The Troop

Lead news item from CNN.com, October 22:

17

THEY HAD locked him in the closet. Their Scoutmaster. The town’s only doctor. Almost unbelievably, this had happened. They’d ganged up. Kent and Ephraim, and Shelley with his ball-bearing eyes. Even Newton and Max had joined in.

You deserved it, Tim, HAL 9000 chastised. You put the boys in danger. Knowingly or not, but they were your responsibility. Remember the Scout Code.

How was it my fault? Tim asked himself. Had he invited the sick man onto the island? Had he purposefully, maliciously set events on an extinction vector? No, no. He’d acted out of kindness. He’d done what any caring person would do. He’d tried so hard, under such desperate circumstances, to make the right choices—how was he to know it would turn out so horribly wrong?

It ended in this: Tim locked in a closet, alone with his thoughts. And his hunger. And the sick sweet stink of his body.

He was resigned to the fact he’d forever be known as the Scoutmaster who’d been mutinied by his own Scouts. That ought to make “Big” Jeff Jenks bust a gut.

Tim sat with his spine flush to the closet wall and his knees drawn tight to his chest. He tested each joint for weak spots. No luck. Solid wood nailed at inflexible angles.

A thin bar of sunlight wept under the door. Tim ran his fingers along the dissolving edge of light. Hugely comforting. A link to the world outside the closet. To the mainland and the sureties it held. To his cold cellar and its shelves stocked with preserves. To the glass canister of tongue depressors in his examination room.

He breathed heavily and focused. He could untwist a coat hanger and thread it under the door and… what? Jab someone in the ankle? Trip one of the boys? Why bother? Maybe he deserved to be here.

There’s no maybe about it, Tim, said HAL 9000.

He was trapped. Impossibly, inescapably. Maybe it was for the best. Fact: he was ill. The boys may have been right to lock him up. It hurt tremendously that they’d done it—a sudden feral act that made a mockery of all those years they’d been together, a close-knit group under his command. And now, cooped up in here, he couldn’t help them anymore—and that scared him profoundly.

Were you helping them, Tim? Really?

“Shut up, HAL,” he croaked, sounding like a drainpipe clogged with sludge. “You’re not my pal, HAL.”

You’re becoming irrational, Tim. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Good-bye.

“Good. Scram. Get lost.”

Tim’s thoughts returned to his Scouts. They were running wild, a quintet of lost boys. Did they have any inkling of the peril they were in? How could they, really? Boys didn’t process fear the same way as adults, especially when it came to sickness. Their scabs healed like magic, their coughs dried up overnight. But Tim knew the frailty of human bodies; he’d seen how even the stoutest ones could collapse into a sucking pit of disease and death.

Not to mention the fact that they’d also laid their hands all over him while doing the deed. They had breathed in the air he’d exhaled in fear-sick gusts. He may have even spit at them. Dear God, had he actually spat on the boys?

Part of him—a shockingly large part—was okay being in here. Perhaps he was unfit for command. Fact: he was paralyzed with hunger. He kept catching whiffs of cotton candy from someplace. His eyes blinked uncontrollably. He kept hearing his mother, dead six years now, calling him home for supper. Timmy, chowder’s ready!

Eat, said this funny little voice. It wasn’t HAL or the Undervoice. This one was different—sly and insistent, like baby rats clawing the insides of his head.

But there’s nothing to eat in here, he told the voice.

Sure there is. There’s always things to eat, silly.

The rats kept clawing, clawing; before long they’d claw through the soft meat of his brains and scratch through the bone of his skull. Tim pictured it: his skull bulging, his scalp and hair stirring with antic life, the skin splitting with the sound of rotten upholstery as a tide of hairless pink ratlings spilled from the slit, slick with blood and grayish brain-curds, squealing shrilly as they sheeted clumsily down his face, past his unblinking eyes, bumping and squalling over his lips spread in a vacant smile.

Okay, he answered that funny niggling voice. But what should I eat?

Oh, eat anything, it said with cold reasonableness. Any old thing you can find.

The closet was wallpapered. Who the hell wallpapered a closet? The paper was torn in flimsy tatters. He tweezed a curl between his fingers. It ripped down the wall with a lovely zippering sound.

He placed the strip of wallpaper on his tongue. The ancient paste was vaguely sweet. He swallowed hungrily.

Lovely, the voice said. Just lovely. Now eat more.

Tim did as the voice asked.

Peeling and eating and peeling and eating.

The funny little voice was easy to obey. It didn’t ask for much and what it did request was simple to accomplish.

Just eat.

And eat.

And eat.

A body settled against the other side of the door. Tim licked his paper-cut lips; his tongue had gone thick and gluey with paste. He whispered:

“Max? Is that you?”

Silence.

“Newt? Ephraim?”

A song—sung in a low mocking warble:

The singer was plugging up the space between the door and the floor.

Shelley?

Tim’s precious bar of light vanished in heart-stopping chunks.

“No,” he moaned. “What are you doing? No, please, no, please don’t…”

He pushed his fingers under the door to dislodge the barrier but his fingertips met with resistance. Next came the whooonking sound of duct tape stripped off a roll. The last meager particles of light filching under the door disappeared entirely. Tim sat in total darkness.

He opened his mouth to beg for his light back. It was all he had, for God’s sake. The childlike plea died on his lips. Somewhere down inside of him—not too far down, either—he could feel that relentless squirming. His teeth snapped shut.

EAT.

The voice wasn’t so small or funny anymore.

Tim did as it said. He wept softly without realizing.

18

SHELLEY PLACED the tape back in the kitchen drawer. His heart was beating a little heavier than normal. His eyes were hot and watery with dull excitement. The Scoutmaster was making faint pleading noises from inside the closet.

Shelley tried very hard not to laugh. He did not think the Scoutmaster’s noises were very funny—Shelley didn’t find anything funny, really. Not ever.

He inhaled through the alcohol-soaked gauze over his mouth and nose. He understood the danger—he could practically see the microscopic eggs ringing the scotch bottle’s rim, the one Kent had drunk from last night. He saw the eggs hovering in the cool air above the dead man’s chest. This didn’t scare him. If anything, it excited him.

He glanced at his handiwork on the closet door. He’d wedged two dish towels underneath and taped them in place. Now the Scoutmaster had no light at all. If the other boys asked why he did it, he already had an excuse: Shelley had heard the Scoutmaster’s consumptive hacking and sealed him in so they wouldn’t all get what Tim clearly had.

Shelley opened the cabin door and slipped quietly outside. A fine band of golden light striped across the horizon. The others still slept round the fire.

He went round the side of the cabin and found a spiderweb suspended between the east-facing wall and the overhang: an intricate hexagonal threadwork hung with beads of morning dew.

Shelley plucked a strand of gossamer near the web’s center as if he were strumming the world’s most fragile guitar. A spider crawled out of a knothole in the log. Its legs pushed out of the hole as one solid thing, all bundled tight like the ribs of a shut umbrella. To Shelley, it looked like an alien flower coming into bloom.

This one was big. Its bell-shaped body was the size of a Tic Tac. Its color reminded Shelley of the boiled organ meat his mother fed their dog, Shogun. The spider picked its way nimbly across its web. It had mistaken Shelley’s gentle plucking for a trapped insect.

Shelley pulled a slender barbecue lighter from his pocket. He always carried one. Once, his teacher Mr. Finnerty had caught him burning ants near the bike racks after school. The fat carpenter ants had made weird pop! sounds as they exploded: like Shelley’s morning bowl of Rice Krispies.

Mr. Finnerty confiscated his lighter. He’d given Shelley a frosty, revolted look as if he’d just accidentally stepped on a caterpillar in his slipper. Shelley smiled back complacently.

He’d simply bought another lighter. He bought one every few weeks from different stores around town. He also bought mousetraps and ant traps. One time, a shopkeep had remarked: You must live with the Pied Piper, son, all these mousetraps you buy. That had concerned Shelley a little, and he’d made sure to steer clear of that store. It wasn’t wise to establish a pattern.

He flicked the ignitor. A wavering orange finger spurted from the metallic tip. Shelley worked carefully. It wasn’t a matter of savoring it—he’d done this so many times that his heartbeat barely fluctuated. He was simply methodical by nature.

He touched flame to the web’s topmost edges. The gossamer burnt incredibly fast—like fuses zipping toward a powder keg—trailing orange filaments that left a smoky vapor in the air. The web folded over upon itself like the finest lace. The spider tried to scurry up its collapsing web, but it was like trying to climb a ladder that was simultaneously ablaze and falling into a sinkhole.

Shelley idly wondered if the spider felt any confusion or terror—did insects even feel emotions? He sort of hoped so, but there was no way to be sure.

He set fire to the web’s remaining moorings. The web fell like a silken parachute with the spider trapped inside. Shelley harassed the spider through the grass, nipping it with the flame. He liked it best when he could sizzle a few legs off or melt their exoskeletons so some of their insides leaked out. He tried not to kill them. He preferred to alter them. It was more interesting. The game lasted longer.

He harried the spider until it scuttled under the cabin. He exhaled deeply and blinked his heavy-lidded eyes. Soon the spider would crawl back to its hole and build another web. Spiders were very predictable. When it did, Shelley might return and do it all over again.

Shelley scuffed his feet over the charred grass. It was best to leave no evidence. Take only photos, leave only footprints. He worked carefully, reflecting on the fact that this—what he’d just started with the Scoutmaster—was something new entirely. Something terribly exciting.

Spiders couldn’t tattle on you; mice couldn’t squeal—well, they could… but now Tim, he might just tell the boys what Shelley had done. But Shelley had an innate sense of leverage, a sixth sense he must’ve been born with; he understood that people in compromised positions were less believable. And even if the boys did believe Tim, or only a few of them—Max might; Newt definitely would—well, Shelley wasn’t sure that mattered now. He felt the pull of the island in his bones, a strong current anchoring him to it. The sun crawled over the water, and Shelley felt this day, which had only begun, might go on forever.

The boys had not yet stirred. When they did, talk would turn to tiresome matters: when the boat would show up, how badly their folks would flip out, the identity of the dead man in the cabin. Most of all, they’d talk about how they’d be safe, real soon.

But Shelley was positive the boat wasn’t coming.

Shelley wasn’t particularly intelligent, at least according to the methods society had developed to measure that. He’d scored low on his IQ test. In school, he earned Cs and the odd D. His teachers gazed upon his pockmarked cheeks and slug-gray eyes and pictured Shelley fifteen years later in a pair of grease-spotted overalls, his slack and pallid moonface staring up from the oil-change pit at a Mr. Lube.

Shelley was aware of their opinions, but it didn’t trouble him. Shelley was actually happy with this perception. It made it easier to engage in the behaviors that gave him pleasure—though he failed to experience pleasure in the ways others did.

Shelley was far more perceptive than most gave him credit for. His impassive face was the perfect disguise. His expression hadn’t changed when he’d seen the dead man on the chesterfield, but his practical mind had immediately aligned it with the black helicopter that had hovered overhead during the hike.

He had also aligned the thick white rope that had come out of the dead man with the thin white rope that had come out of his dog’s bum a few years ago.

Shogun, the family sheltie, had gotten into some spoiled chuck in a neighbor’s trash can. He passed a seven-foot worm weeks later. Shelley was home alone when it happened. He heard Shogun yowling in the backyard. He found the dog squatted in the zinnias. A white tube was spooling out of his butt, some of it already coiled up in the cocoa shells his father had spread over the flower beds.

Shelley crouched down, completely fascinated. He flicked at the white tube, mesmerized. The thing wriggled at his touch. Shelley giggled. He flicked it again. Shogun reared and snapped at him. Shelley waited, then touched the tube again. Flicking and flicking it gently with one finger. It was slick with the dog’s digestive juices. Shogun mewled pitifully and craned his skull over his haunches to stare at Shelley with wounded, rheumy eyes.

After shitting it out, Shogun tried to bury the worm. Shelley shooed the dog inside. He wanted to study it. It was dying very fast. Its head was a flat spoon shape. Many smaller spoon shapes branched off the biggest spoon: it looked like a Venus flytrap—the only plant Shelley found even remotely interesting. Each of the spoons had a slit down the middle studded with tiny translucent spikes. That must’ve been how it had moored to the dog’s intestines… fascinating.

Shelley thought back to that sunny afternoon in the garden, Shogun’s plaintive yipping as that greedy tube spooled out of its bottom. He was filled with a certainty as keen as he’d ever experienced.

The boat wouldn’t come. Not today. Not for a while. Maybe not ever.

And that was just fine with him. That meant he could play his games.

And if he played them patiently enough, carefully enough, he might be the only one left to greet a boat when—if?—it did show up.

He turned his vaporous test-pattern face up to the new sun. It was warm and not unpleasant. It would be an unseasonably hot day. New life could grow in this kind of heat. He walked back to the fire to rejoin the others.

19

WHEN THE boys awoke, the cooler was gone.

It contained all the food Scoutmaster Tim set aside. Wieners and buns. A six-pack of Gatorade. A bag of trail mix. Hershey’s Kisses. All they had left until the boat arrived. Max had placed it next to the fire the previous night. When they woke up, it was gone.

“Where the hell is it?” Ephraim said. He stamped around the campsite, knuckling sleep-crust out of his eyes. “I’m hungry, man.”

The others roused themselves slowly. Their sleep had been fitful, thanks to the ominous howls and sly scuttlings of the wild creatures lurking beyond the fire’s glow.

Newt said: “The cooler’s missing.”

“No shit, Captain Obvious,” Ephraim said. “Which one of you guys took it? Was it you, Newt, you lardo?”

Newton beheld Ephraim with bruised eyes. “Eef, why would I…?”

“Because you’re a big fat fat-ass,” Ephraim stated simply.

“Newt slept next to me the whole night,” Max said; he knew it was wise to calm his best friend down before he “lost it,” as Eef’s mom would say. “If he’d tried to take the cooler, I’d have heard him.”

Shelley came round the side of the cabin.

“Where the hell were you?” Ephraim said, the challenge clear.

“Hadda take a piss.”

“What happened to the cooler?”

Shelley set his flat-hanging face upon Ephraim’s. “Dunno, boss.”

Ephraim balled his fists. He wanted to plant one between Shelley’s cowish eyes. But he was distantly fearful that his fist would sink right into the placid emptiness of Shelley’s face. It would be like sinking into a bowl of warm dough studded with busted lightbulbs. Worst of all he got the queasy feeling that Shelley wouldn’t exactly mind it—and that his face would eat his fist. Dissolve it somehow, like acid.

Ephraim inhaled deeply, willing himself to stay calm. His mother said he had a temper just like his father’s. The father who’d headed out to catch the afternoon stakes at Charlottetown downs and never came home. The shithead who’d busted his own son’s arm and didn’t even remember. The father who was currently a guest of the province at the Sleepy Hollow correctional center following a string of convenience store thefts—one of which netted the princely sum of $5.02.

He was also the man whose footsteps many figured that Ephraim would inevitably follow. The apple never falls far from the tree, went the whispers around town. It didn’t help that Ephraim looked almost exactly like his father: the same antifreeze-green eyes and open-pored olive complexion.

And, Ephraim knew, the same temper.

One afternoon he and his mother had come across a construction site. An open sewer with a nest of hoses running down into it. Workmen had set up a large reflective warning sign. The top left side of the sign was crimped so that it read:

You should heed that warning, his mother had said.

And Ephraim tried to. But people were always pushing his buttons—which he had to admit were more like huge hair-trigger plungers. Whenever his emotions threatened to spill over, he’d follow his mother’s suggestion to breathe deeply and count slowly backward from ten.

10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3—

“Wild animals must have dragged it off while we were sleeping,” Kent said. “We should have hung it in a tree or something.”

Kent looked nothing like last night’s world beater. A dirty ring of sweat darkened his T-shirt collar; the same dark patches bloomed under his armpits. His eyes sat deep in his skull, the flesh around them netted in fine wrinkles: it looked a little like the wattle on an old biddy’s neck.

“Bullshit,” said Ephraim. “How would we not have heard animals making off with it?”

“I was pretty zonked,” Max said.

Ephraim pointed at Newt. “You figure the Masked Skunk made off with it, too?”

Newton winced. “I was wiped last night, too. I mean, it could have—”

“Fuck, man—if one of you took it, just admit it,” Ephraim said, his voice taking flight to an upper octave. “What do you think I’m going to do—go crazy? Start laying you guys out?” He raised his hands, all innocence. “You couldn’t have eaten it all, right? So we’ll just say you’ve had your fill and leave it at that.”

“Animals,” Kent croaked.

White-hot rage pounded at Ephraim’s temples. His molars ground together so hard that he could hear them in his skull: thick plates of shale scraping against one another.

He stalked away from the campfire in the direction of the cabin… but he took a wide berth around it, continuing on into the sparse woods behind.

He pulled a battered old Sucrets cough drop tin from his pocket. Three lonely cigarettes jostled inside. He’d hoped to duck away with Max, sharing a smoke down by the shore while they stared at the stars. Max didn’t smoke, but Eef planned to convince him to be his smokin’ buddy. Otherwise it was just him, alone, launching off lung rockets. Snacking on cancer sticks. Which painted a pretty lame picture, actually.

He poked a cigarette into his mouth, flicked his brass Zippo, and touched the flame to tobacco. He inhaled, coughing as the gray vapor rasped his throat—at first it’d felt like swallowing fiberglass insulation, the pink kind stacked in bricks at the hardware store—hissing the smoke between his teeth. He tried to blow smoke rings, puffing out his cheeks, but the wind rose out of the west and tore them apart.

Birds called in a metallic rhree-rhree-rhree: a sound like a rusty axe drawn across a cinder block. The nicotine hit his system, nerve endings a-tingle.

Settle down, he chastised himself. So what if one of those assholes ate the food. You’ll be at your own kitchen table with a big plate of spaghetti in, like, what, two hours, right? Away from this island. Away from…

From the dead man. Which, truth be told, had freaked Ephraim out more than anything in his life. Seeing the man laid out stiff with his limbs jutting at weirdo angles and his chest slicked in brown gunk—that had been the worst part: that he’d died streaked in filth—Ephraim had barely managed to tamp down the high-pitched wail that had threatened to spill over his lips.

He’d never seen a dead person before. The closest he’d ever come to anything remotely like it was the time he’d been walking home from school and saw a hydro worker get blown off a power pole by a jolt of electricity. The guy had been thirty feet up in a cherry picker. A current surge must’ve ripped through the transformer. Ephraim remembered the guy’s face and body lighting up like a Fourth of July sparkler. The flash was so bright that it printed everything on Ephraim’s eyes in negative for a minute afterward.

The man rocketed out of the cherry picker as if there were dynamite in his boots. He hit a sapling on his way down; the limber little tree bent with his weight before snapping with a crisp green sound. By the time Ephraim ran over, the workman was up and walking a dazed circle. The electricity had melted the treads of his boots: the rubber pooled around the soles as if he’d stepped in black jelly. Ephraim found it painful to breathe: the dissipating electricity left a lingering acidic note. Smoke spindled out of the man’s overalls, right through the coarse orange weave of the fabric, rising off his shoulders in vaporous wings.

“Ah God ah God,” the guy was saying over and over. Mincing around in stiff stutter-steps like a man walking barefoot over hot coals. “Ah God ah God ah God ah God…”

The flesh over his skull had melted down his forehead. The electricity had somehow loosened his skin without actually splitting it. Gravity had carried the melted skin downward: it wadded up along the ridge of his brow like the folds of a crushed-velvet curtain, or the skin on top of unstirred gravy pushed to one side of the pot. His hair had come down with it. His hairline now began in the middle of his forehead. The man didn’t seem to realize this. He kept hopping around saying “Ah God ah God…”

In the calm eye of horror, Ephraim became aware of the tiniest details. Like how the hairs on the man’s head were melted and charred, like the bristles of a hairbrush that had drawn too near an open flame. Or how the skin on the man’s head—sheerer and hairless and now stretched with horrifying tension over the dome of his skull—was threaded with flimsy blue veins like the veins on a newborn baby’s skull.

Ephraim had run to the truck and babbled into the CB radio. He was still babbling for help when the paramedics showed up.

That was the closest Ephraim had ever come to death until last night. And the dead man here (who the hell was he, anyway?) had been so much worse because he had been so much more final. The dead man couldn’t get skin grafts and a hair weave like the workman could. All that lay in wait for the dead man was a lonely hole in the dirt.

And now Scoutmaster Tim was pretty sick, too. Maybe the same way the dead man had been?

They’d locked him in that stupid closet; Ephraim hadn’t quite felt right about it—he got carried away, was all. And now Kent looked like he’d been attacked by vampire bats in the night; they’d sucked a gallon of blood out of him and soon—

He inhaled deeply. Held it. Let it go.

10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1

Are you angry, Eef? came his mother’s voice. Or are you scared?

Ephraim realized that those emotions existed on two sides of a razor-thin line. One bled into the other so easily.

Anger. Keep Out.

Fear… Keep Out?

It’s always good to have a little fear, son, especially at your age, he heard his mom say. Fear keeps you honest. Fear keeps you safe.

Ephraim stubbed the cigarette, dug a small hole in the earth—a little grave for my coffin nail, he thought cheerlessly—and buried the butt. He headed back to the campfire, confused in his thoughts.

From the sworn testimony of Nathan Erikson, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:

20

THE COOLER was discovered two hundred yards down toward the shore. There was no physical evidence to indicate it had been dragged: no zigzag lines through the soft dirt or trampled weeds. This suggested it had been picked up and carried to its present spot. It lay overturned in a patch of purple-pink shrubs.

But the crude way that the food had been shredded did suggest an animal. The hot dog packages had been torn open. Raw rags of the granular pink meat lay scattered about the cooler, alit upon by listless late-October flies. M&Ms were strewn around like multicolored jewels.

Ephraim kicked dirt over a half-chewed hot dog. His jaw was set at a sideways angle, his eyes hooded.

“Fuck it. Boat’ll be here soon.”

The boys walked down to the shore. They hadn’t packed their bags—none of them wanted to go inside the cabin, though none of them spoke those words. The air was crisp, with a soft undernote of peppermint. The face of Newt’s Timex Ironman read 8:23. The boat was scheduled to arrive at 8:30.

Kent slumped on a boulder carpeted with moss that resembled the fuzz on a tennis ball. When he was sure nobody was watching, he pinched some moss and stuffed it into his mouth. He didn’t know why he’d do such a thing. It shamed and disgusted him.

He was just so damned hungry.

Newton sidled up. Cautiously he said: “You okay, K?”

“I’m fine.”

“You look a little green.” Newton gave him a chummy smile and pointed to the water. “Like me when I get seasick. The rest of my family have great sea legs, but not me. When the boat gets swaying, I just toss my cookies. Lose my lunch every time.”

“Newt, screw off.” Kent gave Newton a look more pleading than threatening. “Okay? Please?”

He turned away and caught Shelley gawping at him. That same vapid look as always—was it, though?

Kent had been sure the others were asleep when he’d woken last night. The growl of his stomach had drawn him out of a deep slumber: an aching burr like a chain saw revving endlessly. He’d sat up with his hands reflexively clawing his belly.

His eyes had darted to the cooler. Next he’d glanced at the other boys, scrutinizing them carefully. They were asleep, Newton snoring loud as a leaf blower.

His gaze had been drawn helplessly to the cooler. The hunger was like nothing he’d ever known. Beyond an ache. More like an insistence. A summoning. There was a big, dark pit inside of him—something that had started out as a pinprick hole but had rapidly grown into a vortex, the equivalent of a violent tornado, but instead of the random objects that a twister pulls into its funnel—trees and mailboxes and lawn mowers—the one inside of him was sucking at his own insides, his liver and kidneys and lungs and stomach, with the incredible pressure of industrial machinery.

Kent had been terrified that if he let it go on much longer, the hole would suck clean through him—out of him.

He’d stood silently and crept to the cooler. His heart beat a staccato hi-hat behind his rib cage. His bladder was so tight he thought he might piss himself. Kent had forced himself to exhale softly—otherwise his breath would escape in shrill peeps like a baby bird calling for food. And what did baby birds eat? Worms. Their mothers chewed them up in their flinty beaks and regurgitated them. Worms just like the one that still lay on the cabin floor next to the dead man. Except not that big. And not so maggot-white. It would take a million birds to eat a worm that huge.

Kent’s hands had crawled over the cooler’s lid. The pebbled plastic reminded him of summer picnics. An ice-carpeted cooler with the brown necks of Coke bottles poking up. Watermelon sliced two inches thick. He’d bite through its pink flesh and spit the black seeds… seeds that looked a little like blood-swollen ticks, now that he thought about it.

His hands flirted over wieners and buns and teardrops of chocolate wrapped in silver foil. Surely one couldn’t hurt? It was his anyway. One-fifth of this food was earmarked for him. So what if Kent wanted to eat his share in the middle of the night?

He’d plucked a Hershey’s Kiss from the bag with trembling fingers. A runner of drool stretched into a glimmering ribbon in the firelight. He’d unwrapped the chocolate quickly and popped it into his mouth. Chewing and swallowing…

Before his mind could catch up to the mechanical movements of his fingers, the bag was empty. He’d lost track of things. His fingers and lips were streaked with brown chocolate. Brown—Kent’s gorge rose with quick revulsion—brown like the muck pooling out of the dead man’s stomach.

With swift, silent movements, he carried the cooler down near the shore. Things went hazy from there. Kent could only recall brief glints and flashes. Tearing and rending. Shoveling and swallowing. He may have wept while doing it.

At some point he’d glanced up and saw Shelley watching. Shelley, who should have been sleeping. Shelley, whose face had gone wolfish in the moonlight.

Go on, he’d mouthed to Kent. Keep eating. Enjoy it.

When Kent came back to himself, the cooler was empty. The persistent internal suck had ebbed to a muffled quaver in his gut. It was more than he’d eaten in his entire life. Guilt settled into his bones like lead. He pictured his father hovering over the scene with an accusatory eye.

You don’t get it, Daddy, he’d wanted to say. You don’t understand what I’m going through.

I understand weakness, son. Prisons are full of weak-willed men.

Afterward, Kent had stepped into the ocean to clean his hands and face. The cold water pinkened his fingers. Even at that hour, the mainland was a flurry of light and motion. He cupped water in his hands and walked back to the cooler, wiping his chocolaty fingerprints off the handles.

On the way back to the fire, he’d found Shelley lingering beneath the leaves of a weeping willow. Kent curled a fist and settled it under Shelley’s chin.

“Say anything and I’ll kick the shit out of you,” he whispered.

“If you say so.”

Kent took a step back. Something in Shelley’s placid expression nearly made his knees buckle.

“You know what, Kent?” Shelley said. “Your breath stinks like shit. Like cotton candy that someone took a big piss on. Can’t you smell it?”

Kent could smell it. The treacly-sweet stink with its ammoniac undertone nearly made him gag.

“I mean it, Shel. Keep your lip zipped.”

Kent plodded back to the fire and struggled into his sleeping bag. But by morning, despite his devouring the cooler’s entire contents, the hunger pangs had already returned.

NEWTON GLANCED at his Timex again: 9:02.

Stanley Watters’s skiff should have puttered up to the wharf a half hour ago. It was not like Mr. Watters to be late. Before his retirement, he’d been the logistics coordinator at the local FedEx depot; the time of day was practically imprinted in his blood. Watters’s favorite parlor trick was to look at his bare wrist when you asked what time it was—Watters never wore a watch—and give it to you to the very minute. Freaky. He might be a minute or two off nowadays but still, for him to be a half hour late? That was a rare occurrence indeed.

“You think something happened?” Newton said. “Mr. Watters is what, seventy?”

“Do you think we could swim back?” Ephraim said.

Newton scoffed. “Are you nuts? With these currents? They run the Atlantic Ironman Triathlon off Baker Beach.” He pointed in the general direction of North Point. “I went with my mom once to watch it. Guys were staggering out of the ocean. Their teeth were bashing together so hard I could hear it. Most of them puked, they were so exhausted. And those were athletes. Grown-ups. And it was only a thousand meters. From here to shore is three miles.”

“There are sharks, too,” said Shelley.

Their heads swiveled. Shelley’s vulpine face was pointed toward the slate-gray water, his expression unreadable.

“Oh, bullshit,” said Ephraim.

Shelley’s scarecrow shoulders joggled up and down. “Whatever. My uncle’s seen plenty of sharks. He said one time a couple of oystermen caught a great white down around Campbellton. It swum into Cascumpec Bay after a storm. He says when the oystermen slit its belly open, two full wine bottles slid out onto the dock.”

Shelley’s uncle was a lobsterman, so it could be true.

Ephraim made a fist and slugged his thigh. “Could we make a raft or something?” He pointed at Oliver McCanty’s boat. “Or try to get the motor working on that? What do you think, Max?”

“Why wouldn’t we just chill out?” Max said. “He’s only a half hour late—”

“Almost forty-five minutes, now,” Newton said.

“It’s probably nothing,” said Max. “Maybe he’s constipated.”

This earned a laugh from the others. Ephraim said: “Old man Watters is a total tight-ass.”

Thunderheads advanced. The boys watched the sky, enrapt. Thunder rolled across the water and echoed back on itself: a sound that was somehow feathery and alive. The clouds shaded purple to jet-black and then whitely incandescent, creased with lightning, billowing up like huge lungs inflating themselves. They spread across the water like a determined battalion. Rain washed down from the leaden clouds to tint the air beneath them a misty gray.

“Maybe old man Watters knew a storm was coming,” said Max. “Maybe that’s why he hasn’t shown up.”

Newton said: “Why not just come early then? He knew what time to come. Why leave us out here with a big storm coming through?”

“We don’t know it’s a big storm…” Max said uncertainly.

Soon they spotted the silvery shroud rolling across the water—which itself had taken on a brooding hue. It stretched over the ocean in a menacing canopy, pushing back the blue sky and blotting out the sun. The water bloomed deep red.

“Shit, it’s bad,” Kent said thickly. “We have to take cover.”

They picked their way up the beach toward the cabin. Newton cast a panicky glance over his shoulder. The silvery pall was advancing at a terrific pace. Its contours had settled into a definite shape. A diaphanous funnel connected the water’s surface to the corpulent black thunderclouds above; it rocked side to side like a hula dancer’s hips.

A cyclone.

Newton recalled that one of those had touched down in Abbotsford a few years ago. It tore through the saltbox shacks lining the shorefront cliffs, smashing them to matchsticks. It picked up million-dollar yachts owned by rich American cottagers and flung them about like a child tossing his toys during a playroom tantrum.

“We’ve got to get inside!” he shouted over the banshee wind. “Or underground. Fast!”

By the time they reached the cabin, the shaker shingles were slapping against the roof—a brittle racck! racck! like the clatter of dry bones.

As one, they hesitated at the door. The dead man was in there. Scoutmaster Tim was locked in the closet. It was like revisiting the scene of a murder—one they’d all sworn in a pact to never talk about.

Lightning daggered through a bank of roiling purple clouds and forked sharply into the ocean. The water lit with a mushrooming sheen as if a tiny atom bomb had gone off below the surface.

Newton said: “We have to get inside. It’s going to hit us any minute.”

“We need to take cover, but not in there,” said Kent. His face was bleach-white except for the jaundiced flushes painting his cheekbones. “I don’t want to see that man again.”

Ephraim jeered: “You wanted to see him bad enough last night, didn’t you?”

“Scoutmaster’s in there, too,” said Newton.

Kent set his body in front of the door. A trivial gesture, like having a scarecrow guard a bank vault. The wind rose to a breathless whistle that ripped around the hard angles of the cabin, making an ululating note like a bowstring drawn across a musical saw.

“They’re sick,” Kent said simply.

“Sick?” said Newton. “Kent, one of them is dead.”

“Him, then. Tim. He’s sick. The whole place is sick.”

“How about this, Kent? How about you’re sick.”

It was Shelley who spoke. The boys almost missed it: the wind tore the words out of his mouth and carried them away over the whipsawing treetops.

Newton said: “What? Who’s sick?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Shelley said, louder now. “Kent. He’s sick as a dog. Last night I saw him—”

“Shut up!” Kent almost sobbed. “You shut your dirty mouth, Shel!”

“Last night,” Shelley said, enunciating each word with utmost care, “I caught Kent eating the food. He stole the cooler and took it down to the water. By the time I got there, he’d eaten it. He—”

Shelley was opening his mouth to say something more when Kent strode forward and dealt him an openhanded slap to the face.

“You shut your lying fucking mouth. I’ll kill you, you crazy little fuck.”

Shelley just stood there. A trickle of blood ran from his split lip like heavy sap from a tapped maple tree. Did he even notice, or care? The empty vaults of his eyes filled with vaporous white, reflecting the lightning that flashed over the bluffs. They became the glass eyes of a toy clown.

“He did it,” Shelley said softly. He didn’t have to speak very loud anymore: the boys were attuned to his every word. “Yes, he did. Ate all our food. He couldn’t help himself—could you, Kent? That’s why I didn’t say anything at first—I felt sorry for you, Kent. You’re sick. You’ve got the worms.”

Kent sagged against the door. The effort it had taken to slap Shelley seemed to drain his meager power reserves.

“We’re not going… in,” he said haltingly.

“Listen, Kent.” Ephraim spoke with cold menace. A brick-hued flush was draining down his cheeks to pinken his neck. “You ate our food. Fine, whatever, it’s been done. But I’m not standing out here waiting to get crisped by lightning. So I’ll tell you what—take a quick count of the teeth in your mouth. Then get ready to kiss about half of them good-bye, because if you don’t get out of my way in about two seconds, you’re going to be picking your pearly whites off the ground.”

Without waiting for an answer, Ephraim laid his shoulder into Kent’s chest. Kent folded like a lawn chair. Ephraim barreled through into the cabin. The sickening sweetness hammered him in the face—the air inside a decayed beehive could smell much the same.

Wind screamed through the gaps in the walls—the sound of a thousand teakettles hitting the boiling point. A swath of shingles tore off the roof to reveal the angry sky above: bruised darkness lit with shutter flashes of lightning. The wind curled in through the new aperture to swirl scraps of bloody gauze around the cabin like gruesome snowflakes.

“We have to get to the cellar!” Newton said.

“What about Scoutmaster?” Max shouted back.

They all turned to Kent, who had just dragged himself up off the floor. Lightning lit the sky and seethed through every crack and slit in the cabin.

“He’s sick,” Kent said.

Ephraim said: “You’re sick, too!”

“I’m not!” Kent held out his hands—they did not make for compelling evidence of his claim. “I’m not fucking sick!”

“Max,” Ephraim said. “Is Kent sick or not?”

“I think maybe so,” said Max—not because he wanted it to be so, but because there was no other answer for what he was seeing. “I’m sorry, Kent.”

“What a fucking shock!” Kent snarled. “The Bobbsey Twins agree!”

The wind hit a momentary lull. In that dead calm, the boys heard Tim’s voice calling them from the closet.

“I am sick.”

Kent pointed at the door. An expression of smug elation was plastered on the strained canvas of his face. “You see? You see now?”

Max knelt at the closet and tore the strip of duct tape off. Who the hell had put it there? He started yanking the tea towels stoppered under the door—then stopped abruptly. What if something squiggled out from under the door? The Scoutmaster’s fingers, even, gone thin and witchy like long pointed wires?

“There’s a big storm coming,” he said to the door, to the Scoutmaster. “It’s already here.”

“I can hear it.” Tim’s voice was weird. “What you should do is get some candles and blankets and head down to the cellar.”

“What about you?”

“I think… I’ll stay right here, Max.”

The hopelessness in his voice sent a volley of cold nails into Max’s chest.

“Why?”

“You know why, Max. Are any of the other boys looking bad?”

“Yeah, I think Kent is.”

“I’m not sick!” Kent screeched pitifully.

“You shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you,” Ephraim said with calm contempt.

The wind dropped to a brief lull. Tim’s voice could be heard clearly.

“You have to be careful,” he said, sounding immensely tired. “Whatever this is, it’s catching. I don’t know how. But it can be passed around… round and round… I’m so hungry, Max.”

Thunder crashed overhead like massive two-by-fours being thwacked together. The hair at the nape of the boys’ necks stood at attention. A string of blood trailed under the closet door. The ventricles of Max’s heart ran with ice at the sight.

“You’re bleeding,” he whispered.

“Am I?” Tim did not sound surprised or alarmed. “I don’t know where it could be coming from. I don’t feel it at all. Now go on, Max. Get down to the cellar. Go, hurry.”

21

BEFORE THE boys entered the cellar, a fight broke out.

Ephraim ransacked the cabin cupboards for candles and a pack of matches. He picked nimbly around the dead man, whose limbs had stiffened at tragic angles and whose body now shimmered with fruit flies.

Newton dashed down to the fire pit and grabbed their sleeping bags. He cast a fearful glance at the ocean. The water was in complete turmoil. With the wind whipping about, Newton’s feet didn’t feel entirely moored to the earth anymore.

He raced around the side of the cabin to meet the others. Ephraim had thrown the cellar doors open, the plywood trembling in the wind. Snapped spiderwebs blew like the flimsiest lace over the yawning entryway. The fermented smell of the earth rose up. The sky had gone the color of a blood blister—only a weak sickle of light shone into the cellar. The first few dusty wooden steps were visible, but the remainder of the staircase was overtaken in pooling shadows.

Ephraim pointed at Kent. “Sorry, man. You aren’t coming down with us.”

Kent’s face somersaulted from shock to rage to speechless terror at the prospect of being left alone outside.

“You can’t…” He offered his hands in a wordless plea. “You can’t just—”

Ephraim crossed his arms. “You did it to the Scoutmaster.”

Max saw the strange electricity running behind Ephraim’s face: cruel voltages quivered his skin.

“That was different,” Kent said feebly.

“I don’t think so. I think it was smart.” Ephraim’s hands spanked together in a polite golf-clap. “Very smart.”

“We can’t just leave him out here, Eef.”

Ephraim wheeled on Newton. “You want to get sick next? Want to be sneaking off in the middle of the night to eat everyone’s food?”

“I’m sorry,” Kent whispered.

Ephraim cupped a hand to his ear. “What’s that? Can’t hear you.”

“I’m sorry.” Tears brimmed in the cups of Kent’s eyelids. “Just let me come down with you. Please. Don’t leave me out here.”

“No can do,” Ephraim said coldly.

“What are we going to do, Eef?” Max said, gesturing to the storm set to make landfall. “Just leave him?”

“He can go back inside the cabin,” said Eef. “It doesn’t matter n—”

Which was when Kent tried to bull past Ephraim into the cellar. Yesterday that confrontation would have been a coin flip. Now it was pitifully one-sided.

Ephraim pushed Kent—an instinctual move. His face wrenched with quick revulsion as he shoved Kent aside as one might a squirming sack of beetles. Kent went sprawling.

Newton said: “Eef, come on…”

Ephraim’s lips curled back. “Stay out of this, you fat shit.”

Kent crawled up and came again. For an instant, it looked as though Ephraim would step aside—this tormented expression came over him, stuck between confrontation and flight—but his rage took over. He punched Kent in the belly. His fist sunk into Kent’s gut in some terrifying way: it was as if Kent’s body shaped itself around Ephraim’s fist, welcoming it. Kent’s breath came out in a gust.

“Stay down,” Ephraim told him.

Instead Kent dragged himself up. He looked like some bloodless creature risen from his grave. His face had the pallid sheen of a dengue fever victim. The other boys ranged into a silent ring around Ephraim and Kent, the same ring that seems to form organically in school yards whenever a fight’s brewing. Rain now pelted down to soak them through to their skivvies.

Ephraim struck out impulsively at Kent. If his mother had seen him, she’d have noticed the quick, reckless anger in his eyes—so much like his father.

Eef’s fists zipped out and back rapidly, as if repelled by Kent’s yellowed flesh. In short order, he’d raised a goose-egg on Kent’s forehead and bloodied his nose and smacked him squarely in the left eye—a wound that would blacken nicely before long. Kent held his arms out, fingers squeezing and opening convulsively. His skin tore like crepe paper, stretched too tight over the flinty outcroppings of his face. Blood leaked out of his wounds only to be rinsed away by the heavy rain.

Kent kept trying to speak as Ephraim’s fists peppered him. “I’m sorry,” he said penitently, his voice unheard amid the peals of thunder. “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry…”

Ephraim’s fist sheared off Kent’s jaw. Blood leapt through the electrified air. Ephraim’s knuckles had split open. It went on forever, and then it stopped. Ephraim’s eyes remained wild, his nostrils dilated.

“You can stay out here with him,” he told Newton. “Your choice. But he’s not coming down.”

The hardest-hearted part of the boys realized that Kent had earned this. If you call the tune, you also have to pay the piper when he begs his due.

“We can’t just leave him, Eef.”

Ephraim rounded on Newton. “We can, and we’re gonna. Or I’m gonna—and Max, too. And Shelley, I guess.”

Shelley was already halfway down the cellar stairs. The other boys remained in the pelting rain, lightning spearing over the trees. Ephraim turned to Max.

“Come on, man. Let’s go.”

Max fell in behind Ephraim… then he checked up. Dark clouds massed overhead, throwing them into a sudden night. Lightning lit the twitching contours of their faces.

“Eef, man,” Max said. “Can’t we at least find someplace safer for him?”

The two boys stood face-to-face, shirts rain-stuck to their chests, heartbeats shivering their skin. Something passed between them—a subtle split, an inelegant falling away. Maybe it was necessary, maybe not, but it happened. Both boys felt it.

Eef said: “Do you have any idea how stupid you are, Max?”

“Don’t lock the door,” Max said, holding Ephraim’s gaze. “We’re coming back. Come on, Kent.”

THREE BOYS skirted the cabin’s edge. The wind blew with such gale force that it elicited shrieks from everything it touched. The logs shrieked as it lashed at their unflexing angles; the trees shrieked as gusts threatened to uproot them from the ground; even the grass shrieked—a thin and razor-fine whistle—as the wind danced between every blade. Rain needled down so hard that they felt as though their faces and arms would be sliced open: like walking through a storm of paper cuts.

Kent stumbled, arms outflung. Max reached impulsively—Newton’s hand manacled his wrist. Newton shook his head and mouthed: You can’t touch him.

Kent dragged himself out of the muddy stew, his boots slipping—they looked too big all of a sudden, his feet swimming in them—and followed Newton to the woodpile. It was rung by stacked cinder blocks and edged by trees; the wind wasn’t quite so bad.

“Stay here!” Newton had to holler to make himself heard.

Kent knelt, too tired to argue. The boys folded the woodpile tarp and settled it over Kent’s shivering shoulders. Earwigs and millipedes and wood lice and deer ticks squirmed from the dead logs, startled by the storm. Crawling and twitching through the mud, they skittered up the tarp. Max reached out to brush them away, revolted at the thought of touching them but even more revolted at the possibility they’d alight on Kent’s skin and hair. Newt grabbed his hand again.

Kent didn’t seem to mind. His eyes darted, charting the course of those milling bugs.

Newton said: “We’ll come get you soon!”

Kent’s head swiveled. A mechanical motion, like a toy abandoned in the rain. Lightning creased the sky and seemed to penetrate his flesh, igniting his bones in skeletal relief. His lips split in a grin that sent gooseflesh up the nape of Max’s neck.

An earwig squirmed round the cup of Kent’s ear, tracked across his face, and hung like a squirming fat raindrop from the boy’s lower lip.

“Kent,” Max breathed, horror twining up his spine like a weed. “There’s a…”

Kent’s tongue snaked between his teeth, curled lovingly around the earwig, and drew it into his mouth. His eyes never left theirs.

22

WHEN EPHRAIM was eight, his mother took him to visit the mausoleum where his grandmother was kept. He remembered feeling slightly curious beforehand. Back then, Ephraim still held a healthy curiosity about death.

He remembered the thin acrid smell that had attended their entrance into the granite rostrum. The sterilized smell of death. It wasn’t the flyblown battlefield reek with its sweetness that was kissing cousin to a truly good smell—barbecued pork, maybe—a sensual similarity that made it all the more sickening. This was sanitized and tolerable. An ammoniac mothball smell overlying subtle decay.

Ephraim caught that same pungent smell as he’d crept down the cabin’s cellar steps. His heart made a giddy leap—what had died down here?

Ephraim had watched as Max and Newton guided Kent behind the cabin, wind snapping their clothes against their frames like flags flapping on a pole. A thin needle of regret had lanced through his heart. He’d argued with Max about abandoning Kent—and they never argued. Rage had pounded at Ephraim’s temples as his neck flushed with heat. No fists had been swung, but it’d been a fight all the same.

That bothered and confused him. Ephraim possessed a keen sense of fairness. He’d inherited that from his father; the only phrase he could ever recall him saying was: You pay what you owe. And his dad was paying now, in prison. Kent had earned his ills, hadn’t he? He needed to pay what he owed.

But where did that leave Ephraim now? In a cellar with Shelley Longpre—the last alignment he’d ever seek.

He pulled the doors shut, latching them from the inside. The wind and rain roared and bashed the cabin above. The swaybacked steps groaned under his feet. Long, straggly tendrils trailed lightly across Ephraim’s face: they felt like the dangling, unnaturally long limbs of a daddy longlegs spider.

He lit one of the candles he’d scavenged. It illuminated Shelley’s face—his skin seemed to radiate a light all its own, a greasy luminescence as if glowworms were stitched under it. Shadows, made misshapen and monstrous by the wavering candlelight, scurried along the cellar walls. The root systems of trees and plants dangled down from the roof.

Ephraim walked the perimeter. Empty, barren. A musty boat tarp was heaped in one corner. The heap seemed to expand and contract in the fitful light.

“Sit down, Eef.”

Shelley sat cross-legged on the dirt. With his long limbs folded, knees and elbows kinked, he looked vaguely insectile, like a potato bug curled into a protective ball, only its gray exoskeleton showing… or one of those cockroaches that would scuttle up the drains during island storms—the ones that hissed when you squashed them.

“Nah, I’m good.”

“You were right,” Shelley said. “About Kent. He deserved it. He brought it down on himself.”

Something unshackled in Ephraim’s chest. He didn’t hate Kent—it was a question of fairness, was all. You pay what you owe.

“Max will understand,” Shelley said softly. “Even Newton. Before long they’ll see how right you were.”

There was something oddly narcotic about Shelley’s monotone drawl. Ephraim felt sluggish and just a bit queasy—that happy-sick feeling he got in his belly after riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Montague Fair.

“Come,” Shelley patted the dirt. “Sit.”

It seemed less a request, more a subtle directive. Ephraim sat. Shelley’s body kicked off ambient warmth, moist and weirdly salty like the air wafting from the mouth of a volcanic sea cave. He slid one pale, whiplike arm over Ephraim’s shoulder—an oily, frictionless, hairless appendage slipping across, smooth and dense like a heavy rubber hose. His fingers thrummed on Ephraim’s bare flesh; Ephraim wanted to brush them away, their tacky warmth making him mildly revolted, but that narcotic sluggishness prevented him from doing so. Shelley’s arm constricted just a little—he was stronger than he looked—pulling Ephraim close.

“You’re in charge now, Eef. Isn’t that just awesome? That’s how it should’ve been all along, isn’t it?”

“I don’t… don’t really care about that.”

Shelley smiled—a knowing expression. “Sure you don’t.”

“I don’t. Sincerely.” Rage crept up Ephraim’s throat, burning like bile. “Shut your fucking mouth, Shel.”

Shelley’s smile persisted. The edgeless grin of a moron. His teeth were tiny—Ephraim had never noticed before. Like niblet corn. Bands of yellow crust rimmed each tooth. Did Shelley ever brush his teeth? Did something like Shelley even think about stuff like that?

Something like Shelley? Ephraim thought. Someone, I mean. Someone.

“Relax, Eef. I’m on your side.”

Where the hell were Max and Newt? Ephraim wished like hell they were here now; anything was better than being cooped up

(trapped?)

in this dank cellar with Shelley. Lightning flashed, igniting the slit where the cellar doors met in camera-flash incandescence. Thunder boomed with such force that it seemed to bulge the planks overhead, rattling Ephraim’s heart in its fragile cage of bone.

“Jesus, Eef…”

Shelley was staring at Ephraim—at his hands.

“What?”

Shelley’s arm slid off Ephraim’s shoulder. He leaned away, swallowing hard, his eyes riveted on Ephraim’s hands. His torn, bloody hands.

“What the hell are you looking at, Shel?”

“Nothing. It’s… no, it’s nothing.”

Ephraim’s arm shot out, snatching Shelley’s collar. Shelley issued a mewling noise of disgust, heels digging into the dirt as he propelled himself away. He knocked the candle over, snuffing it.

“Your fingernails!” he said—a blubbery, spittle-flecked shriek. “I think I saw something moving under your fingernails, Eef.”

Ephraim’s hand fell away from Shelley’s collar, his fingers knitting into a ball under his trembling chin. The darkness closed in, strangling, suffocating, squeezing the air from his lungs. The skin under his fingernails—skin he’d never even considered as a discrete part of his body—buzzed at a hellish new frequency.

“Wh-what did you see?”

“Something,” was all Shelley would say. “…something.”

Next fists were pounding on the cellar doors. “Eef! Open up, man!”

Ephraim tried to stand. He couldn’t. The strength had fled his body. He curled into a ball, knees drawn tight to his stomach.

“Eef!”

Shelley hesitated for a long moment before mounting the cellar stairs. Newt and Max came down, windblown and dripping wet. Ephraim’s heart swelled at the sight.

“You okay?” Max said.

Yes, Ephraim thought, shivering with cold anger. It’s nothing. Not a goddamn thing at all. Fuckin’ Shel. I’ll kill him.

“It was nothing, Eef,” Shel said, grinning greasily in the dark. “I was wrong, probably.”

Newt said, “Wrong about what?”

“Nothing!” Eef shouted—and in the next instant there came a ripping and rending crash as the big oak cracked almost directly above them. The splintering mash of wood as the tree crashed through the cabin roof. BOOM! The air inside the cellar seemed to condense and turn to cold lead in the boys’ lungs. The tree struck the floor with a terrible impact and bounced once. The cellar roof splintered—shafts of cold light streamed through the shattered slats. Next it bulged down threateningly.

“Oh God,” Max said. “The Scoutmaster…”

Uncertainty flickered on the boys’ faces. As the rain and wind hit a momentary lull, they could hear Kent outside at the cellar doors.

“Please—please!” he begged, the words coming out in hysterical yelps. He scratched on the doors like a dog pleading to come inside on a cold night.

Ephraim caught Max’s eye, holding it. No words were spoken. Finally Ephraim bowed his head, blew at the hanging fringe of his hair, and tromped determinedly up the steps. The fear in his heart morphed into something else, at least temporarily—a breed of unflexing resolve. It seemed the best, perhaps only way to keep a lid on his terror.

He unlatched the door and threw it open. Rain arrowed through the entryway. Lightning lit the planes of Kent’s twitching, horrible face.

“Get in,” Ephraim said. “But you have to sit away from us. I’m sorry.”

Kent nodded pathetically and dragged himself to the corner with the boat tarp, pulling it over him. Max caught Ephraim looking at Kent’s wounds, then at his own split knuckles. It wasn’t hard to guess what he was thinking.

From the sworn testimony of Nathan Erikson, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:

23

IN TIME, the wind died down. The storm blew out to the northern sea. Water dripped all around them; it seemed terribly loud, each drop producing a watery echo. The boys huddled, shivering and soaked, in the cellar—all except Kent, who sat in isolation under the tarp.

“We ought to check on the Scoutmaster,” Newton said.

Ephraim nodded. “Kent, you stay here.”

Kent’s face was wan and ghoulish above the burlap. It looked like the wooden face of Zoltar, that mechanical sideshow oracle at the Cavendish County Fair: 25 cents to know your future! Things were stuck in his braces, too… insect parts? Yes. Thoraxes and legs and antennae bristled from his mouth-metal. He was gnawing on the moldy tarp. Working the frayed edge like an old man gumming a carrot. A faraway look in his eyes—he could have been contemplating a lovely sunset.

“Okay,” he said. “I kinda like it down here, anyway.”

“You okay, K?” Newton asked, repulsion lying heavy in his gorge.

“Sure.” A death’s-head grin. “Never better.”

A collective unease enveloped the boys—even Shelley. How long had it been? Less than twelve hours. Half a day ago, Kent Jenks had been one of them. The biggest and strongest of them all. The boy everyone in North Point forecasted great things for. Now here he was, curled in a cellar, insects gummed in his teeth, gnawing mindlessly on a tarp. Reduced and squandered in some nasty, terrifying, unquantifiable way. Whatever was wrong with him, this sickness, it was rampaging. Barnstorming through his body, devouring him. Newton sensed this: that Kent was being eaten from the inside out, his flesh loosening by degrees, the meat flensed from his bones as his body shrunk inside his skin until… until what? This sickness cared nothing for Kent—for the man he could’ve become, for the bright future that seemed so assured. It was coring him out, ruining him in unfixable ways.

They left him down there. Ephraim shut the doors and jammed a stick between the handles so Kent couldn’t escape.

THE ISLAND was still in the passing of the storm.

As they’d heard from the cellar, the huge oak—one of only five or six truly big trees on Falstaff Island—had snapped, falling upon the cabin’s interlaced log walls. The spot where it had broken looked like the butt of a trick cigar: splinters of wood stuck out of the trunk at crazy angles, perfuming the air with sap.

They inhaled the peculiar scent of the earth after a storm while surveying the cabin. The roof was cleaved in half, sagging inward like a huge toothless mouth. The door hung off its shattered hinges. Ephraim hauled it open. His gaze fell to scrutinize his fingernails. He shot a look at Shelley—who caught his eyes and held them evenly.

“Careful as we go inside,” Ephraim said, sounding very much like Kent. “Cover your mouths like before.”

The roof had collapsed in a solid flap that resembled a wave set to break. The boys walked through a corridor of shadow created by the fallen roof and found Scoutmaster Tim in the splintered remains of the closet. The tree had snapped the two-by-fours and pancaked the closet’s plywood walls. The trunk had landed on his head and shoulders.

“Tim?” Newton said in a small, disbelieving voice. “Are you…?”

The final word—okay?—died on his lips. Scoutmaster Tim was definitely not okay.

The finality of the situation assaulted Newton. It was in the way the tree trunk sat flush with the floor. It was in the crushed eggshell of the Scoutmaster’s skull, which was visible—barely but hideously visible—beneath the bark. It was in the jagged purple lines that raced all over his flesh: the pressure had bulged and ruptured his vesicles. His skin looked like some gruesome jigsaw puzzle. It was in the sweet smell that rose off his body and the darker undernote of death: a somehow rusty smell, Newton thought, like the smell that came off a seized engine block at the dump. It was in the boot that had fallen off his foot—more like ejected off when the tree came crashing down, causing his legs to spike upward in one spastic motion, flinging his boot away. It was in the pale knob of his toe poking through the woolen sock. It was in the cricket that rested in the split V of his open shirt collar, which just then began to rub its legs together to produce a high humming song.

“He looks like the witch in The Wizard of Oz,” Shelley said. “The one the house landed on, not the one that melted.”

“Shut the fuck up, Shel,” Ephraim said hoarsely.

Newton’s heart was a wounded bird flapping inside his chest. He wanted to scream, but the sound was locked up under his lungs.

“What should we do?” he said. “Is he really…?”

He found it impossible to say. Dead. The word itself was somehow unapproachable. He knelt and touched Scoutmaster Tim’s hand. The flesh was cold and dank like a rock in a fast-running river.

“It’s okay, Newt,” Ephraim said. “It must have been fast, you know? I don’t think he even felt it.”

Newton spoke with his head down. “You think so?”

Max sincerely hoped it was so. He felt sick. His Scoutmaster—the adult he’d known longer than anyone besides his own parents—had died in a closet. The one person with the best ideas for getting them off this island was gone, and he’d left five dumb, piss-scared kids behind.

“Should we bury him?” Ephraim said.

Before any of them had a chance to respond, Scoutmaster Tim’s stomach began to move.

At first it was barely visible; it seemed as if weak fingers were pawing at it from the inside. Max watched, his mouth unhinged. It was sickeningly mesmerizing.

“What…” Ephraim breathed, “…is that?”

A fragile white tube broke the surface of the skin an inch above the Scoutmaster’s navel. It pushed through insistently, twisting around as if tasting the air. It was followed quickly by another and another. Soon there were seven or eight: it looked like the legs of an albino spider struggling to escape its spider hole.

Each tube was slightly pebbled—they seemed to be studded with something. Max squinted closer. They were… oh God, they were mouths. Little mouths like the ones on a sucker fish.

The Scoutmaster’s stomach split soundlessly, like Saran Wrap, groin to rib cage. Hundreds of worms came boiling out, all much smaller versions of the single massive abomination that had come out of the other man—the stranger. Some were the thickness of butcher’s twine, but most were frail and wispy, as insubstantial as the clipped threads of a spiderweb. They twisted and roiled and spilled down the Scoutmaster’s papery flesh: his skin empty of blood and nutrients, just a soft white covering like dry fatback.

Max noticed that the worms didn’t appear to be singular entities. Rather they were twisted together—a pulpy white ball radiating dozens or hundreds. It was as if something had gathered them up and tied them all into a bulging knot, like that ball they saw yesterday in the rocks—a knot of fucking snakes. These spiky worm-balls tumbled over one another, squirming and shucking. A horrible low hissing noise emanated from the Scoutmaster’s chest cavity.

“No,” Newt said, his head snapping side to side. “No no no no…”

The hissing noise stopped. Slowly, achingly, the worms stretched as a single unit—a cooperative hive-mind—toward the sound of Newton’s voice.

“Jesus,” said Ephraim.

Then the worms swung in his direction.

Some of them swelled menacingly, a small bead crowning at their tips. There came a series of dim, pop-gun percussions. Delicate strands wafted through the air, sunlight falling along their ghostly wavering contours.

Ephraim stepped back. He swatted at the strands with a helpless look on his face. He stared at his knuckles, which were broken open and still weeping slug-trails of blood from his fight with Kent.

Max knew Ephraim so well that he could almost see the crazed thought forming in the other boy’s head.

They can get inside of me through there. These wounds are basically wide-open doors in my body…

Through an aperture in the cleaved roof, Max spotted a slit of perfectly blue sky—that scintillating blue that comes on the heels of a bad storm—and below, a scrim of gray marking the mainland. His parents would be there. Why hadn’t they come yet? His folks, and Newt’s and Eef’s and Kent’s and Shelley’s, too? Fuck old man Watters—if he couldn’t get his ancient ass in gear, why wouldn’t their folks show up? Kent’s dad could use the police patrol boat—special dispensation, right? An emergency. But no, they’d left their kids alone on this killing floor of an island. Two men were dead already, and Kent was bad off. Death warmed over, as Max’s mom would say. Except for Kent, death might come as a relief. A shudder fled down Max’s spine—the very thought of Kent, dead, his body invaded by these things…

24

KENT WAS dreaming.

He was on the ocean with his father. Night was coming on. The eerie smoothness of the water, not a wave or ripple, was what made Kent realize that he was dreaming.

Kent was thinking about a girl in his class. Anna Uniak. Anna was pretty and trim and he was sure his father would approve. He often looked at Anna out of the corner of his eye—she sat one seat ahead and to the left of him at school. The light would fall through the classroom window and pick up the fine downy hairs on her cheeks. It looked like peach fuzz, Kent thought. He could eat Anna’s skin just like that—just like a peach…

The sky was strung with strange clouds. A dull crimson and hanging very low, bleeding into the setting sun. Kent thought he could see shapes in them—sinuous squirmings as if the clouds were coming apart in the face of the ocean wind, or giving birth to multiples, or something else he could put no name to.

His father wore his police uniform. His badge winked in the guttering embers of the day’s light. His father’s wrists, projecting from his sleeves, were wasted looking and his fingers too skeletal.

“It’ll be a long night,” he said. “And goddamn, I’m hungry.”

A flock of birds—not the ever-present gulls but jet-black, arrow-eyed ravens—flew overhead, shadowing their boat. Kent could hear their tortured cries and see their rotted beaks. Some kind of white, cindery dust was drifting down from beneath their wings. It fell through the air in little white ribbons, just like in a ticker-tape parade.

Fear stole into Kent’s heart. He wished he wasn’t so scared—his father had taught him that fear was a useless emotion. Fear is just weakness exiting the body, he’d said to Kent on many occasions.

But there was something wrong with the whole scene: the menacing shapes lurking within the clouds, the white things drifting down… and his father. His father—

The police uniform hung off his body. He lurched toward Kent with his arms outstretched—stick arms that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a concentration camp prisoner—his fingers just clattering bone. His face was all cheekbones and bulging brow and parchment-thin skin stretched to the point of tearing.

“A long night!” this starved apparition screamed at him. “A looong and hungry night! Yummy yum yum!”

His father reached for Kent, bony hands clawing round his shoulders, digging in, piercing the skin. Jeff Jenks leaned in and his skin now came apart: rifts appeared in the fabric of his face, fine lines like cracks in bone china, and then those rifts all met and began to wriggle and suddenly Kent was staring into a face made up of hundreds of white pulsating tubes.

“Nobody loves me,” his worm-father sang sadly. Writhing alabaster worms dripped off his lips and into his mouth, thrashing contentedly on the Swiss-cheesed root of his tongue. “Everybody hates me; I’m going to the garden to eat you.”

Kent toppled into the bottom of the boat with his father atop him. His father’s face fell apart in sections. The abominations detached and squirmed down his collar, pattering onto Kent’s upturned face like warm raindrops. They found his mouth and nose and ears and eyes, infiltrating them with greedy abandon.

“This is only fear entering the body,” his father said.

NEWTON WAS the one who suggested they make a list.

His own survival instincts told him this was the wisest plan. When the world was crumbling around your ears, your best bet was to set yourself a few simple tasks to focus your attention on. While you were working on those tasks, your mind had a chance to cope with the situation. If you could just get past the initial shock—the shock of death and of sudden isolation—then maybe a better plan would come to you later.

They stood down at the shore now: Ephraim, Max, Shelley, and Newton.

“Three things,” Newt said. “First, find some food. Second, medicine for Kent.”

“Why?” Shelley said. “He’s just going to end up like Tim.”

Newton glanced up sharply. Shut up, Shel. Shut up and go away. Walk into the ocean and just sink. “We don’t know that. We don’t know that at all.”

Shelley only smiled—sadly, poisonously, impossible to tell—and wandered down to the shoreline. That’s right, Newton thought. Just keep walking, jerkoid.

“Third,” Newton went on, “we either make a raft or oars for the boat we already have.”

Ephraim doubled over, clutching his knees, and vomited on the rocks. His body vibrated like a hard-struck tuning fork. He stayed that way for a while, breathing heavily, before straightening up and wiping his lips.

“I don’t know.” He stared at the other boys. “I don’t know what to do now.”

His gaze fell to his knuckles. He rubbed them with his fingers and spread blood down to his wrist. There was something obsessive about the way he did it.

Newton said: “It’s okay—”

“It’s not okay,” said Ephraim. “The Scoutmaster’s dead. He… oh my God, his belly split open and a bunch of worms fell out. Worms. How the hell did they get there?”

Max said, “We have to stay away from the cabin. Do what Newt said. Get some food. Make a raft or something. Find a way back home.”

Shelley called from the beachhead: “You sure we’ll be able to get back home?”

He was crouched by the shore, stirring the water with a stick. He pushed the tip of it against the fat body of a sea slug. He exerted slow pressure until the slug’s body burst like a snot-filled bath bead.

The boys hadn’t seen what he’d done. Did it matter, anyway? Part of him—a growing part—wanted to shed the mask that shielded his under-face. This possibility put a warm lump in his belly.

“What are you talking about, Shel?” Ephraim said.

He pointed across the water at the squat shapes on the horizon. “Those aren’t trawlers. They aren’t fishing boats. Those are ships—like, military stuff.”

“So?”

“So think about it, Eef,” he said. “That guy who showed up the other night. What was that thing that came out of him? And then Scoutmaster, then Kent. Whatever it is, it’s spreading—right? That means it’s a disease. Something that hops from person to person.” He cocked his head at Ephraim, who kept rubbing his knuckles against the coarse weave of his pants. “It gets inside of you somehow and starts… doing what it does, I guess.”

Ephraim’s hands clenched into fists. Blood was streaked down his pants.

“What are you saying, Shel?”

“I’m saying maybe they won’t let us leave. Even if we build a raft. They’ll keep us right here because we’re contagious. We’re contaminated.”

“Shut up,” Max said. “That’s stupid bullshit. Nobody’s going to keep a bunch of kids on an island, Shel. Our folks wouldn’t let it happen. They’re adults. Adults don’t do stuff like that.”

As his words echoed into silence, Max realized that he’d held the exact opposite viewpoint only minutes ago, inside the cabin. His mind wasn’t centered anymore—it spun on confused, worrisome tangents.

“Can you explain those ships?” Ephraim asked Max hopefully.

“They could be army ships. All I’m saying is they’re not going to stop us from going home.”

“Then why aren’t they coming to get us?” Shelley said.

Max had no answer for that. Newton said: “They could have a million reasons for staying away. If it’s something contagious, maybe they have a cure. Then they’ll be here quick as quick. But Max is right—they’re adults. If they’re making us wait, I’m sure there’s a good reason. Until then we have to make do. That shouldn’t be so hard, should it? We’re Scouts, aren’t we?”

“So what are we going to eat?” Max said.

Newton said: “There’s berries and fungi. We should be able to catch something, don’t you think? Scoutmaster showed us how to string a foot-trap, and there’s rope in the cabin.”

“Are you gonna get that rope?” Shelley asked.

“If I have to,” Newton told him evenly.

Ephraim said: “What about Kent? If he’s sick—”

“If? He is sick,” Shelley said.

“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to put your head through a tree,” Ephraim said.

“Save your energy, Eef,” Shelley said in a voice gone silky soft.

“Kent needs to throw it all up,” Newton said. “That’s the best way to get what’s inside of him out. There are plants that can do that pretty safely. It’s in my field book, which is still in the cabin. So I’d better—”

A boat motor kicked up beyond the spit of headland that projected from the southern tip of the island. The boys could just barely make out a boat streaking toward them.

“Hey, check it out—that’s Mr. Walmack’s cigarette boat,” Ephraim said.

Calvin Walmack was one of the town’s few summer people. He showed up every June with a mahogany tan, bleached white teeth, and his shrill wife, Tippy. Mr. Walmack owned a vintage cigarette boat that was moored down at the jetty. The Ferrari of boats, Max’s father called it: pretty much just a huge motor strapped to strips of polished teak.

Mr. Walmack’s boat hammered over the water, hitting the waves and skipping dangerously. It looked to be on the verge of hydroplaning. Two other boats were in pursuit: stockier and painted a dusty black. Gun turrets were mounted on their bows.

The cigarette boat skiffed off a big wave and came down with a smack. The engine cut out. A thin ribbon of smoke coiled up to smudge the sky. Newton could see two men in the boat, but they were too far off for him to make out faces. They were waving their arms.

The pursuing vessels cut around the cigarette boat in a scissoring move. Men moved swiftly about on deck. Ephraim thought he saw the sun glinting down their arms—glinting off the weapons they were carrying.

The boats bobbed on the surf. The boys watched with their hands canopying their eyes. The black boats returned the way they had come. The cigarette boat remained afloat but looked empty.

When the black boats were well clear, a small explosion rocked Mr. Walmack’s boat. A gout of flame shot up from the engine. A sound like a shotgun blast trailed across the sea.

“What the hell?” Ephraim’s face settled into an expression between bafflement and fear. “What just happened right now?”

Nobody had an answer—not for what happened to Mr. Walmack or his boat, or for anything that’d happened since that strange man staggered out of the sea two nights ago.

Nothing made sense anymore. Everything existed beyond logic.

The cigarette boat sank and was gone in a matter of seconds.

25

BEFORE THEY entered the woods, Newton stepped inside the cabin. He needed his field book and the rope. His heart was beating like a tom-tom. Fat beads of sweat popped along his brow before he even walked through the shattered doorframe.

Don’t do this, his mother’s voice chimed in his head. Please. This is so very dangerous, Newt.

Newton’s mom had always been protective of her only son. Elizabeth Thornton was crowned Miss Prince Edward Island the day after she’d fallen pregnant with Newton. “Fallen pregnant” was a common phrase on the island: as if local women were constantly toppling off things—stools, ladders, cliffs—and getting knocked up on the way down. The man who’d done it was a “contest stylist”: a fey grifter who mentored unwitting contestants. For a fee, he’d teach them to Vaseline their teeth to a pearly shine or strap packing tape around their breasts to give the proper “uplift.” Such men trailed along the pageant circuit like gulls following in the wake of a crab trawler, picking up scraps.

This particular stylist put a bun in Elizabeth’s oven the night before the Charlottetown Spud Fest. He was gone the next day, no different from the itinerant potato pickers who descended on the island like locusts in the fall only to blow back to the mainland on the first winter wind. Newton never asked after his father. He and his mother made a tiny perfect circle, and he was happy within its circumference—and as for those skills a father might’ve taught, well, there was Scoutmaster Tim, who struck Newt as a far better (surrogate) dad than a contest stylist could ever be.

Complications during the delivery led to severe scarring of her uterine walls. Newton would be the only child Elizabeth would ever have.

Some people around here have lots of kids, she’d tell her son. It’s like they’re trying to get it juuuust right—the perfect child. Well, I got that right off the bat! I guess this was God’s subtle way of telling me I didn’t have to try anymore. I can always find another man, but I’ll never be able to find another son.

Oh hell, and could Elizabeth find another man. All she’d have to do is step outside and whistle: they’d come running from all directions with flowers and heart-shaped boxes of chocolate clasped in their callused hands. Elizabeth Thornton was a pure stunner. Another common phrase—“Island women are like Christmas trees: nobody wants them after the twenty-fifth”—didn’t apply to her: her face had taken on a luminous haunted quality as she’d aged. It only intensified her beauty. She had no shortage of suitors despite being saddled with a teenager—even one as oddball as Newton.

But she resisted all advances and lived alone with her son in a small house on the edge of town. She was happy. Her son was happy. But Elizabeth was a perpetual worrywart. Much to Newt’s chagrin, she wanted to drape him in bubble wrap before sending him out into the world. She didn’t even approve of him being in Scouts. But it was the only social outlet he had—the kids at school could be so cruel; the sons of lobstermen and potato farmers didn’t understand her sensitive boy. At least Scouts was better than Newt spending his afternoons in the woods alone, cataloging ferns and tubers.

“You be careful,” she’d told Newton at the boat launch before he’d left for Falstaff. She kissed his forehead and mussed up his hair. “Don’t eat any funny mushrooms or chase after things that might bite you.”

“Mom, please,” Newton had said, mortified.

Her voice was in his ear even now, ever present, as he made his way through the storm-splintered cabin.

Newt—oh Newt my baby boy, this is not a good idea.

What choice did he have? His books were in here. The rope, too. Without them they might starve. And Kent might die just like the Scoutmaster had.

For a fleeting instant, Newton had a very un-Newtlike fantasy: he pictured himself stepping into a throng of well-wishers, his fellow Scouts sitting gratefully in Oliver McCanty’s boat, which Newt had fixed and piloted back to the mainland. Next the mayor would pin a badge on Newt’s chest in a ceremony at town hall, Scoutmaster Tim’s portrait in a gilt-edged frame, his mom waving from the crowd, Max and Ephraim safe and thankful—his friends now—Newt demurring when the mayor called him a true hero, saying only: “It was all due to my Scouts training, sir.” This silly self-obsessed fantasy left him feeling a little embarrassed.

The cabin roof bowed in a rotted arc to touch the floor—or nearly so. There was still a portion where it failed to reach: a jagged lip where the fungal-encrusted shingles didn’t quite touch the floorboards. Newton knew that on the other side of that lip—maybe only a foot away—lay Scoutmaster Tim’s body. And the last time he’d seen Tim, he’d been writhing with… Newton didn’t want to think about it. But the first real threads of terror had now begun to squirm into his belly. An awful silence sat heavy within his chest—it was mirrored by the same awful silence on the other side of the roof where the Scoutmaster lay.

Or was it entirely? Newton was almost positive he could hear something.

Newton, oh my baby get out of there get out of there this instant!

He thought of Sherwood, his cousin. Tall, stout-shouldered Sher, all roped in farm-boy muscle. Which made him think about Alex Markson, the boy he’d made up on Facebook—a fusion between Sherwood and himself.

What would Alex Markson do? Newton wondered. He turned it into an acronym: WWAMD?

So… WWAMD in this situation? Alex wouldn’t be afraid—no, Alex would be afraid, because Alex was most certainly a sane person with the correct instincts for self-preservation. But Alex would do whatever was needed. He’d do the right thing.

How could the worms still be alive if their host was dead? Shouldn’t be possible, right? Newton stared at the lip between the shingles and the floor. A fleeting band of light traced along its edge…

Yes, there, he swore he saw movement. Tiny wavering shadows flitted through the light.

Then he heard the noises like cockroaches scuttling and shucking in a bowl of not-quite-solidified Jell-O. Saliva squirted into his mouth, bitter and tangy as the chlorophyll in a waxy leaf. He felt faint with fear. His stomach flooded with cold lead as his testicles drew up into his abdomen.

Get out of here right NOW!

It wasn’t his mother anymore—this was the lizard brain speaking, the cold voice of survival. He went jelly-legged: the bones felt as if they had been reduced to marrow soup. Pure fear invaded his mind, creating a carnival of terrifying images. Visions of clean-picked skulls and empty sockets, huge white worms barreling out of inflamed tunnels like hellish bullet trains, long, tubelike hands slipping from the shadows reaching for… for…

A shuddering groan escaped Newton. He put his hand over his face and stumbled back. His ass hit the cabin wall and he yelped in surprise.

“Newton?” Max called out anxiously. “You okay?”

Newton swallowed with difficulty. It was so good to hear Max’s voice—to remember that the world was bigger than this cabin with its collapsing angles and alien sounds that made Newton’s skin scream.

“I’m okay. Just stay outside. Be out in a sec.”

Newton realized that he could just get the hell out—it was one of the perks of being a kid, wasn’t it? Kids could abandon anything at any time with no real repercussions.

Except there were no adults around anymore. And he had work to do.

He edged down the wall into the bedroom. There, his books were on the far side. A sleeping bag lay five feet beyond his right foot. He hunkered down and crab-crawled toward it. He heard those distant popgun pops—Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!—and imagined those weightless ribbons surging through the air toward him. He crawled faster, a desperate moan swelling in his chest.

He reached the sleeping bag and pulled it over him. Just before he did, he saw the air above him shimmering with luminous squiggles. He lay under the bag, inhaling the scent of its owner: stale sweat and pine sap and illicitly smoked cigarettes, so it must’ve been Eef’s.

Newton rose with the bag tucked over his head. Pfft! Pfft! Pfft! He oriented himself, swallowed his fear—a plum stone lodged in his throat—and shuffled toward the closet with the bag held up like a shield. The squirming was very loud now, even through the cloth of the bag; it sounded eager and agitated at once.

Even though his heart was beating hard enough to shudder every bone in his body and adrenaline-rich sweat was dumping out of every pore, Newton advanced patiently and cautiously. God, somehow the worms were still alive, still firing off their pfft! fusillade. Newton figured they must be spores or eggs or something—a way for the worms to infect you from far away. On the peripheries of his vision, he could see the odd ribbon go floating past.

Don’t breathe them in don’t breathe in at all get out of here now now NOW NOW NOW

His toes hit the edge of the collapsed closet. The tip of Scoutmaster Tim’s index finger lay beside his right foot. He flung down the sleeping bag and backpedaled madly as it settled over the Scoutmaster’s body.

The pfft!s were muffled by the bag. The Scoutmaster’s arm jutted from beneath it. Frozen at an unnatural angle, fingers like craggly bits of driftwood washed up on the beach.

Newton hustled over to his knapsack and made sure the nylon rope was still inside. His field book was a little water-fattened after the downpour, but still legible. He quickly checked to see if any of the ribbons had gotten on anything. No, he was clean. He stuffed the book in his knapsack, gave everything a final once-over, and hightailed it outside.

News item from the Montague (PEI) Island Courier, October 22:

26

THEY SET out just after noon. Three boys: Max, Ephraim, and Newton.

Max checked on Kent beforehand. Still huddled in the cellar under the tarp—his body looked like it was vanishing into the cellar wall, oozing into the hard-packed dirt, as if the wall had grown a mouth and was consuming Kent the way a spider eats a fly: injecting corrosive poison, dissolving the guts, and sucking them out with a long, needlelike proboscis.

“We’ll be back soon,” Max told him. He stood on the final step before the cellar floor, keeping his distance. “We’ll find something to make you better, okay?”

Kent said nothing, just watched with eyes hard and dry as pebbles.

Shelley was missing. They called his name a few times, halfheartedly. No response.

“Should we go anyways?” Newton said.

“Why shouldn’t we?” said Ephraim.

If the boys felt a vague uneasiness over Shelley’s whereabouts—more and more it seemed best to keep him in plain sight—his disappearance gave them an easy excuse to leave without him. What harm could it bring?

Maybe he really did walk into the sea, Newton thought, not unhopefully, then quickly chastised himself for it.

Newton took the lead. Max and Ephraim didn’t question this. After seeing him emerge from the cabin sweaty and near delirious with fear, his knapsack slung triumphantly over his shoulder… it was tough not to measure him a little differently.

The afternoon was bright but cool. Most of their clothing was inside the cabin, damp and unwearable. Ephraim had a Windbreaker. Newton only had one dry shirt.

They walked along the southern skirt of the island following the shore. Strands of kelp washed up on the rocks, looking like disembodied green hands clawing their way out of the sea. Ephraim peeled a strand and looked questioningly at Newton.

“Yeah, it’s edible, Eef.”

Ephraim nibbled an edge. “Holy crap, Newt!”

“I said it was edible,” Newton said. “I didn’t say it was any good.”

Max peeled a strip off a flat rock. “Hey, it’s not bad,” he said, chewing. “Salty. Like beef jerky from the sea.”

Ephraim took another crackly bite and chewed morosely. “Whatever. I’m hungry enough to eat a bear’s asshole.”

Soon after saying this, Ephraim lapsed into a moody silence. He kept rubbing his knuckles on his pants.

“You okay, man?” Max said.

He put a hand on his shoulder. Ephraim shivered as if a spider had crawled down his back. At first Max thought it was because of what’d happened outside the cellar—that awful snap between them, something Max had felt to his core. But that wasn’t it, was it? A cold species of relief washed over Max, only to be replaced with dread. Was Eef…? Max gave Newton a worried look as his hand slid off Ephraim’s shoulder.

“Feeling real weird, man.” Ephraim’s voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well. “I’m not really feeling like myself.”

“Yeah, none of us are,” Max assured him.

“Max is right, Eef. With what happened to the Scoutmaster and now Kent… we just got to hold it together a little while longer, is all.”

Ephraim gave Newton a bemused and slightly shaken look. “Newton Thornton, professional pep-talker,” he said bleakly.

They climbed a hillside that crested to a flat rise studded with boulders and hardy tufted shrubs. The air was perfumed by the salt wind that gusted across the table rock. The ground was pockmarked with holes. Each hole was dug down to a tight gooseneck bend that obscured its occupants from view.

“Prairie dogs?” Max asked.

“Are we on a prairie?” said Ephraim. “Where are the cowboys, Tex?”

“Shut up,” Max said irritably. “Cowboys aren’t all on the prairies anyway.”

Ephraim laughed and scratched his elbows. He’d scratched through his Windbreaker. Max noticed blood dotting the torn nylon.

“Not prairie dogs,” said Newton. “Birds. I’ve read about them. Instead of making nests in trees, they burrow underground.”

Max said: “Can we catch one?”

Newton looked doubtful. “I’ve never seen a rope trap for birds—you need box traps for those, with chicken wire. I don’t think it’d be worth it. They’re pretty much just bones and feathers, right?”

Max thought about those dead shearwaters on his kitchen table and said: “Let’s not bother, okay?”

“Whatever we do eat out here, you can bet it’s going to be a bit weird,” Newton said. “We ought to be prepared for that.” He smiled gamely. “Just think of it all like chicken or something.”

They crossed the plateau to a granite shelf overlooking the sea. The clean mineral smell of the rock hit their noses. Sunlight filled in the slack water between the waves in mellow gold. White ospreys took flight from their cliff-side nests, arcing over the water.

Ephraim kicked a stone over the edge. It clattered down the cliff and nearly crushed an osprey nest sitting on a jagged outcrop. Ephraim pointed at the trio of brown-specked eggs in the nest and said:

“You want to climb down for those? I could go for a three-egg omelet.”

Newton looked dubious. “There’s nowhere to tie the rope. If you slip, it’s a long way down.”

Ephraim picked his tongue along his upper teeth, still considering it. “I’d have to share the eggs with your fat ass, Newt—wouldn’t I? I do all the work and you horn in on the reward.”

“You can have them,” Newton said stiffly. “I just don’t think it’s worth getting hurt over.”

With the prospect of eggs fading, they wandered down a switchback descent that emptied into a salt marsh to the east of the cliff. The ocean water leached into a mucky terrain of buckled trees and diseased-looking hummocks. A rotten stench boiled up from the long grass, which was exactly the sort of grass Newton hated: the serrated-edge kind that raked your shins when you walked through it in shorts.

They trudged through, trying to avoid soakers. Their boots cracked through skeins of crusted bile-colored salt that looked like the scum topping a pot of boiled meat. Late-season grasshoppers flung themselves off the grass and stuck to the boys’ clothes with their barbed legs. Newton flinched every time one pinged off his hips.

His gaze kept drifting to those hummocks. They looked like half-submerged rodents—giant mole rats suckled on plutonium-enriched water that had somehow quadrupled their normal size. They dotted the marsh like hairy icebergs, the worst parts hidden underwater. Newton pictured what might lurk below the surface: long, narrow faces and thin black lips studded with sharp rat-teeth that protruded at busted-glass angles… ringed pink tails sweeping through the filthy water waiting to wrap around an unsuspecting ankle.

They came upon a rotted tree stump. Newton dug his field book out, riffled through the pages, and skimmed a passage. He grabbed a flap of bark hanging loosely from the stump and pried it back. It snapped with a puff of dust. The boys knelt and stared inside. Things wriggled in the loose wood pulp. They wriggled just like worms.

“Grubs,” Newton anounced. He opened his book and read: “Witchetty grubs are the large, white, wood-eating larvae of moths.”

The grubs were a speckled white with a wrinkled exterior that resembled the skin of an apple that had sat in the fruit bowl too long. Their bodies were as big as a toddler’s finger and crimped like beads on a necklace. Their back ends tapered to a pooched orifice. They moved in frantic wriggling paroxysms: they resembled creatures in a perpetual state of being born.

“The raw witchetty grub tastes like almonds,“ Newton read. “When cooked, the skin becomes crisp like roast chicken, while the inside becomes light yellow like a fried egg.”

Max blanched. “Jesus. You’re kidding, right?”

“Didn’t I say that whatever we ate, it’d be weird?”

“Yeah, but… you can’t eat a grub, man,” Max replied. “You’d be depriving that young moth of its life goal of bashing into a lightbulb all night.”

Newton plucked one out of the stump. It writhed in his palm like a section of intestinal tract trying to pass a stubborn lump of food.

Max said: “I dare you. Double dog, man.”

Newton popped it into his mouth. Pulped between Newton’s molars, the grub made an audible squelch. Watery pus-colored fluid seeped between his teeth.

“I can’t believe you just did that,” Ephraim said, awestruck.

“Ooh,” Newton gagged. “Bitter. It’s not almondy!” He dropkicked the book. It sailed across the marsh, pages fluttering like the wings of a crippled bird. “It’s not almondy at all!”

Ephraim and Max doubled over laughing. Newton refused to spit it out—he seemed to hold the grub’s revolting taste against it. He chewed with dour discipline, clenching his fists as he swallowed.

“Wait a sec,” Max said, nervousness replacing mirth. “Did you say it tasted like bitter almonds? Isn’t that like, poison?”

Newton rolled his eyes. A bit of the grub was still stuck to his lip. It looked like a bleached shred of tomato skin. “No, that’s cyanide. This didn’t taste like almonds at all. It tasted like bitter… shit. A bitter nugget of shit.”

“How do you know what shit tastes like?” said Ephraim, swiping a tear off his cheek.

“How about you shut up,” Newton said, stooping to retrieve his field book. “At least I’m trying, Eef.” He held his arms out, an all-encompassing gesture. “You see a Burger King out here?”

27

SHELLEY WAITED until the boys had humped around the island’s southern breakwater before starting his games in earnest.

He’d hid in the high brush east of the cabin. The boys called his name without much gusto. The sun slanted through a bank of silvery knife-blade clouds, hitting his skin and buzzing unpleasantly—Shelley didn’t care for the sun. His favorite time of day was twilight, that gray interregnum where the shadows drew long.

His fingers fretted with his lip, which Kent had split. Squeezing the wound, the cleaved flesh only semi-healed. Blood squirted, running down his knuckles. Shelley didn’t feel it much at all.

Newton’s voice had drifted over to him. “Should we go anyway?”

Yes, thought Shelley, playing with the blood. Just go. Leave, now. Enjoy your hike.

He’d followed Newton, Max, and Eef to the south shore, skulking through the brush on the low side of the trail. He disguised his presence well—Shelley was a natural chameleon; it was one of his more undervalued talents.

He was intrigued by Newton’s belly and back flab. It spilled over the waist of his pants like soft-serve ice cream over the edges of a cone. He wondered how it would look if the fat boy got worms. He imagined the buttery folds of skin lapping up on themselves like those ugly-looking dogs—what were they called? Shar-peis. Newton would have a shar-pei body. Inside all those yards of empty skin, his bones would be left to rattle around like pennies in a jar. Boy, that would be something to see.

Once the boys were gone he backtracked to the cabin. He was excited. Oh so excited. It took events of precipitous magnitude to pierce the Teflon plating surrounding Shelley’s emotional core and make him feel much of anything.

But there was much to hold his interest today.

The dead men in the wrecked cabin. The ships offshore and the black helicopter that swept occasionally overhead. The sheer fact that there was nobody of consequential authority around for miles. He didn’t have to wear his mask so tightly. He could loosen the straps and let the things underneath twist their way into the light.

But mostly there was Kent Jenks—Johnny Football, Mr. Big Shot, the uncrowned king of North Point—locked up in the root cellar.

Oh my God, the fun they were going to have.

The last time Shelley could recall feeling this level of elation was the afternoon he’d killed Trixy, the kitten his mother adopted after finding her under their porch.

Shelley had been killing things for a while by then—although he didn’t think of it as killing, per se. Other creatures, even people, were empty vessels. Of course, not physically empty: all living things were packed full of guts and bones and blood that leapt giddily into the air when it was released from a vein. But none of them had an essential… well, essence. They were just ambulatory sacks of skin. That was really it. Shelley honestly felt no more remorse tearing another living thing apart than he would ripping the limbs off a wooden marionette.

He’d gotten started with bugs. He’d found these two big stag beetles entangled in a territorial battle in the crotch of the backyard maple. He’d gathered them up and, after some preparation, pulled most of their legs and antennae off—he used his mother’s tweezers for this delicate work, the same ones she plucked her eyebrows with—and put them in a matchbox. He was surprised and delighted to discover that beetles were cannibals: when he’d opened the box a few days later, he found one of them flipped helplessly on its back and the other one devouring its gooey insides.

He’d promptly filled the matchbox with his mother’s nail polish remover and lit it with a match. The beetles’ organs popped and crackled inside their black exoskeletons as they roasted.

He soon graduated to bigger, more impressive conquests. He caught deer mice in sticky traps and painted liquid Borax onto their eyeballs with a Q-tip—it was mesmerizing to watch their black eyes shrivel and sputter like fat in a fire.

Shelley found that animals adjusted to their physical diminishments much better than people. If you burned a man’s eyes out, he would shriek and bleat, of course, and he’d need a cane and a Seeing-Eye dog the rest of his moaning, miserable days. A mouse just stumbled around in pain for a few minutes, pawed at its cored-out eye sockets, squeaked and twitched its nose, and carried on with what it was doing before. Animals were incredibly flexible that way.

Shelley had gone to work on Trixy during an evening when his parents were off at a silent auction for their church. He was at the kitchen table eating a Creamsicle. Trixy twined round his socked feet, brushing against his calves.

“Hello, kitty-kitty.”

She hopped up on his lap. Her little claws pierced his sweatpants and dug lightly into his thighs. Shelley chewed on the Popsicle stick while petting the kitten. She arched her back to accept his soft strokes. Her fur was downy like the hair on a baby’s head. He could feel her small, thin bones beneath her coat.

He carried her upstairs. She was purring quite loudly—such big, satisfied noises from such a small thing. Her body was a power plant, kicking off a lot of heat. Shelley’s mother hadn’t had her spayed yet.

He went into the bathroom and locked the door. He put Trixy on the toilet lid, where she kneaded the macramé seat cover. His mom said this was a sign of separation anxiety—kittens would knead their mothers’ bellies to stimulate milk, so they could nurse. But kittens who’d been separated too early kneaded anything. Sweaters and sofa cushions and toilet seats—as if any of those had the ability to squirt milk. They were confused, according to Shelley’s mother. A real heartbreaker, she said. Shelley just nodded as if he felt the same way, too. He found that if you nodded—slowly, deeply, your chin almost touching your chest to indicate sincerity—people would think you shared their feelings. It was one of the many tricks he’d learned in order to blend in; hiding in plain sight was a beneficial skill.

Shelley plugged the bathtub drain and ran the water, glancing back to the toilet. Trixy was still there, purring. Good. As the tub filled, his hand crept under the elasticized hem of his sweats to toy absently with his privates. He wasn’t surprised to find that he was erect—a throbbing, urgent hardness that seemed to drain the blood out of his arms and legs and focus it all on his penis. He stood with his mouth unhinged, eyes alight with unspeakable excitement, an oily sweat breaking out over his long, milky body.

He opened the cabinet under the sink and donned the long plastic gloves draped over a canister of Ajax: his mother’s cleaning gloves. His fingertips went cold while the rest of him burnt with a steady eager heat.

He sat Trixy on the edge of the tub. The kitten stared up at him with round yellow-edged eyes as her paws slipped for purchase on the porcelain. Another thing about animals: they had no conception that the creatures who fed them might be the same ones who could do them such great harm.

Scout Law number eight: A Scout is a friend to animals…

Shelley grabbed Trixy by her scruff and plunged her into the water.

It was as if raw electrical current had been pumped into Trixy’s body: her limbs went rigid and scrabbled against the porcelain. She almost screwed out of his grip, but he grabbed her throat—his hand manacled easily around the furry drainpipe of her neck—and shoved her back down.

After twenty seconds, her struggles lessened. After about a minute, her struggles ceased. Shelley gave it another few seconds just to be certain.

He let go of her motionless body. A dry, dusty taste filled his mouth—it was like he’d swallowed a mouthful of the chalk they spread into white lines on a baseball diamond. But already the elation was subsiding. It was over so fast. The kitten had almost no fight in her at a—

Trixy shot straight up out of the water. She looked so damn scraggly with her fur soaked and matted to her skin. Shelley almost laughed. Trixy yowled and scrabbled up the sloped side of the bathtub. Shelley reached in and lovingly collected her four little legs into a bundle, clasping them all in one hand. She bit feebly at his gloves with her needle teeth. She let out a desperate reeeeeooowl and beheld him with tragically confused eyes.

He dunked her under the water. His face was expressionless, but the sweat had now soaked through his shirt. His penis was painfully hard and he felt the excruciating yet somehow pleasant need to urinate.

He pulled Trixy out of the tub. Her head lolled comically between her shoulder blades. He dunked her once more, absentmindedly, the way an old biddy dips her bag of Earl Grey in a teacup.

She may still be alive, he thought. He considered letting her live. That could be interesting. Shelley figured Trixy might act like Johnnie Ritson, who as a boy had swum out beyond the shore markers and nearly drowned. Now Timmy spent his days in an old rocker in front of the Hasty convenience store saying “Hi! Hi! Hi!” to everything: customers, random passersby, delivery trucks, pigeons, the clear blue sky. One time Shelley put a tack on Timmy’s rocker when he was using the toilet, waiting until nobody was watching. Timmy’s reaction amazed and amused him: he sat heavily, gulping from a can of Yoo-hoo, just rocking and rocking, blabbing “Hi! Hi! Hi!” He didn’t register it at all. Shelley had lingered, intrigued, and when Timmy got up he’d seen the brass head of the tack flush with Timmy’s wide, flat ass, the surrounding fabric dark with blood.

Unfortunately, Shelley figured a stumblebum kitten might raise his mother’s eyebrows. The safest option was the one that most compelled him, anyway.

When it was done, Shelley drained the tub and made sure everything was dried with a bath towel from the rack. He draped the plastic gloves back over the Ajax. Then he went downstairs and got an orange trash sack and put Trixy inside.

Before Trixy, Shelley had never killed anything that might be missed. Ultimately, he decided to burn her. He stuffed her in the pellet stove in the basement. Trixy went up in a burst of whiteness behind the grate. Shelley was fleetingly concerned that the smell of burnt fur would rise through the vents to permeate the house, but any suspicious odors were well gone by the time his parents got home.

It was here that Shelley had an epiphany: proper disposal was its own alibi. The kitten was gone. It wasn’t necessarily dead. It may have run away. Cats did it all the time. Cats were stupid and ungrateful.

When Trixy disappeared, his mother was in a state. She mooned around the house, gazing forlornly into the backyard—which made life harder for Shelley, as he conducted business in the yard and didn’t want his mom to see him at work. “Isn’t it awful about Trixy?” she asked. “The poor thing.” Shelley nodded deeply, sincerely, chin touching his chest. Every so often he’d catch his mother looking at him—not accusingly, exactly, but… questioningly. As if the son she’d given birth to had been poached in the night, replaced with an exact physical duplicate. This duplicate spoke in her son’s voice and aped his intellect and abilities, but there was something worrisome about this new one. He—it?—was a step outside of humankind, looking in. Did it like what it saw?

But if his mother indeed felt this, she’d never given voice to it. Parents held an intrinsic need to believe in the essential goodness of their offspring—their kids were a direct reflection of themselves, after all.

A week after murdering Trixy, Shelley lay in bed, a wedge of cold moonlight slanting through the curtains to plate his pasty, wasplike face. He replayed the scene in his head: Trixy, waterlogged and wild-eyed, rocketing from the tub. It brought the tingle back to his privates—the bedsheet tented at his crotch—but the sensation was pitifully diminished, a watery imitation of that galvanic rush. Shelley pondered: if he’d felt that rush with something so pathetic as a kitten, imagine how it’d feel with something bigger, stronger, more intelligent. The risk would only intensify the euphoria, wouldn’t it?

SHELLEY WALKED past the remains of the campfire and cut around the side of the cabin to the cellar. He crouched and tapped gently on the cellar door.

“Kent,” he called in a singsong voice. “Oh Keeeeennnn-tah.”

Something clawed up the steps at the sound of his voice—it sounded like a huge sightless crab. There came the hollow thip of bone on wood. Dust sifted down from the hinges. Shelley inhaled a gust of sweet air that stunk of rotted honeycomb. For an instant, Shelley saw a creature between the cellar slats: a thing composed of famished angles and horrible bone, the raw outcroppings of its face standing out in razored points.

Fingers slipped through the gap between the doors. They did not look like anything that ought to be attached to a human being: shockingly spindly and so awfully withered, like ancient carrots that had been left in a cold, dark fridge so long that they’d lost their pigment. None of them had fingernails—just bloody sickles rimmed by shreds of torn cuticle. Shelley assumed Kent had eaten them, one after another. This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home…

“I’m so hungry.”

The voice was ancient, too. Shelley pictured an ineffably old man-boy crouched on the stairs: a wrinkled horror with snowy hair and incredibly ancient eyes, the corneas gone a sickly yellow like a cat’s eyes—like Trixy’s eyes?

Shelley said: “You’re still hungry? Even after you ate all our food?” He tsked. “Do you think I should let you out?”

“I don’t know,” Kent said, sounding confused. A sulky child.

“I think you deserve to be there. Don’t you think, Kent? You made us lock the Scoutmaster up. So we locked you up. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

Silence.

“I asked you a question. Isn’t it fair, Kent?”

“Yes,” Kent said in a petulant tone.

“Tit for tat, right?”

“Yes.”

“The Scoutmaster’s dead.”

Silence again.

“Whose fault is that, Kent?”

The silence persisted.

“Hey!” Shelley chirped sunnily. “Remember the helicopter? It dropped a care package. Food. Juicy meat and buttery bread and candy and—”

“Please.”

Shelley had never heard a word wept before. But that’s what Kent had done. He’d actually wept the word please.

“Please what, Kent?”

“Please… feed me.”

“I could. But first, Kent, you need to answer my question. I’ll ask again: Whose fault is it that the Scoutmaster is dead?”

“It’s… it’s my fault. It’s all my fault. But I didn’t mean— I never meant to—”

“It doesn’t matter what you meant, Kent. It only matters what happened.” Shelley’s voice was silky soft. “So think about this. He died very badly. A tree fell on his head, you know. His skull got crushed like an eggshell. So yes, Kent, it’s really, truly, totally all your fault.”

Faint, beautiful weeping. Shelley drank up the sound the way a succulent plant drinks up the sunlight. His jaws were strangely elongated, the lower part a half-inch longer than the upper to reveal a wet ridge of teeth. He looked like a salmon in rut.

“Thank you for answering my question, Kent. Now, what would you like to eat?”

“Anything. Anything.”

“I mean, there’s so much. I can’t carry it all back here. So you’ll have to tell me. We have apple pie and chocolate-glazed doughnuts and big steaks and—”

“Meat. Meat.”

“You wait here,” Shelley said, as if Kent had a choice. “I’ll be right back.”

Shelley stole through the cabin’s shattered door. Early afternoon sunlight fell through the roof’s broken latticework, quilting the floor in honey-colored bars.

The roof sagged down before him. He unscrewed an old glass light fixture that now sat at eye level—amazingly, it hadn’t been smashed during the storm. Inside the frosted glass bowl were several dozen insect carcasses. Flies mostly, along with a few dragonflies and moths. He shook the crackly remains into his palm and went back to the cellar.

“Here’s the first course, Kent. It’s… peanut brittle.”

Shelley placed a desiccated dragonfly corpse in Kent’s fingers. They disappeared through the crack into the darkness. Eager crunching sounds. The fingers reappeared.

“More.”

Shelley fed Kent dead bugs as if he were feeding a goat at a petting zoo. Kent made pitiful groveling sounds as he ate. Shelley couldn’t believe his good fortune. This island, the isolation, this distracting illness—it was the ultimate playground.

His eyeballs felt tacky in their sockets; a dry saltlick taste lay thick on his tongue. His penis throbbed fiercely inside his trousers; he pushed it with the heel of his palm, squashing it against his thigh to achieve a dizzying, elating pleasure. Quit playing pocket pool! Mr. Turley would’ve said if he’d caught Shelley doing it in gym class. But Mr. Turley wasn’t here, was he? No adult was here—except the dead ones in the cabin—meaning Shelley could do exactly as he wished… but he must be careful. It would be so easy to make a mistake—to “blow it,” his father might say—ruining his lovely game. He mustn’t get carried away.

“More,” Kent whispered.

“All gone,” Shelley said. “No more. You ate it all.”

“Please.”

“Tell me how it feels, Kent. Tell me and I’ll give you something else.”

“It feels empty. There’s a hole and it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Forever and ever and ever. It wants me, Shel—and it wants you, too. Wants all of you.”

Shelley crouched for a moment, gnawing on the inside of his cheek. Kent sounded bad—seriously bad. Bugfuck nuts, as the island phrase went. A pang of concern snuck into Shelley; at first he didn’t know what it was, seeing as he didn’t experience emotions the way others did. An uncomfortable nibbling in his belly, like hungry baby mice.

Shelley returned to the cabin. The dead man, or what was left of him, had fallen off the sofa during the storm. His limbs were ramrod-straight with rigor mortis. His legs stuck out straight with his toes pointed up. Patches of bright green fungus bloomed around his eye sockets and the edges of his mouth.

The man’s nose had fallen into his face. Shelley watched a beetle crawl out of his sunken septum. It climbed to the crest of one nostril rim—just a hardened hole of cartilage like a little manhole in the man’s face—and hung there unsteadily.

The interlocked halves of its exoskeleton came apart. A high pressurized hiss: it sounded like a steam valve blowing from very far away. The beetle cracked open. Shelley could see white things wriggling inside of it.

A subspecies of some raw emotion—not fear, but something hovering at its edges—spider-scuttled into Shelley’s chest.

He knelt beside the big dead worm on the floor. It had hardened and toughened like an earthworm sizzled on a summer sidewalk. He scraped it up with the edge of his knife. Its insides were still mushy and gelatinous. Custardy-yellow goo squeezed through slits in its skin.

A new, wildly intriguing idea formed in Shelley’s mind.

He returned to the cellar. Kent’s fingers wriggled at the slit.

“Supper’s on, Kent,” Shelley said.

The leathery strap of the dead worm disappeared through the slit—jerked with sudden violence, it slipped between the slats with a breathless zippering hiss. Next: sucking sounds. Contented babyish coos. The fingers appeared again, streaked with yellow slime.

“I’m sorry,” Shelley said, although of course he’d never been sorry for a single thing his entire life. “No more food. Kent, you went and ate it all. You greedy pig, you ate it all.”

Shelley walked away. He’d become bored with Kent, whose throaty cackle followed him back to the firepit.

“You promised!” Kent shrieked. “You promised me meat! Come back! Pleeeease!”

Shelley sat beside the dead fire, stirring the ashes with a stick. He drew squiggles. Worms on the brain, must be. He felt like one of those circus performers who spun plates atop long bamboo poles. Lots of irons in the ole fire, as his dad would say.

Next up: Ephraim. Stupid, angry Eef. Eef the fatherless freak. Eef the cuckoo bird who went to Dr. Harley’s office to babble about his feelings. When Shelley’s homeroom teacher suggested that perhaps he could benefit from a session or two with Dr. Harley—this after she’d caught Shelley poking the class hamster, Puggins, with a pencil, the tip of which he’d scrupulously sharpened—his mother had scoffed, outraged. My son doesn’t need to see a damn headshrinker, thank-you-very-much-good-day.

Earlier, back in the cellar, Shelley spotted Eef staring at his hands. His knuckles had broken open when he’d punched Kent—an incident Shelley had enjoyed immensely because it meant group dynamics were shifting. Changes made people unsure, especially boys his age, because routines were important. When you took away routines, things went haywire. And Shelley liked haywire, because then anything could happen.

Shelley could tell that Ephraim was afraid that whatever was in Kent had gotten into him—it’d leapt between their bodies, from Kent’s lips to Ephraim’s hand, swimming in on the rush of blood. Shelley knew Ephraim was scared and he foresaw a great profit in nursing that fear along. It would be easy. Ephraim was so predictable—so predictably stupid.

Of course, Shelley hadn’t seen the teeny-tiny worms at that point—but he’d understood that the sickness, whatever it was, scurried inside of you, ate you from the inside out. That’s what made it so scary. This wasn’t a bear or a shark or a psycho axe murderer; those things were bad, sure, but you could get away from them. Hide.

How could you hide from a murderer who lived under your skin?

After the storm, when they went in the cabin and saw the Scoutmaster’s rotting body, saw those threadlike worms squirming in his chest—Shelley couldn’t believe it. Everything was coming up aces.

Now it was simply a matter of keeping all those plates spinning.

Shelley had a method of probing, of opening doors in people that was uncanny. He rarely used this gift—it could get him in trouble. But he was able to spy the weak spots the way a sculptor saw the seams in a block of granite; one tap in the right spot and it’d split right open.

I saw something, Eef.

That was all it had taken. The smallest seedling—he’d slit Ephraim’s skin, just the thinnest cut, slipping that seed in. If Shelley did some additional work, well, maybe that seed would squirm into Ephraim’s veins, surf to his heart, and bloom into something beautiful. Or horrible. It didn’t matter which to Shelley.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the walkie-talkie. He’d slipped the other one into Ephraim’s backpack this morning, while the other boys had been busying themselves for the hike. He fiddled with the button, not quite ready to put his plan into action.

After all, how much good luck did one boy deserve?

28

SOMETIME AROUND midafternoon, Ephraim sat down and refused to get up.

“That’s it. I’m not walking anymore.”

They had come to a copse of spruce trees. The air was dense with the scent of pine: it smelled like the car air fresheners drivers hung off their rearview mirrors.

Ephraim sat on a moss-covered rock with his fingers knit together in his lap. His body position mimicked a famous Roman sculpture that Newton had seen in a history book: The Pugilist at Rest. Ephraim looked a bit like a statue himself. His skin had a slick alabaster hue, except for around the lips and the rims of his nostrils, where it had a bluish-gray tint. Newton had a scary premonition: if they left Ephraim here and came back years later, he was sure Eef’s body would remain in this fixed position—a statue of calcified bone.

“Come on,” Newt said gently. “It’s gonna be okay. We’re going to find food soon.”

“Not hungry,” Ephraim said.

“Well, that’s sort of good news. It means you’re not sick, right?”

“It doesn’t mean anything.” There was an undertone of liquid menace in Ephraim’s voice. “We don’t really know anything, do we?”

“We have to keep moving, man,” said Max. “If we can find a good place to set a trap, then—”

“Then what, Max?” Ephraim’s chin was cocked at its customary challenging jut. “We catch a skunk? Great! Wonderful! Let’s all chow down on skunk burgers that’ll taste like skunk ass.”

Newt said: “We can’t just give up.”

“Hey, you guys do whatever you want. I’m not stopping you.”

Newton looked at Max as if he should say something. They were best friends, after all—other than Ephraim’s own mother, Max was the only person on North Point who could reliably get Eef to calm down and stop acting crazy. But more and more, even Max felt powerless to address Ephraim’s mounting mania.

Ephraim kept rubbing his fingers over his knuckles. The skin around the raw wounds was inflamed.

“Do you see anything?” he asked nobody in particular.

Max said: “See what, man?”

Ephraim said: “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

Max and Newton exchanged a glance. Neither of them wanted to leave Ephraim, but they both knew they couldn’t force him to come. If they pressed too hard he’d lash out, maybe even hurt one of them. The group was casting off all inessential members, winnowing down to an unlikely core.

“What would you rather,” Max said. “Keep hiking and find some food or stay here alone, sitting on a rock—pouting?”

Ephraim shot to his feet, fists balled, chest butting into Max’s; he got so close that their chins touched, their noses, too—so close that Max could smell Eef’s breath, which was bad, yeah, but not sweet: just the regular bile-and-stomach-acid smell of a boy who hadn’t eaten properly in days. He saw the familiar fire in Ephraim’s eyes: less a flame, really, than jags of blue electricity crackling outward from his irises; it reminded Max of the plasma globe at the Science Center.

Ephraim’s fist rose with sudden swiftness, knuckles striking Max’s chin. It wasn’t a hard punch, but hard enough to snap his teeth together with an audible click. It didn’t hit Max’s knockout button, his legs didn’t even tremble—Ephraim took most of the steam off it—but it was a punch all the same.

Ephraim pushed Max away, as if their closeness might prompt him to lash out again. Max’s heart shuddered in his chest. He could feel the lingering imprint of his best friend’s knuckles on the underside of his chin: three perfect points still burning into his skin.

Ephraim’s jaw worked, his teeth grinding side to side; it appeared he might burst into tears.

“I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean that, Max.”

Max rubbed his jaw. He’d never been punched before. “I know, Eef. It’s okay.”

Ephraim shook his head. “No it’s not. No. It’s. Not.”

The three boys stood in the greenish, claustrophobic light. Ephraim slumped back on the rock.

“We have to go, Eef,” Newton said softly. “Are you sure you don’t want to—”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“But so… you’ll stay right here?” Newt asked.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ephraim repeated.

“Okay. We’ll be back soon.”

“Do whatever you want.”

Max and Newton left him. They slipped under the canopy of spruce fronds into the clearing beyond.

29

AFTER THEY were gone, Ephraim sat motionless. The wind stirred the treetops, blowing pinecones off the boughs. Reaching into his pocket, he retrieved one of the two remaining cigarettes, lighting it with the Zippo. It tasted disgustingly sweet, like the tobacco had been drenched in rancid syrup.

He tweezed obsessively at the swollen flesh edging his knuckles. He picked and twisted until fresh blood flowed. It dripped off his fingertips and pattered onto the brown needles. He scrutinized it for wriggles.

The pain was sharp but bearable. It felt really good. Really necessary. Idly, not really aware of his actions, Ephraim angled the cigarette until its burning ember drew near the flesh of his wrist. He felt the heat but wasn’t alarmed by it. Touching his skin, the ember made a sizzling sound like bacon in a frying pan. The stink of burnt hair, the vaguely sugary smell of crisped skin. The ember left a blackened divot, pain radiating from it like the rays of a cartoon sun. Endorphins and adrenaline washed through Ephraim, calming him somewhat—but the feeling didn’t last.

They were inside of him. Somehow he both knew and didn’t know this unavoidable fact—or he knew and yet hoped with every ounce of belief that he was wrong.

I saw something, Eef. Under your fingernail.

Shelley’s words drilled into his head, blistering his brain like a branding iron. How could Shelley see anything? Dark in the cellar, a storm shaking the earth. But Shelley’s words had only reinforced Ephraim’s own belief: they’d gotten inside.

Simple math: Kent was sick. He’d punched Kent. They’d shared blood. Ephraim may as well have thrown open a door and said: Welcome to the party!

At first there had only been one… a tiny, white, hungry guest squirming contentedly in the half-moon of his fingernail. And Ephraim would’ve permitted it to live in his fingernail, if it promised to stay under the nail like a pet in a glass bubble. Ephraim was generous—he could give up that much of his body. He’d even show it to his friends to gross them out: Look, guys, I’ve got a new friend. He’d let it have his whole finger, even; plenty of men back home on the island were missing fingers—they’d get pulled off on factory lines, shredded in tractor gears—so okay, no big loss.

But these things weren’t content with a fingernail, a finger, a hand, or an arm. They wanted the whole enchilada.

Ephraim thought about those little white tubes bending toward him in the cabin. He’d stood mesmerized, swooning in fear as those shimmery strands floated toward him. Ephraim’s heart-blood had seized, veins feeling like they’d been pumped full of quick-dry cement. He hadn’t moved an inch. None of the other boys had stepped in to save him, either. Scout Law number two: A Scout is loyal to the king, his country, and his fellow Scouters. Well, fuck that. Ephraim’s fellow Scouters hung him out to dry, even his so-called forever friend.

But he wasn’t mad at them, really. Would he have stepped in if those threads had drifted toward Newton—even Max? He blamed himself for acting like a stupid stunned cow. That inward-looking anger crystallized into rage, which then transformed quite suddenly into fear.

Ephraim was as terrified as he’d ever been in his life. Something was inside of him—he was almost positive of that now. Locked up behind his skin. Incubating. That something had become somethings. Multiplying and feeding and breeding. That was how any living entity increased its numbers, wasn’t it? They were having sex inside of him, like those disgusting snakes in the rocks. Things were fucking inside his skin right this instant.

He’d never had sex himself. Sure, he’d gotten his hand up Becky Scott’s skirt on the baseball bleachers behind the Lions Club before she’d protested about being a good Baptist girl—of course, she’d taken his hand and put it there in the first place. Ephraim realized girls couldn’t be understood the way boys could be, but still, he’d been looking forward to touching a girl again, to reexperience that light-headed sensation of his heartbeat shivering every inch of his skin. But that seemed less likely now. Because of the stranger, and the Scoutmaster. And Kent. And now himself?

Their sly squirming infested his ears. The surface of his flesh trembled as they moved beneath it—or was that just the dappling of the sunlight on his arms? No: they were there. But they were being sneaky about it. Burrowing inside of him like rats in the walls. Chewing away at the insulation and gnawing at the foundation.

He stared at the crook of his elbow. A fat blue vein pulsed there. He put his thumb on it to stop the blood flow. The beat of blood through his vein seemed out of line with the beat of his own heart. Like something else had commandeered it.

We could share. Ephraim directed this desperate plea into his body like a phantom radio signal. Share ME—my body. Okay? But like, you can’t do to me what you did to Scoutmaster Tim. You really shouldn’t have done that. Maybe you can’t help yourselves? I get it. I have control issues, too. We could—what’s the word? Like, live together. But you can’t… you better not… don’t you fucking eat me!

Ephraim screamed—the sound of a nail levered out of a wet plank of wood. What a colossal fucking idiot. Trying to reason with these things. May as well reason with the tide, with a fucking salamander. He wondered if the Scoutmaster had resorted to that—if in the final hours and minutes he’d sobbed out an entreaty, wishing for mercy. What the fuck would it matter?

Ephraim wished they’d just go away. Could he flush them out? Could he dig them out?

“Eef?… Ephraim?”

His name, coming from his backpack. He lifted the flap and found the walkie-talkie. Dazedly he said: “Yeah?”

“You guys left without me.”

“We couldn’t find you, Shel.”

“It’s okay, I’m not angry. How’s it going?”

“I’m by myself. Max and Newt left.”

Silence. Then: “Really?”

Ephraim sniffed. His sinuses were full of snot, like when he used to cry—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. When he’d seen that repairman blown off his cherry picker by a burst of electricity, maybe?

“They had to get food. I was holding them back.”

The air crackled, full of static. “Real friends wouldn’t leave you. Sorry, Eef, but that’s the truth.”

“Would you have left, Shel?”

Silence again. Then: “I’m not really a friend, Eef—am I?”

Ephraim stared at his pointer finger. The milky crescent under the nail—the lunate, that part is called. How did he know that?

“No, Shel. I guess you’re something else.”

“How you feeling? You don’t sound too hot.”

There was something ghastly, something monstrously and soulsuckingly awful about Ephraim’s situation: alone and full of things, his only confidant a brooding, toxic boy—Creepy Shel, the girls at school called him; the Creepazoid; the Toucher—on a crackly walkie-talkie. A sense of despondency settled into him, marrow-deep.

“Eef, you still there?”

“Uh.”

“You hungry?”

Oh, fuck YOU, Shel. Rage boiled up Ephraim’s gorge—then transmuted swiftly into a fear so profound that beads of sweat squeezed from the skin of his brow, pop-pop-pop like salty BBs. Hugging his arms tight across his body, chest hitching, Ephraim rocked side to side. His dearest wish was to be home, safe in bed, with his mother humming downstairs as she cooked: meatballs, sausage and peppers, or even lobster, which he thought of as sea bugs and totally loathed. But the surety and safety, the calm cadence of his mother’s voice—yes, he missed that terribly.

The things. He felt them. Massing behind his eyeballs. Infesting his corneal vaults, twining round his ocular stems. Packing his sinuses, a wriggling white multitude, squeezing through his aqueous humors like tears. Spilling down his nose, down the back of his throat, million upon million gorging themselves, growing fat on him. Ephraim was crying now—yet he barely realized this.

“I can help you, Eef.”

Ephraim sucked back snot. “W-w-what?”

“I said—are you listening? Really, really listening? I said I can help.”

“H-how?”

In the still tranquillity of the island woods, wind stirring gently in the treetops, Shelley began to speak. His words were soft, honeyed, washing over Ephraim like a tropical zephyr. It all made so much sense.

Ephraim pulled his Swiss Army knife out of his pocket. His mother had bought it for him. It hadn’t been his birthday or Christmas—she got it for him just because. She never did that. Never enough money in the kitty. He’d sat on his bed, gazing at it in disbelief. He’d slipped his thumbnail into the crescent divot in each attachment and pulled them out. He’d loved the crisp snick they made clicking into place.

“Are you doing it?” Shelley asked. His voice sounded far away, ignorable.

“Yeah,” Ephraim snapped irritably. “Shut up, just shut up for a sec.”

Carefully, he unfolded the can-opener blade. He sat poised, the wickedly curved blade hovering a quarter inch above his skin, a few inches from the cigarette burn. His skin seemed to jump and shiver—as if things were tunneling beneath his flesh like roaches under a blanket. Bastards.

He dug the sharp silver sickle into the puffy flesh of his knuckles and drew it along the phalange bone on the back of his hand. The blade opened his skin up rather easily, leaving a dully sizzling line of pain. For a moment, the incision shone pale white like the flesh of a deboned trout. Next it turned pink before running red with blood.

The anger racing through his veins dissipated with the appearance of that blood, and with it went some of the fear—just like Shelley said it would. Which was good. Very good.

“Do you see it, Ephraim? You must see it, don’t you?”

Ephraim watched the blood trickle down his hand. He squinted. He was positive he’d seen something wriggle as the can opener cleaved through his flesh: a flicker of squiggling white, just like Shelley promised he’d see.

If he cut deeper next time, and faster, could he catch it? Pinch it, tug it out? It may be very big. Not as big as the one that had come out of the strange man’s gut but still, big.

He’d have to twist it around his fingers like fishing line and pull very carefully. He imagined tugging on the end coming out of his hand and feeling a dim secondary tug down by his foot, where its head was rooted. Tricky work. If it snapped before he got its head out, it would just wriggle away and respawn. He had to get the head. Once he got it, he’d squeeze it between his thumb and finger and squeeze. He’d shiver with delight as it burst with a meaty sploosh.

“Do it, Ephraim. Do it. Don’t be scared. There’s nothing to be scared of. You’re almost there.”

The squirming in his ears was maddening. He unfolded the knife’s corkscrew attachment. He idly raised it to his ear, edging the tip into his ear canal. The cold metal tickled the sensitive hairs—the cilia, they were called; he remembered that from science class. Lunate, too, he realized—God bless science class.

Ephraim imagined pushing the corkscrew into his ear and giving it a good solid twist or two, like he’d seen his mother do when opening bottles of cheap Spanish red. She’d drunk a lot of those after his father stepped out. He pictured pulling the corkscrew out and finding a thick white tube threaded round the coils. Gotcha. But there could be other things on those coils, too.

Still, it might be worth it. The human brain didn’t actually have any sensory receptors—yet another thing he’d learned in science class. You could stab a naked brain with a steak knife and the person wouldn’t even feel it. They might piss their pants or forget their best friend’s name all of a sudden—but they wouldn’t feel any pain.

Shelley’s voice, at one with the wind: “What would you rather, Eef? Put up with a little pain or get your eyes eaten out by worms? That’s what they do, you know—they save the eyes for last.”

Ephraim took the corkscrew out of his ear. He folded it back inside the knife and set it on his lap. It sat there: a long red lozenge with the insignia of the Swiss cross on it. He figured a guy could tear himself apart pretty easily with such a knife. Use its every attachment to pinch and pull and pry his own raging flesh until he fell to pieces. It would hurt like hell, except for the brain, of course—but maybe it would be worth it.

Ephraim sat under the spruces in the thinning light of afternoon. The walkie-talkie went silent. Run out of batteries? He already missed Shelley’s helpful voice.

His fingers picked along his arms, plucking at the downy hairs there. A small, timid smile sat on his face. His gaze was set in a misty, vacant stare—as though his eyes themselves were not connected to his mind at all, but were just sitting loose in their sockets like a couple of green marbles.

What would you rather?

His twitching fingers set themselves to new purposes he could not discern. Slowly and without being fully aware of it, Ephraim reached again for the knife.

30

MAX AND Newton hiked nearly an hour before coming across a patch of wild blueberries. They clung to bushes that grew in the shade of a rocky parapet. Many berries were so withered they almost looked freeze-dried; many more had rotted to hunks of bluish fuzz. But a few bushes must have bloomed late in the season—these ones were clung with overripe but edible berries.

The boys picked them with trembling fingers, not believing their luck. They gorged on berries until their lips and fingers were stained a pale blue.

Afterward they sat with their backs against the parapet. Newton belched loudly and shot Max a slightly embarrassed glance. His shirt was stretched across his stomach. His belly button peered out from the tight fabric like a sightless eye.

Newton pulled his knees up and encircled them with his arms. He closed his eyes and found himself back in the cabin where they had discovered Scoutmaster Tim. As he’d watched those worms waver back and forth making those pfft! pfft! sounds, he’d been sure things would only get worse. The odds were very sharply aligned against them, weren’t they? But he remembered something his mother once said: The only way you’ll ever really know people is to see them in a crisis. People do the worst things to each other, Newton. Just the worst. Friendships, family, love and brotherhood—toss it all out the window…

And though he’d desperately wished he were home, some deeper part of his psyche recognized that rescue was not an immediate probability. Something bad had happened and they were trapped in the middle of it. All they could do was hang tight until the adults figured things out.

That was the biggest part of survival, Newton realized: maintaining a belief in the best-case scenario. It was when you started to believe the worst-case one that you were doomed.

The boys gathered an extra pint of berries to take back to Ephraim. Max rolled them up in a kerchief and stashed them in Newton’s backpack.

The land dipped gradually. The gentle downslope led into a narrow valley. Pine trees bent over facing precipices, casting long shadows. The lowering sun burnt without heat behind gunmetal clouds. A cold breeze skated through the natural wind tunnel to pebble their arms with gooseflesh.

Newton crouched next to a lightning-cleaved tree. The stump was ringed with toadstools. Pale orange in color, each stem shaped like tiny moose antlers.

“Coral mushrooms,” Newton said. “They’re safe to eat, but also a powerful laxative.”

“What’s that?”

“They give you the shits.”

“Not poisonous?”

“The antler-shaped ones are okay. Those do look like antlers, yeah?”

Max squinted. “Yeah.”

Newton picked a few and put them in his pack. “When we get back to camp, we can boil them. Make a tea. Then Kent can drink it. Clear him right out.”

“You think?”

“You got a better idea?”

Max smiled. “You know what? You’re a real fun guy.”

“What?”

“It’s a joke Mr. Lowery told in science class. What did one mushroom say to the other? You’re a real fungi.”

A slow smile broke over Newton’s face. “Oh, I get it. Fungi. Fun guy. That’s funny. That’s really, really funny.”

Max frowned, and Newton immediately felt bad. It was just like him to suck all the funny out of a joke. He was a humor vampire. He thought about his Facebook persona, Alex Markson. Cool, handsome, suave Alex Markson. What Would Alex Markson Do—WWAMD? Not what Newton had just done, that’s for sure.

Max said: “Mr. Walters told another joke that he got in trouble for.”

“What?”

“How do you make a hormone?”

“How?”

“You refuse to pay her.”

Newton cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I. But Shelley repeated it to his mother. That got Mr. Walters in some deep shit for a few days.”

Max squinted at an area about ten yards past the tree stump. A trail was tamped through the grass.

“Animal trail,” he said.

Only a foot wide, maybe less, so it couldn’t have been made by a very big animal. A fox or a marten or a porcupine.

“How did animals even get on this island?” Max wondered aloud. “You figure someone built an ark?”

“The Department of Game and Wildlife might have dropped them off,” Newton said. “They would have surveyed the land and, y’know, figured out what species would live best.”

“How’s it feel carrying around that big-ass brain of yours all day?”

Newton’s eyes darkened. “Don’t make fun of me, Max. Not now.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Yes, you were. You were starting up on it, anyway. Just quit it, okay?”

Newton huffed back snot and raked the back of his hand over his nose. Was he about to cry? Max had never seen Newton cry. Not even after the most merciless teasing sessions. Not after an endless round of “Keepaway” with his Scout beret—a game that often ended out of pure apathy: someone would simply drop Newton’s beret and the jeering circle would dissolve, leaving Newton to grope pink-faced in the dirt for his hat.

“Don’t be an asshole, Max.” Newton’s eyes blazed from the reddened flesh of his sockets. “Not now.”

Max took a step back as if Newton had physically struck him. He held his hands out in a penitent and pleading gesture.

“Really, Newt, I wasn’t—”

The following words came out of Newton in a hot rush, like a bottle of soda that had been shaken so hard and for so long that the cap had finally blown off.

“I like weird stuff, okay? So what? And I’m fat. I know that, obviously. I wish I wasn’t but it’s not like I eat like a pig. I mean, yeah, I like ice cream but so do lots of guys. Mom says it’s glandular. A slow metabolism. She even ordered me a pack of Deal-A-Meal cards from that guy on TV who wears those glittery short-shorts.”

Max was stunned. Newton had never spoken this way to him—to anyone, as far as he knew.

“You know what’s hilarious?” Newt said. “I was skinny as a baby. Like, I-could’ve-died skinny. I couldn’t put on weight. A total shrimp. I slipped four percentiles, Mom said. The pediatrician told her to feed me butter—pure warm butter.”

Max wanted to apologize. To say, more than anything, that it wasn’t really Newton’s fault. Max and the other boys didn’t pick on him because they despised him… it was more a case of boys needing someone to single out. A fatted calf to sacrifice. They had to turn someone into that bottom rung on the ladder if only so they didn’t have to occupy it themselves. Boys weren’t very inventive, either. The simplest flaw would do. A lisp. An overbite. Dental braces. Being fat. Add to it a few glaring idiosyncrasies—such as being a know-it-all bookworm who was fascinated with mushrooms—and presto! One made-to-order sacrificial lamb.

Max gave Newt a look of cautious empathy. “Sorry, okay? I wasn’t trying to, like, be a shithead or anything.”

Newton set his jaw off-kilter and touched his lip to his nose. “Okay. Forget it. It was nothing.”

THE TRAP proved a lot harder to build than they had figured.

Newton had found a diagram for a “sapling spring snare” in his field book. He claimed to have built one in his backyard—Scoutmaster Tim had come over and certified it, awarding Newton his Bushcraft badge.

But the saplings in his backyard were limber. The trees edging the game trail were old or dead: they snapped as soon as the boys bent them. When they finally found one that might do and tried to bow it down—the “spring” part of the trap—the natural tension of the wood was simply too much.

“This might make an okay wolf trap,” Newton said with a shake of his head. “But a small animal would get catapulted into the sky.”

They retired to the bluffs overlooking the game run. They sat with their feet dangling over the bluffs. The air smelled of creosote. The clouds lowered like a gray curtain coming down.

Newton said: “You don’t feel sick, do you?”

Max said: “I don’t know what sick should feel like.”

“Hungry.”

“Well, okay yeah, I am hungry.”

“Yeah,” said Newton, “but not hungry-hungry, right?”

“I guess not. I guess it’s bearable.”

Newton looked relieved. “Good. I mean if we were really that hungry—that crazy—we’d know it… right?”

Max rubbed his chin, wondering if Ephraim’s knuckles would leave a bruise—wondering, more gloomily, if he’d live long enough for that bruise to heal. He gave no answer to Newt’s question. What was there to say? If that particular hunger fell upon them, crazy hunger, nothing would really matter anymore. It’d be far too late.

Night birds sang in the trees: haunting, melancholy notes. Newton’s foot went to sleep. He stood to walk the tingles out of it, wandering to the edge of the valley where the soil gave way to a flat expanse of shale. Gentle waves slapped the shore. The water was the gray of a dead tooth, liquefying into a sky of that same unvarying gray.

Newton squinted into a tide pool. Something popped up on its placid surface. Whatever it was, it had the coloring of an exotic bird’s egg. It vanished again.

“Max! Come over here.”

They peered down. Their breath was trapped expectantly in their lungs. There—whatever it was popped up again. Bubbles burst all around it. Then it was gone.

“It’s a sea turtle,” Newton said.

THEY CREPT down to the shore. The tide pool was hemmed by honeycombed rock. How had the turtle gotten in? Maybe there was a gap in the rocks underwater. More likely it had gotten carried in with the high tide and was trapped until the tide came in again.

“Could we eat it?” Max said. His voice was raspy with excitement.

“We could.” Newton’s voice held the same anxious rasp. Something about the idea of meat—even turtle meat—was insanely appealing.

They doffed their boots and socks and rolled their pant legs up past their knees. A light wind scalloped the water, spitting salt water at their naked legs.

The tide pool sloped steeply to a bottom of indeterminate depth. The turtle’s shell was the size of a serving platter—they could just make out its contours when the turtle poked itself above the surface. Its head was a vibrant yellow shaded with dark octagon-shaped markings. Its eyes were dark like a bird’s eyes. It had a wise and thoughtful look about it, which was pretty typical of turtles.

The boys patted their knives in their pockets. Max had a Swiss Army knife. Newton had a frame-lock Gerber with a three-inch blade.

“How should we do it?” Newton whispered with a giddy, queasy smile.

“We have to do it fast. Grab it and drag it out and kill it, I guess. Fast as we can.”

“Do they bite?”

“I don’t know. Do they?”

Newton pursed his lips. “It might if we aren’t careful.”

They waded gingerly into the pool. The water was so cold it sapped the air from their lungs. The water rose to the nubs of their kneecaps.

The turtle was a darker shape in the already dark water. It swung around lazily, unconcerned. As it rose up the boys caught sight of its shell: a mellow green patina flecked with streaks of magenta. Strands of sea moss drifted off it like streamers on a parade float.

It swam right up to them, totally unperturbed. Maybe it was curious—or maybe it was hungry, too, and thought the boys might make an easy meal. It swam between Newton’s split legs. He trembled from the cold and from the fear that the turtle might snap at his thighs. But it swam through serenely enough.

It had four flippers. The two at the front were long sickles, sort of like the wings on a plane. The two at the back looked like bird talons, except with webs of tough connective tissue. The skin on all four flippers was iridescent yellow overlaid with dark scaling. It was a beautiful creature.

Max gritted his teeth and plunged his hands into the water. His fingers closed around the edge of the turtle’s shell, which was as slimy as an algae-covered rock. The turtle kicked forcefully—its strength was incredible. Suddenly Max was on his knees in the freezing surf. The rocks raked his shins. The turtle’s small ebony claws dug into his thighs. He opened his lips to cry out and when he did the sea washed in, leaving him choking and sputtering.

The turtle slipped out of his grip. He splashed after it blindly.

“Newt! Get it before it gets away!”

Newton hobble-walked to where the turtle was throwing itself against the tide pool barrier. He grabbed one of its rear flippers. It was slippery and tough like a radial tire slicked in dish soap. The turtle swung around and snapped wildly at Newton. Its head telescoped out on its wrinkled neck farther than he’d thought possible: it reminded him of that game Hungry Hungry Hippos. Newton let out a fearful holler as its jaws went snack-snack-snack inches from his face. He caught the briny smell of the turtle’s breath and another, more profound scent: something hormonal and raw.

He reeled back and nearly tumbled face-first into the water. The turtle went back to flinging itself at the rock. Max was breathing heavily through gritted teeth. Water hissed between the chinks with harsh hsst! sounds. The bitter tang of fear washed through Newton’s mouth. This situation had developed horrible potential, though he wasn’t quite sure how that had happened.

“You grab one flipper,” Max said, his eyes squeezed down to slits. “I’ll grab the other. We’ll get it up on shore. It won’t be so tough on land.”

They took hold of its back flippers and dragged it out. The turtle’s front flippers paddled in useless oarlike circles. Its head thrashed, sending up fine droplets of water. Max’s whitened lips were skinned back from his teeth—more a funhouse leer than a smile. A look of horrible triumph had come into his eyes.

They heaved the turtle up onto the sickle of rain-pitted sand. It tried to scuttle up the beachhead but it was hemmed in by steep shale. The boys hunched over with their hands on their knees—their kneecaps chapped red with cold—to collect their breath. The sky had gone dark: an icy vault pricked with isolated stars. A fingernail slice of the moon cast a razored edge of brightness over the sea.

“We should build a fuh-fuh-fire,” Newton said, his teeth chattering.

“First we have to kill it.”

A painful tension had sunk into Max’s chest: the pressure of a huge spring coiled to maximum compression. He was angry at the turtle for its mute will to survive and for its defiance of his own needs. He was frustrated that the turtle had scared him. He’d have to kill it for that transgression alone.

The turtle turned to face them. Its head was tucked defensively into its shell. It struggled forward on its front flippers, aiming to return to the tide pool.

Max stepped in front of it. The turtle’s head darted out to snap at his toes. Max pulled his foot away with a strangled squawk. The turtle had taken a V-shaped bite: the wound went a quarter inch into his toe, almost to the nail.

Max felt very little—his toes were still numb and his system was awash with adrenaline—but as his blood pissed into the sand he sensed all the threads inside his body gathering up, tightening, and committing themselves to a steely purpose.

He’d kill this thing. He wanted it dead.

Max found a bit of driftwood and hooked it under the turtle’s shell. It wheeled and snapped off three inches of bleached wood. Max jammed the remaining portion under its front flipper and levered it up savagely.

The turtle flipped onto its back. It uttered a pitiful squall that sounded too much like the cry of a human infant for Newton’s ears.

“There.” Max’s chest heaved. “There, you fucking tough guy—there you go.”

With one trembling finger, he flicked open the largest blade of his Swiss Army knife. Moonlight lay trapped along its honed edge. His anger and fear helixed into each other. Things were speeding up and yet everything was held in a bubble of crystalline clarity: the tide swelling over the rain-pitted sand and smoothing everything with a layer of silver; the shriek of gulls overhead that seemed to urge him toward an act of savagery he’d already settled his mind around.

Max pressed the knife to the turtle’s stomach, which was the off-beige color of the rubberized mat in his bathtub at home. The tip slipped into one of the grooves in the turtle’s shell as if guided by its own inner voice.

Max had never killed anything. Oh, maybe bugs—but did they really count? He’d never stabbed anything, that was for sure. Newton stared at him with eyes that shone like cold phosphorus. Max wished he’d look away.

He bore down, unsure at first but steadily applying more force. The blade slipped and skittered along the turtle’s belly, leaving a milky scratch on its shell. The turtle mewled. Its flippers oared in crazy circles. Its helplessness made it look stupid, comical. Max could do whatever he wanted to it.

He refolded the knife and pulled out the leather awl: just a simple metal spike. He held the knife in both hands as if it were the T-handle on a TNT detonator box. He took a rough guess at where the turtle’s heart might lie, then hunched his shoulders and bore down with all his weight.

The spike pierced the turtle with the sound of a three-hole punch going through a thick sheaf of paper. Blood poured from the perfectly round hole, darker than Max had ever imagined. The turtle’s back flippers clenched and unclenched spastically. Something dribbled out between those flippers: pearlescent roe that had the look of delicate soap bubbles.

Max punched the leather tool through a second time. The turtle’s body compressed under Max’s weight, its chest buckling like when you press down on a plastic garbage can lid. Its flippers beat helplessly at the air. Blood burst out of the wound in a startling syrupy gout. The smell was profoundly briny, as if the turtle’s organs were encrusted with salt.

Max punched the spike through again, again… again. The turtle gurgled, then made a fretful stuttering sound: icka-icka-icka, as if it had a bad case of the hiccups.

Max moaned and sawed his arm across his eyes—he’d begun to cry without being aware of it—and stared at the turtle with eyes gone swimmy with tears. Blood was coming out of it all over. It rocked side to side frantically. A low venomous hiss came out of the punctures; it was as if the turtle’s organs had vaporized into steam that was now venting through those fresh holes.

“Please,” Max said. He punched the spike through again. It went in so goddamn easy now, as if the turtle’s skin had relinquished its prior rights of refusal. “Please won’t you just die.”

But it would not. Stubbornly, agonizingly, it clung to life. Its head craned up to take in the bloody wreckage of its own body. Its eyes were set in nets of wrinkles, inexpressive of any emotion Max could name. Its will to live was terrifying, as it rejected the notion of an easy death.

Why had he done this—why? Jesus, oh Jesus.

On TV it was always so quick and easy, almost bloodless: the detective shot the murderer and he collapsed, clutching his heart. Or the knife slid in soundlessly and some guy went down clutching his stomach, venting a sad sighing note—“Eeoooogh…”—before he died. But it didn’t work that way in real life. Suddenly Max understood those awful stories he’d seen on the national news, the ones where a reporter grimly intoned some poor person had been stabbed forty times or whatever. Maybe the stabber would have stopped after a single stab if that was all it took. But most living things don’t want to die. It took a lot to kill them. Events take on a vicious momentum. All of a sudden you’re stabbing as a matter of necessity. You’re hoping that if you just put enough holes into a body, the life will drain out and death will rapidly flow in…

“Newt,” he pleaded. “Newt, please.”

The boys knelt in the sand, wet and shivering. Sand stuck to the pads of their feet. Max was shaking and sobbing. He could never, ever be hungry enough to kill something if this was what it meant. The turtle was still hiccuping, but now those sounds were interspersed with frantic peeps, like a baby bird calling from its nest.

Newton grabbed blindly for the turtle’s head. He slashed wildly with his knife, trying to hack through its throat. But the turtle withdrew into its shell and Newton’s knife only cut a deep trench around its jawbone. WWAMD? Not this. Alex would never have done this. Newton burst into a freshet of tears.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his chest hitching uncontrollably. “I thought that might be the quickest way. Y’know, cut its head off. Like a guillotine. A terrible thing to do but still better than…”

The turtle peered out from the leathery cave where its head now resided. Its eyes blinked slowly. Its mouth opened and closed like a man at the end of a long run. Blood filled the lower hub of its shell and dripped onto the sand. It kept peeping and peeping.

The boys knelt with their shoulders bowed as the turtle bled to death. It took so, so long.

At one point, its head poked out of its shell. Its blood-slicked eyes stared around as if in hopes that its tormentors had grown bored of their sport and left it alone. Maybe it thought it could still return to the tide pool and be carried back into the ocean. Animals never gave up hope, did they? But its glazed eyes found them, blinked once, and resignedly returned to the darkness of its shell.

The great wave of the tide moved farther inland. The water lifted. The surf sucked at the boys’ bare feet. The turtle’s flippers went stiff all at once, then relaxed. Tiny translucent creatures that looked like earwigs crawled out from the deep folds of its skin to trundle over its cooling body. Aquatic parasites looking for a new host.

“I’m not huh-huh-hungry anymore,” Newton said.

“Me neither.”

“My muh-muh… my muh-muh… my mother says you can’t really love yourself if you hurt animals.”

“I didn’t mean to. Not like this. If I’d known—”

“I know. It’s over now anyway.”

The water lapped at their feet with a dreadful languidness. The gulls hurled down shrill shrieks from high above. The wind whispered in a language they could not name.

They buried the turtle in the forgetting sand of the beach.

31

“EEF… EEF, you still there?”

The knife slipped from Ephraim’s hands. It kept on slipping. He couldn’t get a good grip. It was all the blood. His hands were greasy with it. It shone on his fingers like motor oil in the moonlight.

He’d seen it.

He’d cut a satisfyingly deep crescent around the knob of his ankle bone—he’d glimpsed sly movement there. A faint pulsation that on any other day he might have dismissed as the heavy beat of his heart through a surface vein—but now, today, no.

And he’d cut too deeply. He knew this immediately. His hands had been shaking too hard in his excitement—in his need to find it. His skin opened up with a silky sigh, as if it had been waiting all his life to split and bleed. The inner flesh was a frosty white, as if the blood had momentarily leapt clear of the wound.

In that instant, he’d seen it.

Terror had seized his heart in a cold fist. Undeniably, it was inside him. Feasting on him. Coiling round his bones like barbed wire around a baseball bat.

But on the heels of terror came a strange species of relief. He was right. It was just like Shelley promised. He wasn’t crazy.

“Shel?” He coughed. A carbolic taste slimed his tongue, in his sinuses and lungs, burrowing into his bones to infuse the marrow with the flavor of tar. “Where did you go?”

“I’ve been here all along, friend. Don’t you remember?”

“Ug,” was all Ephraim said. A warm, sluglike blob passed over his lips, falling to the carpet of pine needles with a wet plop. Ephraim couldn’t see what it was—didn’t want to.

“Did you see it, Eef?”

“Ub.”

“What did it look like?”

He’d seen only a flash. It was thicker than Ephraim ever thought possible. Fat as a Shanghai noodle. Its head—he’d found the head—split into four separate appendages. They looked spongy but predatory, too, like the petals of a lotus blossom or a snake’s head primed to strike. It’d flinched like an earthworm when you ripped back a patch of grass to find it squirming in the dark loam; its body had whipped madly about as it withdrew into the sheltering layers of his muscle tissue.

“Oh no you don’t,” Ephraim had hissed.

He’d dug his fingers into the wound and tweezed with his fingertips. He felt the bare nub of his ankle bone—cold as an ice cube. His fingers closed around the worm, he was sure of that… almost sure. The parted lips of his flesh were rubbery and slick, gummed with the blood that was still flowing quite freely.

He’d gotten hold of it, just barely. A strand of spaghetti cooked perfectly al dente (“to the tooth,” as his mother would say): a mushy exterior with the thinnest braid of solidity running through it. Did worms have spines? Maybe this one did.

Squeezing his fingers, he’d tried to pinch his nails together, praying he could decapitate the horrible thing. Afterward, he figured he could pull the rest of its limp body out using the Swiss Army knife tweezers. If he was unsuccessful, he guessed it would just rot inside of him. It might create internal sepsis. His innards could be riddled with ulcerated boils and pus-filled lesions. He might die screaming, but at least he’d die empty rather than infested.

He’d die totally alone.

In that moment, he’d thought: Do I really want that, to die alone? Where were Max and Newt? It was nearly dark by then and they’d promised to return. Instead they’d abandoned him. Max, his best friend, had left him alone. Friends until the end? Bullshit. Ephraim only had one friend left in the whole world.

He’d gripped it—the tips of his fingers pincering the hateful thing. For an instant it had thrashed fretfully between his fingertips… Ephraim was pretty sure, anyway. But he’d pulled too quickly. It squirted through his fingers. He’d reached again, desperately. Gone. He’d had his opportunity and lost it. It was safe inside him again.

“It gob abay, Shel,” Ephraim said with despondent, childlike petulancy—marble-mouthing his words on account of the warm syrup in his mouth.

“You have to keep trying. Or are you weak… a sucky-baby, like everyone says?”

What? Who’d have the balls to—nobody said that. Did they? He pictured them on the school yard—a gaggle of boys casting glances over their shoulders, sneering and laughing. He saw Max laughing at him. Rage tightened the flesh of his forehead. Something thorny and superheated surged against his skull, threatening to shatter through.

“I hear it all the time, friend. At school, behind the utility shed where the big boys smoke cigarettes. They say Ephraim Elliot acts tough, but he’s a pussy. He’s a cuckoo—his mommy makes him see a shrink because his head’s all messed up…”

Ephraim’s gaze fell upon his stomach. His shirt had ridden up to expose a slip of taut flesh. It rippled as something surged beneath it.

Maddening, mocking, playing peek-a-boo.

Ephraim picked the knife up. The blade was still keen.

How deep could he cut?

It all depended. How deep did his enemy lie?

What would you rather?

32

KENT WAS a beast. He could kill at will.

For a while there, he’d thought differently. When the other boys had left him in the cellar—abandoned him like a whipped dog—he’d been scared. So, so scared.

He’d felt his strength seeping away like the air from a leaky tire.

The things that lived in him now were awesomely hungry.

He knew they were there. He’d lain on the dirt floor and felt them sliding around inside him. A soft whisper came to his ears: a million snakes slithering across frictionless sand.

The thought occurred to him: he could die here. It didn’t quite seem possible. He was only fourteen. Didn’t God look out for drunks and children? That’s what his father always said.

At some point, Shelley had come to the cellar doors to feed him. The peanut brittle did nothing to kill his appetite. But whatever Shelley had given him next—tough and rubbery on the exterior, bursting with warm softness within—now that made him feel great.

Still, Shelley had been a bad boy. Shelley had promised meat. And Kent would soon get what he was owed.

Fresh energy percolated through him. His blood zitzed with adrenaline. He felt as though he’d eaten a raw steak—Shelley should have brought me steak; you should never go back on your word, Shelley you scumbag—as he inhaled the scent of blood that was not his own.

Kent was powerful. Oh yes.

He stood in the cellar, shoulders hunched. He could feel new bones growing up his back. They clawed through muscle and tendon before breaking through the skin on both shoulders. It was perfectly painless: he imagined this was what a caterpillar felt like when it emerged from its chrysalis as a beautiful butterfly.

Brand-new strength shot through him. Pounds of fresh muscle were slabbed onto his arms and legs. His chest cracked apart and widened as his shoulders grew broader and thicker. He did not feel pain or fear anymore. Was this how a superhero felt—or a god? Was that what he was now?

Weak light streamed through chinks in the floor, falling across his new contours. His body was a mass of fast-twitch muscle fibers and vein-riven flesh. He laughed: a low baritone. He could smash through the cellar door if he wanted to. He could find the boys who’d locked him up and tear their bodies apart like paper dolls. Find Ephraim, son of the no-good jailbird, and crush his skull to splinters.

Perhaps he would. Or perhaps he would be merciful.

But for now he’d wait. They would see him soon enough. Although their tepid hearts might burst at the sight of him.

WHEN THE other boys didn’t return by nightfall, Shelley decided to kill Kent.

That was the thing about spinning so many plates—inevitably, one would topple off the pole. But the prospect of watching those plates shatter excited Shelley enormously.

He’d found a dead sheepshead on the beach. It had washed in with the afternoon tide, rotted and picked at by sunfish. He skewered it on a sharpened stick and carried it back to the campfire.

It was near dark when he stole around to the cellar with the dead fish. His breath came heavily, like a moose in rut. A dank musk dumped out of Shelley’s pores: sour adrenaline mixed with something else, something fouler.

Shelley jimmied the stick loose from the cellar doors and flung them open. The granular light of dusk sifted down the steps. Shadows twisted on the warped wood. Shelley took a cautious step forward, hunting for movement in the gloom.

“Kent?”

Shelley’s prey dragged himself up the steps tortuously, a ghoul crawling out of a shattered coffin. For an instant, Shelley thought he had no skin: it was just a shambling, jerking Kent-skeleton advancing upon him. As he drew closer, Shelley realized that the thinnest stretching of skin still clad Kent’s wasted frame. He was covered in bulging boils: they looked like halved golf balls under his flesh. His eyes were cored sockets: Shelley was amazed they hadn’t fallen out of his head to dangle by their glistening ocular stalks…

…Kent rose from the cellar, exultant. The newly crowned king. His body shone like rippled steel in the moonlight. Power and strength coursed through him. He was unstoppable. He came slowly, savoring it. His feet echoed on the steps like distant thunder. He curled his hands into fists and watched heatless lightning crackle and pop between his knuckles. He could kill a man with a look—with a simple thought. He had eaten the godhead and taken its power…

…Shelley stepped back in wonderment. He couldn’t believe that Kent was still able to move. The boy’s eyes were yellow and diseased. His lips had receded into the gauntness of his face. He shuffled out of the cellar with sickening animation, a gleeful marionette in the hands of a spastic puppeteer. The fleshless pinworms that were his lips skinned back to disclose a dizzying grotesquerie: his gums had been eaten back from his teeth, and all but one—his left front incisor—had loosened and fallen from their gum beds; yet they remained connected by Kent’s braces, gray teeth linked like charms on a gruesome bracelet, clicking and clacking in the dark vault of his mouth, all hanging by that one tenacious tooth… which, as Shelley watched, slid from Kent’s gums with a slick sucking sound, a bracelet of teeth bouncing over his lips, his chin, tumbling to the cellar steps. Kent stepped on them, oblivious to his own teeth shattering like ribbon candy.

“Wha arr ooo loogin aaa?” the boy-thing croaked.

What are you looking at?

“Almost nothing,” Shelley said in a tone of pure awe.

The Kent-thing held out its driftwood arms, fleshless fingers outstretched toward the rotted meat in Shelley’s hands…

…The weakling cowered at the sight of him! Shelley had glimpsed Kent’s newfound beauty and power and he was quailing in fear. As it should be. This puling wretch, Shelley, held out an offering with one quaking hand. A hunk of braised meat dripping with juices. Perhaps Kent would be merciful. Perhaps Shelley would be spared…

…Shelley led the Kent-thing past the fire. The thing shambled awkwardly, staggering and collapsing and dragging itself up. It made the sucky-drooling sounds of a revolting starved infant. Saliva dripped from its flapping gums to slick its filthy Scout uniform. Moonlight glossed the dome of its skull, which was covered in bloody patches. My God, it must have torn out its own hair and eaten it.

“Come on, Kent,” Shelley cooed. “There’s a good boy…”

The Kent-thing loosed a high gibbering cackle. Night birds screeched from their roosts in the trees stitching the shore. They were down at the water now. Shelley waded in. The Kent-thing blundered in after, slipping on the rocks while Shelley stared with sick wonder.

“What are you?” he said.

Shelley tossed the dead fish into the surf. The Kent-thing shambled after it. Its bonelike fingers punctured the rotted flesh. Its toothless mouth tore a stinking strip off.

“So gooo… sank ooo… so gooooo…”

Shelley knelt beside the Kent-thing. He was aware of the danger but couldn’t help himself: he craved this closeness. He petted its head the way you’d pet a dog. His rock-hard penis pressed urgently against the wetted fabric of his trousers. A tenacious chunk of Kent’s hair came away in Shelley’s hand—it pulled free with no resistance at all, like wiping cat hair off a velour cushion.

“Show me,” he said softly.

Kent turned to regard him. Flecks of rotted fish clung to his jaws. His mouth hung open at a quizzical angle.

“Wha…?”

Shelley gripped Kent’s head and lowered it into the water. It didn’t require much effort at all. He caught the stunned expression on Kent’s face as he went under. His arms flailed. His legs kicked weakly. Air bubbles stormed to the surface, bursting with liquid pops. His uniform rode up his back. Shelley saw the pulsing tube running next to his spinal column—it looked like an awful second spine.

Kent’s struggles weakened. Shelley hauled his head up. The Kent-thing’s eyes were foggy. White worms had pierced the skin of his neck, writhing furiously.

“Show me,” Shelley said anxiously. “I want to see…”

…The illusion shattered abruptly. The mental scaffolding fell away and Kent saw himself as he was. When that happened he prayed—a quick, fervent prayer—that the sight would drive him insane. Better to be mad than to witness the devastation of his body from a sane person’s perspective. To see the skin stretched like parchment over the warped sticks of his bones. His body hilled with huge lumps, white worms twisting out of them in a frenzy…

…“Show me,” Shelley said again.

The Kent-thing’s eyes hung at half-mast. He coughed wretchedly. Something burst from his mouth, a fine mist spraying Shelley’s face. Something fluttered against his nose and lips like the beat of a moth’s wings. Shelley stuck his tongue out involuntarily to clear it away—realizing, in some dim chamber of his mind, the terrible danger he was in, but the fear was washed away on the tide of his awful, powerful needs.

“Show me.”

Shelley wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. Did he want to watch Kent’s soul depart his body? Would it slip away behind the convex curve of the Kent-thing’s eyes like smoke through a glass bowl?

He dunked Kent’s head underwater casually. He hummed an off-key note while Kent thrashed and bucked. Shelley felt insistent wriggles on his tongue and swallowed without quite realizing it.

The Kent-thing’s limbs settled. Shelley turned him over so that he faced the sky. His eyes stared glassily through the salt water.

…Either Kent had been fooled or he’d fooled himself. He gazed at the airless vault of the heavens stretching above the ocean. The stars were white-hot, encircled by gauzy coronas. So lovely. The unfairness of it all came crashing down. He’d never tell a girl he loved her. Never see his parents’ faces again. Never sprint across the outfield at the Lions Club Park tracking a long fly ball. This fact leapt straight out at him. The world was not a fair place. His father had lied—or he’d just been plain ignorant. He’d never see his father again to tell him just how wrong he was. Never never never…

…A look of terror and loss came across the Kent-thing’s face. Shelley’s heart trembled. Joy washed over him in an awesome wave. Yes. Yes. This was what he’d been looking for.

Shelley set a hand on Kent’s chest and pushed him under, hoping to lock that expression on his face. Bubbles detached from the insides of Kent’s nostrils and floated up. A bigger bubble passed over his lips and burst on the surface with a wet pop.

In the final moments, Kent’s face settled into a calm and beatific expression.

The joy burst like a glass globe inside Shelley’s chest. His fingers dug into Kent’s waterlogged uniform while he waded deeper into the sea, pulling the grotesquely buoyant Kent-thing past the breakwater, infuriated for reasons he could not name.

Shelley grabbed the stupid thing by its hair—it was dead now, and dead things relinquished their names—dragging it into the surf. It weighed almost nothing. The salt water held it up; its heels bumped over the rocks for thirty-odd feet, but once Shelley had gotten far enough from shore it floated freely, like a piece of wood.

The tide clutched greedily at the body. Shelley hesitated, not wishing to release it just yet. He was enraged—vaporous, cresting surges of anger rocked through him.

He’d expected so much more. Some kind of revelation. A sign of the gears that meshed behind the serene fabric of this world—a glimpse of its seething madness. But no. In the end he’d seen only mocking resignation—and, finally, bliss.

He continued to drag the dead thing through the water. If he’d been paying closer attention—and usually he would’ve been; Shelley was a preternaturally aware boy, coolly observant of everything around him—he would have seen the thing’s scalp detach from its skull. The skin had winnowed to a sheer, raglike substance that peeled as easily as the papery bark off a birch tree…

If he’d not been off in his own little reverie, he would have heard the sound of the dead thing’s scalp tearing free of the bone: a watery sucking noise, little bubbles popping as the sea flooded in to kiss the naked skullbone…

If he’d not been zoned-out and oblivious, he’d surely have seen the thousands of white threads twisting out of the dead thing’s head—its skull, which was networked in fissures where the connective plates of bone had drawn thin and detached. They came out in snowy gouts, fanning out in numberless profusion, encircling Shelley’s hips in a wavering nimbus…

His reverie broke only once they began to touch his skin. And the moment he realized this was the moment it ceased to truly matter.

“Oh!” Shelley said.

He jumped in the water—a silly, girlish little hop. “Fishy!” he said, believing that a sunfish or saltwater eel had brushed his thigh. But then he looked down, saw the worms streaming out of Kent’s skull case, wriggling and darting… his rubbery face settled into an unfamiliar expression: horrified revulsion.

He stared, entranced. They were so small. The moon played over their bodies, almost shining right through them. They moved in hypnotic, transfixing undulations. He nearly laughed—not because the sight of them was funny, but because they didn’t even seem a proper part of his existence. They were funny because they weren’t entirely real…

They flicked around him in playful patterns. There were just so many. They curled into one another, jesting and flirting. He felt something playing against his skin but it was a distant, forgettable sensation. A sting on his hand. A light, burning sensation like a wasp sting, only much less severe. It was followed by another and another and—

Shelley was rocked by an abrupt surge of adrenaline. His fingers unkinked from Kent’s hair. He beat the water with his palms—frenetically, spastically. His gorge rose.

They were everywhere, clinging to him somehow. He uttered shrill, nasal, squeaky notes of violent distaste: “Eee! EeeeEEEE!”

The threads became more animated. They poured out of the dead thing’s skull, leaving a milky contrail in the dark water—it looked like a streamer fluttering from some grisly Fourth of July float.

They wriggled down Shelley’s trousers, flitting and licking against his skin.

He swept the water with his forearm, trying to propel them away. His fear was unlike any he’d ever known; it made him desperate. Water fanned up, each droplet alive with wriggling white, landing on his arms and neck and lips. He snuffled salt water up his nose, sputtering on it.

He felt them inside his underwear. Some were so thin that they passed right through the weave of the fabric, needling inside, finding the sensitive skin at the bulb of his penis, the little hole where the piss came out.

Kent’s body floated out past the breakwater. Threads continued to spill from it, sifting down through the water. The stars played their metallic light upon the waves. Kent was a silver shape dressed in the brightness of the moon. Smaller shapes—inquisitive fish—darted at his appendages, fussing with his fingers and hair.

LATER, SHELLEY dragged himself back to shore. He shambled up the beachhead in hesitant steps. His lower lip hung slackly, a globule of spit suspended from it. The glob stretched until it snapped, splashing the rocks.

Tiny white things thrashed in the wetness.

He returned to the campfire and stared into its dead embers. The walkie-talkie was there, but the game with Ephraim was a distant concern.

He could resume it when Ephraim returned… if.

A gray curtain draped over Shelley’s thoughts—but beneath it and around its edges, things jigged and capered.

His hand kneaded his crotch anxiously. The pleasure he’d experienced earlier with Kent was gone. Now that area itched and burned. Could be a case of crotch crickets. Shelley had once overheard a construction worker saying that to his buddy while clawing ruefully at his groin. Shelley was pretty sure this wasn’t crotch crickets—it was a burn, a painful one, inside of him now. It’d raced up his piss-pipe like lit gunpowder, a bright and lively pain that ebbed to a strange hum inside his skin. Now he felt it spreading through him in slow, sonorous waves.

He bit his lip. He’d made a mistake. A big one, this time. Gotten carried away with his games. Lost sight of the danger.

It was only for a second, though, an internal voice whined. Just a heartbeat.

He sat cross-legged on the dirt. The burn receded. As the moments passed, it didn’t feel so bad at all. A comforting numbness coursed through his limbs, his veins filling with some wondrous warm nectar.

His stomach, though. That was grumbling, revving up—roaring.

Shelley’s hands clenched, tearing up clumps of dirt. Without realizing or truly caring, he filled his mouth with the contents of his hands. He chewed methodically. Grit and shell shards ground between his teeth. It sounded like he was eating handfuls of tiny bones.

“Bleh,” he said, letting the half-chewed mess fall out of his mouth. His tongue was a blackened root. He looked like a ghoul who’d been eating his way down to a coffin.

“Noooooobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going to the garden to eat worms—to eat worms…”

Shelley began to laugh. A high, piercing sound like the scream of a gull. It stripped out over the water, touching not one pair of human ears.

SHELLEY SAT that way for a few hours. He did not speak. He was motionless—except for a brief spell where he shook uncontrollably, unable to control his limbs.

When the sky reached its deepest ebony, Shelley began to feed in earnest.

33

NEWTON BUILT a fire on the beach using the driftwood he and Max gathered. It took quite a while to get it lit: his fingers were shivering badly.

After it was going, they huddled on the sand with their shoulders touching lightly. Both of them had stripped to their skivvies—Newton’s field book advised against staying in wet clothes. The water dried on their naked flesh, leaving a whitened sheen of salt. Their internal temperatures inched back up.

They hadn’t spoken since burying the turtle, which they’d done before building the fire. Every so often, their gazes drifted to the spot on the beach where the sand had been smoothed by their trembling palms.

Newton’s eyes found Max’s above the fire. “Do you think it will go to Heaven?”

“The turtle?” Max’s shoulders lifted imperceptibly. “I really don’t know. It could. If there is a Heaven, I guess it ought to—I mean, right? What would that turtle ever have done to deserve not to go to Heaven?”

Newton’s shoulders relaxed, then stiffened again as a worried cast came over his face.

“What about the Scoutmaster?”

Max frowned. “Why are you asking me?”

“Your dad’s the county coroner. He works with the priests and pastors, yeah? I figured he’d know.”

For all of Newton’s smarts, he could be incredibly thickheaded. “I don’t know, Newt. I’m not the one who makes those choices, am I? Nobody really knows. Not my dad or the priests or anyone. I guess when we die, we’ll know who was right about everything.”

“But Scoutmaster Tim was a good person.”

Max blew a lock of damp hair off his forehead. “Sure he was. He was a doctor. He helped people. I guess… yeah. He’d go to Heaven.”

“Do you think he’s there now? Looking down?”

“Depends how long it took him to get there. Maybe he had a few stopovers.” Max saw the look of dread on Newton’s face and said: “Yes. He’s up there. He’s happy now.”

“I never saw a dead person before, Max.”

“I never saw a dead person like that, either.”

“Were you scared?”

Max nodded.

“You didn’t look scared.”

“Well, I was.”

The night’s silence stretched over the immensity of the ocean—an impossibly quiet vista that stirred fear in Max’s heart. Would death be like that: endless liquid silence?

Newton grabbed a piece of wood from the pile, inspecting it by the fire’s glow. A black spider picked its way across it. Newton let it crawl onto his fingers.

“Careful,” Max said. “What if it’s poisonous?”

“Poisonous ones have red bells on their abdomens. This one is pure black.”

It climbed off his fingertip. Newton watched it go with a dreamy look. “A spider used to live inside Mom’s car,” he said. “She parked it under the oak in our driveway. Every time she took the car out, she’d see a web hanging between the side-view mirror and the windshield. She would snap it. The next time she looked it’d be back. Finally she tilted the side-view mirror as far as it would go and looked into the compartment behind. A little white spider was living in there. Every night it came out and strung a web. Mom would come out and snap it. So it would just build it again.”

“Did she kill it?” Max said.

“Absolutely not,” Newton said fiercely. “Who was it hurting? She even left its web alone from then on. But then one day we were driving and I spotted the spider on the windshield. We were doing, like, eighty, tooling down the highway to Charlottetown. It was trying to build another web—on the windshield while the car was ripping down the road. I thought it would blow away. I could see the sunlight glinting on the web it had managed to lay down. Crazy, right? Mom pulled over. We took the spider and put her in an apple tree along the road. Her new home.”

Newton smiled. Max figured he was reliving the memory: on the roadside on a wet spring day, the cree-cree of crickets in the long grass as his mother let the little spider slip off her finger onto the branch of an apple tree clung with pink blossoms. It was a nice image.

“After we got back on the road, Mom said, ‘Insects can make a home for themselves almost anywhere. They say that about cockroaches: if there’s ever a global Armageddon, they’ll be the only things left. You can’t beat a bug for adaptability.’ I think humans can be the same, too—don’t you think, Max? If we really need to, we can survive almost anywhere.”

Knotholes popped in the fire. Max’s ears became attuned to another sound: febrile cracking noises coming from the darkness where the rocks met the beach, near the spot where they had buried the turtle.

“You hear that, Max?”

“Hear what?”

Newton got up and crept toward the noises. His mind conjured up an absurd image that was nonetheless chilling: the reanimated sea turtle clawing itself up from its sandy grave, blood dripping from its puncture wounds, its bonelike mouth snap-snapping.

The fire threw wandering sheets of light upon the rock. The cracking noises grew louder. They were joined by other sounds overhead: the rustle of wings in the cliffs.

“Oh my God.”

A clutch of pale green eggs—the patina of the sea—were buried in the sand. Each about half the size of a chicken egg. They had been covered in a fine carpet of sand. The boys had totally missed them.

Each egg was struggling with minute hectic life. Shards of shell broke off. The tiny limbs of unknown creatures were pushing themselves out.

“What are they?” Max said.

They didn’t have to wait long to find out. When the first flipper appeared, Newton whispered: “They’re turtles.”

The scenario played out in Max’s mind: a mama turtle swims in with the high tide to lay her eggs. She gets stuck in a tide pool. Next a pair of horrible two-legged things blunder into the pool, heave her onto the sand, and…

The baby turtles didn’t even look like turtles, the same way those baby shearwaters on the kitchen table hadn’t really looked like birds. They had no real shell, only a translucent carapace draping their grape-size bodies. You could see through their skin as if through a greasy fast-food bag: the dark pinbone of their spines, the weird movement of their organs. For all their newborn freshness, they still looked ineffably old. Max reached to touch one. Newton grabbed his wrist.

“You can’t. If it gets human smell on it, its mom won’t take it back.”

It took a moment for it to sink in.

“Let’s just get them into the water,” Max said softly.

Newton nodded. “I guess it’s okay to touch them for that.”

With infinite care, the boys picked up the baby turtles and carried them across the sand. They tenderly picked the shards of eggshell off their bodies. They knelt at the shore and let them go. Their flippers paddled as they made a beeline for the open sea.

The air above was alive with harried wing beats and livid screeches, the bats and gulls having been thwarted in their attempt to poach an easy meal.

The boys made sure every turtle made it safely into the water. The birds made crazed dive-bombs: their wings pelted the ocean, desperate to snag the babies before they submerged.

“No, you bastards!”

Max stumbled into the water, waving his arms. He shadowed the turtles into deeper waters, wading out as they skimmed through the sea, coaxing them lightly with his hands.

“Go on, now. Swim, swim. Fast as you can.”

The water rose to his stomach. The riptide sucked at his legs. Only then did he reluctantly return to shore, dripping and shivering.

They returned to the fire. Newton smiled wanly and made a checkmark in the night air.

“That’s our good deed for the day.”