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The Spider (and the) Librarian ~ by Amethystine, based on a recounting told to him by his good friend, ArachNed

It wasn't as though he had never dropped a book before that moment or anything. But it was still surprising as the hardcover slipped out of his grip, and a matter of immediate and intense concern to him, in that precise instance.

~

Ned had been shelving books at his library for quite some time. He had been doing it for so long that it had become a total and genuine surprise when he saw a tome tumbling to the tiled floor. It was inconceivable, in a way. He was just so accustomed to an absolute absence of accidents that if he didn't see a novel get nudged off of a shelf and hit the ground, the resulting and resounding report that rippled through the air in the repository of knowledge made him recoil in shock.. or perhaps jump, startled. He would have tried not to show it, but such noises almost always terrified him when they took him by surprise.

At those rare times of unseen fumbles, he could have sworn that it would have had to have been someone ELSE who had sneakily dropped something directly next to where he was working. Of course, that was not the truth, as there was never anyone there to either blame or swear his innocence to.

Half of Ned's confidence (and his surprise, in those instances) was borne of the typical type of tried and true tedium of his tasks. A person will invariably become so relaxed in their repeated routine that while they have the ability to avoid all possible slip-ups, a distraction or a meandering of the mind makes a mistake materialize. The other half was a simple matter of anatomy.

Ned was so accustomed to his perfect record because he had the unique capacity to catch any careless collapse of covers before they hit the ground, thanks to a quirk of his biology that gave him two, or three, or even four chances to snatch the dense descending packet of papers out of the air. Admittedly, it was more than a quirk. Ned was a spider. His full name was ArachNed. The aforementioned 'quirk' was the fact that he had eight limbs, all of them able to catch a falling book, if they weren't already holding something else.

In the interest of avoiding confusion, you should know that ArachNed was not a normal spider. Although, you should probably suspect this already, as you have heard that he is a spider that can not only handle books (instead of being utterly crushed by one), and also that he possessed the intelligence and the size to easily organize them. Despite being able to scurry around on floors, walls and ceilings with eight legs, Ned tended to stand upright on the pair of legs that were furthest back on his body.

Of course, when he was upright upon them, they were 'lowest', no longer at the rear of his form. Those lowest legs were human-like in their shape and possessed strong feet that were vaguely like those of a bird, if only because of their one backwards-facing toe. Unlike an avian, Ned had two toes per foot facing forward.

Going higher, the foremost (or highest, when standing up) pair of the spider's 'legs' were also very human in nature, but were similar to human arms, and had hands with two fingers and one thumb.

It was the addition of two other, wholly separate pairs of limbs that set him apart from any peers he might have had in shelving prowess. Both of them where more thin and could rather aptly be described as 'spidery'. They extended from the middle of his sides, equally distant from his human-ish shoulders and 'hips'. Each of these four extra arms were tipped with a pincer-like claw, which were meant for gripping things to climb, but were used almost as much to hold books.

The spider would hold books in reserve in these four pincers while the hands upon his main arms placed the literary objects in question in their proper spots. The lower arms would then pass a new tome up to his hands, and the claws would either shuffle their load about to have the next book in order ready to be next, or, if the supply was depleted, they could busy themselves with straightening the shelves in general. Pushing up tipped over rows, pushing bookends back tightly into place, all while he used his human-esque hands to finish off the last of the things he was holding. Even one of his feet on the ground would be able to manage the lowest shelves, as he deftly balanced on the remaining, non-busy limb.

So, now you see that any one of these extremities could snatch some errant falling object, from his feet to his hands, and the four pincers in between. If something was close enough to his face, he could even snatch it with the small leg-like limbs that framed his mouth, his pedipalps.

Knowing all of the spider's options in catching books, you can now better appreciate why he was so distraught when he saw he could not re-snare the one that had just slipped from the chitinous hold of his fingers.

He was, at that moment, a fair distance above the floor of the large library, hanging upside down by a silken thread of webbing. His toes gripped the line that emerged from his large, bulbous abdomen.. which, in turn, emerged from his backside. The webbing was temporary, of course, while a spider's abdomen is quite set in place.

This fact should instill more of an understanding as to Ned's unease at his faux-pas, but you still lack the most important element to his dilemma.

ArachNed worked at night, in the library. When it was closed. Ned was not actually employed there, in any way, shape, or form. He lived in the crawlspace above the high ceiling of the library. He moved in there to be able to read to his hearts' content, but reading all day, every day had eventually become dull.. and he had taken to shelving to break up his days. Or nights, as the case may have been.

No one knew about Ned. That's the way he liked it.

No one knew about Ned, until he dropped that book.

~

He had been caught up in his work, putting away the books from the day before that the actual employees of the library had not gotten to, and were left for the next day. Absorbed in his efforts, he hadn't heard the tell-tale sound of a car door, and when he had heard the opening doors at the front of the building, it had almost been too late to scurry away. He had cursed mentally to himself and pondered how dark it was outside the building, blaming the changing seasons for his temporal miss-step. The coming winter had brought more and more darkness in the mornings, how was he to know that the humans that ran the place would ever arrive before the dawn?

*((Art by WhiteMantis. To visit (and praise) her posting AND make out the finer details, such as the book titles in the image, view it in a much larger size, here: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/7033776/ Thanks, WM!))*

In any case, he had silently snuck back toward the front of the building, peeking toward the main information desk from around the side of the first and front-most bookshelf, watching the worker milling about and organizing things. He envied the real staff of the repository of such knowledge, wishing he could stand side by side with them and discuss literature.. or philosophy.. or anything, really!

It was unfortunate, but the only way for him to get back to his sanctuary above the ceiling was through a large vent almost directly above the large desk at the front of the whole open space that made up the main book-shelf filled area. Luckily, there was just the one early-morning arrival.. so far. He had suspected that there would be more showing up any minute.

While the elderly woman librarian had left to step into a back room momentarily, the sneaking spider had managed to dash across the open space between his hiding spot behind the shelf and the front desk, as well as get up the wall behind it, heading for the vent and safety. In his dash, he had even been able to grab the small stack of items he had chosen for himself, things he would read later that day, while hiding. He had picked them out earlier, as soon as he had crawled down from his humble abode above the ceiling, and had left them on the information desk for when he was to leave.

He had certainly been trying to leave at that moment, so he desperately wanted to snatch them up. Without them, he'd have been without any material all day, so it was worth the risk (to him) to try to heave them upwards with himself. He had thought so, anyway. The librarian had soon come back and stood behind the information desk, almost perfectly under where he had frozen. He had been too scared to move, afraid of giving away his position, at least thankful that his possible detector wasn't much for looking up higher than eye-level.

But when he had dropped one of his choices, a particularly thick volume of Ludlum's literature, and had watched it descend, as if in slow motion, towards the gray-haired head of the librarian below, he no longer thought it good that he'd been mindful enough to grab his latest reading picks.

Believing that the beefy book would bean the brittle-boned woman and break her brain-pan, the arachnid was frozen in place where he hung.. aside from a slight swaying on his silken thread.

Now you should understand why this particular case of butterfingers -or butterclaws- was such a matter of immediate and intense concern to him.

His existence would be discovered. He'd have to leave, at the least. He could be hunted down and killed, or captured and imprisoned.. or tortured and dissected.

ArachNed could not tear his four eyes away from the suspenseful soaring of the spy-thriller best seller. This was not how he had planned to be captivated by that book. It flew further and further down, tumbling end over end, hurtling toward the unaware staff member.

He could watch no longer, so he clenched all four of his black eyes shut at the last agonizing moment, tensing up all over as he waited to hear some kind of sickening thud or wet crunch. But what he heard was the much more surprising, loud clapping slap of the heavy, dust jacketed covers impacting on the floor, perfectly flat. It was far louder than the dull, blunt death-stroke he'd been expecting, and it nearly made him lose his grip on his webbing.

He opened one upper eye slowly to squint carefully down, seeing the shocked woman below clutching her chest and looking around on the desk and back to the fallen fiction multiple times, as if trying to discern where it could have come from, with such forceful falling.

The spider swallowed and gave up on trying to be totally silent, quickly climbing up his line while also using one spare pincer to gather the slack up after him. He knew it was only a matter of moments before the matron of the books below would exhaust all earthly possibilities and think to look up, despite the impossibility (to her) of a book falling from the ceiling.

He kept two of his eyes on her as long as he could, until he reached the already open grate of the vent and started clamouring into the boxy metal passage. As he tried to quietly crawl in, he had to look away from the still searching human below, hoping she would give up and not even think to look up in any way at all, lest her peripheral vision alert her to his legs and fat abdomen sticking out of the vent's opening.

As soon as his last limb was tucked safely into the cool space of the airy tunnel, the arachnid breathed a sigh of relief, his heartbeat finally slowing down after the roller coaster of the last few minutes. He waited and listened and heard no signs that anything was amiss, cautiously and carefully reversing himself in the large air duct to face outward once more. Shrugging and believing all was well, he reached out to push up on the extended vent cover, which would allow it to swing back down into place. It had been propped open all night on its trick hinge while he was working.

In retrospect, he probably should have left it for someone else to close. Surely, someone would have eventually seen that it was open and either reluctantly got a ladder to climb up and shut it. Or that same someone could have possibly told a lowly library clerk to do the same. Ned certainly should not have done it himself, not after the close call he had just gone through.

And yet, he did reach out and shut it. And although the lightweight metal worked exactly as it always did, the short cry of shock from below was unexpected.

Ned snatched his hand away from the then closed cover as if it had been burned, sucking in a breath and chastising himself internally. He couldn't believe he'd been so stupid, but at the same time, he couldn't believe he'd finally been seen by the oblivious official below.. after all that. His routine little life flashed before his eyes, and he knew it was bound to change, from that moment onward. He would need to run away to somewhere new. Probably to some place in the wild, miles from anywhere. Or some rotting abandoned house. The spider lay on his back and muttered further self-deprecation, hitting his own head with his six limbs, a staccato of sharp strikes snapping against his skull, while wishing the worst for the one who had ruined his perfect little place in the world; him.

A gentle call rang out from outside the vent's grate, "Hello? Who's in there?" The voice was much less angry than Ned had been expecting, the tone was almost completely curious, rather than rageful.

Remaining silent, the spider tried to think of what to do. It was clear that she had seen him, but he wasn't about to answer her and just give up the ghost after being hidden for so long. It was an odd logic, borne of the constant life of stealth, and he didn't want to admit defeat, even if he was clearly already caught.

"I know you're up there, in that vent. I don't know how you got in here, but it doesn't matter. It can't be safe up there for you, dear, please, come out and let's get this sorted.." she said, trailing off. Ned could just tell that she was lost in thought, devising something else to say, something more convincing to use against him, to draw him out. He expected threats of violence, or promised retribution, or the involvements of the authorities. Or.. he swallowed nervously at the last thought that struck him.. entomologists.

"You're not in trouble, I know what it's like to be young too, you know. If you can believe that, at my age!" Her self effacing laugh was light and calmed the spider, somehow. He almost retorted that he wasn't some kid.. but aside from how that would have blown his cover, which he was still trying to maintain.. he also knew that nothing made you sound younger than denial of youth. He considered that she might be duplicitous in her claim of his innocence in her eyes, but-- it just rang true to him, for whatever reason. She went on, "I'm the only one here for another hour, you don't need to worry.. I can take you home if you come out."

"This.." Ned's voice cracked, so rarely was it used. His fear in that moment only made speech harder for the spider as he meekly managed to get the following faint words out: "..this _is_ my home."

There was a long, pregnant pause while the elderly woman absorbed the answer she had been presented with. After what felt like a number of minutes to the arachnid, the librarian hesitantly asked, "Do you mean metaphorically.. or literally?"

"Umm, both, I guess!" replied the multi-legged male, who began to inch his way forward to peer out through the grate's tiny, thin metal slits. He could see the kind human peering up in his direction, her hands on her hips. "For years," he added, softly, committing to the truth at that moment.

Ned could see her lean back in slight surprise, her short curly hair bobbing as she nodded to herself. She began to talk again after mulling it over "Ohh my, why, I've only worked here for one year. I wouldn't feel right, then.. it wouldn't be proper for me to say you had to go, if that's the case and you have seniority. Where have you been living? I mean, where in the building?"

For the next few minutes, the spider explained how he had lived and worked there for quite some time, leaving out a few key details about his species situation. Well, ALL details pertaining to his species. In the end, the librarian, who's name was Martha, declared, "Some of the clerks did seem to think there weren't as many books to be put away as there should have been. None of them are ever here on consecutive shifts from the night before to the morning after, so they just thought the person working in the evening before was doing a great job. But, dear, if you've been working, I daresay we owe you at least the room you've been using. That is, I think you should be welcome to it."

"Sooo, can I go there now? I don't want to keep you from _your_ work or anything.." asked Ned, wanting to get back to his long delayed escape. "You'll never see me again, I promise."

"And what if I want to see you, dear? You sound like a beautiful person, despite your hardships," Martha ventured, subtly urging the 'boy' to come to her. She did not think his life was fulfilled by books alone.. she knew he needed a friend. She thought she could be one. Lord knows she herself could use at least a new acquaintance, she had lost a fair number of her own over the years.

The spider was flummoxed. Show himself? He couldn't, he shouldn't, he wouldn't. And yet, he wanted to so badly, needed to. Somewhere deep inside himself he wanted to converse, to discuss the things he had read. To be accepted in some small way. He uttered the last obstacle to that idea, blurting out: "I look like a monster."

"Oh, you're just being silly, I know you've been alone for a whi--"

"No, I'm serious, I look like something from.. well, not Lovecraft, but.. well, you know what I mean. Forget Stoker or Shelly or Rice, I'm not kidding. I'm more like.. science fiction, gahh," he babbled, before quieting and beginning again. "I'm a.. a.. uh.. a 595 in Dewey," he stammered, unable to say what species he was directly.

"Dewey Decimal? A five-ninety.. I'm a bit rusty, is that reptiles or bugs?"

"Bugs," sighed Ned.. "well, 595 is insects, and well, me. 597 is reptiles and fish and all that stuff."

"Oh. Insects and spiders? You mean you look like a spider? I don't know if I believe--"

The librarian was interrupted by a sharp metallic banging as Ned shoved his abdomen out of the vent, forcing the grate open above his bulbous buggy butt. He waved it at her a bit, letting her get an abundant eyeful of the black and white swirling spiralling patterns on the curved back of his behind. He didn't hear anything, save for a sound he could easily place: the creaking of the springs on the information desk's rolling chair. He may have made Martha faint, he thought.

Climbing out the rest of the way, the spider deftly descended to the bookcase, then to the floor, turning to see Martha peering at him with eyes as big as those belonging to his usual meals. He muttered something along the lines of 'I told you'. Crouching, he used his two lower left arms to retrieve the errant novel he had dropped, earlier. The book that had gotten him into his predicament. He added it to the stack it had originally been in, in his other arms.

The librarian seemed to take note of the sizable stack of library materials he had only once he picked up the large one, following its path from the floor, through his animatedly articulating arms to the collection of tomes. At sight of the spinnerette-tipped spheroid, so brashly bared to her, she had imagined the owner of the voice as nothing more than just a giant spider. So it was a relief that he was as similar to a humanoid shape as he was, as well as being of such a small size, standing at only about four feet, she guessed.. shorter than she sat in her chair.

For Martha to see the miniature monster handling the books, it was humanizing, she could relate to his reading choices.. her Reader's Advisory training kicking in, making her think of other titles he might enjoy, as well as semi-categorizing him based on the entire group of choices he was holding.

As she was doing so, ArachNed mumbled with eyes downcast, "Sorry. I almost hit you with that one. I dropped it by accident. I mean. Of course. I wouldn't drop it on purpose. I'm glad it landed flat. Doesn't hurt the spine. If it goes down sideways--"

"It can really tear them apart, yes," finished the formerly frightened female. She smiled, seeing another patron in front of her, suddenly. An astute, intelligent, shy, nervous one, with an eclectic taste in literature. "Don't worry about it, no harm done, honey."

For a long moment, they peered at one another, the spider and the librarian, the invertebrate and the human.. the young male and the old woman.

As the moment passed, Martha spoke sweetly, turning to open a drawer with practised ease, as she had done hundreds of times, just as she would have with anyone else, despite feeling much better on that singular occasion, "I think you need a library card, dear."

The End

Epilogue -

Although it may have cost her the price of a larger thermos and a steady supply of sugar and honey, Martha wouldn't have given up those early mornings with Ned for anything. Neither would have the arachnid. The librarian kept her word, he stayed in his life and his living quarters within the library he loved so much. They shared her tea and talked when she was there earlier than the rest of the staff, although the spider's cups were topped with heaping helpings of the aforementioned honey and sugar.

Neither of them could believe how stimulating the company of the other was, nor how rewarding their friendship.