It was Tony’s fault. As usual.
Yes, it may have been Vanessa’s idea to play hide and seek. Yes, it may have been Vanessa who said when asked that the attic was NOT off limits. Yes, it may have been Vanessa who took her sweet time searching the downstairs bedrooms, leaving Tony’s zero-minutes-forty-seconds attention span and him alone together for far too long.
But the wandering eye that found the old clock was Tony’s, as was the hand that reached out to poke at it. He’d never seen a clock its like before – on one hand, it was an old, old old grandfather clock, the kind whose grandchildren had all had grandchildren and then died on it; on the other hand, although it was so dusty it was hard to tell, it didn’t seem to have numbers on it.
Tony wiped aimlessly at the faceplate of the clock one-handed and stared as the world made less sense by the minute. There was a mammoth at eleven, and a person at noon, and a spider at one, and was that a DINOSAUR at nine o’clock? It was hard to see.
Two things happened, both important. First, Vanessa yelled “FOUND YOU!” at the top of her powerful lungs, making Tony jump.
(That still made it Tony’s fault, okay? Not Vanessa’s fault that he’s so high-strung)
Second, Tony’s hands hopped in place. And as they hopped they jostled the hands of the clock, which felt as though they were made of sandstone, or maybe preserved bone, and sent them lurching on their way prematurely, sinking down from half-past noon to one with a resigned, creaky sigh.
It struck one.
That may be underdescribed. Let’s try that again.
It struck one, and a sound like a thousand moaning winds brewed up inside the cabinet and spewed out with the muttering ire of a hundred over-full nursing homes, circling and sputtering about the attic with dogged determination. As the sound went on – and on, and on, and ON, it didn’t seem to want to end, not even slightly – the air was filled with the sound of awful little legs, tiny dancing bodies, and eensy weensy mashing jaws. Spiders were filling up the room, spiders were standing at attention at Tony and Vanessa’s feet, spiders were mounding themselves up into a great seething pillar of arachnid bodies, its tip narrowing and narrowing until it unfolded into a singular, brightly-coloured spider about an eighth of an inch long.
“Right!” she snapped. “That was quicker than we’d thought it’d be. Well? Clear off!”
“What?” asked Tony. (Which was a very stupid question)
“Tony, what did you break?” asked Vanessa. (Which was a very smart question, and got straight to the point).
“The clock rang, didn’t it?” said the spider, in a horrible little hissing voice that sounded like hairs rubbing together because that’s what it was. “You hard your turn, didn’t you? Come on, you know the rules. We all agreed this was much tidier than just struggling and whinging every time something big went down, so don’t go welching on your word and make this as difficult as it never had to be. Mammals! Look at you, get to run rampant for a few tens of millions of years and it goes straight to your enormous fucking heads!”
“Don’t swear,” said Vanessa, who was used to policing the language of tiny rambling people.
“I’ll swear when I fucking want to, placenta-haver,” spat the spider. “Quit wasting space with your lungbellowry, my children and their children and their children and their children have been waiting long enough already. Now hold still, you’re first on our skeletonization list.”
“Wait!” blurted out Tony. “Wait wait wait!”
“What what what?” asked the spider in a rudely sing-song tone of voice that was quite disrespectful.
“We’ve got to uh….” said Tony, who’d had no plan because he was stupid.
“…Finish the ceremony,” said Vanessa, who had one because she was clever and smart.
“The what.” said the spider. Said, not asked. There was the feeling the sentence had been just… dropped there.
“Ceremony,” said Tony unhelpfully. “We’ve got to uh, have one. Rules.”
“Transfer of power,” said Vanessa.
The spider’s mandibles did something complicated that reminded both of them of their grandmother struggling not to spit out her dentures when she was cross. “Fine,” she said. “Have your stupid ceremony. What does it entail?”
“Tea,” said Vanessa.
“Tea?”
“Boiled water and leaves.”
The spider looked as nauseated as a sixteenth-of-an-inch face with no expressions can be. “Fine. Tea. Yes, do that. I will wait here, try not to throw up, and pray that I am not expected to share.”
“Sorry,” said Vanessa sweetly.
“There are rules, but there are limits,” said the spider. “Eat them.”
“There’s cookies!” shouted Tony.
“Cookies?”
“Like flies,” he said. “But better.”
The spider scratched the tip of her left mandible thoughtfully. “Acceptable. Cookies first, eating you later. But hurry up, later’s closer nowadays.”
“Fix it,” muttered Vanessa to her brother, as she passed him on her way to the staircase. And that was a very sensible thing to say, because only the biggest idiot in the universe would expect what she’d said to mean what Tony did over the next few minutes.
They stood there, the boy and the spider, sizing one another up. Briefly. There wasn’t much spider to size, and Tony wasn’t much to look at from her point of view either. Too few legs to be worth counting.
“’Tea.’ How long does ‘tea’ take?”
“Ages,” said Tony promptly.
The spider sighed. “Ceremonies. Ceremonies, ceremonies, cere-fucking-monies. What is it with you mammals and your attaching loads of pointless bullshit to everything? You chew your food and stick it in a special pouch to digest it, you nanny your babies for ever and ever after you’ve had them, you don’t even eat your mates. Why don’t you eat your mates? Honestly, think about it: how much simpler would your life be if your mother had eaten your father at conception and left you to mature under an eave somewhere, eh?”
Tony shrugged.
“Typical mammal. At least you’ve got good taste in housing – look at all these nooks! We’ll have no shortage of places to stay.”
“The window’s real nice,” said Tony, pointing at the far end of the attic. “It’s got loads of cracks to let bugs in.”
“Where?”
And as the spider was looking, Tony did the dumbest thing. He reached up behind him and tried to fix the clock. But because he was a stupid fat baby, he did the dumbest thing: he tried to fix it without looking. Just grabbed the handle and tugged blind, like a big galoot. And then came the whirring, the whirring and the wailing and the terrible grinding, like a giant eating beef jerky.
“What was THAT?” demanded the spider.
“Nothing,” said Tony hastily.
“I know what nothing sounds like,” said the spider. “I hear it every day in my web. Lots of nothing. That wasn’t nothing. Are you lying to me, tasty boy?”
“I’m not!” protested Tony. “Neither! I’m neither! And it wasn’t me!”
“I didn’t say it was you,” said the spider. “What’re you trying to hide? Are you trying to hide something?”
WE ARE NOT SOMETHING AND WE ARE NOT HIDING.
Both Tony and the spider looked up. Hovering a discreet few millimetres above Tony’s dumb mushroom haircut that made him look like a mushroom was a squid. It was large enough to cause considerable alarm – about five foot from mantle to tentacle-tip – but what added to the impression it made was that it was glowing softly on a spectrum that didn’t quite have anything to do with visible light.
“Awwkp,” said Tony.
“Who’re YOU?” asked the spider.
WE ARE THE CEPHALITES> DESCENDANTS OF THE GENE-WARS> SPAWN OF HUMAN VANITY> DESCENDED FROM ROOKERIES. THE CLOCK HAS TOLLED> IS IT NOT OUR HOUR?
“NO!” shouted the spider. “It’s OUR turn! Our clock just rang!”
ALARMING. WE HAD ASSUMED THIS SITUATION WAS SETTLED.
Vanessa ran up the stairs, kettle in hand along with a fistful of mugs, a tablecloth in the other. She opened her mouth to say something insightful, saw the CEPHALITE, and settled for dropping a mug.
WE SHALL REASSEMBLE YOUR CONTAINER.
“No it’s fine it’s better this way thank you very much,” said Vanessa. “I thought it was spiders? Why are there squids, Tony is this your fault that there are squids?”
“No!” said Tony. “It’s because… because… because the ceremony’s not done yet!”
The spider looked agog at this, and agogness only becomes more impressive with mandibles. “What, you monkeys tied the clock to your stupid little show-plays?”
Vanessa considered the options carefully.
“Yes!” said Tony.
Vanessa sighed.
“Right! Then get a move on and get things working, before who knows what happens. Tea, right? Hop to it!”
Vanessa poured the tea. One mug for her, one for the spider, one for the CEPHALITE, and none for Tony, who was left to his own devices in front of the clock. An ancient, groaning night-stand had been converted into an over-stuffed table. The tablecloth didn’t cover it so much as enfold it, like a starfish sucking the guts out of a mussel. It had effectively become carpeting for half the attic.
“Right!” she said brightly. “Let’s get started. Take a sip.”
There was a pause.
“You know,” said the spider pointedly, “some of us don’t have lips.”
“Oh.”
“And by some of us, I mean both of us.”
“Ah.”
“In short, you can take your sipping and shove it right up your ass, primate.”
“Just a little drink?”
Vanessa noted that Tony had fumbled his way around to the clock hand again under pretense of scratching his back, but one of the CEPHALITE’S eyes was pointed in his general direction.
“No!” said the spider. “No no no!”
Vanessa shrugged. “Fine. I’ll take the mug then.” And she lashed out with her hand right-quick just as she bumped the table with her knee.
If it wasn’t quite like clockwork, it was at least like dominos. In order of events:
-the spider leapt backwards and raised her legs in threat posture
-the tea hop-skip-jumped from side to side and slid ominously towards her
-the spider bit her mug
-the mug spun gently on its access, sashayed thrice, and shattered into ten thousand nine hundred ninety eight fragments
“OAF!” shrieked the spider.
“You shouldn’t have done that!” said Vanessa. “You knocked it over!”
“You scared me!”
“You scared ME!”
WE ARE INCAPABLE OF SCARED.
“To hell with your-“ and then the spider was cut off by the screech and howl of the clock’s bell, as Tony had hastily yanked on its hands until something moved again.
There was silence then. But nobody present expected it to last for long, they were just resigned to the worst. Which it soon arrived as, in the form of small, furtive scuttling noises.
Something nudged Vanessa’s ankle.
“Beg ‘pardon,” said a small, horribly polite little voice that was far too reedy to belong to any human, “but is it our turn again? We don’t want to make any fuss, but we’ve simply been waiting for ERAS, you unnerstand.”
The spider crossed its legs over its eyes. “You,” it breathed. “You, you, you. Just YOU. You had your turn! You had nearly THREE HUNDRED MILLION YEARS of your turn! Go AWAY, grandfather!”
There was a dreadful noise like someone slapping a bag of broken potato chips with a wet towel and something like a cross between a lobster and a cockroach poked its head up onto the table.
“That’s a very rude thing to say,” said the trilobite severely. “No call for that nohow. We heard the bell, we knew our call, honest to chitin we’ve fair grounds for our supposing. Oh now, what’s all this?”
“Tea,” said Vanessa. “It’s a ceremony, and since SOMEONE jumped at their mug, it got messed up. You’re here early.”
The trilobite’s antennae twitched. “Huh. Well, suppose I might as well stick around then. What is that?”
“A mug.”
“Can I have one?”
Vanessa slid her mug over. The trilobite clasped the thing in its legs. “Huh. Warm as right. Now what?”
“Now,” said the spider, “you all go away and let us have our turn, since it’s our turn fair-and-fucking proper, THANK you very much but not really.”
“Not yet,” said Vanessa. “Cookies first.”
“Cookies? We’ve had your damned tea, we’re done. This whole ceremony’s a rolling disaster.”
“It’ll only get worse if you try and stop it.”
“Hang that hang the cookies hang you upside down and suck out your juices,” sang the spider in a happy sing-song. “We are DONE, and-“
The familiar whistle-scream began again. This time everyone screamed with it, except the trilobite, who was busy trying to figure out handles. Even it looked up as the wind faded though – there was a thud.
Preceding the thud, there was thirty-five feet of placoderm filling an awful lot of the attic.
“Hello,” it said, in a voice that had pounded its way to its throat after a ten-thousand-mile swim. “Us again?”
THERE IS CONFUSION, stated the CEPHALITE. AND TEA. AND COOKIES. TAKE SOME.
The armoured fish considered the table. The bony plates it had in place of teeth klinked softly as it thought, jaws that could sever sharks in two absently muttering.
“Nah. Not thirsty.”
“Tea isn’t really about THIRST,” said Vanessa properly. “It’s about style.”
The tiny, rhythmic plinking sound of the last fifteen seconds turned out to be the spider’s head smacking into the tablecloth. “Fine,” she said, between thuds. “Cookies.” Thud. “Get.” Thud. “Them.” Thud. Thud. Thud. “Now.”
Thud.
Vanessa flew down the stairs. The placoderm watched her movements with curiosity. “Huh. They walk?”
MOST OF THEM DID, said the CEPHALITE.
“New.”
“Oh come off it,” said the trilobite. “We were around before you lot and we’ve been walking since era one here. AND our cousins on land, the whole aunts-and-uncles of ‘em.”
The placoderm shrugged shoulderlessly, a current of muscle flowing down its body. “No bones. Different.”
“Typical vertebrate,” muttered the trilobite.
AGREED.
“Agreed doubly,” snapped the spider. “What’s keeping those cookies?”
Vanessa trudged her way up the stairs again, oreos in hand. “We should’ve had homemade,” she said, “but SOMEONE ate them all.”
All eyes turned to look at Tony for the first time in ten minutes, still leaning against the clock with one hand behind his back. He swallowed hard and tried to look nonchalant, and it wasn’t Vanessa’s fault at all that he was so bad at it. Really, if he’d been doing his job properly it’d all have been fixed by then, so he deserved to be called out.
“Sensible.”
“Haven’t we all felt that way?”
EATING IS THE PRICE OF FLESH.
“Indeed,” said the spider. “So, how’s the rest of this ceremony go?”
“Oh, you just eat a cookie each,” said Vanessa casually. “And then it’s all over and it’s your turn.”
“You eat it with your eyes closed!” added Tony. “You have to do that! If you don’t do that, it ruins everything all at once!”
“Can’t. Will look nowhere.”
“I suppose I can stick my head in the crevice of these floor-boards.”
INK WILL ISSUE FORTH FROM WITHIN MY BLADDERS> OBSCURING ALL SIGHT.
“Of course,” said the spider. “Of course of course. I’ll just cover my eyes with my legs. You two should have no trouble with that.”
“Oh, Tony doesn’t need to do any of this,” said Vanessa. “He’s not part of it.”
“But he is,” said the spider. “He has to eat my cookie for me. My jaws are too small – and this cookie has to get eaten, doesn’t it?”
“Well uh you see um there’s eh a bit of a problem if we kind of sort of look it’s just that” said Vanessa, or something really articulate and clever.
“No, no, it’s perfectly all right,” said the spider, as sweet as cyanide. “Come over here and take this cookie for me, will you Tony? There’s a good bipedal ape.”
Tony, who was obviously too stupid to realize that the jig was up, shrugged. “Sure, I guess. Whatever.”
He slouched forwards, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets (in plain sight, the spider’s gaze gloated upon), feet shuffling.
Shuffling quite heavily, maybe, but none of the participants at the meeting were land-dwelling bipeds save for himself and Vanessa. And SHE saw what he was doing straightaways, although she could’ve told him right then and there that it was completely a bad idea.
But Tony shuffled, and Tony stomped, and Tony twisted his heels, and miraculously enough he made it almost all the way to the table when the tablecloth underfoot decided that enough was enough and shucked itself clear of its burden in one smooth motion, surging gently forwards towards him along with the tea mugs, the tea kettle, and a half-box of semi-stale oreos.
Tony was already ducking. Which might have looked suspicious, if everyone hadn’t been slightly distracted.
The tea mugs landed, one after another, directly on the trilobite, making a noise like a steel drum band.
The box of cookies scooped up the spider like a cowcatcher and sailed (screaming brightly) into the far corners of the room.
And the tea kettle missed the CEPHALITE by a whisker (it went on to thank precognition), bounced off the placoderm’s bony mask, and smacked square into the face of the clock with a sound like the end of the world in a trash bin.
“I’LL FIX IT!” yelled Tony. And because the others were too surprised – or too squished – to tell him to stop right there, nobody did anything as he leapt at the clock, grabbed the hands, and twisted them both the only way they could go.
When the screaming died down, the spider had new bruises, the attic had a new window, and the clock needed new innards. Unfortunately the last set had been ground down to something finer than silt, so determining replacements could be problematic.
THIS COULD BE PROBLEMATIC, said the CEPHALITE.
“No fooling,” said the trilobite with a grimace. “D’you remember who made this thing anyways? Maybe we could let them have a go at it.”
IT WON’T BE BORN FOR TEN UNTO TWENTY THOUSAND MILLENNIA.
“Shit,” said the placoderm.
“Does this mean it isn’t our turn again yet?” inquired the newest visitor to the attic from the freshly created window, speaking as crisply as one can past teeth the size of bananas. “I take it this means it isn’t our turn again yet.”
“It was going to be OUR turn!” wailed the spider. “Ours! Not yours, OURS!”
The dinosaur yawned and shook its head, nearly adding a skylight. “Oh, spare me. The thing’s obviously as wrecked as a mammal’s self-esteem. It was never your turn.”
“It was their fault!” said the spider. “Theirs! They wrecked everything! I didn’t see it, but they did it, I know it! Theirs!”
Eyes rolled in the few individuals present that were capable of such.
“Spare me,” said the placoderm.
“Too right,” said the trilobite. “Granddaughter, you’re making a nuisance of yourself. This was a bungle from the right go, and throwing blame won’t make it any better.”
“Right, yeah, absolutely, sure, totes,” said Vanessa brightly. “So I guess that was a false alarm, everyone’d better go home now, such a shame, nice to meet you all, ta-ta?”
There was an awkward moment where no-one spoke. Immediately, everyone tried to fix it at once.
“Well.”
“Not as strictly such, no…”
THAT WOULD NOT BE OPTIMAL.
“Go? GO?”
“We just got here…”
There was a pause again, during which Tony and Vanessa’s hearts hopped out of their mouths and fell into their stomachs.
“Fact of the matter is,” said the dinosaur, “the old system is broken. And we’re all here. Taking turns obviously hasn’t worked, so…”
Anyways, that’s the whole story. And that’s why there’s dinosaurs, trilobites, mammoths, spiders, giant jawed fish, and five-foot psionic squid roaming the street tonight, and why it’s NOT Vanessa’s fault.
Surely mom will believe this.