Up the drive the front lights of the house instantly came on; two of them glowed yellow as though shutters had been quickly opened—or lids lifted! George had no time to note anything else—except perhaps that the drive was very white, not the white of gravel but more of leprous flesh—for at that point the car simply stopped as if it had run head-on into a brick wall! George wasn’t belted in. He rose up over the steering wheel and crashed through the windscreen, automatically turning his shoulder to the glass.
He hit the drive in a shower of glass fragments, screaming and expecting the impact to hurt. It didn’t, and then George knew why the car had stopped like that: the drive was as soft and sticky as hot toffee. And it wasn’t a drive!
Behind George the wide fleshy ribbon tasted the car and, rising up, flicked it easily to one side. Then it tasted George. He had time to scream, barely, and time for one more quite mundane thought—that this wasn’t where Kent lived—before that great white chameleon tongue slithered him up the hill to the house, whose entire front below the yellow windows opened up to receive him.
Shortly thereafter the lights went slowly out again, as if someone had lowered shutters, or as if lids had fallen….
The Man Who Saw No Spiders
In mid-1977 (yes, I was still in the Army), I wrote “The Man Who Saw No Spiders.” An arachnophobe, me? Naaah! But I know a lot of people are, and I don’t confine my fiction to things that scare just me; I enjoy giving other people the shudders, too. I mean, that’s what it’s all about, right? Entertainment? No? Ah, well, to each his own.
Anyway, two years later W. Paul Ganley used the story in his award-winning small press magazine
Weirdbook 13…
and that’s about all I can say about it. But if
you
haven’t seen any spiders just lately, or if you should find that you don’t even want to
think
about them—
—Er, what was I saying?
“He what?” asked Bleaker, Conway’s neighbor, incredulously.
Conway smiled at his friend’s astounded expression, then repeated himself, adding: “It’s quite genuine, I assure you, Jerry. He won’t admit of spiders. They don’t exist for him.”
“Then of course he’s a madman,” Bleaker shrugged. “I mean, it’s like someone saying he doesn’t believe in mushrooms…isn’t it?”
“Not at all,” Conway answered. “The man who says he doesn’t believe in mushrooms at least admits of their theory—by the very act of naming them—if you see what I mean?”
“Frankly, no,” Bleaker shook his head, reaching for his drink. He lived only a short walk away from Conway, along a beautifully wooded path, set back half a mile from the main road that wound out from the nearby town and over the hills northward. The area was lonely but lovely and a hand-ful of well-to-do families had their homes on the edge of the woods that stretched away to the hills. Bleaker and Conway had built comparatively close together, hence they were “neighbors,” even though their houses stood almost a quarter-mile apart.
“OK, Jerry, look at it this way,” Conway persisted. “If I say I don’t believe in God, then there’s not a great deal you can do to convince me that God does indeed exist, is there? No I’m not trying to be offensive, I assure you. I could just as easily have made it Father Christmas or Easter Bunny. However, while I don’t admit of a God, I can readily enough understand others who do believe. I know what they are on about; I understand the theory of it.”
“Yes, but—” Bleaker began, wishing that the girls would come on out of Conway’s kitchen and get him off his psychiatric hobbyhorse.
“—But suppose I refuse to accept something as tangible as a good old-fashioned English mushroom. What then?”
“Why, then I bring you one, Paul. I let you touch it, smell it, eat the bloody thing! I show you the word in an encyclopedia with a picture of the real thing alongside. I get out a dictionary and spell it out for you: m-u-s-h-r-o-o-m…! I take you into town, the market on a Friday, where I buy you a pound of them. You can’t escape them, they’re there. Mushrooms are—you have to accept them.” He sat back, smiling at his own cleverness.
“Good!” said Conway, successful psychiatrist written all over his face. “Now then, assume that when you bring me the mushroom I ignore it. As-sume that my senses won’t, can’t recognize it. Assume that when I look at your dictionary I see ‘mush’ above and ‘mushiness’ below, but no ‘mushroom’ in between. That I don’t even hear you when you say the word ‘mushroom.’ That I wonder why you’re making funny faces when you spell the word out for me. What then?”
“Then you’re a nut, pure and simple.”
“Oh? And suppose that in every other instance I am a perfectly normal human being. An upstanding member of the community. A happily married man with no problems worth mentioning. In short, assume that in every way save one it’s clearly demonstrable that I am not a nut. How about that?”
Bleaker frowned. “Hmm…. Could you possibly have some new, weird, exotic disease? Shall we call it, say, ‘fungitis’? Even then, though, it has to be a disease of the mind. However harmless you are, you still have to be a nut.”
Conway looked disappointed. “Yes, well the man we’re talking about is not a nut. He’s Thomas Waterford, gamekeeper for Lord Daventry at The Lodge. And with him it’s not mushrooms but spiders. He doesn’t believe in them, can’t see them, he might as well never have heard of them. And from what I’ve seen of him, he’ll never hear of them again.”
“He’s a nut,” Bleaker insisted, without emphasis.
“He’s as sane as you or I,” Conway denied. “I’ve used every trick in the psychiatric book to test his sanity and I’m certain of it.”
“So what caused it then?” Bleaker demanded to know. “Has he always been this way?”
“Ah! Good question. No, he hasn’t always been this way; I was lucky to get onto him so quickly. It started a week ago yesterday, on a Saturday morning. Rather it started on the Friday, when his wife asked him to clean all of the cobwebs and spiders out of the cellar of the gatehouse where they live. She hates spiders, you see. Yes, that was on the Friday. He told her he was busy, said that Lord Daventry was worried about poachers and he’d be out in the woods for most of the night, but that he’d clean out the spiders in the morning. He believed in spiders then, you see? But when she reminded him on the Saturday he ignored her. And when she took him down into the cellar to see how badly infested the place was, he—”
“He couldn’t see the spiders?”
“Right! At first she thought he was kidding her on, but later she started to worry about it. On Monday she told Lord Daventry about it and he had a go at Old Thomas. Then he contacted me. It seemed such an interesting case that I took it on gratis, as a favor. I drove over the hills to The Lodge that same afternoon….” He paused.
Interested despite himself, Bleaker prompted him: “And?”
“Jerry, it’s like nothing I ever dealt with before. For the last five or six days spiders have had no place whatsoever in Thomas Waterford’s life. Here, listen to this tape. I recorded it on Wednesday morning, five days after the thing began.” He went over to his tape recorder and pressed a button, listening as snatches of speeded-up conversation babbled forth until he found the spot he was looking for. A second button slowed the tape down and the recorded conversation became audible: