cloud spider fly

But now the Cloud-Spider was beginning to turn, as the dancing Iron Woman began to turn inside it, dragging it with her like a gown. Its wail grew agonized, higher, thinner. Its edges were being dragged towards that turning centre, like spaghetti being rolled up on a fork. As it turned it rose upwards, turning faster. Soon it was spinning, like an immense whirlpool. The Iron Woman’s revolving dance had turned into something else. Something that climbed into a spinning column. The cloudy body and webs of the giant spider were twisted tightly round it.

‘It’s the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon,’ cried Hogarth. ‘Going back up. It’s taking the horrible cloud with it.’

‘But what about the Iron Woman?’ cried Lucy.

Sure enough, the long, swaying, whirling corkscrew of darkness was going up – just as they had seen the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon coming down. Lucy and Hogarth couldn’t take their eyes off it. The Cloud-Spider was now completely wrapped around that spinning column in tight webby folds, with a few raggy skirts of it flinging out here and there. Somewhere in there the eight eyes must be stretched out long and flat and thin like elastic. But where were the Iron Woman and the Iron Man?

They watched the writhing column climb into the sky, with its corkscrew tip now piercing upwards, worming upwards. Huge and dark and towering, it swayed as it climbed. Growing smaller, as it climbed away. Soon it was a wispy blot, high in the blue. Then a dithering dot, like a skylark. They watched it, and watched it, till at last they were staring into nothing.

They looked down the hill. The air was so clear, in the morning sun, the town seemed to be sparkling. The Iron Woman and the Iron Man were just coming out of the woods, climbing towards them. Lucy ran towards them. Then stopped. Hogarth joined her. The two giants stopped.

‘Oh!’ cried Lucy. ‘Are you all right?’ The Iron Woman was no longer a beautiful, gleaming blue-black. She was the colour of an iron fire-grate after many fires, rusty pink and grey-blue. And the Iron Man was the same. As if the inside of the Cloud-Spider had been a furnace of some kind.

- The Iron Woman, Chapter 6