Chapter Three: In which our heroine discovers that while music may soothe the savage breast, viola playing causes savage spiders to run away screaming

Question: If you were lost in the woods, who would you ask for directions—an out-of-tune violist, an in-tune violist, or Santa Claus?
Answer: The out-of-tune violist. The others are just figments of your imagination.

"Mary Sue, we don't want to go to Middle Earth!" Kit said.

I shrugged. "For one thing, this is the chance of a lifetime for me to be in the one place I've always wanted to visit. For another, I think this is the end of the line, and this train is out of service."

Right on cue, a pleasant female voice sputtered to life over the intercom. "This train is now out of service. All passengers please leave the train. This train is now out of service, all passengers please leave the train. Please remember to take all your belongings and violas with you."

The mayor looked out at the terrain doubtfully. Improbably, the doors had opened directly into a forest. A dark, tangled forest, with no light visible from above except that coming in from the clearing made by the subway tracks. "My shoe's broken. How am I supposed to walk with one broken shoe? For that matter, where are we supposed to walk to?"

I hadn't a clue, but I did know something about the woods of Middle Earth. Given the tangled, impenetrable growth on both sides of us, I'd say we were either in Mirkwood, or the Old Forest near the Shire. Either one of those woods was dangerous, and the same advice would get us through either one. Do not stray from the path.

And there was a path. It ran alongside the train, then bent so it continued on from where the tracks ended. I led the way. "Follow me," I said. "Don't leave the path—not for any reason! I've got a bad feeling about this!"

"Wrong movie," Kit commented.

"Huh?" I asked.

"'I've got a bad feeling about this' is something Han Solo would say in Star Wars. We're in The Lord of the Rings right now, remember?"

"Depends," I said. "We could be in The Hobbit, especially if this is Mirkwood."

As we travelled onward, I became increasingly convinced that we were indeed in Mirkwood. For one thing, though the undergrowth was tangled and impenetrable, the trees didn't seem to be on the verge of sentience. For another, there was animal life in the forest, something in which the Old Forest outside the Shire was conspicuously lacking. For a while, we traversed onwards and made decent time. The mayor eventually solved her shoe problem by wrenching the heel off her other shoe in some rabbit or snake hole, so even she could hobble forwards at a smart clip. We were fine, at least until we encountered the spider webs.

Drew was in the lead, as usual, and so was the first to feel the silken presence of the webs. She reacted in a predictably Drewish way—she screamed. The rest of us hobbled or ran forward as best we could, to find her brushing the webs out of her hair. "Sorry," she said. "Just cobwebs."

I looked closely. If they were cobwebs, they were pretty damn big. And strong. And, well, just a little to coherent and patterned to be cobwebs.

"They're spider webs," I told the others.

"Damn big spiders," the mayor remarked.

We didn't have time to react to that comment, because the spiders, alerted most probably by Drew's screaming, jumped down from above. One grabbed the mayor and tried to sting her, but she stabbed it with the broken heel of her shoe. The spider fell off her and ran away, dripping ichor. One rushed at Drew, and she beaned it with her rock.

But it was I who saved the day. "Music soothes the savage beast," I misquoted. "Music..." In a trice, I had pulled out my viola, and started to play.

I never knew spiders could hear. I didn't think they actually had ears or anything to hear with. I supposed, if I'd thought about it, that they might sense the vibrations of my music and that would calm them, rather like putting an infant in a car seat and taking him for a ride will cause him to stop screaming and fall asleep.

I was therefore rather surprised when the spiders started making music of their own, kind of a screeching sound. They stopped attacking, and slowly backed away. When they got past a certain distance from me, they actually turned around and ran. I stopped playing as soon as I was certain that the spiders were gone, and packed up my viola. It was then I realized that the mayor was lying on the ground, tucked as well as she could manage into a foetal position, with her fingers stuffed in her ears.

And she was off the path.