EPT
One of those shifts is when the walk out to get to work suddenly necessitates shielding my eyes from the headlights of oncoming cards, glaring as they bump across the uneven tarmacadam. Earlier though, I noticed a message from Rory in which he noted that the spiders in his bathroom had resorted to cannibalism, a sure sign that winter was coming. Curiously enough, the only time I’ve seen spiders resort to cannibalism is when an egg sac bursts, pouring forth an ocean of tiny white spiderlets, which then proceed to gorge on one another… but he did get me thinking.
The last time I took any real notice of a spider (and by that I mean, public notice) was when I first started working in my current job. I tweeted that a spider had just dragged itself across my desk, ripe with eggs. It looked fit to burst, but managed to make its way out of sight before it did so.
Two nights ago I found I couldn’t sleep, an experience exacerbated by the relentless skittering clicks and muffled thuds of a lone daddy long legs across the ceiling of my darkened bedroom. I eventually arose, turning on the light, determined to sort the whole grisly business out as quickly as possible. During my manifold unsuccessful attempts to banish the miserable creature, I managed to force it towards the wrong side of the room.
My house has a wrong side, it’s the side my first dog would sleep on before he was driven mad. It’s the side where there is a black growth across parts of the ceiling that appears not to be mould, but a kind of retroactive burn, as though the house will eventually catch fire, and the wrong side is simply showing signs of it early.
In my room, the wrong side of the room is characterised by a billowing layer of webs, a kind of twisting, undulating silver drapery that hangs, like a twisted curtain, from one side of the room to another, petering out a few feet from the end wall. Into that morass of half-spun and half re-spun web, twining its way as far as it could from my nascent attempts to destroy it. Then, suddenly, it froze, suspended in mid-flight.
I watched, waiting for the inevitable tide of various arachnids to be summoned from the room’s edges to find what little prey they might in the creature they’d caught (incidentally another arachnid, though not a spider). Normally, the curtain would take shuddering breaths under the weight of accumulated eight-legged mass, but instead there was just the steady, periodic clicking of its wings as it attempted to free itself. Whatever spiders there normally are here are gone.
Winter has come to the house of Volte.
