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".