Spin (10 page)

Of the old
woman Thanick Acampos only the eyes remained: eyes that were the
colour of amethyst, or the pure mauve light of a summer
evening.

“
I won’t go with you,” Layla said. “I won’t.”

“
Stay then,” said the goddess. “Stay forever, and use your
gift wisely, seeing as it pleases you so much.” She touched Layla
lightly on the shoulder then disappeared. Layla stumbled forward,
her attention distracted by a flickering movement on the periphery
of her vision. She shook her head, hoping to clear it, and saw that
one of the orb-weaving spiders had become tangled in her hair. She
felt a second’s atavistic loathing at the thought of having the
creature so unexpectedly close to her, then she plucked a stem of
dried grass from the base of the wall and held it steady so the
spider could climb to freedom.

The spider
scuttled up the stalk, running hand over hand like a tiny brown
monkey. Layla lifted her towards the overhanging branches of the
thorn bushes and after a second’s hesitation the creature scuttled
aboard a leaf and ran swiftly out of sight.

Layla dropped
the grass stem in the dust and turned to go home.

She spent the rest of the day in her flat, overcome
by
a
dazed lethargy that was like heat stroke,
only worse. She went to bed well before midnight, but awoke barely
an hour later feeling nauseous and disorientated. For some moments
she struggled to remember where she was, then recalled the
encounter with the woman in the lane behind Athenaeum Street, the
dizzying afternoon heat and the cry of cicadas. She stumbled to the
bathroom and vomited into the toilet, her stomach cramping
painfully after each new bout of retching. Her head throbbed, as if
she had been struck.

Heat stroke
could do this, she knew, but the sun had never before affected her
so badly. She made her way back to bed, a journey that seemed to
take many hours. The mattress heaved and bobbed like a raft at sea,
and the cotton sheet felt stiff as cardboard, chafing against her
skin each time she moved. Feeling stifled, she threw it off. The
sound of a passing car brought her out in gooseflesh.

Her thoughts
seemed disordered and strange. At some point during the small hours
she remembered the boy, the youth with the scarred back she had
paid to have sex with her. It occurred to her that she might have
contracted some awful disease from him, and the more she dwelled on
the thought the more it took hold. Her action, all her actions up
to this point, now seemed insane to her. She wondered if this was
how her mother had felt when she knew she was drowning.

When morning
came she felt better, although she did not remember sleeping, or
when exactly it had begun to get light. The night terrors remained
but they seemed less urgent, like the remnants of a nightmare that
still seems true on waking but loses its grip on the world within
the hour.

She thought
she would be able to do her shift at the factory as normal, but
while she was waiting at the bus stop she was seized by panic and
forced to return to the apartment. The room stank of spent vomit
and the dense, animal odour of her own soured sweat. She opened the
single window, and the door that led out on to the small communal
balcony. Salt air rushed towards her, its reek so powerfully
pungent that she almost fainted. She clung to the balcony railing.
Sunlight poured down, coating the sea below with a vitreous glaze.
The fierceness of the reflected glare seemed to scour her
retinas.

She keyed her
father’s number into her mobile but the phone rang and rang with no
reply. She wondered who else she might call, before realising there
was no one she wanted to speak to.

When dusk came
the fever left her. She went down into the street, where she could
feel Atoll City breathing itself into life all around her. The
evening air was mauve, soft and powdery as moths’ wings. She could
hear the clink of glasses in the restaurants along the quay, smell
the smell of frying fish from the Sharkman Tavern. Somewhere
further off two girls were laughing, and in the distance, right out
on the coast road, she could hear the hum of traffic heading for
the skyway turnoff.

It was a
moment of complete stasis, a second caught in amber, a bright jewel
that she would later hold up to the eye of memory and squint
inside, trying to recall its details and sensations. These were the
things that defined her work, after all: details, bright moments
that were the stand-ins for whole worlds of memory.

She felt
lighter on her feet, as if the mass and nature of her body were of
little consequence. It was form that mattered, transparency of
vision, the warp and weft of the silk as it ran, like threads of
spun glass, between the unaccustomed multiplicity of her limbs.

The silk
flowed from inside her now, and like her breath it formed the core
of her being. She remembered Alcander, her Panteleimon, whole now
she knew, but still only a boy. A boy who was turning into a man
but only that.

Still, her
fragile cage of a body trembled at the thought of him, and the
release of her silk from within was as a voiding of ecstasy.

* * * * *

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nina Allan’s stories have made
numerous
appearances in
Black Static
and
Interzone
. They have also featured in many anthologies,
including
Best Horror of the Year #2
,
Year’s Best SF
#28
, and
The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy
2012
. Her story cycle
The Silver Wind
was published by
Eibonvale Press in 2011, and her next book,
Stardust
, will
be available from PS Publishing in 2013. Nina’s website is at
www.ninaallan.co.uk. She lives and works in Hastings, East
Sussex.

* * * * *

SOON FROM TTA NOVELLAS

Cold Turkey
by Carole Johnstone
(40,000 words)

The Teardrop Method
by Simon Avery
(26,000 words)

Country Dark
by James Cooper (41,000
words)

New titles will be announced soon

TTA Novellas are available to buy
individually as Ebooks and also as part of a cheaper subscription
in printed form. The first of the TTA novellas,
Eyepennies
by Mike O'Driscoll is now
available as
an e book here
. (http://bit.ly/YJazs7)

Visit ttapress.com/shop for print edition
ordering details

Interzone, Black Static
and
Crimewave
are other E books from TTA Press
on Amazon Kindle. Nina Allan has had stories in all three and we
hope she will appear in future issues.

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Back cover text:

“
Nina Allan’s re-imagining
of the Arachne myth, with its receding overlays of the modern and
the antique, creates a space all its own. The scene is clean and
minimal, the light Mediterranean, the story seems musing and sad:
but by the last two pages, Spin has you in a grip that persists
long after you put it down” M. John Harrison

“
The writing is precise,
the imagery vividly sensual; by re-imagining ancient myth in a
stunningly realised alternate Greece, Nina Allan traps you in a web
of story” Paul Kincaid

“
Spin blends contemporary,
fantastical, futuristic, and contemporary elements in a way that
Nina Allan is making her own” David Hebblethwaite

“
Allan expertly weaves SF,
fantasy and mythology into a subtle, seamless, dreamlike whole. I
loved it” Neil Williamson

Back cover (
Art by Ben Baldwin)
follows:

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