Medusa's Web by Tim Powers Page A

anachronistic compound—“I think Scott and Madeline may very well have looked at it. I remember that they were both very sick, with characteristic symptoms, on the day my mother got the collection back.”
    In a small voice Ariel asked, “So is it . . . special, that one?”
    Claimayne’s laugh seemed forced. “One spider to rule them all, one spider to bind them,” he said lightly. “And I believe this may be a detoxified version of it, of the Medusa, who ordinarily turns her viewers to stone.” He had found a handkerchief among the bedclothes and now dabbed ineffectually at the wine stains on the lapel of his dressing gown. “Not literal stone, you understand—just something like a total nervous-system seizure and death, from helplessly performing a million actions at once.”
    Ariel frowned and shook her head. “And all this Medusa spider business makes an old car show up in the driveway?”
    â€œOh, Ariel. What happens—sometimes!—when you look at a spider on Monday and then somebody else looks at it on Friday?” She rolled her eyes impatiently, but he persisted, “Go on, what happens?”
    â€œYou overlap with each other for a minute or so. You’re in his body on Friday, and he’s in yours on Monday. If you’re lucky, you can act, do stuff, in his body.”
    â€œDo you know why?” When Ariel shrugged, he went on, “It’s because the spider you both looked at, or which you yourself looked at both times, doesn’t see those two times as two times. Nor as two places. To the spider, it’s one event.”
    Ariel shuddered, remembering that she had looked at one just yesterday, and in fact had yet to do the “after” by looking at it again two days from now.
    â€œYou make it sound as if they’re alive, ” she said.
    Claimayne was staring at her. “Amateur!” he said with a smile. “Dilettante! How long were you a steady user? You must have sometimes sensed that they’re . . . something like alive.”
    She shook her head, frowning, and whispered, “I don’t know.”
    â€œWe’re three-dimensional creatures—four, really, since we extend in the fourth dimension, too, which is time. The spiders exist in a different sort of universe. They’re two-dimensional, appearing motionless to us but perpetually spinning in their own frame of reference, and probably entirely unaware of us, even when we spike one into our universe by providing it with a reciprocal image of itself, inverted and reversed, on our retinas.”
    â€œAnd so I see old cars.”
    â€œAll right,” he said gently. “All right. Somebody—was it Woody Allen?—said that time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. Well, you and me, and my mother, and Art and Irina, probably, and even their two bungling curiosi children, all of us have so often used the spiders to make separate moments combine, in this house—made an hour of one day also be an hour of a later day—that time is breaking down, here, everything is beginning to happen at once. And so 1920 or ’50 or ’70 leaks into 2015 sometimes, even if no spider is being quickened in either time at that moment.”
    Ariel nodded dubiously. “Like a cabinet door that’s been opened and slammed too many times, and now it swings open all by itself, even when nobody touches the knob.”
    â€œIf you like. That old car you saw was visible for a minute or so here—I expect it was brand-new when you saw it—and I imagine some residents of this house in the old days were sometimes startled to see a Honda or a Prius parked out there, or to hear a Beatles song echoing out of the house. We’ve bored so many holes through the timeline of this house and grounds that it’s like a load-bearing wall riddled by termites.” He smiled. “And I think our foster