Rachel was a young girl of nine and an explorer.
She had donned a hard cap and affixed to it a reflective circle of foil. In the sun, it shown like a bright lamp. She needed such a lamp that would carry with it a piece of the sun because she was exploring the dark parts of her side yard, and among the willow near the rocks she found what she was sure was an old tunnel to a magic land.
She gathered together the other things she knew she’d need, her well-worn adventuring gear. She shouldered her gear and made off.
She took the garden spade and the small shovel from the shed and made to reopen the tunnel. She found it had wooden rafters like the ceiling of her attic, and after crawling a bit, she found it had the same musty dusty smell. As she crawled carefully, knowing old tunnels to be Dangerous Places, she came across boxes baring strange runes, bricks and bracks, a left-handed tea kettle, and an upsidedown candelabra. When she dusted them aside, she found three spider’s webs met at the center of the candelabra.
The spiders had not seen the sun in many years. When Rachel brought that piece of it with her on her hat, they had blinked and muttered at first, but now with three eyes undazzled, they looked again and found it quite to their liking. Their world was all askew, and it seemed there was much more of it, wider and taller, than they remembered. The sun made things wholer and stouter.
A spider doffed its tophat to Rachel.
“Why hello,” she said. “Thank you primly for your manners, friend Spider. I am Exploring. Your tunnel was lost but now it is found!”
The spider blinked at her several times. Eight, by her count.
“I am looking for Adventure. Do you know where she lives?”
The spiders nodded. Adventure was something they had sought in the youth of their long spider-lives; the hatted spider had found her, but she was far abroad, and always moving, and he concluded he was more suited to contemplative peace and quiet rather than tag along. He preferred to wait, and maybe someday, Adventure might come to him. He was an important spider, after all.
He gestured with three legs to the tunnel down which he had found Adventure. It was past the old Hellenistic statue with the natty Lei, but right of the red blinking. He told Rachel he got as far as the City of Levity, a place of balloons and windmills, nestled high in the clouds near the weathervanes and steeples. He had ridden a leaf to get there, but tiny though she was, he did not see any leaf feeling up to the task for her.
“Thank you kindly, friend Spider.” she said. She offered them each a crumb of crumbcake, but they declined, knowing the reopened tunnel would provide, and her road was long. The third spider, more spindly than the rest, offered her a long cloak from behind a box. It smelled of must and dust like the rest of the boxen town, but the spider said it also had a velvety gleam and a loving cuddle sewn into it. Rachel took it in exchange for a pin she had brought.