Free Screaming Science Fiction by Brian Lumley Page A

expression, then repeated himself, adding: “It’s quite genuine, I assure you, Jerry. He won’t admit of spiders. They don’t exist for him.”
    “Then of course he’s a madman,” Bleaker shrugged. “I mean, it’s like someone saying he doesn’t believe in mushrooms…isn’t it?”
    “Not at all,” Conway answered. “The man who says he doesn’t believe in mushrooms at least admits of their theory—by the very act of naming them—if you see what I mean?”
    “Frankly, no,” Bleaker shook his head, reaching for his drink. He lived only a short walk away from Conway, along a beautifully wooded path, set back half a mile from the main road that wound out from the nearby town and over the hills northward. The area was lonely but lovely and a hand-ful of well-to-do families had their homes on the edge of the woods that stretched away to the hills. Bleaker and Conway had built comparatively close together, hence they were “neighbors,” even though their houses stood almost a quarter-mile apart.
    “OK, Jerry, look at it this way,” Conway persisted. “If I say I don’t believe in God, then there’s not a great deal you can do to convince me that God does indeed exist, is there? No I’m not trying to be offensive, I assure you. I could just as easily have made it Father Christmas or Easter Bunny. However, while I don’t admit of a God, I can readily enough understand others who do believe. I know what they are on about; I understand the theory of it.”
    “Yes, but—” Bleaker began, wishing that the girls would come on out of Conway’s kitchen and get him off his psychiatric hobbyhorse.
    “—But suppose I refuse to accept something as tangible as a good old-fashioned English mushroom. What then?”
    “Why, then I bring you one, Paul. I let you touch it, smell it, eat the bloody thing! I show you the word in an encyclopedia with a picture of the real thing alongside. I get out a dictionary and spell it out for you: m-u-s-h-r-o-o-m…! I take you into town, the market on a Friday, where I buy you a pound of them. You can’t escape them, they’re there. Mushrooms are —you have to accept them.” He sat back, smiling at his own cleverness.
    “Good!” said Conway, successful psychiatrist written all over his face. “Now then, assume that when you bring me the mushroom I ignore it. As-sume that my senses won’t, can’t recognize it. Assume that when I look at your dictionary I see ‘mush’ above and ‘mushiness’ below, but no ‘mushroom’ in between. That I don’t even hear you when you say the word ‘mushroom.’ That I wonder why you’re making funny faces when you spell the word out for me. What then?”
    “Then you’re a nut, pure and simple.”
    “Oh? And suppose that in every other instance I am a perfectly normal human being. An upstanding member of the community. A happily married man with no problems worth mentioning. In short, assume that in every way save one it’s clearly demonstrable that I am not a nut. How about that?”
    Bleaker frowned. “Hmm…. Could you possibly have some new, weird, exotic disease? Shall we call it, say, ‘fungitis’? Even then, though, it has to be a disease of the mind. However harmless you are, you still have to be a nut.”
    Conway looked disappointed. “Yes, well the man we’re talking about is not a nut. He’s Thomas Waterford, gamekeeper for Lord Daventry at The Lodge. And with him it’s not mushrooms but spiders. He doesn’t believe in them, can’t see them, he might as well never have heard of them. And from what I’ve seen of him, he’ll never hear of them again.”
    “He’s a nut,” Bleaker insisted, without emphasis.
    “He’s as sane as you or I,” Conway denied. “I’ve used every trick in the psychiatric book to test his sanity and I’m certain of it.”
    “So what caused it then?” Bleaker demanded to know. “Has he always been this way?”
    “Ah! Good question. No, he hasn’t always been this way; I was