hemi pulled frantically at the rope, several quick tugs. “Anything more than four,” they’d told Skool, “means
pull.
”

There were agonizing seconds of delay. Then the rope was hauled back hard, and the captured Black Window began to rise.

Deeba, Hemi, and Jones clambered as fast as they could up the slope of the tunnel. Their captive slid behind them, still shaking as it tried to escape, opening and slamming shut like a biting mouth.

Black Windows followed them into the funnel. Deeba felt the vibrations of feet closing behind, and thought in terror that she couldn’t go any faster, until with one last heave, Skool yanked the tethered window the last few meters of the tunnel, sweeping Jones, Hemi, and Deeba with it.

They came spilling out of Webminster Abbey, to where Skool hauled, and Obaday, the utterlings, and the bishops waited anxiously. The Black Window they had snared skidded out, shaking furiously in its bonds, tied to the now distinctly unimpressive-looking fake. Curdle circled it, emitting aggressive puffs of air.

“We’re okay!” said Deeba. “Don’t let go of it!”

Giant wooden spiders’ legs poked aggressively out of the hole, looking for prey, but the windows wouldn’t come out of the abbey. None except the one that they had caught.