Spiders on the Case Page 6

  “Yes, of course.”

  So Felix told them about what he’d overheard.

  “A million dollars!” Jo Bell, Julep, and Buster kept repeating. But it was not the money that impressed Edith.

  “These scoundrels were celebrating! They were going to drink champagne, and you were in the champagne glass. You could have drowned, Felix.” Edith began to sag.

  “Steady there, old girl,” Fatty said soothingly. “Your son is back. He’s safe and there’s work to be done.”

  “Yes, yes. Of course,” Edith said. Her voice was still shaky, however. “Now, about the message. How much silk do you think we’re going to have to put out?”

  “That depends on what we want to say,” Julep offered. “But I think we can use the silverfish. They are the perfect shape for forming some parts of the letters.”

  “True, true,” Edith said as she reflected on the alphabet they had learned.

  “If I may make a suggestion,” Jo Bell said. “I think we should just say, ‘Tom, go to New World Explorers’ Atlas page 56 and the Debrett’s Fashion Portfolio page 12.’”

  “That’s going to take a lot of silk,” Edith said. “Not that I won’t be up to it once I manage to relax old number ninety-five. But can we do a bit of editing?”

  “Well, you can’t cut out Tom’s name. That’s what’s going to grab his attention,” Julep said.

  “Why don’t we do a call number instead of a book title?” Jo Bell asked. “That will save a lot of words. What’s the call number for that atlas with the map of New France?”

  “G 995.1,” Buster piped up.

  “Yes,” Jo Bell continued. “We just write ‘Tom G 995.1.’”

  “That’s succinct,” Edith said. “But do you think it’s safe to write the call numbers as numerals?”

  Buster tilted his head thoughtfully. “I think it all has to be in code.”

  “You’re right, Buster. I don’t think we can take any chances,” Jo Bell agreed.

  Much discussion followed: Would it take more silk to write out the call numbers or the title of the atlas and the fashion portfolio? Did they have to include the fashion portfolio? For as Buster said, many more maps had been stolen than fashion illustrations.

  Finally, it was agreed that the message would be the name Tom with an exclamation mark and then the call numbers in hieroglyphs. Julep had not yet learned the system of hieroglyphic numerals, but Jo Bell immediately piped up. “I’m good in math. That can be my department.”

  And so they began that night. They worked in shifts. Edith and Felix went out to hunt for new silverfish and soon cleared out Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Jo Bell and Buster, under Julep’s direction, began the silken inscription.

  It was Thursday night when they began. But because they had to make the hieroglyphs so big, they felt it would take them the entire weekend before the job was completed. They needed a sign that Tom couldn’t miss.

  My, that’s very interesting.” It was Friday morning, and Tom Parker had made his usual stop at the spiders’ display case. He was looking at what appeared to be a new web under construction by his favorite bug family in the Boston Public Library. This morning he was especially intrigued by the single silverfish that had been strung horizontally at the base of a shimmering arc of silk. There was a haunting familiarity to the design. “Now, what are you little guys up to?” he whispered.

  “I don’t appreciate him calling us ‘little guys,’” Jo Bell said.

  “Don’t complain,” Buster replied. “He’s looking at it. He’s realizing that this is something different.”

  “And it’s just Friday,” Julep said. “By Monday, we should have it almost done.”

  At noon they changed shifts. Felix devised a clever hauling net for their catch of silverfish. But it was still exhausting work. Edith sighed as she climbed back into the web. “I’m going to take a breather for a moment.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom, I can haul these.” Felix had become very attentive to his mother since his little escapade in Eldridge Montague’s pocket.

  “We almost have enough to finish the job, I think,” Edith said. “We really cleaned out Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I suggest that Jo Bell and Buster go to the prayer books, especially the Latin book of hours. There’s one published in 1500, call number 242.9492. I saw a small gang heading in that direction.”

  “It shouldn’t take that many more,” Julep offered. “For the ‘O’ in ‘Tom,’ it’s the quail symbol. One silverfish for the whole body should work.”

  “Yes,” Edith said. “And I think we could use axial threads for the legs.”

  “How’s your old ninety-five spigot, Mom?” asked Felix. “That’s your axial silk one, isn’t it?”

  “It’s kind of you to inquire, dear. I think it’s all better. My silk flow seems fine.”

  A few hours later, shortly before the library closed, Tom came by the display case again. His mouth dropped open. He whispered the name of the first glyph for the “T,” then the second for the “O.” Could it be? he thought. Could it possibly be that the spider family was trying to communicate with him? He’d felt a special bond with this little family ever since they’d arrived. What were they trying to tell him?

  “Good night, Tom,” Rosemary said as she got up from her desk to leave. “Have a nice weekend down on the Cape.”

  “Yes, I will,” he said distractedly.

  “See you on Tuesday, right? Are you still taking an extra day?”

  “Yes,” he said. And at the moment, he very much regretted it. Tom knew he ought to leave right away to beat the traffic down to Cape Cod, but he decided to stay just a bit longer. They seem so intent, he thought as he watched the five spiders working away with incredible industry, not paying the least bit of attention to him. There was almost a desperation to their spinning and weaving.

  An hour later, Tom was stuck in traffic on Route 3, in somewhat of a daze. It’s simply unbelievable, he thought for the one hundredth time. The spiders had spelled his name. At five forty-five, the largest of the spider children, the one he thought was a girl, although it was hard to be sure, had completed the glyph for the letter “M.” The last letter in his name.

  The image was burnished in his mind’s eye. It was an owl, elegantly constructed with a large gleaming silverfish slanted at just the right angle and a smaller one placed for each foot. The rest of the body was woven with silk thread. It was a work of art. Tom could picture it now even as evening fell, car lights blazed, and impatient drivers honked their horns as if the sound alone would blast them down Route 3 and across the Sagamore Bridge to the Cape.

  The temperature was hovering — even at this hour — near 90, and everyone was thinking of the beach except Tom Parker. He was tempted to make a U-turn and drive straight back to Boston, but how would he explain it to his aging mother? He had not been to visit her for almost a month. No, he had to continue. I mean, he thought, what would I say? “Mom, I had to go back to work because some brown recluse spiders are trying to send me a message.” It would sound certifiably crazy. He’d be packed off to the loony bin.

  Meanwhile, back in the Rare Books Department, Jo Bell was directing the beginning of the first hieroglyphic call numbers. Silverfish lent themselves well to the hieroglyphic numbering system because the numbers one through ten were shown as groupings of short lines. It was, however, a somewhat complex engineering job. She and Buster had spun a double-strand halyard for hoisting the silverfish that would be used for several of the call numbers.

  “All right, commence hoist!” She barked out the command. A glimmering silverfish rose on the halyard.

  “Halt and begin to pay out!”

  Julep and Felix swung out on a radial and began to squeeze out number four sticky thread.

  “Attachment complete!” Felix called down to Jo Bell. “Over and out!”

  The silverfish now hung in the web. Soon they would begin the next set of call numbers for the New World Explorers’ Atlas and be one step closer to catching th
e thieves.

  On Sunday night, one minute before midnight, Edith and the children had completed the job.

  “It’s a work of art!” Fatty exclaimed, gazing at the shimmering threads that showed the complicated hieroglyph numbers.

  They couldn’t wait until Tom returned.

  But by nine forty-five on Monday, when there was still no sign of the conservator, they began to worry.

  “He’s never late,” Buster said. “I hope he didn’t have an accident driving down to the Cape.”

  “Surely we would have heard,” Edith replied. “Rosemary would have said something.”

  They waited for Tom all day Monday. But it was early Tuesday morning that Edith began to sense something dreadful was about to happen. She heard a tuneless whistling at seven thirty in the morning, when the cleaning crew usually came through. But it was always Joe who did the sweeping and dusting in the rare books room, and he never whistled. The whistling was coming closer and closer, and suddenly there was a creaking noise that sent a jolt from Edith’s fangs to her spinnerets.

  Edith heard a scream. She was not sure if it came from herself or one of her children. Then Felix shouted, “SCATTER AND DIVE FOR COVER!”

  The case was opening. An immense feather duster hovered like a dreadful cloud above them.

  “Climb!” cried Edith. “Get out of the web.” And then it was all gone, every fantastic filament, every last shred of the hieroglyphs they had spent three whole days weaving.

  Next, there was a terrible roar as the cleaning lady poked something with a nozzle into the corner of the case. “Outta here! We’ll be sucked up!” Felix cried out. Draglines flew through the air so they could haul themselves out of the display and escape the great sucking mechanical beast that had invaded their peaceful domain.

  “Well, that’s done,” the cleaning woman said. “What a mess! Bet no one dusted that in years! These librarians and their books. So dirty!”

  Edith was trembling. She still didn’t know if her children had escaped or had been vacuumed up. “Children!” Edith called.

  “Jo Bell?”

  “Here!”

  “Felix?”

  “Here, Mom.”

  “Julep?” She waited. “Julep?” Panic was rising. “Julep, darling, Julep!”

  “Oh, for the love of Pete!” they heard the cleaning lady exclaim. “Yikes, it’s a spider!”

  Edith’s tiny heart beat wildly, but her body was frozen with fear. Her youngest child could be killed or could be scared into biting the cleaning lady. That, too, would spell certain doom for them all.

  Four seconds later, there was the softest little noise on the surface of the display case. A noise so tiny that only a spider could have felt the vibrations.

  “It’s Julep,” Jo Bell said. “Julep!”

  “Is she alive?” Edith croaked, hiding her eyes behind one of her eight legs.

  “Of course I’m alive. She just flicked me off her.”

  “Oh! Thank heavens.” And with that, Edith collapsed.

  “What happened? What happened?” Buster had been sleeping across the room somewhere in a boxed set of nineteenth-century locomotive drawings. “I heard a noise. It sounded like a vacuum cleaner.”

  “It was!” Jo Bell said somberly.

  Buster looked around the case and staggered a bit. It felt as if his eight eyes were spinning. “But every thing’s gone. The webs, the message. It’s all gone!”

  Indeed the shimmering hieroglyphs were gone. The display case had not a speck of dust, and the glass was polished on both sides and gleaming. Even the precious book of the Liang dynasty sparkled with a new cleanliness.

  “I hate hygiene!” Edith said in a low rumbling voice that the children had never before heard.

  But the spiders’ devastation was nothing compared to that of Tom Parker. Five minutes after the cleaning lady went on her merry hygienic way, Tom arrived. He didn’t bother to take off his jacket but walked directly over to the case. He looked down through the glass and blinked. Then, emitting a small gasp, he pulled out his reading glasses and bent down for a closer look. “It’s gone.” He blinked several times. He looked up and, with a confused gaze, stared into the perpetual twilight of the rare books room. “Did I dream it?”

  “No! No! No!” the spiders all cried out together. But Tom could not hear their melancholy vibrations.

  He turned to Rosemary, who had just arrived. “Rosemary, isn’t Monday the cleaning day for rare books?”

  “Yes, but Joe has been out, and I think someone else came up this morning instead.”

  “Indeed they did. The display case was opened.”

  “Was something stolen?” Rosemary asked, jumping up from her desk.

  “No, dusted.”

  “Oh, dear. I know you don’t like that case dusted. I should have put a note on it. But I’ll be sure to call Custodial Services and tell them not to dust the case again if Joe is going to be out longer.”

  “It’s too late,” Tom whispered to himself. “Too late.”

  It’s never too late, Tom! It’s never too late!” Jo Bell had swung up to the top of the display case and was shouting at him through the glass.

  “He can’t hear you, Jo Bell. He doesn’t speak spider,” Julep called up at her.

  “It’s useless, Jo Bell,” Felix said.

  “We’re beaten,” Edith nearly sobbed.

  “Mom!” Jo Bell glared at her mother. “How can you say that? You never talk that way. We need to think of something!”

  Jo Bell slid down her dragline to pace the felt floor of the display case. Her head was tipped down. She found the spotlessness of the freshly vacuumed felt offensive. There’s not a speck of dust! This is no way to live!

  But Jo Bell would not let herself or her family be defeated. No idiot human with a vacuum was going to stand in the way of justice.

  Jo Bell turned to Buster, her mom, her brother, and her sister. They all seemed to be waiting for her to say something. They were all paying full attention.

  “Listen to me.” Her six eyes were smoldering. “This is not an end. This is a beginning.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Felix.

  “Just that we’ve been defeated in the display case. But we shall rebuild our web with the hieroglyphic code. And we shall do it not only here. We shall send out our message far and wide. We shall weave it in the case, on the shelves, in the stacks, and right across Tom Parker’s desk. The dusting is finished. The cleaners don’t come back for a week. And in that time, we shall fight on.”

  Suddenly, the spiders felt a fluttering in their spinnerets. “Bestir yourself,” Jo Bell continued. “There is silk to be made! We will weave on and defend the volumes of this library against the tyranny of unchecked greed, against the violence of the X-ACTO blade. We shall spin on with growing confidence, for we have done it once before and shall do it again. And we shall grow bolder in the air! We shall not be defeated and we shall never surrender. Tom Parker will see and understand our message and step forth to rescue what rightfully belongs to the citizens of this fair city!”

  A stunned silence followed this speech. But no one was more stunned than Jo Bell herself. Her siblings and her mother were looking at her in awe. Moments before, they had been awash with disappointment and anger, exhausted from their efforts. But now their spigots itched to unleash new silk.

  “Allons, enfants!” Jo Bell had slipped into the first words of the French national anthem without realizing it. But she quickly switched back to English. “Let’s go, spiders of the Boston Public Library. Onward!”

  “I know where there is a new batch of silverfish!” Julep said.

  “I can start making the two-strand hoist,” Buster offered.

  “And I can set one up on the shelf where the Wurmach Encyclopedia of Hieroglyphs is,” Felix said.

  The five spiders had never worked so hard. But it seemed easier. They were able to spin out the hieroglyphic words faster, more smoothly. It was as if their spinnerets had
been greased, for the silk just flowed. And not once did anyone complain.

  When dawn began to break on Wednesday, they all straggled back to the display case. Four different webs had been woven in places that Tom would never miss — beginning with the computer on his own desk.

  “What’s this?” Tom whispered. Stretched across the computer screen and anchored on either side of the keyboard was a message that sent chills up his spine.

  He rushed to the display case, where he saw the same message repeated. He leaned forward and breathed heavily over the case.

  “Tom, are you all right?” Rosemary asked.

  “Yes, yes. Just fine.”

  “There’s a fellow on the phone about the Wurmach Encyclopedia again. He’ll be in later this morning. I have to go down to that meeting in the trustees’ room. I’ll be back in an hour, but I can get the Wurmach now,” Rosemary said.

  “Wait! I’ll get it!” Tom answered.

  Tom Parker had a sudden instinct, a hunch like a sixth sense. He raced into the stacks where the early dictionaries and encyclopedias were kept, and he was right. Here stretched the biggest web of all. This time, there were three simple words spelled in enormous glyphs:

  “Smoot and Montague, those scoundrels!” shouted Tom.

  The children and Edith had followed Tom as he raced to the three sites where they had constructed webs.

  “He got it!” Felix cried out. Then they began to dance a celebratory jig.

  “Oh!” sighed Edith. “I am so proud of all of you children. It won’t be long now!”

  “You can call it spiderwebs,” Buster said. “But it’s truly a dragnet — and it’s Jo Bell’s. What a brilliant idea, Jo Bell.” He couldn’t conceal his admiration.