by John Halkin
‘I’ll take some equipment with me, but…’ He left the rest unsaid, his fear that the worms might really have started a spring offensive as Angus suggested, that they might find not five, ten or twenty, but hundreds of them. What then?
Fran came downstairs again. She’d changed into Helen’s jeans and sweater; Matt pointed out her gumboots. It hurt him seeing her in Helen’s clothes, and she realized it. She touched his arm and looked into his face, as if trying to say something. He nodded unhappily; it had been his own suggestion after all.
Outside, the sky was pale and slightly streaked with cloud. The tree-tops were thick with birds; on any normal morning he’d have stopped to comment on the dawn chorus, but this time the shrill twittering jarred his nerves. As though they were singing in triumph, he thought; reminding him that human beings were in a minority on this planet.
‘I’ll drive first and you follow behind,’ the sergeant was saying. ‘Don’t wander off on your own. And Doctor Davies, I don’t think we need detain you any – Oh Christ, look at that!’ His voice dropped almost to a whisper.
As the early morning sun rose above the crown of the hill its rays caught the supple, multi-coloured worms which had gathered around Matt’s car. There must have been at least thirty, some curled in the high grass of the rough lane, others stretched along the parallel strips of exposed soil which had been hardened and worn bald by the tyres. One was draped like an ornate figure 6 over the boot of the car, with its head guarding the lock. Another, shifting position every few seconds, displayed itself on the roof.
They stopped dead. ‘It’s beautiful!’ Fran breathed.
For a few seconds Matt’s hatred dissipated. No existing film stock could capture those colours. Their scales broke up the light, heightening the natural luminescence of their skins.
‘You’ll have to do something,’ Doctor Davies was burbling, his voice strained with fear. He clutched his bag in his right hand like a weapon, his knuckles whitening. With his left hand he nervously brushed some of his long hair back from his face. ‘We can’t stay here all day. We must get away.’
A few worms moved, aware of the presence of human beings. They raised themselves, arching their heads as they swayed. Perhaps they were merely taking pleasure in the warm sunlight; or perhaps they were co-ordinating their attack.
‘Oh, yes,’ Matt agreed. ‘What d’you suggest?’
‘You’re the man with all the experience,’ the sergeant commented steadily. ‘They’re mostly gathered round your car, so if we risk trying to reach mine and…’ He stopped.
‘Give them what they’re after.’ Fran sounded strange – not afraid, but as though she’d just discovered something about the worms she’d not understood before. ‘They want the skin samples.’ She paused. ‘Or you.’
Matt’s anger flooded back. Maybe it was something about her face, white and drawn after their sleepless night. Or the fact she was wearing Helen’s brown, polo-neck sweater. He looked at her, seeing Helen. The worms were trying to get at him through his own weak spot, he was convinced – his emotional tangle, Helen-Fran. He flushed hot with fury.
‘The sergeant’s right.’ He drew on his gauntlets. ‘You all keep back while I deal with them. Who else?’
The worms watched him, almost warning him that they could predict what he was about to do. He hated everything about them – the threatening way they slithered through the grass towards their victims, their tiny eyes, those beautiful, evil skins, the deadly jaws with their sharp teeth.
The only weapons he’d brought from the cottage were a heavy walking-stick and his sheath-knife. They’d be sufficient. He waded in among them.
Two or three worms wriggled out of the way as he approached; once he’d passed them, though, they closed in again behind him. He was completely surrounded.
Swinging his stick viciously at the nearest, he heard the skull crack. His right arm rose and fell rhythmically, like a reaper with a sickle. The worms snapped back at him, crowding around his legs. He ignored them. This time he was not hunting skins; he was killing with cold deliberation.
A worm slid over his foot and he tried to stamp on it, almost losing his balance. He’d only to fall, he knew, even stumble back against the car, for them to be able to reach his face.
Something moved up his leg, curling around it. At the same time the worm on the boot lid launched itself at him, twining about his right forearm.
‘Stay calm,’ he muttered to himself; fear gripped him. ‘Never panic…’
In his left hand he grasped the sheath-knife. It was razor-sharp, honed every day. The worm on his arm tightened its coils. It was already raising its head to strike at his face when he slipped the point of the blade into its throat.
A sudden hiss. The rippling body slackened and he shook it off.
The worm on his leg dodged the blade twice, then caught it between its teeth, holding on like a vice. As Matt pulled it clear, the sharp edge cut into the corners of its mouth. Something gave way – maybe the blade had entered the brain – the coils loosened and it fell.
Another worm slithered lazily across the top of the car, dropped down on to the carcase and began to eat it.
Breathing heavily, as much from shock as from his exertions, Matt heard something behind him and swung around. Fran had joined him. She’d armed herself with a spade and was ferociously chopping down on any worm that approached. Grimly he renewed his own attack, laying about him with the heavy stick, till suddenly he realized they’d won.
They must have killed between fifteen and twenty altogether. Those that remained were too busy feeding on the bodies of their fallen comrades to show any further interest in Matt or Fran. They were gulping down great mouthfuls of flesh. Two had been cut in half by the spade; in each case they ate their own shorn tails.
Matt brought his stick down hard on the heads of three more, spattering them across the ground. Fran decapitated others, grinning with joy as each head fell.
‘Intelligent?’ Matt cried with scorn, whacking at yet another one. ‘Rhys must be off his rocker if he thinks these are intelligent. They’re just asking to be killed.’
‘Are they?’
Something in her voice made him glance at her sharply. Her face glowed with the effort, all traces of tiredness gone. But what had she meant?
Near her feet was another worm. She slammed her spade down at its head, but missed and severed its tail. Once again it twisted back on itself to investigate and then began to swallow the amputated section.
Fran shuddered as she watched it.
But it wasn’t until afterwards in the car – he was following the sergeant to the farm – that she revealed what was on her mind.
‘Don’t you see, Matt?’ she pleaded with him anxiously. ‘They eat their own dead every time, and their own tails, as if they’re afraid of samples of their flesh falling into the wrong hands.’
‘Or simply hungry.’ He was remembering that later in the morning he’d have to face Jenny. What could he say to her? She would accuse him, hurt, and he’d be able to deny nothing. If he hadn’t gone to London with Fran, Helen might still be alive.
‘Another thing,’ Fran was insisting, ‘it was the skins brought them to our car in the first place. They wanted them back. To eat them. Don’t you see what that means?’
‘We can’t possibly know,’ he said wearily.
‘All the women wearing our belts, gloves, handbags… they’re in danger if they go anywhere near a worm. It’s true, Matt, and you know it.’
Matt didn’t answer. He was still thinking of Jenny, trying to work out what to say to her and absentmindedly sucking the wound on his finger.
‘You’re hurt?’ Fran asked.
In the heat of the fight he hadn’t noticed it happen. One of the worms must have caught him with its teeth, tearing through the artificial leather of the glove.
‘Thought you said they didn’t bite through clothing,’ she was going on.
‘That’s right.’ It had taste
d his blood, he realized; its mind would have flashed the message back.
‘So?’ she demanded.
‘So they do now.’
16
Little knots of people stood around in the steep cobbled streets and on the harbour walls of Westport, talking it over, swapping experiences. That morning they’d opened their newspapers and switched on their radios expecting to learn that other towns had also been affected. No mention of any. It seemed this small fishing port had been the only one.
Everyone had a story to tell. Mrs Phillips had been about to fill the kettle when she’d discovered a worm exploring her kitchen sink; it had oozed its way up to the draining-board where she’d killed it with a bread knife. Old Jack Ridley, up early as usual, had been startled when one suddenly reared up at him as he was about to use the outside lavatory. Others had been seen lying alert on the low corrugated iron roof of a lean-to bicycle shed. In a lobster pot. In a bucket. Coiled around the milk bottles on a doorstep. Lurking among the washing Mrs Cornish was about to hang on the line.
Most people had put on thick protective clothes and tucked their trouser legs into gumboots. Many carried some sort of weapon: a heavy stick, or even a shot gun. They’d no doubt who was to blame. Only one man could be responsible, the man who’d brought the worms to Westport in the first place.
Matt and Fran left the police station and threaded their way back to the car. Everyone had heard by now of Helen’s death but there was no word of condolence, no look of sympathy. Matt felt relieved when at last they reached the car and got in, slamming the doors and starting the engine. People moved out of their way as they drove off.
Maybe they were right, he thought. If he hadn’t brought the worms here…
Helen was dead. Three more people were in hospital in addition to the young couple mentioned by the police sergeant. One of them was a child who’d gone out early that morning to meet her father off a fishing boat returning to harbour. In the estuary the body of a young man in swimming trunks had been found; a worm had gnawed its way into his intestines. And the toll of animals was not yet fully known: at least two cows, several sheep, a mare in foal, pigs, dogs, hens, geese… But no cats. Not yet.
Thank God Jenny was safe, though she refused to see him. Frank had tried to be diplomatic on the phone. ‘Shock,’ he’d said. ‘Doctor Davies has been around again. Maybe it’s best she stays on with my kids for a day or two, don’t you think?’
What choice did he have? Where could he take her – back to the cottage where she’d returned from a birthday party to find her mother dead in the bath, with the worms still feeding on her? He could hardly invite her to Fran’s flat over the shop. Over and over again he heard that hurt little voice on the phone: ‘I hope I haven’t disturbed you in the middle of sex, I hope I haven’t disturbed you in the middle of sex, I hope I haven’t disturbed you in the middle of…’
Fran was looking at him. His hands gripped the steering wheel as the car rocked over the uneven lane leading up to the cottage. ‘Oh, hell.’
The undertakers’ van was already there. As he pulled up the men manoeuvred out through the back door carrying a long narrow container covered by a waterproof cloth. He stood in the garden and watched them. No sign of the worms now, not even of those he’d killed earlier that morning, but this was their moment of trumph. Killing Helen, and in that particular way, hit him harder than anything else they could have done. The police constable watched him impassively. Fran stood near him, anxious. He felt empty, and suddenly alone.
Motorcycle engines shattered the silence, several of them roaring up the lane as the undertakers’ van pulled away. A gang of teenagers in full black leather gear with silver studs and white-painted Nazi insignia rode into the garden, round and round, revving aggressively, through Helen’s flower beds, flattening the daffodils and churning up the vegetable patch he’d sown only a few days earlier.
The policeman made no attempt to stop them, but stepped back into the shelter of the kitchen door and began to speak urgently into his radio.
Fran clutched Matt’s arm. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘Nothing.’
One by one the bikes stopped, splitting the eardrums with their revving before the engines finally died. The boys dismounted and gathered in a group. Six of them. He recognized two or three, though he couldn’t see their faces clearly through their helmets. One was the telegraph boy. Another he’d seen working on a fishing boat. They looked towards him, arguing amongst themselves.
‘Now, lads, be sensible. Leave him alone,’ the policeman warned them, trying to assert his authority though he couldn’t have been more than four or five years older.
‘Who touching ’im?’ the burliest of them sneered. He went to the door of the main shed and started kicking it in with the flat of his foot till it burst open. ‘ ’Ere they are!’
Matt dashed across with a warning to be careful, the worms were dangerous, but they brushed him aside and began to carry cans of paraffin into the shed. When the young policeman tried to intervene, one of the boys stood in front of him with a crowbar in his hands, blocking his way.
‘Yer wan’ them worms dead much as we do, don’ yer?’ he threatened. ‘We’re gonna clean this place up, kill every bloody worm. Why don’ yer jus’ look the other way at the pretty view? Jus’ leave us be.’
The policeman glanced at Matt, who said: ‘Let them. Why not? They’re doing my job for me.’
Bitterly.
Through the open door he watched callously as they poured paraffin into each tank and set it alight. The worms thrashed about trying to escape the flames but he felt no pity. The largest succeeded in knocking away the safety net from the top of their tank; then their heads appeared above the edge, swaying as they burned, their eyes seeming to seek his. He didn’t move. Let them fry. The fire crackled and the sick smell of scorched flesh mingled with the stench of paraffin.
Fran joined him. ‘It’s the end, isn’t it?’ she whispered, her lips quivering. ‘The end of all we planned.’
It hardly seemed credible that only the previous evening they’d been having dinner with Cy Steinberg, negotiating the contract for worm skins which could have made them rich. Drinking champagne while Helen fought for her life. And lost.
The boys kicked open the door of the smaller shed, overturning the cages and whooping with delight as the mice ran over their feet. The white rabbits cowered fearfully against the walls. They shooed the animals out and set fire to that shed too.
One mouse headed for the far end of the garden where the grass was high; Matt had been intending to clear it that summer and maybe plant potatoes or parsnips. But before it could reach shelter, loping over the vegetable patch, a long worm appeared slithering towards it. The brilliant sunshine brought out the full splendour of its colouring. It stopped for a second as though posing to be admired, then shot out to catch the mouse between its teeth.
Simultaneously the boys spotted it. They scrambled for their bikes, shouting to each other, kicking the engines into life and roaring off towards the rough grass. The worm was mo slow in sensing the approaching danger; it died, squashed beneath the wheels of the first bike. Up and down over every inch of ground they rode like Furies, making sure no worms escaped. Matt looked on, accepting the punishment. Blaming himself.
‘You’re sure you don’t wish to lay charges, sir? They’re making a bit of a mess of your place.’ The policeman watched them nervously, uncertain how to handle the situation.
Both sheds were burning fiercely; the roof of the larger one cracked and swayed, on the point of falling in. The garden was unrecognizable, scored with deep tyre-marks where the bikes had skidded round, the plants broken and mauled.
‘Quite sure,’ he said.
The policeman nodded and went over towards the lane where Matt saw him talking into his personal radio, away from the noise of the bikes. Requesting instructions, maybe.
One worm broke cover, slipping across the earth at an amazing speed, chang
ing direction several times, playing games with the bike pursuing it. The others stopped to applaud and encourage, taking sides. Then it made a mistake; the rider swooped on the worm, catching it by the tail and swinging it around his head.
He let go. Matt dodged as it flew through the air towards him, and it landed on Fran’s blouse. She screamed in panic, trying to brush it off.
‘Stay still!’ he shouted.
It slipped, then seemed to steady itself as it prepared to strike up at the flesh beneath her chin. In the background Matt could hear the boys laughing, enjoying the sight. He grabbed the worm with his bare hand just below the head but instead of squeezing he turned and walked towards the one who’d thrown it, still sitting astride his bike with his helmet off, grinning, running his fingers over his close-cropped hair.
‘You threw this?’ Matt demanded.
At first the goon didn’t flinch as Matt held the worm close to his face. He was the son of the timber-yard owner, in his mid-twenties, with a reputation to keep up among the tougher element. Matt had often seen him with his hangers-on in the pub down by the harbour. He moved the worm an inch or two nearer; it strained forward to bite, its jaws opening.
‘You’re mad! Get that thing away from me!’
‘You shouldn’t have thrown it,’ Matt told him. The fury simmered inside him. If it had landed only an inch higher its teeth would have been buried in Fran’s neck, perhaps severing the jugular. ‘You’d better take your friends out of here, or I’ll let it feed on your face.’
He was in a tight spot, he knew. The others had gathered in a circle around him, still on their bikes, the engines ticking over. One false move and they’d ride straight at him. Beyond them, he could see Fran had armed herself with a garden rake.
‘Tell them to go,’ Matt ordered. ‘But you stay here till they’re all away.’ To emphasize the point he brought the worm closer to the goon’s scared face again.
‘You bastard, I’ll get you for this, see if I don’t!’ The goon twisted his head to avoid being bitten, but the worm’s sharp teeth sank into the lobe of his ear. Just the tip of it, but enough. The blood trickled down the side of his neck.