Chapter Twenty Six
The Spider's Lair

After a fair old distance, the two heroes came upon a circle of trees and a bus stop opposite The King’s Head, and knew they should turn left. After a pint, they emerged, and were now facing due east. They entered an archway, with the University crest carved in stone above. Hapless fought off a deep reluctance to enter through the gateway, almost as if he knew that the monks of Perv were waiting for him inside. Passing under the arch, however, nothing happened. They followed the bare stone pavement until it came to a wide space with numerous paths leading off in various directions. In the middle was a tall lamp standard in the form of a great, stylised spider painted black. The signposts underneath formed its legs, and gold lettering indicated the various destinations; academic departments mostly. Hapless shuddered. He hated spiders, and this one was especially big and hideous. There was a brass plate showing the name of the sculptor, and a date, but it was splashed with paint, as if it had been recently refurbished but with insufficient care. Indeed, one of the spider’s legs was unfinished, and still red. The workmen had failed to paint it black. Ro held his nose.

“Strewth! Is that you or has one of us trodden in something?”
“Sorry”, said Hapless.
A real spider’s web, broken and patched over what looked like many days and meals, was strung between two of the arrows, or legs, as they might be described in arachnatomy. A white spot of bird droppings was situated above the web. It lay on top but was intricately woven amongst the strands of silk, as if the web had been there first, but had then been repaired after the damage caused by the faecal impact, and further rents caused by the flailing legs and eventual retrieval of some trapped insect. They watched as a delicate lacewing was suddenly captured by an invisible force, the strands of fine gossamer thread clinging and holding it ever more firmly as it struggled against the irresistible barrier. A reek filled Ro’s nostrils. He sniffed disgustedly.
“Oh crap” said Hapless, wearily, “Not me this time”. He scraped his boot on the kerb, an act that served only to increase the smell. Ro nearly retched.

Meanwhile, although the lacewing struggled in fear and pain and became ever more entangled in the web, pulses of excitement, received directly from the web’s outer strands, ran up the sensitive legs of the web’s owner. She was watching. She, who had lain patiently in wait, unmoving against the scattered carcases of her prey, the most recent of which was a small moth sucked dry by those merciless fangs. She, was watching. Long had she remained thither, her many eyes with but one purpose. Forgotten were the many dangers of the world, for there are other horrors, some not yet named, which stalk the earth in continual search of the unvigilant or unprotected, and who might in turn fall victim to some other power mightier still. Maintaining tension with two legs on the silken strands that carried the lacewing’s signal, she moved the other six until they were repositioned over the web in a well-rehearsed process of coordinated stealth. A brief moment later, the lacewing’s brilliant compound eyes were filled with multiple images of the hideous visage of the approaching spider. It should be pointed out that the insect’s brain processed these into a unified and horrifying image.
“Don’t point fangs at people! It’s very dangerous”, said the lacewing, but the spider did not speak Lace.

Ro looked up at the dramatic scene of nature laid out before them. ‘Red in tooth and claw, and as dramatic as any encounter between tiger and deer in an Asian forest’, he thought grimly. He couldn’t make out a thing from that distance, but he suddenly remembered the lady’s glasses. He groped in his rucksack and pulled out some old field glasses that a lady gave him. “That’s rather tenuous”, remarked Hapless.
“Well, yes”, he replied, “but I don’t want to come up with some elaborate side-story at this stage; it’s distracting, to say nothing of pointless”.
“Spose not.”, admitted Hapless, Get on with it then”. Using a knurled brass ring, he focussed the field glasses on the scene before him. They were powerful. He could see the glint of eyes amid vertically combed fur, and two comparatively huge, horny fangs poised to strike. Deftly and with consummate ease, the spider dabbed her victim in the neck, or the bit between the thorax and the head. I’m not really sure if you call it a neck in a lacewing, it’s probably a cervix, but it’ll do for our purposes, especially as a cervix is better known in humans as pretty well at the other end of the torso. Biology eh? Quickly she bound her next meal roughly in silken threads. In seconds it was over. She retreated to the side of her web, and waited in silence once more.

Suddenly, Ro leapt forwards, shouting.“Hey, you filth. Clear that up!”
‘What’s happening?’ thought Hapless, turning round to see Ro confronting a figure some distance away. Ro was pointing to the ground.
“You types drop shit everywhere and the rest of us have to play pavement hopscotch, and not always very successfully”, he added angrily, showing her his shoe. An expensively dressed woman exercising her poodle’s anal sphincter looked at Ro steadily. Rather than being embarrassed, she calmly approached the outraged figure.
“I say, you’re a strong-looking young man, aren’t you?, she breathed seductively.
“I…”, stammered Ro.
“I’m looking for a strong man to, well, to take care of a few things in my garden, and there’s some work in the bedroom, too if you want it”, she offered in an innocent-sounding tone. “Do you have big muscles?”, she asked.
“I… er… I … well I.. they’re pretty big I suppose….. and I keep myself pretty fit”, came the reply. Hapless raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘Vanity will be his undoing’, he thought, ‘literally by the looks of it’. “Ro, we have to go!”, he said.
“I can see you are both strong and fit”, continued the woman, “and I would like to make you an offer…”, but Ro was not listening. He had noticed that the woman had rather large hands, and indeed was a few inches taller then Ro himself. As he looked closer, he saw that her chin, set in a square jaw, was glinting with tiny rigid hairs.
Ro stared at the chin with growing realisation. “There hair there”, he said lamely. He regained his composure. “Okey dokey!”, well thanks for the offer … er… madam, but I’m not really available for that sort of thing, really. I’ve gotta go now”, spluttered Ro.
“Oh you lovely boy! You’re spluttering all over me. Let me wipe your face”, came the reply, but Ro didn’t hear that either, as he was making a quick exit back to the lamppost and Hapless, not quite missing all of the several turds that were in his way. The pair turned away as the woman broke down. Sobs and whining dwindling into the distance were the only audible sounds as they resumed their journey.
“Poor bugger!”, said Ro. “I mean”. Hapless looked smug.
“I must say, that represents a level of hypocrisy in you that I'd previously suspected, but not noticed owing to highly evasive skills”, he said smugly, and rather unfairly.

Looking up again, Hapless saw that the spider and half of the web were gone. A bird must have made off with it. Only the lacewing remained, exposed and hanging by a thread.
“Oh well”, mused Hapless philosophically, “It seems the spider didn’t get to it’s meal after all, but became one itself. At least the lacewing didn‘t get eaten”.
“Nope”, said Ro, “It’ll just hang there, facing slow starvation, constrained in its bonds, freezing cold and unable to move, until its pathetic body finally succumbs to the beckoning arms of insect death”. He looked at Hapless. “Perhaps, sometimes it’s better to be consumed by the monster. At least it might have been over quickly”, he reflected.
“Now I’m not sure if we’re actually still talking about the lacewing”, said Hapless. Ro said nothing. As it happened, just as they turned away, the lacewing fell down to the path, trailing only a couple of pieces of silk, which would have been rubbed off and freedom gained within a few short seconds had it not landed on a piece of dog turd that very soon afterwards made contact with Hapless’s boot, which in the next instant, crushed the insect-turd complex to oblivion.