Spider Women (Chantal & Zelda)

The last of Rose‘s housemates we meet in The Sandman are two women, maybe sisters, maybe friends, maybe something else entirely. In The Doll’s House, we assist to the debut of possibly the weirdest inhabitants of the shared house, Chantal and Zelda, women clad in black punk-Victorian dresses portrayed by Daisy Badger and Cara Horgan, respectively, and who boast to have the Eastern Seaboard‘s largest collection of stuffed spiders. Their nature and role in the story is quite a mystery in the comics as well, but we do get to know them a bit better: let’s see together.

The story of Zelda began alone, with her father Robert and her unnamed mother. Since her childhood she was a very weird kid, always fascinated by things other girls her age found scary or repulsive. In particular, Zelda loved graveyards, as they gave her a sense of transience, as if they were the proof that human soul was destined to something else, something greater. Needless to say, not many people shared this passion of hers, starting from her mother, who considered her sick and monstrous, and never lost an opportunity to tell her so. Then came Chantal, a girl Zelda met in a graveyard of all places: she shared her passion for everything concerning death, albeit for different reasons. Chantal didn’t believe in God, and she only loved the place for its aesthetic, the most sublime one according to her. Despite this core difference, the two girls realized they were soul sisters, and decided to stick together for the rest of their lives, sharing their unique view of the world away from a world that didn’t understand them. They started dressing the same way, with white dresses and a veil that hid their faces, to the point that nobody would have ever been able to tell who was Zelda and who was Chantal. When they were old enough, they moved together to a rented room in a big house in Cocoa, Florida, the first tenants of Hal Carter. Here, they earnt the nickname Spider Women, as they put together an impressive collection of stuffed spiders that counted more than 24,000 specimens, the largest collection on the Eastern seaboard, or so they claimed. They got along with their housemates, albeit they barely interacted with them at all: since Zelda stuttered, it was Chantal the one who spoke between them, and usually in quite an elaborated and old-fashioned vocabulary. The two were as one, but they would have gotten even closer soon enough.

One night, the two were sleeping and dreaming in their beds. Zelda was dreaming of being a little girl again, running in a graveyard while chased by her screaming mother; Chantal was dreaming to fall in love with a sentence, only to find herself trapped into a recursive story. Suddenly, the two dreams mixed up together, and little Zelda found her soul sister Chantal trapped in the literary loop: to save her, she told her one of their favorite ghost stories, M.R. James‘ Lost Hearts, calming her down. When they woke up, they were scared, confused and alone, and they spent the night holding each other. The experience, albeit brief, had changed them, Zelda especially: she had now found a courage she didn’t know she had, and she even started speaking despite the stutter. When Hal Carter decided to sell his house, it came as a surprise when Zelda and Chantal offered to buy it, taking possession of the one that had been their shelter from the world for so many years. The world, however, has a weird way to break into the lives of even the most reclusive people: in April 1989, Chantal found herself in need of a kidney replacement, but something went terribly wrong. The organ she was donated came from a woman killed in a shooting, but she had not been properly checked, and Chantal discovered she was HIV positive in the worst possible way. Now sick herself, she had only Zelda to look after her, and she did it with all the love and the caring she was capable of. The virus was relentless, though, and in a couple of years it consumed Chantal’s life. If this wasn’t enough, Zelda got it too, and in another couple of years she was forced to move to a clinic in Los Angeles. She was sure she would have spent her days alone when a helping hand came: Rose, one of her former housemates now a famous writer, came for her, offering to pay all her bills and taking care of her day by day. As time passed, however, it became clear that Zelda would have better prepared to face that ultimate mystery she had been fascinated by for all her life.

Zelda and Chantal are young women who find in each other the sister they never had, two kindred souls who share a morbid passion for death and anything related to it. Kind but shy, the two Spider Women always maintain a distance from “normal” people, mainly because they both know what kind of reaction a passion like their usually generates in others. Come what may, however, they have each other, and not even their beloved Death can take that away from them.