by Nick Cutter
* * *
EVIDENCE LOG, CASE 518C
PIECE A-13 (Personal Effects)
Lab journal of Dr. Clive Edgerton
Recovered from SITE A (220 Makepeace Road, Summerside, Prince Edward Island) by Officer Brian Skelly, badge #908
PAGES 122–126:
Test subject 4. Beta series.
GUINEA PIG (Zoologix, Inc; breeding batch EE-76-2)
Subject’s pre-test weight: 1350 grams
/Date: 07.19/
07:00
Introduced modified hydatid (Genetic Recombination M3-11) via injection. Between 100 and 250 post-embryonic-stage eggs delivered via liposome vehicle. Subject is alert and energetic. Eyes are clear. Evidencing no overt signs of distress or pain.
08:00
Subject unchanged.
09:00
Subject unchanged.
10:00
Subject unchanged.
10:13
Subject emits series of squeals.
10:47
Subject appears disoriented. Bumping into bars of its enclosure. Emitting distressed squeals at a significantly higher pitch and with increased frequency.
11:07
Subject is observed chewing bars of its enclosure.
11:09
Subject is observed consuming cedar shavings lining its enclosure.
11:15
Subject is observed consuming own fecal matter.
11:22
Sizable evacuation of larval-stage hydatid via excretory tract.
11:41
Subject emits squeals reaching a prolonged high pitch before ceasing. [post-test note: subject vocalizations cease at this point]
11:56
Subject is observed consuming portion of left front paw. Eyes glazed. Breathing rapid. Overall bodily torpor. Subject appears either unaware of its actions or beyond pain. Bleeding is minimal.
12:03
First gastrointestinal rupture observed. Occurs along transmedial cleft. Fissure observed to be 1/8in. Quantity of adolescent-stage hydatid worms observed exiting the subject’s body.
12:08
Subject exhibiting signs of late-stage morbidity. Noticeable stiffening of joints, labored breathing, milky film developing on eyes. Subject’s mouth opening and closing repeatedly. Appears to be chewing on the air.
12:16
Second gastrointestinal rupture observed. 1/2in below original fissure. Large quantity of adolescent-stage hydatid worms observed extruding from subject’s stomach cavity.
12:19
Subject/host deceased.
12:22
Remaining hydatids deceased. Test concludes.
Test duration: 5 hours 22 minutes
Subject’s post-test weight: 490 grams
Total weight loss: 860 grams
* * *
15
FIFTEEN MINUTES later, Scoutmaster Tim would be locked and shivering inside the cabin’s utility closet.
It would be Kent’s idea. He would suggest that the boys lock their Scoutmaster up for a rational reason—but ultimately he would do it simply because he could. There was something thrilling about leading the others in such an enormous act of rebellion.
KENT SET off from the fire at a determined clip. He figured Tim may try to stop him, but more and more it seemed he lacked the resolve. Tim was scared. He’d said so, practically blubbering his guts out around the fire.
Kent wasn’t scared, though. Hell, no. It wasn’t any part of his character. They needed a proper leader right now, not a big ole ’fraidy-cat.
The other boys would follow. Kent was positive. All it required was for him to take that first step. Who the hell was Tim, anyway? In the view of Kent’s father, Mr. Timothy Riggs was a lonely middle-aged fairy. Not a pedo—Jeff Jenks would cut his own balls off before he’d leave his kid in the woods with one of those. No, according to “Big” Jeff, Tim Riggs was probably just a willowy, sorrowful queer who lived alone in his big house on the bluffs.
You’ve got every right to see what’s inside that cabin, son—every legal right! Kent heard his father saying. Don’t let this noodle-wristed flamer make that decision for you. Not now, with the stakes this high. Don’t you see what he’s done? The quack’s cut open a complete stranger—gutted him, field-dressed the poor bastard like a five-point buck; he’s admitted as much—and now he wants to cover up his act. A man is dead, son! It’s up to you to get this under control. What, Tim’s going to stop you?
“Listen, Kent, it’s a total mess in there,” Max said from behind. “I mean, a dead guy. No joke. Why the hell do you want to see it so bad?”
“I wanna see it, too,” came Shelley’s voice from someplace in the dark.
Kent laid his hands on Max’s shoulders the same way his father did when one of his deputies got a case of the jitters.
“Max, I need to see. Okay? If I don’t see what the problem is, how can you expect me to deal with it?”
Max’s brow furrowed. “Yeah, but—”
“But nothing. We have every right.”
“Okay, but you better put gauze over your mouth and eyes.”
“Why?”
“Infection.”
Kent nodded somberly. “Yeah. Good thinking.”
Tim had nearly caught up. Kent heard his labored breathing like a sick Pekingese. “Kent Jenks! If you set one foot inside that—”
Kent shouldered his way through the door. The smell hit him like a ball-peen hammer. Sweetly fruity top notes, rancid decay lurking underneath.
The man lay on the chesterfield with his wrists and ankles bound. His shirt was slashed open, his white flesh glazed with sludge. He would look almost peaceful if not for those skinned-back lips setting his mouth in a horrible leer. He looked like a man holding a carnal secret.
A segment of the worm lay on the floor. To Kent, it looked like a much bigger version of the condom he and Charlie Swanson had once found under the football bleachers at Montague High. Charlie had poked the condom with a stick. Sluggish late-summer flies took flight, their drone thick in Kent’s ears. What is it? he’d said. Charlie said: You’ve never seen a ’domer? You pull it over your wick before you screw a chick so you don’t get her preggers.
Charlie had two older brothers. He knew things. Kent remembered feeling vaguely ashamed of his innocence. Also, a little sick.
But the sight of the man stunned him now. He was dead. Maybe Kent had expected it to be like his grandmother’s funeral: Grandma lying restfully in a mahogany coffin in the beige parlor while a pianist played “Nearer My God to Thee.” Serene with her eyes closed and her cheeks gently rouged.
This man was graceless in death. A ring of purple bruises encircling his neck. A brown shitlike mess leaking out of his side. One eye wide open, the other at half-mast like he was tipping a dirty wink. Fruit flies shimmering over his wound to drink the sweet filth. The man had died unloved and without dignity.
Kent wished he could act as his father would have right now. He’d cordon off the area and call for a forensic appraisal. He’d grab a bullhorn and calmly say: Disperse, people. Nothing to see here.
But that wasn’t true, was it? Jesus, there was everything to see here.
Fear stole into Kent’s heart like a safecracker. It embarrassed him—he’d pushed for this outcome, hadn’t he?—but right then he wanted to take it all back. He wished he were on the mainland, safe in his bed with his Labrador retriever, Argo, sleeping soundly beside him. He wished for that with every atom of his body.
Tim plowed through the throng of boys, splashing rubbing alcohol on the fronts of their shirts.
“Pull them over your mouth and nose! Hey—do it! Now!”
The boys obeyed. Their gazes were fogged with shock above their pulled-up collars—all except Shelley’s, whose eyes held an excitable glittery quality.
Tim shoved Kent. Both hands planted in the boy’s chest. Kent went down so hard his ass bounced off the floor.
“I told you to goddamn well stay out of her
e, didn’t I, Kent?”
Tim hunched over the fallen boy. He grabbed his shoulder roughly and shook him. Kent’s body rag-dolled in his grip.
“This is the site of a disease! Now you all run the risk of infection!”
Tim ran his hands through his hair, which stood up in smoke- and sweat-hardened spikes. His mouth hung open like a panting dog’s, the flesh drawn tight over his cheekbones.
You’re acting irrational, Tim, HAL 9000 said coolly. You’ve harmed a child now—and is it really the first time you’ve harmed a child tonight?
“Worms spread by contact,” he said, ignoring that voice. “Do you understand? If you eat something full of worms or worm eggs, then you get worms. There’s nothing for you to do, Kent. There’s nothing to be fucking fixed. If your dad, the mighty Jeff Jenks, tried his dick-swinging act here, he’d end up just like that guy over there. Okay?”
Tim pictured Jenks the senior: his blue uniform stretched over his gut, buttons taxed to their tensile limit, hairy-knuckled hands hooked through his belt loops as he surveyed the scene with a caustic eye. Wellsy wellsy wellsy, Doc, what’s the rhubarb here?
“Don’t you talk about my dad like that,” Kent said weakly.
“Shut up!” Tim slumped heavily at the kitchen table. “Just shut . . . up! I mean it, Kent. If you pull any more shit, I will truss you up like a Christmas turkey. Do you know one goddamn thing about contagion—any of you? We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. Could be orally borne. Could be waterborne. Jesus, it could be airborne.”
“Then why cut him open?” Shelley said, covering his mouth so his words were muffled by his fingers. “Why drag Max into it? Or us?”
Tim looked from boy to boy to boy, seeing nothing he could recognize anymore: only disdain and suspicion and slowly kindling rage. That trust he’d worked so hard to build up, an undertaking of many years, had worn down to a brittle strand. The possibility that it could snap at any moment left him paralyzed with fear.
He pointed to the cleaved segment of worm on the floor. “That is like nothing in nature, boys. Do you understand me? These things should not exist. It’s nothing God ever made. So we have to be incredibly careful. We have to step very lightly.”
“We should burn down the cabin,” Shelley mumbled.
Tim shook his head. “That could just put the contagion into the air. What we are going to do is this: Go outside. Sit by the fire.” Tim worried the ragged edge off one fingernail with his incisors and swallowed it convulsively. “We’ll wait for the boat to come the day after tomorrow. That’s all we can do.”
The fixed drone of a helicopter worked its way across the open water. It seemed to hover directly above them. Coin-bright wedges of light—the glow of a searchlight—shafted through apertures in the roof. The helicopter’s wings sent gusts of sea-scented air through gaps in the cabin’s log walls. The light dimmed abruptly as the helicopter continued out to sea.
“Will the boat even come, Scoutmaster Tim?” Newton asked.
“Of course. We’ll all go home. Your parents will be thrilled to see you. They’ll send a research team out. Now come on. Let’s . . . let’s . . . go on out . . . outsi—”
A wave of dizziness rocked the Scoutmaster. Gnatlike specks crowded his vision. His sinuses burnt with ozone: the same eye-watering sensation as if he’d jumped off the dock into the bay and salt water rocketed up his nose.
He licked his threadlike lips. “We have to . . .”
Kent hauled himself up. His eyes reflected a horrible awareness.
“You’re sick,” he said in a trembling voice. “You’re infected. You’ve got the worms.”
“I don’t—” A childlike sick feeling hived in Tim’s stomach: as if he’d eaten too much cotton candy at the Abbotsford carnival and gone on the Tilt-A-Whirl. “It’s so important that we . . .”
“We have to quarantine him,” Kent said to the others. “He could make us all sick. Like him.”
Kent advanced with a determined gait. Tim held his arms out. Jesus! A pair of fleshy javelins. He pushed the boy. His hands sunk harmlessly into the boy’s chest as Kent’s shoulders sagged to dampen the impact.
Tim stumbled away on legs that felt like wooden stilts screwed into his hips. “Please,” he said. He pushed again, kittenishly. Kent was smiling now. It was not a kind look.
This transgression had been building in Kent—it enfolded him with a cold sense of assurance. He was right to act against his elder. If you exerted your will and held fast to that course of action, things inevitably worked out. All the gifts that came to you—gifts befitting your inflexible strength of character—would be rightfully earned.
He pushed his Scoutmaster. Tim fell comically: arms outstretched and mouth open like a fish in its dying gasp. He hit the floor with a spine-jangling thud. His intestines jogged in the loosening vault of his gut. He did a very natural but terribly unfortunate thing.
Tim passed gas. A reedy trumpeting note that daggered through the shocked silence. A ripe reek wafted through the room.
“I’m sorry,” Tim said. “I don’t—”
Shelley snickered. “You stink.”
Kent pinned Tim with that rifle-sights look. “Lock him in the closet.”
“No,” Tim said, the word escaping his mouth as a sob.
The boys were held in a dimple of tension. Many possibilities tiptoed along the edge of that moment.
Next they were upon him. Shelley went first. Kent followed. They surged down upon their Scoutmaster, leapt on him, screaming and grabbing. Ephraim next. Then Max, with a low, agonized moan. They were filled with a giddy exuberance. All of them felt it—even Newton, who came last, regretfully, mumbling “No, no, no,” even as he fell into the fray, unable to fight the queasy momentum. They were carried away on a wave of thick, urgent, blind desire.
It happened so swiftly. The pressure that’d been building since last night, collecting in drips and drabs: in the crunch of the radio shattering in a squeal of feedback; in the black helicopter hovering high above them; in the snake ball squirming in the wet rocks; in the sounds emanating from the cabin as Tim and Max operated on the man; and most of all in the horrifying decline of their Scoutmaster, a man they’d known nearly all their lives reduced to a human anatomy chart, a herky-jerky skeleton. It brewed within them, a throbbing tension in their chests that required release—somehow, by any means necessary—and now, like a dark cloud splitting with rain, it vented. The boys couldn’t fight it; they weren’t properly themselves. They were a mob, and the mob ruled.
It’s just a game, a few of the boys thought. It was a game as long as they could ignore the look of sick terror in their Scoutmaster’s eyes. The helpless fear of an adult—which ultimately looked not much different than the helpless fear of an infant. It was a game as long as they could ignore the dead man on the chesterfield leaking brown muck.
A game, a game, a game . . .
They dragged Tim to the closet. He unleashed a series of shrill yipping shrieks. He was terrified of forfeiting control—of how fast it had happened. Terrified of that closet. But mostly he was terrified of whatever might very well be inside of him.
“Please, boys,” he whimpered. “Please no—I need help—”
They would not listen. The wave reached its mad crest. They pulled the Scoutmaster with ease. With his weight distributed among the five boys, he weighed no more than a child. Ephraim’s hands slipped under Tim’s shirt. He felt the abrupt cliff where the flesh fell off his lowest rib. His body was divoted and warped. Ephraim’s hands fell upon Tim’s stomach . . . he reared back, shocked by the fretful lashings that met his fingers.
Shelley’s lips skinned back from his teeth. He looked like a hyena prowling among the corpses on a battlefield. Kent flung the closet door open. It was empty save a few jangling coat hangers. They barrel-rolled Tim inside. The Scoutmaster’s quivering fingers stuck out through the doorjamb. Ephraim gently folded them into the darkness of the closet.
They set their
weight against the door. Their breath came out in jagged gusts. Kent dashed into the bedroom, returning with a combination lock. He fastened it through the lock hasp and clipped it shut.
The boys came back to themselves with a jolt. Max and Ephraim passed nervous unsmiling looks. Their Scoutmaster’s whimpers carried under the door.
“When do we let him out?” Newton said.
“When the boat gets here,” Kent said coldly. “No sooner.”
“What if it doesn’t show up?”
Kent said: “Shut up, Newt.”
Nobody bothered asking for the combination; they knew Kent wouldn’t tell them. The bottle of scotch stood uncapped on the table. A man’s drink. General George Patton drank a shot of cheap scotch before battle, Kent’s dad always said, and a glass of good scotch after a victory.
What was this if not a victory? When the boat arrived tomorrow, his quick thinking would be hailed.
“Go on, Kent,” Shelley told him. “Have a drink.”
Max said, “No—don’t—”
But Kent had already raised the bottle to his lips. It went down like molten iron. He sawed his arm across his mouth. His grimace became a broad grin.
“Everything’s going to be okay, guys.”
* * *
From the sworn testimony of Nathan Erikson, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:
Q: Mr. Erikson, state how you came to be associated with Dr. Clive Edgerton.
A: I was just out of school. A few guys who graduated with me caught on as associate profs, but they were the creme de la creme. I was more like the flotsam.
Q: At loose ends?
A: You could say so. Not a lot of companies have much use for a theoretical molecular biologist whose doctoral dissertation was “The Human Aging Process as Relating to the C. elegans worm.”