While an actual face helped calm her down to hiccups, Danny's glowing fingers were a deeply misguided attempt at relaxing her because she stared, horrified, and recoiled. Her eyes didn't follow them as they waved, though, but remained focused on a point that turned out to be just over Danny's shoulder, at a spider that had just dropped from the canvas above them on a fine string of its silk and waved gently in the fan's breeze, stretching four of its long, elegant legs in that slow, awkward way spiders do.
The girl started slowly, loathe to tear her focus away from the spider in case it disappeared and she would have to wonder about where it had gone and if it was on her, saying, "Noreen. I didn't know her very well." Then she gave up on the spider because she dropped her face into her hands to sob, declaring, "But it's my fault! She had only been here for a day and I knew she was scared, too, and wanted to go home so bad and she told me she wasn't comfortable and I thought she was just like me, she was homesick, but I made her come with me to the toilet that night because it was away from the camp and in these trees that were so dark and I was sick and so badly didn't want to go alone and no one else was so kind as she was. So it was my fault and I feel so horrible but no one even believes me! She had the flashlight because she was so kind to wait for me outside so she was pointing it at me when I came out and I could barely see her, and she hadn't even said anything when suddenly these big arms were around her then these horrible, hairy, gigantic tarantula legs and she barely even screamed but she dropped the flashlight and I could only see this terrible thing on his head that was like lizards with open mouths and then these big-- big snake fangs he had that he bit her with and she went all stiff and didn't make a sound and then they were both just gone, up into the air or the trees or something." She finally took a breath then, shuddering, her face still down in her hands until she had some kind of control over herself. When she looked up, it was with frustration to say, "Everyone says she just walked off and Clive even said I must have been dreaming and the dig was getting in my head, but why would I dream something so horrible?"
The spider behind Danny had landed on another of the pots, this one still thick with old dirt, cracked across its surface and deep in the crevasses, but the face of the figure carved into it could still be made out as a pair of wild eyes, a smiling row of beast's fangs, and a crown of snakes. The pot was broken and lay on its side, and the spider slowly crawled over the edge of it and out of sight, into its cool belly.