Hannah Gerlic was dreaming of wings.
In the dream, she was trapped in a cage—a strange, spherical cage made of hard twisted wood, or maybe of bone. She was screaming, but no human noise came out of her mouth. Instead, the sound from her throat was the panicked batting of wings, of terrified birds flapping madly to escape. But the wap-wap cry was drowned by the wretched scratchings of a hundred real birds scrambling around her, all squawking and beating, trying to escape the cage. Their claws scratched her neck and face and hands; their beaks drove into the soft flesh of her ears, her thighs, her eyelids; their wings beat her. She screamed and cowered and tugged fruitlessly at the wood-or-bone cage. Suddenly, the beating and scratching and spearing ceased. The birds fell still, electric and listening, claws hooked onto the cage or into Hannah’s flesh or hair. Another noise. A tick-tick. A crackling. What was it? It sounded like heating metal, or rain on tin, or …
Suddenly, she screamed and the birds took wild wing.
Hannah’s eyes flew open.
She was instantly wide awake, and the dream of wings and bones disappeared like a stone dropped in deep water … all except the noise. The tick-tick sound. A gentle tapping. Testing.
She was in her bed, and her room was dark. Her Hannah Montana alarm clock said it was 2:13 a.m. (the letters stood for ante meridiem). It was raining outside; raining hard. And yet, over the rain, she heard the tick-tick noise. The scratching, tapping, testing sound. She rolled over and looked at the window.
Her stomach did a roller-coaster lurch.
There were spiders on the sill. Hundreds of spiders. Their stiff, black bristles glistening with rain. Each was at least the size of Hannah’s hand. They were piled on one another, five or six deep, and they were scratching at the glass and poking their legs into the thin gaps around the frame. Hundreds of bristled black legs were poking, prodding, scratching, trying to get in.
Hannah’s window was what Mum called double-hung sashes and what Dad called a pain in the arse to paint: two wooden-framed windows, one inside and below the other; the top was fixed, but the bottom one could lift vertically and be held open by hinged supports in the frame. The windows locked with a swiveling brass catch.
The catch was almost undone.
The swivel was barely caught on its stay plate. Just a tap would loosen it and the window would be free to rise. As Hannah watched, a spider pressed against the glass and slipped one long, spiny and graceful leg up between the window frames and patted the catch with its hooked foot.
Without thinking, she leapt from the bed and slammed the catch hard shut, slicing off the spider’s leg. Her stomach threatened to gush itself empty over the carpet as she stumbled back to her bed. She opened her mouth to shriek.
But before she could, her eyes widened and the scream died in her dry throat.
Something was crawling over the scuttling mass of spiders, shoving them out of its way. It was itself a spider, but a size Hannah thought impossible. It was large as a cat. It shuffled aside its tiny cousins to crouch on the sill. Its ugly nest of unblinking eyes—like enormous drops of glistening black oil sitting in a dense carpet of bristles—seemed to fix on Hannah. The creature’s legs were as thick as carrots.
Hannah stared, shaking. It’s huge it’s huge it’s huge! It was big enough to simply smash the window in.
As she watched, frozen solid, the huge spider brought one leg before its head and raised its horny foot vertically in front of its curved fangs. The breathing holes beneath its abdomen let out an audible hiss.
Oh my God, thought Hannah. It’s shushing me to stay quiet.
The large spider began scooping the smaller spiders aside. The hundreds of legs withdrew from probing the gaps around her window and the spiders fell away. As they did, the giant, feline spider gracefully and silently stepped back and down and out of sight. In just a few seconds, all the spiders were gone. It was as if they’d never been there; as if they’d been a wakeful extension to her nightmare in the cage. Except she could see on the inside sill the hairy section of leg she’d sliced with the catch, lying like a bit of black pipe cleaner. Her bed was shaking. She realized it was her heart pounding.
They were coming to get her. She knew it. Just as she knew that the horrible thing she’d picked up that afternoon—the dead bird that someone had cut up and changed—had been left for her and no one else. Her urge was to throw the covers over her head and crawl into a ball.
That won’t help! she told herself. This was like those movies on the TV where the idiots did nothing instead of doing something, like locking the door or driving away or calling the cops.
Hannah swung her legs over the bed and padded to the door. There was a brass latch under the handle. She turned it and tried the handle. Locked. Good. But there was a two-centimeter gap under the door. More than enough room for the smaller spiders to crawl through.
Then she heard a sound that made the soles of her feet tingle.
A long, low squeak.
The back door was swinging open. They were coming.
She had to wake Mum and Dad and Miriam! Hannah opened her mouth and drew back a deep breath—
No! You yell, and the spiders will have to kill them. They’re here for you!
Hannah’s eyes began to sting and her vision softened with tears. What should she do? She looked around for something to shove under the door.
There was a framed picture on the wall; it was a poster of Hermione Granger (whose real name was Emma) and she’d begged and begged her parents for it and agreed to pay it off with her pocket money. The frame was thick plasticky stuff cast and colored to look like wood; it was as thick as her thumb. She ran to it and took its bottom edge. It was heavy. She strained and lifted. The picture came off its hook suddenly and its weight tipped her backward. She threw back one foot and dropped her arms, gaining control just before she overbalanced. She turned and staggered to the door.
Black spindly legs were probing through the gap. A row of spiders was hunched there, low on their bellies, starting to crawl under.
Hannah dropped Hermione’s picture facedown on the carpet, expecting the crash of breaking glass. But it just thudded. It’s plastic, she realized gratefully. She slid the poster toward the door. It won’t fit! she thought wildly. It’s too big! It’ll jam on the frame and they’ll just crawl right over it and get me and bite me and drag me out the back door and through the rain and down …
… to the woods.
The thought of the Carmichael Road woods suddenly drenched her with more terror than the sight of the searching, testing, hairy legs. They were nearly in. She aimed the picture frame square at the door and shoved.
It squashed the spiders back and slid neatly between the jambs with just a couple of millimeters to spare each side. A nearly perfect fit.
Hannah knelt on the floor, eyes wide, breathing hard, suddenly wanting badly to go to the toilet. Rain rumbled on the roof.
Then the picture frame moved.
It slid back into the room a centimeter. Then another. The spiders were pushing it back.
Hannah scampered forward and sat all her weight on the frame.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a scratching at the door, and the handle began to slowly twist. First one way. Then the other. Then it jiggled—click, click, click. She could imagine monstrous, thorny feet on the other side pressed hard against the door.
She realized her lip was trembling. She was going to cry.
Stop it. Stop it.
The scratching stopped. The door knob ceased moving.
Quiet, except the hushed hiss of rain.
They’ve gone, she thought. Relief as sweet as cordial flooded through her. They’ve gone.
Then she heard another slow, sly noise down the hall.
The door to Miriam’s bedroom was creaking open.