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Warm milk is all he gets.
After that door closes and the world is eerily slammed back to normal, Jon’s legs unfreeze and he stumbles back off the step. Makes the journey home alone and wobbly, no desire left for exploring (it won’t return for a long time) and no interest in another police escort. He jumps at shadows and scowls at the one or two grown ups who shoot concerned looks at him over the playground fence. He is too shaky to run but wastes no time making it up the front garden, socks slipping down his ankles and into his shoes.
At the door he hesitates. He doesn’t have keys and realises with a shivering dread that he cannot bring himself to knock. His fists curl uselessly and it’s then that the first tears squeeze silently from his staring eyes. Hot and pointless and stinging his cheeks.
The door opens and he shouts, staggering backwards. It is not another spider, of course it isn’t. It is his grandmother, predictably angry and worried sick. Jon looks up and sees her mouth open in a scolding shape, but her hand comes gentle into the fabric of his t-shirt. She pulls him into the warm, tungsten kitchen with exasperation instead.
She can see - she must have seen - that this is worse than the standard scrapes he comes home with sometimes, that this hasn’t been a shove on the playground. But he doesn’t tell her, mouth glued shut with shock, and she doesn’t try asking. She’s too old and tired for digging, and this must have seemed above and beyond.
She heats up the milk in a pan and gives it to him in a teacup, with a digestive and a smooth of his stress-frizzed hair. He reasons it’s probably not the milk, just being back inside and far away from that door, but his pulse eventually slows enough for him to nibble the biscuit.
It doesn’t help him sleep that night though. He sits at the headboard, legs draw as close as they can be, fingers twisted into the quilt. The light is on, so he can see every millimetre of shadow around the shape of the door and stares until his eyes water. He doesn’t jump when he hears the flush start and slippers pad down the hall, but it is lucky his grandmother never knocks.
She only sighs at the light that greets her when she opens the door. He must still look scared because she comes over rather than hitting the light. Her worn hands shoo him down into bed, pull the covers up and pat them in an observance of tucking in.
‘You can’t have the light on all night,’ she tells him, ‘it’s wasteful. And you’re far too big for that now.’
Jon says nothing which is uncharacteristic enough to make her frown deepen. She touches the back of her wrinkled hand to his forehead. It is still a bit wet and clammy from the bathroom, but she doesn’t do it very often so he doesn’t point it out. It is there for a moment then gone.
‘You’re not sick,’ she confirms, before heading to the doorway. ‘Sleep,’ she tells him, not sounding cruel but very tired, and plunges the room into darkness with a click.
As soon as she closes the door Jon is up and tearing the curtains apart to use the streetlight instead. The light it casts is sickly and pale but better than nothing. He’d never been afraid of the dark before - actually thought his classmates who were were pretty ridiculous, and prided himself on not needing a night-light despite reading grown-up books. But without seeing the outline of the door, he cannot distinguish a fat, black leg from any other shadow.
Even though her hands are pale and spotted and smell like old powder, he half wishes she hadn’t left.
Under the covers, he thinks - as he sometimes has before, on scary nights or through absent afternoons - about being held by someone younger. Someone softer, who looked, judging from the polaroids he’d nicked, a lot more like him. He remembers her a bit, he thinks. His mother. If he concentrates hard. Can remember being pulled into a wriggling, tickling hug. Maybe remembers her singing Take That as a lullaby. But he thinks trying that hard to remember counts as imagining. When he’s older he’ll realise that song hadn’t come out yet when he was five.
Even thinking his hardest, tearing his brain away from the image of the door and the legs coming out of it, Jon cannot remember his father. The ghost of him is felt all over the house. There are a couple of pictures and gifts from him pride of place. Apparently Jon has his eyes, though frowning at the mirror does nothing to confirm this. Still, he imagines his father would join them in a bundle of a hug, would take his temperature and smile with relief when he isn’t sick.
There is a spider in the plug hole the next morning when he goes to run a bath. He doesn’t scream in case it moves, but draws blood from his lip trying not to and makes a racket coming downstairs. His grandmother looks up from the newspaper in shock when he crashes onto the rug, nails between his teeth. ‘Jonathan-? What on earth?’ She makes that same tutting sound of sympathetic discontent, pulling his hand out of his mouth and wiping the blood with it.
‘What’s gotten into you?’ She says. Not unkindly but her frown is not pure concern. She doesn’t want to know, not really. She isn’t equipped to know. Even if it wasn’t a supernatural horror she wouldn’t be equipped to deal with it. She knows that really, they both do.
Jon shakes his head against her hand and mumbles something about a spider in the bathtub. She doesn’t hide her eyes rolling back into her head as she groans to her feet, reaching for her stick.
‘I won’t have a bath,’ he tries, ‘I don’t need one.’
‘You do and you will,’ she says, sighing and chivvying him back up the stairs. She doesn’t raise her voice, not ever, but grumbles with the effort of climbing behind him.
Looking back Jon doesn’t think it was as mean as it had felt - of course children need to wash and to get over what she would have assumed to be an irrational fear of spiders. But at the time he could have cried with relief that the thing was gone. His grandmother clicks her tongue as she sits heavily on the toilet seat to watch the water fill up and gives his back a few scrubbing strokes.
‘You were never scared of insects before,’ she muses under the roar of the faucet.
After all of that excitement she insists he doesn’t go wandering. That is fine, more than fine. Jon promises yes as emphatically as he can without smiling, and though she raises an eyebrow, it turns out she doesn’t need to lock him in. His appetite for exploring has all but vanished. Initially this seems to please her, a peaceful afternoon with the radio and no worry of the school, the aquarium, the arcade, the police forcing her up to answer the phone or the door. But the loss of what had always been her strategy to keep him quiet - the books - is as irritating to her as it is confusing.
‘Here,’ she sighs again, ‘you’re halfway through this one - don’t you want to see how it ends?’
Jon just shakes his head. No, he absolutely does not want to see how it ends.
Novels go untouched, but anything close to a children’s book is pushed roughly away with his foot. She mutters about ungrateful but he will not give in. Overhearing a reading of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in the school library sets him shaking, fingers curled white into his plastic chair. They send him home early, which doesn’t help except that he can screw his eyes up to not see the monster in his bedroom, instead of in front of everyone.
The boy is still missing. There are posters up for him. Everywhere. His face is everywhere and still in Jon’s bad dreams. There is an assembly at school to explain all this to the children, and to pray for him. But they don’t tell the truth. All these grownups keep going on about missing - never dead, never taken, never eaten - reminding the kids not to wander off. They talk about the boy as if he were wonderful, sweet, and kind, doing odd jobs for old ladies. Everyone talks so much about how nice he was that Jon supposes it must have been a bit true. He hadn’t deserved it.
The police come to the assembly, squatting down to the children’s height to gently reassure them they will be safe if they just stay home. They ask for anyone who has seen the boy to come forward. They come to Jon's house too, asking questions of his grandmother about the jobs the boy had helped her with, asking Jon if he’d seen the boy at the park on Wednesday two weeks ago. Jon lies and tells them no, no he never saw the boy who was apparently kind. Perhaps he isn’t a good liar yet because they don’t seem to believe him.
‘Are you sure?’ One officer asks, sitting on the sofa so his face is close and patronising.
‘Yes, I’m sure. Why would I say something I wasn’t sure about?’ Jon retorts, hackles up and heels dug into the old carpet.
His grandmother clips him round the ear for it, but he sees, or he hopes he sees, just a bit of relief in her face. Relief that he’s back to being annoying (clever, as he’d thought of it then) after the scare he’d given her when they’d first arrived.
She reassures him that they’re just suspicious because he insists on running round Bournemouth like a suburban Mowgli (which isn’t very reassuring). But it probably didn't help that they knocked.
She had had to put a sign up, only a day or two After. For the milkman, the postman, the new people delivering her shopping.
Please ring the doorbell,
it says. She lies to the neighbours that it’s to save the paint job on the door. But they probably hear Jon screaming when someone foolishly reads it too late and knocks.
She doesn’t ask what happened to the book. Probably doesn’t even remember it existing. She forgets more and more as she’s climbing over eighty and it’s not like it’s the first book Jon’s kicked up a fuss over or left on a park bench somewhere. He doesn’t like to think about what happened to it - can picture it lying on the curb and later, as an adult knowing what a Leitner is, feels guilty as sickly crawling sin for leaving it there.
The book never comes up again. The milk goes sour with attempts at comfort without understanding.
By the time Jon is eleven he has stopped screaming or crying over spiders and knocks and doors. But revising with the door open still can’t make him focus, and he fails the eleven plus quietly. The local comprehensive is fine, he tells himself, though his grandmother is disappointed, it won’t be scary. There are far scarier things than big kids in the world, anyway. He gets back into reading slowly, keeps his blazer cuffs pulled over his hands and develops his scowl for the corridors.
They have to sit him at the front because he always has half an eye on the door. Miss Wray, his form tutor, notices that Jon flinches at knocks and suggests it after registration one day. It’s horrifically embarrassing, as everything was at eleven, but even more so than normal; it makes him cringe viciously to be coddled. He looks at the grubby carpet as she asks him if everything is alright at home. Everything is fine at home, he tells her. Normal at home. He just about trusts the doors at home and his grandmother knows not to knock if she wants peace and quiet.
Miss Wray is skeptical, fawning, concerned and skeptical over again. Jon ends up pushing his sleeves above his elbows, thrusting his wrists and forearms under her nose to prove that yes, everything is fine, no one is hurting him and can he please go now?
‘I’m not just worried about physically,’ she says, ‘if your parents are-’
‘My parents are dead,’ he tells her, taking some perverse pleasure in the awkwardness and sympathy that mingles on her face.
She lets him go then and he goes away scowling. But she still changes the seating plan.
Once, he is carrying books in his arms because they won’t fit in his rucksack, and a gang of Sixth Formers decide that is funny. They corner him in a dark part of the library, chuckling darkly to each other while he pretends not to be looking for a way past them. It’s fine and normal until he spies cobwebs round the pipe in the corner. Spindly grey strands stretching like evil, sticky lace back into the skirting board. Then he drops the books, useless fingers shaking in his sleeves, and has to scramble about on the floor picking them up. One hardback is over by the pipe and everything in him is screaming leave it. He thinks his tendons are too tight to pick it up without snapping, and the image of many legs scuttling over them makes him want to be sick. The Sixth Formers laugh as he pushes past them and runs, leaving the book behind.
But he is largely fine.
He starts reading up on ghosts and ghouls and goblins. Demons, cryptids, all the things other people are scared of in the night. Nothing seems as real or as frightening as that door, that spider, that book. As school goes on and he’d rather read than drink cider on the windy seafront, he decides that understanding the science of this fear will fix it. Wrapped in an anorak on the pier, he decides almost all of it is fake.
It must be. Dismissing it must work in some capacity, Jon reasons. Nothing ever comes for him again.
He doesn’t ever really tell Georgie. She finds out just enough and quite on accident, really, from a jump he wasn’t ready for and couldn’t hold in. In her signature brand of tenacious comforting that he’s still getting used to, she will not let it go. Doesn’t let it go until he admits that, fine - he doesn’t like spiders, or knocking, or loud doors, or children’s books, and she’ll never believe the reason so he’s not telling.
‘Alright,’ she says, holding her hands up, ‘alright, I won't push it. You know I would believe you though, right?’
He just shrugs, not really believing that and not ready to fight the tangles in his stomach. He tells her thank you though, meaning it. Talking about it makes him unfairly snappy but she’s still here. Do you want anything , she asks and strangely enough he wants milk. She heats it in the microwave and takes the skin off with her finger, but it still helps to feel a warm mug against his palms.
She squashes herself in behind him on the sofa, bundles him up in her soft arms and holds on tight enough that he struggles drinking it. Pointing this out does not make Georgie let go.
Jon’s never sure what exactly she chalks it up to - probably something generically tied to dead parents and being raised in an old house by a white woman who’d rather have had her own son back than him.
‘I get it,’ is all she says, ‘spiders are freaky.’
The next day she hits B&Q, oils up all the hinges in their creaky student flat, and props open all the fire doors. Jon tells her it’s ridiculous, Georgina , because that’s how he feels. She leans against the doorframe (she’s taken to leaving her bedroom door open so he never has to knock), arms folded.
‘If it wasn’t clear enough, Jonathan ,’ she mimics, peeling off her rubber gloves, ‘I’m doing this because I love you. It’s not ridiculous. Get used to it.’
When Jon’s grandmother dies they don’t tell him if he’s getting the house on the phone. Not that that was his first thought, obviously his first thought is grief he’d resigned himself to feeling for several years. These things are always a long time coming and the actual call only puts things in motion that you have had somewhere in the back of your mind, filed away for this moment. Still, he doesn’t love the fact he has to trek down to Bournemouth to meet a lawyer who’s meeting a banker to tell him, long story short, that he can’t have the house. Something about the mortgage.
His last look inside is weird and muddy, like a child’s pothole potion. Sadness, memories, but very little like nostalgia. It feels very different empty. He takes a couple of paintings, a photo album, and some things for the kitchen. But there are cobwebs everywhere and cleaning it brings nothing but a guilty sort of dread. They can keep it, he decides, and he is fine with that actually.
The money gets him a flat in London. A flat of his own that comes pre-hoovered, free of dust and spiders. He goes round it again, glueing up holes in the only slightly grotty skirting board, and propping open doors. It’s a second floor flat so it has a buzzer. He gets a battery-powered doorbell that sticks weekly to his own front door and sighs as he closes it, taking in the blank carpet.
It feels like nothing can get him in here.
So when he finds a job researching the supernatural in Chelsea, on a salary, with a library, it sounds easy and familiar. It sounds like something he could do well and find interesting. They don’t even ask for much - the interviewer pretty much kicks off talking about contracts and benefits.
He never tells Tim through research - not in the library, the office, the pub, the sofa. Not through the move. When he hears Tim talk about Danny through the tinny, plastic-crackling speaker, he knows they have that in common. That feeling of something no one will believe freed by feeding it to the building. To the watcher. That paralysing fear that kills someone else and eats every day after. He wants Tim to trust him and he needs Tim’s help, so he tells him that much.
‘I found a Leitner,’ he explains, the barest minimum. ‘When I was a kid.’
He doesn’t say anything else because Tim has lost his brother, his family, and Jon has lost - what? Blissful ignorance? Innocence he never really had? The ability to look a spider in its bulging eyes?
Still, Tim nods and gives Jon his information, so he must understand a bit of what it meant to trade that.
It’s years later that Jon actually tells the first person the whole story - not a tape, not his patron. He's safe now and the stakes are as low as they’ll ever be. When he eventually tells Martin about it, it’s been long enough he can keep it mostly steady. Voice low, looking at his hands in his lap. But when he finishes and looks up Martin is crying. That sets him off too, and as he cries harder and is squeezed tighter he realises he hasn’t cried about it since he was eight years old. Martin is sorry, he keeps saying, God, Jon, so so sorry about every joke, every time he brought up spiders, every time he’s ever knocked. It’s okay, Jon promises, I’m alright now, I’m alright.
And he actually is, once his chest has come back to slow and shaky rising and falling, and he has a chance to wipe his face. He’s alright. It feels better to tell someone, lighter.
They get a doorbell. Martin takes the spiders every time. He doesn’t point them out anymore, just quietly goes to get a glass and move it. Sometimes Jon doesn’t even look up from his book until there’s a kiss pressed to his forehead.
‘Going down the shop,’ Martin says into his hair, like there were never any monsters in the house. ‘Do we need milk?’