Spider Legs Read Online Free Page B

everything, because the details faded like morning fog, leaving no trace if not caught early. And indeed it turned out to be worthwhile.
    He had dreamed that he was a child back at his parents’ house in Asbury Park, New Jersey. He had just purchased a strange new aquatic animal for his 110-gallon tropical fish tank. The tank was in the basement, already filled with a dazzling array of marine species: orange clown fish, long-snouted coralfish, powder blue surgeonfish, and wimplefish—all from the Indo-Pacific. When he dropped the newcomer into the tank, it immediately settled to the bottom. It looked a little like a tube worm with a sludge-green, chalky outer tube. When threatened, or at night, it retracted its pinky tentacles and hairlike projections, and closed the hinged lid at the top of its inch-thick tube. It seemed to eat the same prepared flake food that the other fish enjoyed—except it ate a lot more than other fish. Occasionally, he supplemented the diet with freeze-dried krill, blood worms, and brine shrimp.So voracious was the tube worm that over the next few weeks Garth went through several cans of food. Each day the animal grew in size until one day it was so large it climbed out of the tank and waited in the corner of the room. When Garth came down to feed the fish, he saw that his hairy specimen was no longer in the tank. He looked around the room near the tank, and then a movement caught his eye. From the corner of the room, it came at him, with large saberlike teeth. Young Garth screamed and ran up the basement steps, the animal hot in pursuit. As he reached the basement door, he found to his horror it was locked. On the door was a computer keyboard and computer screen. The screen had the words:
    PLEASE KEYPRESS CORRECT PASSWORD TO OPEN DOOR.
    Garth typed one password after another on the keyboard, desperately, but none opened the door. The worm came closer and closer as it navigated the basement steps. Its moist body undulated along the carpet like that of a snake. It was only three steps away. Two steps away. One step away. Garth then suffered a fevered flash of inspiration and typed the password “DEATH,” the door finally opened, and—
    “And that's as far as it goes, right now,” he concluded. “I'd better finish it.” At which point he closed his eyes and returned to sleep. He'd trained himself not to fear his dreams.
    This was too much. He might sleep for another hour, now, and the continuation would be lost in the welter of the following dreams. They had gotten all they could. Her concern for what was outside returned, perhaps augmented by the horror of the dream itself.
    “Garth? Wake up,” Kalinda called.
    For a moment Garth was disoriented, trying to shake off the ashes of his weird dream, but then he realized where he was. Kalinda was heading outside the moment she saw him sit up. He stumbled after her, out of the hatch and on to the bright deck.

    “What's wrong?” he asked, his attention shifting to the iceberg. “Wow, you discovered a magnificent berg.”
    “There was something on it that moved. It's not there any more.”
    “Maybe it was a chunk of ice that slipped.” As Garth watched the iceberg he seemed not fully focused, and she knew he was trying to recall details of his weird dream and the atmosphere of impending doom. She would feed those details back to him as soon as this other thing was checked.
    “It couldn't be,” she said. “It was something dark. It looked like it was alive.”
    “The light plays tricks. Could still be ice.”
    “Garth, I thought I saw legs.”
    “A bear? I think most of the bears this far north are white.”
    “It was as big as this ship. Maybe bigger.”
    He looked at her. “Just which one of us was dreaming?” he asked, smiling.
    She remained serious. “I got your dream. But this was no dream. It alarms me. I don't know what I saw.”
    “Natalie saw something in the sea,” he said, remembering. “I wonder—?”
    “Maybe so.