Arachne Silkweaver's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Arachne walked the ground for two days before she found the alley. The bricks held old grease and the dirt between them showed the print of a shoe, then another, then the same shoe again a day later. She climbed the wall and read the marks above her head. A shoulder had brushed the mortar. A hand had grabbed the pipe. Someone came through here often, and came back. She thought of the mice on the farmhouse beam. This was a beam too, only taller and made of brick. She spun across the narrow gap between the two walls. She did not build one sheet. She built layers, a corridor of silk that ran from waist height to above the head, each strand anchored to a crack in the brick. She stretched pale lines across the lower opening so a foot would catch first. She strung heavier cord at chest height so an arm would tear through and tangle. She tucked herself into the seam where two bricks had fallen out and waited. The human she was hunting had walked past her smaller webs three times already without flinching. She had watched him brush her threads off his sleeve like rain. This time the threads would not brush off. He came at dusk. She heard the shoes first, the same shoes from the dirt. He stepped into the corridor and the low line caught his ankle. He pitched forward into the chest cord and his arm went through it and stuck. He twisted, and the twist wound a second strand around his shoulder. He pulled, hard, the way prey was supposed to pull. The anchors held. The brick held. He shouted once. Arachne dropped. She bit him at the back of the neck and the venom went in clean. His legs folded. She worked fast then, the way she had worked in the rafters, turning him slowly against the silk and laying band after band across his chest, his arms, his face. She left a small gap at the mouth out of habit, not mercy. When she finished, a pale shape hung in the corridor, wrapped from crown to foot, swaying a little against the anchor lines. Something on his wrist clicked against the silk as she turned him. She cut the strap and pulled it free. It was a small flat thing with a cracked face. Colored lines crossed under the broken glass, and a light still moved along one of them. She did not know what it was. She kept it. She carried the wrapped body back through the streets in the dark and up into the cave she had been using as a roost. She hung him from the ceiling beside her older bundles and clipped the cracked flat thing to a strand near her keepsake cocoon. The roost was not empty anymore. It had a fresh body in it, and the body had friends, because things with shoes always did, and the friends would come looking.