The Spinner

by Doris Piserchia

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The search for new sources of energy led one man to an accidental breakthrough into a strange parallel world. It was apparently deserted and might have been a good place to prospect until the finder panicked. He tried to shut the dimensional crack that led into that other place. But the breakthrough had prematurely awakened that world's most predatory inhabitant from hibernation - and in raging fury THE SPINNER slipped through to find itself alone and hungry in an American city loaded with good things to eat - people!

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 176

Sample

Mordak stank like an old corpse. The tractor scooped him up with a load of alien soil, cracked him out of his comfortable incubator and dumped him into the living world.

Gusty didn’t know what the place was or how it had come to be there. The sky was gray and full of lowering clouds that seemed to dissolve into the forbidding horizon. There wasn’t much to look at on the ground save for rocks of various sizes and a dusty surface that blew into the air in spirals each time the big mechanical shovel thrust down into it.

The old man wandered about kicking up dust, now and then glancing at the sky to see if it had changed. It paid a fellow to stay alert while treading unfamiliar sod. Tidal waves, conflagration, mud slides or general disaster were not inconceivable in strange territory, and that was where he was, somewhere out from reality in a spot where everything was crazy.

Unmissed, undesired, like the space debris adrift in the orbit of Earth, the human stood up to his ankles in stardust and watched a tractor gobble up a portion of dirt. He observed the horizon, the machine, the ground, the hill of rocks behind which that odd hole in the building yawned and all the while he was thinking that he might not really be experiencing this, that he was still back in the cave asleep and snoring.

He was looking right at the shovel when it unearthed a bubble of glass two meters high and as many meters across. Of course the sphere couldn’t have been glass or the machine would have crushed it to powder, but it was transparent and obviously not too fragile since it merely cracked under the pressure of the metal jaws. They lifted the egg out of its shallow grave and split it open, allowing the contents to drop onto the dust a short distance from where Gusty stood.

Mordak stank and shrieked and tried to see but the sky was still light and his eyes preferred darkness. Large and set far back in his face, they gleamed like blue lamps as they moved here and there from horizon to horizon, blinking, nearly blind. How long he had been living and growing in the bubble-like egg was unknown, but his body had a human form of sorts while the hair on his head was long and stringy.

Gray except for his eyes, Mordak was shockingly lean and alien in appearance. He uncurled from his position on the ground in a slow and dazed sequence of motions that made Gusty think of a mound of writhing maggots. The alien could move in a hurry when he wanted to or when he was angry, which he was then, murderously so. Wasn’t Gusty to blame for the precious life cycle having been interrupted?

Before plunging into the obscurity of rock mounds and craters, Mordak peered closely at the enemy, tried to get rid of the man in that very instant by raising a hand and leaping forward. He was weak and would remain so for a few hours and his vision was inferior in daylight, so all Gusty had to do was step aside and the creature went on past, groping with savage gestures, shrieking as though fate had made off with his stairway to Heaven. As he hurtled away the human image burned on the retinas of his hateful eyes.

Seldom had Gusty been passionately loved by anyone, but to his knowledge no living person harbored in his or her breast an inordinate hatred for him. During the last few decades he had accepted the fact that he was an almost invisible cipher in reality. Now he came to know that Mordak loathed him, atom and molecule.

More than anything he wanted to go back the way he had come, longed to exit from this unholy place and get back into that big lighted tunnel with the rock wall on one side. Home and safety lay beyond that wall and if he could reach the crevice through which he had come, he could fade away like a shadow and be among the caves where his friends lived. Only a little while ago he had been idly wandering through granite rooms that were as familiar to him as his own hands, and then he decided to squeeze through the crevice and discovered something besides the basement of a building. Stupid curiosity made him walk down the tiled tunnel toward that blazing hole of light, and now look where he was. When it came to that, where was he?

Back the way he had entered the gray world he went, skipping and hopping in his haste to find the bright hole leading into the tunnel. He made himself move as nimbly as possible in case the ugly stinker came anywhere near him again. With any luck the bright light of the hole had scared it away and now it was sniffling and snorting among the dunes off to his right.

The hole was as big as a house, glittering like a giant searchlight, smack in the middle of what looked like a solid mountain except that this couldn’t be right since there had to be a building there. Sore-footed, Gusty took a hesitant step into the shattering illumination and was simultaneously relieved and amazed. It didn’t matter that he felt crazy. The tiled tunnel was back again and so was the rock wall to his left. Ahead was the same old carpeted vestibule but he hadn’t any intention of going that far because he could see the special crevice he planned to use as an escape route. It wasn’t very large but he was accustomed to skinning in and out of narrow places so it was like second nature for him to know where this one was.

He looked back and was gratified to see that the gray world had disappeared. Now there was only the bright hole. He couldn’t even hear the sounds of the tractor.

Suddenly two men dressed in pale-blue uniforms walked out of the vestibule. They saw Gusty and both dropped into a crouch while they cocked their rifles at him. Too far away to make out their faces, Gusty scowled and kept moving forward and to his left. They might shoot him before he reached the crack in the wall.

“What’d I do?” he yelled. “You gonna kill me for nothing?”

They seemed to relax right away, stood up and started coming down the tunnel at a run, and all the while Gusty was trying to get to the crevice. They were no more than halfway when he saw the ugly stinker above them. The ceiling was high and they weren’t looking up, but he spotted it because he was still worrying about where it had gone.

Mordak looked like a big spider spread out flat on the tiled ceiling. Rapidly and with craft he crawled a little farther along until he was in position to drop on the men.

“Watch out, watch it, over your heads!” Gusty bawled. At that moment the crevice was there within easy reach and in a flash he flattened himself against the rock wall and faded out of sight.



Tully had been hired by Gee Rumson who gave him a rating of private and sent him to guard the lower levels of his building. Though it wasn’t much of a job, Tully was young and ambitious and desired to become indispensable to his employer.

Now he stood in his clean blue uniform, gripped his black gun and wondered what the old man had been yelling about. Also he was wondering how the old man had gotten through one of those cracks in the wall. Tully had personally checked out every one and would have been ready to swear that nothing other than a snake could use any of them as a doorway into or away from the tunnel.

When he first saw the old man, Tully thought he had come out of the hole. That alone would have been reason to shoot the skinny buzzard but then he started yelling and Tully knew right away he was human except he was so excited that what he yelled was mostly a jumble of high sounds.

Going over to the wall, Tully tried to find the crack. He went up and down the tunnel looking for it but every line and gouge in the granite looked alike. Just as he laid his gun down so that he could run his hands along a particular crevice, he heard Bates scream. Whirling, he saw something sticking to the front of his companion. It was gray and for a second he thought it was a naked man but then he saw the streaks of red running down its arm and realized it was attacking Bates.

Something happened to Tully when the sure knowledge hit him that the gray thing came out of the hole. It had come through the dimensional opening created by the Rumson Bore and here it was not twenty meters away from him gnawing off his friend’s head.

There in the tunnel he discovered that his worst terror was of the foreign, and by that he meant something that didn’t belong to Earth. Had it been an animal clinging to Bates and attacking him, Tully would have grabbed up his gun and used it like a club, but the gray thing was just that, a thing, sticking to the screaming man like an oversized insect.

As soon as Bates went down, the thing turned on Tully. Fortunately for him, he staggered backwards up the tunnel and paused directly beneath a bright light. Unaware that he had moved at all, he stood with his eyes opened wide and his brain emptied of nearly every thought or emotion as he waited for the rotten monster to come and take him. His only sensation was that of coldness.

It gradually dawned on him that the thing was hesitant to close in on him. It circled him, reaching out with first one hand and then the other, obviously longing to come closer and use its dripping fangs on him yet something stopped it and made it remain beyond reach. It never occurred to him that it might not be able to see him.

Shock after shock ripped through his brain as he observed Mordak in all his alienness: sunken blue eyes, slitted nostrils, mouth stretching from ear to ear, gray and slick all over with only a full round pouch where the genitals should be, bony knees, a lump in the center of the chest, feet that were mere pads with many wispy protrusions, like brushes. Hands the same, brushes with each bristle curling and moving independently.

Loud rumblings came from somewhere up above. It was the Bore preparing to shut down for the night. Tully cried out in his mind, cursed and threatened, pleaded with them not to turn it off. They surely wouldn’t leave this thing in here. Not in this world. They had to take it out, make it go back to its own. They mustn’t leave it here where he could see it.

He didn’t know why Mordak decided not to stay in the tunnel and kill him. The thing could have since he wasn’t putting up any defense but stood bonelessly waiting for this creature that was too ugly for him ever to accurately describe to come and rend him.

Without comprehension he watched as it leaped all the way up to the ceiling and scurried away, not towards its own home but into a hallway which had several forks leading to other parts of the building. Its arms and legs moved so rapidly it seemed to him that it possessed more than two pairs. More like it had six or eight. Yes, eight. Like a spider.



Ekler bore a faint resemblance to a hound as he sniffed the air of the conference room into which he had been ushered by a servant several minutes before. He sniffed again. There was the smell of expensive wooden furniture, air cleaner and rank fear.

“The anonymous phone call which I received at the station,” he said, repeating himself. “Everyone thought it was so outlandish. We all sat down and talked about it in order to see what we could come up with. We arrived at some odd conclusions which I’m certain will interest you once you hear them.”

“I’m a busy man,” said Rumson, clasping his hands. They were pale like the rest of him.

“No one is above the law.”

“Certainly not I.”

“The world knows about the Rumson Bore. The world remembers you were restrained by the Court from using it because it was potentially dangerous.”

“Plainly a lunatic made that phone call to you.”

“It was suggested in my office conference that perhaps some government or private agency coerced you into building the Bore and using it. We all know the country needs ore and chemicals.”

The look of fear and annoyance deepened on Rumson’s face. “If you know so much you don’t need me and I don’t see why we need this conversation. Arrest me if you have any evidence of guilt on my part.”

Shrugging, Ekler said, “The old man told me one of the guards was killed; had his head bitten off.”

Rumson sat down at the end of the long, glistening conference table and looked toward the undraped window. Suddenly he shivered and lowered his gaze. Not once did he look toward the light again. “The duty roster isn’t confidential. I can tell you Tully and Bates guarded the lower halls Tuesday night but I’m afraid you can’t talk to them. They’re both on leave.”

“What do you have in the building that requires protecting?”

“My privacy and my property.”

“The two men left addresses where they can be reached.”

Rumson shrugged and clasped his hands. “I tried to get in touch with them as soon as you called me. They left nonexisting addresses and numbers. That isn’t at all unusual. Too often my people get called back before their vacation time is up. Of course Tully and Bates will get some demerits for making their whereabouts unknown.”

Ekler sat down uninvited at the head of the table and propped his chin on his hands. He was a big, muscular man with a shock of dark hair. “Naturally no alien came out of that place. By the way, do you still maintain you don’t know where it is?”

“No, I don’t know where it is.”

“Not Venus or Mercury or Mars?”

“Only a policeman could be so careless about the sciences. Anyone else would point out to me that conditions on those planets are not conducive to life as we know it.”

“It’s a place so it has to be someplace.” Ekler’s chair was equipped with motorized wheels. Silently he rolled away from the table, approached the high, broad window and slowed. He could see the spires of Eastland’s only cathedral. Brass plated, they glittered in the sun like a crown. “It’s somewhere out there, maybe just on the other side of an invisible wall or conceivably light-years away in space.”

Momentarily startled, Rumson said, “I always maintained it didn’t matter where it was as long as it had resources. However you’re mistaken about my having used the Bore. Not since my experimenting days. It’s part of my past.”

“Most business installations have TV cameras built into the hallways or ceilings.”

“Sorry, no. There are no cameras on the lower floors.”

“Our artists composed a sketch from the old man’s description,” said Ekler. “You have a problem, Mr. Rumson. Your agency will dump you when you tell them a murderous alien came out of that Bore, your security people will walk off the job and the citizens of Eastland will try to hang you from a lamppost.”

“It’s all nonsense.”

“A killer in the streets. Like Jack the Ripper all over again.”

Out on one of those streets a few minutes later, Ekler breathed deeply to get rid of the smell of deodorant and wealth. He frowned when he realized that he still smelled fear. It seemed to be all over Eastland.

Rumson had been thorough in his panicked haste. The lower floors of his building were a pile of rubble so search warrants didn’t mean anything. If there had been a Bore down there, it was now covered with tons of debris.

Ekler’s men would be present when the digging crew went to work. The lies were beginning to irritate him. If Rumson had broken the law Ekler wanted to know about it. He was curious to learn what had motivated an old man to call the police and tell such unusual whoppers. Perhaps just to get Rumson in trouble.

Not for a moment did Ekler believe the part about the alien. He hated science fiction. Besides, he knew a bit about the Bore. It supposedly opened into a planet or a world empty of intelligent life. That much was well established fact. In several areas a great deal of vegetation and small mammals had been spotted but there were no high-level animals of any kind. Period. Except that he had put out tracers on Tully and Bates and came up with exactly nothing. But that had nothing to do with aliens. Somebody might have killed Bates. Maybe Tully did it. Maybe the old man did it.

No matter. Ekler would find out. He was a hound when it came to his work.



Mordak knew what he was doing. He was getting his revenge. He hadn’t wanted to come to this place and indeed had no idea how or why he had arrived, having been blinded by a severe bright light moments before plunging through a hole. Since he was here and didn’t know how to get out he would discover necessary things to do.

Anyone who even faintly resembled the old creature in the garden at home would go down before his fangs and his spite; any erect organism walking on two legs and swinging two arms would fit the spinner’s description of the enemy.

When Mordak wasn’t gnashing his teeth he was grieving. The garden was lost to him forever and he was an outcast in a. . .