Killing Time.

While I was sans internet I decided to put my enforced idleness to good use by dusting, vacuuming, and generally tidying my living room. It hadn’t been touched, or even used for that matter, for two months or so and I was feeling almost committed to my place in the human environment for a change. It took two hours to complete the job, and when I’d finished I was taken aback by the fact that it looked very little different.

In all ways, that is, apart from the lack of spider silk. It had been everywhere – between this and that, underneath every horizontal surface, beside my armchair, behind the big unit thing containing mostly wooden bowls, books, and various expressions of my interest in the worlds beyond the veil, strewn across the ceiling and down the walls… The room was full of the stuff. Being a sensitive soul I made every effort to do no harm to the spiders scuttling hither and thither, but their handiwork had to go.

I realised, of course, that the spiders would not have taken kindly to being so outrageously inconvenienced, and a dream began to form in my mind. I saw an army of Cellar spiders – for such they all were – approaching me with revenge in their eyes and determination in their spindly gait. I knew that their objective would not be to drive me to the burning mill with pitchforks as the local villagers might, but to suck my vital fluids until I breathed my last. The fact that I have no straws of either paper or plastic in the house was no consolation since spiders have their own methods. The sound of gurgles, slurping, and the death rattle filled my mind, and the dank odour of something unrecognised hung in the air.