The City The Broken Web, Part 5 Her back crawled, her muscles twitched involuntarily; he was behind her. The Dark man. He was going to destroy her at any moment. Spider awoke to the steady rhythm of windscreen wipers. She had been sleeping with her head plastered against the window, somehow her hair had found its way into her nose and mouth, mixing with her sticky drool. With a panic she realised it was raining, the big fat drops pounding on the roof and running down the dirty windows. Through it all Spider could just see a haze of lights speeding by, the city. The bus was empty except for the old bus driver who sat leaning against his window, reading a newspaper. He saw her looking, grinned, and spat a mouthful of tobacco juice into a battered tin can by the door. "You been out a while." "Where am I?" asked Spider. "This is the city and that's where you are. I was just about to kick you out, you been snoring so loud." The old man grinned again, exposing a row of brown stained teeth. Spider levered herself out of the chair and rummaged through her belongings, everything was where it should be. "You oughtta be more careful with yourself, now you're here in the city, can't just sleep anywhere." said the driver. Spider stumbled up the aisle, her mouth suddenly dry. "There are bad people out there." "Yeah," she said, "can I wait here till the rain stops?" "Depends, depends on how long that takes." Granny had spoken to Spider about the city, how it was a strange place where people were different and the sky was smaller, how it stank of sweat and rubbish and there was no stillness, no quiet. It hadn't prepared her however, not at all. "Good luck." wheezed the driver as Spider stepped out of the bus and on to the sidewalk. She was going to need it.

The Gas Station The Broken Web, Part 4 Spider had never travelled, she had never had the chance. When she reached what people for miles around called 'The Big Road', she had considered turning back. Evening was falling and the great plains stretched away in dusky silence, vanishing in a line of distant indigo. Spider had never seen anything so big, her mind hurt with it, the backs of her hands had begun to sweat. An hour's walk from the long, hickory shaded path that lead back to the plantation along 'The Big Road', lay an abandoned gas station, overgrown with weeds and half collapsed in on itself. Spider shrugged her bag off her shoulder and sat next to it with her back to a tree. If truth be told she had little or no idea if the coach that used to traverse this part of the country still stopped here but night had truly fallen and she had nowhere else to go. The cicadas were beginning to sing, Spider waited for the oppressive heat of the day to fade, it didn't. The terror of the previous evening toyed with her thoughts as she stared into the darkness but she pushed it away, she had heard of people who lived in fear of the night, who dreaded the coming of the dark man every time the sun sank below the horizon, she was not going to be one of them. Spider was determined to fight and that meant, that meant the city. Her heart beat faster just thinking of the word. Just as Spider began toying with sleep, a half finished bottle of warm beer resting loosely in her hand, the coach arrived. It had seen better days, there was little doubt of that. Once it had been a gleaming chrome pleasure cruiser of the highways, a vehicle that epitomised freedom, on which any young man or woman could go anywhere for the most modest of fees. Now it was a tarnished, battered and leaking old wreck with dirty windows and an exhaust that belched and spluttered thick black fumes into the night sky. Spider stood up. The folding doors clattered back on a wheezing pneumatic hinge and an old black man wearing a green visor leaned over from the driver's seat. "You going' anywhere doll?" he said, passed a ball of sodden tobacco. "Yeah" said Spider, slipping her bag onto her shoulder.

The Souvenirs The Broken Web, Part 3 The Wirrens had lived at the farm for as long as Spider could remember. Her pappy had taken her there for the first time when she was a very young girl, dragged her through the swamp because a snake had bitten her on the elbow. She had cried and cried but he'd insisted. "No one can see to the snake bit lake Ma Wirren, no one." And he was right, by god he had been right. The plantation was just a shell now, a rotting ghost covered in dew, rust and grey-green moss. Once it had been a sprawling and productive realm of sparkling white clapboard houses and towering barns thriving with purposeful activity; now there was just Spider, alone. The glowing dawn had dulled Spider's fear, but it was still with an agitated unease that she wandered through 'The Big House'. The birds sung loudly outside but inside the old building sunlight lanced through the crowded, soft rooms filled with spiralling dust motes and memories. Spider's eye slid over yellowed photographs in silver frames, ancient flintlock muskets hanging on walls and countless other aged oddments collected by the Wirren family over the long years they had lived in the valley. Although all these things held many memories for Spider she needed only three of them for her journey. In the bowels of the grand piano, beside the slack and discordant strings, she found an antique colt revolver engraved with the initials "TZW"; at the bottom of the chest at the foot of Granny's bed, under piles of clean and neatly folded undergarments, she discovered a lock of thin golden hair and from the depths of the enormous 19th century safe that dominated the study, she took a length of sparkling silver carefully shaped into the intricate pattern of a tree branch. She put these three things into her bag and left the house for the last time, she walked down the long path and past the lake, she opened the white wooden gate and walked out and down and away. Behind her the grand old buildings lay empty, on the mantelpiece in the Big House the clock still ticked and chimed the hour, the water on the surface of the lake rippled in the breeze, the grass rustled. And in the shadows under the stairs, in the black gaps between the floor boards, in the darkness behind the curtains, there was a faint whispering. "She is gone".

Goodnight Granny The Broken Web, Part 2 Spider hurt, the pain was the first thing she was aware of, it shuddered through her body, made her twist and clench. For a long time the pain was all she knew, it burned inside her bones and hammered against her skull, she willed it desperately to die away, to lessen somehow, but it refused. Eventually she tried to open her eyes, to prise open the stubborn lids and squint through the streaming tears. She lay on the porch, the land around was shrouded in a heavy darkness, it weighed down upon her; like the pain. He could still be out there, the dark man, the fear of him filled her nostrils and mouth, bile rose in her throat and she choked, vomiting onto the dusty boards. For a moment she forgot the pain with the fear of him but then she remembered the rain and Granny, Granny shouting into it and at it, shouting for all she was worth. The dark man came with the rain and no water fell from the vast night sky, he was gone. With that realisation the pain finally started to seep away and Spider sat up against the wall of the old house and felt her eyes flutter with merciful sleep. There was much to do, but not now, not in the night, she should rest first, or so she told herself. "Goodbye Granny." She whispered as she fell back to sleep, alone, in the dark.

The Creeping Rain The Broken Web, Part 1 The rain crept over the dark elms and the lake, over the broken plough lying useless in the field, over the dead stones; it crept like death itself coming for granny Wirren, and she knew it. She sat on the porch and listened to it rustling the leaves in the wood and pattering on the pond. "It's time." she sneered, spitting onto the worn old boards. "How do you know?" asked Spider. "I can feel him coming, girl. He's here at last." Their eyes searched the treeline and the shadow by the old gate. And then they saw him. He stood by the edge of the pond like a black ink stain on reality. He began to walk up the hill. Granny Wirren screeched with laughter. "He's here, I told you so, he's here." Spider backed against the peeling wall of the farm house, her eyes staring. "I've dreamt of you, dark man. I've seen you in my dreams!" Granny screamed into the growing rain, her old voice grating and breaking with the strain. "I see you now!" Spider wanted to run, she wanted to tear her way through the wall and hide beneath the bed, claw the pillow over her ears as she had done as a child, but she could not move, she could only stand and stare.