This Book is Full of Spiders

cloud, it tries to see a shape, or a face, or otherwise associate it with something that makes sense in some known cultural context, like the proverbial image of the Virgin Mary seen in the grain of a tree stump, or a slice of toast. But make no mistake—the observer supplies the face.

You have never heard of anyone being harmed or killed by a Shadow Person, in the sense that you have never met someone who failed to be born. Our unique, limited perception limits us to see only one possible outcome of an event. If we grow tiresome of a tedious conversation with a man, we cannot, say, simply switch to another quantum reality in which that man did not survive a bout of childhood pneumonia, winking him out of our thread of existence like turning the channel on a television. The Shadow Men can.

There are enthusiasts of the paranormal on the Internet and elsewhere who point to the tens of thousands of people who go missing worldwide each year and speculate that they have been taken by the Shadow Men. But I am prone to think that this is misunderstanding their methods. If the Shadow Men, say, invaded your home and took your wife, you would in that next moment have no recollection of ever having been married. At best, you would have only a terrible, gnawing sense of something missing. A hole in your life into which something should perfectly fit, something that should rightfully exist, but does not.

One young man I know, who has written about the incident in his own book, claims that he retains distinct memories of a friend who was lost in an encounter with the shadows. The parents of the friend still live in town. Yet, they do not recall a son. The rental records of his apartment show no person under that name ever resided there, the records of the public school system retain no mention of a student by that name. The difference between our reality and the reality that this young man remembers could be so close that only molecules separate them—a particular sperm that failed to fertilize a particular egg in one reality, but that was successful in another. Some speculate that we sense the ripples of these changes in the form of deja vu, or those infuriating occasions when we insist we remember an event or a conversation with a group of friends that no one else in the group recollects. You hear of a prominent person passing away, and swear that you heard that same news years earlier.

But of course, the real power of the Shadow Men is that we do not perceive them at all.

The Bible II

John and I backed up. I raised the furgun, stupidly, having no idea what effect it would have on these beings. We retreated, slowly, bumping backward against the rigid Amy statue what was still standing there, frozen. Her arms were outstretched, her eyes wide, unwittingly putting herself in an absolutely perfect posture for the situation.

The shadow man closest to me was no more than ten feet away. I had the furgun on him because I had nothing else. Where there would be eyes on a man, burning coals of yellow and orange flared on the shadow man, like a pair of lit cigars floating in the blackness. And in that moment I knew that this wasn’t just a shadow man, but was the shadow man, the one I had seen in my bathroom, the one that lurked in my cell in the basement of the old asylum, the one that now, in this moment, I sensed was actually never far from me. I could not bring myself to think, What are you? Instead, the feeling was more akin to, It’s you again.

I… have spoken to it before…

The blackness closed in on us, no gap between the shadow men now, their cold intelligence, malice and cataclysmic lethality advancing as a solid black wave, like the artist who painted our reality had knocked over an ink bottle on it. We had no room to retreat, both of us pressed against the Amy monument.

“Dave…” John hissed. “Dave… shoot. Shoot them. Do something…”

But my eyes were fixed on the burning coals of the shadow man in front of me, and something was passing between us. There were no words, but we were communicating. The thoughts passed instantly, faster than words could have managed, like files instantly streamed between two computers. If I had to translate what the shadow man told me into words, it would be this:

* * *

What is a man? What do you think a man is? What do you think we are? What do you think your relationship is to us?

You believe in a spirit, or a soul. What do you think that is? It lives inside your flesh, but only your flesh can interact with the world, only your flesh can speak and eat and fight and fuck and reproduce, and ultimately the soul must obey the impulses of the flesh. What, then, is the soul but a prisoner of your flesh? An undying yet constrained energy, bound and enslaved within a shuffling, steadily rotting suit of tissue and savage needs? By virtue of your birth, you make a prisoner of a soul. An enslavement that multiplies as you multiply, breeding with grunts and stench and the spilling of squirming fluids.

You recoil in horror at the idea of the parasites, these creatures who against your will can commandeer your sensory interaction with the world, imprisoning your mind behind a repulsive monstrosity that can command your limbs and even your very thoughts, poisoning every aspect of your being with its own alien desires until it becomes impossible to distinguish your own personality from the urges of the squirming thing living invisibly inside your body. Until nothing that is truly you remains.

Now, you understand.

For us, man is the parasite.

* * *

Somehow, I could feel their hate, an energy that was too big and too cold to get the scope of it, the way that from the ground, the curvature of the earth just looks like a straight line. The shadow people moved in. So, so slowly. A dark tide creeping in on an island of mud and grass maybe ten feet in diameter and shrinking. All those glowing eyes, little pinpricks of light floating on dark, featureless faces.

John said, “Dave… do it. Dave. Now.”

“Do what?”

“Focus! Focus on the most powerful thing you can imagine and squeeze that trigger.”

But that wasn’t right. A nuclear explosion would not work here. Fire would not work. Violence would not work. That was the energy they were made of. Shadows aren’t repelled by the dark, they’re repelled by the light—

The shadow man—my shadow man—floated right up to me, right up to Amy. I found myself shrieking, “NO! NO! NOOO!” in short, barking bursts, the single word over and over again.

Amy’s outstretched arms were beside me and the shadow man was on her now, drifting right into her left hand. My stomach turned as I watched her hand dissolve and vanish completely. All that was left was a stump, her left hand gone forever. But, no, that must have been the confusion of the moment because of course her left hand had always been gone, the accident and all that.

I raised the furgun, pointing it right at the “chest” of the shadow man. It was in his chest.

My mind was blank.

I reached out and grabbed Amy’s other, frozen hand and squeezed. I closed my eyes.

I need to think like Amy.

In that one second before I squeezed the trigger, a face popped into my head. The face was the same one that would have come to probably 75 percent of Americans, if put in the same situation. A bearded face that was surely from the imagination of some long-lost Italian painter, a face that looked nothing like a Middle Eastern Jew. I suddenly remembered two dozen horrible kid shows my adoptive parents made me watch on VHS, where in the final scene the main character always turned toward the camera and said some variation of, “I know how we’ll solve this problem! With Christianity.”

Well, their programming worked. When terror drove everything out of my mind, I fell back on the iconic face and all I could picture in my head was that painting, that shitty velvet Elvisey Jesus that had hung on my wall, that was still sitting in the trunk of John’s Caddie for all I knew.

I squeezed the trigger.

A flash of white light poured forth from the device in my hand. The whiteness condensed down to a shape. Small. Square.