Squirm

by Richard Curtis

  “Young lady,” Mrs. Sanders started to say angrily. It was hot, Mrs. Sanders was exhausted from the morning’s preparations, and her nerves were frayed by the storm and all the inconvenience it had caused. At the moment she felt almost ready to go off the deep end.

  “I . . . told her that it was her turn to serve dinner tonight,” Geri said. Lying did not come too facilely to her tongue, but it was the best explanation she could come up with on short notice.

  Mrs. Sanders glared at Alma, who’d backed away and deposited the skull on a table behind a short wall separating the kitchen from the back door. “Since Geri has a guest, I think it would be a nice gesture if you offered to serve dinner, whether it’s your turn or not.”

  Alma nodded. “It’s settled,” Mrs. Sanders said sternly. She looked at Geri. “Did you tell Alma that you invited Roger for dinner?”

  Geri gulped. “No, I forgot.”

  “Alma, let’s try to think of an extra side dish,” Mrs. Sanders touched the collar of her blouse and looked dreamily off into space. “Lord only knows when’s the last time we had two hungry men around here,” she murmured coyly, and then left.

  The two girls heaved a great gust of relief. “I’m sorry,” Geri said, offering a conciliatory hand to Alma.

  Alma accepted it. The sisters squabbled all the time, but like squalls their fights passed quickly enough. “It’s all right,” said Alma. “I’m really worried about her. I’ve never seen her this freaked out.”

  “Try to stay with her till we get back, okay?” Geri said.

  Alma nodded.

  Mick and Geri left the house. Alma decided it would be a good idea to deposit the skull in a less visible place. She picked it up and gazed at it. Suddenly, for the first time, the enormity of it struck her: just a few days ago, this had been a human being and one she’d known well since childhood. She clapped her hand over her mouth and ran into the backyard gagging.

  CHAPTER

  XI

  “I wonder what made those worms act that way?” Mick pondered aloud as they got into the car. “You think maybe Roger’s old man is fooling around with electricity?”

  “What electricity?” Geri asked.

  “Good point,” said Mick, his aspirations to become a Sherlock Holmes gravely checked. What electricity indeed? There wasn’t so much as a volt of the stuff to be found anywhere in Fly Creek outside of automobile batteries.

  They drove a short way down the back road of the Grimes’ property in the hopes of seeing Mr. Grimes or his son. There was no sign of either, just acres and acres of rich, newly tilled soil, the breeding ground for worms too numerous to count.

  They arrived at a shack that stood at the end of the farm opposite the Grimes’ home, a crude, unpainted structure of warped gray siding and rotten shingles. It was surrounded by crates and crate boards, rusting implements, and the detritus of some twenty years of labor without adequate help to keep the place trim.

  The sky overhead had begun to cloud as it habitually did late in the afternoon here on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. The sun had sunk behind some of these clouds, throwing ominous shafts of shadowless pearly light over the deserted aspect of the farm. The birds had begun to cease their relentless twitter, and a breeze had gotten up, swaying the trees on the perimeter of the farm like troupes of lugubrious dancers.

  Geri, still deeply shaken by her recent traumatic experience in the rowboat with Roger, put her hand on the door handle but seemed almost paralytically incapable of getting out.

  Mick appreciated this and told her to wait in the car. “I hope we find him before it gets dark,” he said, getting out. This was not strictly true. From Geri’s description of the dreadful damage inflicted on Roger’s face, Mick wasn’t sure he’d want to confront him face to face in this fading light. Young and healthy though he was, there was no law saying he couldn’t have a heart attack if the fright were intense enough. His memory of that worm burrowing under his finger was fresh enough—he had the pain of the wound to remind him, if nothing else—to conjure the most gruesome fantasy of what a man’s face would look like if it took the attack of a dozen of the crazed creatures at one time.

  But the most gruesome fantasy he could conjure up was no match for the real thing.

  Had he turned around he’d have seen it.

  Had Geri turned around she’d have seen it too, for it had staggered out of the woods behind the car and stood, wavering like a scarecrow in the wind, about twenty yards away. “Thing” was the right word for it, too, for this could truly not be called a human being. Where a face had been were now a dozen burrows, each as wide as the entry hole of a .38 caliber slug, and from out of each the tail of a worm flicked and quivered. The cheeks were furrowed where the worms had insinuated their way under the flesh. Dried blood and gore blotched his face. His eyes stared lifelessly out of a mutilated head.

  His hands hung limply at his side. Apparently some of the worms had penetrated the cavities of his skull and entered the brain, and a few had probably damaged his brain sufficiently to sever some of the host’s motor centers. Thus he’d lost either his will to resist and fight off the parasites under his flesh, or his ability, or both.

  But they hadn’t penetrated all of his brain. There was enough left to determine to destroy the humans who had inflicted this living death upon him.

  He began advancing on the car. If Geri had looked in the rear view mirror she’d have seen it, but she sat slumped down in the driver’s seat, trying to subdue the attack of nerves that had left her limp in the wake of the afternoon’s events.

  Roger staggered to within a few yards of the car. With lifeless eyes he watched Mick poking around the shack. Then he stopped.

  Mick had picked up a spade.

  In the dim reaches of Roger’s tortured brain he saw the spade as a possible weapon to be used against him if he attacked Geri now. Faltering, he studied the hated intruder, weighing strength against strength, and concluded the odds were too high. This was not the right time. Wavering, the tortured boy turned and staggered off into the woods again, to bide his time.

  Mick and Geri never knew how close they’d come. But they would, soon enough.

  Mick probed the fresh soil around the shack with the spade. He’d found a fragment of yellow plaid cloth near one of the crates, and remembered that Mr. Grimes had been wearing a shirt of that same color earlier in the day.

  Poking in the soil, he came across a few splintered fragments of crate material, and they seemed fresh and dry. He looked around some more and then stopped dead in his tracks. A little crimson patch on a plot of grass. And trailing away from it, dried crimson dots about a foot apart. Blood.

  The trail led to an area behind a stack of crates and a low growth of weeds. Hesitantly Mick followed the trail, knowing he would find something he didn’t want to see, yet drawn to it compellingly. He didn’t know why, he simply knew he could not turn his back on whatever it was that lay behind those crates.

  Grasping the handle of the spade tightly, preparing to swing with all his might at whatever enemy might lurk behind that stack of boxes, he stepped cautiously along the trail of blood and peered around the side of the crates.

  Mick’s eyes shut tightly and a wince escaped his lips involuntarily.

  It was Willie Grimes, dead.

  He lay on his back, his mud-spattered face contorted in a ghastly grimace, proclaiming a pain that no human should be asked to endure. His eyes stared up at the sky, the life mercifully drained from them.

  There was no indication of what had killed the poor man. Mick kneeled down to examine the chest for wounds, and was about to reach out to unbutton the man’s shirt when he thought he saw Grimes’s chest rise and fall. Could it be that he was alive?

  Mick grabbed the shirt with both hands and tore it open at the buttons in order to put his ear to Grimes’s chest and listen for a heartbeat.

  What Mick saw in place of a chest was a sight that he could carry in his mind’s eye for the rest of his life.


  They had eaten away the flesh of his chest and abdomen and were feasting on his entrails. There must have been a thousand of them, a sea of worms writhing in his heart, stomach, liver, intestines, kidneys. The man’s body was virtually alive with worms, methodically eating their way through him until his bones would be as clean as those of Mr. Beardsly.

  It was too much for Mick. His circuits overloaded. It had started with the arduous, hot bus ride, the trek through the mosquito-infested woods, the humiliating fall into the mudhole, the insults suffered at the hands of the sheriff, the worm in his glass, the skeleton in Beardsly’s yard, the vicious worm-bite in the boat. Was any man capable of enduring so many blows without striking out at the malevolent providence that had inflicted them on him? No. No, this was too much.

  He grasped the spade and swung it down with all his might on the writhing mass of worm-infested guts. SPLAT! Blood and slime spattered in every direction. Again: SPLAT! He heard himself cursing as he struck the seething body of Willie Grimes again and again.

  SPLAT! SPLAT! SPLAT! SPLAT!

  Weeping openly, Mick threw down the shovel and staggered away, his rage spent, his fury drained. Nearing the car, he pulled himself together. Geri had gone through hell herself and he needed to be strong for her. He took a deep breath, wiped the tears off his cheeks, and checked the speed of his flight, bringing it down to a calm and confident stride.

  “Did you see him?” Geri asked apprehensively.

  “Get back in the car,” he ordered in a controlled voice, getting in. “Give me the key.”

  “I left it in the ignition,” Geri said, sliding over into the passenger’s seat.

  Mick started the car and spun rubber in the soft soil before the rear tires finally caught on the dirt road. The car leaped forward and hurtled down the road as if the Devil itself were in pursuit, which in a sense was the truth. They came across the main road and Mick swerved onto it with a squeal of tires.

  “Will this road get me back to town?”

  “Just keep going straight,” Geri said, looking at him quizzically. She studied his face. Lines of tension drew his mouth tight, and the veins stood out on his neck as if he was fighting to hold back a scream. “What did you see?” Geri asked the question with more fear than curiosity: she was not at all sure she wanted to hear the answer.

  Mick’s sense of humor returned for a moment. “Talk about New York! Two corpses in one day! Next time, you come and visit me.”

  “Roger?” she asked, gritting her teeth for the devastating reply.

  Mick’s reply was not the one she’d been expecting, but it was devastating nevertheless.

  “No, his father.”

  Though he didn’t know the road, Mick drove recklessly, hitting eighty miles an hour at one point. Geri was almost too numb to be scared—almost, but not completely. She sucked in her breath and pumped the floor in front of the passenger’s seat as if there were a brake pedal down there. She wished there had been. There’d been enough deaths around here without adding two more.

  She looked at Mick and somehow sensed that he was heading for town in order to seek Sheriff Reston. That was a very gutsy thing to do, considering how badly he had fared with him in the last two encounters, and what the sheriff had said to him on the second of these. Yet it had to be done; he had to convince the man that he wasn’t simply some wise-ass from New York City come here to have fun at the expense of the country bumpkins; had to convince him it was a matter of life or death.

  Geri’s intuition proved correct. The station wagon flew past the Town Limits sign—speed 30 MPH—and skidded to a halt in front of the old brick courthouse, where the sheriff’s office was.

  Their heels made hollow click-clacks on the marble floor as they entered and rushed down the corridor where the office was located. An elderly lady was mopping the corridor floor.

  “Is Sheriff Reston here?” Mick asked, breathlessly.

  “Well, he was,” the lady drawled.

  She continued mopping, oblivious to the urgency of their mission. At length she looked up. “Why, Geraldine. What are you doing here?”

  “Hi, Mrs. Norton,” Geri said, glancing at Mick. Geri hated her name and anyone who used it. She’d been Geri since the age of five, but there were still a few fuds who insisted on calling her Geraldine.

  “Did your mother get the yarn I sent her?” She turned to Mick and started talking to him as if they’d been friends for twenty years. “I’m allergic to wool, but I love to knit. I use that orlon, you know.”

  Mick nodded impatiently, hoping to get a word in edgewise or any other wise. Wool! Orlon! The world was being invaded by man-eating worms and this, this . . .

  “She promised me,” the cleaning woman went on, “she’d knit me a shawl. Not for me—for my daughter. It’s a surprise.”

  Mick sighed impatiently. “Is he around?”

  “Who?”

  “Sheriff Reston,” Geri said with a sharp edge to her voice.

  “Oh, yes. I mean, no, he’s not here. He might be having his dinner now. I couldn’t tell you what time it is ’cause all the clocks stopped.”

  “It’s really important that we talk to him,” Geri stressed, bending over backwards to be nice to a woman she cheerfully would have liked to throttle.

  “Oh, well, you might find him over at the Casa Roma,” she said, finally.

  The two young people darted out of the courthouse. The cleaning lady shrugged and went back to her mopping. What, she wondered, could be so all-fired important they couldn’t stand around and shoot the breeze with an old lady for a few minutes. Children these days—really!

  There is a Casa Roma in every small town, not always known by that name but known by the pathetic mural of Rome (or Naples or Venice) done by some talentless local artist, usually the wife of the owner, and the tattered gingham tablecloths and the chianti bottles laden with colorful wax drippings and sputtering candle and the pimply-faced waiters and waitresses looking dumb in their gypsy costumes.

  Actually, Fly Creek’s Casa Roma looked halfway attractive at this hour—dusk—because all the candles had been lit to compensate for the loss of electricity, and the place had a romantic glow that made even Sheriff Reston’s sneering face look rather benign.

  He even smiled at Geri when she and Mick approached his table, and when he saw Mick he merely turned the corners of his mouth down, indicating no more irritation than if the town drunk had raised his voice at the bar.

  The reason for the sheriff’s tolerant attitude quickly became apparent. His dinner companion was the same woman who’d accompanied him to lunch, the tall, dark-haired woman in white with the lost, confused expression on her face. Sheriff Reston was not about to display an ill-temper in front of a woman he was trying to impress, a woman he hoped would be his companion for breakfast tomorrow morning, and everything between these two meals as well.

  “Sheriff Reston,” Geri said, stepping in front of Mick. She knew how sparks flew between the two men, and she wanted to avoid that kind of trouble when there was trouble of a much more serious kind brewing outside the town. “Please excuse us, but it’s very important.”

  He broke a roll, smeared some butter on it, and chewed on it, looking at Geri indifferently.

  Mick had hoped Geri would be able to pin down Reston’s attention, but apparently she’d failed. He drew her aside and looked at the sheriff. “I know you think I’m a troublemaker,” he said.

  “Now that’s the first thing you’ve said that I can buy,” the sheriff laughed. He smiled cockily at his dinner companion, then frowned as he remembered the antique necklace around her neck. Mick and Geri noticed it too, and suppressed a laugh. Geri and her mother had sold it to him just a few hours earlier—for his ‘wife’. Reston looked terribly discomfited.

  Fortunately, the matter was dropped as the waitress came to the table straining under a platter of food. She laid it on a serving table, removed the tops off two stainless steel plates, and set the plates in front of R
eston and the woman. The plates were piled high with—spaghetti.

  Under normal circumstances, Mick and Geri wouldn’t have blanched at the sight of these long tubes of pasta, tangled in a great knotty mass and covered with a blood-colored sauce. Indeed, considering that this was, after all, an Italian restaurant, they’d have been surprised if anything else were served here.

  But these were not normal circumstances, and at the sight of this spaghetti their knees went weak and they turned pale.

  They averted their eyes for a moment, took charge of themselves, and faced the sheriff again. “I don’t know how to go about this, Sheriff,” Mick said boldly, “but I have proof that the skeleton we found was the remains of Aaron Beardsly.”

  In his line of work, Sheriff Reston came across a lot of folks who fancied themselves private eyes. He could now add this city punk to the list. “That so?” he said patronizingly, tucking his napkin into the neck of his shirt. He picked up his fork and a spoon and began twirling long strands of the spaghetti into an orderly braid around the fork. “What kind of proof?”

  Mick watched the spaghetti-wrapping hypnotically, trying hard to keep from gagging. With all he’d done to the sheriff in the last eight or ten hours, he couldn’t imagine the man appreciating it if Mick threw up on his dinner.

  “We found another body,” Mick announced. “It was Mr. Grimes.”

  The sheriff’s hand paused an instant as it conveyed his first forkful of spaghetti to his open mouth, but that was his only reaction to the news. He blinked, then bit into the spaghetti. Several strings of it hung out of his lips, dangling like blood-colored—worms. He sucked at these and they wriggled around his chin.

  “Tell him about the worms,” Geri prompted behind Mick.

  It was plain to see that the sheriff and his friend did not appreciate a reference to worms as they were wrapping their lips around their dinner. Reston sucked at the two or three strands that dangled from his lips, and they slithered into his mouth at last. Geri stared. She actually swayed on her feet at the sight. She could not help but think of poor Roger as the invading worms, tails wriggling like these spaghetti ends, burrowed their way into his face.