Un Lun Dun

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.