Free The Spider Truces by Tim Connolly Page B

there?”
    “I’m going to stay and have supper with Mr Reardon and some of his friends, if Mafi doesn’t mind holding the fort. Do you want to put her on?”
    “Are you going to milk a cow or anything?”
    “I hope not.”
    “I won a goldfish,” Ellis said, in what was to him a seamless line of conversation. “I’m calling it Yootha. Can I keep it? And before you say no can I just say that do you realise I was born in 1967 and now it’s 1979 and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything, so think about that before you say no.”
    The answer was yes. His dad reminded him that Chrissie had had one in Orpington.
    “We’ve still got the fish tank, Ellis.”
    “Where?”
    “I think I might have put it in that little cupboard in my bedroom. We’ll dig it out tomorrow.”
    But Ellis couldn’t wait until then. He pulled his dad’s bed away and yanked open the small black door. He saw the fish tank immediately. It was beyond reach and shrouded in cobwebs. He recoiled and went to the bedroom window. Felix the Cat was still running through the willow tree, getting nowhere.
    If I am brave enough to get that fish tank, then my mum is in heaven, Ellis told himself.
    If I’m not, she’s in hell.
     
     
    He crouched down to the same height as the miniature door and readied himself to step, crab-like, into the tiny cupboard. What he had to do was clear in his head. He had converted the challenge, which scared him, into a picture, which did not. He would pull the tank out into the bedroom in one swift movement. Then he’d ask Mafi to dust the cobwebs off whilst he stripped and washed.
    He made his move and got a hand on the fish tank before losing his balance. Instinctively, he came up off his haunches to prevent himself from falling backwards, raised his arms to hold on to the low cupboard ceiling and discovered there was no ceiling. Curious, he extended his arm fully but still felt nothing. He looked up. High above him was the faintest hint of light and in it he thought he could make out two walls converging towards each other and, on top of them, the skeletal frame of a roof. Looking down again, he saw a switch in the gloom, the sort houses had when electricity was a new invention. He flicked it and was instantly blinded by a light bulb a few inches from his face. He looked down, and as his eyes recovered his mind made a connection between the bare bulb that had blinded him and the bare bulb that hung in the attic above his bedroom. He realised that the cupboard he was crouched in now was the bottom of the dark, bottomless well he had peered down into from the attic, the well that he had once decided went deep into the earth, possibly to Australia. Now the well was lit and he stood and looked into it, and instead of seeing the cave of magic he had once dreamt of finding through this small black door, he saw a maze of timbers draped in cobwebs which seemed to groan beneath the weight of house spiders. He detected movement by the doorframe and, despite the warnings in his head not to look, his eyes fell upon a community of Scytodes . He had encountered them before, on page 74 of the book. Each spider was swamped by clusters of small white growths. Ellis began to shake. His breathing became rapid and sucked the triangular cobwebs towards his face. He shut his eyes and brushed the webs away, activating silken tripwires which, his mind decided, was the scuttling towards him of a million spiders. He let out a succession of long, piercing screams until a wall of noise spewed from his mouth.
    Mafi found Ellis’s legs floodlit by the bare bulb and framed by the cupboard door. Unable to talk him out, she crawled inside and dragged him out. She pushed him on to Denny’s bed and wrapped the sheets around his shaking body until he was curled up on his side. She held him there and he screamed until exhausted. Barely strong enough to breathe, he wiped the tears from his face and smiled bravely.
    “I’m fine,” he