Free Medusa's Web by Tim Powers Page A

you were so forgiving.
    Simply, you loved us.
    Madeline stood up and looked down through the open window at the garden in morning sunlight. The sage and rosemary bushes had spread beyond the boundaries that Madeline remembered, obscuring many of the gravel paths, and dandelions and wild anise filled the squares that were once mowed grass. Tall flowering weeds furred the wide top of the Medusa mosaic wall, and the little pool below it had either been filled in or was completely obscured by long crabgrass.At the crest of the slope, only the red tile roofs of a couple of the garages were visible over the treetops against the blue sky.
    Madeline had moved out of Caveat seven years ago, leaving her aunt with Ariel and Claimayne and the solitary writing of her endless unpublishable novels. Scott had left six years before that, to get married, though when that Louise woman left him he hadn’t moved back in.
    We never came back, Madeline thought. Ariel hated Scott, so he stayed away, and I . . . somehow the whole house, the whole compound of added-on wings and garages and odd little bungalows and endless cellars, seemed like a convalescent home to me—Ariel and Claimayne were both suffering from their spider addictions, and Claimayne was soon confined to his wheelchair because of it . . . and old lame Aunt Amity was generally shut up in her little office, typing, typing . . .
    Madeline turned back to the room and looked at the envelope she was still holding.
    Scott looked at the spider in his envelope, she thought. Aunt Amity made Welcome Home banners for each of us. Ariel threw them away and said, You won’t see them, but Scott saw his.
    And Scott did not see the Usabo spider again. He said he knew it was there, but it stayed safely inside the folder that had the Medusa head printed on it. He apparently sensed it, powerfully—but no hands opened the folder this time. That was good.
    Madeline tucked her finger into the flap of the envelope—Are you there, Aunt Amity? she thought, waiting for me, with your little Welcome Home Madeline banner?—and when she exerted force, the flap simply came open.

CHAPTER 6
    QUICKLY SHE PINCHED OUT the slip of paper and let the envelope fall, and she looked at the ceiling as she unfolded the paper.
    Madeline realized that she had passed the point of being able to keep from looking at it, and so she lowered her head and stared at the eight inked lines radiating crookedly out from the hub.
    She couldn’t move. She could feel the reciprocal reversed images on her retinas because they completed the figure on the paper, quickened it, and the ink pattern and the images inside her eyes were spinning, and curling and bristling with an infinity of ever-finer lines.
    As if she were tilting outward on the roof edge of a tall building, Madeline’s breath caught in her throat, and her skin seemed to contain only rushing cold air, and she had no name or memories and nothing changed, forever.
    Eventually she dimly realized that there was motion, that she was perceiving what as a child she had called the Skyscraper People, the vertical-sided things with no perceptible bases or tops, which seemed somehow to be alive, and she was aware that their apparent height, any height at all here, was just a compensatory trick of her brain. They parted before her—
    And she found herself sitting up in the bed with the high siderails, and through a distorting blur she could see a long white rectangle some distance in front of her. She forced a pair of eyes that were not her own to focus, and soon she could recognize letters— WELCOME HOME MADELINE .
    She tried to speak, but her teeth and tongue were the wrong shapes.
    Then she was among the infinitely tall-seeming geometrical figures again, and they parted as she was pulled between them—
    And now she was sitting on an ornately embroidered sofa in a spacious parlor with framed tinted prints on the pale green walls. A young woman stood by