Kent didn’t seem to mind. His eyes darted, charting the course of those milling bugs.
Newton said: “We’ll come get you soon!”
Kent’s head swiveled. A mechanical motion, like a toy abandoned in the rain. Lightning creased the sky and seemed to penetrate his flesh, igniting his bones in skeletal relief. His lips split in a grin that sent gooseflesh up the nape of Max’s neck.
An earwig squirmed round the cup of Kent’s ear, tracked across his face, and hung like a squirming fat raindrop from the boy’s lower lip.
“Kent,” Max breathed, horror twining up his spine like a weed. “There’s a…”
Kent’s tongue snaked between his teeth, curled lovingly around the earwig, and drew it into his mouth. His eyes never left theirs.
22
WHEN EPHRAIM was eight, his mother took him to visit the mausoleum where his grandmother was kept. He remembered feeling slightly curious beforehand. Back then, Ephraim still held a healthy curiosity about death.
He remembered the thin acrid smell that had attended their entrance into the granite rostrum. The sterilized smell of death. It wasn’t the flyblown battlefield reek with its sweetness that was kissing cousin to a truly good smell—barbecued pork, maybe—a sensual similarity that made it all the more sickening. This was sanitized and tolerable. An ammoniac mothball smell overlying subtle decay.
Ephraim caught that same pungent smell as he’d crept down the cabin’s cellar steps. His heart made a giddy leap—what had died down here?
Ephraim had watched as Max and Newton guided Kent behind the cabin, wind snapping their clothes against their frames like flags flapping on a pole. A thin needle of regret had lanced through his heart. He’d argued with Max about abandoning Kent—and they never argued. Rage had pounded at Ephraim’s temples as his neck flushed with heat. No fists had been swung, but it’d been a fight all the same.
That bothered and confused him. Ephraim possessed a keen sense of fairness. He’d inherited that from his father; the only phrase he could ever recall him saying was: You pay what you owe. And his dad was paying now, in prison. Kent had earned his ills, hadn’t he? He needed to pay what he owed.
But where did that leave Ephraim now? In a cellar with Shelley Longpre—the last alignment he’d ever seek.
He pulled the doors shut, latching them from the inside. The wind and rain roared and bashed the cabin above. The swaybacked steps groaned under his feet. Long, straggly tendrils trailed lightly across Ephraim’s face: they felt like the dangling, unnaturally long limbs of a daddy longlegs spider.
He lit one of the candles he’d scavenged. It illuminated Shelley’s face—his skin seemed to radiate a light all its own, a greasy luminescence as if glowworms were stitched under it. Shadows, made misshapen and monstrous by the wavering candlelight, scurried along the cellar walls. The root systems of trees and plants dangled down from the roof.
Ephraim walked the perimeter. Empty, barren. A musty boat tarp was heaped in one corner. The heap seemed to expand and contract in the fitful light.
“Sit down, Eef.”
Shelley sat cross-legged on the dirt. With his long limbs folded, knees and elbows kinked, he looked vaguely insectile, like a potato bug curled into a protective ball, only its gray exoskeleton showing… or one of those cockroaches that would scuttle up the drains during island storms—the ones that hissed when you squashed them.
“Nah, I’m good.”
“You were right,” Shelley said. “About Kent. He deserved it. He brought it down on himself.”
Something unshackled in Ephraim’s chest. He didn’t hate Kent—it was a question of fairness, was all. You pay what you owe.
“Max will understand,” Shelley said softly. “Even Newton. Before long they’ll see how right you were.”
There was something oddly narcotic about Shelley’s monotone drawl. Ephraim felt sluggish and just a bit queasy—that happy-sick feeling he got in his belly after riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Montague Fair.
“Come,” Shelley patted the dirt. “Sit.”
It seemed less a request, more a subtle directive. Ephraim sat. Shelley’s body kicked off ambient warmth, moist and weirdly salty like the air wafting from the mouth of a volcanic sea cave. He slid one pale, whiplike arm over Ephraim’s shoulder—an oily, frictionless, hairless appendage slipping across, smooth and dense like a heavy rubber hose. His fingers thrummed on Ephraim’s bare flesh; Ephraim wanted to brush them away, their tacky warmth making him mildly revolted, but that narcotic sluggishness prevented him from doing so. Shelley’s arm constricted just a little—he was stronger than he looked—pulling Ephraim close.
“You’re in charge now, Eef. Isn’t that just awesome? That’s how it should’ve been all along, isn’t it?”
“I don’t… don’t really care about that.”
Shelley smiled—a knowing expression. “Sure you don’t.”
“I don’t. Sincerely.” Rage crept up Ephraim’s throat, burning like bile. “Shut your fucking mouth, Shel.”
Shelley’s smile persisted. The edgeless grin of a moron. His teeth were tiny—Ephraim had never noticed before. Like niblet corn. Bands of yellow crust rimmed each tooth. Did Shelley ever brush his teeth? Did something like Shelley even think about stuff like that?
Something like Shelley? Ephraim thought. Someone, I mean. Someone.
“Relax, Eef. I’m on your side.”
Where the hell were Max and Newt? Ephraim wished like hell they were here now; anything was better than being cooped up
(trapped?)
in this dank cellar with Shelley. Lightning flashed, igniting the slit where the cellar doors met in camera-flash incandescence. Thunder boomed with such force that it seemed to bulge the planks overhead, rattling Ephraim’s heart in its fragile cage of bone.
“Jesus, Eef…”
Shelley was staring at Ephraim—at his hands.
“What?”
Shelley’s arm slid off Ephraim’s shoulder. He leaned away, swallowing hard, his eyes riveted on Ephraim’s hands. His torn, bloody hands.
“What the hell are you looking at, Shel?”
“Nothing. It’s… no, it’s nothing.”
Ephraim’s arm shot out, snatching Shelley’s collar. Shelley issued a mewling noise of disgust, heels digging into the dirt as he propelled himself away. He knocked the candle over, snuffing it.
“Your fingernails!” he said—a blubbery, spittle-flecked shriek. “I think I saw something moving under your fingernails, Eef.”
Ephraim’s hand fell away from Shelley’s collar, his fingers knitting into a ball under his trembling chin. The darkness closed in, strangling, suffocating, squeezing the air from his lungs. The skin under his fingernails—skin he’d never even considered as a discrete part of his body—buzzed at a hellish new frequency.
“Wh-what did you see?”
“Something,” was all Shelley would say. “…something.”
Next fists were pounding on the cellar doors. “Eef! Open up, man!”
Ephraim tried to stand. He couldn’t. The strength had fled his body. He curled into a ball, knees drawn tight to his stomach.
“Eef!”
Shelley hesitated for a long moment before mounting the cellar stairs. Newt and Max came down, windblown and dripping wet. Ephraim’s heart swelled at the sight.