The hallway was empty.
The hallway was empty, but something had changed. It took Rachel a few moments to realize what it was. On the staircase, something had been twined around the banister. Rachel stepped forward, relieved now, assuming that the children were playing a joke on her: they had stolen downstairs and wrapped a ball of string or a washing line around the uprights. But no, as she came closer, she thought that it didn’t look like string. It was thinner, and more silvery. She reached out and touched it and it stuck to her hand.
Shaking the thread loose, Rachel followed it down the hallway until she came to the stairwell that led down to the family kitchen. At this point, her way was blocked: and this time, there was no mistaking the obstruction. It was a giant web, made of the same glutinous, gossamer thread.
Rachel stared at the web in horror, but soon, not knowing where her own strength or courage was coming from, she found herself reaching out and tearing at it with frantic, clutching fingers. It stuck to her everywhere: her shoulders, her legs, especially her face, but finally, panting with effort and revulsion, she had broken her way through it. She rushed down the stairs and into the kitchen, which was in darkness. Hollow with dread at the thought of what she might see, she flicked the lights on.
Nothing there. She ran back up to the hallway, then upstairs to Sophia’s bedroom. The girls were still asleep, blameless, angelic. Through the mirrored door, back into the servants’ half of the house, then all the way down the narrow staircase, and into the staff kitchen. Here, threads and webs had been strung up everywhere. The very air was thick with them. Rachel forced her way through them — a particularly tough thread got caught in her mouth, and she bit through it, almost gagging at the bitter, poisonous taste — until she reached the knife drawer, which she threw open, extracting the biggest, sharpest, most lethal carving knife she could find, fully ten inches long.
She turned and faced the back doorway. The door was open. How could that have happened? If it had been her doing, then she’d been very careless.
A particularly thick and elaborate web had been woven across the doorway, but she slashed her way through it somehow, then ran straight out into the garden and towards the corner of the pit where the tarpaulin had been loosened. In the distance, a siren wailed, grew louder and closer, then faded into the distance: a reminder that elsewhere, not far away, normal life was still in progress, bringing home to Rachel the nightmarish unreality of her own situation.
The single thread that led down into the pit itself was as thick as a rope. She sawed away at it for a few seconds and it snapped with a satisfying twang. Then Rachel lifted the tarpaulin and peered inside.
She could see nothing. Just a yawning void; a bottomless pool of blackness.
She stared harder. Perhaps she could discern some outlines. A platform, was it, down there? Scaffolding? Was that an immense ladder fixed to the wall? Impossible to say.
She must have stared into the darkness for three minutes or more. The handle of the knife grew moist with the sweat from her palm. And then, at last, she did see something. Way down in the depths of the shaft, more than a hundred feet away, two pinpricks of light suddenly appeared. A pair of eyes. Whatever the eyes belonged to, it had seen her, and it was staring back at her.
Rachel met the creature’s distant gaze and held it. She stopped breathing. She clutched the knife more tightly. She felt herself mesmerized. She couldn’t move.
And then, at the same distance, at the very bottom of the pit, two more amber pinpricks appeared. Then two more, and two more, and then four more, and a dozen more. Soon Rachel knew that she was being watched by at least fifty pairs of eyes.
Still she did not move. She could not force herself from the spot until the eyes themselves started moving. In response to some sort of collective will, the creatures stirred themselves and smoothly, silently, with unthinkable agility, they began to swarm up the sheer walls of the pit. Their progress was swift and inexorable. In just a matter of seconds they were only fifty feet away. The eyes came closer and closer, never diverting their gaze from Rachel for an instant.
Then, and only then, did she scream. She screamed and ran: ran back to the house, where she slammed the kitchen door shut, bolted it, ran to the staircase, closed that door behind her as well, then hurtled up the stairs, up to the ground floor, the first floor, the second floor and the mirrored doorway that led through to the other half of the house.
Before passing through it for the last time, she turned and looked out from the landing window. The spiders were massing in the garden, overturning the builders’ tools, scuttling over the garden walls, breaking down the trellising. And some of them were trying to get into the house.
Rachel ran into Sophia’s room and shook the twins awake.
‘Get up! Get dressed!’ she shouted. ‘We’ve got to leave, now!’
The girls tumbled out of bed drowsily and rubbed their eyes.
‘What? Where are our clothes?’
‘No time! Put your dressing gowns on.’
They struggled into their dressing gowns. Grace got her arm caught in one of the sleeves and realized she was trying to put it on inside out. Sophia fumbled for ages in her attempt to knot the cord at her waist.
‘Follow me,’ said Rachel.
She grasped Sophia’s hand, and Sophia grasped Grace’s hand, and in that way she tugged them out of the bedroom and onto the main staircase. Their way was blocked by two dense, glistening webs, which she slashed to the floor with a couple of strokes of her blade.
‘What are you swinging that knife around for?’ asked Grace.
‘Why do you even have a knife?’ asked Sophia.
They reached the main hallway and Rachel threw open the front door. Three spiders were gathered at the foot of the steps, barring their path to the door in the hoarding. They were huge, and their swollen bodies shone in the moonlight, burnished with lurid green.
‘Keep back,’ said Rachel. ‘We have to get past them.’
The girls waited at the top of the steps, while Rachel descended, step by step, her knife outstretched. The creatures never took their small, vicious, bulbous eyes off the blade. When Rachel lunged out at them they hissed, reared up on their two back legs, but gradually backed off.
‘Now!’ Rachel called to the girls. ‘To the doorway! Run!’
Grace and Sophia tore down the steps, through the mass of builders’ rubble, past the site office and waited panting by the door. Rachel joined them, walking backwards, the knife still outstretched to keep the monsters at bay, then switched the electronic latch and shouldered the door open. They were out in the street.
‘Where are we going?’ said Sophia. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to go back to bed.’
They were out in the street, but they were not safe. The creatures were here as well. In their loathsome droves they swarmed, milling along the pavements and carriageway, spreading destruction in their path. They clambered on to cars, overturning them, toppling the massed rows of Range Rovers, Porsches and Jaguars. They ran up the walls of the vast, arrogant houses, tearing into brickwork, smashing glass. Property was their first target; after that would come people. The moon was at its fullest and everywhere Rachel looked she could see the green bodies of these vile, mutant insects, crawling across white stuccoed walls, rearing up triumphantly at the summit of chimney stacks. The night air erupted with shrill, deafening noise as a symphony of burglar alarms began to play up and down the street.