Free Six Days by Philip Webb Page A

down, will you?” I go. “You want the whole Vlad army up here?”
    I push past him and shove my hand into the hole. At first there’s nothing. Just dirt and loose wires. The plaster’s so loose, it comes away in my fingers, and I start to pull at it one chunk at a time till I can see the cavity behind. There’s no need for the light – Peyto’s flinder glows blue through churning puffs of dust. He breathes a sigh of relief and reaches out for it, but I hold him back. There’s something there, moving in the shadows, and as the dust settles I see it clearly – a whole nest of spiders, big and small, crowding around the light. And they ain’t just milling about, they’re building a web. Together. Peyto and Erin edge closer.
    “That is stand-out weird,” I go at last.
    “Why? What are they?” says Erin, her face caught up in the wonder of it.
    And it hits me slowly. She ain’t never seen spiders before.
    “It’s like they’re trying to hide it,” breathes Peyto.
    And he’s right – the tresses of the web are starting to cover the flinder like a cocoon. It gives me a shiver to think how long they’d have to be at it to blot out that light. It’s the first time for a hundred years anything new’s been
built
in London.
    “Sorry,” I go to the spiders. Cos it’s a shame to break that gorgeous bit of weaving. Needs must. But then as my fingers push through the threads and close on the flinder, them lonely echoes rise up again, tingling through my arm, into my brain. Like faraway voices calling out to me. Not calling, more like singing. It’s a shock and I want to let go. But I don’t, I can’t, cos the touch of it
holds
me. It pulses softly, like Erin’s flinder, but it’s a different shape, more knotty with a hole through it.
    “What’s wrong?” goes Peyto.
    I realize I must look a bit dazed. I hand it to him.
    I feel that wrench again, the same as when Erin took back her flinder. Except this time I’m distracted by a whole bunch of spiders clinging to the broken trails of web, scuttling to and fro over my hand, up my sleeve. And it feels a strange comfort that they’re there, not running away. So I let them be.
    Peyto’s much more interested in the spiders than the flinder. He smiles at me and tries to catch them as they drop.
    “You get the goose bumps when you touch the flinder?” I go.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Like voices inside.”
    They both stare at me.
    “No,” he goes. “But Erin does.”
    I shrug. “Maybe it’s a girl thing.”
    But straightaway I know it ain’t that. I see it in the way he holds the flinder. He don’t treasure it the way Erin treasures hers. To him it’s a thing he
should
look after, not a thing he wants. Erin would never have left hers anyplace, even if the whole Vlad army was on her heels. And maybe it
knows
that. Cos I reckon Gramps is right. It really
has
got something like a soul.
    There’s about a squillion questions queueing up in my bonce now, but this ain’t the time or the place.
    I hurry them both down to street level and peep outside the door. Still all clear. It’s all going so swimmingly that I’m starting to reckon we’re gonna get away with this. Which is the worst jinx ever.
    Cos that’s precisely when it all goes pear-shaped.
    We turn out of the top end of Little Sanctuary and there, coming from the park toward us, is a Vlad patrol – maybe a dozen soldiers.
    We duck behind the skeleton of an old car and I check we ain’t being surrounded.
    “Have they seen us?” whispers Erin.
    The lead soldier makes a few hand signals, then the others peel off either side of him and start advancing up the road from car to car.
    “They’ve seen us …,” I mutter.
    Peyto goes, “The river.”
    “No way! We’ll get cut off!”
    “We won’t. Trust me.”
    Before I can hold him back, he’s off, darting toward the river. The Vlads are closing. I can see the red beams from their rifles, and my guts go loose. It’s sheer panic that makes