 
### Spiders in Your Mind

### Collection One

by

Patrick Ryder

Published by Fourth Wish at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Patrick Skelton

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**Author's Note:** As an exception to the above license, if you enjoy this book and wish to lend it to friends or family, I am happy to allow you to do this without restriction. I value the opinion of all my readers, and all I ask in return is that you give me an honest review where you bought the book or on the author's website (patrick-ryder.co.uk). Please ask the person to whom you lend this book to give a review too.

This e-book is dedicated to my beautiful wife, Jillian, who never ceases to amaze me in more ways than she will ever know.

She achieves the impossible, being simultaneously my toughest critic and my most constant source of determination. Without her, I would have given up this crazy idea of writing a long time ago.

I would also like to thank my friend, Linda 'Snugbat' Smith, for the hard work and talent she put into the cover art.

I sincerely hope you enjoy reading this collection of short stories. But – good or bad – I value all feedback from my readers. Please try to find the time to leave a review wherever you obtained this e-book. Alternatively, see the 'About the Author' section at the end of the book for ways to contact me directly.

~ Patrick Ryder

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Buried Alive

Spiders in Your Mind

Matryoshka

The Kids from Snape

Unpaid Debt

About the Author

### Buried Alive

Edgar Harvey Brown had been buried alive by his friends. But what was stranger than this was that they remained his friends. Indeed, he hoped his incarceration would seal his relationship with them. He had even dug half of his own grave himself – and with a certain amount of excitement mixed in with his understandable trepidation.

Edgar – or Eddy as he usually got – had been trying to get into Iddy's Gang for weeks. His method of attack was to hang around near them whenever he could find them, making sure to laugh whenever Iddy laughed. It was a simple approach that finally seemed to have paid off, and last Tuesday, in the cloakroom at school, Iddy – while holding Eddy's head in an arm lock and knuckling his skull – had said, 'I reckon old shit-head here's cool enough to hang with us. What d'ya reckon?'

No one had objected (no one ever did), and so Eddy had become a full member of Iddy's gang – just like that. Subject to passing his initiation test.

Eddy's initiation test had now reached the point where it was becoming an ordeal. How long was it since they had buried him? He had no idea. He was wearing his new watch, a Timex Indiglo that his mum and dad had bought him for his last birthday, so he'd thought he would have had no problem watching the hour that he had agreed to spend down here ticking away. Unfortunately, no matter how he wriggled his body, he couldn't get his watch arm up to his face because of the narrowness of the box he was in. Worse, he daren't press too hard against the sides of the modified packing crate that was his makeshift coffin; if he did, splits around the nails holding the wood allowed the planks to move apart and soil to begin trickling onto his stomach. There was already a cold, heavy pile resting there.

Iddy's Gang (who were all thirteen or fourteen years old) comprised four members: Handsy, a scruffy runt who was nevertheless an incredibly fast runner; Tot, who was like a gorilla but fatter and with less intelligence; Budge, slim, dark-haired, and annoyingly liked by most females, including teachers; and Iddy himself, who was a genetic freak and already stronger and hairier than most adult men. Privately, Eddy disliked them all – with the exception of Budge, who was the closest thing Eddy had to a friend and the reason he had been trying for so long to get into the gang.

Budge's dad was a farmer in the tiny village of Birkin. Only Budge and Eddy lived in Birkin, but the others all lived just a kilometre down the road, in neighbouring Beal, so it was easy enough for them to cycle here. The farm Budge's dad worked was littered with old junk, including wood in various forms, and had a work shed, so it was the natural place for them to set about the construction of Eddy's pretend coffin. The village also had a small church, with an infrequently visited graveyard, so they were unlikely to be disturbed during what Iddy had begun referring to as _The Service_.

Budge had in fact been the one who thought up the idea of burying Eddy in a real graveyard as an initiation test. This was small surprise to Eddy, since he had observed that Budge was most of the brains and all of the imagination in the gang. Nevertheless, Eddy was quietly disappointed that his _friend_ had not come up with something a bit easier. Budge had seemed to enjoy the time they had spent in his dad's shed, sawing and nailing the old packing crate that would serve as a temporary coffin. They had cut the wood just big enough to hold Eddy's crunched up body but small enough so they didn't have to do too much digging to bury it.

It was now getting warm inside the box. At the level of Eddy's neck, a hole had been made in the lid and a length of grey drainpipe had been taped into the hole using duct tape. The pipe poked at least thirty centimetres above the ground and made deep fluting sounds as the cold November wind pushed belligerently through the graveyard above, but little of the air seemed to be making it down to Eddy. He found himself breathing quickly and still feeling unsatisfied. He had the presence of mind – just – to hold onto the panic that was now beginning to fester in the lower parts of his mind. He knew, if he panicked, he would suffocate. End of story.

Time passed.

It had to happen. He had managed to blank it from his mind up until now, but it was inevitable that eventually it would burst through, and now was that time.

He wasn't alone down here.

The location of Eddy's hole (he refused to think of it as a grave) was halfway between two rows of graves, one new and one very old. Eddy wasn't sure which one was the harder to deal with.

The nearest new grave held Mr Thomas, a red-faced man who had lived in Birkin all of his eighty-one years, and was always either smoking or whistling – and sometimes managed both together. He had died just last month, so Eddy guessed that his coffin would now hold a fair old mushy mess. What if some of it – some of _him_ – was seeping through wormholes in the earth, about to begin dripping into Eddy's face?

With an effort, Eddy shook the idea away – only to begin thinking of his other neighbour. He tried to recall the nearest gravestone to his left. He remembered it was the shape of a church door and most of its engraving had been weathered away or covered by lichens. The skeleton in there could be hundreds of years old. Its coffin would have rotted, leaving the naked bones free to claw slowly through the soft soil towards him, soon to begin scratching on his box to be let in.

'Stop it!' Eddy shouted at himself. 'Just stop it. Bodies are worm-meat. I'm by myself down here.'

More time passed.

Eddy wished he could see his watch. But, then again, what difference would it make? What if his new Indiglo said he'd been down here two hours? Three even? He still couldn't get out until Iddy said so.

What time had it been when he had climbed into the box and Tot had nailed the lid on? About two, Eddy thought. What time did it get dark in early November? Four-ish? It couldn't be long now before the faint, circular pool of light falling down the metre of drainpipe onto his chest began to fade. It was definitely darker now than it had been when he had started this stupid initiation test.

'It's just dark because of a cloud,' he tried to reassure himself, but not one bit of him really believed it.

Something moved then in the mound of soil that lay on Eddy's stomach. He wished now that he had kept his coat on. It was his own fault. He had realised that – no matter how cold and damp the soil was that came out of the hole – his breathing would quickly warm things up once the lid was nailed on the box and the soil was filled in above him. The hot air that now enveloped Eddy like wet polythene proved that he had made the right decision, but it was still hard not to imagine grubs beginning to chew through his thin T-shirt and into the soft surface of his belly.

'Fuck,' Eddy said. 'Bastards. They've left me longer than an hour. That's the test. They're all sitting on the wall, laughing about when I'm going to start yelling and pissing my pants.'

Eddy was determined he was not going to do that. It would be a joke that would never die if they came and got him and found his jeans soaked with piss. They would probably even start using it as part of his name. _Piss-pants Eddy_ maybe.

Again, something moved against the soft flesh of his stomach. Eddy managed to get his right hand up there and quickly brushed off the mound of soil. Then he slapped his hand down on his stomach, just in case anything was hanging on by its teeth.

_Budge is up there_ , Eddy reminded himself to take his mind off bugs. _He won't let it go on too long._ They would probably leave him until it was getting dark, just to give him a scare. Then he would hear Iddy shouting down the drainpipe to him, 'How ya doin', Eds? Thought we'd forgotten ya?' Then he'd hear the muffled sound of shovels working down through the soil. And the soil would be soft too, not like when they'd dug the hole. It wouldn't take them long to get him out. He would hear the shovels banging on the lid of the box. Handsy would use his penknife to lever the lid open, and cool, fresh air would rush in. They would all have a good laugh. Iddy would knuckle his head and say, 'Fuckin' nice one Eds. Look lads – not one fucking drop of piss. Ladies, we have a new _cell_.' That was what Eddy called his gang members – _cells_. He'd got it off some film about suicide bombers. It was stupid. Lots of things about Iddy were stupid. But no one ever told him.

The air in the box continued to get warmer. Eddy realised he had taken a few steps into that sucking black pool that was panic. He was breathing quickly, panting almost. That was why the temperature was rising.

Eddy tried to slow down. Relax. He found himself thinking back to his burial, trying to recall details that might indicate they were all having a laugh at the amount of time they were really going to leave him.

***

The hole was now looking a lot deeper than Eddy had imagined it would be, and still the digging went on. For the past half-hour, Tot and Handsy had both been moaning that the hole was deep enough. Iddy had simply sat there, with his back against a gravestone, and told them to keep digging until he said stop. When he finally did say stop, Eddy was taking a shift, and he was shocked at how difficult it was to scramble out of the hole and up the slope of freshly dug earth.

'I'm not cool with this,' Eddy said to no one, but mainly to Budge. 'There's at least a tonne of dirt there; the box lid won't be strong enough.'

'Relax,' Budge said, jumping up onto the lid of the modified packing crate. 'Look, you could drive a car over it.' He bounced his trainers up and down on the lid to demonstrate.

The box lid bent a little and let out a squeak that didn't sound at all reassuring to Eddy.

'What about the gaps? If dirt pours into my face, I'll suffocate.' Eddy looked at Handsy and Tot, who were both holding shovels and looking impatient to get on with the interesting part. Iddy was smoking, cupping the cigarette in his hand to keep the cutting wind from shortening its life. There were no other people in the graveyard, and nor would there be: Birkin church's graveyard was generally a place where solitude – at least for the living – could be guaranteed even in mid-summer. No one would come on a biting Thursday afternoon in November.

Budge said, 'The gaps are too small to let the soil through. It's like the holes in the bottom of a plant pot – they don't let soil through.'

Eddy tried to be convinced. Budge was a farmer's son; he should know about soil. Maybe.

Iddy flicked his tab end onto the nearest grave and got up. 'Open the lid then,' he told Budge.

Budge stepped down from the box and lifted off the lid.

Eddy felt like he had been doused in iced water. His heart was pounding. He looked at Iddy. 'Want me to get in?'

'Fuck off! We're not lifting you down. Health and safety, Eds. If we dropped you, you'd fuckin' sue us.' He laughed, and looked for the same from his entourage, who all dutifully obliged – even Budge. To Budge, Iddy said, 'Put the box in the hole.'

Budge bent over and grabbed one end of the box. 'Grab that end, Eddy.'

Eddy didn't hear.

'Eddy! Grab that end.'

Finally, Eddy's brain got that he was being spoken to and he did as Budge said. Together, they manhandled the box over the hole. The splintered wood slipped out of Eddy's fingers when the box was barely below the level of the ground, and the box fell the last metre into the hole, which visibly loosened many of its nailed joints.

' _Now_ you get in,' Iddy said cleverly.

Eddy removed his coat and handed it to Budge. 'Keep this for us.'

Budge took the coat and began examining it. He looked like he was considering putting it on.

'An hour, right?' Eddy asked Iddy. 'Just an hour?'

'Scout's honour.' Iddy stuck two fingers up in mockery of the Scout Sign.

Eddy climbed down into the hole, using the edge of the box as a step. It was a bad idea. The edge of the box screeched and moved alarmingly under his weight. Eddy looked at the pile of soil that was soon going to be on top of the box. It plainly weighed a lot more than he did.

Handsy stuck his spade in the mound of earth beside the hole. 'I'll get the hammer and nails,' he said, and hurried over to the crumbling drystone wall near the road.

Eddy sat down in the box. Walls of dark earth rose up around him. A pungent, coppery odour invaded his nostrils. Iddy, Tot and Budge appeared around his limited horizon. Tot, threw half a spade of soil down at Eddy, and much of it went down the back of his neck.

'Fuck off,' Eddy told him – and then had an instant of panic. He couldn't remember ever directly telling anyone to eff off before, and starting with someone who could probably rip his head off bare handed wasn't the most sensible thing he'd ever done. But then an incredible thing happened, something that made Eddy think all this might be worth it after all.

Iddy pushed Tot back and stared at him long enough for Tot to get the message. 'Stop fucking about and get the lid,' Iddy told him.

Despite thinking he might be on the point of pissing himself, Eddy felt a moment of elation, and a warm feeling of... what was it? _Belonging_ – that was it. All he had to do was this stupid hour in this stupid box and he would be in Iddy's Gang. No one would touch him then. No one would say a word to him. Eddy was surprised to find himself smiling as he lay down. The smile died on his face when he tried to get comfortable and his head and feet pressed up against the ends of the box.

Handsy reappeared, wielding a hammer and holding a carrier bag of nails. Some of the nails had poked through the polythene, and, for some reason, Eddy found his eyes locked on their sharp, rusting points.

'Who's gonna time me,' Eddy asked, unnerved by the muffled quality of his voice inside the box.

Budge held up his wrist, revealing a cheap digital watch. 'I'll set my stopwatch,' he said. He was wearing Eddy's coat.

Tot had fetched the lid. He slid down the soil, and straddled the box. Then, without ceremony, he dropped the loosely nailed together panel in place.

Eddy found himself in darkness. Even with the light coming down the drainpipe near his neck, it took his eyes a while to adjust. The box lid was flexing and pressing down on his knees as Tot kneeled on top of it. Eddy jumped as two things hit the box lid near his head: one was a solid thump, which he guessed to be the hammer, and one tinkled a bit, which had to be the bag of rusty nails.

The hammering began.

'Don't use too many nails,' Eddy shouted, but he knew his voice couldn't climb out of the end of the drainpipe with enough energy to be heard above the noise.

The hammering went on.

'No more nails,' Eddy yelled. It was pointless, he realised. Not only couldn't they hear him, but the number of nails wouldn't matter a gnat's cock anyway when they dumped the tonne of soil back on the box lid. But somehow, it mattered to Eddy. Somehow, it just seemed like they were using too many nails.

At last, the hammering stopped. Eddy felt the box lid flex again, and then the pressure lifted from his knees. Tot must have climbed out of the hole. There was silence. Eddy couldn't even hear the wind. There was a voice, followed by laughing. Iddy was saying something, his unnaturally deep voice falling heavily into the hole.

'Dear, Lord, we ask you to take our Eds and look after him forever.'

'Stop it!' Eddy shouted up the drainpipe.

'We ask you not to knuckle him too often, but only when he deserves it.'

More laughter. Budge was laughing too.

Iddy continued. 'We ask you – oh, bollocks to it. Dirt to dirt, ashes to ashes, and all that shite. Get shovelling, you two.'

There was a heavy, damp thump, as the first shovel of soil landed on the box lid. Some of it filtered through a crack in the wood above Eddy's face and fell in his mouth and eyes. The soil in his mouth felt cold and gritty and had a strong coppery taste. He tried to spit it out, but already it seemed to be everywhere – under his tongue, between his teeth, all over his gums. The soil in his eyes simply hurt, and they immediately filled with tears. He blinked fiercely but succeeded only in rubbing the grains deeper into his soft eyeballs. Instinctively, he tried to bring his hands up, to protect his face, but they moved hardly at all before hitting the lid of the box. This had not occurred to him – that he wouldn't be able to get his hands up to his face, and somehow it was what finally pushed him over the edge.

Thump. Another shovel of soil landed on the box lid.

'Let me out!' Eddy screamed so loud that he felt like he tore something in his throat. 'The box is leaking. I'll do something else. Anything. I'll get you money, Iddy.'

Thump. More soil landed on the lid.

'Please, guys, let me up. I can't do this. I can't. The box is fucking leaking!'

Thump. Thump. Thump. Each shovel of soil made a sound slightly more muffled than the one before it.

Eddy screamed again, and began kicking and punching as hard as his limited movement would allow.

Soil poured in. It came in around the drainpipe and tickled his neck coldly; a thin stream fell on his face, which he had now turned to the side, so it landed on his cheek instead of going in his mouth and eyes; and there was already another heavy mound on his belly.

Eddy realised that by hitting the sides of the box, he was simply widening the cracks between the planks of wood, allowing the soil to come in more quickly. He stopped immediately.

The sounds made by the shovels of soil landing in the hole were now distant. He couldn't hear voices anymore. He couldn't hear laughter. Was that good or bad? Why were they being quiet? Silence was just something that did not happen in Iddy's Gang. Iddy himself hardly ever stopped taking the piss out of something or someone, and when he wasn't talking, Handsy filled in the gaps with one of his endless supply of X-rated jokes. Eddy did not like the silence. It was like a real funeral.

Eddy knew now that nothing he shouted was going to get Iddy to rethink this idea. Instead, he tried a bit of damage limitation on his sanity.

'Budge,' he shouted. 'Budge, can you hear me? Start timing. We said one hour. Set your watch going.'

No one replied. Eddy doubted they could even hear him. The soil was now compacted firmly under its own weight against the outside of the box, providing lethal acoustics, which killed any words Eddy spoke the moment they exited his mouth.

Eddy realised even the shovelling sounds had stopped.

Had they gone? They must have. 'Budge'll be timing,' he whispered to himself. 'Less than an hour. Might be down to fifty-five minutes now.'

Already, the air around Eddy's face felt warm, damp, and lacking in oxygen. He realised he was still in a state of panic. His heart was hammering in his narrow chest, and his lungs were pumping away at the available air much faster than the drainpipe could provide fresh supplies.

***

Eddy stopped thinking about his burial an hour or more ago and began concentrating on breathing less air. The drainpipe still made frequent fluting sounds, like poorly-played pan pipes, indicating wind was still tearing across the graveyard above, but precious little new air seemed to be coming down to Eddy. And it was getting warm. Very warm.

_The heat's coming from behind you_ , Eddy, a little voice whispered from the bottom of his mind.

A trickle of sweat ran down Eddy's temple. It felt like legs – lots of legs. He couldn't bear the idea that a centipede or spider was scurrying down his face, and he shook his head from side to side, banging his temples against rough wood.

'It's just sweat, Eddy. Breathe slow. Breathe... slow...'

Somehow, he managed to get control of himself. His heart rate and breathing slowed, but not much. Parts of his body now seemed dead with cramp, the air he was breathing stank of his own fear, and the light from the end of the drainpipe was all but gone now.

Suddenly, there was no way he could bear not knowing how long he had been down here. He jammed his knees as far as they would go into the corners of the box and began jerking his body downwards. He managed to get his nose level with the lip of the drainpipe, but he still couldn't quite see up it.

Why is your back is warm, Eddy?

It was that annoying voice again. What was it saying – that his back was warm? Eddy realised it was. He pressed the palms of his hands flat against the rough wood he was lying upon and found that, yes, it was warm to the touch.

In the near darkness, Eddy frowned. At school, he'd read that some houses in Iceland simply had a hole drilled in the ground instead of central heating. _What's it called?_ he asked himself silently. _Geometric? No. Geothermal – that's it! Geothermal central heating._ The heat beneath him must be something like that.

He realised he still couldn't quite see up the drainpipe. He pressed his knees even harder into the corners of the box and pulled his shoulders down, trying to shorten his body as much as possible. It hurt, but he could just see up the pipe.

The small circle at the top of the pipe looked a long way away. It was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. The cloud-laden sky seemed so low it might smother the end of the plastic pipe. It did still effuse a dim grey light, but it had to be four o' clock. Maybe even half-past. He had been in here at least two hours. Soil trickled onto his face. He began to yell.

'Let me out. Please let me out. You said an hour. Budge! Iddy! Come on guys, let me out... please.'

The pain of crushing himself so he could see up the drainpipe got too much and he had to stretch out again – at least as far as he could, until his head hit the end of the box. He realised his mum would soon be putting dinner on the table. It was Thursday, so it would be lamb chops and mash. It was Eddy's least favourite meal of the week, but right now, sitting down at the table in the warm kitchen at home, with his mum and dad and little sis' seemed pretty close to heaven. He made himself stop thinking about it.

But it was too late. Thinking about his own home allowed another idea to get its sharp little claws into Eddy – the idea that Iddy and Budge and the others had all gone to their own homes and forgotten him. Swiftly following that idea came the image of spending all night down here, squashed in the pitch darkness, with soil gradually finding its way in between the planks of the box, until it held him like when his sister, Janie, had buried him up to his neck in the sand on Bridlington beach.

'Let me out, you bastards!' he yelled, kicking and punching at the rough wood that held him.

The soil simply flowed in faster.

'You said an hour. I've got to get home.' His voice broke into tears. 'I want to go... home. I... want... to... go... home...'

Your back's hot, Eddy.

It was that voice again.

It's not geothermal heat, Eddy.

Eddy stopped sobbing as the voice caught his attention.

You think there's a volcano underneath Birkin church? Get real.

Eddy realised the voice had a point. It was now getting hot inside the box – much more so than could be attributed to his fast breathing. And it was impossible to ignore where the heat was coming from.

The boards he lay upon were now so hot that they were beginning to burn his shoulder blades through the material of his T-shirt.

Eddy's mind worked furiously, looking for possible explanations, but came up blank. He tried to cling to the idea that it was all part of some elaborate hoax dreamt up by Budge. Maybe he had somehow managed to run a hose under his... the word _coffin_ popped up before Eddy could stop it. _Box_. Under his _box_. But Eddy had been there the whole time they had been digging the hole. He had even dug the last bit himself. There was no way Budge could have put a hose under the box without him seeing. And, anyway, where would they get hot water to poor down it?

The wood grew hotter, and Eddy might have gone mad at that point, but his ears saved him.

Just audible above the sound of his breathing and banging heart – both of which he had now abandoned trying to control – Eddy could hear a scraping sound. It must be shovels working through the soil. They were coming to get him. Thank God!

Eddy called up the drainpipe. 'You had me there, you twats. I thought you'd all pissed off home and left me.' He laughed, but it was a hollow, weak sound.

The wood got even hotter. It now felt as though it were actually reddening the skin on Eddy's shoulder blades, buttocks and calves. But the scraping was now much louder. It would be less than a minute before he heard spades hit the wood of the lid, followed by the screech as the box lid was levered off. Cold, fresh air would greet him. The anticipation was so acute, it was almost painful.

The scraping was now very loud. And fast. It sounded as though they were in a hurry to get him out. Maybe they _had_ forgotten him for a while and now were desperate to get him out, worried they had taken the joke too far.

Something hit the box. There was a fast scratching on the wood, and then the sound Eddy most wanted to hear – the squeal of nails being forced to yield their hold. Planks were torn away.

Eddy expected light to reach him, but his eyes still registered only blackness. He reminded himself that it was now dark in the graveyard... but still, hadn't any one of them thought to bring a torch? No, this wasn't right. Hands were grabbing at him. Many hands.

Eddy heard words fleeing his mouth. 'What? No. No!' And at about that moment Edgar Harvey Brown and his sanity parted company.

The many hands pulled at him roughly, and sometimes their claws dug into his skin, as they lifted him down from the box and carried him. Towards the heat.

Spiders in Your Mind

The black spider descended slowly along a tunnel formed by gathers in the material of the bedroom curtains. It placed each of its eight legs with delicate precision, barely disturbing so much as a mote of dust or any of the hundreds of house dust mites it chose to ignore as it crawled onward towards the warmth it could sense rising from the man and the woman sleeping in the bed below.

Though the black spider's steps were light, they were not light enough. The curtains were thick velvet, chosen to block out an orange street lamp across the road outside, and were prize territory for spiders making their way inside to take refuge from autumn's warning nip. A Giant house spider was currently patrolling the curtains and surrounding wall, including the space behind the wooden headboard of the bed, searching simultaneously for a female with which to mate and, as always, food. He was a large male, as big as a child's hand. At this size, his leg span was wider even than that of females of his own species and he had little to fear in the bedroom. He scurried up the back of the bed's headboard and froze, sensing the almost imperceptible vibrations made by the newcomer moving inside one fold of the curtain towards him. Though the hanging curtain barely brushed the edge of the headboard, the male Giant house spider already knew the trespasser was another spider and one smaller than he, which meant it was either a competitor or food.

One leg at a time, the male house spider stepped from the headboard onto the curtain and headed toward the approaching movement. Using the wide reach of his legs, he crossed the crests of the curtain's undulations. He stopped regularly, always with a number of his legs on two adjacent curtain ridges, so he could compare the strength of the vibrations in each. Soon he found the pair of neighbouring ridges transmitting equal vibrations, and he formed an eight-legged archway over the deep fold beneath him. Now, all he had to do was wait.

The male house spider began to detect pheromones indicating that the intruder was female, but this was not a mating opportunity because she was a different species. So he was going to get a meal then.

Motionless, he would wait for the smaller spider to pass directly beneath him, then he would drop down, deliver one swift toxic bite, and use his superior size to keep a grip on his prey until paralysis took hold.

The gap between the two nocturnal hunters closed. The trespasser appeared to be oblivious of the much larger spider under which she was about to pass.

The Giant male house spider normally relied upon a web to capture food. Occasionally, he managed to ambush another smaller spider while away from his web, though he had never encountered one so insensitive to her surroundings. But the Giant house spider had not reached this size by being over-sure of himself or naïve. Appearances could be deceptive. The smaller spider may be unwary because of inexperience but it was also possible that she had no need of caution because – for unknown reason – she was confident of her safety.

The Giant house spider began to have doubts about his planned ambush. Something – perhaps the smaller spider's metered, constant steps, never pausing to check for danger – was unsettling. He decided it was not worth the risk. Using all the speed his long legs gave him, he turned and hurried towards the lower corner of the curtain, where he squeezed into a gap along the edge of the windowsill, a place he could defend well and was his refuge during daylight hours when he was at his most vulnerable.

The small black spider was aware of the hurried retreat of the Giant house spider but she did not react. Instead, she continued with her steady decent towards the bed.

At the foot of the curtains, she stepped onto the headboard. Then, instead of continuing down the rough side of the wood nearest the wall, she crossed the edge of the panel and began to pick her way carefully down the much smoother varnished face, before stepping over onto a pillow. Here she paused, turning left then right several times, comparing the scent of the two large animals either side of her. She had to be sure to choose the female.

She was in luck. She did not have to find a path to the other pillow. The face of the female animal was right there, just a few steps away. She could feel the woman's warm breath gently combing the tiny hairs covering her palps and legs. The black spider approached the sleeping woman's face and placed a single foreleg gently on her cheek.

The woman did not stir. Her breathing continued slow and steady.

In one swift movement, the black spider moved up onto the woman's cheek. A housefly attempting this – with its clumsy, jerky movements – would almost certainly have caused the woman to twitch in her sleep and may have woken her, but the black spider's steps were more delicate than a butterfly's kiss and completely undetectable to the nerves in the woman's face. The female black spider headed for the woman's ear, giving a wide berth to a closed eye, where she instinctively knew the thinner skin might give her away. She slipped beneath the woman's hair and located her ear. Then, one by one, she neatly folded her legs so she could squeeze down inside the woman's ear canal.

Still the woman slept. Only once did she let out a small moan and drowsily massage her ear with the palm of her hand – when the black spider made the first incision in her eardrum.

***

Naked apart from a pair of striped boxers, Malcolm Thomson carefully finished with the floss, dropped it in the bin beside the bathroom sink and poured a capful of mouthwash. He ran it around his mouth, enjoying the burning sensation as it obliterated bacteria hiding in the nooks and crannies of his gums, and tried to like his reflection in the mirror.

He wasn't bad looking – sincere brown eyes, clear skin, a full head of neatly trimmed dark hair from which he rarely had to pluck a grey straggler – but his cheeks were a bit fat and slack. Unfortunately, his cheeks matched his waistline, and he checked to make sure he could still pull it flat if he needed to. The new temp who had just started at the office had the most perfect breasts he believed he had ever seen, and though he had no realistic notion that a seventeen-year-old girl might be interested in a bloke twice her age, he took just that bit more care with his appearance in case he found himself at the coffee machine when she was.

Malcolm pulled his imagination off the new temp and onto Kerry, his partner of almost five years. He had once been convinced he loved Kerry but now he wasn't so sure. Their relationship had its ups and downs, but even their worst of arguments had until recently carried an electrifying excitement, because they always seemed to end up fucking frantically afterwards. Since they had moved in together last year, things had changed. They felt a bit... flat. Their sex life now had a schedule: Friday nights, Kerry passively tolerated quarter-of-an-hour of missionary; Sunday mornings was usually spoons – and Malcolm was sure sometimes Kerry didn't even properly wake up until he had finished and been downstairs to fetch her the expected _Thank you_ coffee in bed.

Even their arguments had become tame. They had civilised arguments now. A heated discussion without personal insults, a period of mutual silence, and then an end to hostilities only when Malcolm apologised, regardless of whether he felt he was in the wrong. He supposed he was trying to provoke an argument now. He knew Kerry was on a tight schedule today and he knew it had gone seven, which meant she was running late. Malcolm had woken before the alarm and cancelled it, deliberately sneaking out of bed and into the bathroom so as not to wake Kerry. Now he was taking his time, his teeth benefitting from the extra flossing, which was an activity usually confined to weekends. He realised he couldn't think of anything else he could do in the bathroom short of getting out the _Cif_ and the bleach and cleaning the whole place, and – mildly disappointed Kerry hadn't come banging on the door – he finger-combed his hair one last time and turned to go wake her.

There was a movement in the bathtub.

Malcolm felt his heart flip. Then a smile spread across his face. A huge spider was struggling pointlessly to climb out of the bath, slipping back each time it neared the vertical. It was a big one. He couldn't believe he hadn't seen it sooner. It must have been in the plughole, trying perhaps to remain inconspicuous. He stared in fascination at the trapped creature, deciding just how much fun he was going to try to get from this. A spider the size of a pea was quite capable of sending Kerry yelling from a room; this beauty might be enough to get her to think about moving back home with her parents.

The handle on the bathroom door squeaked up and down a couple of times, diverting Malcolm's attention from the spider. 'Malc, you shitface – why the hell didn't you wake me?'

Malcolm went to the door but didn't unlock it. 'Kez, trust me, you do not want to come in here.'

'Stop arsing about, Malcolm. You know bloody well I've got a meeting at nine. Open the door.'

'You really don't want me to do that.'

'Open the door.'

Malcolm slid back the bolt. Kerry immediately tried to barge in, but Malcolm blocked her with his body. 'Kez, I'm not joking. I need to go get the glass.' The glass was actually made of plastic and was designed to hold a pint of lager or beer; together with a square of cardboard cut from a cornflake packet, it formed a kit Malcolm kept in the bedroom to ferry spiders out of the house whenever Kerry spotted one.

'Malcolm, please move. I don't have time for this.' Kerry was already three-quarters dressed for work, her blue eyes bright, her body language sharp. There was something different about her, but Malcolm couldn't put his finger on it. Maybe she was pregnant.

'Trust me, Kez,' Malcolm pressed. 'I _need_ to go get the glass.'

'Malcolm, move.'

Malcolm shrugged and raised his eyebrows. 'Okay, if you say so. But I'll go fetch it anyway.' He stepped aside. He had tried. Was it his fault if she wouldn't listen? He couldn't help smiling. This was going to be a laugh.

As Malcolm headed back into the bedroom, he heard Kerry close and lock the bathroom door. Now it was less funny. Kerry squealing and jumping up onto the settee when an eight-legged resident marched out from under the television was always a source of amusement, but with the bathroom door closed and locked – and with the _size_ of the spider – she might seriously freak out.

Most people had a size limit when it came to spiders. Malcolm could pick them up with his hands as long as they weren't larger than about the size of a one-penny coin, and as long as they weren't too dark or fat. But no way could he touch the biggie now in the bathroom. Hell, even using the glass and cardboard, he would take great care to hold the two together firmly, because he had to admit he'd probably leap clean out of his skin if the spider got out and ran up his arm.

Kerry was thoroughly arachnophobic. She had once reached the point where she no longer dare have a bath because she was scared a spider might fall in the water with her. She had made efforts to conquer her fear, including hypnosis, but Malcolm wasn't convinced by the results. She did now occasionally take baths, but it was a bit of a pointless exercise, because she remained on edge the whole time, and she couldn't wash her hair because she daren't close her eyes and leave the overflow unguarded. She could now tolerate spiders like tiny red money spiders, as long as they were at least a metre away, but she would throw a fit when she saw the giant in the bath and it would take her at least a week to forgive Malcolm, which meant even less sex. Malcolm decided to go get the glass and cardboard.

He opened the wardrobe and took out the spider relocation kit, all the time anticipating a wild scream from the bathroom. Kerry might be using the toilet and unable to see over the edge of the bath. Either that or the spider was keeping still, perhaps back in the plughole, and Kerry hadn't seen it yet. It couldn't be long before the inevitable happened though. Spider kit in hand, he went to the bathroom door and knocked.

'Kez, open the door. I've got the glass.'

Silence.

'Kez?' Malcolm cocked an ear close to the door, trying to hear inside the bathroom.

Brushing. Kerry was brushing her teeth. Standing next to the sink, she would be able to see right into the bath. If the spider decided to have another go at getting out, Kerry would probably do the same – straight through the bathroom window. Malcolm tried the handle on the bathroom door even though he knew it was locked.

'Kez, listen. I'm not joking – there's a biggie in the bath. I'll sort it for you.'

Without drama, the bathroom door opened. Kerry's face was freshly washed, her hair brushed and shiny, and she smelled soapy and clean. Again, Malcolm found himself confronted by the sinking idea that she might be pregnant, but if she was, he would never in a million years have predicted the effect it would have on him: the thin Lycra of his boxers did little to conceal his unexpected swelling.

Kerry kissed him briefly on the lips and slapped a cupped hand over his balls. 'Keep that for later,' she ordered him.

Malcolm flinched. Her acknowledgement of his arousal might have been erotic if she hadn't delivered it with the force of an Olympic shot-putter. A dull ache began to spread through his testicles.

Kerry trotted down the stairs, calling back, 'I'll cook tonight. I'll pick something up on the way home.'

Malcolm was left standing there feeling ridiculous. It was difficult not to: he was dressed in only a pair of boxers, the flap of which had parted to allow the head of his penis to poke out, and he was holding a plastic glass (an absurdity in itself) and a square of cardboard cut from a cornflake packet. He imagined a photograph of the scene on a TV show, with the presenter asking contestants to add a witty caption. He remembered the spider.

Malcolm liked to see some spiders in the house, because they ate flies, but the one in the bath was a bit much. He would never harm it, but it had to go. Shoving his now softening cock back inside his boxers, he got ready with the glass and cardboard and moved into the bathroom.

As he approached the bath, he craned his neck, trying spot the spider. Logic told him there was no danger of the creature running up the side of the bath and jumping on him, but a more primitive part of his brain was not going to allow his heart to slow down until he could see with his own eyes that he was in for no surprises.

He got closer to the bath and leaned over it.

The bath was bright white, and Malcolm mentally braced himself for first sight of the spider. He knew it couldn't harm him, but equally he knew an involuntary shudder would wriggled between his shoulder blades when his eyes first locked onto its eight dark, pointed legs splayed out in the bottom of the bath tub.

Malcolm's eyes crept over the lip of the bath. He could now see the whole of the tub.

It was empty.

Malcolm's eyes went to the plughole.

That appeared to be empty too.

He frowned. He could see no way the spider could have climbed to freedom: there was no towel hanging over the bath side that it might have used as a ladder and the plug chain was wrapped up around the cold tap. The obvious answer to the puzzle was that Kerry had overcome her fear enough to wash the spider away, but it really had been a big bugger and – try as he might – Malcolm just couldn't see it fitting through one of the six small perforations in the plate covering the plughole. That left him with the even less likely explanation that Kerry had dealt with the spider herself, maybe by using something to pick it up and flushing it down the toilet.

He heard the front door open then close, and a moment later a car door did the same outside. The engine of Kerry's car revved into life and she pulled sharply away.

Malcolm looked down at the plastic glass and square of cardboard he was still holding and frowned again.

***

When Malcolm got home from work at 7 p.m., the welcoming aroma of cooking food greeted him. As he placed his laptop on the hallway table and kicked off his shoes, he tried to guess what they were having. Money was tight right now, and Mondays rarely got any more exotic than veggie burgers with chips and a side salad, but the smell coming from the kitchen tonight was altogether more promising. Malcolm loosened his tie and walked through into the kitchen.

'Smells like someone's blown our weekly food budget,' he said, before realising it sounded like he was nitpicking, which he hadn't intended. 'What are we having?'

Kerry grabbed an oven glove and crouched to open the oven door. 'Well, just for a change, there's chips, but then you have a choice. You can have veggie sausages, or you can have what I'm having.'

None of what Kerry had mentioned so far accounted for the rich scents wafting around the kitchen. Malcolm was intrigued. 'And what are you having?'

'I'm having steak.'

'I thought you hated those veggie steaks?'

Kerry placed a tray of oven chips on top of the cooker and opened the grill. An angry sizzling came from within, a sound made only by searing animal fat. 'I do,' Kerry agreed. 'They're like cardboard. I am having a real steak.' She slid out the grill pan, on which were two large, thick steaks. 'I've got you one if you want it.'

Malcolm didn't know how to respond. He settled on, 'Kerry, I thought we both agreed...' It sounded feeble.

Kerry forked one steak onto a plate, then impaled the other and turned towards Malcolm, almost as if she were threatening him with it. 'Do you want it or not?'

Malcolm looked at the steak. It was dripping juices onto the kitchen lino, but Kerry didn't seem to notice. 'That steak', he said, 'has probably come from a cow that never saw sunlight or tasted grass in its very short life. It's disgusting the way we treat animals.'

'You're not going to change the world farming industry, Malcolm, by living on soya and tofu.'

'If everyone says that then, no, it never will change. Someone has to start taking a stand. I thought you agreed with me.'

'I agreed I'd give it a try. Well, I've tried it for nearly two years, and this morning, do you know what I realised? I realised it's worse than when I quit smoking. Passing a hotdog stand is just as much torture now as it was two years ago. Do you want it or not?'

Malcolm shook his head. 'No.'

'Fine.' Kerry dumped the second steak on her plate, and quickly made up a second plate for Malcolm, on which she tossed a pair of frazzled veggie sausages, all of the lettuce she had placed in a colander and all of the oven chips she had cooked.

Unsure what to think or feel, Malcolm took his seat at the table and looked down at the heap of unappetising food before him.

Eagerly, Kerry sat opposite and began sawing at one of the steaks. 'You're not going to get enough energy from that,' she said, and she stuffed a mouthful of steak into her mouth and began to chew, her eyes closing in what might have been a mixture of relief and almost carnal pleasure.

'What?'

Kerry replied with her mouth looking like a tumble dryer full of animal remains. 'You remember what I said this morning? I told you to save it for later. You're going to need a lot more than rabbit food tonight, mister.'

Malcolm heard himself say, 'It's Monday night,' and again he thought he sounded pathetic.

With frantic enthusiasm, Kerry sawed deeper into the steak. At best it was medium-rare, and blood was now flowing freely onto her plate and forming a thick puddle, through which she trailed the forkful of meat before cramming it into her mouth.

***

When Malcolm awoke early next morning, he immediately became aware of two things: his balls hurt like hell and Kerry wasn't in the bed. His memory quickly explained the first for him.

Kerry hadn't been joking when she'd said Malcolm would need all his energy last night. As soon as he got out of the shower, she had thrown herself on him, knocking him down onto the hallway carpet with enough force to partially wind him. She was completely naked, which she was normally self-conscious about, because she didn't exercise and middle-age bagginess was beginning to wrap her pale body. Well, there was no way Malcolm could have accused her of being prim or passive this time.

Malcolm couldn't help but respond to her dominance. He had become rock hard in seconds, which was all the time Kerry took to work herself down onto him and begin grinding herself against him. Her body – both outside and in – had a heat and tautness that thrilled him but also spoilt the encounter, because it was all too much for his senses and he lasted less than a minute.

Because he had just come out of a hot shower, he softened almost immediately, but Kerry had barely started. Jerking his hand with a force that jarred his shoulder, she pulled him into the bedroom. There, she shoved him back onto the bed, and used her hot, fast mouth to get him back into a functioning state.

This time was better. At Kerry's lead, they had gone through every position they had every tried over the past five years and even added a couple of new variations. Unless she had been faking it, Kerry had orgasmed over and over again. For the first hour, Malcolm had though he was in heaven. Suddenly, from nowhere, he appeared to have what he had spent much of his post-pubescent life dreaming about – his own personal nymphomaniac worshipping his cock. After an hour, he began to tire, and he had tried to slow things down, but Kerry was having none of it. With quite frightening intensity, she had urged him to keep working for another thirty minutes, before he forced himself to come again and stopped. Feeling pleased with himself that he had done a _thorough_ job, he had rolled off her and allowed his eyes to close, suddenly overwhelmed by a need to sleep.

Impatiently, Kerry had pulled him onto his back and begun to work on him again with her mouth and hands.

He tried to ignore her. He believed her efforts were going to be in vain anyway, because he was convinced the one crucial part of his anatomy really had done all it could. But, somehow, she got just enough life back into him so that she could carry on kneading her pelvis against him without any real participation on his part. If this was what Kerry went through every Friday night and Sunday morning to keep him happy then he was sorry, because it really wasn't pleasant at all. Towards the end, when he again became too soft for her, she became frustrated and began slapping his balls before, finally, she gave up and left him alone.

Lying here in bed now, with his testicles still throbbing, he wondered if what had happened to him actually qualified as rape. He had always thought the idea of rape between two people in a relationship to be, frankly, ridiculous. And the idea that a woman could have sex with a man against his will he would have thought impossible, because of the mechanics of the crime. Yet here he was, feeling used, even abused, and hurt, physically hurt, by the woman he thought he loved.

Now his memory had finished graphically answering for him the first of his questions, his attention turned to the second: where was Kerry? It was still dark and the digital alarm clock beside Malcolm's bed was showing _6:31_. It wasn't set to go off for another half-hour. Normally, it was easier to wake a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy than wake Kerry, and certainly a lot safer unless you bore a strong cup of coffee as a talisman. In the whole eleven months they had lived together, he had never known her once get out of bed before the alarm started beeping. In fact, whenever she could, she would take advantage of the flexitime at her work and simply go back asleep, and Malcolm would have to wake her before he left the house.

He listened for the shower and other noises in the bathroom but could hear none. What he could hear was a deep drumming sound from downstairs. It followed a rough pattern: three or four beats repeated at irregular intervals. Curious, Malcolm got out of bed and headed downstairs.

There were no lights on anywhere in the house, but he clicked every one he passed, unconsciously aware that the light reduced his nebulous sense of unease. The drumming sounded as though it was coming from the living room. Working his tongue around the inside of his mouth, which had dried and stuck together, Malcolm approached the living room door and opened it.

Silhouetted against the orange light filtering through the curtains, Kerry was standing over near the television, her back to him. She was motionless, her head cocked to one side, as if she were listening for something. Then, suddenly, she moved three silent steps to her left, beat the carpet three times with one foot, and became still again, listening.

Malcolm clicked on the light. 'Kez?'

Kerry turned to face him. She was naked, and Malcolm realised he had fallen into such a deep sleep when she had done with him that he wasn't sure she had been to bed at all.

'You've scared them,' she said, annoyed. 'Gone. The light,'

'What? Scared what?'

'Rats.'

'We don't have rats in the house.'

'Not in. Under.'

'How do you know?'

'Feel them.'

Malcolm sniggered. 'Kez, come on, we don't have rats. This is a new house.'

Kerry suddenly darted over to the fireplace, her steps as delicate as those of any ballet dancer. She dropped to all fours and placed her chin against the carpet. Her naked body in such an overtly sexual position might have started Malcolm's motor running, but, if anything, she was having the opposite effect on him. His balls still ached from last night and they felt like they were trying to burrow inside him for safety. He didn't blame them. There was something just so completely _wrong_ with the way Kerry was behaving. Malcolm realised he daren't go near her.

'Kerry, are you going to get dressed?' Malcolm tried to keep his tone normal, which, for some indistinct reason, seemed important.

Kerry got up on her knees and glanced down at herself. She seemed unsure what to make of the fact that she was naked, as if she hadn't been aware of it until that moment.

Malcolm didn't know what to do. He thought Kerry might be ill, and he had vague ideas that she might have had a stroke or some kind of fit in her sleep. He wanted to go to her, get a blanket around her and maybe even call an ambulance, but he remained standing by the living room door, and he was acutely conscious of the fact that it was fear keeping him there.

'Kerry, you don't have to worry. If we do have rats, I'll get them. I'm pretty sure _Harrison's_ sell those humane traps. I'll go out in my lunch hour and get a couple. They'll be gone by tomorrow.'

'I will get them,' Kerry said.

'You mean the traps?'

Kerry didn't reply. On all fours, she scurried to the corner of the room and placed her hands flat on the carpet. Suddenly, she tensed, excited, as she sensed something moving beneath the floorboards.

***

Lunchtime couldn't come soon enough for Malcolm. He just wasn't with it, and he had accumulated three bollockings during the morning for ignoring potential customers. In truth, he hadn't even noticed them. One couple had been sitting inside the newest Range Rover _Vogue_ , making an assortment of promising noises, when Tom, the Sales Manager, came into the showroom and found Malcolm staring vacantly out of the window, oblivious of the potential seventy-grand sale.

In the tiny staff room, Malcolm had just made himself a mug of tea and opened his neat pot of pasta salad from the garage next door when one of the mechanics came in with a coffee and a hamburger. It was Gary, a young apprentice who – if his relentless boasting were to be believed – had already nailed half the post-adolescent female population of Peterborough, and with no regard for their marital status. If it weren't pissing down outside, Malcolm would have made an excuse to leave; he really wasn't in the mood.

Gary came and sat right opposite and bit into his cheeseburger, chewing with his mouth open, forcing Malcolm to recall the way Kerry had devoured two huge, barely-cooked steaks last night, blood often dribbling down her chin as she masticated.

'Hey, hey, Mal, guess what happened to me last night.'

Malcolm shrugged. 'You shagged Beyoncé.'

Gary laughed around his mouthful of food and nodded. 'Still waiting for her to call. No, no – nearly as good though. There's this shag-piece I've been trying with for months. Carla she's called, right? She's a fucking dancer, at _Marleys_. She is fit. I mean really fucking fit. Anyway, I was in there last night, and you'll never believe what fucking happened, right?'

Malcolm chewed on his cold pasta and sweetcorn. 'I could take a wild guess.'

The sarcasm went right past Gary, as it usually did. 'I couldn't fucking believe it, right – she asks me back to her place. Just like that. I didn't even have to buy her a drink or nothin'. And, fuck... ing... hell...'

Malcolm forked more slippery pasta into his mouth.

Gary was so into his story that he seemed to have forgotten his own mouth was still half-full of chewed-up cheeseburger. 'No bullshit, right – she shagged me into next week. I tell you, my balls feel like Ronaldo's been using 'em for penalty practise.'

Malcolm stopped chewing. In an attempt to make himself feel better about his own limited sexual history, he had always tried to convince himself that most of Gary's reported conquests were either exaggerations of the truth or outright lies. But deep inside, he knew that Gary had just the combination of cheeky quick wit and slimy over-confidence that a disappointing percentage of women seemed to find attractive. Depressingly, Malcolm knew that Gary almost certainly got far more than his fair share of women into bed. It was normal for Gary to go into graphic detail about any new notches on his bedpost, but Gary always framed his descriptions in such a way as to sound like sex, for him, was something he did _to_ , not _with_ , a partner. This latest story didn't fit the pattern. What it _did_ sound unnervingly like was the experience Malcolm had had with Kerry last night.

Gary started laughing, bits of cheeseburger blowing from his mouth. 'Tell you what's funny as fuck though, right? Bill's walking round like a bear with a sore head, 'cos Joe's going on about Laura been all over him last night, and Bill's not had a sniff from his missus in about a year.'

Malcolm continued to stare at Gary.

Gary took another bite of his burger, which he didn't allow to interrupt his chuckling. 'Must be a full moon or sommat.'

***

Malcolm left work early and called in at _Harrison's_ hardware shop on the high street. His memory had served him well: they did indeed sell humane rat traps. The sales assistant – a young lad who was obsequiously polite – insisted on taking one of the traps from its box to show Malcolm. The trap was like a small cage, with a spring-loaded door that was triggered when the rat tried to pull food from a hook inside the cage. Carefully, the assistant demonstrated to Malcolm how to set the trap without losing fingernails in the process. It was a real danger because the spring seemed unreasonably strong and would probably kill the rat as efficiently as a normal trap if the creature panicked at the wrong moment and made a run for it. If Malcolm had believed for one second that they really did have rats at home, he would probably have backed out of the sale, but he didn't want Kerry doing her creepy listening-to-the-carpet thing again, so he bought two.

It was still light when Malcolm got home, but he noticed the living room curtains were closed. Kerry's car was in the driveway even though she didn't normally get home from work for another hour yet. Malcolm used his key to let himself in.

In the dingy hallway he closed the door behind him and then stood in silence, listening.

Apart from the regular clicking of the central heating clock in the kitchen, he couldn't hear a sound.

'Kerry?' Malcolm almost jumped at the sound of his own voice.

No reply.

Malcolm placed his car keys and the two rat traps on the hallway table and approached the living room door, hating the loudness of his shoes banging on the hardwood flooring. This was his home, and yet – suddenly and for no reason that he was consciously aware of – he felt he should not be here, and certainly should not be advertising his presence by making so much noise. The place seemed almost as if it had been deliberately _set up_ for silence.

The living room door was almost closed but not latched shut. A gentle push caused it to swing open, groaning on its old, paint-encrusted hinges. Malcolm stepped into the room.

It was even darker in the living room than in the hallway because of the closed curtains. It felt unpleasantly cool too, as if the central heating wasn't working in here or perhaps a window had been left open all day. A part of Malcolm's brain that had evolved long before language and therefore could not articulate its reasoning had already taken involuntary control of his eyes, quickly searching the room for anything out of the ordinary, any potential threat.

Malcolm's eyes went first to the settee and armchair, perhaps expecting to see Kerry sitting in dark silence. The idea that she might have spent the entire day in here, perhaps still in the nude, _waiting_ , was not one Malcolm wished to dwell upon. Relieved, he saw all the seats were empty. His eyes did not waste time though and were already scanning the rest of the room, paying particular attention to the corners and the places where the shadows were darkest.

Kerry wasn't in here.

_Behind the door_ , a warning voice said in his head, and involuntarily, Malcolm yanked his hand back from the door and took a step away.

Finally, his twenty-first-century brain caught up with proceedings and reminded him that he was an adult and this was his own home and he was behaving like a child dared by friends into creeping around a supposedly haunted house. He felt stupid and forced himself to call out with volume and steadiness: 'Kerry, are you home?'

The central heating timer replied with its incessant _clack-clack-clack_ but it was alone. Malcolm got the irrational notion that the house was silently set like a giant version of the traps he had just bought; one wrong move and some mechanism he had failed to see or understand would viciously cut off his escape – and perhaps half his body too. He shook off the silly idea and reached for the light switches beside the door.

He clicked both switches. With no effect. Frowning, he clicked the switches off then on again, but the room remained in stubborn darkness. Was the power off, he wondered. It couldn't be, because the central heating timer was electric and that was working. Perhaps it was just the lights. There was a chrome uplighter beside the television, which was on a separate circuit. He decided to try it.

The living room was a familiar place to him, and though it was in near-darkness, he saw no cause to watch his footing. As he took his first step, his brain barely had time to realise that the floor wasn't where it was supposed to be before his right leg disappeared into a hole where the polished wooden tiles and the floorboards had been broken and torn up. His shoe wedged among rubble left when the house's foundations had been laid, while his shin jammed against an immovable floor joist, together causing a neat _snick_ somewhere near the top of his sock. He cried out as burning pain spread through his lower leg. He knew instantly he had broken his ankle, and the idea caused a cold sweat to pop out of the pores on his face and down his back.

Malcolm found himself sitting on the adjacent floor tiles. His left leg was doubled under him, while he clutched his snapped right shin, which was still down there in that dark space beneath the floorboards. Chilly autumn air came in through the airbricks and snaked up his trouser leg. One place on his shin felt particularly sensitive to the sharp air, and he guessed the skin had been scraped away there. Tears streamed silently down his face.

The modern, civilised part of Malcolm's mind was still trying to work out why – and how – Kerry had ripped up the floor, but older parts of his brain, those concerned with the simple business of remaining alive, had already decided that he needed to get his foot out of that hole. Right now.

The muscles in Malcolm's leg had tightened before he had time to worry about how much it was going to hurt. And hurt it did. His foot stayed exactly where it was and all that did move was the top part of his broken fibula away from the bottom part, which caused a wave of head-spinning pain. He realised his shoe must have become wedged among the lumps of broken brick and dried concrete that were under the floor. There was no logical reason why this mundane explanation for his foot being trapped should cause panic, but it did. He didn't care how much it was going to hurt; he couldn't bear his foot being down there a moment longer.

His hands were still gripping his lower right leg, and now he used all the strength in his arms to try to wrench his shoe free. It didn't budge, but his foot did come out of his shoe. He wasn't wrong about the amount of pain: it felt as though shards of hot glass were being hammered down the centre of his leg bones. He screamed out and rolled onto his back, clutching his damaged ankle.

He stayed like this for a minute or more, crying through closed eyes, waiting for the tiniest hint that the pain in his leg was going to back off. Eventually, it did, just a little, enough for him to consider sitting up.

He decided he needed to start making some sensible decisions here. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness now, and, glancing around, he saw that the hole he had fallen into was not the only one. In fact, most of the floor tiles and floorboards in the room had been ripped up, exposing bare joists. A peculiar grey mist had filled the void beneath the floorboards, mist so dense and cottony that it appeared to be draped over the joists like a gossamer blanket. The mist may have _looked_ like a blanket but it was not performing the _function_ of a blanket, and the random holes in the floor explained why it was as cold as a meat locker in here.

There was plainly something very wrong with Kerry. She appeared to have taken the day off work and spent it destroying the house in an attempt to catch rats – rats that Malcolm still believed existed only in her imagination. She obviously needed help, but first Malcolm had to help himself.

He became aware he was shivering, a serrated sensation that felt like it was hacking off the ends of his bones, and certainly was not caused only by the low room temperature. He had no idea what the medical symptoms of shock were, but if this uncontrollable shaking was the first step down that road then he had no wish to go any further. He needed to be in hospital, if not for shock then for his broken ankle, and he certainly couldn't drive himself. Did this warrant dialling _999_? He didn't want to be a time-waster, but he was terrified of feeling himself slipping into unconsciousness and being unable to coordinate the movements to get out his mobile phone and call for help. He decided to make the call now, just to be on the safe side.

Then he saw Kerry.

She was above him.

Hanging.

If he stretched up, he could probably touch her.

Malcolm's body simply did not know how to react. He found himself cemented to the spot, with every single muscle in his body – even the ones controlling his heart and lungs – quivering uselessly. Aware that he was short of oxygen, he managed to force his lungs to suck in a ragged gasp. His heart uncertainly gave a few uncoordinated beats before finally finding something approximating a rhythm.

Kerry was motionless, suspended in a cradle of the same grey mist that was draped over the floor joists – grey mist that Malcolm was now being forced to accept was not mist at all, but his sanity wasn't yet able to cope with what it really was. Kerry was still naked, the way he had left her when he went to work. Her skin seemed loose and saggy, except the places it was stretched like a water-filled balloon suspended by a fish hook where it was attached to the strands of... of... _It's a web, Malcolm. You're going to have to admit it sooner or later. Kerry is cocooned in a web._

Now that Malcolm had been force-fed this horrific truth, he saw that the web covered the whole ceiling and had several purses of thicker fibres hanging from it, like demonic Christmas decorations. Each one of these was about the size of a pineapple, and one had a naked tail dangling from it. It seemed Kerry had been right about their having a rat problem. But they didn't have one anymore.

Malcolm stared more closely at Kerry, trying to pick out any sign of life, but she didn't seem even to be breathing as far as he could tell. _What the hell's done that to her?_ a voice in Malcolm's head asked, but it wasn't a strong voice, and Malcolm already knew he did not need to fear something might still be lurking in the room, about to do to him what had been done to Kerry, because whatever had happened to Kerry was self-inflicted.

Until now kept at bay by a sheet of solid shock, panic finally smashed its way through and roughly grabbed Malcolm. He tried to get up off his back, suddenly terrified that Kerry's eyes would snap open and she would drop upon him.

He couldn't move. His jacket and hands were stuck firmly to the floor.

What remained of Malcolm Thomson – the thirty-five-year-old car salesman, whose life never got any more exciting than having a beer while watching the footie in the local on a weekend – now fell through into a basement that exists below gaping terror, a basement that is dark and has no stairs leading back out, a basement that is home to an insatiable beast psychologists have named _Insanity_.

He tried again to get up, wriggling his shoulders free of his firmly-pasted jacket and writhing his glued hands. His left hand came free, but ribbons of hot pinpricks marked the places where tiny fragments of skin had been torn away. He pulled at his right hand again, but this one was held more firmly. It did move a little, but only because the sticky strands beneath it had a measure of elasticity. His hand wasn't coming free with any skin left on it.

Kerry began to move. Except that it wasn't actually Kerry who was moving; it looked more like something moving _inside_ Kerry. Bulges appeared in her flaccid skin. The largest movements came from inside her head, as if her whole skull had been dissolved and her head was now just a soft bag containing... containing what?

Malcolm did not want to know. His mental stability had already been walked at gunpoint to the edge of a windy cliff; the prospect that the Kerry – pretty Kerry, whose warm body he had held tight and been inside just two days ago – was now nothing more than a drained bladder from which something hideous was about to burst would for certain throw him over the edge.

Frantically, he used his unstuck hand to grab his mobile phone from inside his jacket pocket. In his clumsy haste, it was almost like a wet bar of soap in his grip, and it slipped free and clattered down into the hole beside him. He was about to reach into the hole, to grope for it, but he snatched his hand back. He recalled how his shoe had become fast in rubble and realised that an alternative explanation was more likely – that his shoe had in fact been glued to the strands of web that had been spun to catch the rats. He forgot the phone.

A rough tearing sound right above Malcolm's head made him look up. The empty flaps of flesh that had been Kerry had now torn open all the way from under her chin to the top of her vagina. The thing within was black and therefore difficult to see in the diminishing light, but it looked wet and had a lot of legs.

Malcolm twisted and pulled his stuck hand, but it would not come free. All he had in his pocket was his wallet and a fountain pen he used when he'd talked someone into signing on the dotted line at work. It was that or nothing.

He unclipped the pen from inside his jacket, pulled off the cap with his teeth and got to work on his hand. Pulling and digging, it took him several minutes to get his hand free, and it was a bloody rag by the time he had finished. He didn't care. The thing inside Kerry was now out, and he could see that it was exactly what he had – if his sanity had allowed him to accept it – known it would be since he first saw Kerry hanging above his head.

The spider was big. It seemed impossible that it had fitted inside Kerry's desiccated, shredded body. It had done so by ingeniously folding itself – equalling the art of any Japanese origami expert – and now it extended itself alarmingly, one impossibly long leg at a time, until all of its eight limbs were spread across the ceiling, forming an articulated framework, suspending the spider's bulbous body just centimetres above Malcolm's face. The Kerry-spider slowly stretched her jaws wide, loosening her most important muscles, the ones she used to kill. And then two eyes opened. Gone were Kerry's clear blue eyes; in their place were a pair of shiny black globes, almost the size of bowling balls. Then two smaller eyes opened each side of the larger eyes, followed by two more, then two more, until Malcolm found himself stared at by a row of eight unfathomable alien orbs. How long would it take the newly hatched spider to work out that her first meal was just centimetres from her jaws?

Ignoring the fiery pain burning brightly in his lower right leg, Malcolm got on all fours and scrabbled away from underneath the Kerry-spider. With every movement he made, he expected at any moment to feel a heavy weight fall upon him and quick fangs puncture his back.

As he got near the living room door, the Kerry-spider prodded a single leg down in front of him, blocking his path.

Without a thought for the possibility that the leg might be as hard and rigid as a lamppost, Malcolm swiped at it with one forearm. He was surprised to find it was spongy, like a thawed turkey, and it didn't have the strength to resist him. Malcolm guessed the spider had emerged with a soft outer skeleton and might take some time to get up to her full strength. He certainly wasn't waiting around to find out though.

Out in the hallway, Malcolm tried to get up onto his feet, using a door handle to pull himself up. His broken ankle would not accept any weight at all, but he forced it to half-support him every second or third hop as he made his way into the kitchen.

From the living room, he could hear movement. The noises were quick but quiet, and Malcolm shuddered at the thought that such a large creature could be so nimble. It seemed the prospect of her first good-sized meal was simply too much for the Kerry-spider, and she wasn't going to wait for her exoskeleton to harden before coming after him.

Using chairs, worktops, anything to lean on, Malcolm got across the kitchen and to the back door. The top half of the door had small glass panes, but it was now fully dark outside and no light entered. In the darkness, he groped for the door handle and pulled.

It was locked.

'Shit! Shit!' Malcolm repeated, as he continued to rattle the door handle uselessly.

The rapid, precise movements were in the hallway now. Malcolm remembered once watching a brown house spider cover the length of the hallway in ten or twenty seconds (and smiling to himself as he imagined Kerry's reaction if she saw it); if something the size of a small shrew could move at that speed, how fast was the long-legged giant now pursuing him?

Malcolm knew he didn't have his keys on him because he remembered putting them down beside the rat traps when he got home. But, just then, the autumn wind blew a hole in the clouds and moonlight allowed him to see that the key was in the door lock. He had told Kerry a thousand times not to leave the key in the lock. Thank God she never listened to a word he said! Malcolm fumbled with the key and opened the door.

His instinct was simply to run, but he had the presence of mind to close the door behind him first. If the Kerry-spider had hardened to full strength, Malcolm didn't doubt she would simply smash straight through the door, but maybe in her weaker, newly hatched state, the door might buy him some time.

He half-hopped, half-hobbled on his excruciating broken ankle across the lawn towards the bottom of the garden. He reached the fence just as the sound of splintering glass reached him. He didn't have a second to waste, but he had to turn round, to see. He had to.

The Kerry-spider had broken three panes of glass in the back door and a long, elegant, black leg extended through each, pawing the moonlit air.

Malcolm found the sight morbidly hypnotic, and he had to pull hard on his eyes to get them to come away. He turned his attention to the fence blocking his escape.

He'd chosen the fence at the bottom of the garden deliberately. The wooden fences to the left and right were fairly new and sturdy, while the one that ran along the bottom of the garden had endured many winters, and the fragile panels developed a new split every time there was a strong wind. His simple intention had been to kick his way through it, but now he realised there were practical difficulties with his plan. Which foot did he kick with? If he kicked with his good foot, his broken ankle would have to support all his weight, the pain of which he dare not imagine; but if he stood on his good foot, he would have to kick with his bad, which he was sure would hurt even more. He could see only one solution.

He took a step back and jumped at the fence, hitting it with his right shoulder. He had been right about the state of the wooden panelling – it was rotten and weak, and it offered so little resistance that he fell straight through it and found himself sprawled in the border of the neighbouring garden.

Behind him, there was the sound of big slices of the kitchen window shattering as they fell onto the patio paving. Malcolm guessed the Kerry-spider had figured out that she didn't need to break through the back door when she could simply push out the large kitchen window and crawl right through.

Malcolm made a decision then, that no matter how much pain his snapped ankle gave in protest, he was going to force it to carry him. It had to. He had to run and run fast, and he didn't have time for broken bones.

He lifted himself onto all fours, got his good leg beneath him and pushed. He braced himself to take his first proper step on his broken ankle, but he needn't have worried, because his sore and bloody hands were once again stuck fast, preventing him from getting to his feet.

The wind blew another gap in the clouds then, allowing Malcolm to see the garden he was in for the first time.

His first thought was that it had been snowing. Every surface, from the lawn up to the roof of the house, was white. It took his brain a few seconds to accept that it wasn't cold enough for snow and the white colour was in fact web. It was everywhere. The plants, the pond, the garage were all shrouded with the stuff. Even two mature trees either side of the lawn were strewn with the fine white fibres most of the way up their considerable height. Malcolm was vaguely aware of his eyes widening and his jaw sagging open as he glanced left and right. Every house he could see was swaddled right up to the television aerial in a blanket of web.

Clouds covered the moon again, and the carpet of web became a uniform black shadow, impossible to see unless you knew it was there, which was of course how millions of years of evolution had designed it.

Malcolm's brain – though beginning to split apart at the seams – was still functioning sufficiently for him to realise that the overwhelming quantity of web could mean only one thing, but he daren't go any closer to that thought.

A security light came on then, its beam blinding Malcolm. He wondered why it had not come on when he had first broken through the fence. He averted his eyes and found them on one of the pair of trees in the garden, now thrown into silhouette. Hanging from a branch, about a third of the way up, were two parcels, much like the ones he had seen holding the dead rats in the living room, except these ones were human-sized.

Now Malcolm saw that it was not he who had triggered the security light but something big lowering itself out of the dense shadows between the cocooned meals. And it wasn't the only movement. Though the wedge of intense brightness projected by the security light made the surrounding areas seem darker by contrast, Malcolm could just make out over the tops of the fences bordering the garden slender black legs craning into view.

He sensed the Kerry-spider move above him. A scream got halfway up his throat before being extinguished by two enormous fangs perforating his left and right lungs simultaneously. He had the nauseating sensation of slick fluid running along his arteries, spreading coldness and numbness and pain – lots and lots of pain.

Already Malcolm felt consciousness leaving him, and death might not have been too bad for him if the Kerry-spider had been more mature. But she was a baby and vulnerable and unable to defend her kill. Wisely, she backed away as two large females approached and raised their forelegs at each other, both equally matched and equally determined not to surrender a single mouthful.

Matryoshka

'I know what you are, and I know what you're here to do.' Frank Digby felt calm, in-control – amused even. In fifty-three years of life, such positive emotions remained for him rare enough to feel strange in his head, like some sponge had become lodged in his brain.

The psychiatrist sitting opposite him, Dr Robert Harrison, a man half Frank's age but wearing thick glasses and completely bald, finger-tapped a note on his touch-sheet and gave Frank a practised empathetic smile. 'What am I, Frank?'

The room was steel-walled, without windows, and the door had no card-slot on the inside. Frank wasn't claustrophobic but he didn't like it. If someone on the outside so desired, the room could become a murder weapon every bit as effective as a bored-out plasma spray – because there was simply no way out. Doubtless it was deliberately designed that way, to intimidate, but Frank thought the programmer could have used more imagination. The only furniture in the room was the single bolted-down aluminium table between them, and the pair of incongruous brown leather chairs they were sitting in. A cheap wall-clock clicked away the time, its second-hand vibrating irritatingly each time it jumped to a new marker.

'All this,' Frank said, opening his hands to indicate the uninspired room. He couldn't help a short laugh. He began massaging the dark stubble on his cheeks, his fingers sounding like they were running through a stiff yard-brush. 'You're a construct of the program, Doc. You're here to rehabilitate me, to try to stop me killing again.'

A fly buzzed close to Frank, and his hand flicked out faster than the eye could see but predictably missed the cocky black dot by several centimetres.

Dr Harrison asked, 'Who have you killed, Frank?'

'Don't do that, Doc! Don't you do that! I'm not crazy. Four of them. Four lying, prick-teasing slags.'

'Do you know their names, Frank – these women you've killed?'

Frank felt the rare positive emotions draining from him, washed aside by more-familiar emotions: frustration, anger, rage. He sat forward in his soft leather seat, which creaked realistically.

'Look, Doc-'

'Call me Robert.'

'Doc. Nothing I say today is going to be any different to what I said yesterday, or the day before that, or the pissing day before that. Jesus! Don't you get bored? Why don't we spend the time talking about something interesting? Football. Do you watch football, Doc? You must follow the World Cup. It starts in two weeks. Reckon we could repeat twenty-eighteen?'

'You're right, Frank – we do spend a lot of our time together talking about the same things – but there is a very good reason for that. Going back over memories sometimes helps us to remember things we've forgotten, or maybe things we've deliberately hidden from ourselves. To answer your question, I do think we've got a good team, and I think we might even win, but no one is going to pay me to sit here and talk to you about football.'

Frank started laughing. 'I'm sorry. I just can't take this seriously. Just how exactly are you getting paid? You mean to tell me they've even simulated you a bank account? You're shitting me!'

Dr Harrison waited.

'How deep does all of this go, Doc?'

'I don't understand your question, Frank.'

'I mean, they've simulated this room – including that bloody annoying fly – all the corridors, the canteen, the showers, the exercise yard, even other prisoners ... but how much detail is there inside _you_? On the outside, you're exactly how I would expect some spotty adolescent geek to code "a psychiatrist": bald, crappy academic dress-sense; you even still wear glasses for shit's sake! No one wears glasses anymore. But on the _inside_ ... Do you have memories, Doc? What make of car do you have?'

'I have a Toyota, six months away from its Compulsory Recycling Date.'

Frank laughed again.

'And I wear glasses because I have recently been operated on for Stargardt's disease, and I can't have laser correction for at least two years.'

'I'd be sorry to hear that, Doc, I really would ... if I thought aforementioned geek couldn't fix it by deleting a few strands of code.' Frank smiled broadly. 'You have any family, Doc?'

'Yes, I'm married. I have been for seven years. And we have two young daughters.'

Frank shook his head, grinning from ear to ear. He hadn't enjoyed himself this much since he'd disposed of that last sixteen-year-old prick teaser, pretending online that she was eighteen. His memory got caught back in time then, savouring the stages her pale, round face had gone through: the tears as he had forced his way into her; the sudden wide-opening of her eyes as he started to squeeze her thin neck, gently at first then tighter; and finally the stillness, the serene beauty in her soft features as unused life drained from her thin body.

Frank's memory abruptly tossed him back into the present. 'What are your daughters' names, Doc?'

'You know I can't tell you personal information, Frank.'

'Is that the truth? Or is that a detail they've missed, information they haven't programmed into you?'

Dr Harrison regarded Frank impassively, and Frank found himself becoming annoyed that he couldn't tell what the man was thinking.

The fly ventured close to Frank's face, and he slapped himself hard on the cheek, getting closer to his target this time.

The fly landed on the clock and casually began cleaning itself, oblivious of the red second hand passing beneath the Perspex it was standing on, or of the gaze of Franks eyes, pointing darkly at it from across the room.

Dr Harrison said, 'Frank, we seem to have gone off the subject. And that's okay. Let's forget the girls-'

Frank slammed the table in front of him, knocking over his half-full beaker of water. 'Women! They all said they were eighteen. They wanted to be women, so I treated them as women.'

Dr Harrison kept his voice perfectly modulated. 'Let's forget all about that for now. Let's talk about this place, all of this around us, and what you think about it.'

Frank felt like crude oil was being pumped into his brain, his thoughts becoming trapped like sea birds as the slick advanced. He didn't want to talk about this place, but he didn't want to stop talking either. One thing he had learnt already in prison was that no one – absolutely no one – listened to you (and that included his cellmate, a big, black guy called Elwyn, who spent most days humming continuously and shuffling a pack of cards but never playing with them). And so, resentfully, Frank found himself looking forward to his daily chats with Dr Harrison. But Frank wasn't stupid. He knew the whole elaborate thing – including the design of his dumb cellmate – was constructed deliberately so that he would feel compelled to talk to Dr Harrison when the opportunity arose. Knowing this didn't stop it working, however. He couldn't help himself. He needed to talk, and if this facsimile of a shrink were all he could get to listen to him then that would have to do. Any port in a storm, as the saying goes.

'So you want me to repeat what I told you yesterday, Doc,' Frank said, 'about all this being a made-up world?'

'I do.'

'What's the point? Why can't we talk about football, women, the weather?'

'No one's-'

'Yeah – no one's going to pay you blah, blah. But why do you care? You must know that the whole idea of you having a salary paid into your bank – the whole notion that you have a life outside of this room – is ridiculous.'

'What makes you say that?'

'Because you're not real! None of this is real. I may have done bad things, Doc, but that doesn't make me mentally retarded. I can read. I'm a certified nano-engineer for crying out loud. I subscribe to _Science Tomorrow_.'

Dr Harrison considered for a few seconds. 'I don't think I follow you Frank. You've read something?'

'The _Virehab Rehabilitation Centre_ – near Milton Keynes. A miracle cure for serial offenders – specifically serial murderers. Like me.'

'So ... that's where you think you are now, in this _Virehab Centre_?'

Frank chuckled. 'You know, Doc, when I first read about it, I wondered how it would work. I mean, things that sound too good to be true usually are. Apparently, _Virehab_ claim they can speed up rehabilitation by as much at ten times. How they do it is a secret better guarded than the Coca Cola recipe, but if you think about it, the basics are pretty obvious.'

Dr Harrison looked puzzled and fascinated at the same time.

The second hand in the wall-clock vibrated annoyingly each time it chopped away another second. The fly was still cleaning itself.

'I mean,' Frank continued, 'if they can jack into your skull to create all of this –' he waved his arms around the room '– they can do anything. My guess was they'd pump you full of drugs, or somehow tap into your subconscious – and I'm sure they're doing that, when I'm asleep, or _feel like_ I'm asleep, here in this place. But I have to admit that you... you impress me, Doc. I never for one second thought I'd get my own personal psychiatrist seven days a week.'

'Your well-being is my primary concern, Frank. I want you to get better, so you can get back on with your life. If I have to work seven days a week for that then that's fine with me.'

'Bullshit! Just look at these chairs: nice leather, very expensive ... _if_ they were real. And what do you get an hour, Doc? Four hundred? Five? And I see you fourteen hours a week and can call you whenever I want – even in the middle of the night. So you'd be on time-and-a-half then. And you're trying to tell me they'd spend that on murdering scum like me, when they have to close a hospital every month because they have no cash. Bollocks!'

'So ... you don't think I'm real?'

Frank started laughing.

Dr Harrison sat forward slightly, the leather of his chair creaking authentically. 'Frank, listen to me carefully. I _am_ real, and I'm here to help you. But to do that, we need to get past this idea that I'm not real. And to do that, I think we need to focus on the first part of all this alternative reality you've constructed. We need to talk about the place where all this started – your belief that you've killed four women.'

'Thanks, Doc.'

Dr Harrison's deeply wrinkled forehead concertinaed. 'For what?'

'For calling them "women".'

'Frank, this is a hospital, not a prison. You checked yourself in here – don't you remember that?'

'Don't do that, Doc. I told you not to fucking do that!'

'Do what?'

'Try to make out I'm crazy. I'm a bad man. I've done bad things. But I am _not_ crazy.'

'No, Frank, you're not crazy. For some reason, you've constructed in your mind an alternative reality – one which centres on the murder of young women.'

'So you're saying _Virehab_ doesn't exist,' Frank said, 'that I've dreamt it all up?'

'No, _Virehab_ is a real place. I read an article about it myself in the Sunday paper. But what we need to understand, Frank, is why the place has become so important to you that you now believe you're in there.'

Frank stared into Dr Harrison's eyes, shrunken and distorted behind his thick glasses. He was suddenly tired of fighting. How could you ever win a battle that was taking place inside your own mind? Every shot you fired, whether it was on target or not, was only going to blow away another small part of the person that was you.

'Do you know what really scares me, Doc – absolutely terrifies me? They claim one hundred percent success.'

'And why should that scare you?'

'Think about it, Doc. You work with human brains. It's like trying to herd cats: if you're lucky, one or two might go where you want; the rest will wander off and carry on doing exactly what they want to do. What's the only way you can think of that you can guarantee a criminal will not re-offend?'

Dr Harrison remained silent, but Frank could tell he had the answer and just didn't want to say it.

'Come on, Doc, answer my question. What's the _only_ way you can _guarantee_ a criminal will not re-offend?

With its maddening clicking, the clock simulated the passing of a few more slices of time.

Finally, Dr Harrison said, 'If you never let them out.'

'Exactly! You never let the scumbags onto the streets again.' Frank felt like he did when he had just made a particularly good chess move, and he sat back smugly. 'You and me, Doc – friends for life now. We're in this for the duration. My guess is we'll get round to talking about football after all.'

***

Frank's two hours with Dr Harrison was almost up, and today he was glad. These chats had become the highlight of Frank's life – small islands of intellectual activity in his otherwise benumbing existence – but today's talk had seemed like hard and unpleasant work. The Doc had seemed to get inside his head, like a maggot chewing away inside an apple, and that made Frank uneasy. He no longer felt fully in control. He no longer felt fully sane either.

Frank had tuned out; he realised the Doc was talking: 'Fantasies are something everyone has from time to time. I imagine some people even have some pretty freaky ones. But-'

'You're making me mad today, Doc.'

'That's okay, Frank. Strong emotion is a good sign – it means we're getting at the root of the problem.'

'No, you don't understand – you're making me _really_ mad.'

The fly buzzed close past one of Frank's ears and landed on the table in front of him.

Frank shot forward and slapped both of his palms down on the table.

The suddenness of the movement caused Dr Harrison to jump.

Frank smiled. He turned his left hand over to see what he already knew: centred in his palm was an intricate tangle of legs, wings and crushed insect parts. The fly's eyes caught the light from the overhead fluorescents and presented the most beautiful spectrum of metallic colours. It all looked very real.

'Proves nothing,' Frank said.

Dr Harrison briefly shook his head. 'I'm sorry?'

'I want to serve my time in a normal prison, Doc. That's all I want. I don't care if I spend the rest of my life with some hundred-kilo queen jamming his Johnson up my arse in the shower every day. At least it'll be real. Being in this place ... it's driving me crazy. All I do all day, every day is look for the bugs in the program. There must be some. A corner in a room where the polygons don't join properly and you can see through into nothingness. Or maybe a person who repeats the same behaviour over and over – like that lobotomy survivor I share a cell with. No one real could ever do only what he does and stay sane. Every night, I try to dream up random questions I can ask people, trying to find one the A.I. programmers haven't anticipated.'

Dr Harrison did a good job of concealing a sigh. 'Have you found any of these ... "bugs"?'

'I honestly don't know. And that's the problem, that's what got me thinking. What if I committed another crime in here, in this place? Would my trial be held inside this simulation or back in the real world? How could I know? And what if my request was granted and you moved me to a _real_ prison? It could just be a different part of the simulation. Hell, maybe they can simulate whole lives. In which case, how can I ever be sure I've done my time?' Frank let out a small gasp of exasperation.

'Frank,' Dr Harrison said soothingly, 'just take a deep breath.'

Frank couldn't let it go. ' _Virehab_ works because they never let you out. They just make you believe you've been released. Your body stays in a tube in Milton Keynes. Until you die.'

'Frank, slow down. Think about some of this. As you said, you're an engineer – you know what quantum and nanomechanical computers can do. Are they capable of simulating a whole world – people, traffic, jobs, the weather ... life? How could such a thing ever be programmed?'

Frank chuckled. 'You've obviously never tried one of the newest cyberdildonic suits. I've got a program for mine that I guarantee will make you come even if you were trying to name the twenty-eighteen World Cup squad – and in less time. It's not just reality; it's _better_ than reality!'

Dr Harrison glanced up at the clock, which continued to tick away time cheaply. 'Our time today is nearly over, Frank, but I've got a question for you to think about for our meeting tomorrow. I want you to think very carefully what I could do to show you that all this – and me – is real. Will you do that for me?'

'No. No, I won't. I've already thought about it. And can't you see that's the problem? Now I'm in this place, there is nothing you or anyone else can ever do to convince me I'm back in the real world. Whether you send me to another prison or open the door and let me walk right out, it makes no damned difference. Wherever I go now, I can't know that it isn't just another world within a world.'

Dr Harrison listened.

The clock ticked.

Frank continued. 'It's like Russian dolls. When I was a kid, someone gave me some to play with. I took them all apart and put them side-by-side. There was six of them. But I got angry because I was sure there should have been seven, and the biggest one was missing. But then I realised there might be eight ... or nine. How could I ever know? How could I ever know I had the biggest doll?'

Dr Harrison glanced up at the clock again. He picked up his soft briefcase, and began rolling up his PC. 'I have to go, Frank. We'll talk about this again tomorrow, okay?'

Frank didn't hear him. His eyes were focussed at their greatest distance, on a time long past, watching one of the few clear sequences available for viewing in the otherwise cloudy memory of his childhood. 'I stamped them all to matchwood,' he said, and there was sadness, even regret in his voice. 'And then it didn't matter if I had the biggest doll. I mean, hand-painted or not, a pile of wood is a pile of wood.'

Dr Harrison continued packing up. 'Frank, I really don't think this is helping you. Can you try to think about my question? Try to think what I can do – anything – that can show you that this hospital is real and we are all here to help you.'

'There is just one thing that might – just might – prove one way or the other what this place really is.'

Dr Harrison paused, zipping up his padded case. 'What's that?'

Frank looked directly at Dr Harrison and began rocking backwards and forwards agitatedly. 'You're not going to like it.'

'That's okay.'

'No, you don't understand – you're really _not_ going to like it.'

'I just want to help you, Frank – whatever that takes.'

Frank began breathing heavily. He wasn't sure he could do it, but what other option did he have? He had thought about it and thought about it. This place – the not knowing – was eating the inside of his head. And maybe that was part of the point, part of its modus operandi – to make him crazy, to render him harmless by intentionally driving him insane. He knew he couldn't get out. And even if he served his time like a good boy and was let out, how could he know he had really been released, that his body wasn't still in a glass tube in Milton-bloody-Keynes? So he had to settle for second best: he at least had to know the true nature of his prison. And the only way he could think of to do that was to do what he had done to the Russian dolls.

A hint of nervousness had crept into Dr Harrison's voice when he looked carefully at Frank and asked, 'What are you thinking?'

Frank's brain felt like a tangle of spaghetti boiling in a pan. Could he do it? Although he'd done it four times already, he knew it wouldn't be easy. It still felt wrong.

Swatting the fly had proved nothing. Humans swatted flies. It was as natural as sex. Therefore the A.I. would have been programmed with that possibility. But, what if he did something so unexpected that the A.I. couldn't know how to react? Then he might get his pile of painted matchwood. And at least he would know.

The clock ticked ... and ticked. In Frank's ears, each _click-rattle_ of the second hand seemed louder than the previous one.

Frank had launched himself over the low aluminium table almost before he knew he had made his decision to act.

Dr Harrison was a slim man, several centimetres shorter and a good few kilograms lighter than Frank; he went down like he had been hit by a bull elephant that had had molten glass pumped up its rectum. As Frank bit hard into the soft flesh of Dr Harrison's nose, the alarm sounded, failing by a good margin to drown out the doctor's screams.

So far, the system was coping fine with Frank's behaviour. This eventuality had obviously been foreseen and programmed for. He needed more.

Frank began chewing on the gristly lump of Dr Harrison's nose that he had managed to bite off. He reasoned the simulation would be expecting him to spit it out, so he tried swallowing it instead. Surprisingly, this eventuality, too, seemed to have been anticipated, and the only difficulty Frank experienced while trying to swallow the rubbery flesh was that he was almost sick.

The blood streaming from Dr Harrison's nose was flowing into his mouth, causing him to gargle almost comically as his screaming continued.

The simulation would undoubtedly have code for the standard thumbs-pressed-into-eyes attack, so instead Frank flicked off the doctor's glasses, pushed an index finger down the side of one of his eyes and levered out his eyeball.

It came out just fine. Frank really was impressed by the attention to detail in this programming.

The alarm was still blaring; he didn't have long. What next? What would the simulation expect him to do with the eyeball? Tough one. He decided to bite off half of it and swallow it. He almost retched as it popped between his teeth, detail he wasn't expecting. Then he mashed the remaining half of the eyeball in-between Dr Harrison's teeth.

Projectile vomit erupted from the doctor's mouth, covering Frank's face and shoulders.

Frank looked down at it, and was surprised to see crumbs of scrambled egg and fibres of pink bacon. And he could _smell_ the bacon.

Deep down inside Frank, some glimmer of humanity nagged that this was wrong – just _wrong_ – but he was having far too much fun now to take any notice. He loved a challenge (a crossword, a Sudoku, a jiggram – anything), and he was now more determined than ever to find a hole in this mock reality that persisted around him.

He levered out Dr Harrison's second eyeball and threw it hard against the wall. It bounced around the room, causing Frank to laugh aloud.

Frank glanced at the wall-clock. Was the second hand stationary when he wasn't looking at it? Perhaps the computers lacked the processing power to run the clock while maintaining all this other unpredicted detail. The second hand rattled onto the _4_ -digit ... but Frank was convinced it had stayed on its previous mark longer than a second. Was he managing to overload the system?

Frank thought hard. What could he do next that could not possibly have been foreseen by the system's designers?

Strangling Dr Harrison was way too obvious. Even trying to smash the doctor's jaw off might be part of some sort of standard violence module built into the system; this was, after all, a prison, not a day nursery. Then Frank got it. What if he turned it around – got Dr Harrison to hurt him? That was a twist. Frank unzipped his trousers.

'I'm going to stick my cock in your mouth, Doc. It's up to you whether you suck or bite.'

Frank shoved thick fingers into Dr Harrison's mouth and levered his teeth apart, allowing him to force some of his continuous screaming past the blood filling his throat. Bizarrely, the resulting intermittent sound was not unlike the building's alarm. Frank's uncircumcised member barely nosed clear of his dark pubic hair when he was unaroused, but he managed to get the head of it in between Dr Harrison's teeth. Frank was certain this would do it. No way could the system's designers have coded for this.

'Crazy bastard!' Dr Harrison gurgled past Frank's now expanding penis, and then he bit. Hard.

Frank screamed. He pulled back and inspected the damage. It looked pretty fucking real: the end of his dick was gone and blood was flowing freely from the remaining ragged tangle of flesh. He fell sidewards and slumped against the wall. There was no way they could have seen this coming. What kind of twisted pervert had designed this system?

Dr Harrison was trying to crawl away from Frank, slipping repeatedly in the ever-expanding puddle of dark blood.

Frank tried to think logically. Models were abstractions. They always focussed on the important, discarded the irrelevant, with the aim of solving a particular problem. It was an axiom of engineering theory. The only way you could model the whole Universe in all its intricate detail was by using a machine as big and complicated as the Universe – another actual universe in fact. It was difficult to imagine _Virehab_ had somehow managed to cram a whole universe into their four-storey office block on a Milton Keynes industrial estate.

Frank – losing blood and becoming dizzy – checked the clock on the wall. The second hand was still noisily chipping away at time. Frank was no musician, but it seemed to him to be keeping perfect time.

The door slid open and two male nurses in hospital whites rushed in.

'Crazy, son of a bitch,' the larger, silver-haired one said. 'Zap the bastard.'

The thinner nurse pointed a square black gun at Frank, and a circle of laser dots appeared on Frank's blood-soaked tunic. A moment later, Frank felt his whole body screw itself up, as every one of his muscles went into agonising spasm.

Frank began to lose consciousness, but he could still hear the rough voice of the larger nurse: 'I told them. I told them the twisted fuck should have been in the secure wing. Anyone who fantasises about raping and killing schoolgirls is going to do something fucked up sooner or later. Shit, the Doc's hurt bad. Where are the fucking paramedics?'

The voice of the thinner guard followed. 'Ha! Looks like the Doc's cured Frank anyway.'

'What?' The larger guard sounded impatient at his colleague's inappropriate amusement.

'Well, he's not going to be following through on any of his sick fantasies now. Doc's' bitten most of his dick off.'

Frank really did feel ill now. His head was swimming, his whole body was twitching painfully, and his stomach was trying to empty itself but couldn't get enough muscles to act in coordination. Either _Virehab_ 's programmers were absolute geniuses, or Frank was indeed about to get his wish and pass from this world into another, a world not inside one of _Virehab_ 's servers – a world of smooth and infinite blackness.

The Kids from Snape

Everyone went quiet when the kids in the long black coats got on the school bus at Snape. Today was Mark's first day at Witcham High and he had other pressing concerns – such as not getting his head brayed in – but his eyes and ears would have to have been sewn up for him not to sense there was something not right about the Snape kids.

Mark was twelve years old, and he was not at all happy that he had to start another new school when he'd been in his last one less than a year. To make matters worse, there was less than a fortnight to go before the summer holiday, and Mark really didn't see why he couldn't just have a longer summer holiday and go straight into Year Eight. The Head of Witcham High, however, thought that it would be good for Mark to get to know his new classmates before the long summer break, and Mark had never known his parents disagree with a teacher, so that was that.

At his last school, Southfields High, Mark had slipped through the obligatory induction process relatively unscathed. He'd been cornered and pushed about a couple of times, and once had his bag emptied in the dirt and was made to give up his dinner money, but he hadn't actually been hit by anyone. Some kids had got it much worse, a fate Mark avoided by having the intelligence to hide his intelligence. He had learnt at a very young age that being labelled _Brainy_ or similar was like turning your head into a fist magnet.

And now here he was again, less than a year later, facing the same ordeal, with the added perk that he was the only new starter today, so he did not enjoy the protection of the herd. Today, the lions would have their eyes on him and him alone.

Mark's parents appeared not to be entirely unaware of their son's unhappiness about having to change schools again so soon. When his father had explained to him that they had to move to _The North_ because he had lost his job, he had told Mark that, after they moved, there would be enough money spare to buy him the _Silverfox Pit Viper_ mountain bike Mark had been Googling pictures of for months. The bike had twenty-one gears and full suspension, and at the time, it had seemed like a good deal. But now – sitting here on this lurching old double decker, watched by unknown kids who he could _feel_ weighing him up, and now faced with the unnerving spectacle of the kids who had got on at Snape – the bike (which still hadn't materialised) seemed like distant and inadequate compensation.

Mark's unease wasn't being helped by his crisp new uniform and the fact that his mother had – at her own insistence and by her own unskilled hand – trimmed and parted his dark hair so that he looked like a _Proper Young Man_. He might as well have been wearing one of those plastic slogan hats you got at the seaside: BULLIES – PLEASE FORM AN ORDERLY QUEUE.

In the village of Barlington, where Mark now lived, two other boys had been waiting for the school bus. They had seemed okay (one wore glasses), and Mark had wanted to join in with their laughing about stuff they had seen on _YouTube_ , but they were a year or two older than Mark, and shyness had got the better of him.

The grinding engine of the bus had preceded its arrival by a half-mile at least. The ancient vehicle's brakes were no quieter. Forced to bring the tons of tenuously connected metal to a halt, they squealed so loudly that the sound seemed to slice right to the small bones in Mark's ears, and only fear of appearing _soft_ to the other boys prevented him from clapping his hands to each side of his head.

When the doors of the bus had flipped open and Mark stepped up, the driver had turned his head slowly in Mark's direction. He looked ill. His face was a thin grey colour, and his dark-rimmed eyes seemed to be sinking into his skull, like coal features on a melting snowman.

Less than a third of the seats on the lower deck were occupied, by kids who had got on at villages even further away from Witcham than the unbelievable ten miles Mark had to travel. All the kids had taken seats towards the back of the bus, and Mark got the feeling that the nearer you were to the back seat, the higher up you were in the pecking order. Oddly, however, the two boys who go on with Mark – despite looking way too geeky to have noteworthy rank – also migrated straight to the raised area at the back of the bus. There they joined in with the laughing and loud conversation of a club Mark wondered if he would ever be a member of. Almost all the lower seating area remained completely unoccupied. Mark had taken the first forward-facing seat behind the driver, grateful to be away from potential confrontation, but at the same time feeling exposed and conspicuous – somehow vulnerable to a threat he could not yet perceive.

Mark's jitteriness when he had first got on the bus was, however, nothing compared to the leaden fear that sank through him when the kids at Snape got on. If there had been a fire escape next to him, Mark would have used it.

There were three boys and one girl. They all had sharp blue eyes and silvery blonde hair, though the girl's was partly hidden by a dark bonnet that looked so ancient Mark imagined even his great-gran wouldn't be seen dead in it. Despite the warm and sunny July morning, all four were dressed similarly in long black macs, made from a strange material that Mark imagined might have been cut from the wings of giant bats.

As the Snape kids took their seats, they appeared not to notice Mark, but then, as one, they turned to look directly at him.

Mark stopped breathing. He became aware that everyone at the back of the bus had gone quiet. The Snape kids' eyes were on him probably for less than a second, but when they turned away to take their seats, Mark found himself light-headed, as if all the oxygen had been sucked from his blood. He was sure, if they had looked at him long enough, he would have suffocated on the spot.

The bus lurched and jolted on its way. Mark tried to look out of his side window, at the passing hedges and fields, but his eyeballs seemed irresistibly drawn to the left, towards the Snape kids. They were sitting in a square foursome, staring straight ahead, silent.

After a while, the kids at the back of the bus did start talking again, but their conversations were subdued. After Snape, there was no more laughter.

***

Mark's cheerless first day took a turn for the better at lunchtime, when he acquired a new friend. Ian was his name. Mark had been standing in the corner of the playground, trying not to attract attention, when a fat lad with gopher teeth had simply walked right up to him and offered him a sherbet lemon.

Mark hesitated, suspicious that the lad holding out the paper bag to him was possibly a scout or decoy for a gang about to jump him. Ian just continued to hold out the bag, until Mark eventually rummaged his fingers inside the paper, pulled out a yellow sweet, and their friendship began.

Ian lived in Osston, which explained why Mark hadn't seen him on the bus. With hindsight, Mark realised that his initial suspicion about Ian being a scout for a gang was ridiculous. Ian was overweight, had goofy teeth, and had taken less than a minute to ask if by any chance Mark played chess. He was a Nerd with a capital _N_ ; there was no way he had any friends. At his previous school, Mark – along with anyone else safely ensconced in a group of superior friends – would have had the luxury of laughing at Ian and others like him. But here, 200 miles from those friends, among kids that spoke so thickly he could barely understand them, Mark was humbly grateful for Ian's approach.

It turned out that – while Ian definitely could not be called _cool_ – he was more normal than Mark had first thought, and they quickly identified three things they had in common: they were both into mountain bikes; they both had an Xbox 360; and they both thought the kids from Snape were weird.

'I'm getting a _Silverfox Pit Viper_ ,' Mark told Ian as they balanced on a steel railing just inside the school entrance, well away from the bulk of the kids in the playground.

'I might be gettin' a _Sand Cobra_ next Christmas,' Ian replied.

Mark cracked a sherbet lemon between his back teeth and half-closed his eyes at the sharpness of the powder that fizzed around his tongue. ' _Pit Viper_ 's got _Deore_ -' Mark's words evaporated from his brain.

All four Snape kids were standing not twenty feet away.

Puzzled why his new friend had stopped talking, Ian looked at Mark, and then looked where Mark was looking.

The Snape kids didn't seem interested in Ian. Their piercing blue eyes remained fixed on Mark, unblinking, like the eyes of wolf pack hungrily assessing a lone or weak elk.

Mark felt like a bucket of iced water had been poured down the back of his neck. He tried to turn his attention elsewhere, to behave normally, as if he hadn't seen them, but his eyes simply wouldn't come away. Just as on the bus earlier that morning, he found his breathing again wasn't working right. He was becoming lightheaded, and he was sure he was going to faint if they didn't turn away soon.

Fortunately, they did. Synchronously, like a small school of fish, they turned and headed away, directly across the playground. The way they moved, with their legs concealed beneath their cape-like coats, they seemed to float, rather than walk. The other kids didn't seem to be paying them much attention, but Mark noticed that the Snape kids were able to walk across the crowded playground in a perfect straight line, as if they were clearing the path before them using some kind of telepathic force. Mark decided there and then that, on the way home, he was going to sit on the top deck of the bus, well away from the Snape kids.

***

When the bell rang at the end of the last lesson, Mark hurried to the area where the school busses picked up, intending to get a seat upstairs and thus not catch so much as a glimpse of the Snape kids. The plan was a reasonable one, but it lacked one important ingredient: hindsight. With hindsight, Mark might have realised that he was not the only one uncomfortable about being near the Snape kids, and the emptiness of the lower deck was no coincidence. Neither was the resultant overcrowding on the top deck and the consequent zeal with which their tacit owners protected their seats up there.

'You're in my mate's seat, you little shit.' The lad glaring at Mark with black eyes was literally twice his size. He couldn't have been older than sixteen, because there was no way his Neanderthal lump of skull could contain enough brain cells for its owner to be doing A' Levels, but to Mark he looked about twenty. He had a weaselly kid with him, who Mark guessed was the usual occupant of the seat he had taken. Mark also became aware that all the other kids on the top deck were eagerly watching, hoping for some violence – maybe even some blood.

'Smack 'im, Robbo,' someone shouted.

Later, Mark would not be able to believe that he just sat there.

'Oi, posh boy, you deaf or just fucking stupid?' Robbo asked, getting a dutiful laugh from his weaselly companion.

Before Mark realised he'd done it, he said, 'Has it got his name on it?'

It seemed to take a few moments for the fact that someone was challenging Robbo's gene-given authority to sink into his slow brain, and – unbelievably – Mark found himself using the time to make things worse.

'No, well, it can't be his seat then, can it?'

Robbo grabbed Mark's blazer and tried to headbutt him, but the bus driver chose that exact moment to set off. The bus's old clutch was about as smooth as a rat trap, and the bus jolted so sharply that Robbo completely missed Mark and smacked his forehead on the chrome rail which ran along the back of the seat. This did not improve Robbo's disposition towards Mark.

Mark briefly saw the first fist filling the whole of his left eye before he felt it graze open the skin on his cheekbone. The punches that followed came so thick and fast that he didn't see a single one, much less have a chance of avoiding any of them. At some point, he felt his blazer go tight under his arms, there was a ripping sound, and he was thrown into the narrow aisle between the seats. From down here, Robbo looked as big as a house. Bloodthirsty faces appeared above the seat railings, hoping to see a gruesome finale. Crazily, Mark noticed a piece of pink chewing gum stuck under the seat to his right, and then he rolled into a tight ball, certain that a prolonged kicking was about to begin.

It didn't. It seemed to be over. Robbo deliberately trod on Mark's hand as he went towards the back of the bus but that was all. He didn't even say anything else. Not that anything else needed saying. The message was clear: there was no seat for Mark on the top deck. Like it or not, he was sitting with the Snape kids from now on.

***

When Mark got home, he found a brand new bike standing in front of the house, and he became aware of two things simultaneously: his parents were expectantly watching him from the front window and the bike was not a _Silverfox Pit Viper_.

Mark didn't recognise the make. In fact, he couldn't _see_ a make. It just said _Swamp Rat_ on the frame. It looked heavy; it didn't have the _Pit Viper_ 's aluminium frame and _Deore_ gears. And – even to his young eyes – the red, blue and orange paint job looked garish and cheap. As his heart continued to sink, Mark remembered that his parents were watching and he managed to put on what he hoped was a convincingly excited _Wow! Thank you!_ expression.

As it happened, it probably wouldn't have mattered what expression he put on, because at that moment his mother saw his swollen and grazed face. She was outside so fast that Mark didn't even get near the bike before being washed inside the house on a wave of motherly panic. She sat him in the living room, and, as she began dabbing at his tender face with cotton wool balls dipped in warm water, Mark saw his dad wheeling the disappointing bike into the garage.

It was all finally too much for Mark, and he burst into tears.

***

Mark knew his parents better than to expect any kind of a dramatic reaction to the small fact that their only son had been beaten up on his first day at a new school. They never reacted to anything. At his last school, Mark had come second in the annual Science Fair, with a robot that simulated a dice throw by drawing spots on a sheet of paper. When Mark brought it home, he quietly placed it on the dining room table, along with the bright yellow second-place rosette, and went to get his tea. Eventually, his mother noticed and simply told him to get it off the table in case it scratched the wood. By bedtime, Mark had given up on his dad noticing, so he picked the robot up and took it to show him. His dad was watching the news, so Mark's timing was (perhaps deliberately) off, but he had hoped for a bit more than he got. His dad, barely glancing away from the television, said, 'Mmm, yeah. Who came first then?' And therefore it came as no surprise to Mark to find himself getting on the bus again the following morning as if nothing had happened.

Mark took his original downstairs seat. There was plenty of noise from the back of the bus – at least before Snape – and Mark heard his name mentioned more than once. Though he strained his ears, he couldn't quite catch if his standing up to Robbo was being viewed as heroism or insanity. He strongly suspected the latter.

The bus worked its way along roads so narrow that it filled them verge to verge and had to huddle into the grass and stop whenever confronted by an oncoming vehicle. The July sun – hot on Mark's legs even at eight in the morning – flickered through large trees that grew close to the sides of the road. As the bus passed under them, they raked their branches along the metal, and Mark's imagination got the insane idea that the trees were trying to catch the vehicle, whereupon the branches would smash through the glass like the tree on _Poltergeist_ and drag all the children away to some infernal limbo.

Once he got his overenthusiastic imagination back in its box, the beauty of the countryside was not wasted on Mark. The trees, laden with sunlit leaves, were in fact breathtaking. They were linked by thick hedges, behind which small, stonewalled fields interlocked together, some dotted with grazing sheep or cows. It was a huge improvement on the concrete-lined walk he used to take to his last school. He might have begun to enjoy the journey were it not for the darkening cloud over his mind – the knowledge that the bus was drawing ever nearer to Snape.

Then Mark saw amidst overgrown brambles a vertical milling stone into which the name SNAPE had been chiselled. The letters were barely readable, blasted away by winter gales that must have numbered in the hundreds. Immediately after the sign, the bus had to negotiate a ninety-degree right-hand bend; there was an identical but left-hand bend at the other end of the village, so that Snape was built on the central stick of one half of a swastika.

Mark felt his heart swell up into his throat. He clearly recalled the sensation of not being able to breathe yesterday, and he resolved not to look at the Snape kids today. Instead, he tried hard to focus on what kind of a village was home to such weirdos.

It actually looked fairly normal. The houses (they were in fact all bungalows, Mark would realise a minute later) were made of dark grey stone and roofed with rough-edged tiles that Mark supposed were slate but were blacker than any slate he had ever seen before. The small windows were even darker than the roof tiles, and, despite the hot sunshine, Mark was sure the rooms behind them were dingy and damp. He imagined the hidden nooks and crannies in those rooms were home to a shuddering variety of crawling insects.

The bungalows' gardens were obviously cared for, though the plants growing in them were strangely formed and mostly without flowers. It was difficult to see what pleasure their owners derived from planting and tending such harsh products of evolution.

Something was odd about the whole street too, and it took Mark a minute to realise what it was: there were no footpaths, no telegraph poles and no streetlights – no sign in fact that Snape had made it out of the nineteenth century.

The bus's brakes squealed, the doors flipped open, and Mark became aware that the Snape kids were getting on. He managed to keep his eyes pointing at the glass beside him, but he found they had refocused on the reflections in the glass. The reflection was weak but enough for him to see clearly that each of the Snape kids deliberately looked at him before sitting down.

The bus let out an unhealthy grating sound from its gearbox and lurched into motion. Mark forced his eyes again to penetrate the reflection on the glass, and he found his attention on a perfectly ordinary sight.

Hanging on a thick washing line that ran alongside the last bungalow in the village were two Babygros of the type with feet, mittens and hood permanently attached. For a moment, the sight of the baby clothes drying in the morning sunshine destroyed Mark's perception of Snape as a sinister place. But then his brain made a readjustment, and he realised that – far from being normal – the Babygros were in fact the most abnormal thing in the village. They looked as out-of-place as the Snape kids' dark macs on a hot July morning.

For a start, the Babygros seemed to be made of a material that it was impossible to imagine hanging from rails in _Mothercare_ or _Babies R' Us_. It was skin-coloured, but was slightly transparent, and Mark got the feeling it had a texture similar to the chamois leather his dad used on the car. The washing line the Babygros were hanging from didn't actually look like a washing line at all. It was in fact a thick, bristly rope, secured at each end to a wooden post as thick as a telegraph pole. It looked necessary, too, because the Babygros were pulling the rope into a deep V, as if they were heavy, heavier even than Mark's school rucksack on a PE day.

***

Mark's second day at Witcham High School passed mostly without incident. It seemed that, by hanging around with his new friend, Ian, who had lived all his life in the nearby village of Osston, Mark was already sort-of accepted. Either that or the kids here had the memory span of a mentally retarded goldfish, and they had simply forgotten he was new. Mark cared little about the reason; he was just happy that no one was paying him much attention.

Except, that was, the Snape kids. Several times throughout the day, Mark caught sight of the four of them across the playground, always together. Somehow, they seemed to know when he was looking at them and all would turn their heads to stare right back at him.

***

When Mark got home, his tea – chips and turkey twizzlers – was waiting on the table for him. As his mum dabbed at his face with a cold flannel, she said, 'I got your tea early because I knew you'd want to be out on your new bike on a sunny night like this.'

'Yeah, I can't wait,' Mark said with as much enthusiasm as he could act, and then hurried his tea down, got changed, and went into the garage.

On second viewing, the _Swamp Rat_ wasn't actually that bad. It wasn't the _Pit Viper_ he'd wanted, and it did look heavy, but the bright paint job was growing on him. The bike had twenty-four gears, too, three up on the _Pit Viper_. Despite himself, Mark found he wanted to go out on it.

At the end of the driveway, he decided to go left. Their new house was only the third in the small village of Barlington, and so Mark was almost immediately past the _30_ signs and out into open fields. The whole area around the village was completely flat, but Mark tested and counted every one of the twenty-four gears anyway. The pedals ranged from being so stiff he had to stand on them to being so slack he couldn't work his legs fast enough, and his left foot slipped off, adding a grazed shin to his current list of injuries.

Once the pain in his shin began to fade, Mark started to enjoy being alone on his new bike. The warm evening air breezing over his face and the novelty of the full suspension soaking up the potholes in the roads seemed to create a tunnel through distance and time, and Mark suddenly became aware of two worrying facts: he didn't have a clue which way was home, and the sun was getting low in the sky.

Mark braked to a stop and looked around. He shivered; it was chilly in the shadow the of the huge ash tree he had stopped beside. The land here undulated slightly, but Mark could see a long way in any direction – enough for him to see absolutely nothing he recognised. Did he turn back or go on? The road he had just cycled along had zigzagged through fields without a single junction for at least three miles. He didn't fancy having to cover all that distance again. He surveyed the road ahead.

It was dead straight for maybe half a mile. The distant fields were draped over hills that appeared to be more pronounced (and hence tiring) than those here. There seemed to be a lot more trees too. And open crop fields gave way to smaller stonewalled grass fields, some containing livestock. Something bothered Mark about all this, but it took him a few moments to realise what it was.

_I'm near Snape_ , Mark thought, and the idea seemed to unmoor his stomach, allowing it to float ticklishly inside him.

Mark was pretty sure he knew how to find his way back home from Snape, by tracing the same route as the school bus, whereas the three-mile road he had just pedalled along might – for all he could tell – be three miles the wrong way. Heading for Snape was the logical thing to do, but he just couldn't do it. Mark started to wheel his bike around.

As Mark turned, sunlight caught on something white in the hedge perhaps three-quarters of the way along the road towards Snape. Mark stopped in the middle of the road and put a foot down. He squinted, trying to wring out the last bit of resolution from his retinas.

It was a road sign. There was a junction in the road – actually a crossroads he could see now he looked harder. A grey pole was poking from the hedge next to the crossroads, sprouting white-and-black metal signs. Each would have the name of a village and a distance in miles. Then Mark remembered that, on the way to school, the bus came to a crossroads just before it turned right into Snape. If it were the same crossroads, he was less than five miles from home. He had to go see.

Pedalling less than enthusiastically, Mark headed towards the signpost, all the time trying to recognise features thereabouts. Beside the road to the right was a broken down stone barn with many of its roof beams showing through missing areas of slate. Mark was sure he recalled seeing the barn on his way to school. And the curved wedge-shape of the sheep field ahead looked familiar too. His confidence grew that it was indeed the crossroads on the bus route, and he began pedalling faster.

At the crossroads, he locked his back wheel, stopping on the sandy soil that had spilled from the verges onto the uneven tarmac. The grey pole held four black-and-white signs. The one pointing back the way he had come said FANGFOSS 3½, a tiny village of about five houses he had come through when the sun was much higher in the sky and the world seemed a warmer, brighter place. The sign pointing left said HOOK 2, possibly the only village Mark _hadn't_ cycled through this evening. There were two signs pointing right: KILHAM 3 and – thank God! – BARLINGTON 4½.

Mark was just about to get going in the highest gear his tired legs could manage when he found himself looking again at the signpost. Because it stood on a crossroads, it was reasonable to expect that it should have carried four nameplates, one for each road. It did indeed carry four plates, but two pointed in the same direction. This was the crossroads at which the bus turned right towards Snape on its morning journey, but there was no sign for this.

All of the signs were rusty; it had probably rotted right off and fallen into the grass verge. If the sun had been a bit higher, the shadows a bit shorter, Mark might have had a look for it, just to satisfy his curiosity.

He shrugged it off and got pedalling hard for home. He had never heard his dad shout or even raise his voice, but he knew, if he didn't get back before dark, he would get silent disapproval for being late and riding without lights, and that was somehow worse than a straightforward telling off. He sure was going to have a good look at the signpost from the bus tomorrow morning though.

***

The next morning was another in the unusually long sequence of hot sunny days that had continued unbroken since Mark had first arrived in Barlington ten days ago. Mark had expected weather in the north of England to be worse than it was in the south, but, so far at least, it seemed the opposite. Mark wondered if the summers were always like this up here.

He again took his seat behind the driver, which would once again put him far too near the Snape kids for comfort, but this morning Mark found his anxiety was reduced somewhat, pushed aside by his overwhelming eagerness to see the signpost at the Snape crossroads.

Grinding heavily through each of its gears, the bus seemed to take forever just to get to the next village, Kilham, where a boy and a dark-haired girl Mark found very appealing got on and went upstairs. Pulling away from Kilham, the bus again had to go through the laborious and noisy process of gaining speed. At the vehicle's apparent top speed of forty miles-per-hour, it would take some minutes to reach the crossroads, but already Mark had angled his body towards the window, determined to get a good look at the signpost.

At length, the noise of the engine fell away. The brakes squealed. The bus was slowing for the Snape crossroads.

Mark put his nose on the vibrating glass. The bus was now crawling at walking pace, starting to turn. The post was right there. He started reading the names on the signs.

The two pointing right from Mark's viewpoint – KILHAM and BARLINGTON – were easy to read. So was the one pointing left, directly across the junction; it said HOOK. The one that labelled the long road down which Mark had cycled last night was pointing right at him, almost flat from his viewpoint, and therefore unreadable; but, as the bus turned, it swung to a better angle and Mark read FANGFOSS. Diametrically opposite this on the pole was a fifth sign, which also became easy to read as the bus swung clumsily around the junction to go in that direction. It said SNAPE 2½.

***

As the Snape kids took their seats, Mark applied the same technique as yesterday to help keep his lungs working: he concentrated hard on what he could see through his side window.

Mark never had understood his parents' obsession with gardening, but they had dragged him round enough garden centres for him to realise the spiky-headed plant overhanging the nearest stone wall was not one he had ever seen before. He recalled seeing a television documentary once about weird plants; on it had been a giant brown and red flower that smelled of rotting meat to attract flies. Mark had never forgotten the cool name – the Corpse Lily. He couldn't remember if the plant ate the flies or not, but the thing he was staring at now looked like it did. And it looked like it could eat much bigger things too.

The bus was now slowing to creep round the tight bend at the far end of Snape, and Mark found himself once again in view of the garden with the thick rope washing line. The two Babygros he had seen yesterday were gone, but they had been replaced by a single, much bigger one.

_You don't get babies that big_ , Mark thought.

The Babygro was made of the same strange semi-transparent, skin-coloured material, and was again hanging by its feet. The opening for the face on this one was visible from the road except that it wasn't an opening at all. Where the opening should have been, a piece of some kind of netting had been sewn in place with large stiches. The effect was to make the whole thing look like some kind of scarecrow or straw doll, except that its weight was pulling on the rope so hard that the head was almost touching the uncut grass below.

_Why would you hang a scarecrow upside down from a washing line?_ Mark wondered, and then panicked himself with the thought that he had said it aloud and the Snape kids might have heard him.

He risked a glance in their direction, and saw that they were all still staring ahead, like robots that had had their batteries taken out. If he had muttered anything, he seemed to have got away with it.

The bus began to turn the bend out of Snape, swinging the scarecrow-thing out of Mark's view. But just before he lost sight of it, he was sure he saw one of the hands move, as if in a feeble plea for help.

***

'No way!' was Ian's response when Mark suggested that they meet on their bikes after school and cycle to Snape. They were standing in the corner of the playground. All the other kids were ignoring them, which was exactly how they both liked it. For once, the Snape kids were nowhere to be seen.

'Go on,' Mark pushed.

'In Black Wood, right, there's a really good hill and jump,' Ian said. 'Let's go there.'

'I'll go there tomorrow, if you come with me to Snape tonight.'

'I'm not going to Snape. Anyway, it's too far.'

'You said you once went to Bridlington with your dad on your bike, so how can Snape be too far?'

Ian's face said that he remembered boasting about that and now wished he hadn't. He kicked at some loose cement in the brick wall beside him.

Mark too was uneasy with the idea of cycling to Snape, but his curiosity really was chewing at him. An idea came to him.

'I'll let you ride my bike.' Mark could immediately see on Ian's face a chink in his resolve not to go, and he pressed his attack home. 'You can ride it all the way from the junction in Kilham.'

Ian was thinking about it, but Mark could already see the deal was irresistible to him. Finally, Ian said, 'Well, we're not getting off the bikes.'

'Okay,' Mark agreed. 'We'll just ride straight through without stopping.' This final part of the deal was actually a no-brainer for Mark. He'd never had the slightest intention of stopping in Snape.

***

At the junction in Kilham, Mark sat astride his shiny new bike. He checked his watch: 5:40. Ian was ten minutes late. Mark couldn't help being relieved. It appeared Ian had bottled it.

Bored, Mark bounced his bike's rear suspension and tested the front by jamming on the front brake and pushing on the handlebars. He was starting to like the _Swamp Rat_ and he didn't want to lend it to Ian for the ride to Snape. Therefore, he experienced mixed emotions when sunlight glinted off metal some way along the road and Mark saw Ian furiously pedalling towards him.

Ian's brakes honked as he skidded to a stop beside Mark. Immediately, each of them began evaluating the other's bike. Ian's eyes were wide, taking in the full suspension on Mark's _Swamp Rat_. Mark was struggling to see anything to like about Ian's rusty green offering. It had no suspension, narrow tyres and _full_ mudguards. It looked like an old man's bike.

Ian had already dumped it in the verge, eager to get the swap done. 'Let's have it then?'

'Yours is crap.'

'I bet it's faster than yours.'

Reluctantly, Mark got off his bike and handed it to Ian, who couldn't wait to get on. He immediately began testing the suspension, just as Mark had been doing a few minutes earlier. Unenthusiastically, Mark picked up Ian's gate and swung his leg over the seat, which looked wide enough for two arses. The seat looked crap, but its softness was a relief to Mark's bum cheeks, which were suffering from too much time spent on the much harder, narrower seat of his _Swamp Rat_.

Ian was already pedalling away towards the Snape crossroads, randomly changing gear and bouncing the suspension.

Mark found that Ian's boast about the speed of his bike was not unfounded. With higher gearing and no fat tyres and spongy suspension to soak up energy, on the flat road there was no contest. With surprisingly little effort, Mark found himself way ahead of Ian. That was until he saw the Snape crossroads half a mile ahead and stopped pedalling, allowing the bike naturally to slow to walking pace.

'Told you mine was faster,' Ian managed to say between fast breaths, as he braked to a stop beside Mark at the crossroads. His face was bright red with the effort of pedalling.

Mark didn't hear him. He was staring at the signpost, which – just like last night – carried just four nameplates. There wasn't one for Snape.

***

Despite the missing signpost, Mark insisted they go to Snape as planned. As they drew near the ninety-degree right-hand bend that pointed the road through Snape, Mark found himself again in front. It wasn't by choice. The road sloped gently downhill into Snape, and Mark had just discovered that Ian's gate with wheels had brake levers and brake callipers, but, for some hidden mechanical reason, they weren't talking to each other. He had no brakes. He was picking up speed, and, short of leaping into the nettles at the side of the road, there wasn't a thing he could do about it.

Panic suddenly snaked a tight tentacle around Mark's chest. At this speed, there was no way Ian – who was frantically pedalling some way behind – was going to catch up to him, so one of two things was going to happen: either Mark was going to come flying off at the bend and become impaled in the hawthorn hedge or he was going to end up in Snape. Alone.

Mark's eyes desperately searched out the smoothest path for his tyres, so they might have a chance of keeping him on the road and out of the thorns and nettles. He completely failed to notice that the there was no stone milling wheel carrying the weathered name SNAPE in the hedgerow.

The bend was upon Mark. He banked Ian's bike and instinctively dragged a foot on the floor to keep himself upright. Then his tyres ran up onto the sandy soil that encroached upon the edges of the road, and he felt them losing grip. But the soil proved to be a benefit. Its slope provided a natural banking for him to ride against. Incredibly, he was going to make it. And he might have too, if the bend had been followed by the neat row of bungalows Mark had come to expect from his bus journeys to and from school. What he wasn't ready for was the bend being immediately followed by its twin, which should have been at the other end of the village.

Mark went straight across the second bend. Had a car been coming the opposite way, he would have ended up going over its bonnet and head first through the windscreen. There was no car, but his reactions weren't fast enough to avoid ploughing into the verge and going over the handlebars into a tangle of nettles.

Ian, with a working set of brakes, negotiated the bends less dramatically, though he too went wide on the second bend and collided with his own bike at the side of the road, dislodging the tyre pump from Mark's bike.

'You're extreme!' was his evaluation.

Mark stood up, scratching at his stung naked arms and legs. He didn't say a word. He just stared at the road.

Ian seemed to realise that maybe he was partly to blame. 'Guess I could have told you about the brakes. Sorry, dude.'

Mark continued to stare at the two adjacent right-angled bends, forming a sharp _Z_ in the road. The impossibility of it just wouldn't go into his brain.

'It's not here,' Mark said finally.

'What?'

'Snape. The whole village isn't here.'

Ian screwed up his nose. 'It must be further down the road.'

Mark turned to Ian, something unsettling suddenly occurring to him. 'Have you been down here before?'

Ian shook his head. 'No.'

'Haven't you ever come this way with your mum or dad in the car?'

'No. We always go through Hambleton.'

'So, you've lived here all your life and you've never been down this road?'

'Are we going to Snape or what?'

'We're at Snape!' Mark said. 'Snape's not here.'

'You're whacko. We can't be at the right place. I mean, there wasn't a sign.'

That fact bubbled up from Mark's subconscious and he frowned. 'One of the signs should be near that tree.' He pointed. 'I saw it when I was on the bus tonight.'

Ian just stared at his new friend. He looked like he was reconsidering whether he should be hanging around with someone who plainly wasn't in full possession of sanity.

A wood pigeon chose that moment to leave the tree Mark was pointing at, its powerful wings clapping together as it gained lift. The sound startled Mark, almost enough for him to leap back into the nettles. Mark suddenly decided he wanted to be away from this chilly, shadowy place. Without a word, he picked up Ian's bike, threw his leg over the wide seat and started pedalling back the way they had come.

'Hey, hang on,' Ian called after him, pushing the _Swamp Rat_ and trying to get on it at the same time.

Neither of them noticed the tyre pump that had fallen from Mark's bike. It lay there, its bright orange end poking out of the nettles, a conspicuous marker to where Snape should have been.

***

When Mark got home, he quickly put his bike in the garage, and only then noticed the tyre pump was missing. It was obvious where it must be: it had to be where Ian had run up onto the verge and hit his own deathtrap lying in the nettles. Mark's dad would certainly notice the missing pump sooner or later, and Mark would get a lecture about how much things cost and how he should look after them better. But more than that, the mounting point on the bike looked bare without the pump in place, and the pump was colour-matched to the frame. Mark wanted it back.

It was way too late to cycle back to get the pump tonight. The sun was already low, allowing long shadows to creep out from under the hedgerows across the fields. He would have to wait until tomorrow morning, to see if he could see his bike pump from the school bus.

***

As the bus ground its way along the narrow roads, the roughness of the engine was grating on Mark's nerves. He hadn't slept well last night. He had spent much of his time in bed with his brain in overdrive, trying to convince himself that he and Ian _had_ taken a wrong turn and had been nowhere near Snape last night.

The squeal of the bus's brakes startled Mark, causing him to jump. He realised he had been half-asleep. He found his eyes on the jagged, black leaves of a plant growing in a garden to his side, and he heard the bus's doors hiss and flop open. The Snape kids were getting on.

Mark didn't have any trouble keeping his attention off the Snape kids this morning. He kept his eyes pointed out of his window, determined not to miss the spot where he and Ian had crashed each other's bikes.

With its usual mechanical mini-drama, the bus got moving and soon was turning the bend out of Snape. Mark's eyes frantically poked at the shadows beneath the nettles that smothered the verge here, searching for his pump.

And there it was, lying conspicuously on a flattened area of nettle stems. It was bright orange, with a blue _Swamp Rat_ sticker along its length.

He had been here last night, but Snape had not.

***

As days passed, what Mark found increasingly difficult to believe was that no one found and picked up his bike pump. Mark had now survived into his second week at Witcham High, and the pump had been lying there at the side of the road for five days, including a weekend. Didn't the kids in Snape play out? Didn't people take dogs for walks? It was impossible to believe someone hadn't seen the pump and taken it, or at least moved it, perhaps kicking it, or throwing it into the hedge. But it was still exactly where it had fallen. And Mark still wanted it back.

His dad had noticed the missing pump last Saturday and predictably had lectured him. Mark asked his father to drive him to get the pump, but his dad said that the petrol would cost more than the pump was worth and told Mark that if he could cycle that far to lose it then he could cycle that far to get it back. Mark did consider it, but Ian flatly refused to go with him, and no way was Mark going alone.

He could think of just two other options. The first – asking one of the Snape kids to pick up the pump and bring it onto the bus for him – lasted about as long as it took his brain to think up the idea. Which left one last option.

The next morning, as Mark stood with the other two boys in the warm morning sunshine and heard the familiar grinding of the approaching bus, he felt his heart begin to skip beats. The vehicle came into view, the brakes squealed, and the doors flipped open like dying fish. The other two boys (who Mark now knew were called Gary and Liam but still didn't really speak to) got on first. Mark held back.

Mark had always thought the bus driver looked like a corpse, but he certainly didn't have the patience of the dead. He turned his grey face towards Mark and irksomely flicked his eyes and head, gesturing for Mark to move it.

Mark stepped up onto the bus, and – pushing words past what felt like a half-full water balloon in his throat – he explained his predicament to the driver. While he was talking, Mark became aware that everyone on the bus had become silent and were watching him with wide eyes.

The driver seemed to listen but remained as expressionless as a shark. When Mark had finished, the driver simply nodded slowly and made a pig-like grunt that Mark took to mean, _Now get sat down._

The morning was another hot and sunny one, and Mark found himself sweating freely in his blazer as the bus made its way relentlessly towards Snape. Soon, the bus was making the sharp right-hand turn into the village, and the brakes began squealing as they hauled the heavy lump of iron to a stop beside the waiting Snape kids.

Mark waited until he could see in the reflection in his window that they had all sat down and then he got up out of his seat. As he did this, he couldn't help but have the Snape kids in his view. He expected them to turn as one to look at him, maybe even say something – though, now he came to think about it, he had never heard any one of them utter so much as a single word.

None of them seemed even to notice Mark getting out of his seat, though, had he dared look closer, he would have seen their eyes angled upwards and to the right. They were watching him.

The driver let up the clutch pedal with his usual lack of finesse, and Mark would have gone his full length if he had not managed to catch the steel pole near the door. As the bus began to turn the left-hand corner out of Snape, Mark tried to judge whether the driver was going to help him or not, but the bus negotiated the tight bend so slowly anyway that it was impossible to tell.

There, through the bus's windscreen, Mark saw his pump. It was still untouched, lying where it had fallen amongst the nettles.

Then the brakes screeched and the bus came to a sharp halt. The doors hissed and flopped open.

Rubbery fear expanded in Mark's stomach. Knowing the driver was not the most patient of men, he tried to squeeze it back down and hopped quickly out onto the road.

In the shadow of the bus, it was surprisingly chilly. Mark shivered. For some reason, he didn't feel safe crossing the road in front of the bus, so he went down the side towards the back, watched by all the other kids. Except, that was, for the Snape kids, who continued to stare trancelike straight ahead.

Despite the fact that the bus had been moving at little more than walking pace, Mark found he had to trot two or three bus lengths back to where the pump was poking out of the nettles. As he reached to pick up the pump, he heard the bus's heavy diesel engine revving. Its exhaust blew out a cloud of oily smoke into the pristine morning air and it began to pull away.

Mark just stood there, his brain not quite able to comprehend what was happening. Then, as he heard the clatter of the bus's concertina doors flattening shut, he finally got it. He began to run.

Although the bus had always seemed slower than treacle to Mark, it had no problem gaining speed now.

Mark ran as fast as his adrenaline-heavy legs would carry him. He got almost to the rear corner of the bus before another gush of smoke signalled a change of gear and the bus pulled out of his reach.

He sagged to a stop. Exhaust smoke stung the back of his throat and he began coughing uncontrollably. By the time he had settled, the bus was some way down the road, but not so far that Mark couldn't see through its grimy back windows, top and bottom, the hollow faces of his fellow students staring back at him, like zebras who have just watched lions take one of their own but are simply grateful that today they are safe.

Mark collapsed into the grass verge. He sat there for some minutes, holding his bike pump, sweating in his blazer, only half-aware that he was listening for the sound of an approaching car. It was a distant hope. In thirteen trips through Snape on the bus, Mark couldn't recall ever seeing another vehicle on this road. Now he came to think about it, something else occurred to him that he couldn't believe he hadn't noticed before now: he had seen not a single car in Snape.

Mark knew he was going to have to walk, but which way? His home was definitely further away than school but infinitely more appealing. Home was where his mother would be. Right now, she might be vacuuming the living room, or ironing clothes, or making a coffee – comforting images that seemed so very far away and served only to magnify his unease about his current predicament.

As Mark got to his feet, he saw straight across the road a weathered stone wheel in the verge, on which the name SNAPE was just discernible. With the sight came an unwelcome realisation for Mark: if he wanted to go home, he had to walk back. Through Snape.

The first bungalow he would pass would be the one with the washing line. That thought alone was almost enough to stop Mark dead in his tracks. Thankfully, when he came in sight of it, he saw that, for the first time, the line had nothing hung upon it, though he wasn't at all sure that made it appear any less sinister.

It was now that Mark began to notice the changes.

First, he noticed the surface he was walking upon. It was no longer tarmac; it was hard-packed, sandy soil. He spun around, looking for the place where the transition had taken place, but the sandy road went all the way to the ninety-degree bend at the end of the village.

The houses had changed too. Their walls were now curved. Their rooves were thatched, no longer tiled. All the glass windows had been replaced with wooden shutters, many of which were open and looked like black eyes, creating in Mark's mind the unsettling notion that the families of Snape lived in giant hollowed-out heads.

Mark reigned in his imagination, but it had all become a bit too much. He dropped his bike pump, turned around, and ran.

He might have run all the way to school, such was the level of adrenaline pounding through his veins. Instead, upon rounding the bend, he was stopped dead, as if he had hit an invisible wall, confronted by a sight that was simply too big to comprehend.

There was nothing unpleasant per se about what he saw; it was in fact all quite picturesque. The sandy road snaked away between rolling, tree-dotted hills, all the way to the snow-capped mountains sitting across the horizon. The hazy mountains had to be miles away, but the castle nestled among them was clearly visible because the sun was reflecting off what looked like gold-plated spires, so slender and tall that their tips seemed to impale the clouds. But nowhere could Mark see an electricity pylon, or barn, or telegraph pole, or any sign at all of the world he wanted to see.

Mark simply stood, fixed to the spot, his brain spinning out of control, trying desperately to find a logical explanation.

Had his brain not been so overworked, he might have noticed a musty farmyard odour wafting into his nostrils. As it was, he did not sense anything of the lumbering shape that silently approached him from behind and slipped a thick arm around his narrow neck.

***

Mark hurt all over. His joints and muscles ached, his feet and legs the most. His head felt bloated, especially around his eyes, which he opened with difficulty, straining against thick mucus that seemed to have formed around the lids.

The world was upside down. Mark could feel the heat of the sun on his body but everything looked dim, and he realised he was seeing through some kind of brown gauze, a bit like the material on a used teabag but coarser. In a flash, Mark put it together – the fact that it was he, not the world, who was upside down, the constricting chords around his feet, the pulling in his legs, the itchy material over his face – and he recalled the Babygros hanging by the feet from the washing line at the end house in Snape. With a wave of terror that threatened to wash him instantly out into the Sea of Insanity, he realised the nature of his situation. Those Babygros had indeed had children in them, and now he was one of them.

***

Consciousness returned to Mark in waves, washing leisurely in and out of him. He wasn't sure if he imagined or actually saw an animal that was a bit like a dog but had bony protrusions around its wide muzzle. The creature sniffed at him and then scurried away as if to inform others of its find.

Weak and tired, Mark allowed his eyes to close, and the world ebbed away from him again.

When he next came to, it was to the sound of an approaching engine. The heavy grinding was unmistakable, and he recognised it instantly. The school bus.

The bus came around the sharp bend into the village and the brakes began to protest as they forced the huge weight of steel to a halt. There was a hiss and the doors flipped open. The four Snape kids disembarked and formed a rough line, staring at Mark from the roadside. The bus's engine revved and it began to crawl away, its doors still open.

Mark tried to yell for help but found his lips stuck firmly together. He started trying to wriggle his body, but he was tightly cocooned and could make only the smallest of movements.

The true horror of Mark's situation now began to spread like tendrils of an aggressive cancer through his brain. Perhaps this did something to his brain; for now he found his eyes developed a peculiar power of magnification, and he was able to see the driver of the bus quite clearly, even though the bus was some distance away and the driver's cab was in dark shadow. The driver was looking directly at him, smiling, revealing teeth that were triangular razors.

The tight casing that was causing Mark's whole body to itch hotly, the four Snape kids staring impassively at him, the horror of the bus driver – all of these things did not upset Mark so much as the one sight that in an instant destroyed any hope he may have been clinging to.

On the bus, all the kids were looking at him. Some were even standing up to get a better view.

As the doors on the bus clattered shut, Mark's strangely magnified vision allowed him a glimpse of the seats near the front of the bus, where he had been forced to sit. In his seat were two new children, a boy and a girl. Perhaps, as they passed through Snape tomorrow morning on their way to school, they would look out of the window and notice a heavy Babygro hanging from a rope washing line. But Mark prayed for them that they wouldn't.

Unpaid Debt

I woke briefly. Tubes trailed from my body to machines crowded around my bed. One of the machines beeped steadily, reassuringly. I felt comforted. Machines know when you have died. They don't make mistakes.

Except they have. I slept and the machines decided I had died. I know I cannot be dead because my nervous system is working with cruel fidelity. How else can I be feeling the burning silk and wood beneath me?

Unless ...

No! I don't believe in life after death. In a Heaven. A Hell.

Anyway, I escaped judgement. They never found the girl's body. No earthly soul knows what I did.

The box is gone now, consumed by the fire. Flames flay my naked flesh, yet take none.

Someone is calling in a debt.

###

About the Author

Patrick Ryder is the author of numerous short stories, most of which appeared in small-press magazines in the nineties. He is a professional software engineer and has worked for many years on video games, including the successful 'Broken Sword' series. He has just completed his first full-length novel entitled 'Crossed Shadows' which will be published in 2013.

He lives in York with his wife, Jillian, and two mental dogs (free to a good home).

Thank you for reading my stories. I would love to hear from you. Very soon, I will have a new website (patrick-ryder.co.uk), containing lots of exciting stuff, much of it free. In the meantime, please tell me what you thought of 'Spiders in Your Mind' on Amazon's review system or here on the Smashwords website. Twitter and Facebook pages are also planned for the near future. Watch this space.

~Patrick Ryder
