A game, a game, a game…
They dragged Tim to the closet. He unleashed a series of shrill yipping shrieks. He was terrified of forfeiting control—of how fast it had happened. Terrified of that closet. But mostly he was terrified of whatever might very well be inside of him.
“Please, boys,” he whimpered. “Please no—I need help—”
They would not listen. The wave reached its mad crest. They pulled the Scoutmaster with ease. With his weight distributed among the five boys, he weighed no more than a child. Ephraim’s hands slipped under Tim’s shirt. He felt the abrupt cliff where the flesh fell off his lowest rib. His body was divoted and warped. Ephraim’s hands fell upon Tim’s stomach… he reared back, shocked by the fretful lashings that met his fingers.
Shelley’s lips skinned back from his teeth. He looked like a hyena prowling among the corpses on a battlefield. Kent flung the closet door open. It was empty save a few jangling coat hangers. They barrel-rolled Tim inside. The Scoutmaster’s quivering fingers stuck out through the doorjamb. Ephraim gently folded them into the darkness of the closet.
They set their weight against the door. Their breath came out in jagged gusts. Kent dashed into the bedroom, returning with a combination lock. He fastened it through the lock hasp and clipped it shut.
The boys came back to themselves with a jolt. Max and Ephraim passed nervous unsmiling looks. Their Scoutmaster’s whimpers carried under the door.
“When do we let him out?” Newton said.
“When the boat gets here,” Kent said coldly. “No sooner.”
“What if it doesn’t show up?”
Kent said: “Shut up, Newt.”
Nobody bothered asking for the combination; they knew Kent wouldn’t tell them. The bottle of scotch stood uncapped on the table. A man’s drink. General George Patton drank a shot of cheap scotch before battle, Kent’s dad always said, and a glass of good scotch after a victory.
What was this if not a victory? When the boat arrived tomorrow, his quick thinking would be hailed.
“Go on, Kent,” Shelley told him. “Have a drink.”
Max said, “No—don’t—”
But Kent had already raised the bottle to his lips. It went down like molten iron. He sawed his arm across his mouth. His grimace became a broad grin.
“Everything’s going to be okay, guys.”
From the sworn testimony of Nathan Erikson, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:
Q: Mr. Erikson, state how you came to be associated with Dr. Clive Edgerton.
A: I was just out of school. A few guys who graduated with me caught on as associate profs, but they were the creme de la creme. I was more like the flotsam.
Q: At loose ends?
A: You could say so. Not a lot of companies have much use for a theoretical molecular biologist whose doctoral dissertation was “The Human Aging Process as Relating to the C. elegans worm.”
Q: C. elegans worm?
A: It’s a roundworm. About a millimeter long. Caenorhabditis elegans, but everyone just calls it C. elegans. During its lifetime it exhibits many familiar signs of human aging: reduced movement, wrinkling, tissue degradation, decreased ability to fight infection. I was trying to locate genes that might slow down the human aging process.
Q: A noble ambition.
A: Yeah, well. I was blinded by science.
Q: How did Edgerton know of you?
A: A lot of researchers sniffed around the program, right? They figured they could poach a recent grad—someone willing to do the scut work.
Q: So Edgerton sought you out?
A: It was more a situation of mutual desperation.
Q: What drew him to you?
A: Like I said, the fact that I came cheap and didn’t have any other options. But I had done work with the C. elegans worm—which bears about the same similarity to the hydatid as a minnow does to a great white shark. And neither creature is anything like what Edgerton bred.
Q: He bred? Didn’t you both work on the mutated specimen?
A: Listen… I’ll always carry the guilt. I could tell you that the outcome was unknown—that I was pursuing science—and if I’d had an inkling of what was to come I’d’ve burned that lab to cinders. After all this is over you’ll send me to prison. I deserve that. Deserve more, but for some crimes there exists no fit punishment. I was part of it, but I was the lesser part. On every level.
Q: How so?
A: Clive Edgerton is a genius. He’s also ratshit crazy, pardon my French, possibly a sociopath, but undoubtedly a genius. Even though my IQ is likely higher than most people’s in this room, I was no more than Clive’s lab monkey. I can’t see biological processes the way he does. Can’t see the chains in order to break and reorder them. So I knew what we were doing, yes—theoretically, anyway—but I didn’t create any of it. I can’t.
Q: But you knew?
A: Yes.
Q: And you told nobody?
A: That’s right.
Q: Why?
A: Trade secrets. We were working on something that, if successful, would have been a billion-dollar enterprise. Edgerton was working under a grant from a biopharmaceutical company. Secrecy was crucial.
Q: So crucial that you’d risk lives?
A: We didn’t know lives were at… We’re talking about one of the three holy grails of modern medicine: a cure for male pattern baldness, a method to reverse the aging process, and a means to lose weight without effort. If anyone invents a pill that you can pop at night and wake up with a fuller head of hair or the crow’s-feet diminished around your eyes or five pounds lighter? There’s no saying how much that could be worth. Clive used to cite that old motto: You can never be too rich or too thin. He’d say, “If I can make the rich thin, they’ll make me rich.”
16
TOWARD MIDNIGHT, Max stood down by the shore. The sky was salted with remote stars. The beach was a bonelike strip unfurling to the shoreline. The sea advanced up the shore with a series of minute sucking inhales. It sounded like a huge toothless creature swallowing the island.
Newton joined him. His hand thrummed against Max’s bare arm. His fear leapt the threshold between their bodies—Max felt it now, too.
“We shouldn’t have done that to the Scoutmaster.”
“He’s sick, Newt.”
“I saw that. But not a closet. Am I wrong? Not that way.”
“You did it, too,” Max said tiredly.
Newton swallowed and nodded. “I did. It could have been what my mom calls a coping mechanism. You know, when things get rough, we do things to make it better. Or just to distract ourselves. Do you think that’s what it was, Max?”
“We got carried away, Newt. That’s all.”
Last summer, Max had shared his house with a family of shearwaters—a much fleeter version of a puffin. They colonized the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, nesting in the rocks. But due to a population explosion, shearwaters had begun to nest in the houses of North Point. They’d chip away the Gyprock exterior, tugging loose Styrofoam and pink insulation to make room for their nests.