They were only ten yards upstream, between him and the weir, and the moonlight fell on them clearly. They were wrapped up in cloaks and hoods, "like brown paper parcels, or statues tied up in sacks," he insisted later; and under these garments their bodies seemed to be jerking and writhing in a continual rhythmic motion, though for him it was too disconnected to be called a dance. The new ice parted for them like damp sugar floating on the water. They paid no attention to the watchman, but forded the canal, tallest first, shortest last, and disappeared down the cinder lane that goes via Orves and the observatory to the courtyard near the Plain Moon Cafe.
The watchman rubbed his hands and looked round for a minute or two, as if he expected something else to happen. "Eleven o'clock," he called at last; and though he couldn't commit himself to a description which seemed so subject to qualification as to be in bad faith, added: "And all's all."
MORE SPINNED AGAINST
by John Wyndham
Chosen by Matt Costello
In my house, there are a number of key jobs that fall to me. Some involve brute strength like twisting lids off recalcitrant jars, or breaking up ice on the driveway that I didn't shovel, or hauling the garbage can to the side of the road for the trusty professional trash service to pick up with their usual air of what-the-hey bonhomie. But another job I have is spider killer.
Not bug killer. Everyone's cool with just about any other kind of insect. Spiders though are special. What is it with spiders? Too many legs? The web? Or something else? It's obviously a question John Wyndham has thought about. Everyone knows Wyndham's classic novel, Day of the Triffids. It showed that even house plants could be the stuff of nightmares. But it was a short dark fantasy story of Wyndham's that really helped shape my own twisted world view. In "More Spinned Against," the subject is a very special spider and as in so many great tales a "deal." And just maybe this is why I'm always getting asked to kill the little guys .
Matt Costello
One of the things about her husband that displeased Lydia Charters more as the years went by was the shape of him; another was his hobby. There were other displeasures, of course, but it was these in particular that aroused her sense of failure.
True, he had been much the same shape when she had married him, but she had looked for improvement. She had envisioned the development, under her domestic influence, of a more handsome, suaver, better filled type. Yet after nearly twelve years of her care and feeding there was scarcely any demonstrable improvement. The torso, the main man, looked a little more solid, and the scales endorsed that it was so, but unfortunately this simply seemed to emphasize the knobby, gangling, loosely-hinged effect of the rest.
Once, in a mood of more than usual dissatisfaction, Lydia had taken a pair of his trousers and measured them carefully. Inert and empty, they seemed all right long in the leg, naturally, but not abnormally so, and the usual width that people wore but put to use, they immediately achieved the effect of being too narrow and full of knobs, just as his sleeves did. After the failure of several ideas to soften this appearance, she had realized that she would have to put up with it. Reluctantly, she had told herself: "Well, I suppose it can't be helped. It must be just one of those things like horsy women getting to look more like horses, I mean," and thereby managed a dig at the hobby, as well.
Hobbies are convenient in the child, but an irritant in the adult; which is why women are careful never to have them, but simply to be interested in this or that. It is perfectly natural for a woman and Lydia was a comely demonstration of the art of being one to take an interest in semiprecious and, when she can afford them, precious stones: Edward's hobby, on the other hand, was not really natural to anyone.
Lydia had known about the hobby before they were married, of course. No one could know Edward for long without being aware of the way his eyes hopefully roved the corners of any room he chanced to be in, or how, when he was out of doors, his attention would be suddenly snatched away from any matter in hand by the sight of a pile of dead leaves, or a piece of loose bark. It had been irritating at times, but she had not allowed it to weigh too much with her, since it would naturally wither from neglect later. For Lydia held the not uncommon opinion that though, of course, a married man should spend a certain amount of his time assuring an income, beyond that there ought to be only one interest in his life from which it followed that the existence of any other must be slightly insulting to his wife, since everybody knows that a hobby is really just a form of sublimation.
The withering, however, had not taken place.
Disappointing as this was in itself, it would have been a lot more tolerable if Edward's hobby had been the collection of objects of standing say, old prints, or first editions, or oriental pottery. That kind of thing could not only be displayed for envy, it had value; and the collector himself had status. But no one achieved the status of being any more than a crank for having even a very extensive collection of spiders.
Even over butterflies or moths, Lydia felt without actually putting the matter to the test, one could perhaps have summoned up the appearance of some enthusiasm. There was a kind of nature's-living-jewels line that one could take if they were nicely mounted. But for spiders a lot of nasty, creepy-crawly, leggy horrors, all getting gradually more pallid in tubes of alcohol she could find nothing to be said at all.
In the early days of their marriage Edward had tried to give her some of his own enthusiasm, and Lydia had listened as tactfully as possible to his explanations of the complicated lives, customs, and mating habits of spiders, most of which seemed either disgusting, or very short on morals, or frequently both, and to his expatiations on the beauties of coloration and marking which her eye lacked the affection to detect. Luckily, however, it had gradually become apparent from some of her comments and questions that Edward was not awakening the sympathetic understanding he had hoped for, and when the attempt lapsed Lydia had been able to retreat gratefully to her former viewpoint that all spiders were undesirable, and the dead only slightly less horrible than the living.
Realizing that frontal opposition to spiders would be poor tactics, she had attempted a quiet and painless weaning. It had taken her two or three years to appreciate that this was not going to work; after that, the spiders had settled down to being one of those bits of the rough that the wise take with the smooth and leave unmentioned except on those occasions of extreme provocation when the whole catalog of one's dissatisfactions is reviewed.
Lydia entered Edward's spider room about once a week, partly to tidy and dust it, and partly to enjoy detesting its inhabitants in a pleasantly masochistic fashion. This she could do on at least two levels. There was the kind of generalized satisfaction that anyone might feel, in looking along the rows of test tubes, that at any rate here were a whole lot of displeasing creepies that would creep no more. And then there was the more personal sense of compensation in the reflection that though they had to some extent succeeded in diverting a married man's attention from its only proper target, they had had to die to do it.
There was an astonishing number of test tubes ranged in the racks along the walls; so many that at one time she had hopefully inquired whether there could be many more kinds of spiders. His first answer of five hundred and sixty in the British Isles had been quite encouraging, but then he had gone on to speak of twenty thousand or so different kinds in the world, not to mention the allied orders, whatever they might be, in a way that was depressing.