The Adventures of Sheila the Spider

While Sheila and her parents were sound asleep, the great wooden door of the house was unexpectedly wrenched open. For the first time in years, piercing light poured in, and a gust of wind shifted the dust on the grimy door. And in came the humans! A whole family of them. They came in carrying boxes and crates, dishes and plates, buckets and mops, and faces that said, ‘this is our place.’ They were moving in, reclaiming the house for themselves. Sheila surfaced from a dream. She had sensed something strange in the air, and felt a draught as if it were coming from the great front door itself. Sheila immediately dismissed the idea as impossible, “the front door hasn’t been opened in living memory,” she said to herself. “I must have been having a nightmare…” And with that Sheila settled down and soon dozed off, smiling to herself as she thought of the wonderful house where she and her parents lived. They did not live in the whole house, of course. It was far too large for one family. Sheila’s family lived in a hidden corner of the living room, the rest they shared with a very large number of friends and fellow small creatures. To Sheila the house was perfect. It was paradise. It was safe. It was home. And she loved it. The humans had seemingly abandoned the house to them all, and had gone away for good, a long time ago. So since then, the house had slowly sunk into the silence of plenty and the quiet of security. For there was no dusting, nor cleaning, no hoovers nor sprays, just good honest dust and lots of rich dirt. Sheila turned in her sleep. She felt the draught again. It was worse this time. It seemed to cut right through her. What could it be? What could it mean? Sheila dozed uneasily, not quite able to rid herself of an odd feeling that something was wrong. When she eventually did fall back to sleep this time, she was unable to shrug off or shift a looming sense of foreboding, which for some curious reason twisted itself into a nightmare, a nightmare about humans. Though Sheila had never in her short life come face to face with a human, she had certainly been warned often enough about them. Sheila had even had nightmares when she was very tiny because her parents had told her some scary stories about some of the disgusting things humans did to spiders. The very word, ‘human’, struck panic into most hearts. Neither Sheila, nor her parents, were yet aware that the Jones’ had moved in. But the Jones’ knew at once who it was who had to move out!