Screaming Science Fiction by Brian Lumley Page A

“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 soscout 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 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