Tom Pollock - The City's son

‘Remind me why we have to do this again?’ she said. The thing’s eyes were like glittering pits of ash.

‘Communications.’ He didn’t look away from the creature as he answered. ‘There’s no point having an army if you can’t talk to it.’ He edged closer towards it.

‘O- kay,’ Beth said. There was a hesitancy in the way he was approaching the beast she really didn’t like. An uncomfortable prickle ran up her neck. ‘And — sorry if this a daft question — but why are we creeping towards it like we’re scared it’s going to eat us?’

The look he shot her said, You really want me to answer that?

He laid a hand on the spider’s head. It went all fuzzy, like a TV picture with bad reception, then blurred back into solidity and crept down off its wire. Fil visibly relaxed. He beckoned Beth forward.

Proud that she was managing to keep the trembling to a minimum, she reached out to the thing. The spider’s skin was cool and smooth. The voices coming from it grew louder and she could feel snatches of conversation pulse around her head.

‘ Love you, honey,’ they were saying, and

‘ Good luck today! I’m proud of you,’ and

‘ Can’t wait to see you tonight.’

‘ I love you.’

‘ I love you.’

‘ I love you.’

Dozens of accents, male and female voices, all one on top of another, full of love and affection, thrummed around her skull. Beth felt her heart swell to them. Embarrassed warmth touched her ears and she realised she was smiling.

Dizziness washed over her and she felt like she would fall, but the spider extended a blade-like limb to catch her. It pulled her closer into its abdomen — closer to the voices.

‘ I love you,’ they whispered.

‘Hey!’ Fil rapped the spider sharply on its carapace with his railing. ‘None of that!’

The voices faded again to background noise and Beth’s head cleared. She shuddered. ‘What was that?’ she breathed. The spider’s leg sat cool as steel across her stomach. She pushed at it, but it didn’t budge.

‘Fil!’ she protested.

‘Overzealous little-’ he muttered. He leaned right into the spider until their foreheads were touching. ‘Stow that, you little shite-picker. You get me?’

The thing buzzed static.

‘Yeah, I’ll bet you were just trying to relax her.’ He snorted. ‘Do that again and I’ll relax you: permanently. Onto the biggest bit of card I can lay my hands on.’

The creature bent its forelegs, apparently in submission.

He looked up at Beth. ‘You okay?’

Beth met his gaze. Her heart was thundering and she felt like she was going to be sick, but all she could hear were his words, back at the bridge: Is there any way you wouldn’t be a liability? She wouldn’t show fear. ‘I’m fine.’

Fil leaned close to the spider and whispered to it, and a forelimb coiled around him too. When he didn’t struggle Beth steadied herself. For an instant, she glimpsed her face, distorted in the curve of the spider’s massive exoskeleton — and then the giant spider carried them away, scuttling up and over the phone lines at a speed that left her last breath stranded behind her in the air.

Houses, streets, factories, cars, all streaked past below them: distorted light and roaring, rushing noise. Filius, across from her, became grainy and faded away, and Beth felt her own body fizzing and saw her hand dissolve into pixels. She was breathless, but moment by moment she grew less afraid. The pulse of the spider soothed her.

All sense of motion dissipated. Time changed. The city lost definition, became dark and blurry. What was real, what was vivid, was the web: cables twisted between the shadowy buildings and ran underground, shining as they crisscrossed the urban darkness, alive with chattering voices.

A shape rose on the horizon: a slim steel tower, all blazing light and sound, rising from a hill in the south of the city. The strands of the web converged on it. It grew steadily, shining, blotting out the sky, burning her sight into nothingness. The murmur of a million conversations swelled to a roar — then there was blackness. The light was extinguished like a dowsed match; the voices were silenced. Beth lurched forward and caught herself on a metal banister. Chill air buffeted her and she groped around as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. She was up high.

Really high.

She was standing on a platform on a metal tower. It took her a second to recognise the interweaving metal struts of the Crystal Palace radio mast. The city, hundreds of feet below, glimmered like a firefly army in the darkness.

‘I’m on Cryst-’ She fought for breath and her skin tingled at the sheer lack of anything between her and the drop. ‘I’m on Crystal Palace Tower? That’s-That’s actually beautiful.’ Hysterical laughter bubbled out of her as she realised how far they’d come.

Spiders no bigger than you’d find in your house flickered in and out of existence all around her, crawling everywhere, fussing at bales of wire and satellite dishes with their sharp limbs. The spider that had carried them shivered and then splintered into hundreds of smaller eight-legged bodies, which quickly vanished into the teeming mass.

Beth shuddered at their skittering movements and the wagging of their tiny glassy heads. As her ears adjusted, the wind began to sound more and more like voices, submerged in static: waves of crackling conversation.

Fil rubbed feeling back into his limbs. He peered upwards into the tower’s upper reaches. ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘She don’t know you, and you won’t wanna know her.’ He hesitated, his face pinched, worried-looking. ‘Be careful, right?’ he said. ‘I got us an amnesty with the Motherweb for the chat, but the kids here’ — he indicated the milling arachnids — ‘they can be a little keen. But they only eat voices, so keep your mouth shut and you should be fine.’

He tested a strut with his bare foot, and then he began to scramble rapidly up the inside of the structure, as surefooted as a spider himself, until he was lost to sight.

Beth hugged herself. A sense of freedom went through her like a chill. She thought of the people she knew in the city below, and she wondered if she’d ever see them again. You were warned this could kill you, B, she reminded herself. You already said your goodbyes.

She faltered. B. Why had she called herself that? Only one person ever addressed her with that kind of lazy familiarity. And then she was thinking of Pen, and there was an ache in her chest, a longing, a desperate desire to share this view, this sight that no one ever saw. She hurriedly shoved it down.

The height was making her queasy, so she turned to look inwards — and noticed the bundle. It was about five feet high and maybe three across: a bale of steel wires, hanging down from a strut above her like a fat metal wasp’s nest. Something thin dangled from the bottom of it. She frowned and stepped in for a closer look.

It was a shoelace.

A tightness gripped Beth’s chest and she became aware of the bundle’s dimensions in a new and horrible way. She reached out and her fingertips brushed it, set it swinging in empty space.

The spiders chittered and ignored her.

Swearing softly, she grabbed the struts and began to climb towards the bundle. Her hand slipped on rainwaterslick steel and her stomach lurched, but she pulled herself tight to the metal again.

Easy, Beth, she admonished herself. You’ve climbed worse than this to tag a bloody rooftop.

As she drew level with the top of the bundle she saw a few strands of red hair poking between the wires, drifting like seaweed in the breeze. There were gaps between the metal threads and Beth made out a face: a girl, not much older than she was. The collar of her coat was street-stained. Cobwebs were matted over her eyesockets. A fat cable extruded from her mouth, and Beth almost gagged at the way her throat stretched around it.