Jonathan Coe - Number 11

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.

‘Hurry!’ she shouted to the twins. ‘We’ve still got time!’

Grabbing Sophia’s hand again, she began to drag them both along, breaking into a sprint. Miraculously, the hideous, rampant creatures would back off and allow them to pass whenever they were approached. And so the thing that finally stopped them in their tracks, at the end of the street, was not a spider at all, but a human obstruction: a man. DCI Capes, standing at the corner, who seized Rachel in a rugby tackle and brought her to the ground, while DC Pilbeam wrested the knife from her grasp.

‘It’s all right,’ one of them was saying. ‘Calm down. It’s all right now. Everybody’s safe.’

They held her like that, pinning her to the asphalt, until her breathing had subsided into a calmer, more regular rhythm, the dinning of the burglar alarms had faded away, the spiders had retreated to their subterranean home and Rachel realized that, apart from the sobbing of Grace and Sophia, the world was now empty and silent.

Alison was not thinking about anything in particular. She sat in the armchair at the bay window, watching the sunlight throw elaborate shadows across the curlicued red-and-yellow patterns of the old-fashioned carpet. It was odd how well she remembered this carpet, given that she hadn’t seen it for more than twelve years. The house itself hadn’t changed much. Beverley hadn’t changed much, for that matter — except for Number 11, Needless Alley, which, it turned out, had been shorn of its leafy aviary, and was now home to a prosperous, well-dressed family, who had tidied up the garden and fitted a new front door and repainted the window frames. What had become of Phoebe? Nobody seemed to know.

Rachel’s grandmother seemed cheerful enough on the surface — could not have been more delighted, really, to welcome Alison and Rachel back to her home, even if was just for a day — but there was no escaping the fact that her husband’s absence now filled every room, settled everywhere like a film of dust, in a way that his presence never had. Gran herself, under the strain of this absence, had almost buckled, become wraith-like. She passed through doorways, from kitchen to living room, from bathroom to landing, as silently as a ghost. Even now, as Alison sat in the sunshine daydreaming, she did not even notice that Gran had entered the room, and quietly settled herself on the sofa. Not until she heard her say:

‘Rachel was telling me that your mum’s had a stroke of luck.’

Startled, Alison turned round. ‘That’s right.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well …’ After telling so many people, so many times, over the last few weeks, Alison still found the story hard to believe. ‘She was coming home on the bus one afternoon, just like any other day, when the phone rang, and it was this woman she’d been on TV with. Danielle Perry. She’s a sort of singer, actress … I don’t know what you’d call her really.’

‘I know who you mean,’ said Gran. ‘She’s ever so pretty.’

‘And she said she wanted to record one of Mum’s songs. The one she’d heard her sing in the jungle when they did that show together. “Sink and Swim”. So that’s what she’s done. And it’s selling really well. In the charts and everything.’

‘I’m so glad,’ said Gran. ‘Will she make some money out of it?’

‘Yeah, she already has. Quite a bit in fact.’

‘Everybody deserves a bit of luck now and again. Jim used to do the Lottery, you know. Every week. He never won a thing.’ She was looking at the chair in which Alison was sitting, but it was as if she didn’t see her at all. ‘I can picture him now, sitting right there, crossing out the numbers. That was his favourite chair. His favourite spot.’