by Brian Lumley
“Eh? Why, a stalk, and a leaf.”
“And?…What’s this thing here, staring at you?”
“‘Ere! You’re ’aving me on again, hain’t you? There’s nothin’ there ’cept your finger, sir!…”
Conway switched the tape recorder off. He looked at Bleaker and said, “Both the ‘blank’ and the thing on the apple were—”
“Spiders?”
Conway nodded.
At that point the women came in from the kitchen carrying plated salads. “Spiders!” exclaimed Dorothy, Conway’s wife, in disgust. She turned to Bleaker. “Don’t tell me he’s going on about old Tom Waterford again? I’ve had to listen to nothing else for a week!”
“But this sounds so interesting,” said Bleaker’s wife, Andrea. “What’s it all about? One of your cases, Paul?”
Dorothy held up her hand and took charge of the situation before it could get out of hand. “No you don’t, Paul, not tonight. You’ve got Jerry here bored stiff. And anyway, I’ve told you what the answer is.”
“Oh?” Bleaker looked at her. “What do you reckon then, Dorothy?”
She held up a finger and shushed them, looking very serious. “Flying saucers!” she said.
They all laughed.
“Oh, it’s not so funny,” she cautioned, unable to avoid giggling, despite her semi-serious expression. “It was just before Old Tom went funny that the light was seen over the hills.”
“A light?” Andrea repeated, completely out of her depth.
“Yes, a queer light, over the hills near Lord Daventry’s place,” Dorothy said. “Myself, I reckon the Martians got Old Tom!” And again they all laughed; but Dorothy laughed loudest for she’d succeeded in changing the subject, which was all she had wanted to do….
The “lights” were seen again much later that same night, this time from the other side of the hills. Lord Daventry, sitting in his study, caught the bluish flash out of the corner of his eye as he sat studying some papers. Looking out of his window, away over the hills he saw a beam of light like a solid bar striking from heaven to the earth. It lasted for just a second, then was gone, but it reminded him of similar lights he had seen over a week ago. That had been about the time that Old Tom started his queer business.
Thinking about his gamekeeper made the peer suddenly wonder how Conway was getting on with the case. Lord Daventry knew that the psychiatrist had spent a fair amount of time with Thomas.
Well, Conway usually worked late, didn’t he? There was no reason why he shouldn’t call the man up and find out how things stood. They were, af-ter all, old friends of sorts. Perhaps he’d also ask if Conway had seen the light. He thought about it for a few minutes more, then picked up his telephone and dialed Conway’s number.
He heard the answering brrp, brrp, brrp, from the other end, then the distant telephone was lifted from its cradle in Conway’s study. “Conway?” said the Lord. “I hope I’ve not got you out of bed?”
“Not at all,” Conway’s voice came back, promptly and clearly. “I was doing a bit of work. Had a drink with some friends earlier but they’re long gone. Dorothy’s in bed.”
“Good. I just wondered if you’d seen that peculiar light? I saw it a minute or so ago from my window. Seemed to shine down pretty close to your place. Funny sort of thing….”
Conway didn’t answer. He was staring out of his own window. Out there, just beyond the dense copse at the foot of the garden, emitting a pul-sing sort of auroral radiance whose like he had never in his life seen before, the bluish dome of an alien vessel showed like an obscene blister against the background of nighted hills. Closer to the house, looking at Conway where he stood staring out of the window, something loomed on stilt-like legs—something huge, hairy and hideously ugly beyond nightmare—something much more monstrously alien than the spacecraft which had brought it here.
It was, of sorts, a spider—but already Conway was beginning to forget that there were such things.
The bushes at the side of the house, from which even now a smaller spider emerged, swaying almost mechanically into view; the garden and copse and blister of strange light beyond; the dark backdrop of hills and roof of star-strewn skies: all of these things were peripheral in Conway’s awareness, as the frame of a picture seen close-up is peripheral in the eye of the viewer. His concentration, to the contrary, was centered on the spider, on its eyes.
At the other end of the wire, Lord Daventry waited patiently for an answer. After a little while, wondering at the delay, he asked: “Paul? Are you still there?”
Conway, staring into the vast, crimson, hooded orbs of the thing’s eyes where they glared at him hypnotically from the garden, shook his head as if to clear away some mental smog. He finally answered:
“Yes, I’m here. Could you repeat what you said just then? I didn’t catch it the first time.”
“I said did you see the strange light?”
“No, I saw no light.” Conway made no attempt to enlarge upon the subject.
Believing Conway must be tired, the peer decided to keep the conversation short. “Ah….” he cleared his throat. “Look, sorry to be a nuisance, Paul, but I was wondering about Old Thomas….” He paused.
Conway made no comment.
“Old Thomas,” repeated the peer more loudly, becoming frustrated. “Thomas and his spiders!” His voice came sharp and clear, if a little tinny, from Conway’s telephone.
Conway grunted impatiently and frowned. He jiggled the telephone, blew into the earpiece, and said: “Look, I’m sorry, sir. Terrible line tonight. Can’t hear a thing you’re saying. Can I ring you back in the morning?” And with that he replaced the receiver.
He was dimly, hazily aware, while he performed these casual, automatic tasks, that the smaller of the two creatures outside bore in its mandibles the body of Andrea Bleaker—that as its mouth worked avidly at her middle, the uppermost of its three globular semi-opaque abdomen-sacks was turning a dull red—but this also was peripheral knowledge. Not once did his attention waver from the eyes of the larger creature. He couldn’t divert his attention if he tried.
That night thirty thousand backup vessels beamed in, an entire taskforce, most of them far bigger than the half-dozen or so scout craft al-ready in situ. In the morning Conway made his telephone call, as he had promised, to Lord Daventry, but there was no answer. At midnight a craft had landed in the peer’s garden and its pilot had been hungry.
By midday there were still one or two pockets of uninitiated people in isolated places—the odd Eskimo family or settlement, a reclusive order of Tibetan monks, the crew of a marine survey vessel just north of the southern pack ice—all of whom still believed in spiders, but not many. As for the invaders: there were not especially worried about finding these as yet unbranded mavericks. That could wait.
Right now there was the herding to think about, and then the giant factory ships would have to be brought in….
Deja Viewer
Now we fast forward almost quarter of a century to 2002. I was trying to give myself a break, get away from writing novels for a while, which I seemed to have been doing almost nonstop since retiring (from the Army in December 1980). Now, I’m the kind of fellow who often has odd or peculiar thoughts (what do you mean, you would never have guessed!?) and it had recently occurred to me that when I look in a mirror I don’t see myself as I am but as I was the tiniest fraction of a second ago… because light isn’t an instantaneous medium. In fact there are no instantaneous media—except, or so we’re informed—in “quantum entanglement.” (Okay, so you knew that.) Anyway, that is the thought which led me to this next story, and to say anything else about it, except where it first appeared, in a limited edition, small press British publication called Maelstrom Vol. 1, Calvin House 2004, would simply mean giving it away.
(And as for giving it away, well the title doesn’t help too much, either!)
Yes it’s possible. And yes, I’m pretty sure they’ll do it one day, even if I’m no longer in the pro
gram. Which I won’t be, not the way I am now. But best to begin at the beginning, back when I was eight or nine years old.
I had wanted to be an astronaut…huh! Bad timing. Just when all of that was winding down. And here we are in 2044 and it never did wind up again, not all the way. Oh, there’ve been more Mars probes, and gas-giant moon probes, but all automated, computer driven, and no astronauts worth the mention. We still have the manned, Lego-like, Earth-orbiting international space-station twirling and twinkling away up there, and the Moonbase that no one’s been back to for seven years since its dome was popped by a pea-sized Leonid meteorite, but that’s it, that’s your lot.
No great future in astronautics, obviously.
But with my grades I could at least theorize on space, the universe and like that, even if I wasn’t going to go out there. And with my aptitude for physics—of the more truly physical variety as opposed to, or hand in hand with, the theoretical—I certainly wasn’t going to miss out on a job in some research laboratory; just about any research facility, for that matter. But the dreams (in fact they were nightmares) came a long time before that, when I was eight or nine years old….
They were sort of vague at first.
I remember my father comforting me, sitting on my bed with his arm around me, holding me tight. “What was all that about?” he asked me, with a frown on a face that mine was the image of except for all the lines, that face which on waking I imagined had solidified right out of my nightmare, causing me to shrink back from him. “What was it, Davy? Some kind of bad dream?”
And I remember telling him, “It was a face—I think it was your face, Dad—but the mouth was all twisted up and hurting, and the face was all blurred. You were shouting at me, I think. Telling me not to do it.” And I sat there shivering.
“I was telling you not to do it? Hey, what’s all this, son? Are you feeling guilty about something?”
Guilty? Me? But have you ever known a nine-year-old boy who didn’t feel guilty about something or other? Like his curiosity about girls and their differences? Or the stolen cigarette that made him sick behind the garden shed last Thursday? Or the ten-dollar bill he found in the road and didn’t tell the neighborhood cop about? Or the sparrow he killed with his BB gun before putting the weapon in its box and locking it, and shoving it to the back of a shelf where he couldn’t any longer see it; out of sight, out of mind sort of thing? Of course I felt guilty. But that’s not what the dream had been about. And so:
“No,” I told him, still shivering in his arms. “It was just a dream—a bad dream, that’s all—but it’s gone now.” Which was true enough at the time, except I didn’t know then that it hadn’t gone very far. Or not far enough….
It happened a good many times after that, too many times, while I was still a kid; but on every occasion it was dark and vague, just like the first time, like a bad memory that keeps floating to the surface but never enough that you recognize its origin or what it’s about. Guilt? Conscience? No. I don’t think so. I mean, I had never done anything that bad, had I? Apart from the usual troubles that kids get into my childhood had been pretty much idyllic. I had loved my Ma and Da, and in return had been much loved.
Yet I must have been to blame for something. The dream, my nightmare, must surely be something out of my past, some badly scarred bit of mental baggage or other. Or so I supposed, as I quickly came to dread it without quite knowing why. For let’s face it: it wasn’t that much of a nightmare, now was it? What, a dark blurred face and an obscure warning?
That was all it was, yes. Yet every time it came I would wake up in my clammy, tumbled bed, with those anxious, urgent, distant but insistent demands echoing over and over in my head even as they receded:
“Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t make it happen! For God’ sake, don’t…do…it!”
There were periods, weeks and months at a time, when I slept deep and peacefully and my dreams were nothing much out of the ordinary. And at times like that I tended to forget about the vague visage and its meaningless warning. Or rather I tried to forget it, tried hard to convince myself that whatever it had been, whatever the dream had meant, it was done with now and no longer meant anything.
I tried to put it to the back of my mind, tried to cage it there; a tactic that seemed to work, at least at first. But any reprieve I might have gained was always temporary—it wouldn’t stay caged. Eventually, invariably, it would regroup, refashion itself, and return out of limbo to start tormenting me all over again. And again there would be times when it totally dominated the dark hours, as regular and recurrent as the night itself.
Yet somehow I learned to live with it. Oh, I worried about it—and worried more than a little about the state of my mind—of course I did, who wouldn’t? But since it obviously wasn’t going to go away…well, as that old saw has it, “familiarity breeds contempt.” But in fact it wasn’t so much contempt as an awareness that there was nothing I could do about it,
In my early teens, following a year long hiatus, the nightmare returned in a new, far more disturbing format. Where before its main focus had centered upon a blurred, twisted, frustratingly familiar face, now any sense of familiarity—of recognition, however remote—was absent, replaced by something completely unknown and utterly terrifying.
It happened like this:
Having earned a course of advanced education as a reward for my exceptional grades in Jr. High, I was attending a local college and sleeping at home. On the night the dream returned, taking on this more definite, truly horrific form, my parents were visiting with friends and didn’t hear my shouting…or more properly my screaming. I’m not ashamed to admit it: this time I woke up screaming for my life, screaming my lungs out!
In the dream:
At first there was only the darkness and a certain uneasy awareness; I had felt this before, and so knew what was coming. Then the darkness swirled, like smoke made luminous in the beam of a movie projector. And there in the gloom, out of this weird ectoplasm, the face gradually firmed up, coalescing into a more solid projection. But it wasn’t the usual face, or at least it didn’t seem to be. And:
“Don’t!” That ethereal warning, even before the thing had fully developed. “Don’t do it! For God’s sake, don’t!”
I wanted to answer—to ask what it was I mustn’t do—but my mouth was dry, made clammy with sleep and fear. And all the time this foggy outline putting on flesh…or losing it? For abruptly, as suddenly and shockingly as that, the face was full-formed. But it wasn’t nearly a full face! And:
“Don’t you do it!” the scorched thing gurgled yet again—this crisped and peeling, bodiless, agonized visage—hanging there like an apparition in the dark. “Don’t you dare do it!’”
Its hair smoked, burned away from one half of a blistered scalp. Its left eye was a gaping, blackened hole in a scorched and peeling roast of a face whose seared cheekbone was clearly visible. Its mouth was welded shut in the corner on that side, causing its withered lips to writhe as they issued its urgent, stilted, inexplicable warning:
“Don’t do it! You mustn’t…mustn’t…do it!”
And finally I was able to swallow, to squeeze saliva into my throat and moisten it, and choke the question out. “What is it that…that I mustn’t do? I mean, what do you want of me? What are you asking?”
At which the thing—this ruined face, this apparition—twitched, blinked its good eye and despite its awful injuries somehow managed to assume a bewildered expression as it slowly backed away. And emboldened I called after it, “Wait a moment. Don’t go. What is it you don’t want me to do?”
But then its attitude seemed to change, to harden. For a moment it hung there in midair, gazing at me intently through that one good eye. And as I in turn tried to back off—which needless to say I couldn’t, because one can’t in nightmares of this sort—so the thing rushed upon me, angry now, frustrated that it wasn’t getting through to me or because it didn’t know how to. And as I tried to ward it off:
/> “Don’t!” it shouted, spitting blood and yellow pus in my face as frustration split its welded lips, and strips of seared skin curled like wafer-thin shavings down its chin. “Don’t you do it!”
Its voice was full of pain, and its teeth were white, red and clenched; they were grinding where they showed through that fretted left cheek!
Which is when I woke up screaming, screaming my lungs out, and I’m not ashamed to admit it….
After that…thankfully the nightmare’s incidence in this its most recent, more grotesque form was only sporadic, and by chance or sheer good fortune I was seventeen before it once again came to the notice of my parents. By then, however—having scared the wits out of my mother one night with my gibbering and shrieking—I had decided it was time to reveal the extent of my problem and perhaps seek help.
By then, too, I had submitted four extremely well-received scientific papers and had been assured a position in one of the country’s finest experimental labs when my formal education was complete, and I knew the last thing that any future colleagues of mine would want to discover—or that I would be prepared to reveal—was that since my childhood through young manhood I had been suffering from…well, how best to put it? A deep-seated persecution complex? Mental depression? Some rare psy-chological disorder? Any or all of these things? Possibly.
I saw several shrinks (please excuse my use of this term, and try to understand: I’ve never had much faith in psychiatry, so this was somewhat of an ordeal for me), one of whom went so far as to attempt regression. Perhaps my cynicism was to blame for his total failure; or perhaps it was simply that there was nothing in my past, my childhood, that he could focus in on or pinpoint as the source of any emotional problem whatsoever.
And so, not knowing when it would strike next, I was left to suffer the nightmare, all through my final term of education and well into my nineteenth year, when mercifully its fortnightly, then monthly, then quarterly incidence seemed to indicate a gradual remission. So that by the time I took up my position at “the facility” (whose location I may not reveal for reasons of national security) I had again begun to believe that perhaps this time my troubles were truly behind me—
