Un Lun Dun

“It’ll do,” Deeba had said. “They won’t have seen nothing like it before.”

The bait swung below them, in the darkness of the web. A long time passed.

Every time a spider-window approached, Deeba gazed into its glass. There was one that contained nothing, one with a room full of lamps. When a third came close, Deeba squinted, and felt Jones’s hand close around her mouth to stop her screaming.

Hammering on the inside of the glass as the Black Window rose was a gaunt, exhausted woman. She was thin, her hair was wild and dry, her eyes staring. She stared straight at Deeba and Hemi as the window passed.

The light was waning.

“It’s evening,” Deeba whispered. “Maybe this isn’t working.”

“Maybe it’ll help,” said Hemi. “It’ll stand out more.”

He shone his flashlight on it, and Jones swung their clumsy window from side to side. Its limbs waggled. Deeba saw several of the Black Windows stop moving, then, to her simultaneous triumph and horror, pick their way towards them.

“Here they come,” whispered Hemi.

From the shadows in the rear of the hall, a window came fast.

“We’ve got something’s attention,” whispered Jones.

The Black Window ran with its u

The window hung, its legs wide. Through its glass, Deeba could see a weak electric bulb, the gray of a little room, and attached to a wall opposite, a huge, antique revolver.

“That’s it!” She grabbed Jones’s hand. “It’s the one with the UnGun in it! It’s come to check out its double. Never seen another with a pistol in it.”

The Black Window moved in agitation. Jones swung the bait gently, making its legs rattle. Other spider-windows watched and drummed their limbs.

“Is it angry, or flirting?” whispered Hemi.

“I du

Deeba took hold of the rope that led out of the tu

The bait twitched and jiggled. Don’t look too close, Deeba thought. But the soldering-iron-and-pipe gun they’d rigged up seemed enough to fool the agitated Black Window. It drew back its limbs, paused, then pounced.

It gripped the dangling fake window.

“Now!” shouted Deeba, and Jones pulled hard on the second cord, as Obaday Fing had shown him. The loops Fing had woven around the bait all tightened together. It was beautifully precise. The thick silk bonds clamped firmly, and pi

Instantly, everything went mad.

The captured window yanked its body, swinging at the end of the tether, trying to pull free. Jones staggered, was almost hauled off the little ledge.

All the other Black Windows began to run towards them.

“Quick!” yelled Deeba. “Help!”

Hemi pulled frantically at the rope, several quick tugs. “Anything more than four,” they’d told Skool, “means pull.”

There were agonizing seconds of delay. Then the rope was hauled back hard, and the captured Black Window began to rise.

Deeba, Hemi, and Jones clambered as fast as they could up the slope of the tu

Black Windows followed them into the fu

They came spilling out of Webminster Abbey, to where Skool hauled, and Obaday, the utterlings, and the bishops waited anxiously. The Black Window they had snared skidded out, shaking furiously in its bonds, tied to the now distinctly unimpressive-looking fake. Curdle circled it, emitting aggressive puffs of air.

“We’re okay!” said Deeba. “Don’t let go of it!”

Giant wooden spiders’ legs poked aggressively out of the hole, looking for prey, but the windows wouldn’t come out of the abbey. None except the one that they had caught.

75. The Room Nowhere

“It’s really not happy, is it?” said Obaday Fing.

It was early night, and the stars moved above them. Deeba and her companions examined their captive in the almost-full loon, and the faint glow from windows at the edges of the square. The cobweb curves of the huge abbey moved gently in the wind.

“I simply can’t believe it,” said Bishop Bon.

“I’m terribly impressed,” said Bastor.

The window rattled and shook, still pi

“Let’s get on with it,” Jones said. “This bloody thing’s strong.”

They looked down through the glass.

In the room behind the window, the bulb dangled horizontally, and the wall the pistol was attached to looked like a floor below them. Next to it was a closed wooden door. It was only about six feet away.

“So that’s the UnGun,” said Hemi.

It was a very big, heavy revolver, like the ones Deeba had seen in cowboy films. She leaned close to the glass, and the window opened and slammed like teeth. They all jumped back.

“Right, so we get a rope with a hook, and we dangle it inside, and grab it,” said Obaday.

Hemi wedged a hefty plank of wood in the window’s opening, to its obvious fury. Its snared legs were twitching. Skool struggled to hold it.

“Come on!” said Jones.

“Here we are, here we are,” said Obaday. But when he dangled a hook of bent piping on his spider-silk rope through the open window on the pavement, something strange happened. As soon as the rope passed through the window’s opening, it immediately changed direction, and fell sideways.

Obaday stood with a rather stupid expression on his face. The rope dangled in an L-shape, down to the window, then inside at a right angle.

“It’s ’cause down’s a different direction there,” Deeba said. “That’s not a floor below us, it’s a wall. We need something stiff.”

They tried with the bishop’s staffs, but they couldn’t reach the UnGun.

“Whatever you’re going to do,” said Jones, watching Skool struggle, “may I ask you to speed up?” Deeba heard creaking from the wood keeping the Black Window open.

Everyone looked at each other.

“I knew it,” Deeba said, and before she had time to reconsider, she sighed and stepped into the open window.

Deeba heard her friends’ appalled shrieks as she slipped through.

She experienced a very peculiar fall, changing direction beyond the glass. She twisted, and rolled on the floor of the little room.

“Deeba!” she heard. “Get out of there!”

She looked out the window at her friends. They were looking down at her, from her angle seeming to jut straight out of a wall beyond the glass. Hemi was reaching urgently through the window.

“One second,” she said.

Opposite her on the wall was the UnGun.

Deeba walked across the concrete floor, her friends urging her to hurry. She felt u

When she closed her hand around the wooden grip of the UnGun on the wall, she braced herself, expecting to be hardly able to pick it up. She lifted it.

It was lighter than she had expected. She hefted it in her hand, examined it.