“Cover your mouth!” Tim screamed. “Don’t let any of it touch you!”
Fists battering the door so hard that dust sifted down from the rafters. The boys’ massing voices, dominated by Kent’s.
“Tim! Max! What’s going on? Open the door!”
The stranger’s body rocked side to side. His feet slipped off the chesterfield and hit the floor with a brittle rattle.
The tube now shot straight up out of the wound, rising in a monstrous ripple. A foot. Two feet. Three feet of oily tube weaved out of the man—the dead man, Tim prayed, the dead man who please God feels none of this—like a headless albino cobra out of an Indian fakir’s basket. It threshed like some obscene bullwhip, leaking brownish fluid. It stood quivering for a long instant, flicking back and forth: it looked as if it was tasting the air, or hunting for smaller and weaker creatures within striking distance.
Which was when the stranger woke up.
His eyelids fluttered, then his eyes went wide—wider than ever should be possible. It was as if the man had awoken from a terrible dream only to find that those terrors were dwarfed by those in the waking world. He loosed a volley of piercing screams—they almost sounded like the snarls of a terrified dog.
“Stay away, Max!” Tim yelled. “Stay back!”
The stranger reached instinctively for the thing coming out of him—his hand died before reaching it, his fingers softening into a caress. His eyes were miserably bright and aware, bulging with pure shock and horror: the eyes of a little boy who’d come face-to-face with the nameless horror lurking under his bed.
“Ug…” was the single syllable that came out of his mouth. A caveman’s grunt of disgust. “Uhg… ug…”
“Tim!” Kent screamed. “Open this freakin’ door right now!”
The tips of a boy’s head bobbed at the cabin’s lone high window, a pair of hands hooked on the sill—Ephraim’s hands; they had to be Eef’s—set to boost their owner up for a look inside.
Tim realized he was watching a man die.
He’d seen it before, of course—but Max hadn’t. Here was a man neither of them knew the first thing about. And now, in a way that was somehow obscene, Max would witness this man during the most private moment any human being would ever have: the moment of his death.
The man’s eyes rolled back. He exhaled. Mercifully, his eyes closed.
The tube dropped onto the man’s chest like a length of rope. It lay in a loose coil for a moment before twitching and crawling under the man’s shirt. Tim imagined it working up the man’s neck and into his mouth. Thrashing its way down his throat and back into his stomach to link up with the rest of itself. Eating its own tail—or its own head?
Out of his peripheral vision, he saw Max reaching for the soldering iron—
“Don’t!” Tim said. “Don’t you fucking dare, Max.”
The tube wrapped around the man’s bird-thin neck, encircling it in a greasy ringlet. It elongated slightly, the many rings that constituted its body thinning with cruel, purposeful tension.
Jesus Christ, it’s constricting, Tim’s mind yammered. It’s choking him.
Tim tried to stand, but his legs were cramped with the sudden dump of lactic acid. He pulled himself forward. His hand slipped on the severed link of tube, which pulped under his palm like a rotten banana.
The man’s face had turned the blue of a sun-bleached parking ticket. Tim was shocked that this thing—
It’s a worm, the Undervoice said. A fucking WORM that’s what the fuck it is and you better wrap your head around that buddy, oh pal-o-mine
—had the strength to do what it was doing.
He dragged himself forward, scrabbling for the scalpel that had skittered under the chesterfield’s skirt. He hunted amid the dust bunnies and insect corpses while a thick, hopeless whimper built in his throat…
Kent’s fists pounded on the door but that sound was far away now—a dream-noise not attached to the waking world. The tube flexed. The man’s neck bent at a sudden unnatural angle. His body stiffened before going limp.
Oh no, Tim thought. His next thought was: Oh thank God.
The tube released from the man’s throat, retreating once again into the incision. Tim grabbed at it through the man’s shirt. The thought of touching it directly brought on a mind-numbing revulsion. He pictured it feeling like a lubed length of nautical rope burning through his fingers. But when his hand closed around it, the tube was warm and pulsating and horribly smooth. Its flagellate body was already going limp as if it had a pinhole leak. He slashed the scalpel through the man’s shirt and through the thing’s body. It was like cutting through ripe stinking cheese. It took no effort at all.
He saw inside the severed portion. There was no identifiable anatomy to the thing. No vertebrae or organs. It was full of loose brownish goo. Some massive carnivorous leech. The unsevered portion slid sluggishly back inside the wound. Its skin continued to weep those pearly pustules.
The man’s stomach deflated. Brown filth bubbled out of the wound. Half-digested bits of chesterfield foam bobbed on its surface.
Squinting, Max thought he saw something deeper inside. Two objects? Long and glinting, their angles man-made.
Tim and Max stood breathing heavily in the dim light of the cabin. The hacked-off portion of the tube slid out of the vent in the man’s shirt, hitting the floor and wadding up like a huge tube sock. The brown goo had run over Tim’s fingers and down his knuckles like watery molasses. Overcome by instinctive revulsion, Tim wiped his fingers on his pants—and when even that closeness was too much, he unbuttoned them, yanked them down and off, wiped his hands on the fabric, and hurled the pants into the corner. He stood shivering in his underwear. His thighs were unbearably thin: knobbed sticks on a forest floor.
“Jesus,” he said softly, then gave Max a sharp look. “Did you swallow any of that stuff? Get any in your mouth or eyes?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“No,” Max said. “I didn’t get anything in me.”
“You kept the gauze over your mouth the whole time?”
“Yes.”
“Okay… okay, good.”
Tim staggered to the table and drank scotch right out of the bottle.
“If you drink whiskey, you’ll never get worms, Max.”
Kent pounded on the door unrelentingly. “Tim! Tiiiiim!”
The Scoutmaster stumbled to the sink and washed his hands. He did this for some time; the hard island water made it difficult to get a good lather going. His legs trembled like a newborn foal’s. When he was finished, his hands were a raw, nail-scraped red. Did it matter anymore? He shuffled into the bedroom, not speaking to Max, coming out with pants on.
He kicked the chair away from the door—he had to kick three times; he seemed to lack the energy to do it properly—and flung the door open to catch Kent red-faced and fuming, his hand raised in midknock.
“Get away from the fucking door, Kent.” Tim’s voice belonged to something recently dug from its grave. “Get your ass far, far away.”
14
TIM SAT at the fire and explained what he could. Most of it failed to make sense to him at all.
“A worm?”