Most men can't make it through even five words of what I'm about to tell you (4 page)

took a step toward Kelly, snatching out at her arm.

"COME ON!"

She flinched away from me, a look of terror and revulsion that only panhandlers are usually treated to. The shadow man

slid closer to her, inches away. I reached out to grab her arm and felt arms around me, holding me back.

I was being restrained by Dr. Welsh, the man having probably 70 pounds and six inches on me. He shouted calming

things into my ear, told me to settle down. I screamed something about him being a retard and that we had to get out and

get out now.

A whisp of blackness drifted off the shadow man, something like an arm but without any bones, limp and serpentine. It

brushed Kelly's cheek.

She screamed. She bent over at the waist, hands clawing at her hair, shrieking like she was trying to break a window with

the sound.

I tried to twist out of the grip of the man behind me. I could hear Dr. Fred back there rustling around in a box or drawer,

probably trying to come up with a sedative for me.

"Kelly!" I screamed. "KELLY! HEY! Look at me!"

She raised her head, still screaming, pausing only to take in harsh swal ows of breath to fuel the next one.

"Kelly! Run!"

The shadow man reached over, silently swiping a black hand across Kelly's chin.

Her lower jaw disappeared.

Her tongue flopped uselessly in front of her neck, nothing to support it. A row of upper teeth hovered with nothing to bite

down against, surrounded by a grotesque clown's smile of exposed muscle and torn skin. I could see that little dangling

thing hanging in the back of her throat. The girl's eyes bulged with a look of crippling dread and confusion unlike anything

I had ever seen on a face before.

Her scream turned into the garbled squeal of a dying animal. The hands were no longer holding me, I was no longer

struggling. Everything in the room went stil , everything but the choking screams.

The shadow man moved across the girl, drifting over her like an eclipse. It passed, moved on across the room, and

shrunk itself into a stream floating through the air like a puff of cigar smoke. It poured itself into a spot on the wal where I noticed a picture hung, a photo of a dozen or so guys in lab coats. The shadow man's remains spilled into the photo like it

was a window. Then, it was gone. The photo, I noticed, suddenly seemed to be missing three or four people.

I looked back at Kel y in time to see her fall to pieces. Fingers, a hand, a forearm, al fell to the carpet in neat, dry chunks, like pieces of a broken dol .

Next, shoulders and chest and abdomen fell off in slices and blocks, bits of shirt still neatly in place, tumbling softly to the carpet as if she had been made of cans of spam. I watched numbly as the mangled face landed atop a scattered pile of

pink parts of what had been Kelly Glass. Disassembled.

The parts melted into the floor in a puddle of marbled pink and brown syrup. One second later the puddle vanished,

leaving behind empty carpet.

Welsh's meaty arms let go of me and I went to the floor, on my hands and knees. I couldn't breathe.

My fault. My fault. My fault. Oh, Kelly, I'm so sorry...

"Are you okay?"

That was Dr. Fred, from the back of the room.

From the floor, I said, "Please tell me you saw that."

"Saw what, David? Did you see the shadow man?"

"The girl, asshole. Kelly. Did you see what happened to her?"

"The girl? Do you see a girl, David?"

I sat back, on the floor, crossing my legs. I looked a the photo on the wal . Eight guys in lab coats. I shook my head but

didn't say anything. Dr. Welsh spoke up.

"Can you describe her? Is she here now?"

"Kelly. Her name was Kelly." I tried to remember her name from the article. "Glass, Kelly Glass."

I craned my neck and caught Dr. Fred giving Welsh a raised eyebrow. Kelly
who?

Welsh said, "Would you mind if we tried that again? On another day maybe?"

"I'm going home."

I stood and walked out. Before I left campus, I walked over to the waiting room of the clinic, found the newsletter and

flipped to the article about the experiment...

____________________

Experiment Glimpses the 'Shadow Man' Inside

Researchers on campus are drawing worldwide attention, thanks to some new findings that

may shed light on the hallucinations and feelings of paranoia common in patients

suffering from schizophrenia and other psychiatric diseases. The experiment, conducted by

cognitive neuroscientist Marvin Welsh and assisted by psychologist Fredrick S. Pratt and

research assistant Mark Hoagland, was performed on a...

____________________

In the black and white photo, instead of Kelly Glass there was some tall geeky guy with poof bal hair.

So sorry, Kelly,
I thought.
So, so sorry.

Illustration b
y Nedroid

I drove home. Once again, I didn't say a word about it to anybody.

Weeks passed. Nothing happened. The leaves changed color, to be sheared off the branches by gusts of wind.

Halloween decorations appeared. People started playing football. Eventually, I stopped leaving a light on at night.

Maybe, I thought, I was wrong. Maybe the dark thing that strode into that little room hadn't looked me right in the eye,

maybe it hadn't torn that girl out of reality just to teach me a lesson. Maybe it wasn't all about me, after al .

Then, exactly 64 days after they hooked that machine up to my brain and opened the door to that dark place and let that

thing in, I found something in my bed. Or rather, it found me.

There exists in this world a spider the size of a dinner plate, a foot wide if you include the legs. It's called the Goliath Bird-Eating spider, or the "Goliath
Fucking
Bird-Eating Spider" by those who have actually seen one.

It doesn't eat only birds - it mostly eats rats and insects - but they still cal it the "Bird-Eating Spider" because the fact that it can eat a bird is probably the most important thing to know about it. If you run across one of these things, like in your

closet or crawling out of your bowl of soup, the first thing somebody will say is, "Watch it, man, that thing can eat a fucking
bird.
"

I don't know how they catch the birds. I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can't fly because if it could, it would

have a different name entirely. We would call it "Sir" because it would be the dominant species on the planet. None of us would leave the house unless a Goliath Fucking Flying Bird-Eating Spider said it was okay.

I've seen one of these things, at a zoo when I was in High School. I was 15, face breaking out in acne and getting fatter by

the day, staring open-mouthed at this monster pawing at the glass wall of its cage. Big as both of my hands. The guys

around me were giggling and punching each other in the arm and some girl was squealing behind me. But me, I didn't

make a sound. I couldn't. There was nothing but a pane of glass between me and that
thing.

For months after I'd watch the dark corners of my bedroom at night, for hairy legs as thick as a finger, poking out from

behind a stack of comic books and video game magazines. I expected to find strands of spider web as thick as fishing line

in my closet, bulging in clumps of half-eaten sparrows. Or spider droppings in my shoes, little turds laced with bits of

feather. Or piles of pink eggs, yolked with baby spiders already the size of golf bal s.

And even now, ten years later, I glance between the sheets at night before pushing my legs in, some part of my

subconscious still looking for the huge spider crouching in the shadows.

I bring this up now, in the wake of the Shadow Man incident, because the Goliath was the first thing that popped into my

mind later that fall when I woke up with something biting my leg.

I had been dead asleep, wrapped up like a burrito against the autumn chil in the room. I felt a pinch on my ankle, like

digging needles. The Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider leapt out of the fog of my sleepy imagination as I flung the

blankets aside. I fully expected to find eight furry legs and a bundle of shiny black eyes looking back.

I didn't. It was too dark.

I sat up and squinted down at my leg. Movement, in the shadows. I swung my leg off the bed and I could feel the
weight
of whatever was biting me, clinging to the ankle and heavy as a can of beer.

A spastic jolt of panic ripped through me and I kicked out with the leg, grunting in the chill air of my dark bedroom, trying to shake off the little biting whatever-it-was. The thing went flying across the room, passing through a shaft of moonlight

spilling in around my blinds. In that brief second I saw a flash of jointed legs - lots of legs - and antennae and a tail.

Armored plates like a lobster. The whole thing was as long as my forearm.

What in the name of-

Illustration b
y Nedroid

The creature flew across the bedroom and hit the wall, landing behind a basket of laundry. I stood up out of the bed,

squinting, edging around the room. I couldn't see anything in the darkness. I backed up, heart hammering, felt the wal

press against my back.

My eyes flicked around the room, looking for something to use as a weapon. Too freaking dark. I pawed around at the

jumble of objects on my night stand, saw something jutting out from under a copy of
Entertainment Weekly
. Round and

slim, I thought it maybe was the hilt of a knife.

I grabbed it and threw it, realizing only after it was airborne that it was my asthma inhaler. I reached again, grabbed for

what looked like the heaviest object on the table, something shaped like a can of soup. I chucked it. It clanged lightly off

the opposite wal and I remembered it was an empty can of Slim-Fast.

I grabbed the table lamp, a novelty item that consisted of a naked bulb jutting out of a stained glass sculpture of a turkey.