The shape moved fluidly across the top of the lumpy blanket, managing the uneven surface with ease. It stopped a few feet from Tyler, coming to an abrupt halt directly in line with the dull glow from the light that continued to struggle to penetrate the dust-filled air.
The creature was roughly the size of a small dinner plate; a thick, milky white dinner plate like a newly molted crab. And it did kind of look like a crab, although it wasn’t a crab—it wasn’t quite right. For one, the creature had six legs instead of eight, and each of the legs had several joints—too many knots of cartilage—at least four or five by Kent’s count.
“Fucking stuck,” Tyler grumbled as he tried to yank the blanket back once more.
The thing suddenly reared up—which was the only way Kent knew how to describe it—the many joints in those six legs articulating oddly, almost robotically. The revealed underside was a moist, opaque white, which at first Kent thought was featureless. But then the thing hissed, and he noticed a small, quarter-sized puckering orifice in the center of its mass. And inside this orifice, Kent caught a glimpse of row upon row of miniature teeth.
Staring at those rows of oscillating teeth, Kent knew that there was no way that both of them were getting out of the basement alive.
16.
”Tyler!” someone shouted, but it was too late. When the boy finally looked up from the network of capillaries on the underside of what Kent was fairly certain now was a pelt or skin of some sort, the milky white thing had already dropped back down on all six of its legs. As he watched in horror, it lowered even further in time with the rhythmic cracking of its jointed appendages, each seeming to stiffen and lock into place.
“Tyler?” Kent whispered.
Before Tyler could answer, there was another crack, a louder, more defined sound, and the crab-like creature—the palil—suddenly flung itself through the air, covering the distance between it and Tyler in what could only be described as grace. In the blink of an eye, the thing landed square on the side and back of Tyler’s shaved head and the boy screamed. Almost immediately upon impact, the articulated leg joints fanned out until the thing was flush against the side of his head like a cap. Then it seemed to lock into place, and Tyler screamed again.
“What’s going on?” Sergio yelled.
Kent couldn’t tear his eyes away to look up, but he thought that perhaps Tyler was too deep in the dark room for them to see the thing that was latched onto his head.
“Get it off me!” Tyler screamed, but his own hands hung in midair at shoulder level, clearly indecisive.
Kent was still frozen, but he couldn’t leave, couldn’t go to his friend, even if he wanted to; he had to keep turning the crank. The thought of being immersed in darkness with that thing was unbearable.
Tyler started to yell continuously now, a noise that reverberated off the brick walls of the basement like a drumroll.
“Tyler? Kent?” Sergio cried from above. “What the fuck is going on down there?”
Kent didn’t answer, but even if he could’ve found the words, he would have remained silent; he had no idea what the fuck was happening.
Tyler was waving his hands above his head, moving them in concentric circles, and with every rotation he got closer and closer to thing that was pressed against his shaved scalp.
“Kent?” he whispered, his eyes wet. “What the fuck is it?”
Kent shook his head slowly, tears streaming from his own eyes.
“Please,” Tyler pleaded, “get it off me.”
There was a loud crunching sound and the crab suddenly contracted, and it was as if Tyler’s skin—all of it, all of the skin covering his entire face and head—was pulled in the direction of the crab. He started to moan as his eyebrow and eyelids were pulled upward, his left nostril and the corner of his mouth extending unnaturally. As Kent watched, the boy’s eyes began to roll back into his head.
“Get it off me,” he blubbered between moans.
“What the fuck is going on down there? Get out of there!” Sergio screeched.
“I can’t move!” Kent finally managed to blurt out, eyes still wide in horror. “I have to keep turning the fucking handle! Rip it off, Tyler!”
Although Tyler was still moaning, a long, undulating wail, his hands stopped whirring for a moment and they hovered just a few inches above the crab-like thing.
“Take it off!” Kent yelled, furiously cranking the handle. “Just pull the fucking thing off!”
Somewhere mixed with the buzzing electricity and whirring fan, he picked up the undertones of more cracking sounds, again muffled. It sounded like someone popping small packing bubbles under a blanket. There were more of these things under the animal skins, of that Kent had no doubt.
Tyler’s hands finally came down on top of the creature, his fingers overlapping on its surface. For another moment he hesitated, a grimace forming on his face as he felt the strange texture beneath his palms. Then Kent saw Tyler’s eyes roll forward, and his grasp of the thing tightened to the point that his knuckles went a stark white even in the dim yellow glow from the lightbulb.
“Pull, Tyler, pull!”
Tyler pulled. He pulled so hard that his face—his horribly stretched face—started to turn a deep red, bordering on purple. At first, nothing happened, but Tyler gritted his teeth and persisted, grunting as he tried to pry the crab from his head.
“Come over here,” Kent shouted, still turning the handle. His arm and shoulder were screaming now, his muscles begging for him to stop.
Tyler, still pulling at the crab, took an awkward step toward Kent. The cracking sound, coming from somewhere behind his friend, intensified, but Kent barely noticed. His eyes were transfixed on the milky palil that seemed to have adhered to Tyler’s head.
After another few steps, he passed within view of the boys above, and Kent heard a collective intake of breath. Kent used all of his willpower to avoid looking behind Tyler, to avoid focusing on the disturbing movements beneath the brown fur that flashed in his periphery.
When Tyler stumbled to within a foot of Kent, he finally got a good look at the thing, and immediately realized that it was not smooth as he had first thought. Instead, he noticed hundreds of tiny perforations speckling the otherwise hard surface that seemed to flutter every few seconds, the thin membrane surrounding the interior of each vibrating like a miniature blowhole.
The thing’s legs were flattened against Tyler’s head and face, one of them covering most of his left eye. And it had six knuckles and not four or five as Kent had first thought, each one a knot of tough cartilage-like tissue.
Tyler moaned again, and when his fingers tensed as he again tried to yank the thing off his head, Kent realized just how far his skin was stretched. There were small dots of blood forming at the corners of his left eyelid and nostril, and the skin in these places was so thin that it was bordering on translucent. Kent shuddered.
“Do something! Kent, fucking do something!” Sergio screamed, and something inside Kent broke.
At long last, Kent made a decision.
He reached out with his free hand and grabbed the thing’s surface, trying to reach around the backside between Tyler’s hands.
The palil was damp, cold, and hard. Every few seconds, the hundreds of tiny orifices fluttered, puffing cool air between Kent’s fingers. The sensation made him gag—it was like holding a perforated crab, one that thrummed and vibrated like a hummingbird. Mustering all of his courage, he grasped the ridge separating the hard topside and leathery underside with his free hand and yanked it toward himself, trying to use the front edge as a lever.
Nothing. It didn’t move at all.
He yanked again, and Tyler coordinated his efforts and pulled with him. This time, the crab-thing seemed to lift a bit; but instead of seeing dead space between the crab and Tyler’s head, it took the skin with it.
A cluster of bloody spider webs splayed from the corner of Tyler’s eye as his skin reached its elastic end.
“Get it o
ff,” Tyler pleaded, the tears spilling from his eye mixing with the blood, forming pink streaks that traced down his cheeks.
Kent could see deeper into his friend’s eye socket than he had ever wanted to, and felt his gut revolt. It was all he could do to keep from letting go of the handle and vomiting.
“Tyler! Kent! What the fuck is going on?” Sergio screamed from above.
Kent ignored the shouts and Tyler’s continuous moaning and tried to concentrate.
It was clear that the thing—the palil—wouldn’t come off by pulling it unless it took Tyler’s skin with it, which wasn’t an option.
Kent’s eyes flicked to the handle that his now numb arm cranked, and then to the debris around his feet from the collapsed staircase. He released his grip from the crab.
“What’re you doing?” Tyler moaned. “Don’t let go! Keep pulling!”
Kent ignored his friend; he had made up his mind.
The only thing that made sense was to smash the palil; letting go of the handle and smash the hissing fucker in the darkness. A dangerous proposition, no less, as if he missed the thing then he could very well brain Tyler.
His eyes darted to the blood that now spilled from the network of splits in Tyler’s stretched face.
No other option.
To his left, just three or four feet from him, was what looked like half of a stair tread that had smashed in such a way that one end was tapered. Eyeing the splintered end, he thought he might be able to grip it.
“Go get help!” he screamed over Tyler’s moans and the increasingly loud cracking sound from beneath the fur pelts. “Sergio, Baird, go get some fucking help!”
“I’m not goin—”
“Go get some fucking help!” Kent screamed hysterically.
He took one last look at Tyler’s stretched face, the boy’s fluttering eyelids, his hands still clutching the palil, rhythmically pulling the thing so that it looked like his face was pulsating, and Kent made up his mind.
Without hesitating, Kent stopped spinning the handle and leaned far to his left, feeling for the wood as the light blinked out almost immediately. He nearly careened over onto his side, his body confused by the fact that his arm was no longer spinning around in a rapid circle. Righting himself, Kent reached into the darkness, his fingers trying to grasp the broken stair, all the while trying not to stray far from the hand crank.
His heart skipped a beat when his groping hand didn’t immediately find the wood. His fingers desperately clawed at the dirt floor, so much of it collecting beneath his nails that he nearly cried out.
A crack—one of those synovial pops—sounded so close to him that he almost pissed himself.
No! Please, no!
But then his fingers scraped across the familiar surface of worn wood, and he immediately grabbed the narrow end of the stair. Having found the object, he managed to orient himself and scrambled back to his feet before moving directly to his right.
Amazingly, his hand found the handle of the crank generator almost immediately, and although every muscle on his right side protested—his shoulder, bicep, and back—he forced himself to spin it again.
In the thirty or so seconds that had passed since the lights had gone off, things had changed. And not for the better.
Tyler must have staggered backward in the darkness, as he was now a few feet closer to the fur-covered eggs, and his eyes had completely rolled back into his head so that only the whites were visible. The chitinous, cracking creature—the cracker— seemed unchanged; it was still fused to Tyler’s shaved head, the tiny blowholes still fluttering every few seconds. Kent inspected it closely for a second, trying to figure out if it had eyes or some other sensitive organ that he might be able to poke with the sharp end of the piece of wood instead of striking it.
He found nothing; it was just a symmetrical, flattened disc with six knobby legs.
A particularly low moan spewed from Tyler’s open mouth, and his knees buckled. It was clear that he only had a moment or two before Tyler collapsed, passed out, or succumbed to whatever the thing was doing to him.
Grip it and rip it.
He heard muffled voices from above and more cracking from behind Tyler, but he drowned out these distractions and readied himself.
Despite only using one hand, the broken stair’s arced descent was violent and deliberate. It struck the top of the hard crab shell studded with the hundreds of tiny holes, and Kent heard a new sound: a hollow thunk that sounded like a boulder being dropped into a lake.
Then his entire left side erupted in vibrations.
17.
It was a mistake; all of it was a mistake.
Leaving the confines of their tents; drinking the bottle of vodka; coming to this abandoned Estate and playing Ba di ba. It was a mistake to stop pulling the cracker, it was a mistake telling Baird and Sergio to leave, and it was a mistake to try to smash the cracker with the broken wooden step. Mistakes, all of them.
The shell did not fracture like Kent had expected, despite the speed of his strike and the sound that it made when the blow landed. But it didn’t go unnoticed, either; instead, the thing started to move.
At first, the legs that had been flattened against Tyler’s skull started to curl up, bending at the many joints in a coordinated, almost hypnotic, manner. Then the cracker seemed to disengage from Tyler’s skin, although judging by the way the boy’s moans continued unabated, this offered him little relief.
As the legs retracted, the suction from the tiny, tooth-filled orifice seemed to lessen and the tear marks on Tyler’s skin seemed to relax. Kent’s stomach did another barrel roll. The skin on the boy’s face was loose—too loose—and it seemed to have disconnected from the muscle and sinew beneath, the sagging flesh hanging over his left eye socket like a limp sail on a windless day. It was as if Tyler had developed some sort of palsy or affect; the whole left side of his face dropped dramatically. What made it worse was that his eye hole didn’t line up perfectly anymore; Kent couldn’t make out the white part of his eye beneath the sagging upper lid, while the lower hung too low, revealing a wet red tangle of muscle.
Kent almost swung the piece of wood again, thinking that the cracker might be more vulnerable now that it had detached, but before he had a chance to react, the thing seemed to prop itself up on those six heavily jointed legs like a tripod. The palil paused once it reached its apex, stretching to about eight or ten inches above Tyler’s head, and Kent caught a glimpse of the ragged hole in Tyler’s skin where it had been affixed. If it had had recognizable eyes, Kent would have guessed it was staring at him.
Still turning the handle like a madman, Kent finally allowed himself a shallow breath, but remained otherwise still. He was mesmerized by the way the thing seemed to flutter every few seconds as air was forced through those tiny holes all at once.
I should hit it again—swipe it off his head.
But Kent did nothing—he couldn’t make up his mind. Instead, he watched helplessly as the thing cracked once—a hard, resounding snap—its legs articulating beneath its body at alarming speed, forming a single, almost drill-like appendage.
What happened next made Kent piss himself.
The palil seemed to dive into the ragged hole it had made in Tyler’s skin, dissecting what little sinewy connections remained as it burrowed beneath the boy’s flesh. Then, somehow, inexplicably, the thing managed to flip over in the confined pace, the small, anus-like orifice wriggling back and forth until it centered on the hole in his skin, the multitude of tiny teeth now exposed to the outside world.
Tyler staggered backwards, but his ungainly movements did nothing to stop the cracker’s progress. The legs slowly and methodically articulated the other way—double-jointed, it appeared—so that once again they were completely flat against his head, only this time they were beneath his skin. It looked like six sausages pressed beneath a thin layer of uncooked filo pastry; six horrific Beef Wellingtons ready to go into the oven.
Like a madman, and
fearing that he was indeed going mad, Kent continued to spin the crank, his body in full automation mode now, the warmth spreading from his crotch not even registering.
It was odd how, what with Tyler’s stretched skin and the thing now burrowed beneath, the holes—the eyes, the mouth—almost seemed to line up again.
Almost perfect, Kent thought, his head spinning.
Except, of course, it wasn’t perfect; there was a knobby protrusion that was buried at his temple like a shallow, upside-down bowl.
At the same moment that Tyler’s body went limp, Kent heard a chorus of other cracks—groups of six, all the same cadence.
Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.
More movement caught his eye, and for the first time in what seemed like an eternity, Kent managed to look away from his boyhood friend. There, perched on top of the now ragged brown, grey, and black furs were about a half dozen crackers, all poised, all of their bodies lowering—crouching—in unison as each of their horrible six legs snapped into place.
The timing was nearly perfect: just as Tyler fell backward into the mass of eggs and skins, the crackers sprang, two of them landing and immediately suctioning to his head while the others landed on his exposed hands and neck.
Unlike the first cracker, these ones took no time burrowing into and underneath the boy’s skin.
Kent heard Tyler utter one final moan before his body sunk into the animal skins, a bubbling sound and a gassy release spewing forth as his body was quickly coated in an obscene frothy bath.
Kent could take it no longer. His turned to the hole in the ceiling, at what had once been the stairwell entrance—the trapdoor. Then, without thinking, he let go of the crank handle and bolted toward the opening just as the light faded and he was once again immersed in blackness.
18.
Kent had no idea how he had managed to get out of the basement, let alone how he had sprinted his way across the charred foyer, through the open doorway, and into the pitch black night. The burning scrapes on his palms and forearms suggested that he had somehow leapt from and scrambled out of the basement, but he couldn’t even remember making the decision to leave. He was sweating profusely as he ran, his right arm now completely numb, his inner thighs chafing from the salt left behind by his urine.
Insatiable Series Omnibus Edition (Books 1-3) Page 36