Web by John Wyndham

Author:John Wyndham
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1978-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Five

I had hoped to get ashore quietly and ask Walter’s or Charles’s advice on dealing with David’s body, but there turned out to be no chance of that. Several people who were idling around the encampment saw us approaching and came down to greet us, so there was no hiding it. We sent one of them back for a blanket to cover the body, then we carried it up and laid it in one of the bags among the cases. Then Jamie and I went in search of Walter. We discovered him and Charles together in a tent which had been put up at the site to act as an office, at work on a drainage plan. They received our news incredulously, and came to see for themselves.

“Spiders!” exclaimed Walter. “It’s unbelievable. What kind of spiders?”

We explained that Camilla had the specimens. Presently we discovered her under a tarpaulin awning where she had set up a microscope on a table, and was intently examining one of the spiders through it.

“I can’t find anything unusual,” she told us. “It has all the looks of a perfectly normal type – though I can’t identify it. There are too many kinds. I’ll try to dissect one if I can – it’s a very tricky job. But I’ll be surprised if there’s anything to be found – I mean, abnormally developed poison glands, or anything of that kind. I think it’s just the numbers of them that made it fatal.”

“There were a lot of them?” asked Walter.

“They seemed to drop on him in a mass – impossible to say how many,” Camilla said.

“There must have been several hundreds in each of those groups on the beach,” I put in. “Though of course we didn’t know what they were then – they simply looked like moving brown patches.”

“You think there’s an infestation of them round there?” Walter asked.

“Infestation is a mild word for it,” Camilla told him. “You remember those patches of mist you reported seeing?” She reminded him, and went on to tell of the quantities of web we had seen from the sea. “And we’ve no idea how far inland it covers,” she concluded.

Walter looked down at the three or four dead spiders lying on the table.

“It seems impossible. I never heard of spiders behaving in such a way,” he said.

“That is what is troubling me,” Camilla told him. “Spiders definitely don’t behave like that. There is a class known as hunting spiders, but they certainly don’t hunt in packs. In fact, spiders don’t do anything in packs…”

Walter remained thoughtful for some moments, then an anxious expression came over his face.

“The exploring party hasn’t returned yet,” he said, uneasily.

There was still no sign of the exploring party when the sun went down.

An air of apprehension hung over the whole encampment. Joe Shuttleshaw was the most restless. From time to time he would walk along the beach to the point where the party had started hacking its way along one of the overgrown tracks. There he would put his hands to his mouth, and call at the top of his voice.

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