A small black spider descended from the ceiling and dropped onto Sergeant Rowan’s shoulder. He quickly brushed it away, but another fell, and another. He got rid of them, too. One of them scuttled toward Lucy. She stamped on it. When she lifted her foot, it was still there. It looked slightly flatter but was otherwise unharmed. Lucy tried again, but was still unsuccessful in killing it. This was clearly no ordinary spider.

“Ugh!” said Lucy loudly. “How horrid!”

Little Miss Muffet’s head turned in her direction. It was one thing trying to crush her pets, but obviously quite another entirely to describe them as horrid.

“Not horrid,” said a soft voice from somewhere behind the silk. “Beautiful.”

Miss Muffet was having trouble speaking properly. She sounded like she had hairballs caught in her throat. The spider strands around her mouth trembled, and a fat brown spider emerged from between what might have been her lips. It was quickly followed by another, and another, and another.⁴⁴

Sergeant Rowan backed away. Above them, ranks of spiders moved across the ceiling, forcing the humans and Boswell to retreat farther to avoid having the spiders drop on them. More of the nasty creatures were spreading across the floor. There was a sense of purpose to their approach. The spiders were herding Samuel and the others, moving them closer and closer to the stairs.

In case they needed any more convincing, a massive shape disengaged itself from the darkest corner of the room and moved steadily toward them. A beam of moonlight caught it, causing the eight black eyes in its head to gleam. It was the size of a small car, except small cars didn’t have eight legs and long poisonous fangs that dripped venom as the enormous spider detected the presence of prey.

“My pretty,” said Miss Muffet, stroking the dense hairs on the spider’s head. “Pretty is hungry.”

“You know,” said Sergeant Rowan, “perhaps we should see what’s upstairs after all.”

So they ascended to the next floor, and the spiders, thankfully, did not follow.

41. “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” was written in 1944, although why anyone would want to wake up in the early hours of Christmas Day to find Santa Claus performing some makeshift implant dentistry on them remains to be seen, and would be likely to result in long-term trauma. What next? “All I Want for Christmas Is My Appendix Removed” or “. . . My Nose Broken and Reset”? What’s wrong with a train set, or a doll? Some people are very complicated.

42. Damocles was reputed to have been a courtier in the court of Dionysius II, a tyrant ruler of Syracuse in the fourth century B.C. Perhaps unwisely, Damocles suggested that Dionysius was quite the lucky fellow to have such a nice throne, and lots of gold, and all of that power, so Dionysius invited Damocles to take a turn on the throne, just to try it out for size. Unfortunately, as with most tyrants, there was a catch, for Dionysius arranged for a big sword to be hung over the throne, held in place by a single hair from the tail of a horse. Not surprisingly, Damocles didn’t care much for sitting in a throne under a sharp blade that might, at any moment, drop on his head with unpleasant consequences, and after a while he politely asked Dionysius if he might be allowed to sit somewhere else instead. Dionysius, having had his fun, agreed. The moral is that those in power are always in peril, too, especially if they’re tyrants whom nobody likes. The Sword of Damocles is thus very famous, much more so than the lesser-known Onion of Unhappiness and the Custard Tart of Doom.