Spider Girl

Начало книги

Alone in the cellar of a derelict apartment building in New York’s East Village, Sarah Jordan watched a spider on a web. It had not moved in twenty minutes. Nor had Sarah. She had waited. Her eyes had adjusted to the faint light provided by a flashlight with a red bulb.

The male spider ventured a foreleg toward the next strand. Sarah kept as motionless as the female waiting in the crevice between two bricks where the web was anchored. The ritual had resumed.

The male’s approach is infinitely cautious. He negotiates the web in a series of delicate movements and spins a special thread on which to coax the tenant female. He telegraphs his presence by tapping the signal thread that leads to her lair. She studies the vibrations. One fault in the rhythm, one spasm of panic, and she reacts as if he is prey, she kills him savagely.

Sarah, twenty-three, wore cord pants, two double-knit sweaters, and a leather jacket for this. The dirt and darkness of the cellar did not trouble her. She combated the cold with layers of clothes, things more practical than pretty, thermal underclothes, and woolen socks that reached her thighs. She kept her red-gold hair tied in a brown silk scarf her father had thrown out three years ago. He did not know she had hooked it out of the plastic Salvation Army sack. Probably he would not notice if he saw her wearing it. In Queens last summer he had passed her on the street. She had shouted after him, and he had continued walking as if she were some streetwalker calling him Daddy out of malice.

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