Welcome to the Nightmare Magazine Story podcast.

Enter freely and of your own free will.

I am your humble host, Terence Taylor,

when very much at home with the children of the night.

Stay close as my muse, the medieval Dima Gola guides us down into beautiful darkness.

In this episode, before our full-length story, we have a short shot, the spiders you swallow

in your sleep, written by Wendy Nicol and narrated by Nan McNamara.

But first, a word from our sponsors.

And now, Nan McNamara.

The spiders you swallow in your sleep.

By Wendy Nicol.

The image flashes only briefly on the television screen.

But that's all it takes.

In that millisecond before Libby squeezes her eyes shut, the spiders are already at work in her mind, weaving sticky, new synaptic bridges. They twist and shape the unlikely connections,

binding thoughts of white faces, red noses, and oversized shoes, with fear and terror, and syrupy

blood.

The smell of candy floss and peanuts immutably linked with rot.

Calliope tones, with danger.

She shakes her head to disrupt their work.

They scatter into darkened crevices.

Libby sits with her friends in the back of the driver's ed class, listening to their whispers of all the worrisome ways that serial killers prey on girls like them, crouching in

back seats and under car carriages, faining flat tires

...