Within these stone walls, copy rooms had been set up, dimly lit by tallow candles and on occasion by oil lamps, where apprentices were taught the craft of faithful reproduction of old manuscripts gathered by monks and collectors from around the ancient world.
Books were being invented to replace the antique scrolls, bound volumes being more easily read and carried, and more durable.
It was claimed that this copy room was the most faithful and accurate of any in Europe, and the apprentices—as they grew older and more expert—were celebrated beyond their station, and thus acquired pride. And this pride took the form, so the legend tells us, of a spider that plagued the copyists one cold winter, as they wielded with gloved hands their pens and brushes. Candles warmed the gelid ink in its tanks, and the monks’ meticulous strokes froze upon the paper before they could dry. (Indeed, to this day, some of these manuscripts bear letters with a special inky sheen—freeze-dried.) There was not fuel enough, neither brush nor wood nor dried seaweed, charcoal from the mainland, nor dung from the island’s cattle, to warm the abbey.
Despite the cold, the spider—so the copyists informed the abbot—became visible first as a moving spot in the corner of ink-weary eyes, a blur that zipped across the pages, leaving delicate, inky trails. Errors began to creep into the copies, as these apparitions distracted the monks. And no sweeping or blessing improved the situation.
The spider soon became bold and lingered upon the vellum, lifting its forelegs and spreading its palps in defense as it was brushed aside or hit with a pounce-bag. It always disappeared without a trace—only to reappear on another page, at another copy-stand.
For weeks this apparition—or natural nuisance, none could say which—haunted and befuddled the monks. Some claimed it was a pagan spirit sent to devil them and increase error in our sin-stricken world. Others, usually skeptical, still found it hard to believe so tiny a creature could survive the chill without infernal assistance, the fires of hell being almost a tempting prospect through early spring. And so it went until the heather lost its sere and budding leaves poked forth green and red from bush and tree. It was February, and the island’s hard winter was passing early with rain and storm into glorious days of golden sun. Monks took a break from their work and gathered seaweed from the white beaches to fertilize their gardens and small farms. Balmy breezes danced through the abbey, coaxing the chill out of old stone and dank earth. Grass pushed high and green, and the making of vellum and fine parchment resumed as the calves and lambs were born.
The winter’s copies were brought out and displayed to the air, to dry away mildew, and the abbot examined them in the brightness of the abbey garden, his weak but loving eyes vigilant for errors, blemishes, anything that might make them unacceptable to clients present or future. (For many books were stored in the abbey’s stone tower library, against the future demand of a world reborn.) And so the abbot was the first to discover that one copy in an entire run of manuscripts bore in its margins a scrawled, clumsy, and unsanctioned poem, thus:
Between the lines
A bogey walks
Eight legs, eight eyes.
Letters will flee
Ink will be smeared
Till it be born
In ash and dread,
Wolf ’s eye red,
Seen by the Three;
Who spare the mite
That words make flesh
Five lost, reborn.
The abbot ordered this abomination pumiced, and yet within hours the ink on the offending page returned, stubborn and bold. The master of copyists stripped the page, carried it to the trash heap outside the stone walls, and burned the offending vellum, intoning prayers of exorcism before spreading its ashes over the bones and offal.
But neither spider nor poem would die. Someone had copied those lines, with subtle variations, on scraps of vellum and wood and even on shards of pottery, no one knew how many times, and pressed them into the chinks between the abbey stones and elsewhere. In old structures and homes across the island the copies would continue to be found, now and again, until the Vikings arrived. But before the Vikings, manuscripts from Iona became less and less trustworthy, until copying was stopped and all newer copies were either burned or stored under lock and key, for none could be sure that allcopies back to the beginning were not tainted, the minds of even expert readers being imperfect to the task of total recall of so many pages.
The abbey was closed and the most valuable and beautiful books transported elsewhere. No one knew what the poem meant, yet for years, scholars claimed the spider and its errors could be removed for good, if that secret were to be discovered. Who were the three, and why did they live in ash and dread, and what apocalypse would resurrect just five corpses from their graves? (For some versions had as the final line, “Raising five dead.”)
And why all the concern, why the whispers and stories and frantic efforts to shrive and cleanse? For it was after all only an eight-legged bogey, tiny though fierce; none had been bitten or in any way injured by its journeys over the copied words. And those manuscripts had likely not passed through antiquity unchanged, having been scribed by so many diverse hands through the centuries, in different languages and different nations; even in Saracen lands, where error must be the rule. Some—heretics no doubt—still insisted that the spider was a servant of God and simply marked with its legs the proper corrections, based on memories of errors it had witnessed long before. But doubtless God would never have assigned such a task to loathsome vermin. Ginny closed the book, frowning deeply. That did it. She’d had enough of Bidewell and his obscurities. Ignoring her fear, she pulled back the steel bars, undid the bolts, and tugged open the door to the loading dock. The night air was cool and damp and smelled faintly of exhaust. Only a few cars traveled this way after six. Rain had passed several hours before and now the evening sky, still bright with dusk, was clear and intensely blue.
Ginny stepped onto the ramp and stared up with hungry, grateful eyes, as if she could fold and stash away the entire sky, keep it beside her always…not a book in sight, anywhere. She examined the shadows in the small, empty parking lot. Nobody watching. Stiff, still not sure what she would do, she walked like a marionette down the ramp to the open gate, jerking her head to look up, look back.
A few more feet, a couple of yards…
Time to regain her strength, her resolve—to do what she was born to do. She had lost all confidence in her ability to walk between raindrops. Why had she ever come here in the first place? The clinic—the doctor—she couldn’t think clearly, her ears were buzzing so, and her heart felt as if it might explode in her chest.
They never give up, you know. Once you make that call, they’re always waiting.She murmured, “I wish I could fly away. They’re keeping me here.”
You’re keeping me here.
“Just walk!”
Down at the corner, beyond the long, dark warehouse wall, a stop-light turned green, yellow, red, then green again. The sky darkened. The street was deserted.
The air smelled fresh and empty.
For the first time in two weeks, she searched for a more fortunate side branch—sent ahead her ethereal feelers for the nearest, safest parallel, a colder, fresher stream. Something interrupted her concentration. She looked down. Minimus wound between her legs, tail like a soft finger against her calves. The cat looked across the road, then butted her ankle. The thin man with the silver dollars, the smoky female. Are they still out there?