David Wong: This Book is Full of Spiders

John walked up behind me and said, “I wouldn’t even put it in the top five. And I know what you’re thinking, and no, we can’t push her out of the way. Nothing can be moved. And I don’t mean that in the sense that they tell you not to change anything when you go back in time, like it’s a rule or something. I mean literally nothing can be moved. I tried.”

I said, “I can move the furgun.” I still had it in my hand.

“Right, and you’re moving your pants when you walk. I think it’s anything you were touching when everything stopped.”

“How long does it stay like this?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only done it once before. I couldn’t intentionally make it start up again but… I got the sense that it lasts until you do what you need to do. Whether you know what you need to do or not. If that makes sense.”

“What do we need to do?”

I stared over at the column of smoke frozen over the burning truck, the still flames looking like orange-blown glass sculptures. Then, from the still, black column, a whisp of smoke moved.

At the exact same moment I thought it, John said it out loud:

“Oooooh, shit.”

The shadow men were here.

It started with that single, black shadow, hanging in midair. It was moving toward us.

Then I saw another one. And another. They grew out of the air, black shapes like holes burning in the white curtain of reality, revealing the darkness beyond. Three and four at a time they appeared, the darkness taking on the vague shapes of men. Each time my eyes focused on one spot, walking shadows would appear where I wasn’t watching. It was like trying to count snowflakes as they landed on a windshield.

John and I backed away from them, then realized they were behind us, too, on the other side of the ditch.

We were an island in a black tide of them.

and I must emphasize that my encounters with the Shadow Men have been rare, in the sense that stepping in dog feces is rare. That is, the potential is always there, you never forget it when it happens, but you go just long enough between incidents to let your guard down. Yet, everyone has been in the presence of a Shadow Man, in the same way that everyone has been in the presence of electricity. It is all around you, invisible, tickling at the periphery of your perceptions. Then one day, you touch a bare wire…

These beings live in between moments and outside of time, across dimensions and perhaps never fully exist in any particular one. They have been called ghosts, and no doubt they wear the faces of the recently dead in the imagination of a person trying to reconcile what they saw in that dark corridor, or in the silence of their bedroom at three in the morning. For others, they will perhaps appear to be tiny, gray aliens. Centuries ago a Shadow Man would have been called a faerie, or succubus. That is how the human brain works, when it looks at a formless 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 déjà 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.

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.