The house had a web in the corner that nobody had built, and Marla decided it was a message rather than a mistake.
She had been in the house for six weeks, long enough to know that the kitchen tap dripped on a Thursday, and the tall window at the back stuck in the wet. She had not been in the house long enough to know what the web meant, so she left it alone, which was the correct decision for six weeks and then not.
The web was in the corner of the room that used to be a study, above the desk where her grandfather had kept his correspondence. It had no pattern she recognised, no radial symmetry, no careful geometry. It was a knot of silk with one long line running out of it and down the wall, and the line went to the window.
She followed it with her eye and then, because she was who she was, with her finger. The silk was cool and it did not give, and where it crossed the window frame it went through a crack in the paint that had been there since she was a child.
On the other side of the crack the spider was waiting, and it was not the shape she expected. Not a spider. A knot of silk with one leg, folded.
The room got very quiet in the way that a room does when it has been listening the whole time and only now decides to answer.
"You have been counting the days wrong," it said, and Marla understood that it meant the six weeks, and that it meant something else underneath that, and that the second meaning was the one she would keep thinking about later, in the taxi, with the windows down.
"I have been counting the days exactly," she said, because that was true and because she was about to be more afraid if she was not.
The spider tilted, which is not a movement a spider makes. "Exactly is not the same as correctly. Your grandfather counted from the day the roof was fixed, and he stopped counting on the day the web appeared."
Marla looked at the web, and the web looked back with the patient, awful attention of a thing that has all the time in the world.
"How long ago," she said.
"Since the thread you are standing on."
She looked down. She was standing on a line of silk, and it ran out across the floor and under the door and out into the hall, and it was warm, and it was the width of a wrist.
The window cracked. Not broke, cracked, the way a bone cracks, and through the crack came the smell of the kitchen tap dripping, and it was Thursday.
"You will want to let go of that door," said the spider, not unkindly.
Marla let go of the door.
She was in the hall, and the door was shut, and the line of silk was gone, and she was holding a letter that she had not seen in six weeks. Her grandfather's handwriting. The date on it was a Thursday. The date on it was next Thursday.
The spider had stopped talking. Somewhere behind the door something very small began, with enormous patience, to weave.