Colin Wilson - Spiderworld 05 - Shadowland.pdf - Colin Wilson - margozap

Shadowland

Spider World 06

by Colin Wilson

a.b.e-book v3.0

Note from Scanner: Even though the back cover says this is the fourth book, it is

numbered 6 because the first book was originally published in three pieces: The Desert ,

The Tower , and The Fortress . It was later released as a single collection entitled The

Tower . Since I scanned all of the books, I numbered them 01-06 to avoid confusion.

Back Cover:

Shadowland: The fourth volume in the epic Spider World series

When the first three volumes in Colin Wilson's Spider World series appeared in

the 1980s, they were published internationally to great critical acclaim. But the story was

left unfinished -- until now!

The series is set in a future in which humans have lost command of the Earth to

giant insects. In The Tower, a young man named Niall, starting from a precarious desert

existence, learned to command unsuspected mental powers, forcing the dreaded Spider

Lord to an uneasy standoff. In The Delta, Niall learned how and why humans had been

dispossessed, and, to his astonishment, found himself unquestioned ruler of the spider's

city. In The Magician, a powerful malign being poisons Niall's brother, who can only be

saved if Niall can seek out and defeat this magician.

Shadowland is Niall's epic journey to save his brother's life and remove his realm

from the dark shadow of the magician. Along the way, as in each of the previous

volumes, he acquires a little more of the magical powers that are humanity's unclaimed

heritage.

As in preceding volumes, Shadowland challenges outmoded thinking about the

nature of time, human consciousness, evolutionary potential, global change, and the

equality of species. Colin Wilson combines spellbinding storytelling with daring

speculation, as only he can.

in any form whatsoever, without permission in writing from

the publisher, except for brief passages in connection with a review.

Cover design by Grace Pedalino

Cover photograph by Grace Pedalino

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

1125 Stoney Ridge Road

Charlottesville, VA 22902

434-296-2772

fax: 434-296-5096

e-mail: hrpc@hrpub.com

www.hrpub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilson, Colin, 1931-

Spider world -- Shadowland / Colin Wilson.

p. cm. -- (Spider world ; v. 4)

ISBN 1-57174-399-5 (acid-free paper)

1. Spiders -- Fiction. 2. Telepathy -- Fiction.

I. Title: Shadowland. II. Title.

PR6073.I44 S625 2002

823'.914-dc21

2002005688

If you are unable to order this book from your local

bookseller, you may order directly from the publisher.

Call 1-800-766-8009, toll-free.

ISBN 1-57174-399-5

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed on acid-free paper in the United States

To Frank

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One

Part Two

About the Author

Acknowledgments

My friend and editor, Frank DeMarco, should certainly be at the head of these

acknowledgments.

Spider World was started in the early 1980s, and its first part, consisting of The

Tower and The Delta, was published in two volumes. The publisher suggested a sequel,

and I began The Magician, which was published in 1992. But I must admit that I felt

myself beginning to flag, and decided to take a break before I launched myself on the

conclusion of The Magician, Shadowland. I felt like someone who has just returned from

a trip to the North Pole, and that I needed to recharge my batteries.

In fact, I became absorbed in the question of the age of the Sphinx, and found it a

relief to write nonfiction. From Atlantis to the Sphinx was followed by Alien Dawn, a

book on the problem of UFOs, followed by another study of the age of ancient

civilization, The Atlantis Blueprint. When people asked me when I intended to finish The

Magician I said: "Perhaps never." I was afraid the book had gone cold on me.

Then Frank DeMarco, who had published my Rogue Messiahs and Books in My

Epilogue

Life, asked me if I felt like writing a fantasy novel in a new series he planned. I asked him

if he had ever read Spider World and he said no. So I sent him the three volumes I had

published so far. To my delight he liked it, and gave me the go-ahead.

After a decade, I felt a little nervous about returning to the world of the giant

spiders, recalling my sense of flagging imagination. But I found that the well had refilled

itself in the ten years since I had finished The Magician, and I was soon writing with all

the old sense of not knowing what was going to happen next.

So in a very real sense, this is Frank DeMarco's book as much as mine. He has

even encouraged me to brood actively on its sequel, New Earth.

This book also owes a great deal to my son-in-law Dr. Mike Dyer, an expert on

wildlife conservation, to whom I turned whenever I wanted to know something about

birds, animals, or fish.

I also feel I should again express my gratitude to Roald Dahl, who in 1975 said to

me casually over dinner: "You ought to try writing a children's book."

Cornwall, March 2002

Introduction

Niall is born into a world dominated by gigantic telepathic spiders, who breed

human beings for food. His family belongs to the small number of humans who are still

free; they live in an underground cave in a waterless desert, continually on the alert for

spiders who float overhead in silken balloons, probing the desert landscape with beams of

willpower. Other humans live in an underground city called Dira on the shores of a dead

sea. While visiting relatives there, Niall is captivated by the charms of the ruler's

daughter Merlew. But when he overhears her referring to him as "that skinny boy" he

decides not to accept her father's invitation to remain in Dira.

On the way home, Niall and his father take shelter from a sandstorm, and Niall

finds a telescopic metal rod, a relic of the remote days when men ruled the Earth. By

accident rather than skill or choice he uses it to kill a spider whose balloon has crashed in

the storm. In doing so, he has committed an offense for which he and all his family could

die a horrible death.

Soon after their return to the desert, while Niall is absent, their cave is discovered

by spiders. Niall's father is killed and his family taken captive. Niall finds his father's

body when he returns to the cave. In trying to follow the trail of his family, he also is

captured and taken to the spider city. Upon his arrival he learns that all the inhabitants of

Dira are also prisoners. Merlew's father, King Kazak, a natural survivor, has now entered

the service of the spiders, and urges Niall to do the same. Rejecting the thought of

betraying his fellow men, Niall flees to the white tower in the center of the city, and

enters it with the aid of the telescopic rod. There he learns that it is a time capsule left by

former men, and through a supercomputer called the Steegmaster, he learns the history of

humanity on Earth. He also is presented with a device called the thought mirror, through

which he can achieve a high degree of concentration.

On leaving the tower, Niall takes refuge in the slave quarter of the city, and is

appointed overseer of a contingent of slaves, whom he leads to the nearby city of the

bombardier beetles. The beetles, as intelligent as the spiders, love explosions, and Niall

has arrived in time for one of their great annual celebrations, Boomday, organized by

their chief explosives expert, Bill Doggins. But the festival culminates in disaster,

destroying the complete stock of explosives. Niall agrees to lead Doggins to a disused

barracks in the slave quarter, where they expect to find gunpowder.

They find more than that: Reapers, the deadliest weapon ever invented by man,

which fire a beam of atomic energy. They use these to shoot their way out of an ambush

by the spiders, and escape back to the city of the bombardier beetles in stolen spider

balloons.

The ruler of the beetles, the Master, is furious that they have broken an ancient

peace treaty, and is inclined to hand over Niall and Doggins to the spiders for

punishment. Only the treachery of the Spider Lord, who decides to preempt the decision

by trying to strangle Niall, leads the Master to decide to allow Niall to stay after all.

Nevertheless, Niall is dismayed by the Master's decision that all the Reapers

should be destroyed -- dashing all hopes of using them to free his fellow men. So Niall,

Doggins, and a group of young men decide to travel to the Delta, perhaps the most

dangerous place on Earth, because Niall has concluded that the Delta is the source of a

powerful living vibration that is responsible for the abnormal growth of simple life-

forms, including the spiders. His aim is to destroy this source, known to the spiders as the

goddess Nuada.

The Delta proves to be even more dangerous than they expected; its perils include

octopus-like plants that lurk just below the surface of the ground, and humanoid frogs

that can spit a stream of poison. Niall and Doggins are the only ones to reach the heart of

the Delta, and there they discover that the "goddess" is actually a gigantic plant that

forms the summit of a mountain.

Since Doggins has been blinded, Niall is forced to press on alone. In the night that

follows, in telepathic communion with the goddess, he learns that she is indeed the source

of the giant life-forms. She came from a distant galaxy, transported to our solar system in

the tail of the comet Opik, which came close to destroying the Earth.

Another long and dangerous journey brings Niall and Doggins back to the city of

the beetles. There the Master agrees to the Death Lord's demand to hand him over. In a

final confrontation, only the direct intervention of the goddess saves Niall from an

appalling fate. But the "miracle" also convinces the Spider Council that Niall is the

emissary of the goddess, and to his own bewilderment, he finds himself exalted to the

rank of ruler of the spider city.

The Spider Lord agrees that there should henceforth be peace between human

beings and spiders, and that they should regard one another as equals. However, many

spiders secretly regard this treaty as a betrayal. Among these is Skorbo, a captain of the

Spider Lord's guard, who -- with six accomplices -- continues to trap and eat human

beings.

One snowy morning, Niall finds the dying Skorbo in a corner of the main square;

he has been struck down by some tremendous blow. Following the trail of blood to the

garden of a deserted house, Niall discovers that Skorbo has been the victim of an

ingenious booby trap: a young palm tree had been bent to the ground and then released by

cutting the rope that held it. Human footprints indicate that three men were involved in

Skorbo's murder.

Concealed nearby, Niall finds the swollen corpse of a man who has died from

spider venom; Skorbo apparently had succeeded in killing one of the "assassins."

In the roots of the palm tree, Niall has found a heavy metal disk, engraved with a

birdlike symbol. When he returns to the garden, this disk has vanished. Niall deduces that

it has been taken by one of the "assassins," and that they have been able to remain

undetected in the spider city by masquerading as slaves. Niall is able to track one of the

bogus slaves to a building used as a hospital. The man is subdued with the aid of a glue

spider, but immediately kills himself.

The pale skin of the dead man suggests that he originated in some place where he

has been deprived of light. With the aid of a "mind machine" in the white tower, Niall

learns that Skorbo's killers came from some region beneath the Earth, and that its ruler,

whom Niall calls "the Magician," is driven by a deep hatred of the spiders.

The third assassin also is tracked down, but proves to be already dead -- an

animated corpse.

After witnessing the execution of five of Skorbo's accomplices, and the

banishment of one of them who refuses to submit, Niall discovers the whereabouts of

Skorbo's "larder," where his paralyzed victims are hung like carcasses in a butcher's shop,

awaiting their turn to be eaten. One of these is a girl, Charis, whose pale skin indicates

that she is also from the underground realm of the Magician. Recognizing that Charis is

his last clue to the whereabouts of the Magician, Niall decides to keep her in his palace

until she can be restored to consciousness.

In the house that had been occupied by Skorbo's killers, Niall finds froglike

talismans carved from green stone, and realizes that they emanate a malevolent force. A

mat of some kind of seaweed proves to be the means by which the assassins were able to

draw vital energy from the girl who accompanied them.

Niall learns that Skorbo had once been lost in the mountains to the north of the

Great Wall, after a crash landing in his spider balloon. Niall begins to entertain the

suspicion that there may have been some connection between Skorbo and the Magician,

and that Skorbo's death may have been in revenge for some kind of treachery.

Niall's attempt to learn more about the Great Wall, and the Gray Mountains, is

frustrated by the fact that the spiders are almost totally ignorant of their own history.

Then he learns that the greatest of all spider warriors, Cheb the Mighty, is kept in a state

of suspended animation by the vital energy of young spiders, and that Niall, as the ruler

of the spider city, will be allowed to question Cheb.

A journey beneath the city leads him to the sacred cave; there young acolytes

bring back the great spider warrior from the land of the dead. Cheb describes how the

spiders first learned to make use of human servants, who regarded themselves as spiders

rather than human beings, and how these psychological hybrids helped Cheb to enslave

all the remaining humans. Niall then speaks with the spirit of Cheb's famous adviser,

Qisib the Wise, and learns of the events that led to the building of the Great Wall.

Qisib tells of how Cheb's successor sent his human servant Madig to select a site

for a new city in the Gray Mountains of the north. Madig, alone of all his party, returned

with a message for the Spider Lord that the Gray Mountains were the territory of the

Magician, who would destroy any invaders.

The Spider Lord was incensed -- particularly when Madig died, apparently of a

Colin Wilson - Spiderworld 05 - Shadowland.pdf

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