“Ah, here we go,” Sheriff Reston said, inserting a brass key into a cell door on the third floor of the courthouse. “It’s not much but it’s comfortable,” he added, looking at the cot.
“A bed is a bed, now isn’t that right, Jim?” she said, smiling coyly. She sat down on the bed, and patted the place next to her. “I’m mighty tired, Jim, mighty tired.”
Sheriff Reston knew enough to understand that Irene’s use of the word tired was not meant to be taken literally.
He sat down and removed his Stetson, flung it across the room. She raised her face and he pressed his lips to hers. She murmured and yielded to his importuning lips. Her breasts heaved as he drew her body close to his and caressed her ardently. She fell back, arms extended to her lover, who covered her body with his beefy weight, grinning his pelvis against hers. The hunger swelled between them like the rising chords of a symphony finale. They paused to shed their clothing. Reston’s eyes dined on her voluptuous figure as she bent over the bed and pulled back the sheet.
She finished smoothing the sheets, then lay down, and beckoned to him. Reston finished undressing and kicked his jodhpurs into a dusty corner. “Ready or not,” he said, grinning.
“Oh, I’m ready, sweetie,” she said. “I’m plenty ready.”
They lost track of time, but it seemed they made love for hours. She was fierce and animal in her passion, bringing out a lust and stamina in him that he rarely had a chance to display. In due time the candle sputtered, crackled, and extinguished.
They lay quietly in each other’s arms. Then they had a hankering for a cigarette, and Reston tiptoed across the room to fetch his pack out of his shirt pocket. Unknown to him, a river of worms had crept up the plumbing of the little water closet next to his makeshift love-nest, and was closing in on the shirt which lay strewn across a chair. His feet narrowly missed the advance guard, which squirmed in anticipation of the flesh it craved.
He returned to the bed, put two cigarettes in his mouth, and struck a match. The mass of invading worms surrounding the bed hesitated, and one wave retreated against the door, causing it to rattle.
“What was that?” Irene asked, pulling the sheets up around her.
The sheriff tilted his head, but scoffed. “Don’t worry, I have the key,” he assured her. He handed her a lighted cigarette and they inhaled deeply, blowing the smoke into the air sibilantly. All the light in the room focused around those two red glowing ashes on the ends of their cigarettes.
Irene giggled. “Stop doing that.”
Reston frowned. He wasn’t touching her. “Doing what?”
She giggled again. “That.”
Reston shifted to his side and looked at her peculiarly. Her eyes were closed and she was sighing softly, as if anticipating another session in the sheriff’s arms. “I’m not doing anything.”
Irene’s eyes opened and she gazed at him in mounting terror. Then she brought her knees to her chest in sudden agony and screamed. For a moment Reston thought, oh God, another crazy dame. Then the first of the bloodsucking worms attached itself to his little toe, and he knew that something awful was in bed with them.
A moment later they saw what it was, but by that time their mattress was aswarm with them, and their screams echoed ineffectively in the night until the worms smothered their voices . . .
The hysterical shrieks from the third floor of the courthouse barely carried across the street to Quigley’s, but they were detected above the blare of the transistor radio by Eddie. With Jeff, Susanne, and Amy, he sat at the formica table by the window, head nodding drunkenly, when the terrible cries penetrated his booze-fogged brain.
“Did you hear that?”
Susanne raised her head and opened the lids of her eyes. “What?”
Eddie drew his bayonet out of its scabbard and made a pathetic gesture of gallantry. “Give me that candle,” he said, rising uncertainly to his feet.
Jeff pulled out of his stupor just long enough to hand the candle to his pal. Then he nodded off again like a guest at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.
Looking a good deal less than a cavalry officer about to lead a do-or-die charge across no-man’s land, Eddie raised the bayonet and dashed out on the floor of the bar.
He slid about three feet in the slime of ten thousand worms that had burst into the room through the kitchen, consuming the cook and everything else edible. Until Eddie set foot on the floor, nobody else in the bar knew of the menace in their midst because they sat above it on their stools.
When Eddie plunged into the sea of worms, however, they learned. His cries and blubbers were dreadful to hear, and it was quickly apparent that they were not the sounds of someone who’d had too much to drink. They were the sounds of death.
But before anyone could come to Eddie’s rescue, those same sounds were issuing from the throats of all the other patrons. In the first minutes eight or ten went down beneath the slinking death at their feet. A few climbed on top of the bar, figuring they were safely above the danger.
Until the first contingent of ceiling worms began dropping into their hair . . .
CHAPTER
XVII
For several moments Mick hadn’t the slightest idea where he was or what had happened to him. He had only the evidence of his senses to guide him, and that wasn’t much help. His senses told him it was a dark night, that he was outdoors, that he lay in muddy earth, that there was a large piece of plywood partially covering his body, that his head hurt and his leg was killing him.
He lay still, listening to the chirp of a solitary cricket, until his brain began to weave together the information gathered from his senses and restore his memory. When it did come back it almost overloaded his mind. He pushed the plywood board off with a grunt, then sat up with a start. He was at the bottom of a steeply inclined pit whose walls contained just enough rocks, roots, and ledges to give him purchase—or rather, to give purchase to a man with two good legs. But Mick’s right ankle, where he’d sat on it hard after Roger tossed him into the pit, felt broken. Getting up that incline with one leg would prove a more challenging test of Mick’s outdoorsmanship than anything he’d bargained on when he’d climbed aboard the New York–Miami bus . . . when was it? Yesterday? Yesterday? So much had happened in such a short time that seconds and minutes and hours lost their meaning.
He winced, struggling to his feet. It all came back to him now. Roger. Worms. Worms! Roger had threatened something about worms when he’d knocked Mick into the pit.
Mick plunged his hand into his pocket and produced his butane lighter.
He flicked it, igniting a tall flame. Must conserve fuel, Mick said to himself, twisting the tiny control knob until the flame shrank to a quarter of an inch. He held it up to the steep muddy walls of the pit and beheld a thousand wriggling heads, snatching at the night air from inside their miniature caves in the mud. They shrank and wiggled back into their holes before the flame of Mick’s lighter.
He knew, though, that the dim glow wouldn’t be enough to hold the creatures at bay while he attempted to scale the wall of the pit. He could feel ten thousand eyes on him, waiting. An errant gust of wind while he climbed and it would be all over. The remembrance of Roger’s worm-eaten face was enough to inspire Mick to prodigies of ingenuity.
He held the lighter up and scanned the floor of the pit. Stuck in the mud about a yard away from him was a tree branch about two feet long. He picked it up, then set it by his feet, carefully placing the lighter in an upright position beside it. Now his hands were free, and he quickly unbuttoned his shirt and stripped out of it.
He picked up the stick and wrapped his shirt around the end of it, knotting it like a turban with the sleeves. Then he picked up his lighter and held the flame beneath the shirt. The shirt flared into blue flame.
He dropped the lighter back into his pocket and hoisted the torch over his head.
Just in time.
He looked down at his feet. The worms had formed an attack perimeter of a yard around
his toes. He thrust the torch at them and they cleared an exit path like the Red Sea parting before Moses’ command. He limped up the wall of the pit and peered at it. Before the intense glow of his torch, the cave-dwellers retreated deep into the earth.
There was no time to lose. His shirt would consume itself in flame within minutes.
He found a gnarled root about four feet off the floor of the pit, and, grasping it and placing his good foot on a narrow rock ledge, hauled himself up. He stood on the ledge, surveying the next handhold in the light of his torch. He rested on one rock, but it came out of the earth and tumbled to the pit below. Another one held steady and he hoisted himself another yard. He quickly became drenched in sweat. The effort of boosting himself up the incline with one bad leg and one hand—the other held the torch—was the most difficult of his life.
Two more tries ought to do it.
He mapped out his route. There was a big rock about two feet over his head, then the roots of a pine tree that grew on the rim of the pit. He fingered the smooth rock until he found a niche and . . . yes! Up he went, his good foot found a ledge and he was within reach of the lip of the pit. His hand enclosed the tree root. It was high above him, too high to haul himself out with one hand alone. But without the torch . . .
He waved the torch around the wall of the pit and the rim, hoping to drive back any potential attackers far enough so that by the time they could advance again he’d have scaled the last part of the wall. Then he tossed the torch over the top, grabbed the root with both hands, and shinned himself up, kicking at the soil with his good foot. He could hear himself grunting and cursing, and for a second his muscles failed him. Then his imagination conjured the wounds of an army of maddened worms burrowing into the meat of his calf and thigh, and he shot out of the pit as if someone had goosed him. There was nothing to get the old adrenalin pumping like the fear of being eaten by worms, he declared to himself, almost laughing.
He picked up the torch, surveyed the ground, and found another dead branch, crooked but serviceable as a cane. Fighting the sharp pain in his ankle, he limped back toward the house, his heart thundering in dread of what he might find there.
His torch had all but extinguished itself as he broke into the clearing around the Sanders’ house, and his stomach churned as he realized he could detect no light in the windows. That was bad, very bad.
He limped to the wreckage of the dining room, picked through it cautiously, and stepped inside the house. “Geri? Anybody here?”
He held the torch in front of him and sucked his breath in, horrified to the marrow of his bones. A river of worms flowed through the breach in the building’s wall, forming a delta of worms in the kitchen, and beyond it an open sea of worms in the living room. More horrible than any nightmare, this living Sargasso boiled like a thick soup. When the front ranks shrank before his torch, they sent a wave through the sea of worms like an ocean swell.
Waving his torch around his feet, Mick stepped in, proceeding one foot at a time and being careful to thrust the firebrand behind his heels to hold back the tide that flowed in his footsteps.
Just as the flame began to flicker he found a couple of candles on a kitchen counter. Beside it, a box of wooden matches. He lit the candles, then hurled the expiring torch into the sink. Then he picked up the candles, one in each hand, and waved them in a circle around his body, stooping close to the floor. Ripples radiated across the seething floor like heavy stones dropped in a pond.
Mick placed a cautious foot in the spot vacated by the worms, and held a candle in front of him to clear a path while holding the other candle behind him to keep the backwash of snapping jaws from flowing in over his heels. Thus he moved deliberately towards the living room, dreading to see what might be there, yet dreading just as much not knowing what had become of Geri and Alma and their mother.
He discovered, at least, what had happened to their mother. The sight was so revolting he gagged and retched and felt he was going to pass out.
In Mrs. Sanders’ favorite chair sat a skeleton. It wore Mrs. Sanders’ dress. Its head was covered with Mrs. Sanders’ luxuriant dark hair. Its shoes were those in which he’d last seen Mrs. Sanders. In its lap were the shawl Mrs. Sanders had been knitting. The bony fingers of the skeleton still clutched the knitting needles, though the skein of wool leading to the bag at her feet was indistinguishable from the skein of worms that busied itself on the bits of flesh that still clung to her leg. Her dress rippled as the starving creatures devoured what was left of her breasts and belly and thighs, her heart and lungs and intestines and liver and pancreas. A few worms pecked at the remaining skin of her lips and the cartilage that had been her nose, and a few slimy fibres that had once been her eyes.
“Oh no,” Mick whimpered, shutting his eyes.
But he had no time for mourning. Even in the instant he’d shut his eyes, the attacking worms had surged forward, challenging the candlelight, seemingly prepared to sacrifice some of their numbers in the hopes of tackling their prey, like charging Asian troops to whom the loss of a few thousand lives is meaningless. Mick held the candles at floor level, sweeping his arms around in clockwise and counterclockwise motions to open a path to the stairs, which were free of worms, but slippery with excreta.
He leaped two feet to the first step, taking care to protect the candle flames from being blown out. Then he made his way up to the first landing. Looking behind him, he witnessed the sea of worms in the living room rising fast like the estuary of a river, fed by a flow through the breach in the dining room wall where the tree had fallen. He estimated five or ten thousand worms were pouring into the house each minute. Already they were two or three feet deep. He had just escaped. If he were to return now, even with candles, they were too deep to be able to clear a path for him. There was absolutely no place for them to go.
He walked carefully to Geri’s room. The door was open. He held a candle before him and poked his head in. “Geri? Alma?” the room was empty.
He peered into Alma’s room. Empty too.
A trail of slime and detritus led out of the bathroom and down the stairs, but the bathroom was now free of worms.
He had to work fast. With the living room filling up fast, and with the odor of human flesh in their nostrils, the worms would soon be slithering their way up the stairs. He had to find the girls quickly or abandon his search and flee for a safe place.
Then he remembered the attic. He looked at the ladder, and saw what seemed to be fresh mud. He set one candle on the floor to protect his rear, and with the other guided himself up the ladder. Two rungs. Three. Four. Two more to go.
Roger struck so fast Mick never really saw it coming. His hands fired out of the black hole, one grabbing Mick’s hair, the other his arm. In that instant, as if time itself had frozen in horror, Mick saw the face of death itself. How Roger had managed to go on living with his worm-eaten face and brain, Mick could not imagine. The bone of the skull was visible where his cheeks and mouth had been. Half of his ears were gone, and the bony plate of his forehead glistened in the orange light. Apparently no worms had penetrated deeply enough into his brain to perpetrate the coup de grace. One worm had, however, eaten through Roger’s tongue and wriggled head and tail at right angles to the tortured organ.
Seeing that, Mick was sure he screamed, but he never heard himself. Roger’s clutch on his hair and arm was savage, the death-grip of a man who has nothing left to lose and lives only to bring as many to doom with him as he can.
They were eyeball-to-eyeball when Mick, snapping out of his paralysis, shoved the candle into Roger’s face. It was a last ditch move, and Mick was pretty doubtful that anybody whose face was eaten through by worms would feel the pain of a flame-burn on his cheek. Luckily Mick was wrong. Roger flinched and relaxed his grip enough to allow Mick to wrench free. So doing, Mick toppled backwards onto the floor.
In the process, the candle in his hand went out—and he landed on the candle on the floor.
Utter darkness
. Mick knew only the location of the enemy. One was swirling and seething tormentedly up the stairs. The other was preparing to leap upon him from above. Mick braced himself for the latter, and just in time. Roger’s heavy right boot kicked Mick in the shoulder, but Mick managed to grab a leg and haul Roger off balance. Roger snatched at Mick’s ear as he tumbled to the second floor landing, and Mick was certain the animal had pulled it off his head. Blindly Mick swung both fists, bidding for the time he needed for his eyes to adjust to the dark. One fist missed entirely, the other caught Roger in the throat. Roger bellowed like a wounded beast and slumped to the floor.
For a minute there was no sound but the seething of the bloodlusting worms downstairs, like a rumbling of a high sea on the shore on an angry night. From the few glints of fugitive light seeping in through the windows, Mick could see the first turbulent units of the worm armies mounting the third or fourth step of the stairs.
Mick reached into his pocket and produced his butane lighter and the matches he’d found downstairs. The lighter flicked twice, three times, but failed. He chucked it into the vortex of the worms downstairs, where it plopped and disappeared immediately as if into a pool of bubbling tar.
He tried a match with shaking hands and it flared into light.
He looked for Roger.
He found him—charging like a lust-crazed ram. Mick had just enough time to brace his abdomen for the impact. The wind only went half out of him, which was enough. More significant, the impact sent him spraddling backwards to the edge of the landing. He managed to grab a bannister brace as he slid over the edge of the top stair, checking the fall which would have been his last.
In a flash Roger was on top of him, flailing with fists, elbows, knees, feet, and even teeth in a final desperate offensive, a Battle of the Bulge, the bulge being Mick himself as he clutched the bannister for all he was worth while taking every blow that Roger could rain on him.
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