Free Screaming Science Fiction by Brian Lumley

thoughts in a situation like this. And yet, through all of this protracted nightmare, a ray of hope still shone. The road to Middle Hamborough!
    Back there, down that road, there was a house on a hill and beyond that a real, if slightly different, world. A world where at least two of the inhabitants owed him a break. From what Kent had told him, it seemed to George that the other world wasn’t much different from his own. He could make a go of things there. He gunned his motor back down the road and out of the mist, back on to a decent tarmac surface and into normally dark night, turning left at the leaning signpost on to the now familiar road to Middle Hamborough.
    Or was it familiar?
    The hedges bordering the road were different somehow, taller, hiding the fields beyond them from the car’s probing headlights, and the road seemed narrower than George remembered it. But that must be his imagination acting up after the terrific shocks of the last ten or twenty minutes; it had to be, for this was the road to Middle Hamborough.
    Then, cresting the next hill, suddenly George felt that hellish drag on his tires, and his headlights began to do battle with a thickening, swirling mist. At the same time he saw the house atop the next hill, the house set back off the road at the head of a long winding drive. High House!
    There were no lights on in the place now, but it was George’s refuge none the less. Hadn’t Kent told him to come back here if he couldn’t find his way back to Meadington? George gave a whoop of relief as he swept down into the shallow valley and up the hill towards the wrought-iron roadside gates. They were still open, as Kent had left them; and as he slowed down fractionally, George swung the wheel to the left, turning his car in through the gates. They weren’t quite open all the way, though, so that the front of the car slammed them back on their hinges.
    Up the drive the front lights of the house instantly came on; two of them glowed yellow as though shutters had been quickly opened—or lids lifted! George had no time to note anything else—except perhaps that the drive was very white, not the white of gravel but more of leprous flesh—for at that point the car simply stopped as if it had run head-on into a brick wall! George wasn’t belted in. He rose up over the steering wheel and crashed through the windscreen, automatically turning his shoulder to the glass.
    He hit the drive in a shower of glass fragments, screaming and expecting the impact to hurt. It didn’t, and then George knew why the car had stopped like that: the drive was as soft and sticky as hot toffee. And it wasn’t a drive!
    Behind George the wide fleshy ribbon tasted the car and, rising up, flicked it easily to one side. Then it tasted George. He had time to scream, barely, and time for one more quite mundane thought—that this wasn’t where Kent lived—before that great white chameleon tongue slithered him up the hill to the house, whose entire front below the yellow windows opened up to receive him.
     

     
    Shortly thereafter the lights went slowly out again, as if someone had lowered shutters, or as if lids had fallen….

The Man Who Saw No Spiders
     

    In mid-1977 (yes, I was still in the Army), I wrote “The Man Who Saw No Spiders.” An arachnophobe, me? Naaah! But I know a lot of people are, and I don’t confine my fiction to things that scare just me; I enjoy giving other people the shudders, too. I mean, that’s what it’s all about, right? Entertainment? No? Ah, well, to each his own.
    Anyway, two years later W. Paul Ganley used the story in his award-winning small press magazine Weirdbook 13… and that’s about all I can say about it. But if you haven’t seen any spiders just lately, or if you should find that you don’t even want to think about them—
    —Er, what was I saying?
     
     
    “He what?” asked Bleaker, Conway’s neighbor, incredulously.
    Conway smiled at his friend’s astounded