The Spider Monarch: Discovery
She didn’t stop running until they had reached her house a mile away from the old mansion. The street was hard to run on and Todd’s knees were starting to protest, but he followed Dee until he caught up to her. The color had returned to Dee’s cheeks and her pace had slowed down so that Todd was leading the way by the time her house had come into view. He stopped on her porch and waited while she jogged up the driveway and let him in.
“Would you like some water?” she panted once she had kicked her shoes off. Todd nodded and Dee bustled off to the kitchen to fill two glasses.
Todd sat down on the floor and put the two books the creature had given him on the coffee table in front of the couch. He opened the photo album slowly. The binding cracked gently in protest as he flipped through the dusty pages of black and white photographs. Wedding pictures, baby pictures, graduation…all of the expected family photographs in neat little rows with handsome smiling people dressed in their best.
“What’s that?” Dee asked bringing in the water and setting it gently down on the table.
“The photo album it gave me.”
“Oh,” she said. “Anything interesting?”
“Not really, no.” He flipped another page open.
“Wait a minute…who’s that?” Dee pointed her finger to a page of girl in a white graduation gown surrounded by her family.
“Probably their daughter.”
“But she has black hair and the rest of the family is blond.”
“Black hair could be a recessive trait; it’s not impossible.”
“Well, it’s highly improbable.”
“Well who do you think she is?”
“I don’t know, Todd, you were the one who decided to talk to it.”
Todd stared at the picture a little longer. She certainly fit in, but her hair was much to dark and her facial structure a bit too pronounced to be part of the family. He flipped the page to more wedding pictures.
“Have you seen her in any other pictures?” Dee asked.
“I don’t think so.” He flipped the page again.
“Maybe we should pull it out and check the back.”
Todd gave her a horrified look. “Are you nuts? This book looks like it’s a 100 years old! There’s no way I’m destroying it.”
“Fine,” Dee said. “But I think it would help.”
Todd moved back two pages and stared at the photo again. “What if there’s nothing on the back?”
“There is,” Dee moved down to sit next to him. “Look at the ridges in the corner. Someone wrote something.”
She slid her finger gracefully under the photo and gently pulled upward against the old glue. She flipped over the picture and dusted off the yellow particles of dust from the back.
“Arachne Serina Belleville at her high school graduation with (from right to left), John B., Sarah B., Margo B., George B., and Jane B.”
“Seems like the perfect family.”
“With Arachne as the black sheep. And that’s interesting because Arachne was the Greek woman who bested Athena in a weaving contest and was then turned into a spider.”
Dee flipped through the photo album excitedly. “And that’s the first and last picture of her in this whole book. I wonder why.”
Todd pulled the encyclopedia towards him and flipped it open. He flipped through pages of pictures before setting his finger on an entry. “See ‘Spider Monarch,’” he said under his breath as he flipped the pages towards the letter “S.”
"What are you doing?" Dee asked looking over his shoulder at the encyclopedia.
"Looking up Arachne," he answered.
"Why would you do that?" she laughed.
Todd shrugged. "Well it’s in here."
“The Spider Monarch,” he read aloud once he had gotten to the page, while Dee was busy flipping through the photo album a second time. “While the origins of this creature are unknown, first records of something like the Spider Monarch were dated from 800 BCE in Alexandria. A legend had formed around a creature similar to a centaur, with the body of a spider and torso of a woman. This creature became Hades’ queen after Persephone decided to save Sisyphus from his unending fate in the underworld. The record was destroyed in the fire that burned the Great Library, but the story had been passed down the generations until it was recorded again and kept in the National Library of Greece. The closest that any creature has come to this anomaly would be the Spider Monarch, first discovered in Norway in 1763.”
“Norway? That seems like a long way to travel.”
“But this might not be it.”
“Well, please continue.”
“The Spider Monarch comes from an egg sack, like any spider, and is usually found in the corner of a closet. Explorers from Norway brought the first egg sack over to England as a present to the queen. Not knowing what it was, the queen saw no reason to publicize the gift. It is highly believed that she kept it with the church and an egg sack was taken to the English Colonies shortly before the American Revolution. The last egg sack location recorded was in New York, 1890.”
“That’s still a long way to travel.”
“A young spider monarch has a similar life cycle of a human being and grows up to be one until age 100 of its life. For its continuing lifetime, the Spider Monarch changes into a normal spider. By the time it is 500 years old, it has lost all of its previous memories as a human and between ages 550 and 600, it finds an arachnid mate. It dies, like a normal spider, around 600 years at which point it has deposited its egg sack into a nearby closet. Nothing is known how the spider knows where to lay its eggs, but once the spider has died, the egg sack swells become the size of a modern basketball. The protective silk hatches once it has been bathed in sunlight for three days.
“Not much else is known about the Spider Monarch. Scientists are still speculating about how it chooses its migratory path, but evidence is strongest that they follow their migration in their human years prior to becoming a spider. Most Spider Monarchs do not stay in the same spot, nor do they like light as they are changing form.
“The most curious thing is its identification. As the Spider Monarch grows, it chooses either Arachne, if it is female, or Icarus, if male. Male Spider Monarchs always become female spiders, though the opposite sex as humans. It is unclear how they know their names, or how the adoptive families know their names, but every Spider Monarch ever studied has had either name, according to gender of their human bodies.
“There is a small body of scientists working underground in Greece on the history of the creature and its nature.”
“So we think this is a Spider Monarch,” Dee said putting down the photo album.
“I think that’s a valid guess.”
“So what do we do about it?”
“Do you want me to read the section on Care and Management?”
“Don’t be silly, Todd,” Dee said getting up from the couch and taking her water glass into the kitchen. “What are we supposed to do about it?”
“Maybe it’s a curse…maybe we should help her be human again.”
“And how are we supposed to do that?”
Todd shrugged. “Teach her to read?"
