Pennerel House crawled with spiders.

Any errant shadow was almost certainly an arachnid. They scurried along the cracking baseboards and made hopeful burrows in fallen curtains. They dropped onto your face as you slept and exploded from drawers when you were just looking for a pair of clean stockings, half-asleep, but by god, now you were awake! Pia Pennerel saw at least four a day, and she catalogued them all. By the time she was fifteen she had amassed a veritable Arachnonomicon.

But as much as she hated finding a spider where she hadn’t wanted one, Pia hated finding a new spider even more. She had tracked the behavior, appearance, movement, temperament, &c. of over twenty species, and this gave her a quiet confidence. She knew what to expect, in the house. New spiders gave her the hysteria. She’d come across a red-bodied, brown-legged specimen the size of a silver dollar one afternoon on her return from school. It was sauntering across the threadbare carpet in the yellow parlor, bold as a button, and Pia stood there paralyzed. It inched closer and closer to her scuffed-up shoes, front legs waving. She regained her presence of mind and threw a pillow at it. This did nothing: the spider simply walked out from under it and continued its promenade, unbothered.

Pia sketched them. Most of her sketches looked the same and were difficult to distinguish, but they made sense to her and that was what mattered. She marked the spiders’ movements, and their locations. Dusty grey fucks lurked in the upholstery. Tiny red fucks liked the library. Fast pointy fucks burrowed into anything soft. And long-legged purple fucks were everywhere. They especially liked the seams of rooms, the places where the wallpaper peeled, and where the molding was coming off in chunks. Occasionally, when the maid was slacking, they liked Pia’s bed too. Pia always watched her step, and batted her pillows against the wall to dislodge would-be bedfellows.

One year she grew bold enough to experiment. If she swallowed a spider would it die? Would the bile in her stomach kill it? Right before dinner one night she stuck her finger in her mouth and retched until she had brought up some yellowish stuff into a small bowl. It dripped down the sides a little, and stank, but Pia would bear anything to satisfy her curiosity. She shook a recently captured spotty orange fuck out of its jar and into the bowl, and watched with interest as it flailed and struggled on the surface of her upchuck. Then the dinner bell rang. Off Pia went. When she returned to the putrid little bowl, the spider was nowhere to be seen. Whether it had been dissolved by the bile or simply had enough skill at swimming to escape, she couldn’t tell. Many errors of science hounded her here: one should always keep an eye on one’s test subjects and make sure they couldn’t escape. She’d have to repeat the experiment in a closed container.

Sometimes her best friend Hetty would come over and Pia would have to pretend the spiders did not exist, that they weren’t just waiting in the corners to be catalogued. To force herself not to reach for her notebook in the presence of a guest, Pia focused instead on Hetty: her movements, her gestures, which corner of the dusty sofa she favored, the occasional languor that pulled her eyelids down like a grown-up’s. She could not catalogue Hetty in her notebook, but she could catalogue her on the inside of her skull. So while they read each other’s logic essays aloud to catch errors, Pia inscribed an entry for Hetty in her brain.

Features: body about my size, a little taller. Two arms, two legs, one head.

Coloring: brown hair, light skin. Typically seen in the navy and white of the school uniform.

Movement: humanoid?

Location: favors the left side of the striped settee.

Behavior: friendly, charming, effusive.

Habits: talking, handing me essays to read.

Web, if any: —

Pia wasn’t good at sketching, but neither was Hetty. They started sketching each other rather than read essays. It was still ostensibly schoolwork, and it was a good way for Pia to add to her catalogue. If Hetty was going to be here all the time—and Pia still did not understand why she preferred the Pennerel house to her own bright besiblinged one—then Pia might as well get to stare at her. In the interest of accuracy, Pia made a concerted effort to improve her artistic ability.

One afternoon Hetty put down her sketchbook and stood up to stretch. She wandered around the parlor, tipping her head back to examine the peeling ceiling fresco, swiping her finger across the moldering mantel and wiping the dust on the wallpaper. She finally came around behind Pia and leaned over her shoulder. “Oh! Is that me?”

“Nearly done,” Pia murmured. It was a portrait from the shoulders up. The eyes weren’t quite right. She’d done something odd to the placement of the facial features early on and had barreled forth with it anyway. She was trying to get the curve of the left cheek just right. “It doesn’t quite look like you, but I’m getting better.”

“That’s very nice,” Hetty said, and her breath ghosted across Pia’s cheek. But then she went back over to the striped settee and held out her own sketch for Pia’s inspection.

It was the parlor, seen from Hetty’s settee, dark and decrepit and badly proportioned. A figure hunched in a nearby chair, blurred and radiant. The pencil had hardly touched that area. “It’s not finished,” Hetty said, almost embarrassed.

“Is that meant to be me?” Pia said.

Hetty chewed meditatively on the end of her braid. “I didn’t know how to draw you. I felt that everything I tried would be—insufficient.” Pia wordlessly held up her own bad portrait, and Hetty laughed. “You’re brave,” she said. “You’re so much braver than I am. It frightens me to draw the best part, because what if I mess it up?”

“I’m the best part?” Pia said.

Hetty said, “Of course.” Her mouth grew serious, and Pia wanted to tear a new page from her sketchbook and draw that face.

For cataloguing reasons.

They stared at each other for a moment that lasted too long. Hetty’s ears grew red and she ducked her head, back to sketching.

This was interesting information. Now Pia had to revise her entry on Hetty. Her earlier one had been wildly nonspecific.

Features: body about my size, a little taller. Two arms, two legs, one head. Hair typically in one long strong braid. Two eyes with intelligence in them. A pleasing nose. A mouth which smiles a lot. Cheeks look very smooth.

Coloring: brown hair, light skin. Typically seen in the navy and white of the school uniform. Seen once in a cornflower blue dress at a party, which is a very flattering color. Sometimes whole face goes pink. Sometimes ears go translucent red. Eyes are a dark grey or blue. More observation needed.

Movement: humanoid? Assured. As though she’s never tripped or made a misstep or made any gesture she didn’t intend to make.

Location: favors the left side of the striped settee. Occasionally will put her legs in my lap. Occasionally will rest her head on my shoulder.

Behavior: friendly, charming, effusive. Absolutely wonderful.

Habits: talking, handing me essays to read. Worries the end of her braid between her lips when listening.

Web, if any: —

When she’d finished her entry, the visit ending, Hetty gone, and gloom descending, Pia noticed that she hadn’t entered any spider sightings yet that day. Normally there was at least one in the morning before school, but now it was a full summer night and she’d seen none. Worried, she went to a reliable corner, found one (1) dusty grey fuck, and felt marginally better.

Find the spider. Categorize. Another tally mark on the relevant page. That’s what she was good at. Nothing less, nothing more. She did not touch the spiders found in her house, and they did not touch her.

But Hetty, whose entry in Pia’s head had quickly migrated to the back of her notebook, did. She’d link their hands (warm) and wrap her arms round Pia’s waist (also warm) and lay her head on Pia’s shoulder, though she was taller than Pia and it ought to have been the other way around. Pia remembered these things, and wrote them all down too. Once, as an experiment, and possibly out of impatience, she laid her own head down, and Hetty gave a little gasp of delight, then brought her hand up around Pia’s face and stroked her cheek. Her fingers were warm and dry. Pia’s eyes rolled back in bliss, and Hetty said, “Aren’t we cute.” Pia hummed. Hetty said, “If we were at a ball, would you dance with me?”

“Of course,” Pia said. “You’d be the first I’d dance with. You’d be the only.”

Hetty giggled. And then they did dance, in the dreary entrance hall, school shoes slipping over cracked parquet, twirling each other with no regard for who was leading, who was following, or what the dance even was—they were moving together and singing under their breath and Hetty’s hands were warm against Pia’s own and it was perfect.

Then Hetty left, and Pia could not catch her breath all night.

Pia’s mother, Marnda, appeared finally at breakfast one morning. Normally Pia saw her around once a month, and normally she wore loud clackety shoes that presaged her appearance; but now Pia didn’t have enough time to hide what she was doing before Marnda, in slippers, materialized in the breakfast room and sneered at her notebook.

“What’s that, daughter?”

“Schoolwork,” Pia said, guiltily flipping the book closed. She was in the middle of observing a lazy crimson fuck, which was taking a desultory interest in the bowl of stewed tomatoes.

“Schoolwork,” Marnda repeated in a high, sing-songy voice. She sat at the table and picked up a bread roll. “I had not known you were so scholarly. Look me in the eye,” she said petulantly, and Pia did so. “Thank you. Manners. Who’s that girl who keeps coming over here?”

Pia picked at her wibbly egg. “My friend Hetty. From school.”

“Your friend Hetty. From school.”

Pia chose not to respond to this. Marnda chewed up the bread roll, mouth open, and helped herself to some stewed tomatoes. Pia looked for the spider she had been cataloguing, to continue cataloguing it in her head. It was gone. She put the tines of her fork into a glob of butter, then pressed them to her tongue.

“Manners!” Marnda said, leering across the table. There were still bits of stewed tomato on her teeth. One of the bits moved, and crawled down onto her tongue, then back out of sight. Pia bit down hard on her fork in shock. The recategorizing she would have to do! The notes she would have to make!

She stared dumbly at Marnda’s mouth through the ensuing lecture, but the spider did not reappear. The only thing that came out of her mouth was a spray of spittle with every fricative.

That afternoon, Hetty came back to the house, because Pia didn’t have the heart to tell her not to.

This time, Hetty found out about the spiders.

Pia had been doing an excellent job of hiding them: of redirecting Hetty’s attention at salient moments, of squashing a stray quick spotty fuck when she saw it racing across the floor towards Hetty’s schoolbag. Hetty’s house was bright and clean and small and had no spiders. Pia knew dimly in the back of her mind that people who did not live with spiders screamed to see them; they howled, affrighted, and beat at them with the nearest empty shoe. If Hetty saw a spider, she wouldn’t want to come to Pia’s house anymore, and then what would Pia do?

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Pennerel,” Hetty said, with a gorgeous curtsey. That was the thing about Hetty, she was always so good-mannered. “I don’t believe we’ve ever met.”

“Lady Pennerel,” said Marnda, sucking her teeth. “We haven’t.” She stood gruesomely in the archway for a couple of minutes, watching as they sketched in silence, beshadowed against the gaping draughty hall beyond; and then she turned and left them alone with a severe sweep of skirts.

Hetty laughed. “Piece of work, your mother!”

Pia had never met any other mothers to compare Marnda to. “Is she?”

“You know,” Hetty said, archly examining Pia, “it’s a wonder she produced you. So sweet and charitable a person out of so—” She waved a hand at the archway and Pia desperately wanted to know what she would have said, but didn’t want to ask.

“Are you done yet?” she said instead, and craned her head to peer over Hetty’s shoulder at the drawing. Hetty leaned back into her with a happy little sound and offered up her sketchbook for perusal.

Spiders. A full page of them.

“What’s this?” Pia said, trying not to let her voice tremble. “Insects?”

“Arachnidae,” Hetty said, not without relish. “I saw one skittering across the floor over there”—she pointed toward the great marble fireplace—“and I got ideas. Riffed off the first one. It was productive.”

Pia took the sketchbook to look better. Hetty’s drawings were sure and quick and she didn’t have much of a sense of scale—every spider was at least as long as Pia’s pinkie finger and they all overlapped each other. The page writhed with them. Spider fangs, spider eyes, spider talons, spider limbs. Seven amusingly rendered spider fundaments.

“Oh,” Hetty said, in a strange tone of voice Pia had never heard before. “What’s this?”

Pia looked up too late.

Hetty had taken Pia’s own notebook, in which she’d inscribed her spider sightings—and Hetty herself. It was too late to coyly insist she didn’t open it: Hetty was flipping through the pages with interest, reading some, and skimming others.

“You catalogue—spiders?” Hetty said.

Pia could only nod, and stare, pinned to her seat by her own hot rising shame. Hetty had flipped to the blank pages, and any hope that she would stop there was roundly dashed by her peeling through to the back cover. She looked at it.

Unguarded delight crossed her face.

“Pia,” she said, “you’ve catalogued me?”

“I catalogue,” said Pia, trying vainly to maintain her dignity, “anything that appears in this house. It’s—”

Hetty held up a hand. “Don’t make excuses. You catalogue spiders. And me. One exception does not mean you have to expand your definition. So therefore, by the transitive property, am I a spider?”

“I don’t think so,” Pia said.

“Then what am I?”

What kind of question— “You’re my friend. By hypothetical syllogism, if I am not friends with spiders, and you are my friend, then you are not a spider.”

“Less than half of that was hypothetical,” Hetty said, but she stood up. “I am bored. Make me a spider.”

“What?”

She gestured to herself, all compact normal human being of her. “Pia. Turn me into a spider.”

This was not a school assignment. “What if I can’t turn you back again?”

“What’s so very great about me as I am that a spider wouldn’t be an improvement? Turn me,” she repeated, “into a spider!”

Pia wet her lips, then, though there was no reason to. “First,” she said, and her voice shook, “you would need to be very small. Very very small. Smaller than my hand.”

She reached out and pressed down on the top of Hetty’s head, feeling her warm brown hair compress slightly under her hand. Hetty giggled.

“Then once you were small enough,” Pia said, “you’d have to grow more limbs. Two more arms and two more legs.”

“Where?” Hetty said, watching her with keen eyes that were maybe grey or maybe blue. “Show me.”

She held out her arms and Pia touched her carefully one place at a time. On her ribs at the side of her body under her arms, each side. On the back, between her shoulderblades. These weren’t spider geometries, but they would do. Then, boldly, and with no thought for correctness, in the round little hollow at the base of her throat.

“Interesting,” Hetty said, and she was close, so close. Her pulse beat under the tip of Pia’s finger. “What next, once I’m small and have legs?”

“Then you need an exoskeleton,” Pia said. “Spider bones are outside their bodies. Well, they’re not really bones,” she said, “but they are a supportive structure. Without it they’d collapse.”

“Oh?”

“Your skin would crust over and harden.” Pia stroked Hetty’s collarbone, sliding under the edge of her shirt to do it. “Maybe it would grow hairs.”

Hetty laughed once, softly. “It has hairs already. They’re very small.”

“Then they would stiffen up and grow bigger. You’d need pincers too. Or fangs.” Her gaze drifted to a spider, a large one, perched on the back of the couch, watching.

How many spiders had Pia seen in Pennerel House, and how many people? The spiders in the world outnumbered the people in it, by an order of magnitude. If there were so many spiders in the world how did she know people weren’t just another kind of spider? How to differentiate species? Reproduction, she thought wildly. Would two people lay an egg and would it hatch into a spider? Seven-armed, one-legged, carapace gleaming, tipped with rough hairs?

“Did you hear me?” Hetty was looking at her impatiently.

“I—no. Repeat that?”

“I said—”

how many eyes hath a spider

“—want to make sure you don’t—”

eleven? seven? oh Hetty is close she has two

“—here because I like your house, or whatever. I like—”

she has too few eyes where’d her other eyes go

“—for you, but not exactly as a friend.”

Pia swallowed. “You’re not my friend?”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant that you mean more—”

if not friend then why Hetty? if here then why not spider

“—and to kiss you.”

Surely Pia hadn’t heard that right. She looked into Hetty’s eyes, which were black, and faceted, and Hetty took her hand in her own, which was not a hand at all it was a cunning hard-shelled appendage covered in stiff hairs. Hetty spoke, and the pincers of her mouth moved, but Pia’s blood roared too loud in her ears to hear.

“I should warn you,” Pia said faintly. “First and last time.”

Hetty said, “How silly,” in a profusion of hisses and clacks, and Pia grabbed her smooth head and kissed her.

It was an assault, not a tenderness. Pia kissed her and she changed, and changed her, and changed herself, and they changed each other. Hetty’s head collapsed and reformed. Her skin grew slick and hard. Her eyes each split in two, and then all those in two again, and they darkened and globbed around on her face. One arm grappled with Pia’s, another wound round her neck, another scrabbled at her waist. Another pair tangled in her hair and pulled it. Pia changed. Chelicerae cut her cheeks. She grew larger, more solid, more powerful. She shot up in an ecstasy of expansion: she would hit the crumbling ceiling at any moment. She grew so large that Hetty was only a fistful of legs scrabbling at her mouth.

True love? Pia thought. She’s a spider. This is as close to true love I am ever gonna get.

“Shush,” Pia whispered, and though it wriggled, she pressed it to her mouth as though this were anything other than an act of attempted consumption. The spider wriggled harder, scrabbling against her lips, which parted of their own accord; and its legs scraped against her teeth, her tongue; Pia kissed it, and kissed it, and kissed it with her whole mouth, until the spider stilled; and this shocked her enough that she inhaled.

And swallowed.

The spider went down like a lump.

She was very sure that wasn’t supposed to happen.

There was a perfect, frozen moment of undeserved calm. Then Pia began to panic. She stuck her finger down her throat until tears streamed down her cheeks, but nothing surfaced.

The tock-tock-tock of Marnda’s footsteps sounded in the hall. She appeared in the archway like a disease.

“Where is your little friend?”

Pia stared at her, frozen, hand stuffed in her mouth. One hiccup made its way out of her chest.

Marnda did not blink. “Daughter,” she said, “clean up when you’re done.”

And she whirled and tock-tock-tocked away. A froth of tiny red fucks hurried after her.

Pia sat down very carefully on the grimy parquet and put her head in her hands. This was a dream. This had to be a dream.

Her stomach hurgled in response.

Something wriggled inside her. Pia opened her mouth and coughed and gagged and retched a spider out onto the floor. It hit with a splat, and got to its feet, slowly, as though it hadn’t a care in this cold and stupid universe.

Its body was almost the size of her fist. It was of a coloring Pia hadn’t seen before: a dusky blue body with brownish markings on its head. Its short many-jointed limbs probed across the seams of the parquet almost shyly. Its eyes were black and numerous.

Pia drew out her notebook and started a new entry.

Features: fist-sized body, eight legs, eight eyes.

Coloring: dusky blue body, brownish markings on the head, black eyes.

Movement: arachnoidal and slow.

Location: to be determined. Seen once voided from my gullet.

Behavior: to be determined.

Habits: to be determined.

Web, if any: —

Hetty did not come over again, after that day.

Over the next few weeks, Pia saw the spider more and more. It would crawl up to her, sometimes, and soon grew bold enough to crawl on her, sidling through her hair and poking at her skin with the sharp ends of its legs. Pia shuddered at the touch but did not move to pull it off her. The other spiders in the house, perhaps seeing this, or sensing her compliance, began to probe at her also.

Pennerel House crawled with spiders. And now they crawled all over Pia, too.