Web Fingers
by s.c. virtes

Web fingers probed the furniture. The television looked out on its home and found it nice. It switched its own channels, each showing a different raucous miasma of insanity, things whirling and the color of living picture-tube blue. There were things on the coffee table to toy with, magazines it couldn't read, candies it couldn't eat. It didn't understand these.
Ah, but the children were fun. The two brothers, Willy and Jon, played with their trucks, and it crept into their eyes to see how they thought of what they were doing. It took one of the young bodies and began to walk ... around the living room, down the hallway, then up the stairs like an obedient zombie. The child climbed up into the velvet shadows and ended on a platform where an ancient, gnarled man stood. This archetypal intruder had his hands upon the railings and stared down like a general overseeing invisible troops.
"I knew you would one day find your way here", said the man in a quiet mindvoice glowing with power. This man had created the TV-spirit and everything it had ever felt. It was awed and made no reply.
"You must continue to daze and hypnotize their elders, and throw images at their young until they no longer have a grasp of reality. Mess with their minds until they can no longer concentrate. Then we shall enter their world and suck it dry."
"I work my stealth in your true shadows," the TV-mind answered, bowing low.
The creator nodded slightly, then folded like an old roadmap and was gone. The boy wandered back downstairs, trying his best to remember why he had left his toys to begin with.
When he got back to where his little brother was playing obliviously, there were faint filaments reaching out from the TV, swirling like smoke over an ashtray.
"Neat, Willy, cobwebs," he said to his brother.
"That's weird."
But then their father entered the room and the webs were sucked back into the closing maelstrom to become an afternoon cartoon.
Jon went over to the TV and ran his fingers across the cool blue tube. There were crackles of static power, and the tiny hairs on his arm stood up. He giggled, yet he was remotely afraid of the cold power he felt.
Dad waved him aside. "Don't stand so close. Your eyes will bug out."
"Maybe bugging is better than what the old man has in store for us," he mumbled uncertainly, almost remembering.
Dad gave him a long, disapproving stare. "What am I going to do with a kid that talks nonsense?" he asked.
Jon and Willy went back to their simple games. Dad flipped through various sports channels, while the TV waited patiently. It reached out one tiny thread of energy, no more than a single strand of spider's silk, popped it into the vein in Dad's arm like an IV, and began to feed.
Dad yawned ... "Long day," he muttered.

Story copyright © 1999 by s.c. virtes