by Nick Cutter
Low murmurs from the bunkroom. The boys must’ve woken up. Tim needed to get a handle on the situation; he didn’t fancy the idea of five groggy boys rubbing sleep-crust out of their eyes while gazing at the human boneyard on the chesterfield.
“Boys, listen up,” he said, easing the door open and closing it swiftly to maintain that barrier. “Something’s come up. It’s nothing major”—was it?—“but it’s best you stay here, in your beds.”
“What’s wrong, Tim?”
This from Kent, who’d taken to calling him “Tim” of late. He’d dropped the Scoutmaster part. Kent sat on the edge of his bed, hands clasped, shoulders rounded like a wrestler awaiting his call to the mat. Kent—even the name had a pushy, aggressive quality. An alpha-male moniker, of a piece with Tanner and Chet and Brodie, names parents bestow upon a boy they’ve prefigured as a defense attorney or a lacrosse coach. No parent harboring the hope for a sensitive, artistic child names that child Kent.
“It’s a guy,” Tim said. “Nobody from around—I’ve never seen him. He just showed up.”
“Does he have a tent?” Newt asked, his thick chin flattened across the mattress. “Like, a hiker or something—an adventurer?”
“Not that I can see.” Tim knelt in the ring of boys. “He seems sick.”
Ephraim whispered, “Sick how?”
Tim sucked in his lips, thinking. “Sick like a fever, something like that. He’s very thin. He’s been asking for food.”
“Maybe he’s a Gurkha,” said Shelley, the words hissing between his teeth.
“He’s not a Gurkha,” Tim said, jaw tight to hold back a mounting queasiness—the man’s funk was seeping under the door, perfuming the room with its rotten-peach stink. “He’s . . . it could be a lot of things, okay? He could’ve been in some other country, some other part of the world, picked up a virus and carried it back with him.”
Kent said: “We should call the mainland, Tim.”
Tim gritted his teeth so hard that his molars squeaked in their gum beds.
“Yes, Kent. I’ve thought about that, and yes, I’ll do it. In the meantime, I need you boys to stay here. Is that clear?”
“You don’t need help?”
“No, Kent, I don’t,” Tim went on. “I’m a doctor, yes? I’m this guy’s best chance right now. But we don’t know what’s the matter yet, so this is the safest place for you.”
Tim opened the door. The frail light of the lantern fell upon a quartet of pinched, anxious expressions—all except Shelley, who stared listlessly at the canopy of cobwebs on the ceiling. He closed the door, debated a moment, then tilted a chair and jammed it under the doorknob.
Tim crossed the main room to the shortwave radio and clicked through the frequencies in search of the mainland emergency band. All he had was a tricked-out medical kit with a few more bells and whistles than your standard wilderness survival kit—items plucked from his own private stockpile. But if he radioed it in, they could send the medevac chopper in from Charlottetown and—
“Reeeeaaagh!”
The man staggered up, careening toward Tim like a sailor on a storm-tossed boat. With one swift motion he ripped the shortwave radio off the table, raised it above his head, and brought it down. It smashed apart in a squeal of feedback. A string of sparks popped inside the busted casing, issuing forth gouts of stinking electrical smoke.
The man brought his foot down on it, stomping with crazed strength. Tim put his arms out to stop him, tipping the lantern over and extinguishing the flame.
He grappled with the man in the dark. It was like wrestling a bag of snakes or steel cables coated in granular grease: cold, oily, and revolting.
“Goddamn it! Stop!”
The man snarled, a cruel silver sound that ripped through the dark like a band saw blade. He coughed something up; wet warmth splashed Tim’s face. Tim squealed thinly—he couldn’t help it—and wiped furiously at his cheek.
The man’s body suddenly went slack. Tim fought the urge to drop him, the way you might a fat-smeared tackling dummy.
Unclean! UNCLEAN!
The bunkroom knob squeaked, followed by a sequence of jarring thumps as the door shuddered against the chair. Tim pictured Kent hammering his shoulder against it, aiming to splinter it to pieces.
“Tim! Tim, open this door!”
Navigating clumsily in the dark, Tim guided the man back to the chesterfield. He felt around for the lamp, found it, relit it. Fetched the medical kit. He tore open packets of sterile wipes and furiously swabbed down every place the man had touched him, specifically his face. Whatever he’d spat up lingered on Tim’s skin—he could feel the dissipating sting, his flesh flushed red as if he’d been slapped.
“Tim!” Kent bellowed. “Open this door right now!”
“Stay inside!” Tim yelled—screeched, more like, his voice elevating to a teakettle shriek. “Try to open that door again, Kent Jenks, and I’ll make damn sure your father hears about it.”
Kent’s sullen footsteps retreated; the bedsprings squeaked as he slid back under the covers.
Tim filled a hypodermic needle with 100 mg of doxylamine. The man’s veins were easy to locate: a rail yard’s worth of blue tubes snaked at the crook of each elbow. After the injection, the man’s breathing normalized.
Greenish matter oozed out the side of his mouth. Is that what he’d spit up? Had he actually been eating rock slime?
Algae. Okay, it’s just algae. Algae’s not infectious. Algae’s just . . . gross.
Tim’s hand dropped to the man’s stomach—he felt it again. A subtle movement like an adder resettling itself under a warm blanket.
It’s just peristalsis. The man has a severe blockage in his intestines; all you’re feeling is a protracted flex as he tries to pass whatever it is.
Tim’s testicles drew up. He swooned with sudden unexplainable fear, his belly packed with cold lead. Who was this man? What in God’s name was the matter with him? Why the hell had he thought it right or appropriate to let him in here? Private hospitals can refuse treatment if a person’s condition is deemed a threat to others—what in God’s name had he done, turning a cabin on an isolated island into a trauma ward?
He reached for the man’s T-shirt, guided by a horrible impulse: pull it up. But even his morbid sense of curiosity resisted it. He didn’t want to see. Not now, at night, alone in this dark.
Except he wasn’t alone, was he? He swung the lamp toward the bunkroom door, the chair still wedging it shut.
“It’s okay,” Tim said, after moving the chair aside and stepping softly inside with the boys. “Please go back to sleep.”
“Who is that?” Kent’s voice had forfeited its thunder: he asked as a boy who was scared and too far from home.
“Like I said—a stranger. Someone who needed help, so I’m giving it to him. I don’t know where he’s from. He couldn’t even give me his name. He can barely talk. He’s asleep now.”
Tim saw his answer only intensified their worry, but found it impossible to offer anything more concrete. It was like one of those TV medical dramas where patients roll into the ER with mysterious ailments—the towheaded boy who weeps tears of blood; the high school prom queen whose head swells up like a beach ball—and only the brilliant pill-popping MD can suss it out: a hairline rip in the aqueous humor; the remains of a parasitic twin resting deep in the thalamic folds. Problem being, Tim was just a small-town sawbones, unremarkable and generally unambitious—none of which had been a problem until now.
Max said: “Well, how sick is he?”
Tim found it difficult to meet their searching eyes—fact was, he had no earthly idea. But he was the adult here, the authority—moral and otherwise—and it was his responsibility to tell them something if only to allay their fears, even as his own mounted.
“He seems manageable, guys. I’ve seen worse.” This lie came so smoothly that it shocked him. “We’ll get him to a hospital and let them deal with it.”
“The radio?”
&nb
sp; “I can’t see right now,” Tim told Ephraim. “It may be broken.”
Kent said: “How did that . . . ? It’s our only—”
“He got here in a boat, okay? If we need to get back to the mainland, we’ll take that. Now . . . go . . . to . . . bed.”
Tim turned and shut the door. The man breathed tortuously off to his right. His face radiated an unearthly light all its own, as if his veins ran with phosphorus. His features gave off the sick light of those poisonous mushrooms that grew in dank island caves.
An image came to Tim, plucked from the deepest recesses of his memory. A man’s face in a parking garage. Tim’s mother had taken him grocery shopping. He was five. The underground lot was nearly empty. They’d passed a huge cement stanchion, the load-bearing ones that kept the supermarket from collapsing, burying them under shelves of creamed corn and Frosted Flakes. A shape leaned against it. A pile of water-fattened trash bags? The pile stirred, shifted, and a face materialized. Tim told himself—he told himself today—that the man must’ve fallen prey to the commonplace decays, drink and drugs and disease . . . but his younger eyes, his boyhood eyes, had seen something else entirely.
The man’s face had been black, but that was not its birth color: it was the lumpen, withery, rotted black of a banana forgotten at the bottom of a fruit bowl. Had he touched that face, Tim was certain his fingers would’ve sunk into it. The man’s nose looked as though it had been subjected to enormous pressures, or else eaten away by something: a caved-in pit above his lips, which were cracked and bloated and coated in unknowable glaze.
Tim’s breath had locked in his lungs, his upflung eyes finding his mother—who was obviously scared, too, a fact that deepened his own fear.
The man had been sick in a way that didn’t seem possible—nothing on this earth, not disease nor the elements nor the tortures of mankind, could do that. He looked like a man who’d been abducted by a vengeful alien race who’d done terrible things, reduced him in some unspeakable way, then delivered him back to earth in order to examine how the rest of his species would react.
He’s seen hell, was Tim’s childish thought.
Worst of all were the man’s eyes—always the eyes, wasn’t it? A calm ongoing shade of brown, and the most awful part was that something continued to live in them—because normally there’d be nothing, right? Defeated and foggy and unthinking, to match the body. But these eyes harbored a remote intellect, a keen awareness. Which was the scariest part: this man had to confront the devastation of his body. He was cognizant of his own ruin. How could he possibly cope with that?
The man didn’t ask for anything. He simply watched, those coolly considering eyes socked in that tragedy of a face, until they passed from sight.
As he remembered this, the veil of disquiet that had settled over Tim shifted and something terrible peered through from the other side—the squirrelly, squealing face of terror. That man’s nightmarish face. Then it was gone.
Tim slipped into an uneasy sleep. Sometime before dawn and without quite realizing it, he rose out of the chair and stumbled to the cupboards.
* * *
News item from the Montague (PEI) Island Courier, October 21:
MILITARY CORDONS OFF NORTH POINT WHARF, ESTABLISHES NO-FLY, NO-WATERCRAFT ZONE
The military descended upon the tiny town of North Point (pop 5,766) early this morning. Residents awoke to Armored Personnel Carriers rumbling down their sleepy streets.
“They chewed right through the pavement,” said Peggy Stills, owner of the Island Cafe on Main Street. “The street’s full of holes.”
The convoy made its way to the North Point dock. A barrier was swiftly erected, encompassing the waterline and outlying areas. A pair of Apache helicopters were spotted sweeping the waters off North Point.
Shortly after 10 a.m. an official dispatch was released, stating that traffic on the waters north of the island was strictly prohibited. A message was sent over the emergency nautical broadcast channel alerting watercraft; the waters off North Point are trafficked by commercial fishing vessels and the occasional ocean liner.
Requests for information from on-site military personnel were rebuffed. The Courier has attempted to contact a military press agent, but to this point this reporter’s calls have gone unanswered.
* * *
7
THE BOYS rose with the drowsy half-light of dawn. The moon hung in its western altar like the last melancholy guest at a dinner party, who was too lonely to leave.
None of them had slept well. They’d heard Scoutmaster Tim come inside with the man—the man hadn’t spoken, but they could smell him: a syrupy foulness like the juice at the bottom of an amusement park trash can. As the Scoutmaster busied himself beyond the bunkroom door, Kent had sat up on his elbows.
“I better check it out.”
Kent Jenks always had to check “it” out. Made no difference what “it” happened to be; Kent was suffused with the unshakable conviction that things would be better if he intervened—as if, by dint of his presence, the situation would come under control. He’d been this way since Beavers, and because Kent was bigger and carried an air of prepossession that could come off as menacing, the other boys typically bowed to his will.
It was the same at school. Kent was the kid who’d butt in front of you at the water fountain—literally butting, a solid hip-check that’d send you flying—saying I got cuts with a chummy backslap, his voice a full octave lower than anybody else’s. The boy who’d grab your sandwich off the waxed paper your mom wrapped it in, take a humongous bite, and go You mind?, flecks of egg salad spraying between his lips. He wasn’t truly mean-spirited, though. Max thought of him as a Saint Bernard: big and slobbery, a bit dumb and oblivious to his own strength, but his heart was usually in the right place. Kent constantly threw down these gauntlets, though, and dared you to run them. Most days it was easier to surrender your spot in line or bite of sandwich.
Lately Kent had been testing how far he could challenge adults. He’d raise his hand in class, grinning sunnily while asking the teacher: Are you suuure? He’d started to call teachers by their first names, too. It wasn’t Mr. Reilly in homeroom anymore—it was Earl. The boys were waiting for the day when Kent sauntered into the teachers’ lounge, took a bite of the gym teacher’s lunch, and said, You mind, George?
When Kent had gotten out of bed and crossed the bunkroom to the door, only Newton had spoken up.
“Better not, Kent. The Scoutmaster—”
“Shut up, flapjack,” Kent had shot back, so casually that you couldn’t even call his tone dismissive: more like how you’d shush a yappy dog. “If I wanted your opinion, I’d—”
“For real, bro,” Ephraim had said. “Don’t go out there.”
Kent blinked, his head cocked at an inquisitive angle. Ephraim was the only boy who worried him—there was something a bit crazy about Eef, this jittery powder-keg quality that made Kent uneasy.
“Gimme one reason why not, man.”
Ephraim just said: “Because.”
“That’s it? That’s the reason—because?”
“Yep,” Ephraim had said.
“Thanks, Eef,” said Newt.
Ephraim said: “Shut up, pork chop.”
Next Scoutmaster Tim had entered the bunkroom and told them that their asses better remain in bed. Soon after came the commotion: the stranger’s scream—“Reeeeaaagh!”—followed by a scuffle, a crash, and the acrid smell of smoke wafting into their room, mingling with the sweetly rotten stench.
Kent had leapt out of bed, attacking the door with savage shoulder-butts; it wouldn’t budge, but Kent kept flinging his body at it, the way he always did—hurling his unthinking bulk at any obstacle with the ironclad surety it’d eventually buckle. He’d only quit when the Scoutmaster threatened to tell his father; Kent stepped away from the door breathing like a bull, his wide-set and faintly bovine eyes reflecting dull smokeless hate.
Around four in the morning, Newton had sat bolt uprigh
t in bed. He’d been awoken by the noise of cupboard doors opening and slamming shut. Next had come . . . crunching sounds? Monotonous, plodding, softly grinding.
“Max?” he’d whispered. “Max, you awake?”
“Go to bed, Newt,” Max said from the bunk below, his voice so thick with sleep that his words ran together: GotobedNewt.
Newton had been shocked that Max and the others were able to sleep with those smells and awful noises beyond the door . . . maybe Max was just pretending to sleep to avoid talking about them. Maybe he’d thought sunlight was a cure-all.
HOURS LATER, sunlight filtered through the sap-yellowed window, sparkling the dust motes that hung in the stagnant air. The boys rose and dressed silently, pulling on bulky sweaters and lacing their boots. Ephraim caught Max’s eye, raised a quizzical eyebrow, and mouthed the words:
You okay?
Max shrugged, smiled wanly, finished double-knotting his boots. Like the others, he’d caught a whiff of the rank sweetness drifting in from the main room, where the Scoutmaster slept. He’d heard the crunching sounds, too.
Max’s grandfather was a farmer. The past few summers he’d paid Max and Ephraim seventeen dollars a day to dump chicken bones into “Jaws,” a stainless steel industrial grinder in the barn. He purchased the bones from a poultry processing plant in Summerside, a dollar a sack. Legally it was called “animal byproduct,” same as cowflops, hog shit, and hen feathers. Max and Ephraim would slit the woven-fiber sacks and dump the clattering bones into Jaws’s hopper. It was gross, mildly disturbing work—Island work, wearying and melancholic, and there was an expectation that all boys should enjoy it.
At least they got to do it together. Max and Eef were best friends. They’d been so for years informally, but a few months ago they’d cemented it: they’d both notched a shallow cut in their thumbs with Ephraim’s Swiss Army knife, pressed them together, and solemnly intoned: Forever friends. They were one better than BF’s—they were FF’s.
Once the bones were in the hopper, Max’s grandfather would switch the machine on. The gears made quick work of them; when the collection receptacle popped open, inside was a drift of fine white powder.