The Wynard was wretched. The boat lay on her side like the mummified body of a long-dead elephant, her gray hull beginning to cave and collapse as moisture and unseen insects completed their rotting work; her timbers were faded and bleached like cow bones. Far overhead, wind roared like fire in the treetops, an invisible wave endlessly crashing.
Nicholas shifted the shotgun to one hand and checked his watch. It was nearly four. The winter sun remained hidden by a million leaves, but he could feel its distant warmth vanishing from the day with greedy speed. The air here in the deep green shadows was frigid and still. Hannah shivered beside him.
“Which way?” she asked.
He looked around the hunching curtains of green and black. At the boat, the track had petered out.
“I don’t remember.”
The last time he’d left here, he’d been carried unconscious on eight thousand spindle legs, Garnock riding on his chest like a stygian cavalier.
The ground ahead, thick with vine and root and trunk, seemed to rise. The air that way had a slightly sour tang. Nicholas reasoned that the river couldn’t be far away, its salty mud banks thick with mangroves and rancid with the droppings of flying foxes. He nodded in that direction, and he and Hannah started again uphill.
As they crawled between the ancient trees, picking their way through the dense shadows over mossy flood-felled trunks and under incestuous, noose-like vines, Nicholas told her everything else he knew about Quill. When he’d finished, Hannah was silent for a thoughtful moment.
“Wow. That’s a long time to be alive,” she said. “Rowena must be very lonely.”
Nicholas looked at her.
“Maybe that’s why she’s so mean,” she continued. “Because she’s sad. Everyone she loved is dead and left behind.”
Nicholas stopped. The trees around them now were more shadow than substance. Even Hannah’s face was a gray mask, as featureless as the sandy bottom of a deep pond.
“I think we have to turn back.”
Hannah blinked. “We can’t. If we don’t get her today …” Her voice trailed off with a shudder.
Nicholas nodded.
“Hannah?” A voice as thin as smoke wended from the dark belt of trees up ahead. Nicholas watched Hannah’s eyes widen and her face tighten like a fist. His own heart began to gallop.
“Haaaannahhh?” A girl’s voice. A pained voice.
Hannah’s eyes darted between the woods and Nicholas.
“It’s Miriam,” she whispered.
Nicholas saw goosebumps on his arm. He shook his head. “It’s not.”
“It is! She’s not dead! They were wrong!”
She started forward. Nicholas snatched her arm and wheeled her round. He grabbed her chin and made her focus her wild eyes on him.
“It’s not your sister, Hannah. Think about it.”
Hannah blinked. She nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Stay here.”
He looked around to orient himself, then cocked the shotgun and stepped into the deeper gloom.
“Haaannnahhh? Help me, Hannaaaahhh!”
The voice was a keening tapestry of pain and sorrow. It made Nicholas’s skin crawl. What was it doing to Hannah?
He moved as quickly as he could, but the trees were wide and old and huddled tight as conspirators. The spaces between them were filled with even older stumps that rose from the rustling ground like the broken teeth of titans. It was growing so dark. Nicholas suddenly realized what a stupid thing he’d done. He’d left Hannah alone.
“Hannah?” The voice was no longer scared. A shadow shifted between the gloomy trees ahead of Nicholas.
“Miriam?” he asked, carefully swinging the gun barrel up toward the movement.
“Hannah!” replied the voice delightedly. And suddenly the shadow jolted forward.
It was a spider at least the size of Garnock, a widow with gloss black and hairless legs, each as long and thick as a broom handle. They moved a shelled body as big as a water-filled black balloon. Yet the spider jumped from tree to tree with amazing speed; one moment swaying like a ready boxer, the next leaping and landing with eerie silence, so fast that Nicholas barely had time to thumb the hammer back.
“Hhhaaaaaa!”
The voice changed from human to something utterly alien as the spider pounced. Nicholas pulled the trigger. The blast was loud but was squashed instantly by the disapproving trees. The spider jerked, but its momentum carried it right at him—he scrambled sideways and the spider hit the tree behind him with the wet crack of a giant egg smashing. It slid lifeless to the dark leaves, its long finger-bone legs quivering in death palsies.
Nicholas turned and ran.
“Hannah!”
He sprinted downhill, dodging between trunks and jumping over spiny branches, sliding and falling and rising and running. Ahead, he heard Hannah scream in terror.
“Hold on, Hannah!”
He thumbed back the shotgun’s other hammer and jumped over the last log into the clearing.
Hannah stood shaking, eyes locked on something hidden from Nicholas’s sight by a wide trunk.
“What is it?” he asked.
She pointed, and he stepped closer to see what she faced.
He felt his own legs turn light as dust.
If the last spider had been big, this one was huge. Its body was the size of a sheepdog, squat and dense, bristling with sandy brown hairs. It was reared up on six legs; its front two pawed the air, tasting it. A cluster of red eyes stared out from a nest of ugly gray hair. Its fangs shuffled noiselessly.
“Kill it, Nicholas.”
He raised the gun, and squeezed the trigger.
And as he did, he noticed the straps tucked in the folds where the spider’s tubelike legs met its thorax. Hannah’s knapsack! As the hammer fell, he jerked the gun aside. The blast shook a sudden hole in the bush beside the spider, which jerked in silent pain. As it moved, its horrible appearance melted away, becoming Hannah on her knees, her hands tied behind her back, and a tiny red circle of a single shotgun pellet hole in her calf. Her mouth was gagged with rags.
Nicholas whirled, nauseated that he’d been so stupid.
The other Hannah stood behind him, grinning. She stepped forward lightly and Nicholas felt a sting in his arm. He dropped the gun and blinked. The smiling Hannah held a syringe in her hand and, as she stepped back, her limbs lengthened and her hair grew. Rowena Quill, young and blond and beautiful, stood in front of him, smiling as only one truly pleased with herself can.
“Hello, my pretty man.”