Spider on My Tongue Read Online Free Page A

blessedly little in the near darkness), but this darkness was total: I stopped with one foot in the apartment, the other in the hallway, and I listened. I heard nothing. I peered hard into the darkness. I saw nothing.
    "Is someone here?" I whispered, realized my cowardice, and said it louder: "Is someone here?" Nothing. I stood very still for a few moments, then withdrew my foot, so I was standing in the hallway again, door open, darkness beyond.
    Think of this: You're driving alone on a country lane. It isn't night, it's bright daylight, in fact; the country lane smells good through your open windows, and the sunlight on the tall grasses, the wild flowers and the occasional honeybee makes you believe, for one beautiful moment, that there must be a God, otherwise, a day such as this simply could not exist. So you smile, and you love the smile (you even glance briefly at it in your rearview mirror because you don't think you've smiled that way in a long, long time, maybe since you were a kid), and you love the day, too, the sunshine, the crisp and pleasant odors of the country lane--you wish that someone were there with you at that moment so you could tell them how really good you feel.
    And all at once you realize you're being watched. It's more than simply a hunch—you know it with certainty, as if it's pain you're feeling. You have no earthly idea what's watching you, but you do know this—whatever it is, it wants to do you harm.
    You glance in the rearview mirror again, see only a rectangle of sunlight, the back of the rear seat. You curse, glance left, then right, at the brightly sunlit fields. Nothing. You stare straight ahead a moment, feel your foot press harder and harder on the accelerator, look in the rearview mirror once more, then left, right, again, but you see only what your good sense tells you to see—the cheerful sunlight, the country lane, the tall grasses and wildflowers, but you believe you know better than your good sense which, you also believe, is protecting you from nightmare by denying that it exists.
    And then you find yourself at home, find sunlight streaming in through the bay windows, the odors of a spring afternoon wafting through the house, and you shiver because, all at once, again, you know that the malevolent thing that watched you on the country lane is continuing to watch you here, in your house—it dogs your footsteps, follows you from the living room to the kitchen to the bathroom and then, much later, into the bedroom, where you lie quivering like a frightened child because you know with mortal certainty that the thing is standing by your bed in the darkness, and that it's still watching, that it's bending over you...
    I learned this as I stood outside my apartment and peered through the open doorway, into darkness: I learned that invisible malevolence is everywhere, but that it isn't purposeful; none of these things intends to do harm, no more than a black widow spider does, or a tidal wave, or the tumor that sets itself up in our gray matter.
    But then, perhaps, you should reread all that I've written here. Perhaps I should!
    ~ * ~
6:12 PM
     
    Oddly, I always welcome sleep. It brings me dreams of places and people I once knew well, people I now love and trust (if only because they exist in my dreams, and nowhere else—my Aunt Pattie, for instance, who always read what I wrote and always proclaimed it brilliant, and my friend Sam Feary, who knew me well, and my fraternal grandfather, whose name was Sam, and who liked to be called "Sammy," even when he was in his nineties). It's my waking hours that constitute nightmare. I see too clearly during daylight. The shadows are harsh and animated, unpredictable and anonymous. They exist in places where shadows should not exist—beneath the wide canopy of the trees, for instance.
    From time to time I walk in the dim woods. I usually walk at dusk, when the light is only good enough that I need to navigate mostly from memory, and I make my