There was this one tiny fellow who stayed behind to mind the place.
Robin and I (td) have just moved house, as Sandra has mentioned. We’d lived in our last place for eight years, and thought we knew every inch of it. We called our two downstairs rooms The Sunroom and The Dungeon: one flooded daily with morning light, and the other half-submerged and having a creepy under-the-stairs space, where daddy-long-legs gathered for nefarious purposes. Additionally, we had a workroom under the house, tucked into a corner of the carport, entered through a locked door with a bonafide skeleton key — a place to keep our bikes and our house-and-garden tools. Robin made and repaired things down there, and I mostly avoided entering it. This was the real dungeon, we know now — a kind of mini Bastille, in our very own home.
This room was half dirt, half brick, and all dust and cobwebs. A filthy light globe dangled from the ceiling. It was whilst cleaning out this last of our rooms that Robin found, tucked into the crumbling brick wall and stuffed up against some insulation, the little prisoner who’d apparently been our guest all these years, unbeknownst to us. We dragged him into the sunlight to have a good look at him, but he didn’t seem any happier for it, so we put him back in his nook and left him there, to keep his vigil. We are sure this is for the best, as the spiders might miss him if we took him now. He’s practically family.