Squirm

by Richard Curtis

  XV

  The deeper Mick got into the woods, the quieter it became. Perhaps this was a natural phenomenon, he said to himself, but he’d never heard of it. The only time the night creatures hushed their voices was when a storm was approaching.

  Or danger lurged nearby.

  Mick sensed it was the latter. The pricking of the skin on the nape of his neck told him something, somebody, was watching him. He wished he’d asked Geri what kind of dangerous animals inhabited the Georgia lowland forests. It was too far south for bear, he supposed. But it was quite far south enough for alligators and moccasins, he remembered with a shiver.

  Also mosquitoes, he added, clapping his neck with a cupped palm as one of the little demons bored into his flesh.

  But mosquitoes wouldn’t cause absolute quiet to fall over the woods.

  There was something else afoot.

  In the pit of his stomach he knew what it was, but his emotions were too fragile to bring the image before his mind’s eye. His mind’s eye blinked it away, sending it scurrying back into the hideous place in his imagination where such diabolical fantasms are spawned.

  Mick was a pragmatist. He knew that the real thing, if and when it disclosed itself, would be horrible enough. Why scare himself with something imagined?

  The night was still and hot, and mosquito-inviting sweat trickled over his brow, throat and neck.

  In due course he came to a cleared patch, and in the dim blue light that filtered through the light cloud cover over the stars he perceived several piles of two-by-fours, a small mechanical cement mixer shaped like an inverted barrel, and a stack of eight-by-four plywood sheets. Mick ran his finger over the edge of one: it was half an inch thick. He frowned. He’d been hoping for a quarter-inch, which God knows is heavy enough.

  He prised two sheets away from the stack and cursed. More bad luck: the plywood was still soaked from last night’s rain. Mick would not only be lugging all that wood; he’d be hauling the water that had swollen up its fibre as well.

  He seized the plywood with his left hand on the bottom and his right on the top edge lengthwise and lifted. The plywood tilted over backwards, indicating his bottom hand was too far forward. He made the adjustment and hefted the plywood again. This time it balanced perfectly on the fulcrum of the heel of his left hand. His right hand simply kept the boards upright as he aimed himself in the direction from whence he’d come and began his return to the Sanders’ home with a staggering gait.

  As he counted out twenty paces before pantingly putting the boards down to rest, all he could do was pray that there would be no wind. A wind would strike the plywood boards like the topsail of a square-rigged ship and, with his luck running as it had been all day, carry him to somewhere off the coast of Bermuda.

  His labored breathing as he paused for his first rest was the only sound in the woods, and without any other noises to contrast with it was enough to wake the dead. Waking the dead was something Mick had little desire to do, tonight of all nights.

  He was about to pick up the plywood for his second twenty-yard rush when he heard the crack of a small twig snapping, as if beneath the weight of a heavy creature.

  Mick’s heart thundered in his chest cavity. After complaining about the deathly silence of these woods, he would have been very happy to get that deathly silence back again. He tried to judge the direction from which the noise had come, but it seemed to have no locus. He cocked his ear for a full minute, but whatever it was out there wouldn’t oblige him by making another noise.

  The best thing to do was pick up the plywood again and make a dash for the house, a sprint of a quarter of a mile or so, awkwardly lugging over a hundred pounds of waterlogged plywood. Sure. Easy. If you’re a forklift truck.

  He bent at the knees and put his back into lifting the boards up. Trotting sideways, like a sailboat before a breeze off the starboard beam, Mick stepped off five, ten, fifteen paces.

  As he stepped off the next five he heard, Oh God, a second pair of feet. He looked forward, backward, and over his shoulder behind him, but made out nothing in the pitch-dark night. Naturally not, he reflected because if I were going to attack someone running through the woods carrying plywood boards, I’d take him from his blind side—four feet by eight feet worth of it.

  That was Mick’s next-to-last reflection. The very last reflection before the thing hurled itself against the plywood (from Mick’s blind side, of course) was, Oh Lord, let it be simply the owner of the lumber coming after me to get his plywood back. How happily Mick would welcome some gruff voice hurling epithets at him for removing building materials without permission. He’d gladly let his attacker keep the five years of life Mick had just lost in fright anyway, and he’d throw two pieces of plywood and his butane lighter into the bargain.

  But it was not the owner of the lumber come to reclaim his property. It was another human. But scarcely.

  Roger’s throat uttered a bloodcurdling sound somewhere between a Rebel yell and the bray of a beast in unspeakable pain. He flung himself against the plywood with such force that his shoulder and hip splintered it, knocking Mick backwards over the edge of a muddy gully. He plunged down the almost sheer slope about fifteen feet, somersaulting the last five and coming down awkwardly on top of his own ankle. A violent pain radiated from the ankle outward, like thin ice shattering beneath a heavy boot-heel, and for an instant the night was lit up with a million pinpoints of pain.

  Mick tried to get to his feet but the bottom of the gully was sloshy with mud, and his ankle was badly twisted if not broken. He peered up to the lip of the gully and, in the faint light suffusing the world through the thin cloud layer above, made out a figure dancing like an elated ape. “Geri is mine!” Roger screamed triumphantly. “She always was. You had to come and spoil everything. Now we’ll see what you look like after the worms get you!”

  Mick stared in horrified fascination at the face of the tormentor above. May I never see anything so ghastly again, Mick prayed silently as he witnessed the remains of a face punctured through and through as if with bullets, except that out of each puncture-hole a tail-tip wiggled. Black bloodstains mottled what remained of Roger’s face, but his round eyes glowed yellow even in this darkness, and his white teeth shone like the Cheshire Cat’s, but evilly.

  Suddenly the sky behind Roger’s head was blotted out, and it took Mick a moment to figure out what the rectangular shape was that was eclipsing the night sky.

  It was Mick’s plywood. Roger had lifted a piece and was about to hurl it down upon his victim. The first piece sang in the air as it hurtled to within an inch of Mick’s legs. He scrambled awkwardly in the mud with his one good ankle dragging the bad one. The plywood landed on its short side, hovered for a moment, then fell harmlessly on Mick’s shoulder.

  If only he could avoid the second piece successfully too!

  No, Mick said to himself, eyes rounding as Roger raised the other board over his head, it’ll never happen. Not the way my luck has been running today.

  He was right.

  The edge of the board glanced the back of his skull, but a board that heavy thrown from that distance doesn’t glance your skull without taking a large portion of your consciousness with it.

  The pressure of the rampaging worms was too much for the shower head in the Sanders’ bathroom. It finally shattered and fell into the living cauldron of worms in the tub below. No longer did the shower look like a meat grinder turning out discrete lengths of purple flesh; it now looked like an open aqueduct out of which flowed an endless molten mass of the stuff, moving at the rate that honey pours out of a jar. The worms had almost filled the tub and already the first phalanxes had gone over the top and were wriggling blindly for living space. They had found their way into the plumbing of the sink as well, and were surging through the faucet. They came up through the pipe that led into the toilet tank, and were issuing from that aperture at a slow but steady rate. In due time the top of the tank began to rattle with the activity of the thou
sands of creatures crowding against it demanding their freedom . . . freedom . . . freedom . . .

  Downstairs Geri had opened another faucet, this one belonging to the kitchen sink. She held a glass under the tap, hoping to coax just enough water out of it to quench her parched throat. Worry and fright had raised a patina of perspiration on her face and body, and the still heat of the night only aggravated it.

  Upstairs, a sound . . .

  Mrs. Sanders, sitting in her favorite chair in the living room, knitting in the dark, heard it too. “Alma? Geri? Did you hear a noise?”

  “No, Mother.” Geri looked at Alma. “Bring her a candle,” Geri ordered.

  Alma had heard it too, and thought she recognized the sound of the porcelain toilet tank top, a sound she knew all too well from the many times she’d fixed the darned gurgling flush apparatus. Whatever it was, it spooked her, and she trembled merely to cross the darkened space between kitchen and living room.

  She picked up her own candle in a dish, and another for her mother, and tiptoed into the living room, breathing deeply to drive the stale air of fear out of her lungs, forcing her mouth to bloom in a cheerful smile.

  The shadows of her own self, cast in duplicate on the wall and ceiling (one for each candle) played cruel tricks on her imagination as she walked deliberately across the threshold of the living room. Her mother sat in her chair, looking very pale and drawn, her hands flicking their knitting needles like the mechanical parts of an automaton. The wool slithered wormlike out of the ball in the bag and twined itself around the metal needles, to be artfully hooked and knotted into the design by hands that seemed to know the way without the assistance of a brain.

  It was creepy, thought Alma. Her mother looked like a zombie.

  “Look who’s talking about reading in the dark,” Alma joked.

  Her mother heard no joke. She only heard that rattling. “Did you hear it?”

  “No,” Alma breathed. “Mother, don’t scare me.”

  They sat silently, heads cocked. Now the rattling of porcelain was replaced by a sort of hissing, flowing sound, hard to identify. “Did you leave the water running in the bathroom?” Mrs. Sanders asked.

  Suddenly Alma beamed. Of course! That was it! She’d left the faucets open in the shower so that when the water finally did come up, she’d hear it. “Yeah. Oh wow!” She jumped to her feet. “Geri, the water’s coming out upstairs!” She bounded to the foot of the stairs. “I can’t wait to wash my face.”

  “Be careful, honey,” Mrs. Sanders cautioned. “It’s very dark up there.”

  Alma put on the brakes. Her mother was right. No sense in breaking your neck just because you’re dying to dive into the shower. She returned for a candle, then padded up the stairs.

  As she did she frowned and tilted her head, her ears focusing on the sound. It was odd: that was not the sound of running water. It was the sound of running something, but what the heck could it be?

  Holding the candle with her left hand, she stopped outside the bathroom door and tested the knob with her right. The door pushed against her shoulder, as if a strong wind was trying to blow it open. She put her shoulder to the door, some profound instinct telling her to beware of whatever it was on the other side. She allowed the door to open one controlled fraction of an inch.

  A nine inch worm wriggled out, straining for Alma’s toes.

  Startled and revolted, she raised her foot and slammed it down on the worm, sending a ribbon of guts shooting across the floor.

  But to do this she had to relax her grip against the door.

  The door sprang open, giving Alma just enough time to confront what it was on the other side. An avalanche of slimy living flesh poured out of the door, engulfing and submerging her and stifling her scream before it could exit from her throat. She swam through the roiling mass of disgust, gasping for air, grasping for a fingerhold on anything more solid than worms.

  Her fingers found only more worms.

  She was drowning in a sea of them. Drowning . . .

  Downstairs, Geri waited anxiously for Mick to return. She felt as if she’d never been lonelier or more frightened in her life. Alma was upstairs somewhere; Mick was off in the woods; and Mother—Mother was as good as gone. The woman went through the paces of being human, but the light had gone out of her eyes, as if her soul had vacated her body, as if her brain had been lobotomized, leaving a scarf-knitting robot in the place of the woman who had nurtured her two daughters.

  She noticed the candle that she’d left in the debris of the dining room guttering. It had used up its wax and was just about out. It must be replaced at once. She took a lighted candle off the fireplace mantle and carried it into the ravaged dining area. The other candle had gone out. She could see the fading red dot of the wick and smell the strangely pleasant but pungent smoke of the extinguished candle. She stooped to set the replacement on the floor.

  Out of the corner of her eye she noticed something advancing towards her. For a second she thought it was just a shadow, for the candle played strange visual tricks with common objects, making hands look as large and ominous on a wall as vultures, and a begonia growing on a table inside the kitchen look like a giant man-eating plant.

  So this shadow creeping steadily across the dining room floor toward her feet, even though it looked like an army of worms in this tricky candlelight, would surely reveal itself to be something ridiculously ordinary when she looked at it more closely.

  Her blood froze as she brought the candle closer.

  Fortunately, the candlelight checked the forward movement of the worm-troops. They retreated before the light, and Geri, despite a revulsion so profound she wanted to spew her guts, had the presence of mind to charge them with the candle. They reversed their liquid flow and slinked off into the darkness.

  Geri bit her hand, fighting back nausea and panic. As long as she left the candle where it was, she reasoned, the worms would hold their position. Now, if she could round up enough candles to last till morning’s first light, she and her family could survive the seige.

  “Mother, where’s Alma?” she demanded, returning to the living room.

  “Upstairs,” the woman said in singsong voice, knitting needles clicking.

  Geri wasn’t sure that this meant Alma was necessarily safe, but there was a more immediate concern. “Is the front door closed?”

  “Yes,” her mother said, “but I left the back open to get some fresh air. I wish there was a breeze,” she sighed.

  Oh God no! Geri’s mind screamed as she raced to the door that opened on the back yard. Fortunately, Alma had left a candle on the hall table beside the door, which served to keep the worms at bay.

  She put her hand on the knob and was about to shut it when a human shadow loomed up on the hall wall. It was not her own.

  “Mick? Is that you?”

  No, it was not Mick.

  It was Roger.

  What was left of Roger.

  Her knees buckled as the ghoulish figure clapped a hand on her mouth and with the other hand, with half a thumb and forefinger, pinched out the flame of the candle. Geri writhed in the powerful embrace of her captor, but his strength was overwhelming. He reeked of the ammoniac odor of worm droppings, clotted blood, fear and stale perspiration.

  Geri had never fainted in her life but there was a first time, she heard her mind say, for everything. Whatever was going to happen to her, it was just as well she was unconscious when it happened.

  In the living room Mrs. Sanders smiled and held the shawl up to the dim flicker of the candle. “There,” she said to Geri, who she believed was within range of her voice, “Mrs. Norton would love this for herself, if only she wasn’t allergic to wool, poor dear. All I have to do is block it and I’ll be through.”

  Now, what did I do with those scissors, Naomi Sanders asked herself, groping around her knitting box and the bag of wool at her feet. No, not there. Ah, the shelf behind her. She reached up and explored the shelf with blind fingers.


  A dozen worms rested on it. Smelling the attractive aroma of human flesh, they attacked.

  Her hand found the scissors a mere second before the worms found her hand. For that moment she was out of danger.

  But for that moment only. Above her head, unknown to her, the ceiling was alive with them. The pressure of the falling elm had weakened an already weak spot, and the hunger of the troops of worms had accomplished the rest. They marched like victorious soldiers through the rough stucco, forming a gaping tear which allowed more and more of them to enter above the head of the unsuspecting Mrs. Sanders.

  And now, like a paratroop invasion, they began to drop off, landing around her feet and creeping up the legs of the chair. As she started to snip the strand of wool from the finished shawl, her chair seemed to burst into life. She sat in a living chair.

  A living chair of death.

  CHAPTER

  XVI

  Irene Anderson clung to Sheriff Reston’s arm as he fumbled with his keys. “My goodness,” she drawled, “you sure do have a lot of keys on that chain.”

  “There’s only one key that counts, little lady,” he grinned, “and that’s the key to your heart.”

  “Oh, I think you’ve already found that one,” she giggled. He’d certainly behaved like a perfect gentleman from the moment she’d approached him that morning. Her car had all but run out of gas in Fly Creek, but the man at the gas station was unable to refill her tank because the electricity that operated the pump was off. Could the sheriff help her?

  Well, the sheriff couldn’t help her as far as gas was concerned, but he’d be more than happy to make her unforeseen stay in Fly Creek just as painless as possible, he’d said. And he had. He’d bought her lunch, presented her with a pretty necklace, taken her to dinner, plied her with wine, joked and teased her. She’d guessed what accommodation he had in mind for her one-night stay in Fly Creek, but that was all right. It wasn’t as if he was some sweaty redneck pawing her and breathing alcohol and cigar tobacco down her neck. This was a gentleman. He had played the game exactly the way a lady likes the game to be played, and if he now expected a reward, she was not disinclined to bestow one on him. After all, she laughed to herself, it’s not as if she hated sleeping with a man, exactly.