by Nick Cutter
“Thank you for answering my question, Kent. Now, what would you like to eat?”
“Anything. Anything.”
“I mean, there’s so much. I can’t carry it all back here. So you’ll have to tell me. We have apple pie and chocolate-glazed doughnuts and big steaks and—”
“Meat. Meat.”
“You wait here,” Shelley said, as if Kent had a choice. “I’ll be right back.”
Shelley stole through the cabin’s shattered door. Early afternoon sunlight fell through the roof’s broken latticework, quilting the floor in honey-colored bars.
The roof sagged down before him. He unscrewed an old glass light fixture that now sat at eye level—amazingly, it hadn’t been smashed during the storm. Inside the frosted glass bowl were several dozen insect carcasses. Flies mostly, along with a few dragonflies and moths. He shook the crackly remains into his palm and went back to the cellar.
“Here’s the first course, Kent. It’s . . . peanut brittle.”
Shelley placed a desiccated dragonfly corpse in Kent’s fingers. They disappeared through the crack into the darkness. Eager crunching sounds. The fingers reappeared.
“More.”
Shelley fed Kent dead bugs as if he were feeding a goat at a petting zoo. Kent made pitiful groveling sounds as he ate. Shelley couldn’t believe his good fortune. This island, the isolation, this distracting illness—it was the ultimate playground.
His eyeballs felt tacky in their sockets; a dry saltlick taste lay thick on his tongue. His penis throbbed fiercely inside his trousers; he pushed it with the heel of his palm, squashing it against his thigh to achieve a dizzying, elating pleasure. Quit playing pocket pool! Mr. Turley would’ve said if he’d caught Shelley doing it in gym class. But Mr. Turley wasn’t here, was he? No adult was here—except the dead ones in the cabin—meaning Shelley could do exactly as he wished . . . but he must be careful. It would be so easy to make a mistake—to “blow it,” his father might say—ruining his lovely game. He mustn’t get carried away.
“More,” Kent whispered.
“All gone,” Shelley said. “No more. You ate it all.”
“Please.”
“Tell me how it feels, Kent. Tell me and I’ll give you something else.”
“It feels empty. There’s a hole and it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Forever and ever and ever. It wants me, Shel—and it wants you, too. Wants all of you.”
Shelley crouched for a moment, gnawing on the inside of his cheek. Kent sounded bad—seriously bad. Bugfuck nuts, as the island phrase went. A pang of concern snuck into Shelley; at first he didn’t know what it was, seeing as he didn’t experience emotions the way others did. An uncomfortable nibbling in his belly, like hungry baby mice.
Shelley returned to the cabin. The dead man, or what was left of him, had fallen off the sofa during the storm. His limbs were ramrod-straight with rigor mortis. His legs stuck out straight with his toes pointed up. Patches of bright green fungus bloomed around his eye sockets and the edges of his mouth.
The man’s nose had fallen into his face. Shelley watched a beetle crawl out of his sunken septum. It climbed to the crest of one nostril rim—just a hardened hole of cartilage like a little manhole in the man’s face—and hung there unsteadily.
The interlocked halves of its exoskeleton came apart. A high pressurized hiss: it sounded like a steam valve blowing from very far away. The beetle cracked open. Shelley could see white things wriggling inside of it.
A subspecies of some raw emotion—not fear, but something hovering at its edges—spider-scuttled into Shelley’s chest.
He knelt beside the big dead worm on the floor. It had hardened and toughened like an earthworm sizzled on a summer sidewalk. He scraped it up with the edge of his knife. Its insides were still mushy and gelatinous. Custardy-yellow goo squeezed through slits in its skin.
A new, wildly intriguing idea formed in Shelley’s mind.
He returned to the cellar. Kent’s fingers wriggled at the slit.
“Supper’s on, Kent,” Shelley said.
The leathery strap of the dead worm disappeared through the slit—jerked with sudden violence, it slipped between the slats with a breathless zippering hiss. Next: sucking sounds. Contented babyish coos. The fingers appeared again, streaked with yellow slime.
“I’m sorry,” Shelley said, although of course he’d never been sorry for a single thing his entire life. “No more food. Kent, you went and ate it all. You greedy pig, you ate it all.”
Shelley walked away. He’d become bored with Kent, whose throaty cackle followed him back to the firepit.
“You promised!” Kent shrieked. “You promised me meat! Come back! Pleeeease!”
Shelley sat beside the dead fire, stirring the ashes with a stick. He drew squiggles. Worms on the brain, must be. He felt like one of those circus performers who spun plates atop long bamboo poles. Lots of irons in the ole fire, as his dad would say.
Next up: Ephraim. Stupid, angry Eef. Eef the fatherless freak. Eef the cuckoo bird who went to Dr. Harley’s office to babble about his feelings. When Shelley’s homeroom teacher suggested that perhaps he could benefit from a session or two with Dr. Harley—this after she’d caught Shelley poking the class hamster, Puggins, with a pencil, the tip of which he’d scrupulously sharpened—his mother had scoffed, outraged. My son doesn’t need to see a damn headshrinker, thank-you-very-much-good-day.
Earlier, back in the cellar, Shelley spotted Eef staring at his hands. His knuckles had broken open when he’d punched Kent—an incident Shelley had enjoyed immensely because it meant group dynamics were shifting. Changes made people unsure, especially boys his age, because routines were important. When you took away routines, things went haywire. And Shelley liked haywire, because then anything could happen.
Shelley could tell that Ephraim was afraid that whatever was in Kent had gotten into him—it’d leapt between their bodies, from Kent’s lips to Ephraim’s hand, swimming in on the rush of blood. Shelley knew Ephraim was scared and he foresaw a great profit in nursing that fear along. It would be easy. Ephraim was so predictable—so predictably stupid.
Of course, Shelley hadn’t seen the teeny-tiny worms at that point—but he’d understood that the sickness, whatever it was, scurried inside of you, ate you from the inside out. That’s what made it so scary. This wasn’t a bear or a shark or a psycho axe murderer; those things were bad, sure, but you could get away from them. Hide.
How could you hide from a murderer who lived under your skin?
After the storm, when they went in the cabin and saw the Scoutmaster’s rotting body, saw those threadlike worms squirming in his chest—Shelley couldn’t believe it. Everything was coming up aces.
Now it was simply a matter of keeping all those plates spinning.
Shelley had a method of probing, of opening doors in people that was uncanny. He rarely used this gift—it could get him in trouble. But he was able to spy the weak spots the way a sculptor saw the seams in a block of granite; one tap in the right spot and it’d split right open.
I saw something, Eef.
That was all it had taken. The smallest seedling—he’d slit Ephraim’s skin, just the thinnest cut, slipping that seed in. If Shelley did some additional work, well, maybe that seed would squirm into Ephraim’s veins, surf to his heart, and bloom into something beautiful. Or horrible. It didn’t matter which to Shelley.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the walkie-talkie. He’d slipped the other one into Ephraim’s backpack this morning, while the other boys had been busying themselves for the hike. He fiddled with the button, not quite ready to put his plan into action.
After all, how much good luck did one boy deserve?
28
SOMETIME AROUND midafternoon, Ephraim sat down and refused to get up.
“That’s it. I’m not walking anymore.”
They had come to a copse of spruce trees. The air was dense with the scent of pine: it smelled like t
he car air fresheners drivers hung off their rearview mirrors.
Ephraim sat on a moss-covered rock with his fingers knit together in his lap. His body position mimicked a famous Roman sculpture that Newton had seen in a history book: The Pugilist at Rest. Ephraim looked a bit like a statue himself. His skin had a slick alabaster hue, except for around the lips and the rims of his nostrils, where it had a bluish-gray tint. Newton had a scary premonition: if they left Ephraim here and came back years later, he was sure Eef’s body would remain in this fixed position—a statue of calcified bone.
“Come on,” Newt said gently. “It’s gonna be okay. We’re going to find food soon.”
“Not hungry,” Ephraim said.
“Well, that’s sort of good news. It means you’re not sick, right?”
“It doesn’t mean anything.” There was an undertone of liquid menace in Ephraim’s voice. “We don’t really know anything, do we?”
“We have to keep moving, man,” said Max. “If we can find a good place to set a trap, then—”
“Then what, Max?” Ephraim’s chin was cocked at its customary challenging jut. “We catch a skunk? Great! Wonderful! Let’s all chow down on skunk burgers that’ll taste like skunk ass.”
Newt said: “We can’t just give up.”
“Hey, you guys do whatever you want. I’m not stopping you.”
Newton looked at Max as if he should say something. They were best friends, after all—other than Ephraim’s own mother, Max was the only person on North Point who could reliably get Eef to calm down and stop acting crazy. But more and more, even Max felt powerless to address Ephraim’s mounting mania.
Ephraim kept rubbing his fingers over his knuckles. The skin around the raw wounds was inflamed.
“Do you see anything?” he asked nobody in particular.
Max said: “See what, man?”
Ephraim said: “Nothing. It’s nothing.”
Max and Newton exchanged a glance. Neither of them wanted to leave Ephraim, but they both knew they couldn’t force him to come. If they pressed too hard he’d lash out, maybe even hurt one of them. The group was casting off all inessential members, winnowing down to an unlikely core.
“What would you rather,” Max said. “Keep hiking and find some food or stay here alone, sitting on a rock—pouting?”
Ephraim shot to his feet, fists balled, chest butting into Max’s; he got so close that their chins touched, their noses, too—so close that Max could smell Eef’s breath, which was bad, yeah, but not sweet: just the regular bile-and-stomach-acid smell of a boy who hadn’t eaten properly in days. He saw the familiar fire in Ephraim’s eyes: less a flame, really, than jags of blue electricity crackling outward from his irises; it reminded Max of the plasma globe at the Science Center.
Ephraim’s fist rose with sudden swiftness, knuckles striking Max’s chin. It wasn’t a hard punch, but hard enough to snap his teeth together with an audible click. It didn’t hit Max’s knockout button, his legs didn’t even tremble—Ephraim took most of the steam off it—but it was a punch all the same.
Ephraim pushed Max away, as if their closeness might prompt him to lash out again. Max’s heart shuddered in his chest. He could feel the lingering imprint of his best friend’s knuckles on the underside of his chin: three perfect points still burning into his skin.
Ephraim’s jaw worked, his teeth grinding side to side; it appeared he might burst into tears.
“I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean that, Max.”
Max rubbed his jaw. He’d never been punched before. “I know, Eef. It’s okay.”
Ephraim shook his head. “No it’s not. No. It’s. Not.”
The three boys stood in the greenish, claustrophobic light. Ephraim slumped back on the rock.
“We have to go, Eef,” Newton said softly. “Are you sure you don’t want to—”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“But so . . . you’ll stay right here?” Newt asked.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Ephraim repeated.
“Okay. We’ll be back soon.”
“Do whatever you want.”
Max and Newton left him. They slipped under the canopy of spruce fronds into the clearing beyond.
29
AFTER THEY were gone, Ephraim sat motionless. The wind stirred the treetops, blowing pinecones off the boughs. Reaching into his pocket, he retrieved one of the two remaining cigarettes, lighting it with the Zippo. It tasted disgustingly sweet, like the tobacco had been drenched in rancid syrup.
He tweezed obsessively at the swollen flesh edging his knuckles. He picked and twisted until fresh blood flowed. It dripped off his fingertips and pattered onto the brown needles. He scrutinized it for wriggles.
The pain was sharp but bearable. It felt really good. Really necessary. Idly, not really aware of his actions, Ephraim angled the cigarette until its burning ember drew near the flesh of his wrist. He felt the heat but wasn’t alarmed by it. Touching his skin, the ember made a sizzling sound like bacon in a frying pan. The stink of burnt hair, the vaguely sugary smell of crisped skin. The ember left a blackened divot, pain radiating from it like the rays of a cartoon sun. Endorphins and adrenaline washed through Ephraim, calming him somewhat—but the feeling didn’t last.
They were inside of him. Somehow he both knew and didn’t know this unavoidable fact—or he knew and yet hoped with every ounce of belief that he was wrong.
I saw something, Eef. Under your fingernail.
Shelley’s words drilled into his head, blistering his brain like a branding iron. How could Shelley see anything? Dark in the cellar, a storm shaking the earth. But Shelley’s words had only reinforced Ephraim’s own belief: they’d gotten inside.
Simple math: Kent was sick. He’d punched Kent. They’d shared blood. Ephraim may as well have thrown open a door and said: Welcome to the party!
At first there had only been one . . . a tiny, white, hungry guest squirming contentedly in the half-moon of his fingernail. And Ephraim would’ve permitted it to live in his fingernail, if it promised to stay under the nail like a pet in a glass bubble. Ephraim was generous—he could give up that much of his body. He’d even show it to his friends to gross them out: Look, guys, I’ve got a new friend. He’d let it have his whole finger, even; plenty of men back home on the island were missing fingers—they’d get pulled off on factory lines, shredded in tractor gears—so okay, no big loss.
But these things weren’t content with a fingernail, a finger, a hand, or an arm. They wanted the whole enchilada.
Ephraim thought about those little white tubes bending toward him in the cabin. He’d stood mesmerized, swooning in fear as those shimmery strands floated toward him. Ephraim’s heart-blood had seized, veins feeling like they’d been pumped full of quick-dry cement. He hadn’t moved an inch. None of the other boys had stepped in to save him, either. Scout Law number two: A Scout is loyal to the king, his country, and his fellow Scouters. Well, fuck that. Ephraim’s fellow Scouters hung him out to dry, even his so-called forever friend.
But he wasn’t mad at them, really. Would he have stepped in if those threads had drifted toward Newton—even Max? He blamed himself for acting like a stupid stunned cow. That inward-looking anger crystallized into rage, which then transformed quite suddenly into fear.
Ephraim was as terrified as he’d ever been in his life. Something was inside of him—he was almost positive of that now. Locked up behind his skin. Incubating. That something had become somethings. Multiplying and feeding and breeding. That was how any living entity increased its numbers, wasn’t it? They were having sex inside of him, like those disgusting snakes in the rocks. Things were fucking inside his skin right this instant.
He’d never had sex himself. Sure, he’d gotten his hand up Becky Scott’s skirt on the baseball bleachers behind the Lions Club before she’d protested about being a good Baptist girl—of course, she’d taken his hand and put it there in the first place. Ephraim realized girls couldn’t be unde
rstood the way boys could be, but still, he’d been looking forward to touching a girl again, to reexperience that light-headed sensation of his heartbeat shivering every inch of his skin. But that seemed less likely now. Because of the stranger, and the Scoutmaster. And Kent. And now himself?
Their sly squirming infested his ears. The surface of his flesh trembled as they moved beneath it—or was that just the dappling of the sunlight on his arms? No: they were there. But they were being sneaky about it. Burrowing inside of him like rats in the walls. Chewing away at the insulation and gnawing at the foundation.
He stared at the crook of his elbow. A fat blue vein pulsed there. He put his thumb on it to stop the blood flow. The beat of blood through his vein seemed out of line with the beat of his own heart. Like something else had commandeered it.
We could share. Ephraim directed this desperate plea into his body like a phantom radio signal. Share ME—my body. Okay? But like, you can’t do to me what you did to Scoutmaster Tim. You really shouldn’t have done that. Maybe you can’t help yourselves? I get it. I have control issues, too. We could—what’s the word? Like, live together. But you can’t . . . you better not . . . don’t you fucking eat me!
Ephraim screamed—the sound of a nail levered out of a wet plank of wood. What a colossal fucking idiot. Trying to reason with these things. May as well reason with the tide, with a fucking salamander. He wondered if the Scoutmaster had resorted to that—if in the final hours and minutes he’d sobbed out an entreaty, wishing for mercy. What the fuck would it matter?
Ephraim wished they’d just go away. Could he flush them out? Could he dig them out?
“Eef? . . . Ephraim?”
His name, coming from his backpack. He lifted the flap and found the walkie-talkie. Dazedly he said: “Yeah?”
“You guys left without me.”
“We couldn’t find you, Shel.”
“It’s okay, I’m not angry. How’s it going?”
“I’m by myself. Max and Newt left.”