Marconi appeared on Amy’s laptop screen. A man in his sixties with a neat white beard, wearing a cream-colored suit. He was sitting at a desk and, as I always did in situations like this, I wondered if he was pantless and only threw on the top part for the camera. It looked like he was in a cramped office, with various framed certificates on the wall behind him. I wondered how long he had spent framing up the shot to get those in there. Or, maybe he was just the type of guy where you could point the camera in any direction nearby and find a cluster of accolades.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “And lady. It is a pleasure to see you again.” Now there’s a fucking lie. “I’m speaking to you from the road, we are en route. I have the specimen safely behind foil once more, and inside of a locked safe for which only I have the combination. Keeping it contained has been an adventure, to put it mildly. One assistant became convinced that we had locked her house cat inside the safe, and became so hysterical she had to be restrained and sedated. As camouflage goes, it is impressive, to say the least.”
I said, “You say you’re on the way, I take it you’re bringing a camera crew?” I knew Agent Tasker would be very annoyed by that.
Instead of answering, he said, “Tell me of how you encountered the specimen, from the beginning.”
We quickly told him all of the stuff that’s in the story you’ve heard up to now, minus the parts about my depression, and John’s implausible cock boasts. Marconi listened to our tale and said, “Fascinating.”
John said, “Chastity—the second mother we dealt with—says there’s a parasite that tricks ants into thinking they’re fruit. They’ll actually volunteer to be eaten. She thinks it’s like that.”
Marconi nodded. “A more appropriate example in this case may be a certain species of fruit fly, whose female has evolved to look exactly like an army ant grub. It will land itself right among a pile of the ant’s larvae and the ants will unknowingly feed, clean, and protect it as one of their own. And, while I do want to be cautious about drawing too close a parallel—these organisms are not of our world, after all—what we have encountered here very much appears to be a hive, in that we have multiple organisms working in conjunction, each of which appears to be very specialized.”
I said, “Okay. So whatever’s in the mine, that’s like the queen?” I was really just waiting for him to get around to the part where he tells us what magic is required to slay it, but Marconi likes to hear himself explain things.
“Let us for the moment speculate that the specimen you sent me is what in a hive we would call a worker. Let us further speculate that what is inside that coal mine is in fact a queen. So, the queen reaches the point in its life cycle when it lays its larvae. But, for some reason, its larvae need human hosts to survive—presumably for food, but that is just a presumption at this stage. So, the workers’ only job is to obtain those human hosts, by any means necessary. It would appear to my eyes that these workers went into the world with the intention of duping humans into adopting larvae as their own.”
“By imitating human children.”
“By imitating human children who are in need of rescue. Note how far it went to present the supposed children’s situation as dire.”
I said, “Okay. So, Maggie went missing and then—”
“Maggie did not go missing. There was no Maggie. The queen laid a larva in that pond near the mine and the worker swarm went about convincing some humans to come retrieve it. Maggie never existed before that moment—the entire story, including memories of the kidnapping, was a brain imprint created after the fact.”
I rubbed my temples. “Right. Okay. So ‘Maggie’ was found at Mine’s Eye, but ‘Mikey’ just turned up in my apartment somehow.”
“After you went to the mine.”
“Yeah.”
“You must have brought it back with you, unknowingly.”
“What, like, stuck to my shoe or something? These things are huge.”
“But invisible, if they choose to be. And that one was destroyed, you say?”
We all glanced at each other.
John said, “Uh … maybe? Last time we saw it, some guys at a motel were shooting it with shotguns. That should do it, right?”
Marconi said, “They were shooting at the larva, or the worker swarm that accompanied it?”
We didn’t answer. Marconi read our faces.
“Let us assume, then, that that specimen is also still loose out in the world. But let’s be clear—hive-based organisms reproduce by volume. It is in fact the single reason they are successful. In this case, the queen presumably needs to continue to draw people to the mine. So, now ten more ‘children’ have gone missing, in the minds of the townspeople. Do we need to guess where the clues are going to lead the manhunt?”
I said, “Holy shit, that’s a convoluted reproduction process right there.”
“Have you seen what the human reproduction process is like, Mr. Wong? Here’s a hint—the automobile you drive was almost certainly designed with reproduction in mind.”
Well not my car, but point taken.
Amy said, “So, we have to keep everyone away from the mine.”
I said, “Hell, they’re probably already out there. Everybody knows where Maggie was found, it was in the papers. You’ll have the bikers out there, even the cops have to at least make a show of it.”
John said, “Oh, and before we go any further, we need to name the creature in the mine, the queen. It’s Amy’s turn. I think she referred to it as the Creature with a Thousand Butts earlier, so is that what we’re going with?”
I said, “She didn’t, and that takes too long to say.”
Amy said, “Millibutt.”
John said, “Done. Also, where does Nymph fit into all this?”
Marconi shrugged. “There likely was never such a man, or being. Just a manifestation of the swarm.”
I said, “But why?”
Amy said it before Marconi could. “To give us something to save the kids from. We each saw the villain we needed to overcome.”
There was some sadness in Amy’s statement that I didn’t fully understand.
“So,” John said, “we go into the mine and fight the main boss. What can we expect to find in there?”
I said, “And before you say it, yeah, we know to expect the unexpected or whatever. But let’s make some educated guesses.”
Marconi nodded. “Well, there are no uninitiated in this conversation, correct? Behind the veil of this world is a realm beyond the physical. The undying entities that dwell there do not have a shape or a size, but can only be measured in terms of their ability to exert will. I have reason to believe that the physical offspring we’re encountering are one entity’s way of inserting itself from that dimension into ours.”
I said, “Sure, so it’s an evil spirit or whatever. I guess that means it’s not flammable?”
“Ask yourself how such entities would do battle with each other. The question is not merely academic within my school of thought—we believe we will find ourselves in just such a battle in the moment after death. Will versus will. Imagine a mortal body as an egg. When broken, what emerges might be a soaring bird or a runny yolk.”
“And here I thought it was just a monster that wanted to eat us.”
“In a sense, it is. Such a being would grow by subduing the will of others to its own ends. In our mythology, devils are always about possession and temptation—chewing up a human will until only a hollow puppet remains. You can decide for yourself at what point we can separate the symbolism from the reality.”
John nodded, knowingly. “Exactly. It’s just like those haunted puppets in your junk room, Dave.”