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Andrews UK - Scott Tierney

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105 pages

English

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Strange Times compiles ten short stories of fantasy, science-fiction and wonder, ranging from the darkly comical Eight Over Four, set in a world which is overpopulated with giant human-sized spiders; to the altogether more thought-provoking Outlawry, where radical new laws result in a dystopian hotbed of opportunism, for the punishment for crime is now crime itself. Also included are two previously unpublished stories exclusive to this collection: Give Us Your Smile, which describes a surreal situation where smiling becomes mandatory, and Don't Touch That Dial.Strange Times also features The Rings of Yesteryear and The Pause, two stories set in the expanded universe of the author's epic time-travelling adventure, Tomorrow Is Another Year.In times as strange as these, this is a collection not to be missed!

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Short story

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	06 janvier 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781789824803
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Strange Times
A Collection of Ten Short Stories
Scott Tierney

Strange Times
Published in 2020 by
Acorn Books
www.acornbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2020 Scott Tierney
The right of Scott Tierney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Eight Over Four
In 2018 it was estimated that there were over 750 million spiders in the United Kingdom.
By contrast, the overall number today is less than ten percent of that – yet the spiders no longer inhabit our attics or hide under the paving slabs of suburban patios; nor do they cast their webs from windowsills or bookshelves or U-bends or radiators, or become helplessly stranded in the plugholes of every bathtub across the nation.
No. Now the spiders live all around us. Spiders with wallets and sunglasses and hose pipes and pets. Spiders with a door key, a national insurance number, a bus pass, a library card, a Wi-Fi password – a birthright to vote. They stand as high as us, dress from the same hangers as us – they shop at our supermarkets and bathe in our swimming pools and accompany their children to the same schools as ours.
Today, the spiders are our neighbours. They live alongside us, coexist with us.
As us.
We must make them all feel welcome…
Charlotte had never spoken to the spiders across the hall in No. 57, for they, like her, kept to themselves – as we all know, spiders are solitary creatures. The only insight Charlotte ever glimpsed into the activities of their day-to-day lives were no more consequential or noteworthy than the scurrying of ten-dozen spiderlings down the hallway as they left and returned from school, to the slamming of the bedroom door as the parents commenced another marital spat. From time to time a bill of theirs was delivered to the wrong address, which Charlotte was neighbourly enough to pop through their letterbox on her way to work – but beyond that, she doubted that she would recognise the spiders of No. 57 if she were to knock shoulders with them in the street.
Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in the flat adjacent did not care for the spiders, however. They hogged the communal washing line, the old couple complained; their bins were overflowing by Sunday, they reported to the council. And so noisy, Mrs. Johnson hissed discreetly to Charlotte from the sanctuary of her doorstep, swatting away a fly. Rowdy, that’s what those spiders were. Racket. Disruptive. Every bloody night! Not like the nice family who used to live there – they kept it down at weekends. And you could speak to them – you could understand where they were coming from.
But this family, dare Mrs. Johnson admit for fear that God would strike her down… they should go back to where they came from, damn arachnids!
Charlotte nodded politely and made her excuses – the term ‘arachnid’ was not deemed to be acceptable these days, no more so than ‘coloured’. Only the elderly still used it, for they were fixed in their ways and knew no better – those such as the Johnsons belonged to an older generation, a simpler time before the spiders’ maturation, when they were still small and insignificant. The Johnsons still thought of the spiders as pests, intruders to be trapped in drinking glasses or banished with a broom – they had been taught to fear the spiders, for that was the bygone society in which they had been raised.
In Charlotte’s case, however, she couldn’t remember a time without the spiders – then again, she could only just recall the decade when mobile phones were exclusive; now everybody had one. These days the spiders were a part of normal everyday life, just as wristwatches and taxes and laces on shoes – to see a hundred fully-clothed spiders waiting at the platform’s edge for the morning train was no more unusual than expecting said train to be delayed. The matter was simply accepted. It was not commented upon.
Today was a Friday, and the six-fifty train to the city was struggling. The carriages were packed, brimmed, elbow to patella – some found the proximity of so many bodies claustrophobic, and preferred to wait in the hope that the next train would not contain ‘so many limbs’; but not Charlotte, for she had become willingly accustomed to rubbing against the prickly fur of a perspiring spider while standing for an hour straight. And she had no alternative other than to stand, for there were no longer any seats in the carriages these days – they had been done away with, determined unwarranted, for a spider could not sit in the manner that a human did. A spider could stand as a human, could carry a suitcase as a human, could drink a coffee and hold a phone and grip the handrail and so forth – yet, noble as the spiders were, they found themselves genetically unsuited to the demands of a civilisation built without a shred of consideration for their requirements.
Naturally, such were their numbers, the spiders’ needs – although the less sympathetic might say ‘dysfunctions’ – had to be accommodated; therefore every last seat in every last train was stripped away, regardless of the human passengers’ strongly-worded letters.
Yet improvements were coming, the rail providers promised:
Nationalisation. Price cuts. New lines. A broader timetable.
And silk rails!
Imagine: Mile upon mile of smooth, sturdy, web-enforced rail!
Intelligent as she was, Charlotte understood as well as anyone that a spider’s silk was five-times stronger than steel – this was a staple of every school textbook going back decades. She could picture that halcyon diagram now: If one were to enlarge just a single thread of a spider’s web to the thickness of mere string, it could support the weight of a Volkswagen Beetle – and now, thanks to the growth of the spiders, this was no longer simply the imaginings of science-fiction! Just think: Cranes that could lift ten-times the previous weight! Bridges which stretched as far as the eyes could see! The technological possibilities were endless, incomprehensible, and the lessening of our reliance on natural resources was also a bonus – for the humans, the spiders lamented, had done enough damage to this planet as it was.
Yet Charlotte had heard from more sceptical voices outside of the mainstream, that despite the construction industry’s and the government’s eager investments, spider silk was not the wonder-material they would have you believe. Its strength, in fact, did not scale with its girth…
In reality, spider silk was a foul-smelling and flimsy excretion which only served to clog sewers and toilets, and squalor the walkways of public parks, for the spiders no longer had any use for this noxious, rubbery, gelatinous jizz.
And why would they? They had grown, quite literally, far beyond their primitive hedge-dwelling ancestors who had relied on such an unsophisticated and unsightly endowment. Why would a humble spider, a humble citizen, no less, risk hanging from a tree in the pouring rain when a central heated council flat was theirs by right? Why would they wait in hope for a measly fly to ease their hunger when a KFC could be delivered straight to their door? For the idea of eating a fly, to the contemporary spider on the street, was unthinkable, disgusting, and objectionable to the point of being offensive.
And in terms of earning a crust, why would a spider actively inflict upon itself the hardships of employment when it was bound to a life expectancy of little more than three years?
Just as the soundness of their silk was unequal to their increase in proportions, neither did the spiders’ lifespans extend beyond that of their smaller relatives. Compared to the humans, the spiders lived brief existences – most humans owned slippers for longer.
Slippers, it was noted, which had flattened so many defenceless generations of the spiders’ ancestors…
Understandably then, it was only reasonable that a spider would see no point in wasting such a flittering lifetime in the pursuit of something as tangential as a salary – especially since the government had vowed to provide every spider with enough income to ensure they lived a life of modest comfort.
For it was inhuman to do otherwise.
The public, the politicians argued, would consider it unthinkable that a single one of our nation’s spiders were at risk of ever becoming impoverished. It was repugnant, repugnant sir! to restrict the spiders’ access to the welfare bestowed to, and by, their human counterparts – what would we be otherwise, if not animals?
And please, think of the children! Look within yourself – who among us could stand idly by and allow a spider’s child to go cold and hungry? More so, what selfish brute could let a thousand spiderlings suffer the same fate? Both a poignant and relevant question, let it be noted, for one-thousand was the quantity of offspring a spider could expect to deliver– and births could occur, depending on the species, up to once a month. And lest we f