Demons Read Online Free Page B

describing the behavior of certain forces under certain conditions, that description accurate but offering no real insight into the nature of that thing—they don’t know why the atom is that way, even if they can describe the series of events that took it there. It’s just as mysterious as if they’d never studied it at all.”
    I wasn’t sure if he’d gone mad—or was stunned into a stream-of-consciousness volubility.
    Finally, as I saw four demons coming toward us through the air, I began to struggle with my paralysis, with rigidity of fear so pronounced that wrenching loose from it seemed to tear something in my mind.
    But there—I was moving, I could grab the professor’s arm and Melissa’s, and pull them toward the glass sliding doors to the kitchen as the four demons drifted closer, closer; these creatures, who were appetite personified, whom I’d later know as Spider clan, drifting with their wispy bodies toward us on parachutes of spun glass that they express from their loins, coming closer and very deliberately to our balcony and no other . . .
    We stumbled through the open doorway, and I pushed the professor and his daughter behind me and fumblingly slid the glass door shut. I locked it, though the act seemed to mock me with its futility.

 
     
    3
     
    The spidery things that had drifted to the balcony were not eight legged, like actual spiders, but only three legged, tripodal, each leg long and thin, jointed, and feathery like certain spiders but big, about two and a half yards long. Their upper parts, as big as laundry baskets, were like oversized suction cups, with a single yellow eye that seemed to slide around the convex top at will, slitting the skin as it went to peer out where it would. There was a sucking mouthpart in the concave underside where the three legs met; a membrane on the rim exuded the web stuff, like ectoplasm that mimicked spider silk. The connection to the parachute of demon silk broke when the spider latched onto the balcony, and its sail drifted and fell to the ground far below—where cars were exploding and fires gushing up—like a flag cut from a pole.
    The three-legged spider thing sucked itself closer to the balcony, one of its legs probing at the doorway.
    I pushed the still-babbling professor to the apartmentdoor, started to open it, and then fell silent—listening to the bubbling, breathing sound from the other side. From the hall. The low chuckle. The whimper. Someone’s “Please . . . please don’t—” suddenly cut off. “Ple—”—
    I put the door chain in place. Paymenz had his arms around Melissa, whose face had gone so gray I was afraid for her.
    Paymenz’s expression changed from second to second: one moment delighted wonder, then sorrow, then fear—fear for Melissa as he looked at her.
    I stepped into the doorway to the kitchen and peered around the edge of the dead refrigerator—which Melissa had filled with racks of dirt and used to grow salad mushrooms. I peered at the glass balcony doors, expecting to see them shattering. But instead the spider creatures seemed to have settled down onto the balcony, draping themselves over it, extending their legs to grip the outer walls, the outdoor light fixture, the drainpipe, the doorframe, arranging themselves at odd angles to one another. They seemed to be in a languid state of waiting. Then someone was drawn up, thrashing, from below, snatched perhaps from a lower balcony: a Chinese gentleman in a powder-blue suit. Perhaps he was from the Asian Studies department , the thought echoed in my head, ludicrously irrelevant. Round face quivering with terror, arms pinioned to his sides by the demon silk that wound around him, he was hoisted by the silk to the Spider clan demons. The two nearest pulled him apart between them, with swift movements of their giant pipe-cleaner legs, and stuffed him into their suctioning maws. Their bodies expanded to encompass the gushing halves of him, and then rippled, squeezing