Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Annabelle admires the hole in the side of her head in the mirror on the ceiling of the elevator.

People typically didn’t notice it. The white cobwebs tend to blend in with the bleach blond of her tight curls at a glance, and the strands of the web could pull ones eyes away if one was tempted to take more than a glance. Those with whom she managed extended visual contact usually decided it was a tattoo or a scar. That’s easier than deciding the person you are talking to has a hole in the side of their head, and that the hole is full of cobwebs. Sometimes, she covers the hole with a hood, to avoid it becoming a distraction at all.

Truth be told, Annabelle likes it. The hole shows what she has become, she truly is, inside and out. What she was meant to be. The fact that the truth of the hole makes people uncomfortable is another advantage in her eyes. Uncomfortable truths make others avert their eyes. Perceptions of weakness alter the judgments others make. Putting people on edge keeps them from noticing other things about her. In the end, it’s another axis of control. Annabelle likes those. She’ll take as many as she can get.

She runs her spindly fingers around the edges of the hole, briefly brushing the edges of the cobwebs that lie within. The resulting tiny vibration goes through her head first, then echoes through the rest of her body, and then she can feel it traveling beyond her, out into the threads that tie her to the world, the less visible ones—ties that are only there if you really know how to look for her. Her tiny vibration gets an echo in response, a returning vibration into her head. An echo from close by—a reassurance. The thread that drew her to this place is responding. She came where she was meant to.

Not that I could really have gone anywhere I wasn’t meant to, she supposes. That’s how this works.

Annabelle isn’t sure yet about the nature of the thread that has pulled her to this building. It’s just another building full of residential flats, maybe a little posh, but not so different from any residential building in London. It feels tied to the Archivist, somehow. She doesn’t know him well enough to exactly how. She hasn’t met him—yet. She’s not sure that she ever will. But she has watched him, his actions, and his intentions for long enough to know the mark that his movements leave. This thread has a faint echo of his signature, as though once in the distant past a wax seal of an eye had been stamped upon it, and over time the edges of the symbol had worn away, and the wax had worn thin until it no longer held in place. Annabelle wasn’t too worried about not knowing what information lay at the end of the thread. She had learned long ago to lean less on preparation and more on her ability to find the information she needed when she pulled on the threads of her own. After all, research is unreliable. Information provided by a third party could be falsified and corrupted. Information provided by the subject of inquiry was much more likely to be true.

At least, more likely to be true when Annabelle extracts it.

The door of the elevator dings, and Annabelle steps out. She couldn’t tell herself why she had pushed the button for this floor, but she didn’t need to. The Mother moves in mysterious ways. She moves down the hall at a saunter, feet soft against the carpeted floor, waiting to find what she has come here for. It will be here, it always is.

As she moves down the corridor, a door at the far end opens. A petite woman steps out, and Annabelle feels the pull at her mind again. She stops to watch. The woman has lovely, huge dark eyes, and moves with a deliberate, self-assured energy that Annabelle cannot help but admire. She is juggling her keys with a beanie as she turns to close the door, clearly trying to be out of there quickly. Just as the door is about to close, a black and white paw swipes around it, making the source of the woman’s urgency clear.

“Nonono Admiral. Back up. Pspspsps back up. You can’t come with me. Yes I love you too. Yes, I know you’re all alone. I’ll be back in an hour. Pspspspssssss back up. Come on now.”

The salvo of responding meows assures Annabelle that whoever this Admiral was, he did not know and did not care what an hour was, and he did not want to be left alone. But with the woman’s encouragements, and the slowly narrowing gap his paw occupied as she crept the door closed, he stopped resisting. Annabelle watched the paw withdraw, and the woman was able to lock the door and turn away, pausing again to jam the beanie over her long braided hair. As she did so, she finally spotted Annabelle watching. She smiled uncertainly. Annabelle supposed that one might naturally be uneasy when a woman that you have never seen before appears in the hallway outside your flat to stare at you and your cat.

Uneasiness has never dissuaded Annabelle. Like the avoidance of the truth of her head, uneasiness was a tool she could use against people. An axis of social control. She smiles back.

“Cats, right?” The woman chuckles halfheartedly.

“Wouldn’t know.” Annabelle responds, smiling emotionlessly. Might as well lean on the axis of uneasiness while it’s here. “What’s yours called?”

“The Admiral.” The woman answers, then looks surprised. As though she answered in spite of herself. Annabelle smiles wider. Whatever she came here for, it’s clearly on the tip of this woman’s tongue. The woman levels a surprisingly piercing gaze at Annabelle and fires back with a question of her own.

“Who are you? I haven’t seen you around the building before.” Questions were to be expected, but Annabelle was not accustomed to answering them. She did not intend to start indulging now.

“What’s your name?” She asks in return.

“I asked first.” The woman fires back. Annabelle keeps her smile wide, then pulls at the threads that only she can see, fingers twitching almost invisibly. Her question was laced with compulsion, but sometimes it takes a moment to take root. Sometimes, a little pull in the head is required. So she pulls.

The woman still doesn’t answer. Her gaze turns from piercing to suspicious. She and Annabelle remain silent for several minutes. Annabelle continues to pull at the threads surrounding this woman’s mind. She can see them. Ties to the cat, ties to the home beyond, ties that stretch outside the building. Not a one of them seems to respond to Annabelle’s pulls.

Resistance to the Mother is unusual, but not unheard of. Perhaps a new tactic.

“Fair enough. I’m Annabelle, I’m new. Just trying to meet neighbors. What’s your name?” The lie comes easily, they always do, and the question is friendlier this time, reaching out like a hand extended for a shake. She laces it with a stronger thread of compulsion, tying it into the warmth of her tone. A new axis to lean on. Friendship can be just as damning as any other tie. Annabelle casts threads around the woman’s brain and tongue as she asks, invisible to the eye and as warm as the potential friendship she has tied them to. They should be comfortable. Her fingers twitch as she pulls against them.

“Right.” The woman responds. Then she is silent. It is not an answer to Annabelle’s question. It isn’t an answer at all. The threads pulled around the woman’s brain and tongue, which Annabelle can pull without even thinking about it these days, lie still and dead as they brush against her, unresponsive to Annabelle’s pulls. Useless. “Look, I don’t know who you are, but this is not a large building, and the walls are not thick. I would have noticed someone new moving in.” She slides her keys into her bag and crosses her arms defiantly, staring Annabelle down, unrelenting. “I don’t know how you got in here, but if you’re still here when I get back, I’m calling the property manager.”

The woman walks down the hall towards Annabelle, strides long and confident, at odds with her slight frame. Despite her nature, Annabelle finds herself stepping aside as the woman strides to the end of the hall, calling the elevator that Annabelle just stepped out of. It arrives with a ding, and Annabelle can feel the threads in her own head pulling urgently. This woman is what she came here for, what the Mother wants, and she is just…walking away. Annabelle spins towards the elevator doors as they slide open, the shock of this woman’s resistance fading against her belief. Stubborn people exist. This must happen sometimes. It must.

“Stop.” She calls. She manipulates every thread she can sense coming off of this woman into it, relevant or not, as though it were a needle threaded with a thousand colors. The single word is laced with so many threads that no one should be able to resist it. Her fingers are spasming now, subtlety of movement abandoned to make way for force as she pulls against every axis she knows, pulling against this woman’s progress down the hall, trying to yank her to a halt.

The woman doesn’t even flinch, much less stop. She steps into the elevator, turns to push the button, and makes eye contact with Annabelle again. Once made, she doesn’t break it, even for a moment. Her dark eyes are attentive with suspicion. An emotion that Annabelle has seen many times, but not one that has ever impeded her in any way.

Annabelle watches the elevator doors close, dumbfounded. Powerless to stop them.

Well, that was…
Interesting.

Chapter Text

Annabelle Cane is not stalking Georgina Barker. Do not get it twisted.

True, she is sitting in the same coffee shop as Georgina Barker. She is sitting on the far side of it, in a spot specifically chosen so that Georgina Barker cannot see her. She is watching Georgina Barker from this spot, staring intently from behind a steaming cup of latte. She is pausing every so often to sip or read or scribble something in an open notebook so that passers by will assume she is a creative type staring into space, not a creepy spider woman staring intently at a fly named Georgina Barker who refuses to be caught in her web.

At least I’m not staring through holes cut in a newspaper. She muses. Could be worse.

Georgina Barker… Can I call her Georgie? I think I’m going to call her Georgie.

She rolls the name around in her mind. Her strings might not have any pull on Georgie directly, but that did not seem to extend to the people around her. Information itself might be the realm of the eye, but the process of getting information was squarely Annabelle’s playground. The property manager, it turned out, was more than happy to tell her Georgie’s name, and that she’d been living there for three years, and that she was a great tenant, and that her cat was very cute. Public records employees, bless them, were always very happy to help Annabelle with birth certificates and parking violations and service animal registrations and whatever else she might need. At this point, with only a day under her belt, Annabelle felt that she knew Georgie very well. Or, at least, that she knew about Georgie very well.

What Annabelle hadn’t discovered was why Georgie was immune to her machinations. Annabelle was quite fond of her machinations, generally, and she was torn between her sheer irritation at those machinations being frustrated, and her absolute fascination with the fact that all her axes of fear and control were powerless against this woman.

She had, for example, machinated to steal things from Georgie’s house in the night. She had machinated to start her morning with an eerie, dangerous situation, and even worse, an awkward one! Georgie had responded to everything with aplomb, cool as a cucumber. As though she hadn’t even noticed something was amiss. She had just…dealt with everything maturely! Absolutely unacceptable. Annabelle had pushed and pulled at Georgie’s edges as though she were a puzzle box, and Georgie wouldn’t slide open. Annabelle, as a rule, slid people open with ease. The novelty of the situation was wearing thin, but the mystery of it was compelling.

Annabelle sighs and sends a couple of spiders scurrying under the tables towards Georgie. Nothing had worked yet, but she had other things she could try.

Annabelle Cane is not stalking Georgina Barker. She is investigating.

oOoOoOoO

Georgina Barker is having the weirdest goddamn day of her life—and she’s had some pretty weird goddamn days.

This day is different, though. Most of her unusual days were…creepy. They involved particularly troublesome supernatural evidence. On a couple of memorable occasions, her weird days involved particularly obsessed listeners. Once in a blue moon, her weirder days involved her close friends getting arrested for ghost-related violence. Her prior record for weirdest day involved a manifestation of death whispering secrets to her in a university medical building, followed by the mysterious disappearance of everyone involved.

Today was not creepy.

It was just weird.

She had woken up that morning to find herself completely out of tea. Now, Georgie distinctly remembered going grocery shopping the day before. She had tea on her list. She put the tea in her cart. This morning: no tea. So, odd, but she could be forgetful. Nothing too strange.

She had run out to catch the bus so she could hit the books at the library and find out a little bit more about this Welsh legend she had been running down. One of her listeners had written in about a weird sighting in a Welsh forest. Nothing too key to her next episode, but she had been turning over the idea of starting a listener letter section, and this seemed like an interesting story to start with. She also needed to get more tea. But when she emerged from her apartment, the bus was already half a block down from her and she had to sprint to the stop, earphones flying out of her hand on the way. She normally had to wait ten minutes past the scheduled time for that bus—and the bus driver had the nerve to look annoyed at her for banging on the door and jumping on last minute. Georgie took a couple of deep breaths and got on with it. After all, maybe it was just a less busy day for the bus. And she didn’t have her headphones, but they were cheapo ones anyway. Strange, and annoying, but what could you do.

Jon was on the bus.

She had made eye contact with him immediately. She hadn’t meant to—she was scanning for an open seat and, lucky her, there was one next to him. Was it too late to ignore their eye contact and pretend he wasn’t there? Without her headphones, it was a lot harder to feign distance from her surroundings. She did a split second scan of the other open seats on the bus. Almost all the seats were full. There was one next to a woman with dark, short-cropped hair wearing a disturbing expression that indicated she might explode into a fit of rage if Georgie looked at her too long. There was one next to a handsome man in an adidas tracksuit who was so hulking that his bulk was already taking up half the seat next to him, leaving only a sliver of room. There was one next to a grinning old pink skeleton of a man who made direct eye contact with Georgie; he was definitely going to talk the whole time and then ask for her number when she tried to get off the bus. There was one next to a tall thin blond man whose curls seemed to—were they turning backwards? Why were they turning at all? That just…wasn’t right. Every person on this bus set her on edge for reasons she couldn’t quite place.

Sitting next to her college ex really was the best of all worlds. Great.

Georgie forced a smile. Jon forced one back. She sat down.

“Hey Jon…how’ve you been?” She tried not to sigh. Being friendly when she didn’t feel friendly wasn’t exactly her bag, but Jon…well it looked like he hadn’t slept since they finished school. Plus, she didn’t want to perpetuate the already weird, negative vibes on this bus.

“…Hey Georgie? L-Long time no see…?” Jon returned, voice a little squeaky. She wasn’t surprised he hadn’t really answered her greeting, but was surprised he hadn’t returned with a question of his own. How unlike him to be lost for words. Sure, at school he had a reputation for being a taciturn academic, but Georgie knew better.

Stubborn little asshole could interrogate the skin off a banana.

But that was a long time ago.

“Yeah, it has been, I guess.” She answered. He didn’t respond. They stared at each other in silence for what felt like seven years. Georgie tried again “You still working at the institute?” Jon nodded silently, his tired face suddenly aging another year or two. Georgie regretted asking. Across the aisle, the blond man giggled. Something about it wasn’t…quite right. It made Georgie deeply uncomfortable. Jon looked like he was about to crawl out of his skin, but he didn’t say anything. Just gave a resigned sigh.

“You still doing…the-the podcast? What the…g-ghost, right?” He asked tentatively, as though the question would bite him. Georgie really wasn’t sure what had gotten into him.

“Yep.” She didn’t feel compelled to answer him any more than he answered her.

“You still have…a cat?”

“…yep.”

The conversation lapsed and they rode in silence. She and Jon ended up leaning as far away from each other as they could in the seat. She didn’t mean to do that, but she wasn’t about to address it. At least it was mutual. Thank god it was only a fifteen minute ride to the library. Georgie barely muttered a goodbye when she got up, but she doesn’t think Jon noticed or minded. It seemed like he might have gotten involved in something weird. Again. Still, she hadn’t been angry, which was a nice change from the last time she saw him. He just looked so tired.

The library was a blessed relief. It was quiet and mostly empty that time of day, and after the strange bus crowd and her conversation with Jon set her on edge, not being around people sounded completely ideal. She remembered idly thinking that her research must have pulled her into a pretty obscure corner of the stacks the cleaner didn’t come to very often very often. There were a lot of cobwebs around.

Perhaps the corners she was in weren’t visited by the librarians very often either. Every book Georgie looked for had been in exactly the first place she looked. Georgie was no library scientist, but she knew that there was a system to how books were organized, and that system was not “whatever Georgina Barker is interested in finding at this moment in particular”. And yet, she only had to think of a book, glance at its name in her notes, and look at a shelf. Practically every time, there it was. She found the obscure outdated Welsh dictionary she’d wanted in the forestry section, and the forestry book she wanted popped up next to her in the mythology section. At one point, a copy of a Welsh fairytale book that she hadn’t even heard of—but which had a story tied to the exact forest she was looking into—was just suddenly lying on the next desk over from her.

Very weird.

The coffee shop had been blessedly normal so far. Well, relatively normal. Not completely normal. She had ordered a green tea latte, and the barista had screwed up her order four times. At one point he attempted to serve her a cup of tomato soup, which Georgie decided was the least green tea latte-like liquid on the planet.

Despite that, the atmosphere around her is full of comfortable, normal chit-chat and laughter, so she lets it slip out of her mind and focuses on her laptop. Her train of thought is broken as a barista drops another green tea latte at her table.

“I didn’t order this?”

“It’s on the house. Apologies for the tomato soup.” The barista smiles, tone apologetic.

“Oh, yeah, no worries, you didn’t have to.”

“Happy to. Enjoy.”

Georgie goes back to typing, trying to focus on her writing. She wants to get the new segment right. She’s trying to think of how to structure the introduction when her focus is broken again by another latte being placed on the table. She hadn’t finished her first one, let alone the second.

“…I didn’t…order this?” She stutters and glances up. This barista was different.

“It’s on the house. Apologies for the tomato soup.” The barista smiles, tone apologetic.

“Oh yeah, your coworker already brought one, it’s ok.”

“Happy to. Enjoy.”

Well that was…weird. Chalk up another one for the books today.

Georgie watches the barista go back behind the counter and greet another customer. Maybe they both made apology lattes and didn’t communicate about it? And the second barista was embarrassed? That made the most sense.

Georgie goes back to typing and thinking. Two minutes later, another latte was placed in front of her. She looks up. It was the first barista again.

“Ok, I definitely didn’t order this one.”

“It’s on the house. Apologies for the tomato soup.” The barista smiles, tone apologetic.

“You know, you already brought me one.”

“Happy to. Enjoy.”

Georgie watches the barista cross the café and go back behind the counter to start chatting with the second barista. Did he forget he had made the latte? Was he ignoring her?

Were the baristas playing a prank on her? They had no reason to, as far as she knew. This was getting exceptionally odd. Well, the best response to this kind of thing was not to respond. If they were filming her for some dumb prank youtube channel, she wasn’t going to give them any view fodder. Georgie goes back to her laptop, trying her very best to think of metaphors about Welsh forests which weren’t cliché.

Two minutes later, another latte is placed on her table. She looks up. It’s the second barista again.

“Please stop bringing me lattes.”

“It’s on the house. Apologies for the tomato soup.” The barista smiles, tone apologetic.

“I don’t know what you’re hoping to get out of this. Please, stop bringing me lattes.”

“Happy to. Enjoy.”

The barista leaves again. Georgie watches him go, finally closing her book and putting it away. There are five green tea lattes on her table now. There’s barely room for all of them. She finishes the first one and contemplates the others. It feels wasteful to throw them away, but she can’t drink all of them. She scans the room, looking for someone filming. This seems a little tame for a prank youtube channel, but she cannot think of what else could have caused this.

She watches the baristas for a moment. One of them is busy at the espresso machine. As she watches, they scoop out some—is that green tea powder? From a large container. She watches, transfixed, as the barista makes a latte, and then makes a beeline for her table.

Georgie has officially had enough of this. She was going to get up, go over there and demand to know what was going on. She was, on heaven, going to ask to speak to their manager. These two clearly needed a talking to.

She stood up, fully intending to march to the counter, cameras be damned.

Next thing she knows, Georgie is on the floor, soaked in a slurry of broken china, hot milk and green tea.

Did I trip?

She looks down at her feet.

…Are my shoelaces tied together?

The entire coffee shop is watching her. The baristas are running over with mops and brooms, looking extremely alarmed.

Maybe not a prank channel then.

Georgie wriggles around, trying to avoid the broken china as she reaches down to free her feet. As she does so, she glances up—and realizes that someone was watching her, not with concern, but with amusement. She hadn’t been able to see her from her table, but there, at the other end of the coffee shop, looking like the cat that got the canary, is that weird blonde woman from the hallway. Georgie is sure it was her. Georgie is also sure that the woman has something to do with her weird day. After all, how many people have a hole in their head full of spider-webs? Georgie had assumed it was a trick of the light last time, but this time she couldn’t avoid the truth of it. That woman is definitely sporting some serious skull implosion.

“Hey! You!” Georgie calls out, ignoring the confused faces of café guests. She stares the woman down with her most withering glare. The glare she saves for ghost skeptics who interrupted her when she was at the library. The glare she used to use to shut Jon up when they disagreed. “What on earth are you doing to me!?” She practically yells, decorum abandoned.

The woman looks surprised, but only for a split second. Then she grins.

“I’m sorry, you must be very upset. I’m not doing anything to you.” Her tone is calm. She doesn’t even set her latte down. She meets Georgie’s withering glare easily—but her eyes go glassy after only a second of contact.

“Bullshit. I know it’s you.” Georgie hisses.

“What’s me? What on earth do you think I did?” The woman smiles and takes a sip of her latte, as relaxed as though she and Georgie had met in the coffee shop for some small talk and this conversation was the natural result.

“I don’t have to explain myself to you. I know you did this.” Georgie spits, finally reaching down and untangling her feet, refusing to break eye contact.

“Did what? Every eye in this place is on you. I think everyone would have noticed if I had somehow conspired to…soak you in green tea latte? Whatever you seem to think I’ve done.” The woman replies cheerfully, taking another sip of latte. “I suggest you take a deep breath before one of these nice people watching you gets worried.” Her expression of gentle amusement is holding, but her glassy eyes make her face seem oddly frozen. Georgie wonders if perhaps there is another expression lying underneath the calm, friendly one she can see on the woman’s face.

Georgie decides she doesn’t care.

“They’re watching you too. Who says they aren’t more worried about you?” Georgie retorts.

The woman chuckles.

“Are they watching me?”

Suddenly, Georgie realizes that she has been having an uninterrupted conversation with a woman on the other side of a busy coffee shop. She has been able to hear every word—and the other woman never raised her voice. Georgie can hear her fine. Because everyone else in the room has gone silent. Has been silent. The baristas haven’t moved any closer since she first saw them running over with brooms—and they also haven’t backed away. Every single person in the room is frozen in eerie, perfect quiet.

Just as Georgie notices this, all of them—every customer, both the baristas, even a woman frozen on the pavement outside—moves in perfect unison. Two dozen marionettes rotate their heads smoothly away from her so that she can’t see any eyes but the glassy eyes of the woman with the spiderwebs in her head.

She is alone in perfect silence, and the only autonomous person in the room.

Well, the only autonomous human.

Georgie decides that she is not backing down.

“Well I’m watching, whoever you are. What the fuck are you trying to do to me?” The ferocity in her voice surprises her. It seems to surprise this stranger too. She sees the woman’s eyebrows slide up almost imperceptibly, the smile fades from her face. Her glassy eyes falter for a moment, as though she is uncomfortable with Georgie’s scrutinous ire. Georgie’s eyes are not faltering. She is not about to look away, not after…whatever it is that this woman did to everyone else in the café.

The woman remains silent. Georgie watches her for a few long moments, indignantly awaiting the response she is owed. She knows that monsters are real, and she doesn’t’ want to give them any ground. But in the end, Georgie feels an absence of fear, not an absence of self-preservation. She knows that knowledge is a good defense, and she wants answers. She cracks.

“Who are you.” Georgie almost whispers. She knows the other woman can hear her. Green tea latte drips off of Georgie’s table onto the floor. The sound is loud in the complete silence of the crowded café, echoing as though the crowded room were a massive cavern.

After several long moments of silence, the other woman pastes her implacable smile back on and finds her words again.

“…wouldn’t you like to know.” Her tone is smooth and amused as ever, but the phrase tumbles out of her mouth rapidly, uncertainly. She sets down her latte and stands at last, then walks straight out of the café. She does not bother taking the notebook lying open on the table. Georgie realizes that it probably wasn’t hers in the first place. The bell on the door sings as it shuts behind her, and the chime is echoed by another sound, some imperceptible whimper from the crowd. Then, voices are all around her. The baristas are rushing over with mops and brooms and apologies.

They comp all six of her green tea lattes.

As an apology for the tomato soup.

oOoOoOoO

Annabelle is not upset. Annabelle doesn’t get upset. Absolutely not.

She is just…concerned. Yes. Concerned.

She doesn’t like to admit it, but the incident at the café had left her…embarrassed. Now, it took a lot for Annabelle to be embarrassed before the Mother claimed her. She didn’t know she could even feel embarrassment now. But she had practically fled the scene when Georgie called her out. Annabelle didn’t know what had gotten into her, she just knew that she didn’t like when Georgie looked at her that way. Something about the expression Georgie wore, indignant and dignified no matter how much latte was on her face, made Annabelle want to explain herself. A desire to explain herself was not something that Annabelle could remember ever feeling before. It made her think that perhaps having her spiders tie Georgie’s shoelaces together was not the best idea in the world. Annabelle was…unused to second-guessing her ideas.

It is now two hours later, and Annabelle is sitting in an apartment in the building across the street from Georgie’s. The tenants were ever so nice to let her housesit while they went out of town for…a while. She’s definitely close enough to pull strings around Georgie’s home, but not somewhere she can be spotted. She isn’t making that mistake again. Georgie recognizing her had been unexpected, and Georgie facing her down was a frustration and, inconceivably, a distraction. Direct investigation, it seems, is not something she should have attempted in the first place. It is so obvious now—Annabelle’s realm is in the subtle. Investigation, no matter how covert, is too overt for her. She needs to play to her strengths. She doesn’t need to do her own investigating. She has hundreds of little spies who can do it for her.

She sighs happily and takes a calming sip of tea. She is in her element here. She feels along the threads into the building across the street, and pulls. A little spider goes crawling under the door of Georgina Barker’s apartment. Annabelle leans back and lets her focus drop for a moment, enjoying her tea. She’ll check on it in just a moment. Let the spider see what it will see, and she’ll pull it back to the Mother so she can learn.

She relaxes for a moment, letting the frustration of the day slip away. She feels silly now. How unlike her to let her emotions get the better of her.

Well I guess I’m only human. That makes her chuckle. Or not. She sips her tea and ponders. She needs to know what Georgie is because it could be a problem for the Mother. She has no emotional stake in this situation and she is absolutely not personally interested in what she will find in Georgie’s apartment.

Absolutely not.

She reaches back out to her little spy, to see what it might have accomplished while she finished her tea. She feels along the thread, relaxed and comfortable in the knowledge that she will figure this out. Whatever is at the center of this mystery, nothing is beyond the reach of the Mother.

There’s nothing at the end. Just…absence. No spider. It’s gone.

What?

She sets her empty mug of tea down, sitting up straight. Georgie was immune, but her apartment was normal. Wasn’t it? She had even sent a little squadron in the night to steal the tea she was now drinking. What had happened in the last five minutes? Annabelle reaches out along another thread, sent another spy scurrying into the apartment. She keeps a closer eye on this one, watching through its eyes as it emerges under the door, scuttling along the wall. Everything looks normal, everything is fine. Then suddenly—darkness.

Excuse me?

Annabelle sends another spider under the door. The same thing, sudden nothing. She tries sending one through a light socket—darkness after only a few seconds. Another—and again, darkness. She sends one through the pipes. It climbs up out of the sink, getting a wider view of the room, and Annabelle is sure she’s going to figure this out when suddenly, coming straight for her little spy, is that—a paw?

oOoOoOoO

The Admiral is having the best goddamn day of his life.

He doesn’t know what these things are, but they’re GREAT.

He’s seen them in the house before. Usually, as soon as he spots them, Georgie pounces and takes them out the door before he can have any fun. But Georgie isn’t home right now.

The Admiral is in charge.

Another one scurries in—this time from a vent. So many little whiskers, it moves so fast, scuttering along the floorboard in the shadows. Being tricksy. Just the way the Admiral likes it. He can’t help but wriggle his haunches as he focuses in. He stalks along the floor, biding his time, watching, waiting. This one almost gets under the rug—but he’s too good for that.

He pounces—and bang! Knockout! Perfect precision! That was his best and most precise attack yet. He allows himself a vain moment of preening. Normally he would play with them a bit, let them run, and catch them again. But today he doesn’t need to—today there seems to be so much, so many, that one little prey thing doesn’t need to keep his attention.

He pauses to proudly lick whisker-like legs off of his paws and scans the room expectantly. Sure enough, in just a moment, there is another fluttering of whisker-legs. Over by the light socket. He begins to stalk, and then his eyes catch sight of more movement—over by the kitchen sink.

Holy shit! There’s two this time! He’s going to need to be fast. He’s going to need a Strategy.

BEST DAY EVER!!!

oOoOoOoO

When Georgie finally gets home, all she wants to do is shower and order takeout and sit down. After the weirdness of her morning, the weirdness of the incident at the coffee shop, the weirdness of that woman, everything: doesn’t she deserve peace?

Well, apparently she doesn’t get to have peace. The admiral is zooming around the apartment like his butt is on fire, swatting at the air, the carpet, the vents, the faucets, anything he can swipe his little paws at. His eyes are pure black pupil. He looks as though he has achieved cat enlightenment, as though his little kitty brain is full of pure kitty joy and possibly pure kitty caffeine. He will absolutely not let her catch him and see if there’s something wrong with him, or even just pet him and try to calm him down.

Georgie has given up chasing him around at this point. She is sitting on the couch and just watching. It is going to be a chore and a half when whatever is going on ends. The Admiral goes flying down the hall again and crashes into Georgie’s room, banging the door open. She can hear the distant sound of him knocking every single pen and book off of her desk before he comes zooming into the living room again and jumps on top of the bookshelf in a single bound, knocking off three—four—seven books.

Weirdest day ever.

oOoOoOoO

Annabelle lies facedown on the floor of the apartment she has conned her way into, catatonic in her frustration.

Worst day ever.