The certainty in her eyes silenced me—I didn’t deny it, and Lace nodded slowly, positive now I wasn’t some long-lost cousin.
“Something happened here,” Lace said. “Something the landlords wanted to cover up. I need to know what it was.”
“Why?”
“Because I need leverage.” She leaned forward on the couch, fingers gripping the cushions with white-knuckled strength. “I’m not going back to my sister’s couch!”
Like I said: hell hath no fury.
I held up my hands in surrender. To get anything more out of her, I was going to have to give her some of the truth, but I needed time to get my story straight.
“Okay. I’ll tell you what I know,” I said. “But first … show me the thing.”
She smiled. “I was going to anyway.”
“The thing is so cool,” Roger said.
They’d done this before.
Without being told, the other two women turned off the lamps at either end of the couch. Roger flicked off the kitchen light and came through, sitting cross-legged in front of the white expanse of wall, almost like it was a TV screen.
It was dark now, the room glowing with dim orange from distant Jersey streetlights, accented by a bluish strip of night-light from under the bathroom door.
The other guy got out of his chair, scraping it out of our way, turning around to get his own view of the blank white wall.
“Is this a slide show?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Roger said, giggling and hugging his knees. “Fire up the projector, Lace.”
She grunted, rooting around under the coffee table and pulling out a fat candle and a pack of matches. She crossed the room carefully in the darkness and knelt beside the blank wall, setting the candle against the baseboard.
“Farther away,” Roger said.
“Shut up,” Lace countered. “I’ve done this more than you have.”
The match flared in her hand, and she put it to the candle’s wick. Just before the scent of sandalwood overpowered my nostrils, I detected the human smell of nervous anticipation.
The wall flickered like an empty movie screen, little peaks of stucco casting elongated shadows, like miniature mountains at sunset. The mottled texture of the wall became exaggerated, and my peep vision sharpened in the gloom, recording every imperfection. I could see the hurried, uneven paths that the rollers had followed up and down when the wall had been painted.
“What am I looking at?” I asked. “A bad paint job?”
“I told you,” Roger said. “Move it out a little.”
Lace growled but slid the candle farther from the wall.
The words appeared…
They glowed faintly through the shadows, their edges indistinct. A slightly darker layer of paint showed through the top coat, as often happens when landlords don’t bother with primer.
Like when they’re in a big rush.
The wall said:
so pRetty i hAd to Eat hiM
I crossed to the wall. The darker layer was less noticeable up close. I ran my fingertips across the letters. The cheap water-based paint felt as dry as a piece of chalk.
With one fingernail, I incised a curved mark in the paint, about the size of a fully grown hookworm. The dark color showed through a little more clearly there.
I brought my fingertip to my nose and sniffed.
“Dude, that’s weird,” Roger said.
“Smell is the most sensitive of our senses, Roger,” I said. But I didn’t mention the substance humans are most sensitive to: ethyl mercaptan, the odorant that gives rotten meat its particular tang. Your nose can detect one four-billionth of a gram of it in a single breath of air.
My nose is about ten times better.
I also didn’t mention to Roger that my one little sniff had made me certain of something—the words had been painted in blood.
It turned out to be more than blood, though. As I incised the wall again with my steel-hard fingernails, breathing in the substances preserved under the hasty coat of paint, I caught a whole range of tissues from the human body. The iron tang of blood was joined by the mealy smell of ground bone, the saltiness of muscle, the flat scent of liver, and the ethyl mercaptan effluence of skin tissues.
I believe the layman’s term is gristle.
There were other, sharper smells mixed in—chemical agents used to clean away the message. By the time they’d found it, though, the blood must have already soaked deep into the plaster, where it still clung tenaciously. They had painted it over, but the letters remained.
I mean, really: water-based paint? What is it with New York landlords?
“What the hell are you doing?” Lace said softly.
I turned and saw that they were all sitting there wide-eyed. I tend to forget how normal humans are made uncomfortable by the sniffing thing.
“Well…” I started, searching for a good excuse among the dregs of rum in my system. What was I going to say?
The buzzer sounded.
“Pizza’s here!” Roger cried, jumping up and running to the door.
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
For some reason, I was starving.
Chapter 6
SLIMEBALLS
Ants have this religion, and it’s caused by slimeballs.
It all starts with a tiny creature called Dicrocoelium dendriticum—though even parasite geeks don’t bother saying that out loud. We just call them “lancet flukes.”
Like a lot of parasites, these flukes start out in a stomach. Stomachs are the most popular organs of final hosts, you may have noticed. Well, duh—there’s food in them. In this case, we’re talking about the stomach of a cow.
When the infected cow makes a cow pie, as we say in Texas, a passel of lancet fluke eggs winds up in the pasture. A snail comes along and eats some of the cow pie, because that’s what snails do. Now the snail is infected. The fluke eggs hatch inside the unlucky snail’s belly and then start to drill their way out through its skin.
Fortunately for the snail, it has a way to protect itself: slime.
The sliminess of the snail’s skin lubricates the flukes as they drill their way out, and the snail survives their exit. By the time the flukes escape, they’re entirely encased in a slimeball, unable to move. They’ll never mess with any snails again, that’s for sure.
But the flukes don’t mind this turn of events. It turns out they wanted to be covered in slime. The whole trip through the snail was just evolution’s way of getting the flukes all slimy. Because they’re headed to their next host: an ant.
Here’s something you didn’t want to know: Ants love slimeballs.
Slimeballs make a delicious meal, even when they have a few hundred flukes inside. So sooner or later, some unlucky ant comes along, eats the slimeball, and winds up with a bellyful of parasites.
Inside the ant, the lancet flukes quickly organize themselves. They get ready for some parasite mind control.
“Do ants even have minds?” you may ask. Hard to say. But they do have tiny clusters of nerves, about midway in complexity between human brains and TV remote controls. A few dozen flukes take up a position at each of these nerve clusters and begin to change the ant’s behavior.
The flukey ant gets religion. Sort of.
During the day, it acts normal. It wanders around on the ground, gathering food (possibly more slimeballs) and hanging out with the other ants. It still smells healthy to them, so they don’t try to drive it off as they would a sick ant.
But when night falls, the ant does something flukey.
It leaves the other ants behind and climbs up a tall blade of grass, getting as high as it can off the ground. Up there under the stars, it waits all night alone.