Tabitha (3 page)

Tabitha decided
to start a blog today; an old some-day fantasy to launch her to fame and
fortune. She read lots of other bloggers who’d done it; self-made experts in
whatever subject they liked. She could be a movie blogger; maybe even the
biggest in Wales. Certainly the only one in this town, so that was a start. She
pictured having free movies to review; paid ads on her website. She’d never
need a day job again. She had it all planned out; all she had to do now was
work her arse off. So there she sat by her computer, by the whistling window of
her top-floor study, overlooking the grey summer sea. She sipped her tea.
Scalded her tongue. She'd given up smoking, but still held her pen like a
cigarette. She caught herself, then placed the surrogate cigarette back on the
desk. A nicotine-starved synapse made her eyelid shudder. Mog leapt up and
strutted across the keyboard. He walked past her to sit on the far side of the
desk, and licked his paws with noisy rasps. Tabitha stared at Mog’s writing on
the screen:

.;
iudxs
z\

Tabitha tapped
the Caps Lock off again and slouched with a huff. It was 11:04. The internet
had eaten her morning. It’d be high time for a cake or a donut if she still had
a job. She put that massive, crushing thought from her mind with a shake of her
head. She looked back up at the computer screen, at the text in its entirety:

It’s

.;
iudxs
z\

She’d started this
new document when the sun was rising over the sea. She’d seen a scatter of
dandelion seeds drift by in the warm summer air; felt inspired and began to
write. Hours later, she’d just watched her cat casually beat her word count.
The sunshine had long since faded to grey rainclouds. Tabitha sat back and
lifted the mug of steaming tea to her mouth again, forgetting her sore tongue.
She burned her lip, cursed. A falling trickle of tea pattered down and turned
the crotch of her grey jogging bottoms into a hot black piss patch. Then came
another power cut. Mains electricity had never met with the full approval of
this old house. The computer's gentle fan died. The screen faded to black with
a helpless
tut.
Her morning's work, unsaved, was gone forever. That could
have been the
It’s
to start an internet sensation, she told herself. The
greatest blog in the world. Once again cruel fate had conspired to thwart her
chances of fame and fortune. Tabitha saw her grim hedge-haired reflection in
the black computer screen. She couldn’t hear the birds singing any more
outside. Rain blew in from the sea. She stood up and pushed the chair away with
her bum, and pulled the old window back down an inch to close off the cold
whistling gap. She blew on a stray dandelion seed on the window sill, and
watched it sail up towards the ceiling. She glanced out of the window as
raindrops plinked and pattered on the glass. Wished for a decent summer. With
shuffling
slippered
feet she carefully carted her mug
of tea downstairs. Mog tried to get under her feet every step of the way.

‘Why
are you purring?’ she asked him, as they went down the second creaky staircase
together. She had to stop and start, sidestepping him, trying not to stand on a
paw in the gloom. The lights in the house flickered and came back on.

The
salty scent of bacon filled the kitchen, filled the house. Both well-fed and
sleepy, Mog and his human snoozed on the couch to the gentle patter of the
pouring rain. Meanwhile, up in the study, the dandelion seed was moving. It had
long since floated down when Tabitha blew on it, and now it bobbed along the
carpet to a damp mouldy corner of the room. Tabitha hadn’t noticed how silvery
the seed looked. She hadn’t seen its tiny legs, no bigger than a mite’s,
wriggling for something to root in. The seed burrowed down into the damp carpet
in the corner. With the quietest electronic
chirrup
, a tiny grey shoot
sprouted from the floor. The sound was just enough to wake Mog, ears raised. As
he jumped down from Tabitha's stomach she woke up with a gentle grunt.

All afternoon
the metallic shoot took in the sunlight that emerged from the grey clouds. It
produced pulsing little lights on tiny fibrous branches. Its presence being
neither intriguing nor frustrating to Mog, it had been sniffed and left
unharmed. Tabitha didn’t see it; she was too busy trying to write her blog. She
didn’t notice its rapid alien growth in the back corner of the room. She tried
her best never to look in that corner. It was a useless cobwebbed space where
the angled ceiling sloped in, too damp and mouldy to leave a box or a bag
there. Too disgusting to clean. If she never looked there, she’d never feel
guilty enough to clean it. She sipped fresh tea and watched the sunlight sprawl
over the ocean; a grey-brown eternity beyond the road outside her window. The
computer speakers gushed shameless pop into the room, making Tabitha tap her
toes to the beat. A seagull flew by outside with a whooping call, laughing at
Tabitha’s joblessness. She slouched there all afternoon, staring at the bright
glow of her blank-paged computer screen. Typing. Deleting. Repeating.

A house spider,
meanwhile, spent all afternoon in the bathroom. It was scaling the inside of
the grand old bathtub by frantically picking out, with trial and much error,
the rougher patches of the worn enamel surface. By sundown its legs tapped
against the rim of the bath.
A seagull sat on the weathered old metal railing on the seafront. Behind it,
across the road, a light in the top window of a town house glowed warmly in the
gathering dusk. Inside, a crazy-haired lady sat at her computer with her head
in her hands. She heard a couple on the street below, fighting and screaming,
probably drunk. She lost her train of thought. Thankfully they went on down the
street, giving Tabitha back her beloved silence. In the musty bathroom Mog
stared momentarily at a fresh hairball, and pawed the spider as it scuttled
across the rim of the bath. The spider fell to the floor, and quickly curled up
to receive a cat-batting around the lino. Caught and briefly mangled in the
dribbling depth of Mog’s mouth, the spider was coughed out to die in a corner.

Up the second
staircase in her study, Tabitha suddenly sat up and tapped away at her
computer:

The true value of films lies in

Hesitating, she
slumped back in her chair with a huff of defeat. Futility draped itself around
her shoulders, as cold and comfortless as a damp shawl with a charity-shop
smell. Mog wandered into the room unnoticed. He puffed up in fright at the
thing in the back corner and made a swift exit. Where a small grey shoot had
sprung up from the carpet this morning there was now an alien plant, two feet
across, sitting spidery and silver in the shadowed corner of the room. Opening
its mouth parts, out slid a sinewy, synthetic snake of a tongue. Tabitha was
checking her messages, unaware. The tongue stretched out silently across the
room. It edged towards the back of Tabitha’s head while she sat staring at her
screen. A big bony needle on the tip was filling with venom for the kill.
Slouching in her chair, Tabitha typed something and then deleted it again. The
tongue stretched and swayed behind her, serpentine, aiming for the top of her
neck. It tensed up, coiled back, and shot out silently. Tabitha kicked the
chair back and walked out in search of her vibrator, yawning like a foghorn.
Unsuccessful, the silver plant tried to wrench its spiked tongue quietly from
the back of the chair. Mog came back in and watched it cautiously from the
door. Once free of the chair, the plant swallowed its tongue back inside. Its
body sagged with
newborn
exhaustion, and splayed out
metallic branches to absorb the growing moonlight. Its tiny lights flickered
out while it recharged, and it sat completely still. Mog stalked around it,
approached it. He gave it a careful sniff here and there, and batted it with a
paw. The silver plant did nothing. It was too hard for Mog to pluck or chew,
and smelled of not very much, so it held very little interest just now. Mog
gave up his inspection and resolved to play with the plant’s wriggling limb in
the future, when the opportunity presented itself.

Tabitha slept peacefully that night in
her double bed. She was sprawled out with newfound freedom; no longer kicked or
groped by a snoring boyfriend. Her soles stroked the bobbly feel of clean
sheets. The homely perfume of good washing powder filled her head and tinted
her dreams. Down the street, Mog strode along a garden wall and thought about
sex. In Tabitha’s bathroom a silverfish tapped the house spider's hunched
corpse with its antennae. In the study, the alien plant woke up in the corner.
It folded its branches down into spider legs, and uprooted itself from the
floorboards with a rustling creak. It scuttled its sleek form down the stairs
to the large landing, sniffing out prey. Tabitha’s closed bedroom door thwarted
it. It scrambled gently, soundlessly against the door for hours while Tabitha
slept. The tall gap beneath the solid door could accommodate its skinny young
limbs, but they flapped around redundantly and soon withdrew. Tabitha turned
over and began to snore, blissfully unaware. Her ugly old piggy bank watched
over her from the shelf beside the bed;
perma
-grinned
porcelain, glowing night-blue in the curtained moonlight. The silver alien
spider slinked downstairs to explore the distant drone of the fridge.

Sunrise over the sea front. The seagulls
were calling already. Mog sat on the living room window sill and watched them
keenly, making short sharp meows. His head darted back and forth to follow their
flight. His pinprick pupils stared in the bright dawn. Tabitha, fresh from the
shower and towel-clad, padded barefoot into the kitchen. She rustled cereal
into a bowl and caught a waft of it, sugar-sweet. Water dripped from her hair
onto the worktop; glassy splashes exploding in slow-motion. Cold milk crackled
on her cereal, a silky white gush. She smoothed her wet hair over her shoulder
and dusted her cereal with extra sugar, then flicked the kettle on and leant
against the worktop while it boiled. She leaned over and plucked a clinking cup
from the hooks. Took a clattering teaspoon from the drawer in front of her and
put it in the cup. The silver spider untucked its legs and crawled silently
from the cupboard behind her. Soundlessly it crept across the wall, and
squatted its arachnid mass on the ceiling over her head. Small lights on its
body focussed their attention on the top of her wet neck. Its spiked tongue
slid out from its parting mouth, a shining trunk slick with mucus. Silently the
giant spider shifted its clawed feet around on the ceiling for the best
position. It moved one leg, then another, then another. Soft as petals it
lowered two clawed legs to join its tongue, ready to grip Tabitha’s temples
before it punctured the base of her skull. Tabitha waited for the kettle and
stared at the floor in a bleary-eyed haze, oblivious. She wiggled a finger in
her ear with a wet rattling squelch to loosen the water that welled there. The
kettle boiled. Steam rolled up against the cupboards and clouded the cold metal
arms that descended, inch by inch. Condensation gathered on the lowering spike
and turned to droplets. Propped against the kitchen counter, Tabitha put a
spoonful of sugary cereal in her mouth with a cold crunch and munched it
loudly. A bead of moisture rolled down the alien tongue, dripped from the bony
spike and landed on the back of Tabitha’s neck. She scratched idly where the
drop fell and crunched another mouthful of cereal, turning to look out of the
window at the greying sky. She
tutted
at the weather.
The giant spider hesitated at the sound. Mog jumped up on the worktop behind
Tabitha, stood up on his back legs against the cupboard and pawed the alien
tongue playfully. His swishing tail caught the teaspoon with a
tinkle
in Tabitha’s empty cup. Tabitha turned at the sound.

‘Mog, get down,’
she said. Then she saw the bony spike above her head. She looked up at the
silver spider on the ceiling. She didn’t gasp or scream. She felt her insides
twist for a second in primal fear, and ducked down from the jabbing spike. Then
she ran. The spider dropped and scuttled after her, inches from her heels. Mog
streaked past her upstairs and into the bedroom. Tabitha sprinted in after him.
She tried to slam the solid old door behind her, trapping the spider’s tongue
in the doorframe as it shot towards her knee. The rubbery limb stopped the door
from closing. A pair of spindly silver legs edged in through the gap around the
door, waving in the air to find her. The thick tongue withdrew then, and
Tabitha saw her chance. It took all of her strength to bang the door shut on
the spindly legs. They curled, frayed and lifeless, on her side of the door.
With terrifying strength the spider tried to wrench its dead metal limbs free
from the doorframe. The door shuddered loudly on its hinges. Tabitha's shaking
hands snapped the lock shut on the door handle. Her heart was hammering; the
metal taste of fear filled her dry mouth. Her thoughtless panic gave way to
terrified confusion. She searched her head for some kind of meaning, some kind
of plan. Mog stared hunched and saucer-eyed from the top of the wardrobe in the
corner. Silver legs whipped frantically through the gap under the door. Tabitha
backed up to the bed out of their way. Getting nothing from her phone but white
noise, Tabitha slammed it down on the bedside table. So it was just her, then.
Just her and death at the door, sudden and inexplicable. She was balled up on
the bed, half tempted to hide under the covers like a screaming cliché. The
monster wasn’t going anywhere though. The door was taking a beating, and she
heard it crack on the other side. This was her only chance to stop it, whatever
the hell it was, while the door still stood between them. Tabitha gritted her
teeth and switched her brain back on. What would her movie heroes do? She
willed her hands to stop shaking, and she put some clothes on. New t-shirt, old
jeans. In her own good time. Meanwhile the thing scrabbled relentlessly against
the door. Made spaghetti of the nice new carpet in a hail of fluff. Tabitha
searched the bedroom for weapons, but saw nothing. Coat hangers, lamp,
hairdryer. TV, shoes. She glanced over at the electrical socket beside the
door.