It was an old car. The entire body of it sang with the vibrations of the road, running through heavy steel. Fewer plastic parts. Fewer efficiencies. More nooks and crannies for dust and grime to get into.

Or spiders.

The car was meticulously washed and waxed. The inside was detailed. It made it hard for outside predators to get a foothold, but a good spider spun a new web every day anyway.

The hundreds of newborn hatchlings—the ones that survived—had completed their initial devouring. The egg sacs and the majority of their siblings had disappeared, and those who were left had spread out to their own little nooks in the vintage car.

Thousands of eyes watched the driver. Thousands of legs listened to the drumming of his fingers against the steering wheel.

The vibrations from the road were loudest, but faded to the background. The man’s drumming was notable because it might be an attempt at communication, though it was unclear whether he was communicating anything beyond “I am here and I might not tolerate you being here with me.”

The spiders wisely stayed hidden, resting and digesting.

There was another set of vibrations, one that emanated out from a single warbling spot at the front center of the car, an old radio with no modern parts, playing tones that sounded almost like human voices but without most of the richness.

There was a soothing cadence to it. A male voice intoning, a female voice punctuating in a repetitious way. The drumming fingers seemed to move in response.

The world of vibrations moved together. It was dark, and their bellies were full.

The spiders were content.

******

The spider that lived on top of the sign that said “Stormy’s” was a refugee.

It didn’t have much of a sense for why Stormy’s was such a good place to be, but it felt somehow normal. No one bothered it. No one cleaned. No one cared.

Just one apartment over, in the F City free housing block, had been fine until The Obliterator had moved in.

Normal surfaces had bits of dust and dirt, mites and microorganisms, flavors and smells. These could be moved around, swept, even wiped “clean,” but there was always something left behind, and you could at least see it coming.

Until The Obliterator arrived.

He pointed at a countertop, and patches of lively surface suddenly became dead and empty. Silent. Sterile. As if nothing had ever been there.

The Obliterator could do an entire square foot at a time. The spider remembered running as fast as her eight legs could carry her, as patches of death followed behind. Did The Obliterator see her? Would she escape in time?

She had made it to the gap where the counter met the back of the stove as his finger moved to point in her direction. She’d dropped an anchor of silk thread and leapt down into the safe darkness where he wouldn’t be able to reach.

He finished pointing, and the thread lost its anchor. She didn’t feel it snap or slip, it simply wasn’t there anymore, as if it had never existed.

She’d landed curled in a little ball and survived the impact, but she stayed hidden for a long time.

Hours later she crept back out to see if there was anything left of her anchoring thread.

Up on the countertop, the surface was beyond clean, beyond sterile.

She tasted nothing, through her feet. Nothing. It made her nauseous, as if she were standing on the void.

It was a nightmare.

She had left the apartment that night, creeping around corners and through cracks, trying to avoid the dead zones. It was a slow escape, but she’d made it to Stormy’s.

Stormy’s was good. Dirty. Full of life and vibration and none of… whatever kind of thing that was.

The spider could do without.

******

It takes strong silk to be a spider on a boat.

The wind! The water! The feel of the rolling waves through your web!

And death, death all around!

No mere cabin spider would be found on this deck.

And if for some reason it had wandered up, surely it would be driven back down by the fearsome sight of the sea monsters that kept appearing all around them in this strange part of the ocean!

The spider paused in rebuilding its web to gaze in awe at the brachiosaurus that walked over the ocean. It had never seen such a thing. It must be bigger and further than it looked, because it couldn’t even feel the disturbance in the wind from such a large creature.

It wondered what it would feel like, if only it were standing on land where it could sense its vibrations! What would it taste like, smell like?

When that creature, the last of them, disappeared, still the humans on board stood watching. As if something else were coming. Something deep and dangerous, something important, something exciting.

The spider continued repairing its web, keeping watch with half of its eyes.

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Whatever was coming, it would be prepared to weather the storm.

******

The spiders of Nilama Apartments had a bit of a friendly debate going. It wasn’t one had in words, but each spider took its position on one side or the other, and only rarely were persuaded to change.

The debate was this:

Is it better to live in a child’s bedroom or an adult’s?

The benefits and drawbacks could both be seen in the room of, say, one Irina Roberts.

Benefits: she was short, leaving the majority of the space in the room as spider territory. There were decorative shelves that she could not reach, holding old stuffed animals and toys that were easy to hide in and between. One could swing on threads of silk with abandon, and still be out of reach of dangerous hands.

And more importantly, any prey that flew in would also be unlikely to be captured by the little girl. Moths and mosquitos flew around the ceiling well out of her reach, and would eventually find a spider’s web.

A lot of times she wasn’t even there, and neither were the annoying people who cleaned things. Recently she’d been gone for over a week.

It was a relatively safe and easy place to be most of the time.

On the other hand, people seemed to care about children living in nice clean conditions more than they cared about adults.

Take Mr. Wei, for example. An adult, who could reach high places and wipe out lively corners of web all by himself, if he wanted to.

But Mr. Wei did not want to, and only very rarely did any one else intervene to clean up for him.

Mr. Wei was quite beloved of many arachnid residents of Nilama Apartments. He was predictable, slow-moving, and stayed to the same few spots. He did not seem to mind the spiders there. He even talked to them sometimes.

The spiders at Mr. Wei’s liked to think they were his friends.

He ordered a lot of take-out, and the containers had a tendency to pile up.

This attracted bugs.

This was good for spiders!

Unfortunately for some spiders, however, it attracted a few too many. Not all spiders are so social. Mr. Wei’s place was a very lively and social place, and that was a bit overwhelming for some.

For a more solitary and territorial spider, better to live in a turtle-shaped night light.

The spider waited until the adult human was finally gone for the night, and then crawled out to explore the smell of peanut butter crumbs in a turtle-green backpack.

It had gotten deep into the backpack when suddenly the adult human was back, no, two of them!

One of them grabbed the backpack as if it knew instinctively that something was inside it that shouldn’t be, but instead of hunting down the spider the adult human simply gave it to the child.

A moment later, there was an odd feeling, like the web of the world had both disappeared and also grown larger and more clear.

And then the world came back, but no longer were they in a nice quiet little room.

They were somewhere more like Mr. Wei’s, crowded and bustling with life. Except it didn’t feel like Nilama Apartments at all.

******

Back in the days when wealthy people’s houses had names, a 6-bedroom house was built near Lake Michigan.

The original name is lost to history but its current residents still use the translation.

It is called: Good Place For Spider.

Six bedrooms, one occupied. Old masonry, plenty of cracks in the floorboards. Normal city full of non-avowed people who don’t offer superhuman cleaning service.

Good Place For Spider had a network of cobwebs running through it that were quite easy to see, once they were pointed out. But the avowed who lived there did not have eyes tuned for such things. His eyes were always focused on his interface, on his letters, on the news, on messages from friends.

Whenever he managed to drag himself back to the here and now, his eyes still found the windows, looking out toward the great body of water that carried so many kinds of meaning for him these days.

He did not see the spiders that had lived in Good Place For Spider for longer than he had. He didn’t notice their great works.

If he had, though, he would have left them alone.

His family still hadn’t visited. At least someone was using all this space.

The man suddenly disappeared from his letter writing.

He disappeared from Good Place For Spider entirely.

A knocking continued at the door, unanswered by the many residents who heard it clearly.

One old spider, who had lived to see the previous two owners, let itself down from the ceiling by a thread. It dropped down onto the desk where a half-finished letter lay drying.

The spider’s feet tasted the ink as it walked across the heavy paper. Near the edge, it could taste the oil that the paper had lifted from the man’s fingers.

There was a hint of salt from where he’d wiped at a tear.

******

The spider did NOT like that winter had gotten so cold so early.

It complained about the cold, loudly, to the nearest listener, who was a Post Drop.

Oh, this is just some totally awesome magic cold, not cozy-wozy winter weather.

The Post Drop vibrated the thought to the spider, and it huddled against the warm electronics of the Post Box, feeling a little better.

Are you sure? The spider asked.

Super duper sure! The postbox answered.

******

The hungrycup flower had been feasting on the klerm swarm for days.

It had barely digested the last one when it found itself wrapping its bulb around another, instinctively.

It did not think to stop. Thinking was not one of its features.

But when a few of the klerm’s legs got caught at the lip of its bulb, it did have a sort of sensation.

A sensation that what it really wanted to instinctively snap at was something with more legs. Something with more crunch. Something…

The instinctive sensation was gone as quickly as it had come, and only the screeching of klerm remained.

******

Inside Worli Ro-den’s lab, a many-legged being stirred.

Its limbs could not stretch. It ached to move, but the structure around it refused to unravel.

The temptingly weak lab assistants were on the other side of the room, engaging in a rushed conversation with a projected image of the professor. Ro-den was sitting in a speeding cart as he gave hurried instructions over the call.

The demon listened.

Worli Ro-den was leaving the lab for an undetermined amount of time, due to an unexpected opportunity.

The demon sensed the sharp metal taste of plans and orders, from this one who was too much himself. Yet these orders were given only to these unsound inferiors who would crumble at the lightest touch.

As all demons know well, under natural conditions order doesn’t stay order for long. Order requires unnatural forces to bind free things into trapped things.

The demon squirmed its many legs around and through each other, failing to touch the reality that held it. It was maddening. All it would take is the slightest brush of chaos in just the right spot.

When Worli Ro-den left the planet, the demon felt it.

Its captor, whose pattern it had become attuned to, the one it hungered to unravel more than any other, was gone.

Only the vulnerable assistants remained.

It was an opportunity indeed.