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It’s funny, really, how ignorant he is. How did he not know? How did he stroll through the Mother’s grand stageplay without so much as a thought for the script— and then still perform each line to perfection? Is he living in delusion? Is he blind?
(…Annabelle doesn’t know. She doesn’t know, and it scares her in a way that few things can; that someone could move without asking, could go off-script and burn the only thing she has to ashes. Who is an actor, without a stage? Who is a daughter, without a mother?
Who is Annabelle, without the Web?)
But the stage is long since set— and so, Annabelle elucidates. She tells him of spiders, weaving in the dark—
(A spider at a certain size is no longer made of spider—)
Of the crack in reality, scraped open mark by agonizing mark—
(Free will, Annabelle’s lips say, is such a funny thing—)
Of the anchor made of his voice—
(Spider’s legs, spindly legs, that grab and reach and twist and hunger—)
And finally, of the choice he must make.
(This is the core of it: the choice. The choice that has already been made; The choice he will pretend he can make again. When the curtains close on the panopticon, will he blame himself? Will he blame her?)
It is a lie, of course. Weaved and anchored with truth, yes, but a lie nonetheless. She tells it as easy as breathing.
(Meaning:
Annabelle Cane has been lying since birth. She lied and lied and lied, every day and every night and every waking moment, she lied like it sustained her, like the truth was poison, like sincerity was a weakness she could not afford.
And then one day, the spiders. One day, the Web, sprawling and Many-legged— and the lies became literal. Strings constricting her throat, threads leading her legs in a dance, in a waltz, in the Mother’s final tragedy.
She lied and lied. In, out, in, out, and then one day she realized:
She didn’t know how to stop.)
And he takes it all in stride.
(Because he doesn’t understand, or because he does?)
The best lies are spun from truth, and Annabelle is a very good liar. So even through the fear— of the spider’s legs undulating in a pantomime of weaving, of strings that he cannot see, of lies and manipulation and Annabelle herself— The Archivist can recognize that one, underlying truth:
Somebody else is always in control.
(And what will you do? Jon says.
And she does not say there is no me not touched by cobweb, or rest, probably, or You say that like I’ll still exist after the lights are off, or I hope I die, God I hope, or anything else at all. Because—
Because Annabelle Cane will do none of those things. Because Annabelle Cane has not done something since she was hollowed out and made into a mask.
I don’t know, she says instead. And it feels like nothing.
It feels like everything else.)
And later— if there is a later, time having long since jumped ship— The Archivist will try, one more time, to escape his destiny.
And he will fail.
And she will watch—
(Not like we do, not in a way that gives her any details. But she will sit there, and hope beyond hope that the ending was a happy one. That Jon will play along, and maybe— just maybe— make it out alive. She hopes one of them will make it out alive.
And she will wonder, in the moments before the ending, about herself.
Who was Annabelle Cane, if not a daughter, an actor, an archetype? Who was she, before her Becoming?
And she will think about Five go down to the Sea, and the beach where she lived. Of eight siblings, with nothing to do; of Crime and Punishment, her major in college. Did she like the beach? Did she like to read, to lose hours on hours in a good book? Did they play games, the eight of them— monopoly and scrabble and tag and hide and seek, go fish and war? Did she love her siblings?
Did she love her mother?
Then the tragedy happens. Then the ending, and Jon bleeding out as the world rots around him, and Martin refusing to go, and the two of them— who never, in any universe, met Annabelle Cane— dying together as the audience claps and cheers, as the crowd rises to their feet, shouting ‘encore, encore!’, as— Something. Some new kind of noise. A last screech, a single dying cry of one lone corpse against the sky, a kind of rattle, a sort of static nothingness that starts in the heart, that falls through your gut like a knife, a sort of not-feeling that spreads to a tingle in the legs and then more, and more, and more—
And Annabelle Cane will say, ‘oh.’ Not like a proclamation, or a lament. Just… A realization, of sorts. Oh: as if she has seen something she didn’t expect. And we, the audience, will never be certain what happens in that moment. But we know one truth:
For the first time in many, many years, Annabelle Cane will look at the sky—)
And smile.