It’s natural to make the attempt to rid your room of invertebrate infestation. Most people would voluntarily embark on great ordeals to fend off the ordinarily unalterable invasion. Kate’s test was distinctly more arduous than most of ours usually are, and it’s pretty worthy of note.
Kate’s desk, she detected one day, was the domain of a tiny black ant, which crawled over her homework, directly under where her pencil was to have gone. To her awe, the tiny creature spoke: “O mighty and esteemed mammal!” The adulatory bastard sweetly spoke. “I am but an unassuming mite, and you, your supremacy, will know effortlessly that a one such as me should cause you no agitation.” Kate was taken aback by the little suck-up, but, kind as she was, she responded: “My room is a cramped and dirty place, but I’ll share what I can with you.”
Very soon, though, Kate found several others making camp on what to them was a fibrous labyrinth but to her was a rug. The ant had brought pals. Most trekked by way of foot, though some more privileged had been blessed with wings. The winged ones migrated towards the nearly broken grime-bleary window. The ants, with great proficiency, found subsistence in every quarter of poor Kate’s room. Her bed had been taken over by the tiny pests, who crawled and shambled all over her with reckless abandon while she attempted to sleep.
Kate wished fervently to take action. She met with the first ant, the one that had tricked her. “Most gracious host,” the kiss-ass began, when she approached him lividly. “My colony has fallen upon awfully hard times, and we’re all feeling the pinch! I’m sure you’ll understand our terrible plight, and we’re all deeply rueful of our uninvited inhabitance, but I vow that we’ll withdraw within one week’s time. Again, noble primate, we lament our forced insolence.” It turned around and it went back to work.
Kate knew she was being cheated, but the ant did give her a deadline, and in a week she decided she’d begin to viciously kick her many hundreds of squatters out.
Ants are not among the trustworthiest lodgers, as Kate realized through simple observation. The allotted week went by and the beasts remained. Kate’s timidity kept her from speaking up for another week, but after that, she couldn’t take the ants’ continuous and unwanted inhabitance of her humble and cramped quarters and confronted the animals.
Once again she appeared before the spokesman ant. “You’ve been here a week longer than you said,” She began. The ant interrupted with another exaggerated oration. “Our deepest and most sincere apologies, most esteemed and vehement vertebrate! It is with misery and guilt that I reveal to you that our queen is most unwell, and we are at the moment incapable of retreat, thus we, my patient host, will understand that we must stay for a time longer.”
“I’ve been patient with you for much longer than I should have to be. I want you ants out of my room today,” she commanded. “If by midnight tonight every one of you isn’t out of my room, I’m going to use my human mind and might to drive you out myself.”
At Kate’s unusual burst of assertiveness the opportunistic ant was taken aback. It agreed to Kate’s terms, and patiently she waited for the creatures to evict themselves. While she waited, the ants, like any other day, crawled all over and around her, searching her room for whatever they wanted. By midnight, not one ant had left, and Kate reminded all her tenants of her threat. Many laughed, including, she saw, the very ant that had agreed to the terms.
Kate was finished with asking. Using words alone she couldn’t make her roommates budge. Watching the aimlessly meandering animals, she formulated a plan. Leaving the Queendom of the Ants that was unfortunately also her room, she made her way southward to the spiders beneath her basement stairs. Pushing through a skein of spider webs, Kate entered.
“What do you think you’re doing?” A pudgy and matronly wolf spider asked her angrily while dodging the fleshy human’s massive paws.
“I’m sorry, Ma’am!” she said, and flushed at her bumbling first impression in the domain of the spiders. The she-spider’s abdomen pulsed with the agitations of a thousand tiny young.
“My children have no where to stay now!” She growled her spider growl.
“Is there anything I can do?” Kate asked, pleading that she hadn’t permanently marred the name of her species in the mother’s many eyes.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” The spider said, exasperated with but forgiving of the lurching mammal, who couldn’t have known better. “What exactly are you doing here, anyway?”
“Well, I came to see the Marquis of the Spiders. I have an offer that might find useful to all of your kind.” Kate replied.
“Actually, human,” the mother said irritatedly, “the Marquess.”
“I’m hungry!” a tiny spider latching onto its sire complained.
“Eat your sister!” the mother answered. Before it could, its neighboring siblings took the opportunity to devour her before she could them. “I’m sorry,” she continued to Kate, “But what kind of offer is it?”
“There’s a whole colony of ants in my room,” said Kate.
The mother’s eyes sparkled and her pedipalps wiggled with appetite. “I’m sure the Marquess would be quite pleased to hear that.”
The mother pointed the direction to the Marquess’s web, and Kate went on her way.
After a short walk on foot, Kate approached the Marquess, a spindly and regal black widow. Kate was smart enough to know the danger of offending a spider of that kind, and kneeled before the sovereign. Surrounding the Marquess in conical webs stood several brown, reclusive sentinels ready to protect her Majesty.
“What is a human doing in my domain?” she asked Kate suspiciously in a thin, whining, but nevertheless imposing voice.
“Madam spider, I have an offer which I think we can both benefit from,” Kate said in a tone attempting to juggle humility with sincerity.
“Explain, vertebrate,” she commanded, gaining what height she could over Kate by stretching out her legs.
“My own domain has been occupied by a legion of ants, and wherever I turn, I see a crawling encampment of their kind. If you would allow yourself and your Marquisate to mobilize to my room, you and your subjects won’t need to fear famine for a great age.”
The noblewoman thought for a moment. “We have enough food in these rich, damp crevices to survive comfortably for a great age, and a trek to the upper worlds would be wasteful at the least, and deadly at the most. I’m sorry, good human, but it would not benefit us to move such a distance.”
Kate hung her head low and sighed, but only in memory of having to comb ants out of her hair every morning, not as an attempt to guilt the Marquess into a change of heart, as it were. Leaving the palace, Kate began anew, though with more despair, her strategy for dislodging her once bothersome, now problematic, rivals.
Once she returned to her domain, Kate observed the ants building their ant structures under her bed. As far into her bed as Kate could see, a blanket of insects covered the floor entirely in the dizzying chaos of their election. Rushing towards the region, she asked one of the legion ants what this construction was all about. “We’re swarming for another queen!” explained the atomy. “What happened to the old one?” Kate asked, perhaps feeling that the ant society’s details would be beneficial for their defeat, or perhaps just to be polite. “She was, in her compromised position of unhealth, tragically stolen from us by the foul sour-beast in the corner of the queendom.” The ant responded, and pointed to a sight Kate could only have dreamed for.
A spider, brown and meaty, lay menacingly (to the ants, at least) inside his rapidly constructed conical web.
Kate left the frenzy and happily scurried up to the spider. “Did the Marquess send you?” She asked, feeling the answer was obvious.
“The Marquess told me of your plight, and I thought an alliance with the vertebrates, however pointless your deeds, would benefit our respective phyla.” “Oh, thank you!” Kate ejected. “I am the Dauphin of the northern spiders, and my army awaits in the vent from which we arrived.”
“They’re having a queen swarm right now,” Kate informed them.
“I know,” the Dauphin replied as his soldiers of many sizes, shapes, and colors slunk out of the vent. “I’m the one that killed their queen, remember? I have it all planned out, Kate,” he said, “Just watch.” The Dauphin turned towards the ant swarm and pointed with his front leg to the skulking spiders.
Immediately, the army pounced on the blanket of insects. The larger ones trampled; the smaller ones bit.
The ants, though in thousands, were overwhelmed beneath the shadows of their much more massive attackers. The jubilant celebration had ended with not excited passion but hellish violence.
Some of the weaker spiders, weaker or weakened, were consumed by some of the more vicious ants; they struggled spastically to rid their punctured hides of the living cancers, but struggling, without exception, in vain.
Once the swarm was successfully interrupted, and the ants’ gathering fully dissolved, the spiders returned to the watching Kate and the Dauphin.
“You see,” he began, “We’ll dislodge the ants by consuming them, as you suggested, but first we must disrupt their society. So the more lost they are, so the more easily we can gorge ourselves on them.”
The swarm had dispersed, returning to its usual search for nourishment, though this time they didn’t know why. Stupidly and often a party of ants looking for food would come close to the spiders’ lairs near the vent. The spiders began moving into the bottom of the bed, picking up the cadavers of ants they found and sticking them onto the quickly enlarging maze of web.
The trembling and horrified ant that had been the first to speak with Kate those many days ago approached, still using its same florid speech to the human, but this time, Kate could tell that it was gravely sincere.
“Oh, great and terrible Kate!” it whimpered, bowing its head low to the ground and forestalling its gaze. “Please let us leave in peace; call off your arachnids and I promise with my life that our colony will leave immediately!”
“That’s better!” Kate responded with obvious relief.
“Thank you! You’ve-” before the ant could finish, a tiny brown spider swooped down on its web and captured the mite, encasing it presently in a envelope of thread.
“This ant was causing you trouble?” The watching Dauphin asked, too late, of course.
“Why did you let that happen?” Kate asked him angrily. “That ant just agreed to my terms unconditionally!”
“Don’t worry, Kate, by this time in two days, my soldiers will have already taken care of every ant here.”
“Are you going to stay, too? Just to cause me the same problems that I came to the spiders with in the first place?” She asked, accusingly.
“You ungrateful witch!” the Dauphin shouted. “We’re doing you a favor, and still your accusations fly!”
“I’m sorry, Dauphin,” Kate apologized before she made another tiny enemy, “I guess I was just mislead by the ants so severely that I don’t know who to trust.”
“Do you now?” The Dauphin demanded. Kate hesitated, but he kept looking at her, pressuring her to more quickly respond.
Finally, she responded acquiescently, “Of course.”
The Dauphin, to assuage her worries, brought her to his web and began outlining his long-term plans.
“We’ll make stringy death-traps for your pests under your bed,” He waited for Kate’s consent, which she gave with a head-nod, “by your window,” again he waited, and again she nodded, “And on your ceiling.” This time he didn’t wait, and continued his explanation, “The ants are stupid, you see, and my minions will fill their webs with the wriggling morsels during their many absentminded ventures forth towards the very webs we’ve laid out for them.”
“I don’t mean to hurry you, sir, but you will evacuate once the ants are gone, am I correct?” Kate asked cautiously.
“Of course, we wouldn’t want to merely replace the vermin; to be preyed upon by our own predators!” the Dauphin chuckled regally. “You don’t have any of our predators, correct?” He immediately inquired.
“Oh, no, don’t worry about that,” Kate allayed him while she pondered about what ate spiders.
“If you’re worried about the length of our stay here, just watch my servants above!” He excitedly commanded, pointing with his foremost leg towards the ceiling, where Kate observed a host of spiders spinning a canopy of web, in which were trapped already hundreds of terrified little writhing creatures, not solely the ants Kate targeted.
“Your webs are impressive, Dauphin,” Kate surveyed, “But will they stay after you’ve left?” The cob-prince gave her an affronted look. “Not that I don’t think they’re beautiful and helpful, but I would like my room not to be too blessed with their presence.” She was getting good at brown-nosing.
It didn’t go unnoticed by the Dauphin, either, who scoffed, “You sound almost like those flattering ants. I hope their annoying habits haven’t rubbed off on you.”
She’d been speaking with the Dauphin for a great while, and night began to creep into her room, and sleep into her mind. “I think I’ll retire, sir,” Kate suggested, leaving the prince’s web and making her way to her bed. “Don’t worry, my soldiers will work perpetually until the ants are gone. Rest.”
When Kate returned to her bed, a number of spiders, which was chasing a greater number of ants like a spooked herd, scurried off of it. The realm under her bed thrashed with arachnid and insect activity. She supposed that eventually the tumult in her room would be over, thanks to the efforts of her new allies, as she plodded exhaustedly on the bed and slowly drifted out of consciousness.
An odd sensation aroused her the next morning, one on her forearm. Upon its inspection, Kate found to her alarm that several spiders had been encasing her arm with web overnight. She gasped and shook the spiders from their work. “What do you think you’re doing?” She asked them angrily while scraping the sticky thread off of her arm.
“We’re spinning you into a capsule of web, direct orders of the Dauphin, madam human,” one of them explained innocently.
“Is that so?” Kate said, redirecting her anger towards the prince, to whom she immediately made a visit, not before wantonly brushing the constructors off.
“My soldiers are stupid!” The Dauphin explained nervously. “They may have thought that your arms was an extension of the bed!”
“Actually, sir,” Kate began, watching her victim cower in the defeat that he knew was imminent, “They told me themselves that you ordered the construction. And secondly, you were only allowed the bottom of my bed, so the construction, even if it weren’t touching me, would be breaching our contract.”
“We had no contract, just outlines,” The Dauphin responded with the hope of regaining the winning position in the argument.
“Only build on the ceiling, under the bed, and in the corners! Anywhere else is my area!” Kate repeated for him. “I have a feeling you don’t want my gracious assistance,” he superiorly scoffed.
“Get out,” Kate asserted. “You’re turning into the ants, of whom, by the way, there are still a huge number.”
“This is our territory now, Kate,” the Dauphin snarled.
“Well, I suppose I’ll have to show you exactly why we humans have such inflated egos,” She said, running out of civil ideas. With her thick shoe, she smashed the being, feeling absolutely no resistance from his pampered body.
She left his manse and heralded their immediate departure from her domain. The spiders, several of them angered by the death of their payroll, assumed Kate and took her to the Upper Bed-Shadow Web, where the Lord of the region, the second in command for the entire spider colony, had audience with Kate.
“They told me you killed the Dauphin!” His hairiness reprimanded. “Do you have any idea what that’s punishable by?” “Any of you poisonous?” Kate asked casually, not too menaced. “Many of us!” The Lord threatened ignorantly.
The Lord’s already dwindling intimidation was somewhat dampened by becoming a snack for an emaciated gray mouse that loomed over the spider Lordship. The tiny beasts, with the rapid death of both their colonies’ leaders, panicked completely, and many of them funneled back into the vent.
“Come with me!” The mouse excitedly called to her. Pretty astounded at her luck, she decided it was better than being surrounded by spider emissions.
They entered a crack in the wall, one particularly untainted by ant and cob. There were nested a family of mice. Four pink and hairless children nursed from a mother mouse who was lazily sprawled all over the ground.
“We want your help, Kate, and we’ll help you in return.”
“Please, don’t trick me, I’ve been tricked enough.”
“We’re not tricking you; you didn’t even hear our offer: if you just let us stay here, in this tiny crack at the border of your domain, for no more than a week, we’ll not only take you to the Marquess of the Spiders and tell her, with you present, that her subjects have invaded your domain without her consent, but we’ll also eat the offending subjects. The ones remaining, anyway”
“Why would the Marquess want anything to do with you? You just ate one of her lords!” Kate laughed.
“We mice have an agreement with the Marquisate, one that’s been in practice for a hundred of our rodent generations, and perhaps thousands of theirs. We both may freely scour the entirety of the basements for insects, and for the human activities’ edible detritus that we both enjoy, and neither will make any hostilities against the other, under heavy incarceration.”
Kate shrugged. “Lead the way,” she suggested contentedly. A short trek to the basement and they once again beheld the Marquess’s grand palace. Gaining audience with her was worryingly easy, but in any case, the mouse spoke: “My good Marquess,” He began politely, “My family, which lives in the domain of the Human, Kate, has found that her land was taken by your Dauphin.”
This perked the black widow from her previous torpor. “He has disobeyed me directly!” She attempted a stifle of her passionate anger. “I just wish to ask your permission that we exterminate them, since we are very hungry, and would also like to help you in any way we can by punishing the belligerent subjects of your Marquisate.”
“Very well,” the woman replied airily, “I shall have to return your kindness one day.”
Upon the mouse’s and Kate’s return to her room, she confirmed, “One week, and you’re out of here?” “I promise, as a fellow mammal, you can have my word, and my life if we stay longer,” he swore. “You don’t have to go that far,” she assured him, but kept it in mind in case he was as sneaky as the rest.
Upon their return, the father mouse immediately went to work, devouring the spiders that drew too close. Four or five of them, climbing down their thin strings from the Ceiling Web, approached the mammal with very justified caution. “Sir Mouse!” one, a black widow as unto her Marquess, plead. “We beg that you let us leave in peace! We’ve exhausted our ant supply, and our only rulers in this colony you and your human ally have assassinated.”
“Your entire colony is illegal under the eyes of the Marquess. Returning would mean execution. It is my duty to her, and pleasure to myself, to dine upon you.” With little hesitation, he bit the poisonous bulb of a spider, who screamed and expired. The others that flanked her rapidly and terrifiedly climbed their strings to the relative safety of the ceiling. The angry mouse pounced on one and plugged his hook-like claw into its writhing abdomen.
“You kill with such cruelty!” Kate observed, repelled at his actions. “Please, you humans aren’t perfectly civil to the rodent community.” Kate was silent.
“Come, you can rest with my family tonight.”
Reentering the father mouse’s hovel, the pink little children, then able to walk a little, chased and scurried awkwardly about under their parents’ feet.
“My husband and I are in your debt for all time for allowing us refuge in your domain, Kate,” The mother mouse thanked her. “As long as you hold up your end of the bargain, I’ll be perfectly happy.”
Days went by, and Kate watched gladly as she found fewer and fewer spiders, many of which deserted her room in terror. Most, though, found their exit from Kate’s room by their entrance into the mice’s mouths.
Only days later, Kate made a visit to the mouse family’s home. There sat withered and pallid the father mouse. “I don’t know if we can help him.” The mother mouse told Kate in tears.
“What happened to him?” Kate asked while attempting to comfort the mother and children. “A brown recluse bastard bit him. We haven’t left since he came in and told us!”
“Well, you can stay a little while longer in my home if you wish,” Kate said, unable to help in any other way. “I couldn’t ask you to leave, since the week is up tomorrow.” “Oh, bless you, Kate!” she replied, “I promise, we won’t bother you for long!” She said, motioning to the father, suggesting that he would be gone long before they would be.
Of course, no one could help so suddenly, and the father expired a few hours later. “I’ll have to raise the children by myself, and they can’t be safe here, with poisonous spiders everywhere!”
“I think I have an idea,” Kate told her, a spark almost visible in her brain. “Let’s visit the Marquisate.”
On their way out, two brown recluses, each with fangs barred, stopped them, “You are subjects of the Chieftain, and his orders are that no one may leave,” one said. “Turn back, or face our wrath, foul vertebrates,” the other threatened. With one pace, Kate stamped them both into the great void.
“Come on,” she told the mice after she rolled her eyes at the tiny, ineffectual spiders.
Another uneventful journey to the basement and again they were before the Marquess, who was aimlessly spinning pictures in her web. The mouse wife approached, “Dear madam, we’ve executed and filled our bellies with many of your dissenting subjects,” she stammered.
“What of it?” She replied, showing little gratitude,
“One of them poisoned my husband! They’re under control of a chieftain now, who I don’t believe is of royal blood at all!” The Marquess dropped her web art.
“Do you mean to tell me that not only did my minions disobey me, but have killed an honorable subject and created their own government? This is the greatest reason I can imagine, and it must be corrected at once.” The children hid under their smiling mother, held up by Kate’s massive pink hand.
“What do you propose?” Kate asked. “I’ll send an army to once and for all abolish this affront to the Marquisate. Two thousand of my blackest widows will regain my realm!”
“Your graciousness,” Kate began cautiously, “I don’t mean to insult you, but the realm that the spiders inhabit is my own realm.”
“You do insult me, Kate. What am I to do but set up a colony of my own there? Aught else would be disastrous to cob-kind! A dangerous trek to the north and back would decimate my people! I do not propose to kick you from your home, but it is my territory, Kate.”
Kate set the mice down and made a whitened fist with one hand and a tendon-streaked point at the queen with the other. “You listen to me,” she fumed. “I’ve put up with a lot of invasions with little bugs like you, and I will not allow you to live in my room, crawl over me, get in my food, get in my hair, spin web on me, or anything else you’ll do while I reside there!”
“Then you are banished!” The Marquess howled. “From my room? I’ll fight to the death to keep my room free of you vermin, and if I am forced to, which I just may be, I am willing and eager to demonstrate the horrifying power of man!” Kate yelled to the black widow. The mice had, in terror, flown up the stairs.
The Marquess’s eyes all bulged, “If you want war, that’s precisely what you’ll get!”
Kate felt tingling on her leg. It was, unsurprisingly, several biting spiders, more of which climbed to the ground on the stair pillars or their own web yarn to attack the girl.
Maniacally brushing the attacking spiders, Kate searched frantically for any object that could beat the approaching army of every possible race of spider.
She grabbed the first thing she felt, a splintery wooden stake which was heavy enough to club the creatures into puddles of tissue. Still more arrived, and Kate mobilized her shoe for the same job.
The sheer numbers of spiders, and by extension, the sheer number of spider innards, almost overwhelmed Kate, and would have consumed her had she not backed into a corner where a shelf stood, on which was a dusty gas lamp. Desperation turned the lamp on, and impulsivity threw it. The gas spread all over the basement floor and swallowed all the spiders on the ground.
Kate reached for her stake again, and the end had been doused in gasoline and conflagration. “I warned you!” she gasped triumphantly to the Marquess, who was watching in horror as Kate plummeted into madness. She leapt over the flames and approached the great skein of thread.
“Stay back, Kate!” The woman screeched. “Keep that flame away from my palace!”
“I’ve been civil to you things, and you’ve repaid me with trickery and greed! I have no more reason to show one more moment of mercy!”
Without another word (or thought, for that matter), Kate set the great palace aflame, burning the basement’s stairs as well. Immediately the Marquess pounced on Kate, who caught her in the palm of her hand. Instinctively, Kate made a fist harder than ever she’d made prior, so tight was it that her not-exceptionally-long nails still managed to put holes in her palms, as well as in the spider. Very quickly after she smashed the vermin, her open hand revealed that the woman, in her last act on earth, damned Kate with a deadly bite. This would have been much worse had the fire not spread throughout the rest of the basement, and, Kate could only guess, the rest of the house as well. Completely surrounded by flames that caressed even the ceiling, Kate sat in her decreasing circle.
At least, she reasoned, she learned that you shouldn’t talk to animals that talk back.