The Spider Truces Read Online Free PDF Page B

to force Denny on to his hands and knees. There was a bare light bulb hanging from the rafters, which blinded Ellis as he climbed in. He found his dad peering over the end wall. It was a strange wall, Ellis noticed, in that it didn’t reach the roof.
    “What’s the other side of this wall?” Ellis whispered.
    “I think this must be the join in the roof where they extended the cottage. The bit we’re in was added two hundred years ago but the other side of this wall is what was the original little house.”
    Denny leant further over the wall and strained. “I think … that what I’m looking at, Ellis, is the slope of the original roof. It used to be on the outside of the cottage. It’s four hundred years old, Ellis. Think of that.”
    “Older than Mafi.”
    “Yes …”
    “Has it got tiles on?” Ellis asked.
    “They’d have taken them off and used them on the new roof. It’s just the timbers.”
    “Oh.”
    “I’ll tell you, Ellis,” Denny said, “there’s a helluva lot of roof on this old cottage. I hope there’re no nasty surprises.”
    Ellis liked his dad saying things like “helluva” because he didn’t use words like that very often.
    “It’s a really big house,” Ellis agreed. “Lots of nooks and crannies.”
    Denny smiled to himself. There was something he liked about his nine-year-old son saying things like “nooks and crannies”.
    “So, what room is under that old roof?” Ellis asked.
    “My bedroom,” Denny said.
    “Oh, yeah. Can I look?”
    Denny lifted his son up to see over the wall. The bulb threw enough light to see the faint outline of the old, sloping roof. As Ellis’s eyes adjusted, a skeleton of rafters and beams materialised in front of him. The timbers disappeared into a well of blackness. He wondered what could be down there. It was the darkest, most unreachable place he could imagine a house to have. A place not originally intended to exist, brought about by change. If there are places one never goes, places that one would never ever have reason to find oneself in, if such places exist, then this well was one of them.

3
     
     
    In his dreams, Ellis walked through the cottage and found secret doorways to hidden rooms and stairways. For a few moments, upon waking, he’d believe they were real.
    Behind Denny’s bed, set into a low wall beneath the slope of the old roof, there was a wooden door, three feet high, covered in syrupy black paint. And although it was just like the doors in his dreams, Ellis was scared of it. He saw it as a mouth that could eat him alive.
     
     
    Pholcus phalangioides lived amongst the ceiling beams in the downstairs of the cottage. Back then, Ellis knew them simply as daddy-long-legs. He wasn’t too bothered by them as they showed no tendency to descend into his air space. Two Nuctenea umbratica took up residence over the front door. When winter came they ceased replenishing their webs but, by then, Ellis had taken to using the kitchen door instead.
    The downstairs toilet had no door, just a temporary curtain destined to remain there for many years. Hanging from a nail in the wall was a paint-splattered cassette player with a tape of Strauss’s Four Last Songs in it. A drawn curtain and the sound of Strauss meant that the toilet was in use. This room was heavily inhabited by various orb-web spiders. Most of them were too small to see but their webs were in the angles of the doorframe, window and pipework. Ellis couldn’t go in there.
    The garden shed was also a complete no-go area. It was jammed full with spiders and webs. The first, and only, time Ellis stepped inside it, he fainted. Mafi found him lying half in and half out of the shed and he was rushed to hospital, for fear of meningitis.
    It angered Ellis that the shed was held by the spiders because it meant he couldn’t get his hands on all the things inside it, his outdoor toys and Denny’s tools, without asking either Mafi, Chrissie or his dad to go in there for him. He