By M. Shedric Simpson
By heart and by hand, Callum knew the movements. Grasp the fleece, thick and tangled. Swing the shears, not too close to the carapace. Greasy wool piled deep around his boots as the rhythm took his limbs. He did not think too much. Best not to, so close to the warrens. Too many strange and wriggling thoughts, rising like fumes from below.
Zaisha gnashed her chelicerae, tearing flesh from the ewe’s carcass. Every bite marked another moment lost. For now, Callum knew she’d focus on what lay before her. On that black pit of hunger in her gut. She preferred live prey, of course, but starved as she was, she’d take what was easiest. What kept her alive another week.
He worked Zaisha’s coat from front to back. A full season’s growth—surely the Spinners would be pleased. But he dared not pause. Once Zaisha sated herself there’d be nothing but the steel links sewn into his apron to keep her from turning on him. Enough to discourage a passing swipe, but nearly useless if she threw the full weight of her three-hundred-pound body against him.
Bones cracked as Zaisha wrenched the ewe’s rib cage open, loosing a spill of glistening entrails. Callum kicked the lumps of wool to the side of the pen, away from the mess. He’d gather them later, once she was back in the warrens with the other spiders, and once he had more light than what the oil lantern provided.
It would have been easier with electric shears, beneath the glow of an electric bulb, but the hierophants did not allow such things, not even in the barracks where the farmhands slept. Such gadgets lived only in his memory, in a time before the sickness took his mother. Before he’d begun his life at Cleugh Taleb.
Zaisha hissed as Callum neared the back of her abdomen, snapping her jaws in his direction. He shifted his stance, glancing to see how much meat remained. Zaisha had always been one of the more volatile of the herd, short-tempered and hard to wrangle. But he kept the shears singing through her coat—the Matron’s hierophants took no excuses. If he came to the Spinner’s hut empty-handed, another farmhand would take his job, and Callum would play the part of the ewe next time.
“Easy, girl, easy.” Callum’s fingertips brushed a rubbery protuberance buried deep beneath the fleece. He winced. Ornery as she was, he’d hate to see the black cancer claim her, the way it had some of the older farmhands. Cascades of tumors that ate through flesh in a matter of days. “We’re almost done here,” he whispered. He worked his hand through the wool and felt dozens of the nodules clustered around her spinnerets, each the size of a ripe plum. “Oh, Zaisha.”
He’d have to report it, of course. The nest-keepers were all but blind, but even they would notice this. She was too far gone. All he could do was go easy on her for this one last shearing and let her finish her meal in peace. He snagged a tuft of wool and drew the shears as gently as he could.
Zaisha screeched. Her hind legs flailed as she lurched forward, but the walls of the shearing pen blocked her escape. Claws scrabbled against wood, against the half-eaten carcass. Flecks of blood spattered Callum’s face. He lunged for the door, but Zaisha’s tarsus caught his shin, sending him to the ground instead.
Breath fled his lungs, and the world spun halfway to black. He thought of the prod he’d left in the firepit outside the barn. Hot iron for a stick, when the carrot was not enough. The other farmhands had mocked him for refusing to use it, and maybe they’d been right.
Callum waited for Zaisha’s carrion breath on his throat, but she only pulled away, pressing herself against the far side of the stall, with the ruined carcass of the ewe between them. He looked down at his hands. Wisps of webbing clung to his fingers. He shook his head. Not cancer after all. Far from that, indeed. “You clever girl,” he said.
The nest-keepers were meticulous about breeding, stealing egg sacs away from their mothers soon as they were laid. Only a few eggs went to the hatchery; most went to the Matron’s table instead. But Zaisha had hidden hers deep within her woolen coat, secured in place with knots of webbing. Callum wouldn’t have noticed himself if he hadn’t been shaving her.
He climbed to his feet. Zaisha had twisted herself vertically, so she could tear at the carcass while still keeping him within the span of her coal-black eyes. Oriented the way she was, she was taller than him, her pulsing spinnerets at his head level, and her hind legs stretching nearly to the ceiling. “No more,” he said. “You just eat up. Gotta get your strength back.”
It wasn’t the best job he’d done, the rear of her abdomen still tufted with unharvested wool, but he’d seen worse. There was enough wool to keep his sisters busy, and the hierophants off his back. He leaned against the wall of the pen and waited while Zaisha gleaned the last few scraps of flesh from the ewe’s bones.
She smashed a rib against the floor with her foreleg, then slurped up the marrow. Callum used the moment to unlatch the pen door and slip through. He tugged at a rope, opening a row of shutters in the ceiling. Afternoon sun poured through, thick as syrup and twice as rich. “Time to go home, girl.”
He didn’t need to open a second blind. She’d had her fill and was glad enough to get her children back to the safety of the dark. All the herd shared that instinct—they shied away from sunlit spaces, like most of those that resided at Cleugh Taleb. Something that Callum never understood, but then, he hadn’t been born to this place, only handed over to the hierophants by a father he barely remembered.
Zaisha scuttled into the warren, and Callum drew the steel-barred gate shut behind her. Zaisha’s tarsal claws scraped against the stone walls as she vanished into the darkness. He stared after for a moment, half-remembering the heavy musk and web-scaled walls he’d glimpsed as a child, when the nest-keepers had taken him to see the herd below. Most of his memories of those early days had faded, but he’d never shake the ice-cold terror of when they’d blanketed the lantern and left him to know the profound and utter darkness of the skittering deep.
If it had been a test, he had failed it. He’d screamed and wet himself, and they’d carried him to the surface shamed and weeping. After that day they’d set him to work as a farmhand, minding the sheep and packing bricks of dung and peat for the fires, never to know the secrets the nest-keepers preserved.
Callum collected the fallen wool, then tossed down some straw to soak up the puddles of gore that Zaisha had missed. The rest of the cleaning would wait until after dinner. He quenched the lantern and hung his apron by the door, then headed outside.
The day’s light was already fading, drawing long shadows between splintered fence posts and white-washed barns. Smoke drifted in the autumn air, sending up a call to dinner. Callum grunted as he hoisted the sack over his shoulder and headed towards the Spinner’s hut.
The door stood open, but he paused at the threshold anyway. “I bring wool from the herd below.”
“Yes.”
It was Seona’s voice. Not a question, not an answer, just an acknowledgment, as if she’d already known that he was coming. But it was often that way with her, as if she saw into a world he’d never understand. Callum stepped through the door and set the sack down alongside the rest of the raw wool.
“It’s a good harvest you’ve brought,” Seona said, never glancing up. She hunched over her spinning wheel, dressed in a simple white gown and a pale brown shawl. “Effie will scour it in the morning. We’ll need all we can get in the times ahead.”
Callum watched her twist the roving into yarn, blending sheep and spider wool together while her bare foot worked the pedal. “Haven’t shorn but half the herd,” he said. “I’ll bring plenty more tomorrow.” Sheep shearing came in the springtime, but the spiders were held underground, long removed from the turn of the seasons.
Seona looked up at him, hands still working the wool. The hollows of her temples fluttered, as if a second pair of eyes lay just beneath the skin. Something tightened in his chest. She’d always been the kindest of the sisters, gentle and beautiful in her otherworldly way. “It isn’t your fault,” she said. “You should know that.”
Her gaze cut through him, and he wondered how many more eyes lay hidden behind the silken curtain of her hair. “My fault?”
She nodded. “What will come to pass. It changes everything and nothing. The work continues. The Matron’s web has already spread, gathering all the world’s little sufferings. The Great Chasm widens by the hour, and nothing will change that.”
Callum shrugged. Such mysteries were beyond his ken. There was a plan, but he was little part of it. He kept his focus on the tasks before him. “Can I bring you dinner?” he asked.
The corners of her mouth creased into the echo of a smile. “I’ll work a while longer,” she said.
There were times Seona seemed closer, and real enough to touch. Real enough to take up in his arms and hold. But on nights like this she seemed half of another realm already. Callum bowed his head. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Twilight burned on the horizon: a skein of red and purple across the darkening sky. The fields rippled gold and bronze, ripe and ready for harvest. Callum glanced back at the dinner hall and the warm glow that surrounded it but felt no yearning for the loud voices and humid air within. He walked instead, taking the footpath north along the base of the ridge. Somewhere beyond those fields, beyond the shadowed hills that cradled Cleugh Taleb, was a world filled with wonders. He’d been but a child when his father had surrendered him to the Matron’s clutch, but flashes of that life still haunted him at night. Wild music, sweet candies, and city streets ablaze with light. The roar of traffic, and the soft arms of his mother wrapped around him. It burned inside him, a glimmer of a time he could never return to. Even if that world still existed, that version of himself no longer did.
The fields gave way to wild heather and stands of gorse, and pain bloomed in the brand above his heart. Like a flower of ice unfurling, bone-deep and aching. He pressed his hand against the scar and felt it writhe beneath the weave of his sweater, just as every time he tried to leave. He’d once walked so far that he’d blacked out from the pain, only to awaken on his mattress with a headache that lasted for days. Cleugh Taleb needed no walls, for the brand upon Callum’s flesh was a leash he could never shake.
A few paces further and the trembling in his hand turned to convulsions. Just once, he’d hoped to catch at least a glimpse of the world he’d once known. The electric glow of some nameless town. An automobile gliding across some distant hill. But all this was denied him. He dropped to one knee, gasping against the ache inside his breast.
He could not rise. Could not take another step, for all the yearning within him. Yet he held out until his lungs were wreathed with fire before he turned his gaze back towards Cleugh Taleb and drew a choked breath.
The way home came easier, drawn by the pull of that brand. Across the fields, with the scent of peat smoke to guide him, as if his feet already knew the way. He ignored the dinner hall once again, heading towards the pens instead. He had cleaning yet to do—if left till morning, the remains of Zaisha’s meal would be rank with flies and decay. It would not bother the spiders, but the other farmhands wouldn’t be as forgiving.
The gloaming sky held too little light to fill the barn, so he lit the lantern and carried it into the back. A carrion scent laced the air, and something scratched and scrabbled in the dark beyond.
Callum thought again of the prod, but the fire pit outside had burned to embers, and it would be nothing but cold iron now. He lifted the lantern instead, peering into the shadows.
Eyes gleamed within the mouth of the warrens. A brown-furred tarsal claw slid between the bars, pawing at the open air. Callum recognized her coat even in this light.
“Sorry Zaisha. I’ve got nothing else for you. You ate it all.”
She butted her head against the gate, a keening whimper in her throat. The latch creaked beneath her weight.
“Come on, girl. Go easy. You should be back below, before the nest-keepers find out you’re missing.”
Her chelicerae gnashed, and she mewled again. The sound crept uncomfortably through Callum’s skull, like the whine of a beaten dog.
“There’s no more,” he told her, gesturing towards the empty pens around him.
She pulled back, then clawed at the dirt on the far side of the gate. Callum shook his head and stepped closer, kneeling just outside of the reach of her claws so that their eyes were on the same level. Her close-shorn coat gleamed in lamplight.
“I know. You want better for them than what you got,” he told her. “Any mother would want the same. But there’s nothing I can do.”
Again, she dug at the stone with her claw. Her head twisted towards the latch that held the gate shut.
“No Zaisha. That world’s not meant for your kind. You have to stay where you belong.” He stood and turned away.
Zaisha trilled softly at his back, but didn’t throw herself against the gate again. In time she’d find her way back down into the warrens. As for what happened to her eggs, well, that wasn’t up to him. He pressed his hand against the brand on his chest, massaging away the dull ache that still resided there.
He paused at the doorway, his breath quick and shallow in his lungs. He felt his mother’s arm around him, her breath upon his face. The wire of tension through his shoulders burned, then melted away.
Zaisha still waited for him at the gate. He hung the lantern from a hook, then reached for the latch. “You’ve got to promise to keep them safe, and far away from here.” His hand trembled as he loosed the pin. If he stopped to think he’d realize the madness of what he was doing. “Far as you can and never look back.”
The gate swung open. Zaisha took a cautious step forward, body held low to the ground.
“It’s okay,” he told her. He stroked the soft sensory fur of her leg. “You can go.”
Zaisha lifted her head. A chittering cry echoed through the barn, answered by a chorus from the warrens below. The tunnel came alive with the sound of scraping claws.
“No, Zaisha. You’ve got to go.” He tried to push her aside, but she stood her ground, blocking the gate from closing. He flailed, and then it was too late. They came as a tide, skittering along the ceiling and walls, pouring from the warrens and rushing towards the open doors at the front of the barn.
Callum flattened himself against the wall, waiting for them to turn on him. Wool pressed suffocating against his face. Limbs twitched against his skin. An impossible seething mass of fur and flesh and chitin. He turned his face and tried to still the thrashing of his heart, not opening his eyes again until the sound of the thousand rasping claws had faded.
There was no sign of Zaisha. She’d vanished somewhere in the flight. Callum didn’t know why he’d expected her to stay, or to offer some sort of goodbye, but her absence left a strange hollow within the cage of his ribs.
The gate to the warrens hung loose on its hinges. It didn’t matter; everything it had once guarded ran free now. Callum limped to the front of the barn, across the gouged and pitted floorboards, until he stood again in the open doorway.
A faint wash of color stained the western sky. Shadows capered beneath it, scurrying across the distant fields and into the open heath. Callum hoped they’d run onward, beneath a starlit sky, until they reached some bright and glowing world beyond those shadowed hills.
* * *
M. Shedric Simpson is a Seattle-based writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, with work appearing in magazines such as Fusion Fragment, Underland Arcana, and Shoreline of Infinity. They and their wife live with some unknowable number of black cats in a little old house between the mountains and the sea. In their spare time they make art, music, and other small things.