Screaming Science Fiction (8 page)

“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:

“Well, we really don’t seem to be getting anywhere, do we, Thomas?”

“P’raps
we would, sir, if I knew what you was
after. I’ve plenty of work on at The Lodge, and—”

“But Lord Daventry said you’d be only too happy to help me out, Thomas.”

“‘Course, sir, but we don’t seem to be doing much really, do we?
I
mean—wot am I ’ere for?”

“Spiders, Thomas!”

(Silence)

“Why are you afraid of them?”

“Afraid of wot, sir?”

“Creepy-crawlies.”

“Wot, bugs and beetles and flies, sir? I hain’t scared of ’em, sir! Wotever made you think that?”

“No, I meant spiders, Thomas, Hairy-legged web-spinners!”

“I mean, I sees bugs every day in the woods, I do, and—”

“And birds?”

“Lots of ’em.”

“And trees?”

“‘Ere, you’re’ aving me on!”

“And—spiders?”

“‘Course I sees trees! The ’ole bleedin’ forest’s full of ’em!”

Conway speeded the tape up at this point, and while it crackled and blustered on he said to Bleaker, “Listen to this next bit. This was the next day, Thursday. I had some rough drawings for Thomas to look at….”

He slowed the tape down and after a few seconds Bleaker heard the following:

“Just have a look at this, Thomas, will you? What do you reckon that is?”

“Bird, sir. Thrush, I’d say, but not a very good drawing.”

“And this one?”

“An eft. Newt, you’d call it, but I’ve always called ’em efts.”

“And this?”

“A tree, probably a hoak—but wot’s the point of all—”

“And
—
this?”

“Blank, sir. A blank piece of paper!”

(Pause, then a cough from Conway.)

“And how about, er, this?”

“A bleedin’ happle, sir!”

“Yes, but what’s on the apple?”

“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.