Lost Souls

chapter 58

The ceiling had knotty-pine beams with plaster between, and the different-shades-of-gray cocoons hung from the beams on thick, lumpy gray ropes. At first they seemed wet, greasy wet like spoiled cabbage leaves or lettuce, but then Nummy saw they weren’t really wet. They only looked wet because they were twinkling, not twinkling bright like Christmas-tree lights, but twinkling dimly, darkly, like… like nothing else he’d ever seen.

Nummy stayed just inside the doorway, but Mr. Lyss took a step toward the dark-twinkling sacks. He said, “We have something very special here, boy, something big.”

“You can have them,” Nummy said. “I don’t want none.”

The cocoons were apart from one another, so when Mr. Lyss walked all the way around the first one, he had his back to the other two, which made Nummy nervous.

“They look wet, but they’re not,” Mr. Lyss said. “It’s something else happening on the surface.”

“I like movies where people they laugh a lot and nice things happen,” Nummy said.

“Don’t babble nonsense at me, Peaches. I’m trying to think this through.”

Jamming his hands in the pockets of his new blue coat and making fists of them to stop them from shaking, Nummy said, “I mean, I don’t like them movies where people they get eaten by anything. I shut them off or change the channel.”

“This is reality, boy. We only have one channel, and the only way we change it is die.”

“That don’t seem fair. Don’t get so close to it.”

Mr. Lyss edged closer to the cocoon, leaned his face in for a better look.

“I could say a bad word now,” Nummy said. “All six of them. I sure do have me an urge to.”

Mr. Lyss said, “The surface is crawling all over. Constantly moving, squirming like it’s a ball of the tiniest ants you’ve ever seen, but not ants.”

“There’s something in it,” Nummy said.

“Brilliant deduction, Sherlock.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means, yeah, there’s something in it.”

“I told you so.”

“Wonder what would happen if I poked it?” Mr. Lyss said, and he brought the barrel of the big gun close to the cocoon.

“Don’t poke it,” Nummy said.

“Spent my life poking anything I want to poke.”

“Please don’t poke it, sir.”

“On the other hand,” Mr. Lyss said, “this isn’t any damn piñata full of candy.”

The ceiling creaked as though the weight of the sacks pulled hard on the beams.

“That’s what I heard downstairs. And what you said to me is-you said it was just an old house, they creak.”

“They do creak. This happens to be another issue.”

When Mr. Lyss stepped back from the cocoon without poking it, Nummy sighed with relief, but he didn’t feel much better.

“I wish Norman was here.”

“Oh, my, yes, we’d be so much safer if we had a stuffed toy dog with us.”

The longer he stared at the sacks, the more Nummy thought they looked… ripe. All swollen up with ripeness and ready to burst.

“How is it,” Mr. Lyss asked, “the reverend and his wife have four children, but there’s only three cocoons, not six?”

For a moment, Nummy didn’t understand, and then he did but wished he didn’t.

“Maybe there’s three more of these suckers in another room,” Mr. Lyss said.

“We got to go.”

“Not yet, Peaches. I’ve got to check the other rooms up here. You watch these bastards and give me a yell if something starts to happen.”

Mr. Lyss moved past Nummy before Nummy knew what the old man was doing. “Hey, wait, no, I can’t stay here alone.”

“You stand guard right there, Peaches, you keep a close watch on them, or so help me God, I’ll use this shotgun. I will blow your head off and bounce it down the stairs like a basketball. I’ve done it before more times than I can count. You want me to play basketball with your head, boy?”

“No,” Nummy said, but couldn’t bring himself to say sir.

Mr. Lyss stepped into the upstairs hall and went away to poke in other rooms.

During the day, there had been times when Nummy wished that Mr. Lyss would go away and leave him alone, but now that it happened, he really, really missed the old man.

The bedroom ceiling creaked again, a series of creaks that made him think he would see cracks spreading across the plaster, but there weren’t any cracks.

No matter what happened on any particular day since Grandmama passed away, no matter what kind of awful problem there was, if Nummy just thought hard enough about it, he remembered something she told him that helped him get through the problem with no problem. But Grandmama never said anything about outer-space monsters that made giant cocoons.

In other rooms, Mr. Lyss opened and closed doors. He didn’t suddenly scream, which was a good thing.

When the old man returned, he said, “It’s just the three. You wait here while I go downstairs and find something to burn them.”

“Please, please, I don’t want to stay here.”

“We have a responsibility, boy. You don’t just walk away and leave something like this to hatch.”

“They won’t like being burned.”

“I don’t much care about the preferences of a bunch of alien bugs, and neither should you.”

“You think they’re bugs?”

“I don’t know what the hell they are, but I know I don’t like them one bit. Now remember-you yell for me if anything starts to happen.”

“What might happen?”

“Anything might happen.”

“What should I yell?”

“Help would seem a good idea.”

Mr. Lyss hurried into the hall once more and down the stairs, leaving Nummy alone on the second floor. Well, not exactly alone. He had a feeling that the things in the cocoons were listening to him.

The ceiling creaked.