They left him down there. Ephraim shut the doors and jammed a stick between the handles so Kent couldn’t escape.
THE ISLAND was still in the passing of the storm.
As they’d heard from the cellar, the huge oak—one of only five or six truly big trees on Falstaff Island—had snapped, falling upon the cabin’s interlaced log walls. The spot where it had broken looked like the butt of a trick cigar: splinters of wood stuck out of the trunk at crazy angles, perfuming the air with sap.
They inhaled the peculiar scent of the earth after a storm while surveying the cabin. The roof was cleaved in half, sagging inward like a huge toothless mouth. The door hung off its shattered hinges. Ephraim hauled it open. His gaze fell to scrutinize his fingernails. He shot a look at Shelley—who caught his eyes and held them evenly.
“Careful as we go inside,” Ephraim said, sounding very much like Kent. “Cover your mouths like before.”
The roof had collapsed in a solid flap that resembled a wave set to break. The boys walked through a corridor of shadow created by the fallen roof and found Scoutmaster Tim in the splintered remains of the closet. The tree had snapped the two-by-fours and pancaked the closet’s plywood walls. The trunk had landed on his head and shoulders.
“Tim?” Newton said in a small, disbelieving voice. “Are you…?”
The final word—okay?—died on his lips. Scoutmaster Tim was definitely not okay.
The finality of the situation assaulted Newton. It was in the way the tree trunk sat flush with the floor. It was in the crushed eggshell of the Scoutmaster’s skull, which was visible—barely but hideously visible—beneath the bark. It was in the jagged purple lines that raced all over his flesh: the pressure had bulged and ruptured his vesicles. His skin looked like some gruesome jigsaw puzzle. It was in the sweet smell that rose off his body and the darker undernote of death: a somehow rusty smell, Newton thought, like the smell that came off a seized engine block at the dump. It was in the boot that had fallen off his foot—more like ejected off when the tree came crashing down, causing his legs to spike upward in one spastic motion, flinging his boot away. It was in the pale knob of his toe poking through the woolen sock. It was in the cricket that rested in the split V of his open shirt collar, which just then began to rub its legs together to produce a high humming song.
“He looks like the witch in The Wizard of Oz,” Shelley said. “The one the house landed on, not the one that melted.”
“Shut the fuck up, Shel,” Ephraim said hoarsely.
Newton’s heart was a wounded bird flapping inside his chest. He wanted to scream, but the sound was locked up under his lungs.
“What should we do?” he said. “Is he really…?”
He found it impossible to say. Dead. The word itself was somehow unapproachable. He knelt and touched Scoutmaster Tim’s hand. The flesh was cold and dank like a rock in a fast-running river.
“It’s okay, Newt,” Ephraim said. “It must have been fast, you know? I don’t think he even felt it.”
Newton spoke with his head down. “You think so?”
Max sincerely hoped it was so. He felt sick. His Scoutmaster—the adult he’d known longer than anyone besides his own parents—had died in a closet. The one person with the best ideas for getting them off this island was gone, and he’d left five dumb, piss-scared kids behind.
“Should we bury him?” Ephraim said.
Before any of them had a chance to respond, Scoutmaster Tim’s stomach began to move.
At first it was barely visible; it seemed as if weak fingers were pawing at it from the inside. Max watched, his mouth unhinged. It was sickeningly mesmerizing.
“What…” Ephraim breathed, “…is that?”
A fragile white tube broke the surface of the skin an inch above the Scoutmaster’s navel. It pushed through insistently, twisting around as if tasting the air. It was followed quickly by another and another. Soon there were seven or eight: it looked like the legs of an albino spider struggling to escape its spider hole.
Each tube was slightly pebbled—they seemed to be studded with something. Max squinted closer. They were… oh God, they were mouths. Little mouths like the ones on a sucker fish.
The Scoutmaster’s stomach split soundlessly, like Saran Wrap, groin to rib cage. Hundreds of worms came boiling out, all much smaller versions of the single massive abomination that had come out of the other man—the stranger. Some were the thickness of butcher’s twine, but most were frail and wispy, as insubstantial as the clipped threads of a spiderweb. They twisted and roiled and spilled down the Scoutmaster’s papery flesh: his skin empty of blood and nutrients, just a soft white covering like dry fatback.
Max noticed that the worms didn’t appear to be singular entities. Rather they were twisted together—a pulpy white ball radiating dozens or hundreds. It was as if something had gathered them up and tied them all into a bulging knot, like that ball they saw yesterday in the rocks—a knot of fucking snakes. These spiky worm-balls tumbled over one another, squirming and shucking. A horrible low hissing noise emanated from the Scoutmaster’s chest cavity.
“No,” Newt said, his head snapping side to side. “No no no no…”
The hissing noise stopped. Slowly, achingly, the worms stretched as a single unit—a cooperative hive-mind—toward the sound of Newton’s voice.
“Jesus,” said Ephraim.
Then the worms swung in his direction.
Some of them swelled menacingly, a small bead crowning at their tips. There came a series of dim, pop-gun percussions. Delicate strands wafted through the air, sunlight falling along their ghostly wavering contours.
Ephraim stepped back. He swatted at the strands with a helpless look on his face. He stared at his knuckles, which were broken open and still weeping slug-trails of blood from his fight with Kent.
Max knew Ephraim so well that he could almost see the crazed thought forming in the other boy’s head.
They can get inside of me through there. These wounds are basically wide-open doors in my body…
Through an aperture in the cleaved roof, Max spotted a slit of perfectly blue sky—that scintillating blue that comes on the heels of a bad storm—and below, a scrim of gray marking the mainland. His parents would be there. Why hadn’t they come yet? His folks, and Newt’s and Eef’s and Kent’s and Shelley’s, too? Fuck old man Watters—if he couldn’t get his ancient ass in gear, why wouldn’t their folks show up? Kent’s dad could use the police patrol boat—special dispensation, right? An emergency. But no, they’d left their kids alone on this killing floor of an island. Two men were dead already, and Kent was bad off. Death warmed over, as Max’s mom would say. Except for Kent, death might come as a relief. A shudder fled down Max’s spine—the very thought of Kent, dead, his body invaded by these things…
Excerpt from a paper given by Dr. Cynthia Preston, MD, Microbiology and Immunology, at the 27th International Papillomavirus Conference and Clinical Workshop at the University of Boston, Massachusetts.
The evidence found in Dr. Edgerton’s laboratory is breathtaking both in the groundbreaking nature of what he was able to accomplish and in the savage expediency of his methods.
Edgerton was viewed by his contemporaries as pathologically secretive. Conversations with him, according to the few who spent time in his presence, were narrowly focused on his work or the work of his rivals.