A Tangled Web

There was nothing but concrete and tarmac in the new city, nothing but towering buildings and roads that were strewn with litter blown by the wind. To Mia it seemed that there was nothing that grew either; nothing that sprouted naturally and even nothing that was built anew by the people who lived there. A slow descent into decay was all that marked change in the new city as time and the elements chewed away at the concrete, cracked the tarmac and ate the people who lived there away from the inside like a cancer.
   In all the time Mia and her grandparents had spent in the new city, she could not even recall once seeing a plant of any shape or size. No one tended a garden or even kept a flower in a pot on a window ledge, as if they had unconsciously given up on the natural world and forgotten it had ever been a part of their lives.
   It had been more than a month before she found the exception to the rule, before she searched the cracks and hidden places in the new city and found life clinging on in the gaps. Mia had wandered from the grey block that contained her grandparent's small apartment and lost herself in the broken industrial landscape that lay beyond. She wound between the empty and abandoned warehouses, hearing only the echoes of her own footsteps.
   Keeping out of the shadows, Mia was filled with a mixture of fear and bravado that spurred her on to explore this lonely maze of buildings. A part of her mind was filled with the knowledge of what might happen to a teenage girl out alone, but another was enamoured of the rebellious course she had taken and in the end that was the part that won.
   She found her reward by pure chance, stumbling upon a crack that ran along the side of a certain warehouse. Over time the crack had become filled with wind-blown dirt and debris as well as a few sturdy seedlings that by some miracle had then managed to take root and grow. The grass that they had grown into she recognised instantly as one of the kinds that her own pets had thrived on back when they had lived on the edge of the open country. Now the unfortunate guinea pigs were subsisting on a diet of dry food and every day she felt a little pang of guilt at their reduced circumstances more than she did for her own.
   Mia bent to pluck a handful of the grass from where it sprouted from the wall, taking the discovery as an omen that there may be good things to be found in the new city after all. She was careful not to take too much, partly because she wished to come back in the future for more and partly because she was sensitive enough to perceive the symbolism of the grass growing against all odds in such an inhospitable place. To have simply yanked the entire crop from the wall was just not in her nature.
   As she rose to her feet and slipped the blades of grass into the inner pockets of her coat, Mia felt a certain prickling sensation on the back of her neck. It was as though she was suddenly aware of a presence that had been hidden from her only moments before. Oddly she was sure that the presence had not simply sprung into being in that moment, but that it had been concealed and then made perceivable, like music that lay in the background and only became clear when one rounded a corner and met the source face to face.
   She cast her eyes about the alleyway between the buildings, looking here and there for the source of the presence. But it was a hopeless task as she could see nothing but the bare walls on either side of her and in the time she searched for it, she was acutely aware of the fact that the presence seemed to retreat until it was no longer perceivable at all.
   Mia was left with the strangest impression that she had been left all alone once more when she had been sure she was alone to begin with.

It was a truism to observe that no one ever had it easy when they were sixteen years old, but as with all things in life there was without doubt a scale on which a person's life could be measured. Mia, or "Amelia" as her grandparents insisted on calling her, had more than the average number of issues to weight the scales as far as her life was concerned.
   Deprived of her mother by a virulent and ultimately lethal cancer when she was only five years old, Mia had been left with the love of her father and no real memories of her deceased parent. The reality of providing for his daughter had effectively taken him away from her in the end as well, reducing his contact with her to awkward phone calls and forced meetings that were made ever harder as his daughter grew up without him and they became strangers despite their attempts to cling to their relationship with one another.
   Left to live with her grandparents, Mia had thrived on their genuine love for her. But at the same time the distance that time had placed between them and the modern world meant that she was both held back from fully connecting with it herself and that there would always be a gap in the understanding of the world she had to live in and their own experiences.
   The bridge between the generations that most children found in their parents was denied to her and she was often forced to rely upon her own self to remain strong. Whenever that challenge proved to be too much, she retreated into a world of her own creation and there righted the wrongs that she could not in reality.
   Now that she found herself on the cusp of adulthood, Mia was less than happy with the face that confronted her in the mirror. She looked at her reflection and saw a plain set of features that simply passed by without notice, lost in the crowd. Like so many people, she was excessively hard on herself and dismissed any compliments she might have received as attempts to either conceal pity at her lack of beauty or a cynical ploy to make fun of her on the part of others.
   Her castigation of herself hurt no one so much as her grandmother, who saw Mia's pale and perfect skin in combination with her jet black hair as a living reminder of her own daughter. The only element of the girl that was not an inheritance from her mother was her eyes, large and coloured with a blue that evoked clear skies and endless summer days. Those eyes were her father's and set in her face, most people saw a beautiful young woman who was hidden beneath the weight of her own self-loathing.
   But as is so often the case with the young, Mia could only see her own flaws.

It could not have been more than a few days since Mia had last been standing outside the warehouse where she had found the grass. She had intended to return soon, but not at this hour or under these circumstances. Now she clutched a flashlight in her shaking hand and glanced up at the entrance to the abandoned building, a gaping portal that loomed over her like the door of the underworld itself.
   How could it have been anything but a mistake to accept the invitation?
   When the other girls had flocked around her and insisted that she should come to the slumber party there had been the constant nagging sound of her inner voice reminding her of reality as it was as opposed to the siren call of the popular crowd.
   It would come as no surprise to learn that school had not been a happy experience for a girl as introverted and sensitive as Mia. To say that she had been bullied was not the right term to describe her time in education. In order to be bullied one needed to have contact with one's peers no matter how fleeting and traumatic, but Mia for her part had formed almost no relationship with the pupils that she attended school alongside.
   A combination of the new school in the new city and her own crippling shyness had isolated her from almost everyone she met in the course of the school day. It was only in art classes, when she was free to express herself with paint that it was revealed there was more to her than a silent and solitary girl.
   But she had silenced the voice that counselled against accepting the invitation and instead allowed herself to be carried along on the tide of inane chatter that spouted from the popular girls. At first the talk at the gathering in the apartment of the alpha female had been the standard gabbling about two-dimensional popular music, lip-gloss and the eternal subject of the opposite sex. Mia was bored no more than a few minutes after she arrived, but she had endured their vapid talk by telling herself that if she listened carefully she might learn the secret of being considered normal by these shallow creatures.
   As the sun sank below the horizon, the talk had moved on to more sinister subjects as they girls tried to scare each other as human beings inevitably do with the approach of night and a receptive audience. Rumours of girls who had gone missing on their way home through the dark alleys of the new city seemed to be a favourite subject. Not satisfied with mundane explanations for the abductions, they speculated about things that crept up from the sewers in the dark of night, not quite human and hungry for the chance to harm those who lived in the daylight above.
   Mia listened to the stories from behind the barricade of her carefully constructed image of strength, trying to allow the silly nature of the things they revelled in wash over her. There might have been a time when she was doing more than pretending to show no fear, but the reality was that the dark streets of the new city were easily populated with dark denizens in her imagination and the stories filled her with a childish dread of what lay outside in the darkness.
   "Hey," the voice of the alpha female cut through the stories like a knife, "we forgot about Mia!"
   The girls name was something like "Amina", the finer details of what name belonged to what face had thus far eluded Mia on account of the fact the popular girls seemed to try to dress and make up their faces to look as alike as possible.
   One thing that Mia was sure of was that she was suddenly uncomfortable being made the centre of attention.
   "Thing is," Amina turned to Mia with an expression that tried to convince her they had been friends for a long time and failed, "we all got initiated before we got to hear this stuff."
   Mia glanced round the assembled girls as they all nodded in agreement with their leader.
   "Initiated?" Mia did not like the way the other girl used the word.
   "Yeah," Amina cocked her head on one side as if explaining anything was a chore, "like into a club where you have to pass a test to join."
   "What kind of test?"
   "The kind that means you're brave enough to handle all these stories without pissing yourself!"
   "Okay," Mia could not believe what she was saying.
   "You'll do it?"
   "I suppose," Mia swallowed despite her best efforts, "what is it?"
   "There's this empty warehouse not far from here," Amina and the other girls were becoming more and more animated in anticipation of the game ahead, "all dark and full of cobwebs. All you have to do is walk inside and stand there for five minutes with your flashlight turned off. We've all done it and we'll be standing right in the doorway so you can see us the whole time."
   "Just five minutes," Mia asked, "that's all?"
   Amina nodded.
  "Okay, let's get it over with."

When the warehouse turned out to be the exact same one where she had found the grass growing, Mia did not know whether to take it as a good or bad sign. Instead she gripped the handle of her flashlight tightly and walked towards the entrance as boldly as she was able.  As soon as she was no more than a foot inside, the gaggle of girls were crowding around the open doorway and urging her onwards with laughter and comments made behind their hands.
   The concrete floor was littered with rubbish and debris which had either been left behind when the place was abandoned or else blown in as time passed. Mia's flashlight flitted through the darkness serving to cast unnerving shadows and illuminate odd shapes rather than provide her with any real comfort as she moved deeper into the cavernous interior of the building.
   She paused to look back over her shoulder and squinted as the light of the flashlights of the other girls danced over her.
   "Just a bit further," Amina's voice reached her a moment before its own echoes reverberated in the dark spaces of the warehouse, "then we'll start counting."
   Mia nodded, more to herself than the others and walked perhaps another dozen feet into the building where she was forced to begin to pick her way through heavier piles of debris.
   Finally she stopped and flicked off her flashlight.
   "Okay," she turned to face the entrance, "start counting."
   At first there was no answer, but she heard sounds from the doorway that seemed to be muffled laughter. They were drowned out moments later by the sound of metal scraping against concrete and Mia's mind reacted swiftly, reverting to its more natural mode of sceptical paranoia to make sense of the situation.
   They were shutting her in.
   It had all been nothing more than a cruel trick.
   How had she managed to fall for such an obvious plot as this?
   Mia flicked on her flashlight and started to make for the entrance as fast as she dared. She had seen the size of the sliding door at the front of the warehouse and remembered how wide the doorway that it belonged to was. Even with all of the girls hauling the door closed, she was sure that there was a chance she could make it all the way back before they got the thing closed.
   At least she hoped there was.
   Her feet wove over and around the obstacles that the flashlight illuminated in her path and for a moment, Mia thought that she could make it.
   But as she ran she realised that something else had crept up on her in her state of panic. The sense of being watched by an unseen pair of eyes that had fallen upon her the first time she happened upon the warehouse was there again, tugging at the edges of her awareness.
   She glanced over her shoulder for a second and stared into a pair of luminous red eyes that loomed out of the darkness.
   Before she could cry out, before she could even draw a breath, she tripped over a pile of debris and tumbled to the ground.
   Mia's head connected with the concrete and she fell into darkness.

She came back around slowly, aware at first only of the fact that her head was pounding and she desperately wanted to be sick. Mia could put the headache and nausea down to the fall and was pretty sure that she must have struck her head when she went down. It was the sensation of cramping in her arms and legs that was harder to explain.
   Mia tried to move her limbs, hoping to stimulate the flow of blood and stave off the pain that was becoming more pronounced as she returned to consciousness. But no sooner had she started than she became aware of something binding her limbs to her body, restraining he so tightly that it was simply impossible to do more than struggle impotently against their pressure.
   She glanced down at her body, not sure of what she would see and trying to prepare herself for the worst. But by the pale dawn-light that penetrated the filthy windows of he warehouse, she saw that she was bound in place by gossamer fine bands of a silky material. The stuff looked as fragile as spun sugar, but her straining against it told her that it must have been as strong as steel despite its appearance.
   Mia cast her eyes around and realised that she was somewhere in the rafters of the warehouse, quite close to the ceiling. She saw that unlike the cluttered floor below, this portion of the building was devoid of debris and rubbish. Instead it was criss-crossed by a myriad of threads similar to the ones that held her in place, as though the entire space was the domain of some giant spider.
   Giant spider; the words suddenly gained purchase in Mia's  confused mind and she found herself filled with dread at the mere thought of what kind of a creature was capable of spinning a network of webs so large and so vast.
   "You are…awake."
   The voice was halting and the words were a statement rather than a question, as if the speaker were unused to the habit of conversation and unsure of the correct manner in which to express himself.
   Mia gazed up towards the source of the voice, relieved to hear a human speaking rather than the sound of some monstrous creature grinding its mandibles at the thought of devouring her whole.
   She was surprised to a face approaching her from above and upside down from her perspective, its eyes darting here and there to take the sight of her in and an expression of interest on its lips. The face was thin and slightly drawn, as if its owner had been deprived of sustenance or forgotten to feed himself for a time. The tone of skin was so pale that she doubted it had seen the light of day for a long while and set against the mass of stark, black hair that hung down from the head served to give the whole a slightly unnerving aspect or hint that there was something odd about this individual.
   As he came closer, Mia noticed that his torso was quite naked and devoid of hair. Socially awkward as she might have been, she was not ignorant of the appeal that lay in the opposite sex and could not help but notice the sleek and powerful build he possessed. She followed the shape of his body as he extended an arm towards her and was totally unprepared for the sight of the limb running from pale flesh to black chitin at the elbow.
   She cried out in alarm and twisted her head away as the hand, which ended in curving black talons reached out to brush her face.
   At the sound of her alarm, a look of shock crossed the face and the hand instantly withdrew. For some reason Mia could not help but feel an odd sense of shame, as if she had upset or wounded the creature. The rational part of her mind was screaming at the sight of the talons and her bondage, but on an instinctual level she could not truly say that she was afraid of this strange creature.
   She watched in silence as the face retreated above her and was lost to sight. But she could still hear the sound of something large moving quickly and with instinctive grace amongst the silken threads.
   Moments later she caught sight of the creature as it manoeuvred itself through the strands to come face to face with her. The shape of its body rendered her speechless as she tried to struggle with the reality that such a thing was possible in the real world.
   Though the creature's torso seemed to be for the most part human in appearance, the remainder was anything but familiar. Below the waist the creature reared up on the body of a colossal spider, the pale flesh disappearing under smooth black plates of chitin. Eight massive legs spread its bulk across the strands and a truly huge abdomen extended behind, the sight of it making her realise that it must have been the source for the masses of webbing that filled the ceiling of the warehouse.
   Mia had read fairy tales of half human creatures when she was a child, but there had never been mention made of such as thing as this let alone that they could live and breathe as surly as any normal man or woman.
   "Apologies," the creature attempted a smile, revealing disturbingly sharp teeth.
   "Apologies?" all Mia could manage was to repeat he word back at the creature.
   "Apologies," it nodded. "Yes, I am not used to introducing myself and it is sometimes hard to remember that it is not considered polite to approach an individual in the same way as I would approach prey."
   "Meaning," Mia's voice was shaking as she spoke, "that I'm not prey?"
   "No," another shake of the head, "my instincts tell me one thing and my conscience another, but I do not really want to eat you."
   "That's a relief."
   "Good," the creature seemed genuinely pleased. "My name is Caleb, please tell me what is your own?"
   "Amelia…but I prefer Mia."
   "Mia," it seemed to be experimenting with the new word as it spoke.
   "What," she stumbled over the question, "what are you?"
   "The man and woman who cared for me used the word Drider, but I only know that I am what you see before you."
   "Are you half human?"
   "I am not sure what you mean by that," Caleb shook his head. "Parts of me look similar to parts of you and parts of me look similar to parts of spiders that I have seen. But I do not think that I am like either of those things as much as I am like myself…if that makes sense."
   "I suppose so," Mia was quickly realising that despite looking like a monster, Caleb was an intelligent being. "People are always making judgements about others because of how they look and not how they really are."
   "Yes," he comment seemed to have stuck a chord with Caleb, " that was something that the man and woman said to me many times. They insisted that I had to look deeper than the surface, come to appreciate others for who they really were and not see them as prey to be hunted and consumed. They told me that it was the only way people would be able to see past the surface in me, if I did so first and proved to them that I was not a monster."
   "You keep mentioning these people," Mia quizzed Caleb, "are they your parents? Where are they now?"
   "They found me in a refuse bin," Caleb spoke the words in a matter-of-fact way, "raised me as if I were their own child and when other humans came to kill me…they gave their lives to save mine. If that is what being a parent means, then yes, they were such to me."
   "So, Caleb," Mia trod carefully, "if you don't want to eat me, and you were raised to be a good person…which I don't doubt for a moment that you are…why am I hanging from this web like a snack you're keeping for later?"
   "Ah," at once he seemed to show embarrassment at the question. "I bound you up like that because…because I liked the way you smell."
   "The way I smell?"
   "Yes, the way you smell. The others smelled of cosmetics and synthetic fibres; false odours for false humans I tend to find. But you smell of oil paints and small rodents. The first reminded me of the woman who raised me, she painted all the time and she was kind. Perhaps I was naïve to think that a smell could mean you would be like her, but I thought so all the same. The second, well, I do so like to eat rodents that you stirred my appetite with the smell…not that I would have eaten you, of course."
   Mia was suddenly worried about what Caleb might have done in the presence of her guinea pigs, but she pushed the thought aside.
   "So now you have me here, what is it that you want with me?"
   "A friend," Caleb's response caught her off guard, "I just wanted to ask you for your friendship."
   "But why me, of all the people in the world?"
   "Why not you?" Caleb was in earnest. "You found my home, you smell right and you ask clever questions. I think you would make an excellent friend." His face began to show anxiety. "I know you can see beneath the surface as you are not screaming at me right now or trying to kill me. What is the problem? Do you have too many friends already?"
   "No," Mia shook her head, "quite the opposite actually."
   "Then I would ask you to please consider being a friend to me. The man and woman who raised me spent years teaching me to master my instincts and see humans as equals and not as prey. But the more time I have been forced to spend isolated from your kind, the harder it becomes for me to keep those instincts in check. I have to tell you that it was very hard to keep myself from catching and eating one or two of the girls that shut you in here with me. Would that not have been a terrible thing?"
   An evil part of Mia considered the thought of Caleb stringing up and eating Amina and her crowd of popular friends. There was no way she would have asked him to do it, but the thought would stay with her for a long time and give her a great deal of pleasure.
   "Alright," she nodded and could not help mirroring the smile that spread across Caleb's face at her answer. "I'll try to be your friend and help you as best I can, so long as you promise not to eat me or any other human beings. No one ever asked me to be their friend before, the fact you're a Drider doesn't even come into it."
   "No one has ever asked me to be their friend either."
   "Seems as though we have more in common than we thought," Mia shook her head.
   Caleb nodded in agreement.
   "Oh and Caleb," Mia's voice was a little pained.
   "Yes?"
    "Could you let me down now, because I can't feel my legs anymore!"