by Nick Cutter
His reverie broke only once they began to touch his skin. And the moment he realized this was the moment it ceased to truly matter.
“Oh!” Shelley said.
He jumped in the water—a silly, girlish little hop. “Fishy!” he said, believing that a sunfish or saltwater eel had brushed his thigh. But then he looked down, saw the worms streaming out of Kent’s skull case, wriggling and darting . . . his rubbery face settled into an unfamiliar expression: horrified revulsion.
He stared, entranced. They were so small. The moon played over their bodies, almost shining right through them. They moved in hypnotic, transfixing undulations. He nearly laughed—not because the sight of them was funny, but because they didn’t even seem a proper part of his existence. They were funny because they weren’t entirely real . . .
They flicked around him in playful patterns. There were just so many. They curled into one another, jesting and flirting. He felt something playing against his skin but it was a distant, forgettable sensation. A sting on his hand. A light, burning sensation like a wasp sting, only much less severe. It was followed by another and another and—
Shelley was rocked by an abrupt surge of adrenaline. His fingers unkinked from Kent’s hair. He beat the water with his palms—frenetically, spastically. His gorge rose.
They were everywhere, clinging to him somehow. He uttered shrill, nasal, squeaky notes of violent distaste: “Eee! EeeeEEEE!”
The threads became more animated. They poured out of the dead thing’s skull, leaving a milky contrail in the dark water—it looked like a streamer fluttering from some grisly Fourth of July float.
They wriggled down Shelley’s trousers, flitting and licking against his skin.
He swept the water with his forearm, trying to propel them away. His fear was unlike any he’d ever known; it made him desperate. Water fanned up, each droplet alive with wriggling white, landing on his arms and neck and lips. He snuffled salt water up his nose, sputtering on it.
He felt them inside his underwear. Some were so thin that they passed right through the weave of the fabric, needling inside, finding the sensitive skin at the bulb of his penis, the little hole where the piss came out.
Kent’s body floated out past the breakwater. Threads continued to spill from it, sifting down through the water. The stars played their metallic light upon the waves. Kent was a silver shape dressed in the brightness of the moon. Smaller shapes—inquisitive fish—darted at his appendages, fussing with his fingers and hair.
LATER, SHELLEY dragged himself back to shore. He shambled up the beachhead in hesitant steps. His lower lip hung slackly, a globule of spit suspended from it. The glob stretched until it snapped, splashing the rocks.
Tiny white things thrashed in the wetness.
He returned to the campfire and stared into its dead embers. The walkie-talkie was there, but the game with Ephraim was a distant concern.
He could resume it when Ephraim returned . . . if.
A gray curtain draped over Shelley’s thoughts—but beneath it and around its edges, things jigged and capered.
His hand kneaded his crotch anxiously. The pleasure he’d experienced earlier with Kent was gone. Now that area itched and burned. Could be a case of crotch crickets. Shelley had once overheard a construction worker saying that to his buddy while clawing ruefully at his groin. Shelley was pretty sure this wasn’t crotch crickets—it was a burn, a painful one, inside of him now. It’d raced up his piss-pipe like lit gunpowder, a bright and lively pain that ebbed to a strange hum inside his skin. Now he felt it spreading through him in slow, sonorous waves.
He bit his lip. He’d made a mistake. A big one, this time. Gotten carried away with his games. Lost sight of the danger.
It was only for a second, though, an internal voice whined. Just a heartbeat.
He sat cross-legged on the dirt. The burn receded. As the moments passed, it didn’t feel so bad at all. A comforting numbness coursed through his limbs, his veins filling with some wondrous warm nectar.
His stomach, though. That was grumbling, revving up—roaring.
Shelley’s hands clenched, tearing up clumps of dirt. Without realizing or truly caring, he filled his mouth with the contents of his hands. He chewed methodically. Grit and shell shards ground between his teeth. It sounded like he was eating handfuls of tiny bones.
“Bleh,” he said, letting the half-chewed mess fall out of his mouth. His tongue was a blackened root. He looked like a ghoul who’d been eating his way down to a coffin.
“Noooooobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going to the garden to eat worms—to eat worms . . .”
Shelley began to laugh. A high, piercing sound like the scream of a gull. It stripped out over the water, touching not one pair of human ears.
SHELLEY SAT that way for a few hours. He did not speak. He was motionless—except for a brief spell where he shook uncontrollably, unable to control his limbs.
When the sky reached its deepest ebony, Shelley began to feed in earnest.
33
NEWTON BUILT a fire on the beach using the driftwood he and Max gathered. It took quite a while to get it lit: his fingers were shivering badly.
After it was going, they huddled on the sand with their shoulders touching lightly. Both of them had stripped to their skivvies—Newton’s field book advised against staying in wet clothes. The water dried on their naked flesh, leaving a whitened sheen of salt. Their internal temperatures inched back up.
They hadn’t spoken since burying the turtle, which they’d done before building the fire. Every so often, their gazes drifted to the spot on the beach where the sand had been smoothed by their trembling palms.
Newton’s eyes found Max’s above the fire. “Do you think it will go to Heaven?”
“The turtle?” Max’s shoulders lifted imperceptibly. “I really don’t know. It could. If there is a Heaven, I guess it ought to—I mean, right? What would that turtle ever have done to deserve not to go to Heaven?”
Newton’s shoulders relaxed, then stiffened again as a worried cast came over his face.
“What about the Scoutmaster?”
Max frowned. “Why are you asking me?”
“Your dad’s the county coroner. He works with the priests and pastors, yeah? I figured he’d know.”
For all of Newton’s smarts, he could be incredibly thickheaded. “I don’t know, Newt. I’m not the one who makes those choices, am I? Nobody really knows. Not my dad or the priests or anyone. I guess when we die, we’ll know who was right about everything.”
“But Scoutmaster Tim was a good person.”
Max blew a lock of damp hair off his forehead. “Sure he was. He was a doctor. He helped people. I guess . . . yeah. He’d go to Heaven.”
“Do you think he’s there now? Looking down?”
“Depends how long it took him to get there. Maybe he had a few stopovers.” Max saw the look of dread on Newton’s face and said: “Yes. He’s up there. He’s happy now.”
“I never saw a dead person before, Max.”
“I never saw a dead person like that, either.”
“Were you scared?”
Max nodded.
“You didn’t look scared.”
“Well, I was.”
The night’s silence stretched over the immensity of the ocean—an impossibly quiet vista that stirred fear in Max’s heart. Would death be like that: endless liquid silence?
Newton grabbed a piece of wood from the pile, inspecting it by the fire’s glow. A black spider picked its way across it. Newton let it crawl onto his fingers.
“Careful,” Max said. “What if it’s poisonous?”
“Poisonous ones have red bells on their abdomens. This one is pure black.”
It climbed off his fingertip. Newton watched it go with a dreamy look. “A spider used to live inside Mom’s car,” he said. “She parked it under the oak in our driveway. Every time she took the car out, she’d see a web hanging between the side-view mirror
and the windshield. She would snap it. The next time she looked it’d be back. Finally she tilted the side-view mirror as far as it would go and looked into the compartment behind. A little white spider was living in there. Every night it came out and strung a web. Mom would come out and snap it. So it would just build it again.”
“Did she kill it?” Max said.
“Absolutely not,” Newton said fiercely. “Who was it hurting? She even left its web alone from then on. But then one day we were driving and I spotted the spider on the windshield. We were doing, like, eighty, tooling down the highway to Charlottetown. It was trying to build another web—on the windshield while the car was ripping down the road. I thought it would blow away. I could see the sunlight glinting on the web it had managed to lay down. Crazy, right? Mom pulled over. We took the spider and put her in an apple tree along the road. Her new home.”
Newton smiled. Max figured he was reliving the memory: on the roadside on a wet spring day, the cree-cree of crickets in the long grass as his mother let the little spider slip off her finger onto the branch of an apple tree clung with pink blossoms. It was a nice image.
“After we got back on the road, Mom said, ‘Insects can make a home for themselves almost anywhere. They say that about cockroaches: if there’s ever a global Armageddon, they’ll be the only things left. You can’t beat a bug for adaptability.’ I think humans can be the same, too—don’t you think, Max? If we really need to, we can survive almost anywhere.”
Knotholes popped in the fire. Max’s ears became attuned to another sound: febrile cracking noises coming from the darkness where the rocks met the beach, near the spot where they had buried the turtle.
“You hear that, Max?”
“Hear what?”
Newton got up and crept toward the noises. His mind conjured up an absurd image that was nonetheless chilling: the reanimated sea turtle clawing itself up from its sandy grave, blood dripping from its puncture wounds, its bonelike mouth snap-snapping.
The fire threw wandering sheets of light upon the rock. The cracking noises grew louder. They were joined by other sounds overhead: the rustle of wings in the cliffs.
“Oh my God.”
A clutch of pale green eggs—the patina of the sea—were buried in the sand. Each about half the size of a chicken egg. They had been covered in a fine carpet of sand. The boys had totally missed them.
Each egg was struggling with minute hectic life. Shards of shell broke off. The tiny limbs of unknown creatures were pushing themselves out.
“What are they?” Max said.
They didn’t have to wait long to find out. When the first flipper appeared, Newton whispered: “They’re turtles.”
The scenario played out in Max’s mind: a mama turtle swims in with the high tide to lay her eggs. She gets stuck in a tide pool. Next a pair of horrible two-legged things blunder into the pool, heave her onto the sand, and . . .
The baby turtles didn’t even look like turtles, the same way those baby shearwaters on the kitchen table hadn’t really looked like birds. They had no real shell, only a translucent carapace draping their grape-size bodies. You could see through their skin as if through a greasy fast-food bag: the dark pinbone of their spines, the weird movement of their organs. For all their newborn freshness, they still looked ineffably old. Max reached to touch one. Newton grabbed his wrist.
“You can’t. If it gets human smell on it, its mom won’t take it back.”
It took a moment for it to sink in.
“Let’s just get them into the water,” Max said softly.
Newton nodded. “I guess it’s okay to touch them for that.”
With infinite care, the boys picked up the baby turtles and carried them across the sand. They tenderly picked the shards of eggshell off their bodies. They knelt at the shore and let them go. Their flippers paddled as they made a beeline for the open sea.
The air above was alive with harried wing beats and livid screeches, the bats and gulls having been thwarted in their attempt to poach an easy meal.
The boys made sure every turtle made it safely into the water. The birds made crazed dive-bombs: their wings pelted the ocean, desperate to snag the babies before they submerged.
“No, you bastards!”
Max stumbled into the water, waving his arms. He shadowed the turtles into deeper waters, wading out as they skimmed through the sea, coaxing them lightly with his hands.
“Go on, now. Swim, swim. Fast as you can.”
The water rose to his stomach. The riptide sucked at his legs. Only then did he reluctantly return to shore, dripping and shivering.
They returned to the fire. Newton smiled wanly and made a checkmark in the night air.
“That’s our good deed for the day.”
* * *
From Troop 52:
Legacy of the Modified Hydatid
(AS PUBLISHED IN GQ MAGAZINE) BY CHRIS PACKER:
LIKE TOM PADGETT, Dr. Clive Edgerton has earned his fair share of nicknames.
Dr. Mengele 2.0.
Dr. Death.
Then there are the garden-variety appellants that society as a whole tends to apply to men like him.
Megalomaniac.
Mad scientist.
Psychopath.
Then there is the sobriquet that Edgerton himself insists you call him by—it was, in fact, one of the conditions of our interview—the title he’s rightfully earned, having graduated with top honors from the finest medical learning institute on the east coast:
Doctor.
“Dr. Edgerton is most likely pathologically insane,” says his administering physician, Dr. Loretta Hughes. “If you look at the things he has done—compounded by his near total lack of remorse regarding them—you can’t help but draw that conclusion.”
She leads me down an austere hallway inside the Kingston Penitentiary, her crepe-soled shoes whispering on the pea-green tiles. Edgerton has been incarcerated here, in the mental health wing, since his arrest. The ensuing trial became a sensation; Edgerton had sat defiantly in the middle of the media storm. His shaven head and outrageous courtroom antics—the grandstanding, the fulminating—gave him the air of a revivalist preacher. The talking heads and pundits dined out for months on Edgerton’s daily servings of bloody red meat.
“But perhaps he’s not insane,” Hughes tells me. “The fact may be that his brain is simply unmappable. He is incredibly intelligent. I hate to use a cliché like ‘off the charts,’ but . . . the fact is that modern science has no real means to judge an intellect like his. It would have been the same with Leonardo da Vinci. The dividing line between genius and insanity is very thin and quite permeable—which is why so many geniuses descend into madness.”
When I remark that Edgerton’s genius was incredibly destructive, Hughes matter-of-factly says: “Da Vinci drew up the blueprint for the first land mine. There’s plenty of blood on his hands, too.”
Edgerton’s cell is 18-by-18, gray brick, with a single cot and a stainless steel commode. As the prison’s marquee prisoner, he doesn’t share his cell. The walls are festooned with charts and formulae and an oversize poster of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
“Da Vinci came up with the idea for the land mine,” I tell him by way of introduction. “Did you know that?”
“Of course,” he tells me in the bristly manner that would be familiar to anyone who saw his televised trial.
Up close it is shocking just how un-academic Edgerton looks. He’s big. Tall. Muscular. Thick across the shoulders, which taper down to a trim waist. Twice during our interview he will drop without warning and pump out exactly fifty push-ups before returning to our conversation. He’s got a Joe Namath quality: Broadway Joe a few years past his prime, going a little to seed but still possessed of the grace and quickness from his playing days.
There are two concessions to the scientist stereotype. The first is his head: he prefers to keep it shaven; it is bulbous, venous, ovoid, vaguely alien in appearance. The second is his gla
sses: thick lensed, black and boxy. The lenses are stuck with an accretion of grit and eye crust: it’s as though Edgerton can’t be bothered to wipe them. His chilly green eyes seem to be staring at me through a grease-streaked window.
Those eyes. They are not normal eyes. They seem to stare through me as though I were glass, focusing on the dead brick behind me.
“Do you know anything about Asian killer wasps?” he asks abruptly. “The Asian killer wasp is the only insect on earth that kills for fun. They’re just gigantic. A full two inches long. They love killing honeybees. They’ll destroy entire colonies. Only takes a few minutes. They grab a bee and lop its head off with their giant mandibles, like popping the head off a dandelion. It would be like a giant mutant running loose in a nursery, stomping babies to death. No reason. They just enjoy doing it.”
I ask if wasps are as fascinating to him as worms.
“Oh no,” he says. “Worms are much more interesting. Worms are indiscriminate, you see. They will eat anything from a hippopotamus to an aphid. They are the ultimate piggybackers: invite one inside and it’s there for good. They’re nightmare houseguests: once they’re in, you’ll never get rid of them. They’re one of the oldest species on earth. Right after the crust cooled there were worms swimming in the primordial soup. The first creature to flop out of a tide pool onto land had a worm inside of it, I guarantee you.”
He smiled vacantly. “They say cockroaches will be the last things left on earth after a nuclear holocaust. Don’t believe it. The last thing on earth will be a worm in the guts of those cockroaches, sucking them dry.”
He pauses as if to regroup. Our conversation has this tenor: elliptical, backtracking, dead-ending.
“They say dolphins and pigs are the only animals that fuck for fun,” he tells me. “Other than us, of course. Worms fuck themselves. They lay eggs in their own skin. Once a worm gets long enough, a segment detaches to become its own worm. They really are motherfuckers, pardon the pun. There’s no joy in it for them at all. No satisfaction of creation, only endless self-creation.”