Nate took a step back. A great big one.
It was Eli Rathbone. And Eli looked… not good.
Eli was white as tallow, white as the flame in the deepest part of a fire. His hair, clown-red before, was now old man’s hair. It was bone white, as if some follicular vampire had sucked all the color out of it. He was thinner than Nate ever could have conceived a person should be—his ribs poked out, his nipples stretched and elongated, his flesh threadbare.
Eli’s face was the worst. A leering Hollywood idol, pure plastic. His eyes bulged, and his teeth pushed past his lips like blunt discolored tusks. He looked unspeakably lonely and lost… but also very, very hungry. His face and frame radiated a yearning that pinned Nate where he stood, a moth skewered in a specimen case.
Oh, hello, Nate. May I come in? Mother, may I?
A drowsy terror settled upon Nate—it wasn’t a heart spiker, the kind of fear that shot adrenaline through your body; no, this was a lazy and drifting fright that bobbed like a kite on a string, dipping and ascending without ever settling.
“I don’t think so,” Nate whispered. “You look sick, Eli.”
The buzz grew louder. Nate noticed an emptiness under Eli’s armpit. Things were moving in there. Nate could see stuff crawling and stuttering about.
Oh no, Nate thought. Oh no no no no—
Nate’s eyes were riveted to the spot under Eli’s armpit. Things were coming out of it. Flies. Or things that looked like flies—
Eli lifted his arm. A deep hole was sunk into his flesh, all pulpy and black. Things squirmed in it. White things. Darker things.
“Go away, Eli.” Nate was amazed at how calm he sounded.
Eli leaned forward until his nose touched the window again. The plastic dimpled with the pressure. Eli’s eyes switched back and forth like a metronome set to a hi-hat beat. Tick-tock-tick-tock, back and forth, tick-tock.
He gave Nate a chummy wave. His hand was misshapen, the fingers fused into a mangled hook. Flies now boiled out of his armpit and pelted the plastic. Puk! Puk! Puk! They were larger than common bluebottles, with gas mask faces. A few tried to squirm through the plastic at the window’s edges; they buzzed frantically, a gleeful note.
Eli smiled. His lips peeled back from his dirty yellow teeth, the buckteeth of a rat. Flies crawled between them—they were coming from inside Eli’s mouth, their bodies wet with saliva. They flew at the window and hit, leaving moist blots on the plastic.
You will come with us, Eli said. His lips were not moving, but Nate heard his voice all the same. All the sweet boys and girls. You are good meat.
His teeth clicked animatedly, the sound of bone castanets. Nate lunged forward, moaning, and yanked the flimsy curtains shut. Eli Rathbone stood in front of the window for a few moments before his shape drifted away.
Shivering, Nate retreated to bed. He pulled the covers over himself and shook until he was sure his body would rattle to pieces.
24
MINERVA JOLTED AWAKE. Firelight played through the gap between the tent’s canvas flaps. Micah was supposed to be keeping watch outside.
She got up. Grabbed Ellen’s gun. Crawled to the flap.
Micah stood outside with his back to her. He was staring at something across the fire. He held the Tarpley rifle at port arms.
“Shug?”
He glanced over his shoulder. Saw her. Turned to face the woods again.
Minny’s eyes were adjusting. Inky darkness pooled past the glow of the fire. She couldn’t tell what Micah was looking at.
“Get Otis’s bow,” he said carefully.
Otis’s compound bow lay outside the other tent. Neither Charlie nor Otis had stirred. Minerva crossed to the tent quickly and brought the bow and the arrows to Micah.
“What the hell?” she whispered.
Micah chucked his chin toward something lurking in the first cut of trees. Minerva couldn’t see anything. Her vision was all staticky as her eyes adjusted.
“There is a flare in my pack,” Micah said. “And tape. Tape the flare to an arrow. Quickly.”
Minerva located the flare and a roll of duct tape. She peeled a strip of gray tape and paused. “Near the arrowhead or further back?”
“A few inches from the head,” Micah said calmly.
“We could burn the whole forest down,” said Minny.
After a moment, Micah replied with: “Good.”
Minerva became aware of a series of sounds coming from not far away: clicks and wheezes and peeps and other animal noises. It was like listening to a disjointed sound loop from David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest, the voices of a dozen beasts all blurred together.
“What is that?” she said.
But she knew. It was one of those things that had chased them the other night. The things Otis and Charlie had tried to capture in the pit that had caught them instead.
She taped the flare to the shaft of an arrow. “Can you shoot a bow?”
Micah indicated his eye patch. “Not so well.”
Otis poked his head out of the tent. “What is it?”
“Come here,” Micah told him.
Otis came over at a low crouch. “It a bear?” he whispered.
“Or something,” said Micah.
Minerva could see it now. Its shape seemed impossible. She had seen bears before—not in the wild, but in photographs. This did not echo her understanding of a bear. It stood fifty yards away, motionless between the trees. Its body pooled upward from a wide base like a bell laid on the ground. It did not have legs, or if it did, they were stubby and deformed—or else it had a multitude of them and moved in the scuttling manner of a crab. Minerva could perceive a host of strange protrusions all over its body. Shortened limbs, bulbous growths. It looked to be covered in huge, throbbing lesions.
Otis saw it, too. “That’s no bear,” he said in a voice full of dread.
The sounds it was making were equally senseless. Syrupy exhalations, ticks and whirrs and chirps and growls and hoots. A cacophony of noise as if an entire menagerie were speaking through a single organism.
“Can you hit it?” Micah said.
Otis nodded shakily. “If it stays put.”
Micah said, “It has not moved since I saw it.”
Otis took the bow from Minerva and notched the flare-weighted arrow on the bowstring. Minerva pulled the strike strip. The flare popped alight.
Otis drew back the arrow and let it fly. It arced through the night, the flare fraying in the wind, and struck the thing. It did not move.
The glow of the flare spread, bringing the shape into sharper relief. It made no sense. It was not one identifiable thing. It was many, or parts of many.
“What am I seeing?” Minerva said.
The thing was never at rest. It twitched and jerked. Parts of it opened; other parts closed. A stew of parts. Heads, snouts, tails, limbs. It was enormous. A seething hillock of flesh. It was nothing God’s light had ever shone upon.
At last it shambled forward. Micah shouldered the Tarpley. Minerva cocked Ellen’s .38. Her hands shook.
A random strip of fur ignited down the thing’s side. The hair went up like a fuse. The thing shuffled toward them. It undulated, seemingly legless, hovercrafting across the ground. It shrieked and gibbered and emitted phlegmy dog-panting sounds. Watching it, Minerva was reminded of Play-Doh. Little shreds of Play-Doh, red and blue and yellow and green, scattered on a table after arts and crafts class. She imagined rolling all those bits into a ball. Squashing everything into a solid mass while still being able to see the individual components: streaks of yellow, blots of red, veins of blue. But instead of Play-Doh, this thing was made of animals, all compressed and crushed together—