Holding the squirming fish in his left hand, Roger worked at the hook, trying to remove it, but it was lodged deep in the fish’s throat. Roger had never been one for patience and subtle finesse. He simply tugged brutally. The hook ripped through the cartilage of the fish’s mouth, spattering blood on Roger’s wrist.
He grinned sadistically as he grasped the fish firmly and dipped it into the water to wash it, then passed a line through its gill and secured it. Geri leaned over Roger to get another look at her catch.
“Think he’s big enough for dinner?” she asked.
“He’s a big one, all right.”
Geri was uncomfortable alone with Roger, but Mick had told her to stall for time. “Maybe we should go for one more,” she said. There was still enough worm covering the barb of the hook so that she wouldn’t have to bait it again.
“It’s all right with me,” said Roger, understating the case considerably. As Geri cast a second time, Roger snuggled up close to her. “You know, Geri,” he said, “this is the first time we’ve ever been alone together. It’s nice, isn’t it? Just the two of us.”
Geri felt herself freezing up. She smiled plastically, holding it on her face like an entrant in the Miss America contest.
“Geri?”
“Mmm?”
“Are you staying in the same room with him tonight?” Roger asked.
“You should know better than to listen to Alma,” Geri said, scolding him mildly.
Roger let out a breath of relief. “I wish . . . I wish we could have done this before he came up here.”
“I’m enjoying it too, Roger,” Geri said. She tried to infuse the statement with enough warmth to sound sincere, but not so much as to give Roger the wrong impression.
“Geri,” he announced, more talkative than she’d ever seen him, “I’ve been thinking. With your dad gone and all, well . . .”
Oh no, Geri cried silently to herself, don’t get serious, Roger, please don’t!
“I’ve been thinking you need someone to help run the business, moving heavy furniture and all. I’m ready to tell Pop that I don’t want to take over the farm.”
Geri’s mind raced ahead, seeking the proper phrasing for declining his offer without hurting or enraging him. With Roger it was usually one or the other.
Before he could press the question upon her, he said, “By the way, Geri, I have a surprise for you.”
“Really?” she asked, shuddering slightly. “What is it?”
“I told you. A surprise.”
He reached behind her and jiggled her fishing rod. With the instinct of a born fisherwoman, Geri snapped her wrist to set the hook in the fish’s mouth. The sudden movement tipped the boat and Roger saw his opportunity. He grabbed her by the back of the head and pulled her face to his, pressing his mouth over hers with a violent, animal passion. His other hand wrapped firmly around her waist and entrapped her in a viselike grip.
“Roger, please! Stop it!” she managed to cry beneath the crush of Roger’s hungry lips.
But Roger wouldn’t let go, and her resistance only enflamed him. “It’s him, isn’t it? He comes down from New York and takes over. Well, I’ll kill him if he ever touches you again!”
Once more he pressed his lips to Geri’s face and neck. His rough beard and hot breath nauseated her. She managed to wedge her fist between her body and his. Had they been on dry land she would have been no match for him, but the fact that they were in the boat equalized her chances, for he had to concern himself with rocking the boat and capsizing it. As the boat tipped the struggling couple at a precarious angle, Roger shifted his weight to compensate. That was what Geri had been hoping. She pushed him with all her might. He stumbled on one of the oars and fell on his face into the bottom of the boat.
Into the worms.
The last time the boat had tipped, the box had fallen to the floor, spilling the rest of the worms out of it. They separated from each other and scurried angrily in every direction. Then Roger fell upon them, crushing a number of them but only trapping many more, who reacted as one might have expected.
They sank their teeth deep into the intruding mass of human flesh.
Which happened to belong to Roger’s face.
Roger’s scream was the most ghastly, unearthly sound Geri had ever heard. At first she didn’t understand. Then, as Roger leaped to his feet, she saw.
At least a dozen worms had burrowed into his face.
One had punctured his cheek and was squirming into his mouth.
Another had penetrated his temple and was insinuating itself into his skull.
Still another had crawled under his eyelid.
Still another had burrowed through his nose.
There were two more in his chin.
And one inside his ear.
For a moment, as Roger struggled to his feet, he was incapable of self-defense. So enormous was his shock that he stood in the boat like a zombie, treating Geri to a sight so horrifying it would be the stuff of nightmares for the rest of her life. Worms were half buried in Roger’s face, inching their way into the muscle and cartilage and brain beneath the skin.
Then Roger began to beat his face wildly, shrieking like a damned soul in the lowest ring of hell. He was absolutely mad with the agony of it, and Geri was paralyzed with fear and uncertainty. She didn’t know how to begin helping Roger. Did she beat his face, cut the exposed ends of the worms off with a knife? At the moment she felt the best thing she could do would be to draw a knife across his throat, putting him out of his misery.
Before she could decide what to do, Roger tilted backwards and capsized the boat. Still shrieking insanely, Roger half ran, half swam out of the lagoon and ran blindly into the woods.
Geri felt her feet touch firm ground and waded out of the shallows onto dry land, running after Roger. She caught sight of him clawing at his face and grappling with the thick brush like a frenzied ape. “Roger! Roger!” she shouted, trying to keep sight of him. She dreaded what would become of him if he disappeared. His only hope was to let her help him.
But there was no hope. His insane pain had given him the strength of a dozen men, and he ripped into the woods with the stamina of a great beast. She called his name several times more, but was answered only by the distant cry of the maddened boy.
She burst into sobs.
CHAPTER
X
Mick surveyed the Grimes’ property from the edge of the woods, then advanced like a guerilla soldier, from tree to tree, stealthily. He looked around once more and, seeing no sign of Willie Grimes, dashed for the truck. Again, checking for signs of Roger’s father, and finding none, he opened the doors of the truck and climbed in, shutting the doors behind him.
Once again the stench nearly overwhelmed him, he managed to avoid it by breathing through his mouth. He waited a minute for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but it was still black as pitch. He reached into his pocket for his butane lighter, and flicked it a couple of times. It burst into a low orange flame, which he held above the dusty tarpaulin.
Hoping there would be no more surprises—but tensing his legs to spring the hell out of there if there were—he unwrapped the tarp. There was the skeleton, as he’d left it. Feeling somewhat like a fugitive from a voodoo ceremony, he began to twist the head off its neck as he’d started to do before Mr. Grimes had interrupted him. It was as hot as a sauna in there, and the air was close and foul, and it was not easy to work on the head while holding his lighter in the other hand.
But at last, with a final mighty tug, Mick wrenched the head loose from the gristle that attached it to the spinal column. Placing the smooth, round skull under his shirt, he climbed out of the rear of the truck and into the bright sunlight.
“BUSTED!” a voice boomed.
Mick’s heart flipped into his throat and he was about to raise his hands in a gesture of surrender when he recognized Alma.
“Hi,” he said feebly, his voice cracking like a yodeler’s. He held the skeleton under his shirt as if
by some miracle Alma wouldn’t notice it.
No such luck.
“What you got there?”
Mick picked up his shirt tail and revealed the skull.
Alma tried to be cool, but if you’d asked her to guess what Mick had been hiding, a skull would have been the last thing to occur to her. “Ooow. Who is it?”
“That’s what I want to find out.”
“You got that out of Roger’s truck? I don’t think he’d dig that.”
“I’ll return it,” Mick said sarcastically. He started to walk back into the woods.
“Okay if I come?” she said, skipping beside him.
Mick wanted to tell her to buzz off, but there was no way. “Sure,” he sighed. “Why not?”
Mrs. Sanders finished preparations for dinner, feeling rather smug about having done it all without electricity. She was also feeling rather exhausted, since it had been years since she’d used mechanical means, rather than electric, to open cans, grate oranges for the dressing, and mash the sweet potatoes till they were as smooth as her machine usually made them—and in a fifth of the time, too.
She retreated into the living room and plopped into her chair and took out her knitting.
Before she’d gotten very far Geri burst into the house, and what a sight she was! Soaking wet and covered with black mud.
Concerned as much about her home as her daughter, Mrs. Sanders jumped to her feet to see what was the matter and to prevent Geri from tracking mud into the house. But Geri’s eyes were wide with fear and she was panting as if the Devil itself were after her.
“Mick!” she called. “Mick!”
“What is it, Geri?” her mother asked.
“Is Mick here?”
“I thought he was with you.”
“He was. He hurt his finger on a hook and went to get it cleaned up.”
Mrs. Sanders looked aghast at her daughter. She also involuntarily put her hand to her nose. The odor of that mud was overwhelming, as if her daughter had floundered around in dead fish for an hour or two.
“What happened to you?”
“I fell in the lagoon trying to pull in a fish.”
That may have been true, but Mrs. Sanders could see from the distraught look in Geri’s eyes that there was more to it than that.
“Geri? Is something wrong?”
Geri took a deep breath, shuddered, and seemed to compose herself. “No, honest. I was just thinking about the fish that got away. What a beauty!”
Mrs. Sanders didn’t buy it, but knew it was useless to pump Geri till the girl was ready to talk. Meanwhile, she was muddying and stinking up the house.
“Well, you march right upstairs and shower off that mud and filth. You smell awful. Lord only knows what those tourists dump in that water these days.”
Geri was just as eager as her mother to get out of the muddy dress and wash off the filth. She trotted upstairs and peeled out of the dress, which clung to her clammily. It fell on the bathroom floor with a plop and she stepped into the tub, longing to feel the warm needles of the shower washing the disgusting slime off her body.
She turned the shower faucets and waited.
There was a hollow gurgle, a sputter, and a cough. But there was no water.
“Oh no,” she groaned, turning the faucets to their full position. “Now what?” God, if she’d have to go the rest of the day with this mud on her she’d just about die!
She’d have just about died if she’d looked up at the shower head while fiddling with the faucets, for, probing their way through the holes in the outlet were the heads of a dozen plum-colored worms. Slowly they oozed out of the shower head like hamburger issuing out of a meat grinder.
Geri spun the faucets this way and that, unaware that a horde of vicious, hungry worms was inching its way towards the flesh of her shoulders and breasts, preparing to drop into her long red hair, preparing to burrow into her scalp and skin the way they had done to Roger only moments before.
“Mother?” she called, twiddling the faucets back to the Off position, “please hand me my robe? It’s on the chair in my room.” Geri decided the only thing to do would be to towel herself dry, perhaps using some drinking water or even club soda from the refrigerator if necessary, and drive over to Fly Lake for a quick skinny-dip.
She’d turned the faucets off not a moment too soon.
The worms withdrew into the shower head again and retreated back into the pipe to wait for another opportunity . . .
The sign said, “M. Elliot, D.D.S.”
Mick and Alma looking mystified and disappointed, stood on the wooden front porch of the house that doubled as a dentist’s office. They thumped on the door for several minutes before acknowledging that no one was home. Mick’s expression seemed to make sense. “I was afraid nobody would be in. I guess you can’t drill teeth without electricity.” The thought of how it had been done before electricity sent a shiver down Mick’s spine.
“Next time, I should wait for a big storm before I make an appointment,” Alma wisecracked.
Still holding the skull under his shirt, Mick walked around to the side of the house, Alma tripping after him like a puppy. “Where are you going?”
“I really have to check this thing out,” Mick said, peering into a window at the side. This was the office.
Mick tested the window and it slid up easily. He shook his head in amazement. If this were New York City, not only would the window be locked, it would have a gate behind it, a guard dog behind that, and an hysterical occupant with a police whistle behind that.
Mick boosted himself over the sill and dropped into the office with something less than snakelike smoothness. Alma’s entrance wasn’t much better; in fact, she fell on top of Mick, knocking the wind out of both of them. They finally got to their feet and looked around the dim, cool room.
There was a marble-topped cabinet on one side of the room, a file cabinet on another, and in the center a fully equipped dentist’s chair and stool. “This is really freaky,” Alma giggled. Mick went to the filing cabinet and opened several drawers, running his fingers over the labels on the file separators, murmuring the names of patients to himself. “May I ask what you’re looking for?” Alma asked.
“Bauter, Baxter, Bayliss, Bean, Beard . . .” Mick muttered, his fingers tripping excitedly over the file tabs. “Beardsly!”
He opened the file and pulled out a set of X-rays. Holding them up, he tried to match what they revealed to what he’d observed in the skull. “There’s three top teeth missing from the skull. I’ll need more light.”
He went to the window and held the X-rays up again, removing the skull from his shirt and handing it to Alma. She didn’t seem gratified to be the recipient of this gift, and reached into her blouse to produce a joint. While holding a human skull, it’s never a bad idea to be a little spaced out, she decided.
Mick groaned.
“Anyone I know?” Alma asked. She put the skull down, lit up, inhaled with a hiss, and joined Mick at the window.
“Shit. Aaron Beardsly.”
She looked over his shoulder at the X-ray. No doubt about it. The holes in the upper jaw corresponded exactly to those in the skull. She went back to pick up the skull and they left. Luckily they’d lingered an extra moment by the window. As they did, a seven inch worm crawled out of the eye socket of the skull and slithered to the floor.
They returned to the Sanders home double-time, Alma wisecracking all the way. “I’ll bet you could trade Mr. Beardsly’s skull for that Nazi bayonet,” she said as they rounded the corner and headed for the porch. Mick could hardly believe his ears. Oh, well, what the hell, he said to himself. The kid was young, a little high on grass, and just a bit insensitive.
“Mick! Mick!” It was Geri’s voice coming from the house, and it had a ring of urgency and distress. A second later Geri, dressed in shorts and halter, ran out to meet them. Her hair was tangled and damp, and her face was contorted with fright.
“What happened? Where’s R
oger?” Mick demanded.
Geri’s eyes widened in a gape as she looked at the skull. An eerie look came over her and she rushed away, sobbing. Mick raced after her, catching her in the kitchen. He grasped her arms in his hands and shook her violently.
She caught her breath and her body drained of tension at last.
“What is it?” Mick asked again, looking steadily into her eyes. “What happened?”
“Mick, it was awful. The worms. They were all over his face. He ran into the woods screaming. There was nothing I could do.”
Mick clutched her to his chest tightly, murmuring consolation into her ear. Slowly she pulled herself together.
“I’m really glad you didn’t chase after him. If Roger can see, he’ll probably try to make his way home too.”
Geri ran her trembling hand through her hair. “The worm farm is closer to the lagoon,” she acknowledged.
“Then we’ll go there and look for him,” Mick decided, taking command. Geri nodded weakly.
At that moment, Alma entered the kitchen, holding the skull in cupped hands as if it were a birthday cake. “Aren’t you gonna put Mr. Beardsly’s skull back in the truck before Roger gets back?” she grinned.
Geri didn’t really grasp it at first; then the name sank in. “Oh, no,” she wailed, threatening to go to pieces all over again.
Mick held her tightly again. “Geri!”
But this time there was no controlling her. She grabbed Alma by the shoulders and started shaking her violently. “Don’t you even care, you little brat? He was a beautiful old man.”
Geri’s kid sister whimpered. “Who said I didn’t care?”
Mick stepped between them. “Cut it out.”
“What’s going on down there?” Mrs. Sanders shouted. A moment later she entered the kitchen, to find dead silence. Mick and her daughters were frozen in awkward postures of feigned innocence. “Just what are you fighting about?” Mrs. Sanders demanded.
One thing you could say about Geri and Alma: they fought like cat and dog, but against the common enemy—their mother—they were fiercely loyal to each other.
“Nothing,” Alma said sweetly.
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