Read Spider Kiss for Free Online

final pin is jammed into the ju-ju doll half a continent away. It was like the cry of a mother brought to see the tiny, crushed form lying beneath the blanket on a busy intersection. It was like the kiss of a spider.
    And the great animal that was his audience, his vacuous, demanding, insensate, vicious audience, purred. Ripples of contentment washed the crowd. Almost mystically the surface of mass hysteria was smoothed, quieted, molded by his singing into a glossy plane of attention and silence. Girls who had been facially and bodily contorted by his appearance, who had thrown themselves forward in a spasm of adoration, now settled back demurely, seated and attentive.
    He went on, singing, gently strumming the guitar, making idle movements of foot and hip and head — yet nothing overly suggestive, nothing that would rouse the sleeping beast out there. His movements, his voice, the chords he chose to pull from his guitar — all combined to lull the herd. His performance was as much a casting of hypnotic trances as it was a demonstration of musical ability. Like some advanced breed of snake charmer he piped at them, and their eyes became glassy, their limbs limp; they stared and absorbed and wanted, but were silent, all waiting.
    And he could sing. Granted his material was that semi-obscene and witless conglomerate of rhythmics known as rockabilly — half thump-thump of rock'n'roll, half twang and formalized beat of hillbilly — he moved his people with it. His voice was low and strong, sure on the subterranean notes that bespoke passion, winging on the sharp, high notes demanding gentleness. His was a good voice, free from affectation, based solidly in the sounds of the delta, the back hills, the wanderlusts of the people.
    It came through. And they listened.
    Until he was sure he had wrung everything from the song; then he finished. A soft rise to a lingering C-sharp, held till it was flensed clean, and a final chord. Then silence. A quick-phrased reporter from Time had once compared the hushed silence following the song to the silence when Lincoln completed his Gettysburg Address. Compared it and found it wanting, diseased, laughable, sexually stimulating, dangerous. Nonetheless, there it was. A long instant without time or tempo. Deepest silence. The silence of a limestone cave, the silence of deafness, the silence of the floor of the Maracot Deep. No one spoke, no one screamed, and if there was a girl in that audience who breathed — she did it self-consciously, inadvertently, quietly.
    It lasted a score of heartbeats, while he stood in the spotlight, head down, wasted, empty, humble.
    Then the holocaust broke once more.
    The realization that they had actually felt honest emotion burst upon the constantly self-conscious teen-agers, and they quickly covered their embarrassment with the protective cloak of crowd behavior. They screamed.
    The sound rose up again, a cyclonic twisting outward, reaching even those beyond the sight of the stage (where the most demonstrative always clustered), sweeping all sanity before it. Carrying its incoherent message of attack and depravity with it like a crimson banner.
    The noise lasted only until he struck the first four notes of the next song.
    Then … the somnambulistic state once more.
    He sang.
    Sang for the better part of an hour and a half, ranging widely in interpretation, though restricted by arrangement and subject matter and the idiom of his music. His songs were the tormented and feeble pleadings of the confused teen-ager for understanding in a time when understanding is the one commodity that cannot be found pre-packed in aluminum foil. His songs were not honest, nor were they particularly meaningful, but they mirrored the frustrations of that alien community known as the teens.
    There was identification, if nothing else.
    The lean boy with the auburn hair, gently moving his hips in rhythm to his own music, unaided by the full string orchestra in the pit, unaided by the