by Kevin Spaide

"Get him on to these bloody spiders then!" The famous woman turned from her famous image and looked commandingly at the thin presence of the bellhop, buttoned tightly into his suit.

"I was hoping you'd forgotten about the spiders," he said.

"I'm afraid not. I'm afraid I can't stop thinking about the spiders. Right now I'm thinking obsessively about nothing but spiders." To the alarm of the bellhop Madame Ullay elected to smile at just this moment. Then, without diverting her gaze from the expression of astonishment fixed like a cheap mask over the young bellhop's face, she raised an eyeliner pencil, as if she kept one up her sleeve at all times, and began applying a heavy line of black along the perimeter of her left eye, restraining with expert fingers any eyelashes not otherwise under her control. Upon the completion of this sudden task, Madame Ullay's face transformed itself into an expression of bemusement tempered with horror as she pointed out, "We were just talking about the spiders not two minutes ago. What is your name." To the bellhop this sounded more like a demand than a question. She began rimming her right eye with a thick black border.

"My name?" The bellhop had never been one to believe in black magic but he knew from the Madame's own TV show that it was bad policy to give one's true name to witches. As soon as they got hold of your true name anything could happen. He pulled his hat off by its tassel, revealing a sea-foam green crewcut, then replaced it haphazardly. "It's Jim," he said. "But most people call me Slimmy."

"Well I shall call you both, alternatingly," pronounced the ex-astrologer, observing the young man through freshly delineated eyes. "And as long as these rooms are thoroughly de-clocked, Slimmy, including the one infested with spiders, Jim, you may leave me now."

The bellhop opened his mouth. A moment later he spoke. "The room itself, begging your pardon Madame, is not infested with spiders, per se. There's just this one chair that could be said to be infested, but they come off it sometimes and wander around the room a little, probably looking for something to eat. Just don't sit in that chair and you should be fine, just fine. And they almost never leave that room."

"Then why not get rid of the fucking chair?" suggested the Madame, exhibiting a kind of guileless practicality she usually reserved for conversations with the mirror or with the dead. "Heave it out the window at once."

"Well a room needs a chair," spoke the bellhop, demonstrably petulant.

"Yes," admitted the famous woman. "Yes, a room does need a chair. But a chair shot through with little spiders?" She glanced at herself in the mirror for reassurance. She was unused to violent opinionation in subordinates.

The bellhop watched as Madam Ullay whispered a few words to her image and he would have sworn on a mountain of Bibles that the image appeared to say something in return a few seconds later. A sharp quiver of fear travelled up his spine. He even had to reach out and grab the chest of drawers to stop himself from falling backward, such was the force of the magic in that room. His fingertips brushed against something there and before he was able to formulate
any thought his hand had seized the object and stuffed it down the back of his work-trousers. Even in the grip of fear he could not rid himself of his old habits. He had just had time to see that it was a golden hairbrush with creamy white bristles.