I followed the line of his big, pink-nailed, black finger off along the path through the park from Broad Street, a little hazy in the summer evening. There was nothing. Then there was a darker spot in the haze and then, not more than about twenty feet away, just about to pass back of the row of bushes along the path, I saw Stanley. Tonight he seemed, somehow, a more positive presence, even at that distance. There was a cocky bounce in his walk and a tilt to his chin that announced "Here is someone to reckon with." Other eyes in our little circle turned his way as he passed behind the bushes. A couple of seconds more and he came around the near side and moved in to join us.
"Hello there, Wino," he said to Jones and there was condescension in it. "Fellows, I want"—proudly—"you should meet a friend of mine."
Around the bushes came a shape, a dark shape; Stanley's friend, from some other place or world. In our group, Saint Betty, a retired queen, choked on the jug and handed it to me. I shoved it along to Jones. The paralyzing effect of Stanley's friend can be measured in the fact that the jug went three times around that thirsty circle—and no one even lifted it to his lips till it fell in the dust at my feet.
Stanley's friend was there all right; really there. What did I say he was like? A dark shape? Yes. But that dark shape and the detail of that shape came through as clear as a hot blue flame to me.
You weren't ever down that way, right? Not to stay, at least. Well, one thing people there have in common is the horrors. Not just the ordinary day-to-day horrors of a hard life but the big horrors. The D.T.s. How do they go? The detail varies. With everyone, there is something that really panics him, gives him that sense of unreasoning, helpless, screaming fear. With a lot of people it is snakes. That's the traditional. With others, it can be heights, or closed rooms; rats, maybe. With me, it has always been spiders, ugly, hairy-legged, bloat-bellied.
The horrors. The height man, when he gets them, will have the sensation of falling, helplessly, endlessly. Once I had spiders. There were hordes, millions of great, stickily scrabbling, poisonous spiders crawling, crawling all over me, over everything—until I woke wrapped up like an iced tamale in the cold wet sheet that is called "calming restraint" in psycho wards.
Stanley's friend? Well, it's an ugly thought, but consider those spiders of mine. And consider people. People, mostly, have religion. "God made man in his image," they say, except God, of course, is the infinitely greater. Now suppose that spiders had a god. A spider god. "God made spiders in his image," the spiders might say, right? So such a spider god, that almighty apotheosis of spiderdom—that was Stanley's friend as I saw him.