Screaming Science Fiction (9 page)

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….

Yes it’s possible. And yes, I’m pretty sure they’ll do it one day, even if I’m no longer in the program. 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….