Tim tried to smile but couldn’t quite get his muscles to cooperate: more the leer of a crazed loon. His face kept shifting polarities, giddy to mortified, great forces working beneath its surface. Max wondered: Did the Scoutmaster really want to save the man, or only investigate for symptoms of his own condition? He contemplated the selfishness of that as the soldering gun sent up pin curls of smoke.
“What do you think it is?” Max asked softly.
Tim picked up the scalpel. He stared at his hand until it stopped trembling.
“I’ve stopped trying to guess, Max. I’ll open him up a little. Just a little, okay?”
TIM THOUGHT back to med school, an operating theater where a doctor-instructor leaned over his patient and said: This is the God moment, folks. You hold it all in your hands right now. So honor the body beneath your blade.
Tim would do his best to honor this man’s body… what was left of it.
“Ready, Max?”
The boy nodded.
“Just follow my instructions. Don’t be scared if I yell or get demanding—it won’t be your fault.” He offered a strained and cheerless smile. “I’ll try not to raise my voice.”
Tim positioned the scalpel over the man’s flesh, which was stretched so tight that he could see the individual pores: a million tiny mouths stretched into silent screams. He lacked the cool confidence of a true “blade”—you could wake one of those guys out of a dead sleep, shove him into the operating theater and stick a knife in his hand, and he’d say I’ve got it from here and get down to cutting.
That was a rare gift. Tim had been given a smaller gift, which was why he’d ended up as a small-town GP wielding tongue depressors and blood pressure cuffs. He’d always been okay with that, too—but as the scalpel hummed over the man’s flesh, he dearly wished for the unerring self-belief of his med-school pals.
The man’s skin opened up as if it had been aching to do that very thing. A V of split flesh followed the blade as it sliced below the ribs, widening out like the wake of a yacht. Everything inside existed in shades of white: the silver skin draping the man’s ribs and the layers of muscle.
“Soldering iron, Max.”
Tim cauterized the severed veins. Medical instruments were often just precision variations of the same tools handymen used.
“Gauze,” he said.
Tim dabbed the blood out of the half-inch-deep slit in the man’s torso—then absentmindedly dabbed the sweat off his forehead. The stranger’s breathing was unaltered. Tim wasn’t surprised. A single baby aspirin would be enough to knock him on his ass. He already may have slipped into a starvation coma.
HAL 9000 spoke up: Timothy Ogden Riggs, are you sure you’re making the right decision? I think you should stop.
The new, conflicting voice—the Undervoice, as Tim now thought of it—boomed back: How could you stop now, even if you wanted to? Don’t you want to know, Tim? Don’t you NEED to know?
The blade slit through bands of taut sinew to reveal the stomach lining. Milky-pale and fingered with blue veins. Tim was reminded of childhood trips to his Scottish grandmother’s home and the boiled sheeps’ stomachs she’d laid out on the kitchen counter, waiting to be made into haggis: they had looked like deflated, overthick birthday balloons.
Jesus… Jesus Christ.
Tim wished so dearly that he were in a hospital right now, a sterilized surgical suite with nurses and orderlies buzzing about like helpful bees. Most desperately of all, he wished the blade weren’t in his hand.
It doesn’t have to be, Tim, HAL 9000 said softly. Just put the blade down. Take Max’s hand—or maybe you shouldn’t touch him, just in case. Stitch this poor man up and leave the cabin. Both of you. Just go.
The Undervoice, nasty and baiting: You fucking coward. Grow a set of balls, man! In for a penny, in for a pound—and you’re neck-deep now, sonny boy!
Tim drew the blade along the stomach lining. A gout of gray ichor oozed around the lips of the incision like congestive mucus. Then… more white. Another layer of tightened white flesh.
“…gauze,” Tim said tentatively.
Max put a square in his hand. Tim dabbed away the warm ichor. The smell was horrible, like rancid grease. This made no sense. He’d cut into the stomach, hadn’t he? He hadn’t expected to find a dark vault, but he had expected a cavity, an expulsion of pressurized stomach gas… something.
It seemed as if he’d simply sliced into a secondary layer of stomach lining—which was impossible. Was this man’s stomach the equivalent of a Russian doll, stomach inside stomach inside stomach?
Something very disturbing is happening here, Tim. HAL 9000’s voice, indistinct and watery. Something is horribly, drastically wrong…
Tim felt a species of fear enter his heart that he hadn’t felt since his stint as a foreign aid doctor in Afghanistan. Although he’d been scared most of his time there, it had at least been a coherent fear: fear that a bomb might come whistling out of the chalky desert sky and through the canvas roof of his jury-rigged triage ward, or fear that some human grenade might dash inside their compound and pull the pin on himself.
But the fear he felt now was childlike, dreamy. There was no reference point to it. The man was just sick—that was all. He didn’t have multiple stomachs. There had to be a rational cause for all of this. It was a serious occlusion, of course… but there was no reason, really no reason, for his eyes to be drawn to that ribbed whiteness within the duller whiteness of the stomach’s lining and for his mind to fuse shut at the possibilities…
…Jesus, he was hungry.
Why had he given the boys all that food? They would be fine until the boat came. But he needed it. Now. He’d packed it and paid for it. By rights it was his.
Tim stared at his patient. The man’s lips were so thin that they’d twisted into a permanent grin. He seemed to be laughing at Tim. Mocking his hunger.
Hey, buddy, the Undervoice piped up. What would you do for a Klondike bar?
“Shut up,” Tim croaked.
Whoa! No need to get testy. The voice had gone vile and poisonous. You deserve a break today, pal. Two all-beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun…
“Scoutmaster Tim…”
Tim couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s face. Lying there like a ghoul. Smiling.
“Tim? Tim! Tim!”
Tim turned dazedly toward Max. The boy’s eyes were bulging out of the whitened mask of his face. His nostrils were dilated like a bull’s before it charged at a red cape.
“Wha…?”
Which was when Tim felt something touch his hand. Which was when he looked down.
Which was when he saw it.
Which was when he screamed.
13
MAX SAW it first. A white stub protruding where Scoutmaster Tim had made the incision.
It looked silly. Like a balloon, maybe: one of those long, skinny ones that the clowns made balloon animals with at the Cavendish County Fair. Max had gotten one last year—a giraffe. The clown who’d made it had approached Max near the Shetland pony pen. He’d been short and dumpy, in slappy red shoes with the toes all squashed like they’d been stamped on by an elephant. The greasepaint on the clown’s face had been badly applied over his stubbled cheeks; the red circles around his eyes were melting down his face in the heat, making him look like a sick beagle. His clown suit was dingy, with yellow patches under the armpits. When he smiled, Max saw brown grime slotted between his teeth. When he blew up the balloon, Max got a good whiff of him: rank sweat and something odder, scarier—a hint of shaved iron. The clown gave the balloon cruel twists with his nublike fingers; the balloon squealed as if in pain. The giraffe was all neck: a bulb of a head, thumblike legs. Max pictured the poor thing dragging its neck through the dirt across the Serengeti…