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Web of Secrets (7) : Spiders have settled in all across town, and while this isn’t normally any great cause for concern, inky black spiders are oddly common. The spiders themselves are not very threatening–small, nonpoisonous, and cowardly. The interesting thing about them is their black webbing–and the strange designs they make. Webs appear overnight, often seeming to come out of nowhere. They are curiously designed, almost as if made to deliberately spell out something. People all over town have mentioned finding webs that spell out a single word, or part of a sentence. Maybe it’s just imagination, but as the days go on, the words seem to be clearer–and the messages are often uncomfortable or distressing. There’s no evidence that the spiders can spell or are trying to send messages, but really–is it that hard to believe? Once a spider has left a message, it disappears. They are masterful escape artists and cannot be caught. There’s no telling what the spiders want you to know, but maybe if you’re lucky one will leave you a message you understand.
Jupiter hadn’t been at work today.
In and of itself, that probably wasn’t much cause for concern. Everybody at Lavender Haze had paid time off and sick days allotted to them, and Jupiter Butterfly had followed all the appropriate procedures about calling in. Someone had covered for her, mostly, and there wasn’t really any need to worry about her. The shop had still wound up understaffed enough to force Preston up to the front and to make him interact with people rather than sticking to the back-rooms with the plants. But that wasn’t Jupiter’s fault and Preston didn’t blame her.
(If anybody’s, the influx of people today was the fault of weirdos on the “tick tock” app that people kept talking about and that Preston still didn’t understand. More than a few alleged “customers” today had turned out to be playing around with their phones, shooting those odd, short-form videos that they liked, messing up the shelves and talking about “witchy aesthetic” nonsense instead of actually buying anything. People like that gave people like Lucette a bad name, in Preston’s wholly unbiased opinion that nobody had asked for.)
Whatever was going on with the spiders, it didn’t help. Seven different customers today had come to Preston to complain about black spiderwebs that shouldn’t have been there—because Preston knew that he and his coworkers kept the store cleaner than that, and some of them had turned up in high-traffic areas—and all of the mysterious webs in question had words written on them. Distinctly unpleasant words, all the way down: one had read “WHORE”, and “TRAITOR” had read another. The second-to-last one that Preston cleaned up before clocking out had even made a sentence, clearly spelling out “YOU LIED.”
(The customer who’d pointed that one out had seemed to find it funny instead of disconcerting, and had seemed to think that using some gravely voice while cupping a hand around their mouth to create an echoing effect would explain why Preston also should have found it funny. He hadn’t understood what they’d had in mind, but he supposed that it was probably very nice for them. The more important thing was getting the spiderweb cleaned up, rather than trying to understand whatever terribly clever reference they wanted to make at him.)
The final spiderweb Preston had cleaned up before clocking out had also been the biggest, and no one had told him to come find it. He’d spotted it in one of the back-rooms while getting out some fresh stock of crystals that needed to be shelved. Taking up most of the furthest-back corner, the web had stared down at him as though it had wanted Preston specifically to see its message, with its enormous letters reading “YOU CAN NEVER ESCAPE.”
It might have been more unnerving if Brother Horace had had any capacity to control spiders, since that message did sound like something that he would have had, but he didn’t have that kind of power. No matter what Brother Horace thought, he was just a man. With a deep breath and an impassive stare, Preston had wiped the spiderwebs away, refusing to let them get to him. As he’d planned, once he’d clocked out, he’d stopped by one of the diners near the shop that he knew Jupiter Butterfly liked, and he’d picked up a quart of their chicken soup and some of their brownies.
Standing outside her apartment’s door, Preston looked around for any other spiderwebs. He didn’t see any just yet, thankfully, so rather than wasting time on cleaning them up, he knocked. Hopefully, Jupiter would be well enough to answer.
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