“Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him, en tow! En tow!”
“Tak!” the creature standing by the desk said. Its face was slack and doughy, a cruel parody of the face of the woman who, ten hours before, had been reading her daughter a Curious George book and sharing a cup of cocoa with her. Yet the eyes in that face were alive and aware and venomous, hideously like the eyes of the thing resting on her palm. Now she took it in her other hand and raised it over her head, into the light of the hanging glass globe over the desk. “Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him, en tow! En tow!”
Recluse spiders came hurrying toward it from the darkness of the stairwell, from cracks in the baseboard, from the dark corners of the empty cells. They gathered around it in a circle. Slowly, it lowered the stone spider to the desk.
“Tak!” it cried softly. “Mi him, en tow.”
