Demons Read Online Free PDF Page A

and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing, pulping him inside. He lived long enough for a brief muffled scream. Then they spat out the empty skins like grape peels.
    A moment later the demon who’d had the upper half of the Chinese gent began to convulse, to shudder—then to strain like a woman in labor, to exude from its nether membranes a finer ectoplasm that spun to form itself into shapes . . . shapes of Chinese children, a Chinese woman, a ghostly boy. . . . Members of the man’s family? His memory of himself?
    The other spiders toyed with these productions as they emerged, pulling them apart, sniffing at them with the ends of their legs, where there were things like nostrils near the grasping claws.
    Then I felt the professor pull me back into the living room. He seemed to be swaying in front of me, far away and yet very near. But it was I who was swaying.
    “You were about to faint, young man,” he said. “Your knees were buckling.”
    “Yes.” After a moment, sinking onto the edge of a sofa arm, I said, “It’s not a dream, is it?”
    “No.”
    “What do we do now?”
    Paymenz sighed. He sat down heavily on a split-open ottoman. “First, I apologize. I . . . began to babble out there. I was useless. Useless as—as bosoms on a . . . whatever that expression is. That’s always been my failure: Faced with the abyss—which, really, is just an infinity of possibilities—I crumble. Into drink, sometimes. And good Lord I need a drink . . . but as for what to do—this calls for, ah, emergency measures. And we must have . . . we must obtain . . . information—so we must do the unthinkable. Melissa . . .” He took a deep breath, and then he made the decision, and he spoke it aloud: “Take the television out of the closet . . . and turn it on!”
    He said this the way another man would say, Get the shotguns out, and load them.
    To Paymenz, a television was more dangerous than a shotgun.
     
     
    We’d hooked car batteries to the little TV cord.
    “The phenomenon seems to be global,” the newscaster was saying. “And it seems to be genuine. Early reports of mass hallucinatory drugs introduced into the water system and an outbreak of rye-mold toxicity turn out to be wrong—as we here at KTLU can attest. Our own Brian Smarman was brutally killed this afternoon by the phenomenon.” He was an almost cardboard cutout newscaster; his hair looked like it had been poured into a cast, and, like many local newscasters, he was heavily caked in makeup. His voice quavered only a little.
    “Did you ever notice,” I said hoarsely, “that the closer you get to Los Angeles, where the anchormen want to be, the better looking they are? We’re halfway up the state from Los Angeles so we get the offbrand-looking newscasters. Up around Redding they’re all goofy-looking ducks who’re saving their money to buy condos—”—
    “Have you ever noticed,” Melissa interrupted, gesturing for me to be quiet, “how you tend to toss out irrelevant remarks when you’re nervous?”
    I had noticed it, actually, yes.
    The newscaster was going on hesitantly. “We—” he looked at the paper, seemed to doubt whether he should read it, and went on “—we are calling it ‘the phenomenon’ because there is such disagreement about the nature of the attacks. Alien invasion, invaders from another dimension, robots created by an enemy nation, and the first signs of—of Judgment Day—we’ve heard all these explanations. Observers from the station here—” his voice broke a little “—seem to agree that—that the beings in question are demonic or supernatural. However, a zoologist who encountered the beings and lived—I do not seem to have his name here—believes that they could be ‘some other form of biological life.’ ”
    “Now will scholarship’s imbeciles have their day,” Professor Paymenz muttered.
    “Shh, Dad,” Melissa chided him. She held on to his arm. We were all three of us huddled on her bed in her