The Troop

EVIDENCE LOG, CASE 518C

PIECE F-44 (Personal Effects)

Preliminary Advertising copy for Thestomax (internal document only; never published)

Recovered from SITE F (Ariadne Advertising, 364 Bay Street, Toronto, ON) by Officer Stacey LaPierre, badge #992

34

“FIRE’S BURNING, fire’s burning; draw nearer, draw nearer; in the gloaming, in the gloaming; come sing and be meeeer-rrrrry…”

Shelley had moved back to the cabin, where he curled up under the shattered bed frames. He’d heaped the soaked mattresses into a sloppy teepee and lay in the mildewy darkness, singing. Anyone within earshot would have noted his lovely voice. It hit each register purely.

“Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya; kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya; kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya… O Lord, kumbaya…”

His voice dipped to a weak warbling note. He went silent. His body tensed. He loosed a tortured moan—the sound of a sick animal. His hands rose to his face. His nails dug into the creases of his forehead. Slowly, he dragged them downwards. His ragged fingernails tore trenches through his flesh. Blood wept from the wounds, though not very much. The sluggish trickles stopped quickly, like spigots being shut off.

In the silence, he could hear it. Them.

A tight, slippery sound like a Vaseline-coated rope pulled through a tightened fist. Coming from inside of him.

Things had turned out very bad for Shelley.

More than the other boys, Shelley was a realist. He understood how the world worked—bad things happened to good people, bad people died happy in their beds. It happened every day. So why bother being good? The word itself was attached to a series of behaviors that was, at best, an abstraction.

A person profited nothing from being good.

It wasn’t as if Shelley had a choice. Ever since he could remember, he’d seen the world this way. People were things to be used, peeled back, opened up, roughly dissected and dismissed. All creatures on earth fell under the same cold scrutiny.

The boy in the moon. That had been Shelley’s nickname; he’d overheard the teachers calling him that one afternoon as he’d lingered around their lounge. Although for a while it had been the Toucher.

He’d earned this moniker for his behavior during recess, which he spent haunting the edges of the school yard. He watched the girls play. Sometimes he’d sidle up alongside one of them—Trudy Dennison was a favorite—and reach out his arm to gather up her long, soft hair, letting it fall tricklingly between his fingers.

He did not find this arousing. Shelley was rarely aroused by anything. Girls did not excite him as they did most boys his age. Boys didn’t excite Shelley either. Not in the traditional manner, anyway.

When girls felt Shelley’s fingers passing through their hair, a look of teeming disgust came into their eyes. That disgust often shaded into an unease that held a gasping edge of fear: as if they were thinking that the world might be a better and safer place were he, Shelley Longpre, not a part of it.

Shelley was aware of their revulsion, but it did not trouble him. He enjoyed it, actually—as much as he enjoyed anything at all. Last year, Trudy Dennison squealed on him. He had to sit down with the principal, Mr. Levesque. Shelley’s father, a tire salesman, was also there. And his mother in her watered silk dress.

Shelley had been sternly warned that touching anyone without that person’s permission was bad. Shelley nodded and smiled his sullen, empty smile. On the way out of the office, he heard his father tell the principal: “It won’t happen again. Shelley’s just… he’s slow.”

Nobody made too big a deal of it. Touching was just Shelley’s thing, the way eating boogers was Neil Caruso’s thing or filching cigarettes behind the utility shed was Ephraim’s thing or playing pocket pool under the trampoline was Benjamin Rimmer’s thing. Every boy had his thing and on the grand spectrum Shelley’s wasn’t so bad—it indicated a future badness, perhaps, a “signpost” as that quack Dr. Harley might say, but right now it was harmless, if slightly troubling. His fellow Scouts didn’t give Shelley grief over it. For one, many of them probably wanted to touch Trudy Dennison’s flowing honey-scented hair, too—they simply didn’t take the next logical step. And two, the boys avoided picking on Shelley out of the sense, inexpressible yet tangible, that he might do something very wrong in retaliation. The worst they’d ever called Shelley was dumb. A real dumb bunny, as Eef would say… well, used to say, anyway.

Shelley was happy as a person such as himself could be with this perception. Let everyone think he was dull. Let their eyes fall on his beanpole body and sluggish limbs and feel nothing but a vague revulsion that they were unable to properly account for. Revulsion mixed with an odd sense of disquiet.

“Someone’s laughing, my Lord, kumbaya; someone’s laughing, my Lord, kumbaya; someone’s laughing, my Lord, kumbaya; O Lord, kumbaya…”

Without his being consciously aware of it, Shelley’s mouth dipped to the raw pine floor. He gnawed on it. His teeth skriiiitched on the wood. Splinters drove deep into his gums. Blood flowed.

Shelley used to be the Toucher. Now he was the touched, thanks to the twitchy-squirmy things inside him now. Making a home.

“Hear me crying and laughing, my Lord, kumbaya,” Shelley warbled. “Hear me crying, my Lord, kumbaya; hear me crying, my Lord, kumbaya… O Lord, kumbaya…”

And Shelley had begun to cry. Tears squeezed from the sides of his eyes—but they ceased quickly. His body was dehydrated as a banana chip. Yesterday he’d urinated against the side of the cabin. What came was just a thin dribble, clear as spring water. Not even the slightest yellow tinge—the yellow color was from the extra vitamins and minerals he usually pissed away. But now he understood the things inside of him were helping themselves to all that extra—and more.

The feeble light of the moon cast through the shattered roof, through the sodden mattresses making up Shelley’s awful nest, falling upon his body. His trousers hung low, divulging a half inch of ass crack. His shirt was rucked up. The knobs of his spine were visible.

Had anyone been watching, that person would have seen the flesh ringing Shelley’s spine begin to lift. Something was tunneling its way through—through and up. Climbing the drainpipe of his spine, corkscrewing higher and higher.

There came a series of dim pops, like weak firecrackers going off: trapped air popping between Shelley’s vertebrae. The tunneling thing looped round the spine, tightening, burrowing through the lacework of tissue and muscle, around again, and again, and again.

Shelley did not scream. Did not move. At one point, he did reach around and scratch at his back, as if under the belief he’d been bitten by a mosquito.

“Ug,” he said—a Neanderthal note. “Ug… uh-ug.”

The tube threaded up his spine, between the sharp wings of Shelley’s scapula. Upon reaching his neck, it thinned out, appearing to struggle—then it flexed convulsively, fattening into a bulging cord up the nape of Shelley’s neck, its scolex fat at his hairline…

“UG,” Shelley said breathlessly. His mouth opened. A clotted rope of blood jetted between his teeth.

It entered his cranial vault. Shelley was immediately suffused with comforting warmth. He sighed, curling deeper into himself. He shut his eyes.

LATER THAT night, Shelley would awake from a familiar dream—they all shared the same palette: shifting browns and blacks and olive greens, half-formed shapes melting into one another—shivering and feverish with a hammer-hard erection tepeeing his shorts. A booming voice followed him out of his dreamscape:

Rock and roll, Shelley m’man—THAT’S how it eats.

That’s the ONLY way it eats.

35

MAX AND Newton rose with the drowsy half-light of dawn. The sun hummed over the sea, an orange sine wave radiating heat-shimmers against the leavening dark.

Max hadn’t slept well. He’d kept sensing strange, vaguely menacing shapes darting at the edges of the fire’s light. His skin was rubbed raw around his waist, which had shrunk somewhat over the past few days. He took a swig from his canteen and winced at the stale, ironlike taste of the water. He fingered his clothes, which he’d hung up last night. Dry enough.

Newton got up soon afterward. They tugged on their pants and socks and boots in silence. They squinted across the sea into the new sun. The dark hulls of those strange ships dotted the water toward North Point.

“We have to get Eef,” Max said.

“He may have gone back to camp,” Newt said. “Y’think?”

“We’d better check.”

They retraced their route, passing through a glade where the light hung in brilliant icicles and thousands of green silkworms hung from the tree branches.

“Is this what they make silk shirts out of?” Newt said. “How do they even stay together? It’d be like trying to sew with spider’s thread.”

The day was bright and warm, the air shot with dazzling light. A deep-seated fear picked along the edges of their thoughts. They were frightened, but that emotion rested with easy familiarity in their chests by now.

They located yesterday’s footsteps in the grass and followed them into the spruces and found Ephraim on the ground surrounded by spiky smears of blood.

“Eef, what…?” Max said, unable to understand what he was seeing.

When the carnival came to Charlottetown last year, Max and Ephraim had gone. Max’s father had driven them and bought ride tickets for both boys—a nicety Ephraim’s mother accepted with stoic gratefulness. They rode the Zipper and had their spines delightfully rearranged on the Comet, an ancient wooden roller coaster operated by a carnie with a spiderweb tattooed on his forehead—a tiny black spider descended to the tip of his nose on a strand so blue, so pale, you might mistake it for a vein. After gorging on waffle cones and funnel cake, they’d come across a freak show operating out of a small blue-and-white-striped tent at the back of the fairground. Three tickets apiece granted them entry to a cramped, dark space smelling of horse manure and another scent beyond naming. The freaks took the stage to the slightly awed, mainly disgusted oohs of the hick crowd.

Freaks, Max remembered thinking. But why would they let themselves be called that? They weren’t that freakish looking. Tattooed and pierced, sure, but nothing that’d raise your eyebrow if you passed them on the street. But what the performers did to their bodies was truly freakish. One guy guided a power drill with a six-inch bit deep into his septum, so deep the tip must’ve tickled the brainstem, then skewered a metal hook—a meat hook, same as plucked hens hung in the butcher’s window—through the hole, drawing the hook out through his mouth. Another guy chewed lightbulbs and stuck long steel needles through his arms, skewering himself like a bug on a pin.

Max was horrified—which, he assumed, was the sought-for reaction. Ephraim, however, was mesmerized. Max had seen that look before; Ephraim was the daredevil, after all. The boy who’d jumped his bike off the seawall, mistiming it badly and fracturing his leg. Max had sat with him in the ER afterward; Ephraim’s leg hung at a crazy cockeyed angle—it hurt Max’s eyes to look at it. Ephraim, however, was fascinated. Check it out, Max, he kept saying, a weird smile on his face. Check it… owwwt. As soon as the cast came off, Ephraim was back at the seawall for another try. His mom must’ve had a constant conniption fit, but Eef had always been that way.

Max figured the crazy stunts must’ve bled away Eef’s rage—the theory of displacement, like he’d seen demonstrated in science class. Problem was, God gave you one body. What you did with it was your own business, but the truth as Max saw it was this: You throw your body at the world. The world hits back. The world wins. So you had to take great care of what God gave you. Eef had never gotten that message.

When they rounded into the sunlit clearing, Max initially thought Ephraim had been murdered.

Somebody or something had found him here all alone and set upon him in a fury. But then he saw the wounds—hacks and gouges, not stabs—and the Swiss Army knife still clutched in Ephraim’s hands. He thought: How could anyone do this to himself? But he knew Ephraim very well. He knew him better than anyone else on earth, maybe. So he knew.

The two boys hunched beside their troop-mate. Newton touched Ephraim’s chest, which rose and fell weakly. There were large, clumsy, gashing wounds in Ephraim’s hand and leg. Blood was gummed in a five-inch half-moon hacked into his side. The cut was jittery but progressively deeper, as if the person who’d done it had grown bolder after the blood started to flow. Worst of all was the long twisting slash on his face: it began near his temple where the bone sunk into a shallow divot and hacked straight down around his orbital bone, cleaving so deep through the skin of his cheek that the knife tip must have poked through into his mouth, then out again, tracing the line of his jaw before petering out in the middle of his chin. The trajectory alone was a brutal and terrifying thing to look at. A mark of madness.

Newton was breathing hard, set to hyperventilate. “Who did this?”

“He did it,” Max said, near breathless. “Eef did. To himself.”

“…Why?”

Ephraim’s eyelids fluttered. He coughed weakly and said: “They’re inside me. Or… maybe it’s just one. But it’s there. Sneeeeaky…”

Max gave Newton a helpless look. “There’s nothing inside you, Eef.”

“Wrong.” Eef’s breath stunk like sun-spoiled liver. “I’ve seen it. It’s…” He licked his lips. Horrifyingly, Max could see the root of his tongue moving through the slit in his cheek. “It’s smart. It lets me see just enough, even touch it, before it slips away. But if I make enough holes, guess what? Nowhere for it to hide.”

The mad certainty in his voice iced the sweat up Max’s spine. His eyes fell upon the walkie-talkie—its plastic casing was slicked with blood. He looked back at Ephraim, who’d followed the movement of his eyes and now turned away, refusing to meet Max’s gaze. His eyes swarmed with an emotion Max couldn’t intuit: a mixture of grief and shame and something else—something much darker.

“Who were you talking to?” Max said. When Ephraim didn’t answer, Max said: “You’re not any skinnier. You still look the same, Eef.”

Mostly the same, he thought queasily.

Fact was, Ephraim appeared more or less as he had when the boat first dropped them off. He’d lost a few pounds, but so had Newton and Max.

“It’s inside of me,” Ephraim said.

Newt said: “How do you know for sure?”

“A little birdie told me, okay?” Ephraim spat pure red. “I know.”

There was a tone of Stage 5 acceptance in Ephraim’s voice; he could have been telling them he had inoperable brain cancer. Max figured it wasn’t worth fighting. As his father said: You can’t argue with someone who’s already made up his mind. He exchanged a knowing look with Newton; a silent pact was settled upon. If this was what Eef believed—that he had a worm inside of him—okay, they’d accept it for now. Anything to stop him from cutting himself.

Newton rummaged the first aid kit from his pack. Swabs of peroxide and iodine no bigger than the Sani-Cloth wipes you get after a messy meal, butterfly bandages, a spool of gauze no bigger than a roll of quarters. Pitiful, really, when facing bodily devastation like this.

Max attempted to paste a bandage over the gash in Ephraim’s cheek. Eef screamed—a shocked bleat—so loud that Max’s hands fled from his face.

“What do you want, Eef?”

Ephraim fixed Max with a pleading look. “Get it out of me.”

“How?”

“Newt, you’ve got a better knife than mine. It’s burrowed deep. It’ll take a longer blade.”

Newton covered his mouth with his hand. He couldn’t imagine hacking into Eef in search of something he knew he’d never find—not after the turtle. Not ever, at all.

“I can’t do that, Eef.”

“Pussy.” Ephraim spat the word out like poison. “Max—your dad cuts people, right? You helped the Scoutmaster. You could do it.”

The best tactic was the one that stopped Ephraim from doing more damage to himself, Max figured. He’d tell him anything he wanted to hear.

“I can do it, Eef. But not here. We need a cleaner site. You could get infected.”

“I already am infected.”

“Yeah, but if I cut really deep and get it, we’ll still need to patch you up. There’s a medical kit back at camp.”

“I found some mushrooms, too,” said Newt. “They should make you throw up and… poop your pants. Maybe we can get it out without having to cut.”

Ephraim closed one eye as if he were squinting through a telescope. “Y’think?”

Max slipped Ephraim’s Swiss Army knife into his pocket. “We get you back to camp and try the mushrooms. If that doesn’t work, I’ll use the knife. Deal?”

Ephraim squeezed his eyes shut. Long, thick veins pulsed at his temples. My God, Max thought, they really do look like worms.

36

THEY RETURNED to camp to find Kent gone.

It had taken nearly three hours to half carry, half drag Ephraim back. His wounds kept tearing apart and bleeding. The rusty smell of blood clung to their clothes—could he infect them that way? Only if he was infected, which both Max and Newton couldn’t quite believe.

By the time they got back, ashy afternoon light was already hanging between the trees. They laid Ephraim on the picnic table by the cabin. Newton went round to check on Kent. The cellar doors were flung open.

“Kent?” Newton called down. “Kent!”

He inspected the doors. They didn’t look to have been busted open. Maybe the stick Ephraim jammed between the handles had snapped or rattled free in the wind? Which could mean that Kent had escaped. He could be out there in the woods.

And no sign of Shelley either—a fact that was not a concern because it was a relief not to have him around, yet deeply concerning, seeing as neither boy wanted to contemplate what Shelley might get up to out of sight.

“You see Shel?” Newton asked Max back at the picnic table.

Max shook his head. “You think something happened?”

“Something must’ve happened, right?”

Mercifully, Ephraim had passed out. Blood loss, shock. They left him temporarily, unease gripping their postures—the boys walked with a slight stoop, shoulders hunched against a phantom breeze—as they made their way down to the shore.

“What if Kent’s gone?” Newton said quietly.

“Gone where, Newt? What do you mean?”

In truth, Newton didn’t know. A shape sat in the dead center of his mind—only a notion, really. Its outline was nebulous but he could make out its heart: a dark and sinister silhouette within the larger blackness that winked and writhed and wanted to play.

“Do you think he might’ve tried to swim back?”

Max kicked a pebble. “He’d be crazy to try… that doesn’t mean I can’t picture him doing it.”

“Do you think he’d make it?”

If he’d actually done it, Max was sure Kent was dead by now. The water was freezing, the undertow deadly—plus he had a strong suspicion Kent might not be welcomed with open arms even if he’d managed to reach shore.

Max put Kent out of his mind for now. A merciless strain of expediency had settled over his thoughts. Ephraim needed help and was right here to receive it. Kent was gone and therefore beyond immediate help.

Max wondered how he and Newton had managed to stay sane these last few days. This thought arrowed out of the clear blue. They were still okay, seeing what they’d seen, where Ephraim and Kent and Scoutmaster Tim and maybe Shelley had cracked. He couldn’t say why that was, exactly… it wasn’t that he didn’t feel the same fear. Human beings couldn’t function in a state of perfect ongoing terror, could they? Their bodies would seize like a car with sugar in its gas tank, minds fusing shut as paralysis leeched into their bones. Constant, unending terror warped minds; brains thinned and went brittle and then snapped—that’s exactly how Max pictured it: a singing snap! like an icicle coming off a February eaves trough. It could happen to anyone. It’d happened to Eef, hadn’t it? But everyone’s built to different tolerances, and you didn’t know your breaking point until the instant you hit it.

How had Max kept that crushing fear at bay? He didn’t really know—maybe that was the trick? Maybe it was that he’d found a way to bleed it away in the quiet moments. Breathing deep, feeling it slipping from him in almost imperceptible degrees.

Maybe Newton had his own strategies—or maybe it wasn’t anything you could strategize. It came down to that flexibility of a person’s mind. An ability to withstand horrors and snap back, like a fresh elastic band. A flinty mind shattered. In this way, he was glad not to be an adult. A grown-up’s mind—even one belonging to a decent man like Scoutmaster Tim—lacked that elasticity. The world had been robbed of all its mysteries, and with those mysteries went the horror. Adults didn’t believe in old wives’ tales. You didn’t see adults stepping over sidewalk cracks out of the fear that they might somehow, some way, break their mothers’ backs. They didn’t wish on stars: not with the squinty-eyed fierceness of kids, anyway. You’ll never find an adult who believes that saying “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a mirror in a dark room will summon a dark, blood-hungry entity.

Adults were scared of different things: their jobs, their mortgages, whether they hung out with the “right people,” whether they would die unloved. These were pallid compared to the fears of a child—leering clowns under the bed and slimy monsters capering beyond the basement’s light and faceless sucking horrors from beyond the stars. There’s no 12-step or self-help group for dealing with those fears.

Or maybe there is: you just grow up.

And when you do, you surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in such things—but also to cope with them. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed… well, they can’t summon it. So they fall to pieces: go insane, panic, suffer heart attacks and aneurysms brought on by fright. Why? They simply don’t believe it could be happening.

That’s what’s different about kids: they believe everything can happen, and fully expect it to.

Max knew he was at that age where disbelief began to set in. The erosion was constant. Santa Claus had gone first, then the monster in the closet. Soon he’d believe the way his folks did. Rationally.

But for now he still believed enough, and maybe that had kept him sane.

He was idly working all of this over in his mind when the screams started.

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:

37

SHELLEY WAITED until Max and Newton went down to the beach before climbing out of the cellar. The gauzy afternoon light stabbed his eyes like cocktail swords. The dark suited him now.

Last night, he’d lain in the cellar and dreamed of darkness slipping over the world. A forgiving dark: you could do things in that kind of blackness and get away with it. Nobody would ever see you. They would only feel you, and you could feel them.

Shelley found Ephraim lying on the picnic table. The sight was a pleasant one. It meant his game was progressing nicely. In fact, it appeared to have entered endgame stage.

Shelley swayed lightly on his feet with a dreamy look on his face. “Nobody loves me,” he warbled, “everybody haaaates me…”

He ran a finger down the gash on Ephraim’s face. When the boy didn’t stir, he pushed the tip of his finger into it. His nail broke the gummy glue of blood. His finger moved inside the wound. He pushed harder, grunting lightly. His fingertip went through Ephraim’s cheek into his mouth—for a thrilling instant he felt the smooth enamel of his teeth.

Ephraim’s eyelids cracked open. Shelley withdrew his finger. It came out with a gooey sound, like pulling your finger out of a pot of wallpaper paste.

“Shel? You don’t look so hot.”

Shelley supposed he didn’t. At some point last night, he’d crept out of the cellar to eat the long timothy grass growing around the cabin. Down on all fours like a cow at its cud. This morning, he’d chased a plump pigeon along the beach, screaming and frothing at the mouth. The foam falling from his lips was white, tinted with green from the grass; it looked like the spume that washed up at the North Point jetty.

He hadn’t caught the pigeon, but later he’d fallen asleep and dreamed that he had. In the dream, he’d torn its feathered head off—but not before eating the black jewels of its eyes as it struggled frantically in his hands—laughing and hissing as the bird’s head separated from its body. He’d awoken to find his belly swollen to match his dream. The skin was pocked with lumps that looked like fledgling anthills.

“You saw it, didn’t you?” Shelley asked dully. “The worm.”

Shelley noticed the yellowish tinge to Ephraim’s eyes. It was as if the oily madness in his brain had leeched into his corneas.

Ephraim’s upper lip quivered. His chin went dimply as a golf ball. “It’s still inside me, Shel.”

“Is that so?”

“Can’t you fuckin’ see, man? Can’t you see it?”

The pleading note in Ephraim’s voice was auditory honey sliding into Shelley’s ears. He furrowed his brow and stared intently at Ephraim—then he drew back suddenly. His head swept side to side, a sad and solemn gesture.

“I’m afraid so. It’s still there. Didn’t you do as I said?”

Ephraim’s mouth twisted into a furious snarl; it was quickly replaced by a scrawl of breathless panic. “I tried! I did exactly what you said. You got to get it out.”

“Why couldn’t you do that?” Twisting the knife in a person’s psyche was nearly as much fun as twisting it in living flesh, Shelley had found. “Is it because you’re weak, like everyone says?”

Ephraim wept silently, clutching at Shelley. “I can’t do it. It’s sneaky.” Leaning to one side, he spat a reeking sack of blood onto the grass. “Can’t… I can’t…”

Shelley’s expression remained placid—hesitant even—but a mad light capered behind his eyes.

“Want me to get it for you?”

“Do you have a knife?”

Shelley nodded. “Of course.” He had a Buck knife with a five-inch blade, an inch and a half longer than the Scouts’ official limit.

“Do you really see it, Shel? The worm?”

After a beat, Shelley said: “I saw it, Eef. It was in back of your eyes for a moment. A ripply thread behind the whites.”

Ephraim made the most wretched, delightful sound Shelley had ever heard.

“You’ve got to get it out of me. I can’t stand it.”

“Okay, Eef.” Shelley smiled, a happy camper. His teeth looked much bigger now with the gums peeling back. “But first, you have to say one thing.”

“What?”

“You have to say please.”

“Please.” Ephraim clutched at the hem of Shelley’s pants, squealing. “Please.”

Shelley stifled his giggles—they built in his stomach like effervescent soda bubbles, rising up his throat in a hysterical wave. He didn’t find any of this genuinely funny; not at all. Ephraim had offered him a rare gift. The rarest. It took so much to penetrate the senseless jelly that enrobed Shelley’s brain—took so much to make him feel. But now he was feeling so, so much—needles of light streamed across his vision, unearthly and pure like a rift into Heaven.

He snapped the blade of his Buck knife into position. “I’ll do it, but only because we’re friends.”

A look of pitiful gratefulness came over Ephraim’s face. “Yes,” he breathed. “Get it out.”

Shelley’s eyes cut down to the beach. No sign of Newt or Max. He’d sharpened the knife the night before their trip. He was scrupulous about such matters. You could split a doll’s hair with the blade—split it into thirds.

He brought it down to Ephraim’s face. He circled the tip around his earlobe and up around the teacup handle of his ear. The skin broke easily, just the first layer of epidermis. Blood teared up along the cut.

“Did you see it there?” Ephraim asked.

Shelley said: “In your ear, yes. It poked out for a second. I saw it wriggling.”

Ephraim’s fingers whitened around the table’s edges. “Oh God. Please, Shel. I can’t stand to have it in me.”

“Mm-hmm,” Shelley said, casually flirting the blade around the basin of Ephraim’s ear. The steel tip brushed the microscopic hairs guarding his inner ear.

“Turn your head,” he said sternly. “I need to see down.”

Ephraim shifted onto his side. His eyes stared glassily at Shelley’s swollen belly. A few buttons had popped off Shelley’s shirt. Ephraim could see his lumped-up flesh through the vent. The inflamed anthills seemed to be twitching and breathing.

Shelley gripped Ephraim’s jaw with his free hand. How would it feel to sink the knife into Ephraim’s ear? Would he encounter resistance or would it be like stabbing a brick of cold butter? He pictured Ephraim staggering up with the knife hilt protruding from his ear, his smile beatific as he screamed: Did you get it? Did you? DID YOU?

Instead, he idly slid the knife up Ephraim’s head into his thick hairline. The flesh opened up as if by magic. A pair of red lips cut through the dark mane. Shelley thought of Moses parting the Red Sea. In the middle of the incision, he could see a vein-threaded rift of skull bone. Endorphins rushed through Shelley’s system, lighting his neurons up like a pinball machine.

Ephraim didn’t cry out. Instead he trembled with an outrush of powerful emotion and whispered: “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Shelley hacked a half-moon into Ephraim’s head. Blood of a shockingly vibrant red sheeted down the boy’s face.

“Thank you,” he kept mumbling with pathetic gratefulness as the blood bubbled over his lips. “Do you see it? Oh please find it. Thank you thank you thank you…”

Shelley was remotely disgusted by Ephraim’s behavior, but also fascinated. Ephraim’s psychosis had some weird narcotizing effect. He wondered: If he cut around Ephraim’s head until he hit the initial incision, could he tear his scalp off? Just like the Indians used to do. If so, would Ephraim even care?

The notion that he could be here for hours, hacking into a willing victim, sectioning Ephraim apart piece by piece, was thrilling in the extreme… and if things kept swinging his way, he wouldn’t have to dispose of the body as he’d done with Trixy. Once he’d relished Ephraim’s death, extracted from him the secrets Kent had witheld—and once Max and Newton were dead, too, a task he foresaw as daunting but still achievable—once they were all dead, Shelley would have their bodies all to himself. He could arrange them around the fire, posing their limbs and thumbing their stiffening faces into expressions he couldn’t quite comprehend, playing with the blood that wept like treacle from their wounds… or he could cut them to pieces and reorganize them—different heads on different bodies—insulting them in death by disgracing their corpses, which would be funny, terribly funny, so funny that the giggles started to rise in his throat again. Afterward he could leave them to the insects: their bodies would become shelter and nourishment for beetles and slugs and worms. Yes, they’d be worm food.

But Shelley had to be careful—the other two would soon return. Shelley thought he could hear their voices near the fire pit. He bit his lip, thinking.

Finally he said: “Wait here, Eef. I’ll be right back.”

He shambled around to the generator, rocking it to see if any gas was left. There was. He descended into the cellar and found an empty mason jar. Then he popped the valve on the generator and drained gasoline into the jar.

He returned to Ephraim and said: “I can’t cut it out, Eef. It’s too sneaky. The only way to get it is to burn it out.”

Ephraim’s eyes were very white and wide in the bloody mask of his face. Shelley’s words came to him as a revelation. They were the most sensible words anyone had ever spoken. Fire purifies all.

Shelley set the jar next to him.

“Burn it out, Ephraim. It’s the only way, my friend.” Shelley touched Ephraim’s twitching face with great tenderness. “You know that, don’t you? You’re my very best friend.”

Ephraim swallowed. For a moment it seemed he would bat Shelley’s grublike fingers away—but they dropped of their own accord. Shelley handed Ephraim his barbecue lighter.

“That’s okay,” Ephraim said, pulling out his Zippo. “I’ve got my own.”

Ephraim picked up the jar and held it over his head. It hung there a moment. His face shuddered as if under the pressure of deep internal forces, then it went slack.

“Thank you, Shelley,” he said. “You’re the only one who gets it.”

Ephraim’s hand tipped downward to saturate his flesh with gasoline.

38

BY THE time Newton and Max ran back to the cabin, Ephraim was on fire.

A towering cone of flame enveloped the body of a boy who suddenly looked small, shrunken, and trapped within it.

They bolted into the clearing only to check up by degrees: their feet lagging like cars rolling to an awkward stall. Their horror inspired inertness.

Ephraim was on fire.

A swiftly charring effigy. Their minds collectively yammered at them to do something but dear God, what could they do? The idea of shouting at him to stop, drop, and roll seemed quaintly absurd.

The flames swept up from Ephraim’s shoulders in orange wings. He was glowing and ephemeral: he might lift off the ground like an ember swirling up from an open fire. His flame-robed arms oared in lopsided circles. The sound of his legs scissoring the air was like sheets of very fine silk being ripped apart. Horribly, Max could see that he was inhaling the fire: flames were crawling down into his lungs, igniting them.

Ephraim crumpled to the ground. His legs kept kicking as if he were trying to step over a low obstacle.

When they finally acted, it was too late—had it ever not been too late? Max dashed into the cabin, heedless of the men lying dead inside, grabbed a sleeping bag, ran back, and dropped it over Ephraim, where he lay curled in a thatch of crabgrass. Plumes of meaty smoke drifted around the bag’s edges. One of Ephraim’s feet jutted from under the bag. The soles of his boots had fused into a smooth black sheen that resembled a slick drag-racing tire. A single point of flame danced on the tip of his boot.

When Max pulled the sleeping bag back, it was obvious at first glance that Ephraim was dead. The heat had curled his body up like when you toss a cellophane packet into a fire: his thighs were tucked tight to his chest like a child in the fetal position. His kneecaps appeared to be heat-welded to his forehead. His clothes were either burned off or fused through grisly alchemical processes to his skin. He was charred all over like something left too long in the oven. His features were erased the same way a mannequin’s would be if someone had taken a blowtorch to its head.

“Oh, Jesus,” Newton said. “Oh, Eef, Eef…”

Merciless bands of iron clapped around Max’s chest. His breath came in shallow jaggedy bursts. The shock was such that he could only stare at the body, coring a hole into it with his eyes.

“Where the hell’s Shelley?” Max said.

Max’s left eyelid developed a weird tic: the muscles kept clenching and releasing; it looked like he was trying to wink but couldn’t quite get his face to cooperate. He felt the anger boiling out of him—which was how he figured it must always happen. Pressure turned fear into rage as surely as pressure turns coal into a diamond. Fear was an internal emotion: it got trapped inside of you. You had to let it out. For that you turned to rage, the ultimate external emotion.

All rage ever needed was something to focus on—was this how Eef had gone through life, fighting this rage that was a kissing cousin to pure madness?

Shelley rounded the cabin. Seeing him, Max’s chest hitched in sudden shock—hic!

Max thought Shelley looked as if someone had located a hidden zipper down his back, tugged it down, and skinned thirty-odd pounds of meat from his bones before zippering the sagging shell back up again. He couldn’t help but notice the blood on his hands.

“Hey, guys.” Shelley waved chummily. The tone of his voice was faintly mocking.

“You.” Max leveled a finger at Shelley. “Where were you?”

“No place special.”

Shelley’s gaze fell upon Ephraim. If he exhibited any emotion at all, it was dry revulsion: the look a passing motorist might give roadkill.

“Where the fuck…” Max said, his words coming out in great livid gasps, “…were you?”

Shelley shrugged with his hands in his pockets: a carefree, maddening gesture. Huge boils the size of cherry bombs throbbed on his neck where his adenoids should’ve been.

“Stay away from him,” Newt whispered to Max. “He’s sick with it.”

But Max’s rage was all-consuming. The reek of gasoline wafted off Shelley. He’d done something.

“What did you do, Shel?”

Max thought: What did any of them really know about Shelley? He was a lanky, furtive boy who kept to himself with an inner intensity of evasion and secrecy. The other boys tolerated him but nobody would call him a friend. They didn’t make sport of him—not because he wasn’t mockable, with his thick-lipped vacancy and stunned inability to comprehend the simplest jokes.

“Stay away from him,” Newt told Max, a little louder.

Max continued to advance. He’d never really been in a fight. Eef got into scraps all the time. He was good at it, too. He was fearless—had been fearless. Ah, Jesus. This felt like more than a fight to Max; the acid boiling through his veins told him so.

He reached for Shelley. He’d wrap his hands round his throat and squeeze until his windpipe collapsed. There were no adults to tell him no—besides, who says an adult wouldn’t act just the same?

One of Shelley’s hands released from his pocket. A quicksilver flash. Next, pain was sizzling along Max’s sternum just above his hipbones.

Both boys stared down. An inch of Shelley’s Buck knife was inserted into Max’s abdomen.

Max stared at it quizzically, his dizzied mind thinking: Now, that doesn’t belong there. The strangest thing in the world, being stabbed. Had he even been stabbed—or had Shelley simply held the knife out defensively and let Max impale himself on the blade?

He glanced at Shelley with a panicky grin that showed too many teeth. It was a grin that said: This was an accident, right? Things haven’t gotten this bad, have they? But Max saw the rancid emptiness in Shelley’s eyes and saw his own cheese-white reflection in Shelley’s dilated pupils and knew that yes, yes, things had gotten this bad.

Shelley’s arm flexed stealthily. Max pulled away but still a half inch of the blade divided the red sheets of muscle. Shelley’s expression was impassive, marginally curious. He could have been carving a roast or dissecting a pickled pig in science class.

A stick of wood whistled down and struck Shelley on the back of his skull. It landed with a solid whock!—the sound of a baseball struck with the sweet spot of a bat.

The knife slipped from Shelley’s hands. His knees buckled. His eyes rolled back so far in his skull that Max saw the quivering whites.

The wood slipped from Newton’s trembling hands.

“I had to,” he said. “He was gonna kill you, Max.”

39

SHELLEY STAGGERED up. A goose egg swelled on the back of his head: it was so huge that it stretched the hairs on his scalp apart to reveal the vein-snaked skin. A crazed, curdled light shone in the pit of each iris. He took a step forward, swooned like a man on the deck of a storm-tossed ship before falling down on his ass. He laughed—a thin, warbling titter that tapered to a drone.

“I’ll k-kill you,” he said between volleys of laughter. There was no real menace in his voice. He could have been stating a matter of his daily agenda. “Kill you both…”

A flash pot of rage exploded in Max’s chest. Blood was running from the stab wound to soak the hem of his underwear.

“You’ll kill us, huh? Is that what you’ll do, you crazy fuck?” He stepped toward Shelley. “What if I kill you first, huh, Shel? What if I kill you?”

Shelley cocked his head at Max. A predatory gesture—was he baiting Max? Shelley sucked back snot and hocked up phlegm. He opened his mouth and showed them the oyster of thick mucus on his tongue.

Max saw things wriggling in it.

Shelley’s mouth curved into a smile as he diddled the oyster around on his tongue.

“You’re sick, Shelley,” Newton said. Max figured he wasn’t just talking about the worms, either. “We found these mushrooms. You could take them. They might flush them out.”

Shelley’s head swung side to side like a pendulum—then he spat. Max dodged; the spit sailed past his leg. It hit the dirt and picked up dust. It’s squirming, Jesus his spit is squirming. Max’s first urge was to stamp on it like he would a revolting bug, but he resisted the impulse.

They backed away as Shelley struggled to stand. Max was sure he’d just keep hocking until he hit the mark—that, or bite them or even lick them. He’d infect them for the pure sport of it.

Max’s heels hit the edge of the campfire. The rocks forming the ring weren’t all that big. Some of them were fist-size, some smaller. He picked one up, testing its weight. It felt good in his hand. It felt mean.

Shelley was coming. Max pegged the rock. The muscles flexed over his rib cage and caused the cut on his belly to tear even wider. The stone whanged off Shelley’s knee. Max thought he saw something crumple and sag under his pants and wondered if he’d shattered Shelley’s kneecap—and in that moment he was so hopeful that he had.

Shelley squawked and fell, clutching at his leg. Max picked up another rock.

“The next one you’ll catch with your face, Shel,” he said. His voice was coolly businesslike, but his bloody hands were trembling.

Shelley hissed at them—actually hissed, like a vampire who’d had a cross jammed in his face. He scrambled away, retreating up the dirt path behind the cabin.

Max pursued, following Shelley until the path tracked into the pines. He paused—could Shel be waiting in ambush? Turning reluctantly, he doubled back to Newton.

“Where is he?”

“In the woods,” Max said. “He was limping bad. I might have broken something.” He considered this possibility, his lips forming a hard, thin line. “Good. I hope so.”

“What if he comes back?”

“I don’t know, Newt. I just don’t know.”

They turned their attention to Ephraim. The wind had blown the sleeping bag back over his body, which was a small mercy.

Max said: “We got to bury him, Newt.”

“Yes,” Newton said. “We ought to do that. It’s the only way he’ll get to Heaven.”

IT WAS dark by the time they put Ephraim in the ground.

But first Newton bandaged Max’s wound. The edges of the cut were clotted with dirt—Newton debrided them as best he could with salt water fetched up from the beach and dressed it with bandages from the medical kit. Blood seeped through the gauze almost as soon as he applied it. It would have to do. The medical kit was almost empty.

They buried Ephraim in the ground south of the campfire. It was softer, almost sandy. They used a collapsible shovel Newton had bought at the Army Surplus. When its handle snapped off, they used their hands.

When the grave was finished, they dragged Ephraim to it. The sleeping bag’s neoprene shell slid over the ground with effortless ease. At first, they were terrified the hole wouldn’t be deep enough and that they’d have to dig deeper while Ephraim’s body sat right next to them.

It was deep enough. They scooped dirt over and patted it down to discourage animals from digging the body up. Newton recited a short prayer that his mother often said. He didn’t know that it really applied, but it was the only one he knew by heart.

Afterward their eyes were hot and dry. Max wanted to cry if only to release the tension in his chest. But his body wouldn’t release the tears because his mind wouldn’t allow it. It seemed inconceivable that Eef could be in a hole in the ground. Just last week Max had raced him across the monkey bars at recess. Eef won. Afterward they’d sat in the shade by the baseball diamond and ate their lunches. Eef’s mom had packed some crackers for him; they’d stuffed their mouths with the dry squares and seen who could recite the alphabet fastest. They were spitting out shards of cracker and laughing like mad. Eef had won that game, too. Eef won just about everything where Kent wasn’t involved.

Max and Ephraim would never hike to the bluffs behind his house, staring up at the stars as the shearwaters called from the cliffs; they’d never talk about girls and candy and their dreams and who’d win in a fight, Batman or James Bond. They’d made a pact to be friends forever, but forever could be so, so brief.

Max curled into a wretched ball beside the grave. Eef was dead. Everyone was dead or missing or insane. The cabin was in splinters and things were falling apart.

Which seemed so unfair.

Where were the adults? Max couldn’t believe someone hadn’t come for them yet. His parents were always nagging him to be on time, to be responsible and to think of others. Well then, what the fuck? His folks were full of shit. Or else they’d be here. And Kent’s parents—including his hot-shit policeman dad—and Newt’s and Eef’s, too. Didn’t they give a shit about them? Maybe they were all complicit in it. A plot. They’d all bought into it. Get them out to the island and cut off their escape route. Let nature take its course.

No. That was idiot talk. Their parents would never do that. The fact that they weren’t here actually spoke to how dire the situation must be. Because this wasn’t nature, was it?

This was something else.

Those things. The way they spread infection—the way they spread.

Newton got a fire going. The warmth helped the anger and confusion melt out of Max’s brain; they were replaced by exhaustion. He felt as if he were wearing one of those heavy lead coats the dental hygienist draped over his shoulders before taking X-rays.

He lay beside the fire. Almost instantly, he was fast asleep.

40

EAT EAT EAT EAT…

Shelley rose in the dead of night to hunt.

He’d found a cool, dark place to hide. He’d limped into the woods, clutching at his hurt knee. He eventually came upon a cavern burrowed into the island’s bedrock. It was deep and narrow and it held the tang of salt. Perhaps it was fed by an aquifer that led out to sea.

He lay in the sheltering dark, listening to the water trickle on the rock. This place suited him. It would be a wonderful place to give birth.

The boys. Max and Newton. Skinny and fat. Jack Sprat and his wife. They thought he was sick. They couldn’t be more wrong.

He wasn’t sick. He was simply changing into something entirely new.

He could feel it inside of him: a vast darkness, itchy-black, unfurling like the petals of a night-blooming flower. It would hurt. Oh yes. But then change always did.

The hateful boys had wounded him. They may have hurt his babies—but no, he could feel them squirming contentedly inside of him. Thank goodness.

The boys needed to die.

Shelley had been planning on killing them, anyway. He wasn’t sure it’d be much fun at this point, although it might provide the same fleeting thrill he’d experienced while drowning Kent: a fizzy, sudsy bath-bubble feeling in his veins. But now he’d kill them as a simple matter of principle. They had harmed him, which meant—inadvertently or otherwise—they had harmed his babies. And a father always defended his children.

Shelley exited the cave. The night enveloped him. He was part of it, dark just like it.

EAT EAT EAT

Oh my, weren’t they so needy? So hungry. They asked so much of him, as all children must… but Shelley was only too happy to give.

He came upon a diseased elm. Its trunk was pocked with tiny bore holes. He tore away a chunk of bark—his strength was immense!—and clawed inside the rotted tree. When he withdrew it, his hand was teeming with woodlice. He crunched them into paste. They fidgeted on his tongue and tickled his throat when he swallowed. He giggled hoarsely while sucking the last few lice off his fingers.

GOOD GOOD EAT MORE MORE MORE

Shelley caught his reflection in a pool of moonlight-sheened water. He was horribly wrinkled. It looked as if spiders with legs of thin steel wire had battened onto his flesh, curling and tightening, trenching deep lines into his face.

His stomach was a swollen gourd. It bulged through his shirt and over the band of his trousers. Its pale circumference was strung with blue veins and sloshed with a dangerous, exciting weight…

…in the dank wastes of his brain—his undermind, you could say—a species of mute fear twined into his thoughts. This isn’t right, a voice said. You’re being eaten alive.

…a wave of acidic warmth washed through those thoughts, burning them away.

Oh, they asked so much of him! It was tiring, feeding all those hungry mouths. And the mouths just beget more mouths and more mouths and more and more and—

Shelley slid down the incline to the campsite. Firelight crept around the cabin’s shattered angles. He snuck around the far side and surveyed the fire pit. Max was sleeping. He imagined grabbing his hair and jamming him face-first into the white-hot coals. He pictured the silly boy’s face melting like a latex Halloween mask.

The fat one, Newton, was staring right at him.

His heart jogged in his chest: ba-dump. Newton sat on the far side of the fire. The flames played over his eyes, which seemed to be staring directly at him.

EAT EAT EAT EAT

In a moment, he thought. First I have to kill them. Then I’ll be alone. Then I can give birth in peace. Then we can all play.

But how would he do it? He’d lost his knife. Was Newton really looking at him?

“I see you, Shelley.”

Newton pulled a knife out of his pocket. His knife. He unfolded it carefully and stabbed the tip into a log. The knife quivered in the wood. An invitation?

“Go away. Get out of here. Now,” Newton whispered.

A cold, slippery eel ghosted through the ventricles of Shelley’s heart, cinching itself tight. He retreated like a groveling animal. He wanted them dead so badly but… but… but he was so hungry.

Shelley’s stomach swayed as he tripped sideways, whimpering softly as his belly brushed the edge of the cabin—for a moment he felt it might detach and burst like a water balloon on the forest floor. Then he’d lose everything. His children. His precious babies.

SHELLEY WAS in the forest again. Night folded over him. The hunger was hellish, unspeakable, but one must suffer for what one loves.

He shambled through the woods, eating whatever. It came to him in flashes. In one moment, he was hunched under a log devouring eggs, maybe—termite eggs whose sacs burst between his teeth like albino jelly beans…

…next he was along the shoreline ankle-deep in the freezing surf, gorging himself on the decayed carapace of some creature that had once crawled in the sea. So tasty. It slipped between his numbed fingers and he collapsed into the surf, squealing like a piglet, clutching at his stinking prize…

…later, much later, Shelley lay in the darkness with the cool trickle of the rock. He was screaming or maybe crying, he couldn’t tell. There was a watery echo down there that did funny things to his voice.

None of that really mattered anymore, anyway. His home, his foolish parents, his teachers, the many jars buried in the backyard full of his playthings, all in various states of decomposition. That was his old life; his silly, forgettable life.

He was going to be a great daddy.

The best.

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

41

MAX DREAMED he was in the mortuary with his father. It’s the only chance he got to see him some days. People didn’t die that often in North Point, but they did like to hunt and fish, meaning his father had a backlog of taxidermy projects. The nature of taxidermy being what it is—framing the anatomies of dead animals before they begin to decay—timing is everything. Of course, the same held true for human anatomies.

His father worked in a white-tiled room beneath the city courthouse. The air held the sharp undertone of charcoal from the air purifier that pumped away in a corner. The shelves and fixtures were stainless steel. A huge steel slab dominated the room’s center.

Max watched his father work. He wore a long white coat—the kind pharmacists wore—and an apron of black vulcanized rubber. His dad whistled while he worked. Today it was “The Old Gray Mare.”

“The old gray mare she ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to be…”

A woman’s body lay on the table. She had died at a very old age. A white sheet was draped over her hips but her chest was bare. Her breasts were long and tubular, as if something had pulled them out of shape. Her empty sockets were withered like two halves of a cored-out squash forgotten for days on a countertop.

His father worked with his back to Max. He picked up an ocular suction cup.

“What happens is,” he told Max in a weird singsong voice, “the eyeballs get sucked down into your head after you die. Did you know that, Maxxy?”

His father never called him Maxxy.

He thumbed the ocular cup into the woman’s socket. Tiny barbs on the cup attached to her naked eyeball. He pulled. The eyeball sucked back into its socket with the sound of a boot being pulled out of thick mud.

“All better…”

His father was whistling again. A sputtering, wheezing noise—it sounded as if it was being made with a different orifice altogether. Fear slammed into Max’s belly.

His father turned. At first Max thought his head had been submitted to some incredible pressure: it was flattened, elongated, pancaked. It projected upward and curled over on itself like a lotus petal.

“Oh Maxxy Maxxy Maxxy…”

A worm’s head jutted from his father’s lab coat. It was the greasy white of a toadstool. Noxious fluid leaked from its ribbed exterior, dribbling down to form a pumicey crust on the collar.

“Thee ole gray mare, thee ain’t what thee useth to be…”

The voice was coming from a pit in the middle of its head: round and ineffably dark like the air in a caved-in mine shaft. The pit was studded with translucent teeth that looked like glassine tusks.

“Thee ole gray mare…” his worm-father sang, swaying and burping up goo.

A pair of yellow dots glowed in the direct center of the pit, looking like the headlights of a car shining up from the bottom of the ocean. Before he woke up, Max swore he could hear another voice coming from the deepest part of the worm—the ongoing scream of his own father, trapped somewhere inside of it.

NEWTON WAS shaking him.

“Max! Max!”

He jerked up. The sunlight stabbed at his eyes. The dream drained thickly from his brainpan, departing his body through uncontrollable twitches and shivers.

“You okay? You were screaming in your sleep,” Newton said.

“Yeah. Just a bad dream.”

It was morning. He didn’t know how long he’d slept. His spine was knotted and his gut kicked over sourly.

They walked to the shore. The ships still charted their distant orbits. They were like the heat-shimmer on the highway: no matter how fast you drove, it didn’t get any closer or draw any farther away. Max wanted to scream at them, but why bother? A waste of his swiftly diminishing energy.

Newton rubbed the sleep-crust out of his eyes and wandered toward Oliver McCanty’s boat. He hauled on the motor’s rip cord. The motor went wuh-wah—the same discouraging sound it’d made when they’d tried a few days before. Newton pulled it again. Again. Again. He thought about the poster in science class—Albert Einstein, shock-haired with his tongue stuck out above the quote: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Defeated, he let go of the cord, staggered back, tripped, and sat down on his ass. He cupped his hands over his eyes, lowered his head between his knees, and wept.

“Hey,” Max said. “Hey, Newt, it’s—”

But Newton was too far gone. The pent-up sobs ripped out of his throat. They were the most wretched noises Max had ever heard. He put an arm around Newton’s shoulders and felt the tension: like grasping a railroad track in advance of the onrushing locomotive. He didn’t tell Newton everything would be okay because it wasn’t—it would never be as it had been. The past had a perfection that the future could never hold.

Max just let Newton cry.

His sobs trailed off. He drew a few hitching breaths and said: “Sorry, Max. That wasn’t very…” He hiccupped twice, exhaled steadily, and said: “…wasn’t very cuh-cool of me. WWAMD?” he said, more to himself than to Max. “He sure as hell wouldn’t cry like a baby.”

“I don’t think being cool really matters now, do you?”

Newton let go of one more shuddery breath. “No. I guess not.”

Max walked to the boat, cracked the motor casing. Inside were two small holes where the spark plugs should go. He thought of his dream—the two yellow dots glowing up from the dark pit…

His mind jogged. Two revelations joined in his head like puzzle pieces slotting into place.

“He must have eaten them.”

“What?” Newton said. “Who did? Ate what?”

“The spark plugs,” Max said softly. “The man. The stranger. He swallowed the spark plugs. Ate them.”

“Ate them? Why would he do—?”

Newton thought about the man—how cadaverous he’d looked, skinny as a pipecleaner. Thought about Kent and Shelley, too. Yes, he decided, the man probably was hungry enough to eat spark plugs.

“He ate them because he was hungry, huh?”

Max shrugged. “Could be. Or maybe he didn’t want to be found. Without spark plugs, the boat won’t start—right? Maybe he figured the best place to hide them was inside of himself.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I saw them, Newt. When the Scoutmaster cut him open to get the worm out. I saw them shining in… well, his stomach, I guess.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

TEN MINUTES later, they were in the cabin, standing over the dead stranger.

They tried to not pay much attention to the state of his body. It seemed wrong, somehow—desecrating him with their eyes. They tried to focus on him abstractly: as a puzzle or a riddle. They had to solve him in the easiest and safest way.

Still, they couldn’t help but stare.

His elbows and knees had been eaten away by something. That was the most obvious thing. Animals, insects? How could that have happened so quickly, though? Or perhaps the skin had been so thin that the bones had worn through all on their own, the way your knees will wear through a cheap pair of jeans.

His face had fallen into itself. It was distracting—they couldn’t drag their eyes away. Newton draped a dish towel over it.

“Do you think the worms are all dead?”

Max nodded. “They have to be—right? That’s what the Scoutmaster said. Once the host is dead, the worms die, too.”

Newton still seemed doubtful. “What about eggs? They might still be there, right? Eggs don’t need food, do they?”

Max set his fingertips lightly on the man’s wrist. “He’s cold. He’s been gone a long time.”

“Okay, but put something on your hands first.”

They found a pair of dishwashing gloves. Newton scrounged up two empty plastic bread bags.

“The gloves go on first. Then the bread bags overtop. Then I’m gonna tape your shirtsleeves to the bags so nothing can get in.”

“Good idea.”

The sun shone brightly through the cleaved roof, glossing insects that hummed over the body. Already the island was taking over the cabin. Mold edged up the walls, fungus grew in the cracks. Soon the foundations would rot and disintegrate. Maybe that was for the best, Max thought.

“Try not to breathe too deeply,” Newton said.

“Okay, fine. You’re creeping me out.”

Newton gave him a bewildered look. “Max, jeez—you’re about to reach inside a dead guy. You better be creeped out.”

Max pushed his fingers into the pasty lips of the wound, through a thin membrane of gelatinized blood and into the dead man’s abdomen. Cold oatmeal, he told himself. You’re just rooting around in a bowl of cold oatmeal.

The man’s insides had liquefied and turned granular; they didn’t seem to have any definition anymore, no organs or intestines—his hand moved through layers of cold, chunky tissue that felt a little like mashed bananas.

Mashed bananas, then. You’re looking for spark plugs in a big pile of mashed bananas.

Max’s hand slipped into a squelchy pocket. A rude farting noise. The air filled with a rotted, sulfury, swamp-gas stink. Max’s gut roiled but nothing came out—just a dry heave that filled his mouth with the taste of bitter bile. His hand closed upon something hard. He pulled it out.

“Holy crow,” Newton said.

The spark plug lay in Max’s cupped palm. It was smeared in pinkish-gray curds, but they could clearly make out the word Champion down its side.

It took Max a minute to find the second one. He had to sink his hand in fairly far—almost to the elbow—ripping through some rubbery kinked hoses in the man’s abdomen to get it: tubelike things that tore up like the witchgrass growing in the shallows of North Point bay.

When it was done, the spark plugs lay side by side on the floor. The boys grinned at each other. It had to be the best news they’d ever gotten. They had to grope through a dead man’s insides to get it, but still.

They were both suffused with a feeling they hadn’t truly experienced in days:

Hope.

42

THEY CARRIED the spark plugs down to the shore. Max was so excited that he didn’t even bother to strip the wash gloves off. The sea came into view over the rocky scree. For the first time since they could recall, that vista didn’t seem so vast or the distance to North Point so very daunting.

Newton popped the motor canopy. He frowned.

“Should we just screw them in like that? All covered in… you know.”

“You think it matters?”

“It could. We should clean them first.”

Max said: “Won’t that ruin them?”

Newton pointed at the words running down the side of the plugs in small green type: Marine Standard. “That means they’re waterproof.”

They washed off the gray-pink curds in the frigid sea. They did so carefully, the way you’d wash oil off a baby mallard.

When they were clean, Newton put them on the big flat rock to dry. Newton chose it specifically because it was large, and flat, and flecked with pink granite. A very peculiar rock. He chose it because he wanted to be absolutely sure they could find the spark plugs again.

Max knocked on the motor’s gas tank. His knuckles brought forth a hollow whonk.

“Sounds almost empty.”

“What about the generator?” Newton said. “It should have gas.”

They returned to the campsite. The cap had been wrenched off the generator’s gas tank. The surrounding earth held the gleam of spilled gasoline. Max rocked the generator. Nothing sloshed inside.

A pall of hopelessness fell over them. The universe was aligned against them. Why? It struck Max that the universe ought to find better targets. Had to be plenty of psychopaths and deadbeats out there, right? Why pick on a couple of kids? The universe could be a stone-cold asshole sometimes.

“What about the emergency jerry can?” Newton said. “The Scoutmaster kept it in the cellar.”

The steps groaned as they traced their way down the stairs. Bars of sunlight fell through cracks in the cabin floor. The cellar was eerily clean: not a single spiderweb, none of the sickly gray mushrooms Max had spied growing in the corners when he was down here the other day.

God, Kent must have eaten them, he thought queasily.

Max picked the jerry can up. It was joyously heavy.

“There’s at least a gallon in here,” he said.

Maybe the universe wasn’t such an asshole after all. But it sure as hell made you suffer something fierce.

Case in point: when they returned to the boat, the spark plugs were gone.

THE PINK-FLECKED rock was bare except for two wet spots where they had lain. Newton actually laughed—a strangled squawk of disbelief.

“They’re here,” he said, shaking his head, a strained smile on his face. “No, no, they’re here somewhere, I’m sure of it. Where the hell else could they be?”

The boys waded into the frigid surf and poked doggedly around the rocks. Maybe a big wave had crashed up on shore and pulled them into the sea. But that couldn’t be—the rocks were dry as saltines. Their ankles turned pink, then blue. Max stomped out of the water.

“Are you kidding? Where the fuck are they, Newt?”

“How should I know? I left them here.”

“You should’ve put them in your pocket.”

“So it’s my fault? Are you serious? What do you think happened—a fish jumped up and swallowed them? A bird flew off with them?”

“Okay, what if a bird did pick them up? A pelican, like the ones perched on the buoys out at Barker Bay? My dad says they swallow soda cans.”

“God. Don’t be so stupid.” Newton adopted a superior tone—as if he were talking to a preschooler who’d just claimed the Tooth Fairy was real. “Pelicans are shore birds.”

“So what’s all this then, Newt?” Max spread his arms out. “Is this a shore, or are you just a big fat moron?”

“Pelicans are mainland shore birds. This is an iiiisland. Mainland shore birds don’t fly to iiiiislands. Do you understand that, or do I need to draw you a map—”

Max took two steps forward, planted his palms in Newton’s chest, and shoved. Newton went down with a jolt. Max expected him to stay down just as he always did—but instead Newton propelled himself off the rocks and drove his shoulder into Max’s stomach, knocking the wind out of him.

They tumbled across the shore, striking at each other. Their blows didn’t have much pop, but they were thrown with cruel intentions. Newton’s fist collided with Max’s nose, and the impact set Max’s skull bone ringing like a cathedral bell. Max rolled over, snarling, and his elbow caught Newton under the chin. Blood leapt into the air, startlingly bright in the morning sun.

They shoved away from each other, breathing hard. Max’s nose was a squashed berry. Blood lay stunned across his cheeks. The wound in his abdomen had opened up again. Blood was dripping from Newton’s chin. They eyed each other warily, trying to gauge whether the fight was over or this was just an interlude before hostilities commenced anew.

“Are we done?” Max mumbled.

“Yeah, we’re done,” Newton said with downcast eyes.

They sat in silence as the adrenaline burnt out of their systems. In its wake came dull relief. It was like tripping the release on a steam gauge: they could breathe easier and think straighter.

Max offered Newton his hand. Newton took it. Max pulled him up.

“That was a waste of time and energy,” Newton said.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know why guys do it. I feel sick. I taste blood between my teeth.”

“Sorry.”

Newton shrugged. “Don’t be. I did it, too.” He smiled out the side of his mouth. “Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you? WWAMD!”

“What?”

“Nothing. Your nose okay?”

Max gripped the tip of his nose, wiggled it. “Hurts, but I don’t think it’s broken.”

They looked out over the sea.

“It was Shelley,” Max said.

“Yeah,” Newton said. “I was thinking the same thing.”

“You figure he chucked the spark plugs into the sea?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You think he took them with him?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You figure he wants us to come find him?”

“Uh-huh. Hide and go seek. Fetch boy, fetch.”

Max sighed. He felt about a hundred years old.

“Red rover, red rover, please send crazy asshole Shelley over.”

“Olly olly oxen free.”

“Come on,” said Max. “We got to find him.”

43

THEY SET off in pursuit of Shelley just after noon.

“I got my animal-tracking badge last year,” Newton said to lighten the mood. “But, y’know, they don’t give out a man-tracking badge.”

They decided to search the areas off the main trail. Shelley couldn’t have gone too far. Before leaving, they ate the last of the berries they’d collected—the ones for Eef. They tasted bitter, but they’d need the energy.

Newton packed his field book into his knapsack along with a map of the island, some rope, and a flashlight. Max snapped a branch off an elm tree. It was as thick and as long as a mop handle. He sharpened one end to a wicked point.

“I don’t want him coming near us, Newt.”

“How else are we going to get the plugs?”

“Maybe we can convince him to toss them to us.”

“You think?” Newt looked dubious. “You don’t figure he’d swallow them, do you?”

They set off on that unhopeful note. The sun was obscured behind ashy clouds. The temperature had dipped. The daylight was already starting to fade. They were bone-tired before they even took their first steps on the steep switchbacking trail.

“I saw him last night, you know,” Newton said. “Shel. He came round while you were sleeping.”

“Wait, what? What for?” Max shivered involuntarily. “What did he do?”

“Just crouched there. Watching, you know. The way Shelley does.”

“So did you do anything?”

Newton shook his head. “I just watched him right back. Honestly, I figured it wouldn’t be so bad if he died out here. I know that’s awful, but…”

Newton held Max’s gaze when he said it. Max glimpsed—not for the first time in the past few days—that seam of stoniness running through Newton. It was unexpected coming from someone who usually rolled over and showed his soft belly. If anyone had asked Max who’d still be standing after all this, he would have said Kent, maybe Eef. But Newton had that survivalist’s outlook. It wasn’t about the badges he’d earned or the fact he was best at starting a fire. Newton had inner resources that the rest of the boys simply didn’t possess—even Max himself. Getting teased your whole life must force you to grow some pretty hard bark.

“I don’t mean that we should hurt him,” Newton said. “When we get back to the mainland, we should tell the police he’s still here, and sick, and maybe they’ll be able to do something.”

“I know.”

“I’m just saying if they don’t get here in time—”

“Let’s not talk about it, okay, Newt?”

“What should we talk about?”

“I don’t know. Maybe food?”

Newt grinned. “Yes.”

They covered all their favorites. The peach cobbler at Frieda’s Diner that came with a scoop of just-starting-to-melt vanilla ice cream. The porterhouse steaks Max’s father cooked up at the annual summer barbecue, two inches thick and marbled with rich melty fat. The pies from Sammy’s Pizza down in Tignish—you had to pay five bucks extra for delivery to North Point, but it was so worth it to scarf down one of those slightly chewy slices covered in little spicy pepperonis and mozzarella cheese.

“Oh oh oh!” Newton said excitedly. “The cannolis at Stella’s Bakery. The best.” He threw his hands up with an air of finality, as if he’d settled some hard-fought argument with a fact that was beyond dispute. “Crunchy on the outside, filled with sweet cheese and chocolate chips on the inside. They crack apart in your mouth and that filling just…” His tongue inched out of his mouth. “…splooshes. It splooshes onto your taste buds. I could eat about a million of them right now.”

Max bent over, clutching his belly. Newton’s rhapsody had left him a bit light-headed. “Crap. Maybe we ought to talk about something else.”

They found a skunk den—it was clear by the smell—and what may have been a fox run, but no sign of Shelley. They debated where he might be hiding, or whether he was hiding at all.

“Maybe he’s following us,” Max said, a possibility that spooked the hell out of them.

“We should follow our noses,” Newton said. “Like Toucan Sam, y’know? The stranger and Scoutmaster Tim and even Kent—they all started to smell sweet, right? Like, gross sweet.”

Max nodded. “Yeah, like rottenny kinda? Like someone’s puke after he ate two cones of cotton candy at the fair and got on the Zipper.”

“I guess like that, yeah. So if we smell that—”

“We’ll know Shelley’s close. Okay.”

The sun slipped lower in its western altar. Twilight piled up along the horizon in ever-darkening layers. The boys hunched their shoulders into the brisk wind.

Newton laughed and said: “You know, my mom’s going to kill me when this is all over.”

Max loved that Newton still thought that way—that he still saw a time when this would all be over. When they would be home, safe.

“Why would she, Newt? For what?”

“For all this. Getting myself into it.”

“None of this is our fault, Newt. It’s just some awful thing that happened.”

“I know, I know. My mom’s just like that sometimes. She cares too much, y’know? Makes her crazy. Remember that flour baby project we did for home ec?”

Of course Max did. Their teacher had given them each a bag of flour to take care of as if it were a baby. Some students hadn’t taken it seriously. Eef tossed his flour baby off the school’s supply shed and hooted as it detonated across the hopscotch court. Kent duct-taped the entire bag to avoid ruptures. Their teacher frowned on this. You wouldn’t duct-tape an actual baby, would you? she’d asked Kent. Are you suuuure? Kent replied with a sly smile, earning sniggers from the rest of the class.

“I really tried to take good care of that flour,” Newton said. “I drew a face on the sack and everything. But the thing is, I’ve got sweaty hands. It’s a condition. Sweaty armpits and feet, too. Can’t help it. Every time I touched it, the sack got wet. It started to come apart. I told myself to stop fussing with it, but I couldn’t help it. I kept touching it just to know it was there and safe. It ripped a little and then a little more until it finally ripped right open. My flour baby… well, died. I guess I killed it.”

“It was just a stupid sack of flour, Newt.”

Newton made a face that said: You don’t get it, man.

“I’m just saying that sometimes the more you care for something, the more damage you do. Not on purpose, right? You end up hurting the things you love just because you’re trying so hard. That’s what Mom does with me sometimes. She wants me to be so safe that it ends up hurting me in a weird way. But I get it, y’know? It must be the hardest thing in the world, caring for someone. Trying to make sure that person doesn’t come to harm.”

THE SKY was the color of a bone-deep bruise when Max caught the first traces of a high sweet stink.

“You smell that?” Max whispered.

Newton nodded. “Where’s it coming from?”

They held their noses up, zeroing in on the location where it seemed to emanate from: a cavern set into a shale-strewn hillside.

They retired out of earshot to formulate a plan.

Max said: “Should we yell down to him?”

“Maybe he’s sleeping. Why wake him up? We can just pluck them off him.”

“Right out of his pocket?”

“If that’s where he’s keeping them, I guess we’ll have to.”

“Okay, fine,” Max said, expelling a few rabbity breaths. “But what if he’s awake? What if he fights back?”

“Are you asking if we should hurt him?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. I mean, you already cracked him over the head, so…”

Newton bit his lip. “Let’s just hope he’s asleep. Rock, paper, scissors for who goes in first?”

Newton’s hand came down clenched in a fist. Max’s hand came down flat. Paper covered rock.

“Forget it,” Max said. “We go down side by side.”

Newton shook his head. “It looks too narrow and anyway, fair’s fair.”

44

THE CAVERN floor dipped just past the cave mouth, plunging them into darkness. A sticky, coagulated darkness that coated their skin like oil. It was as if the rods and cones in their eyes had been shut off like flicking a light switch: click!

Newton was in the lead, clutching with both hands the crude spear Max had made. He figured this was the blackness that must exist at the bottom of the sea—a blackness prowled by sightless things whose skin was so pale and gelatinous you could see the inner workings of their bodies. Things with nightmare anatomies that would evoke cries of horror were they ever glimpsed in sunlight: blind eyes bulging atop skinny stalks, rubbery mouths big enough to swallow a Hyundai, rows of tiny needlelike teeth. Such creatures could only survive in the deeps: their bodies had no protection against the sun—their skin would roast and disintegrate to mush before they even reached the surface. But they had learned to adapt to their lack of sight. They jostled and bumped with the other creatures that lived beneath the light, occasionally lashing out with barbs or tentacles or teeth.

WWAMD? he thought. The answer came swiftly: Alex Markson would be scared shitless. Anyone else on earth ought to be scared shitless, too.

The boys’ collective breath came hot in their ears. Their boots sent little avalanches of shale skittering down the cavern slope. Water trickled over the rocks somewhere below—a sea-seeking tributary. The air was laden with the smell of sweet corruption.

Max’s hand was wrapped tightly around Newton’s flashlight. He had not switched it on yet. Newton would tell him when. Darkness pushed at his eyeballs. Steady fear pulsed behind them: a monstrous pressure massing behind his eyes. With darkness pressing from the front and fear pressing from behind, he was terrified his eyeballs would burst like grapes in a vise. This was the strongest evidence yet that something must be terribly the matter with Shelley: no sane human being would want to hide out down here.

They inched their way down the incline, hands outflung so they wouldn’t run face-first into the rock. The cavern walls were slick with some viscid substance: algae, maybe? Max pictured tiny albino crabs scuttling along the gluey stuff, their pincers tik-tik-tikking. He imagined millions of them forming a chittering umbrella above their heads. His cheek came into contact with a shelf of slimed rock: it felt like a giant raspy tongue. That he didn’t scream out in terror had to count as a minor miracle.

The darkness was disorienting. Nothing could moor itself to it: not even their breathing, which seemed to float out only to hit some unseen barrier and rebound back at them. It could make a person go mad simply because it consumed them: creeping into their mouths and into their ears and up their noses and behind their eyes, invading every part until they were one with it.

The boys moved deeper into the silent cavern… and then came the sounds.

Those horrible sounds, from God only knew what.

SHELLEY HEARD them coming. His ears were very keen now. Oh yes. Very keen indeed.

He could not see the boys yet. The boys who’d come to collect their little prizes. The silly little boys who wanted to get back to their stupid homes, their stupid lives.

He couldn’t see them—but he would soon be able to feel them.

EAT EAT EAT

Oh yes. Shelley would eat. The fat one first, then the skinny one. Eat their eyes so they couldn’t see. Eat their feet next so they couldn’t run away.

It would be a paradise. A beautiful new world. Everyone would be so much happier down here. It would be an adjustment, of course. But they could be useful.

They could be daddies, too. Yes, they could all be daddies.

What a lovely idea.

THE SOUNDS caused the ventricles of Newton’s heart to seize up. He could actually feel them constricting with a painful squeeze.

Long, liquid noises: slllllrp… slllllrp… sllllrp…

“Flashlight,” Newton said. The word came out as a compressed nugget of sound.

Max flicked it on. Stark whiteness washed over the cavern.

Slllllrp… slllllrp… slllllrp…

The boys’ faces were eggshell-white: it was as if fear had blown the blood right out of their skin. Their necks and arms were rashed with gooseflesh. The clammy rock trapped the sweet stink, making the boys dizzy with it.

They were in a small antechamber. A hollow bubble in the rock.

“There,” Newton said, pointing.

The spark plugs sat in a shallow saltwater puddle in the middle of the chamber. Could it really be so simple? Max scanned the puddle for white wriggles. It was clear. He picked his way over, grabbed the spark plugs, and turned to Newton with a tentative, hopeful smile. The flashlight in his hands shone on the rock behind the other boy.

He caught a sly flinching movement to the left of Newton’s waist. The spark plugs slipped from his numbed hands.

Newton’s forehead creased as Max’s hand rose, one quivering finger pointing to the spot behind him. He wheeled suddenly, stumbling, and watched in horror as it emerged.

The thing that once went by the name of Shelley Longpre unfolded itself from a dark chalice in the rock. Crawling out like a spider, folding each of its long, pale limbs out, unpacking itself from its hiding spot with the showy grace of a contortionist.

“Yessssss…” it lisped, the hiss of an adder that crested and eddied.

“…sssSSSeeeeeYeeeessssssss…”

It was long in its extremities and bulbous at its middle. It was naked and translucent and webbed with huge blue veins that snaked over its body. Its arms and legs were nothing but bone wrapped in a thin sheath of skin. Trapped in the eye of terror, Max found himself thinking of the Christmas just passed. His folks had bought him a trombone. They’d wrapped it and put it under the tree. Of course Max knew what it was: a trombone wrapped in shiny paper looked practically the same as a trombone not wrapped in paper.

That was how its legs looked: like bones wrapped in skin-colored Christmas paper.

“EeeeeeYYYEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSS…”

Its voice was the lonely squeal of a hermit. It scrabbled toward them with a leer of hideous glee, hideous hunger, hideous need. Its left eye was completely white: something had sucked the pigment out of the eyeball the way a child sucks the red stripes off a peppermint candy. Its right eye was as shriveled as a dehydrated pea; white threads licked and lashed in the wide raw socket, making a whish sound, sort of like wind-swayed grain in a farmer’s field.

Max noticed clearly in its nakedness that its stomach was an obscenely pendulous appendage. The size of a beach ball, it swayed between its legs with a quivering expectant weight. Its rib cage jutted in monstrous fingers. Huge knobs of flesh seeped filth all over its shoulders; a belt of ulcerated boils encircled its hips. Max’s mind reeled—scant days and hours ago this thing had been a boy, not much different from him.

Sllllrppp… sllllrppp…

Its lips hung down like the lips of an old horse. Its teeth were gone; its gums hung in whitish rags from the roof of its mouth like the pith inside a pumpkin. It reached for Newton with extremely long fingers. It had nibbled its own skin off the tips. Its voice lost its sibilance as it rose to an insane gibber.

“YEEEEEEEE!”

Snapping out of his torpor, Newton managed to lash out with the spear. He struck the thing across its face; its skin tore apart in crepey rags. It mewled piteously and crab-walked around the edge of the chamber, its gut dragging along the rocks. The skin mooring its belly to its abdomen stretched and tore in thin fissures. Max was horrified at the possibility that it would burst apart. What in God’s name would spill out?

“Go!” Newton yelled at Max.

Max pressed his back to the wall and swung round. The Shelley-thing’s tongue darted out of its mouth: a gnarled root. Max wondered if it was trying to taste his scent the way snakes do.

It scuttled toward Max with horrid speed and ferocity. He caught a glance of its back. Something was twined around its spine, like an electrical cord.

One of its bony claws manacled round his ankle, and Max’s bladder let go. Warm wetness drained down his leg. The Shelley-thing seemed to sense that, too—it stared up with those alabaster eyes, keening and snuffling at Max’s calves. Max screamed and kicked it off. The flashlight slipped from his hands and hit the ground, spinning in lazy circles.

Max caught hold of Newton’s arm and dragged him back toward the chamber’s mouth. His mind was yammering; soon the terror would weld it shut…

The flashlight spun to a stop. Its glow climbed Newton’s madly backpedaling legs—then the Shelley-thing darted out of the darkness, squealing with the high excitement of a pig who’d found a truffle, clamping onto Newton’s right leg.

“Let go!” he shrieked. “Get off me!”

It kept squealing and clawing up Newton’s body. Newton felt the warm weight of its gigantic belly pressing between his own thighs. Beneath the sucking sounds, he could hear squirming ones—coming from the wet black hole of its mouth.

“Oh Jesus Max it’s gonna—”

When the Shelley-thing’s stomach ruptured, it did so with a moist ripping tear. Newton’s thighs and abdomen were washed in a warm broth of desiccated organs and shrunken intestines and untold multitudes of writhing alabaster.

Newton screamed in terrified disgust as the Shelley-thing’s face relaxed into an expression of extreme contentedness.

Newton kicked free and skated his heels over the slippery rock. The Shelley-thing toppled face-forward onto the cavern floor. It landed with a sickening crunch that collapsed all the tortured bones of its face.

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

45

NIGHTFALL GREETED the boys as they stumbled out of the cavern. In the silvery fall of moonlight, Newton saw that he was soaked in gore from the waist down. Revulsion swept over him in a dizzying wave.

When Max approached with a handful of leaves—all he could find for Newton to clean himself off—Newton held his hand out.

“Don’t come near. It’s too late—they’re all over me.”

He could feel them inside his pants, prickling his skin with strange heat. They wriggled in the hairs he’d just started to grow down there.

Max said: “What can we do?”

“Get back to camp. I’ll wash up in the ocean. See if that helps.”

THEY MOVED through the woods without a flashlight. Chilling noises emanated from the lacework of tall trees: hoots and scufflings and a frenzied cackle that rose up and up until it dropped to an ongoing buzz like an enormous hummingbird trapped in a rain barrel. Whatever was making those sounds couldn’t possibly be any worse than the Shelley-thing back in the cavern.

When they got back, Max made a fire using shingles that had blown off the cabin roof. Newton went down to the water to wash. Max could just make him out past the moon-glossed shore. He sat cross-legged in the surf, scrubbing and scrubbing. He returned in only his underwear, which sagged wetly around his hips. There was a defeated hunch to his shoulders that freaked Max out.

“I’m hungry, Max.”

“I’m hungry, too, Newt.”

“I think I’m hungrier than you.”

SOMEHOW, THEY slept. In the witching hours, Newton sat bolt upright. His insides were alive and seething. He bit down on his lip until blood came.

An hour later, Max awoke as Newton puked into a thicket of poison sumac. He was curled up on his side, breathing in rapid little bursts.

“I took the mushrooms,” he said. “They do the trick.”

Newton pointed at the puddle of vomit. Nothing but a thin smear of liquid tinged purple from the berries they’d eaten. It was alive with wriggling whiteness.

“I figure one of the little buggers swum up my… my piss-hole.”

He realized there was a better word for it, a scientific word that he probably even knew, but he was too dog-tired to think of it. Besides, piss-hole summed it up best. It was a hole that your piss came out of. Newton laughed to himself. Hah! For whatever reason, he found it deliciously funny. Piss-hole. Hil-aaaa-rious! WWAMD? He’d laugh at piss-hole, too, because it was the funniest word on earth!

Maybe he was delirious. That, or those mushrooms had mind-bending properties. He tore out a clump of poison sumac and rubbed it on his leg.

“What are you doing?” Max said.

“It’ll give me something else to focus on. I can itch myself silly.”

NEWTON ATE the rest of the mushrooms and was violently, frighteningly ill. He vomited with such force that the capillaries burst in his eyes and even his nose. By the time the sun came up, he looked washed-out and haggard, as though his innards had all been wrung out like wet washcloths.

They lay together by the fire. Any time Max moved closer, Newton waved him back tiredly.

“You’re going to catch it,” he warned.

“I don’t care anymore.”

Heat kindled in Newt’s eyes. “You should care. Don’t be stupid. You should care.”

Max withdrew, wounded for reasons he couldn’t quite process.

SOMETIME THAT morning, the black helicopter cut across the postcard-pretty sky. It dipped low, rotors throbbing, panning a circle around them. It was so close that Max could see the sunlight flashing off the pilot’s visor.

“Help us!” he yelled as the blades whipped debris all around. “He’s sick! Can’t you see that? We need help!”

The pilot’s face remained impassive. Max picked up a rock, threw it on a pitiful trajectory. It wasn’t even close. The helicopter banked southward and returned toward North Point.

“Fuck you!” Max screamed as it retreated. “Go fuck yourself!”

Afterward he collapsed. The adults were supposed to act in the best interests of the children. They had to know what was happening. Yet stubbornly, they did nothing but stand idly by.

The adults were content to watch them die.

“I wonder who built them,” Newton murmured.

Max wiped his eyes. “Built what?”

“The worms.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean,” Newton said, “they seem too perfect.”

“They don’t seem perfect at all, Newt. They’re like the worst things on earth.”

“That’s what I mean, I guess. Maybe they are the worst things on earth. But that would make them perfect, wouldn’t it? Perfect at being what they are and doing what they do. Perfect killers.”

“They haven’t killed everyone. We don’t know about Kent.”

Newton’s eyes pinched up at the edges. “I hope he’s still alive. Really, I hope so.”

“He could have swum back.”

Max stared out over the slatey water and wondered if he really believed that.

“If anyone could have, it would be Big K,” Newton agreed, if only for Max’s sake.

“Maybe he’ll talk to the adults. They’ll finally come for us.”

“Anything is possible.”

AROUND NOON, Newton told Max he was having a hard time seeing out of his left eye.

“It’s all fuzzy around the sides.” His laugh held a lacy filigree of hysteria. “It’s like staring at the world from inside a peach or something.”

Max leaned over and inspected Newton’s eye.

“It looks okay.”

Newton scratched at the purple stains on his legs from the poison sumac. He’d been scratching all morning. The flesh was raked open and bloody in spots.

“It does? Okay, well… jeez, it hurts. Maybe it’s not my eye. I don’t think there are any nerves in an eyeball. Maybe it’s behind it. You think?”

Max knelt closer. Terror was building in his chest, gaining a keener edge.

“Spread your eyelids with your fingers. I’ll look.”

“Okay,” Newton said dreamily. “Yeah. Good idea.”

Max held one hand up to shield his own eyes from the sun and squinted closely. Nothing. Just bloodshot whiteness.

“It’s fine, Newt. I can’t see…” His breath caught. “…can’t see…”

“What? What is it?”

It was nothing. Just a teeny-tiny quill. No bigger than an itty-bitty claw on a baby mouse’s paw. It sat at the bottom of Newton’s eye. It was probably just a trick of the light or a sty or something—until it moved.

“What is it, Max? I can feel it.”

The minuscule writhing worm lashed side to side as if stretching itself out in its new digs. Max reached out to grab it. Maybe he could tease it out of Newton’s eye the way his grandfather used to pull coddling worms out of a crabapple… until Max realized it was inside Newton’s eye. Swimming in the jelly.

No. The word ran through his head on an endless loop. No no no no—

It all at once went still. Then it seemed to flex toward Max—as if it knew, in the single vile atom it called a brain, that it was being watched.

“What is it, Max? Tell me. Tell me!”

46

AN HOUR later, Max was back at the cavern.

Newton had asked him not to go. Begged him. What if something happens, Max? Then we’ll both be alone.

Max simply waited until Newton fell asleep—the smallest kindness he could now afford. He’d found a signal flare in the cabin. The ones Scoutmaster Tim brought had gotten drenched in the storm, but this one—which Newton had brought personally, in a Ziploc bag—might still be okay.

Max prayed it would work. If not, it meant going down in the dark with the Shelley-thing still there. He’d have to paw around blindly for the spark plugs. What if he touched it instead?

Max had been happy enough to leave the plugs and try to figure out some other method of escape, but now, with Newt as sick as he was, he had no choice.

Listen, it’ll be no big deal, he thought, bucking himself up. Go on down, grab the plugs, and get the heck out of Dodge. It’s not even that far down: it just felt that way yesterday because you were in the dark. It’s probably not much farther down than the basement stairs at home.

The sun had fallen a few degrees in the sky. It shone brightly through the tree branches and into the cavern mouth. Bright as it was, after a few yards the sunlight turned spotty and that awful darkness took over.

He tore the strike strip. The flare burst alight with a heat so unexpected that it singed the hairs on his arms. They’d been standing on end, along with those on the nape of his neck.

He nudged his foot into the cave mouth. The shadow of the overhang cleaved across his boot. He tried to take the next step—but his back leg wouldn’t move. It may as well have been glued to the ground. The muscle fibers twitched down his hamstrings: antic, fluttering waves under the skin.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Come on.”

An act of profound concentration and willpower was required to budge his back leg. He finally threw it out in front of him in an awkward stagger-step that nearly sent him tumbling down the steep grade of the cave, but he checked his forward momentum in time.

“Don’t be a baby,” Max said to himself, though he had every legitimate reason in the world to act like one. Scout Law number three: A Scout’s duty is to be useful and help others, and he is to do his duty before anything else, even though he gives up his own pleasure, or comfort, or safety to do it.

The temperature dipped by ten degrees as soon as he entered the cave. The air came out of his lungs in short, popping breaths—it almost sounded like he was hiccuping, or on the verge of having a good cry. The fear was as strong as ever: that disembodied ball of baby fingers relentlessly tickling his guts.

One foot in front of the other, he told himself. You can always run. You can pelt out of here like your ass is on fire.

It amazed him that the voice in his head—confident, jokey—could be so different from the piss-scared boy it resided within.

At least he had a flare. The journey was much less disorienting with a light to go by. Salt sparkled on the sea-eaten rock, tinted bloodred by the flare light.

The rocky shelves were overgrown with patches of sickly yellow moss. Colonies of huge white toadstools jutted from the cave walls at lunatic angles; they hung like fleshy ears, their undersides frilled with soft gills—or in some cases, little spikelike teeth. Max’s neck came in contact with one as he rounded a sharp bend in the descent, and it felt horridly clammy and bloated, like the flesh of a waterlogged body coughed up from the sea.

The air was still sweet but didn’t seem as cloying. His breath came shallowly. He could hear the blood beat in his ears. The flare sputtered.

Don’t you go out, Max thought—prayed. Oh don’t you dare go out.

He came to the mouth of the chamber. The smell was strangely enticing: sweet plums packed in salt. The air was alive with sounds, curiously stealthy, over the drip of water. He held the flare aloft. The chamber’s ceiling was clad in the same yellow moss; tendrils of witchgrass draped down. Trundling over the moss, clinging to its spongy folds, was an army of sea creatures: sand crabs and pulpy slugs and huge sightless beetles Max had never seen before. The clicking of their pincers and other appendages created a mammoth chittering above his head.

The Shelley-thing lay to the side of the chamber. Its limbs were spiked out at odd angles; it looked like a dead spider pressed flat between the pages of a dictionary. So small. Death did that, didn’t it? Shrunk everything. It lay in the same position as it had yesterday… didn’t it?

He wasn’t so sure now. Maybe it had inched away from the cave wall—but how could it have done that? He pictured the things inside of Shelley doing that… somehow pulling Shelley’s lifeless body along the cave floor.

Max wondered if the chamber was fed by an aquifer leading out to sea. The tide might have rolled in, flooding the chamber. That would explain the sea life on the ceiling: he didn’t think they’d been there before. It would also explain the Shelley-thing’s positioning: the body would’ve floated up with the tide, bumping around the chamber, brushing into the walls, becoming saturated with seawater before settling on the floor as the tide flowed out.

Had some of those worms flowed out with the tide? Max imagined them wriggling through the water, latching on to a codfish, which got eaten by a seal, which got eaten by a shark, which got caught in a drift net and hauled on board a trawler and slit open on the dock, billions of worms spilling out in front of the perplexed crewmen…

Or maybe Shelley’s body was in the exact same position. It’d been dark and crazy. Yes, Max figured. It was in the same spot. Yes.

He squinted past the sputtering flare light. Was anything else moving? He thought he saw floating flickers in the air—but no, no, those were just vapor contrails from the nearby seabed. He could hear the seethe of the sea seeping through the rock.

The flare had already sputtered well down the paper tube—that shouldn’t happen, should it? Maybe it was an old flare. Its glow had diminished alarmingly.

He set one foot inside the chamber. His leg appeared to stretch out as if made of flesh-toned rubber, pulling the rest of his body with it. His throat was dusty-dry, filled with the ozone taste of the rock. The peripheries of his vision were blown out huge—he could see almost around the back of his head. His pupils were so dilated that they’d overtaken his corneas, turning them black.

He inched around Shelley’s body. A brittle strand of witchgrass brushed the back of Max’s neck. He bit back a scream but still, a breathless little moan came out of him.

Which is when he noticed them.

They were on the stick—the long one he’d sharpened yesterday, the one Newton abandoned in the madness. It jutted from beneath Shelley’s body at a weird angle. All along it, stuck to the wet wood, were tiny nodules. Clustered in white bunches that looked like tiny albino grapes. Tens of thousands of them. Others were larger. They dotted the stick like curlicues of white icing on a cake.

A sea slug fell from the ceiling, going plop in a puddle near the stick. The white nodules stirred in unison. The larger ones uncoiled and stood stiff.

The sea slug sucked its way out of the puddle. Its eyes swiveled lazily on stalks. The large worms jettisoned off the stick, drifting with horrible languor. They settled atop the slug and swiftly coiled around it. The smaller nodules launched next: a shimmering flotilla settling around and atop the slug. Only its stalked eyes were visible amid the banded whiteness; soon, they, too, were cocooned.

Max felt something bursting up inside him, a fearsome bubble packed with razor blades and fishhooks and shattered lightbulbs that strained against the heaving walls of his chest.

He inched around the Shelley-thing, hugging the cave wall. Several more large worms went rigid—they followed him the way a compass needle follows magnetic north, but they didn’t detach from the wood.

The spark plugs weren’t where he thought they’d be—he swore he’d last seen them next to the body. But then maybe the body had moved…

Or something had moved the body…

Or something else had moved the spark plugs.

For an instant he was seized by a terrible possibility: that something else was in the cave with him. An image formed in his head: something huge and pulsating-white and gently, sensuously ribbed, gliding up behind him making the soft suck-suck of a fat, toothless infant mewling for its mother’s breast.

There. Thank God, right there. He spotted the plugs in a shallow pool farther into the chamber. He must’ve flung them there the last time he was here, when the Shelley-thing had reached for him.

He edged around carefully, his butt scraping the wet rock. His eyes hunted through the dwindling, smoky light for threats—they were all around him now. The flare was hot in his hand: the phosphorus was burning the last of its stores, heating through the cardboard tube.

The plugs lay at the bottom of a weirdly ridged pool: it looked like the fossilized remains of a giant clamshell. He reached toward them, then suddenly flinched back.

The dark, festering ooze ringing the puddle—a rotted mulch of witchgrass and kelp—was studded with white specks. They’d stirred agitatedly as his hand had reached for the spark plugs.

How had they known to surround this particular pool?

But as Max’s eyes dodged around in the ebbing light, he realized they were everywhere.

They coalesced around him: specks of white nestled in the ooze, clustered in the rocks, above him, to the sides of him.

Everywhere.

A deep vein of terror threatened to cleave him in half. He felt that tickle inside his skull now, those little fingers trying to unmoor his sanity.

Almost absently, Max brought the flare down, singeing the edges of the puddle. The ooze sizzled; the worms exploded with little pops.

He reached into the puddle, grabbed one spark plug—

The flare went out. Max’s heart seized.

It sputtered alight again. The top was wet now; water dripped down into the tube, dousing the phosphorus. He reached for the other plug, wrapped his fingers around it—

The flare went out again.

Something dropped from the cave ceiling, crawling and clacking on the nape of his neck. Max let out a choked sound of disgust before the flare caught again. He knocked the thing off his neck. One of those huge black beetles. As soon as it hit the floor, it was lit upon by white strands. Max looked for the chamber mouth and—

The flare went out. Jesus oh Jesus no—he stood blindly, tripping, slipping on a patch of slime in the dark. He stumbled back and nearly fell—his arm reached out for balance and collided with something that felt like waterlogged fatback…

The flare sputtered alight. In the bloodlike luminescence, he saw he’d touched the Shelley-thing. His fingers had sunk into the flesh of his back. Its skin was flabby, greasy, seeping nameless noxious fluid.

The skin cracked slightly down the Shelley-thing’s spine. Max saw something flex underneath.

He turned to flee. The air was alive with floating strands. He waved the flare desperately, catching a few: they sizzled up like ghost fuses.

He heard a hideous skin-crawling sound. A splitting, rending sound. He froze. He pictured it being made by the Shelley-thing as it pulled itself up. It was the sound of its body disconnecting from the rocks, its burst-open chest cavity dangling syrupy strings of ichor, twisting with worms while it lisped Yeeeeeesssssss…

Max couldn’t bear to turn around. He feared if he turned and saw that, all would be lost. The terror would crystallize into a hot barbed nut in his brain. Maybe it would just be better to go mad and have done with it for good and all.

With the greatest courage he’d ever summon, Max wrenched his head slowly around.

The Shelley-thing’s body was moving, but the movement was coming from inside.

One foot in front of the other, Max.

It wasn’t Max’s own voice in his head now: it was Newton’s.

It’s just five steps. Four maybe, if you take long strides. Go on now. It’s okay.

Max obeyed, moving quickly and silently. Every nerve ending was on fire and every synapse in his brain was on the brink of rupture, but he managed to slip around the chamber walls until his ass hit the tunnel mouth.

The last thing Max saw in the glow of the sputtering flare before racing up the incline was the skin cracking and splitting down the Shelley-thing’s back. A huge white tube, just like the one that ripped out of the stranger a lifetime ago, was twisted round the gleaming spine bone: it looked like a flag that had gotten blown round a pole in a high wind.

Max watched it unfurl with slow elegance and rise into the dark air. It stood stiff as a bloodhound’s tail with the hunt running hot in its blood.

47

WHEN MAX got back, Newton was awake. A patch of gauze was taped clumsily over his eye. The other eye stared at Max balefully.

“You left,” he said reproachfully.

“I got the spark plugs.”

“That’s good, I guess.”

Newton looked thinner already. A jarring sight: Newton Thornton, the pudgiest boy in school, with winnowed cheekbones that looked as if they’d been carved out of basalt. The wind blew his loose clothes around his body.

“Who needs Deal-A-Meal cards,” he said, catching Max’s look. “Richard Simmons is a…” Newt managed to smile. “…a fucking pussy.”

He sat on a rock, humming a tuneless song, while Max fiddled with the boat’s motor. Night was already coming down; the cold seeped under their collars and iced the skin cladding their spines.

“I’m hungry like you wouldn’t believe, Max.”

“You should try sucking on a pebble. My mom says that’s how the Indians used to control their hunger. When they were on a vision quest or whatever.”

Newton plucked a pebble off the shore and popped it into his mouth.

“Salty,” he said. “And stony.”

They laughed a little. Max turned back to the motor. He screwed the spark plugs into their holes and snapped the covers shut.

“I swallowed the pebble,” Newton said. “Oooops.”

“Suck on another one,” Max said, struggling to maintain a casual tone of voice.

The jerry can of gasoline was where he’d dropped it yesterday. He unscrewed the motor’s gas cap and let the gasoline glug-glug down, making sure he didn’t spill any. He could hear grinding sounds over his shoulder. He was very worried they were being made by Newton chewing on a pebble.

“You should gather whatever you need,” he said, not daring to look. “We should leave soon.”

“You don’t even know that the motor will start,” Newton said tiredly. “It probably won’t.”

“Why would you say that, Newt? Why wouldn’t it start—why wouldn’t you hope it’ll start?”

Max turned and saw Newton regarding him with tragic eyes.

“All I mean is,” Newton said, dropping his chin and staring down, “even if it does start, you should go alone.”

“What a stupid— Why would I do that?”

“Because I’m sick, Max. And if I’m sick, maybe they won’t let you go back home. Because they’ll think you’re sick, too.”

“They meaning who?”

Newton shrugged. “Come on, don’t be dumb. Whoever’s out there. The police. The army. The guys in the helicopter. Whoever is making sure nobody comes to rescue us.”

“Well, maybe I’m sick already too. Who cares? They can cure us.”

Newton shook his head knowingly. “If you were sick, you’d feel it.”

Max came over and set a hand on Newton’s shoulder. The heat radiated through his clothes. That awful sweetness wasn’t so bad coming off Newton. It smelled a little like Toll House cookies.

“I’m scared, Max,” Newton said softly.

“So am I, Newt.”

Max was afraid that if he left without Newt, they—whoever they were—wouldn’t allow him to come back. Which meant Newton would die here. Curled up inside the cabin, perhaps, or in the cellar, like an animal that sought the darkness to die. He would die in pain, but more important and much worse, he would die alone. Newt didn’t deserve that. Newt was a good person. He should live a long time. Marry and have kids. Teach them all the nerdy things he knew. Be happy. That was the only fair outcome.

But if Max left without Newt, he was positive he’d never see him again.

This fear of abandoning Newt was more profound, if less visceral, than that which he’d experienced back in the cavern: if Newton died, it meant all the terror and frustration and rage they’d both experienced had been for nothing.

If they couldn’t leave together, what had they done any of it for?

Max said: “You sit at the front of the boat, okay? I’ll sit at the back. We won’t touch. They won’t have any reason not to take me.”

Newton smiled gratefully. “That sounds like a very good plan, Max.”

48

IT WAS dark by the time Max eased the boat off the beach into the slack tide.

It took a few hard cranks to get the motor going. Smoke belched from the engine housing. For one heart-stopping instant, it seemed the bearings would fry and the motor might seize… but after a few rough revolutions, it settled into an even cadence.

Max goosed the throttle and piloted toward the distant lights of North Point. He’d driven boats before: his uncle was an oysterman and he’d often let Max take the helm of his boat while he dragged in the lines. It’s a lot easier than driving a car, he’d told Max. The ocean’s just one big lane, plenty of room for everyone.

Newton sat at the bow. He was wearing his Scouts sash adorned with the badges he’d earned. He wasn’t sure why he’d put it on—maybe he wanted to show whoever was waiting for them that he was a responsible person. An individual of value.

“Hey, Max?” Newt called out over the motor.

“Yeah?”

“I had this dream today. While you were gone. It was pretty weird.”

“Okay, so spill it.”

Wind whipped off the water. Newton nearly had to shout to be heard—the effort drained him.

“So, well, I was with my mom. We were on this trip. I didn’t know the city. We were in this hotel lobby. Very swanky, which is weird because we don’t have enough money to stay at swanky hotels. But we come through those rotating doors—those doors always kind of scare me, actually; I think they’re going to suck me between the glass and squash me—through those doors and there’s a couple arguing outside. A man and a woman.”

The swells grew larger as the shore receded. The boat skipped over the waves, salt spray licking up over the gunwales. Max squinted over the night water. Shapes loomed against the horizon.

“The man started hitting the woman. Right there on the street. Her head was snapping back. Blood was painted on her cheeks. Then this van stops on the sidewalk. These guys get out and start yelling at the other guy, saying he can’t do that. The guy says he wasn’t really hurting her, only teaching her something. So he wraps his hands around her neck as if to demonstrate, he wraps his hands round her neck and starts choking her right in front of these guys…”

The shapes were beginning to coalesce. A loose group clustered where the water met the night sky, blocking out the lights of home.

“One of the guys from the van puts the guy in a headlock. They drag him away from the woman and over to the van, like they’re going to throw him into it. Suddenly people are pouring out of doorways and out of office buildings. Carpenters and lawyers and deliverymen. The woman who was being choked starts screaming at the guys from the van, telling them to leave the guy who was choking her alone. Then one of the guys from the van punches the choker guy in the face. He goes down in a tangle, unconscious before he even hits the ground. He was wearing loose pants, I remember, and they fell down so I saw his underwear, which were blue and droopy with holes like mice had chewed them.”

Boats. Squat ones that had chased down Calvin Walmack’s cigarette boat. They were painted with some kind of special black paint that prevented the moonlight and starlight from reflecting off them. They floated silently, motionlessly.

“Things sped up. Everyone was getting punched or punching. Fights were spilling all over the street. I remember a tricycle getting crushed under the wheels of a speeding car. Then the choker guy who got punched out gets up and looks around all embarrassed and says, ‘Oh hell no!’ and he wades into this big huge fight—which was everywhere by then—hitching up his pants. And there were fires burning at the tops of the skyscrapers and sirens everywhere and I could tell, in that weird way dreams have of telling you things, that the violence was everywhere. Like a virus, Max. Everywhere.”

The boat drew nearer to the floating vessels. Max cut the motor and drifted with the current. Figures were massed along the decks.

Newt’s voice dropped as the wind dipped. “My mom got her hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off. I didn’t want her touching me. And if she put her hand back on my shoulder—and I was thinking she might do that, Max, for the same reason that I wanted to shrug it off—then I might shove it off. Or bite her fingers. Violence was in the air, Max. We were all breathing it.”

A searchlight snapped on, pinning them in its cool glare.

The boys raised their hands slowly, like robbers who’d gotten caught inside a bank vault.

“We need help!” Max yelled.

Nobody answered.

“We’re okay!” He tried to smile. His filthy clothes flapped in the wind. “We made it. Tell them, Newt. Tell them we’re okay!”

Newton seemed unsure of where he was. One eye stared without recognition. He laughed—a weird, jittery laugh that bounced off the water and fled into the empty vault of sky.

Max thought: Oh no oh please don’t laugh like that, Newt…

Newton stood up in the boat. He held his hands out toward the light: a gesture of supplication.

“I’m fine! I’m aces! But there is one thing.”

No Newt—

“I am very…”

No Newt no Newt—

“…so very very…”

No no nononono—

The wind rose to a shriek that sucked that final word out of Newton’s mouth.

A hole appeared in the back of Newton’s neck. A small hole that appeared as if by magic. Presto! The torn edges of his flesh blew back, creating a perfect little starfish.

Newton pitched over the side. He lay on the sea’s surface for an instant—like a water skimmer, those bugs that danced across the water’s skin—before the sea claimed him; Newt’s body went headfirst, bubbles trailing up from the new hole in his throat as he sank swiftly beneath the boat.

Max barely had time to cry out. He was staring down at the bright red dot hovering on his own chest.

From the sworn testimony of Lance Corporal Frank Ellis, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:

49

SOME NIGHTS, Max Kirkwood would climb the bluffs on the outskirts of North Point and stare out over the water toward Falstaff Island.

This was after it had all happened. After the arrival of the hungry man; the madness of the island. After he’d stood at the prow of Oliver McCanty’s boat with the glowing red dot—a sniper’s laser sight—pinned to his chest.

After the military decontamination, they had transferred him to an isolated clinic. He was toxic, after all. Infected.

Or maybe not.

They had poked and prodded, drawn pints of blood, endoscoped him, X-rayed him, done MRIs and cranial maps, dosed him with every vaccination known to mankind.

After all that, they adjudged him to be clean.

It felt strange returning to North Point. Everything was the same, but everything was different. His Scouting friends were gone. Those who’d been his friends before now kept their distance. People treated him differently. Most of them pitied him. Some, though, felt that he must have done horrible things on the island to have survived. Others crossed to the opposite side of the street when he came walking down it.

At irregular intervals, a black van would show up at his house. Men in hazmat suits would get out. More tests. More needles. They collected his blood and fluids and solids in sterile pouches. It made Max laugh to think that some scientist in a white lab coat would be picking apart his shit with tweezers, frowning and tutting as he searched for clues—well, it almost made him laugh.

MAX HAD bad dreams. Those were the only dreams he had anymore—most nights it was just blackness. He closed his eyes and bang! Black. Eight hours later, the black went away. He woke up. Those were the good nights.

On the bad nights, his dreams were still black. But the blackness was infested with sounds. Squirming. Always this squirmy-squirmy noise in the blackness. And when he woke up, Max would be drooling like a baby.

His mom kissed him good night on the forehead now. Used to be on the lips.

He tried to return to the life he’d known, but that simply didn’t exist anymore.

He wasn’t allowed to go to school. The parents of many students didn’t feel right having Max in the same airspace with their kids. Nothing against Max personally. He was a good kid. A survivor.

But the things Max had encountered on the island were survivors, too. The parents had read the newspapers. One of Dr. Edgerton’s videotaped experiments had leaked online. Everyone knew what those things could do—objectively they did, anyhow. Everyone had seen things, clinically, but those things hadn’t touched them. Not in any tangible way. So people knew in their brains but not inside their skin, and there was a difference.

Everybody thought they knew what had happened on that island. Everyone was an expert. But they didn’t really know. What they thought was bad. What really happened was a lot worse.

Max studied at home. The teachers sent assignments to him in paper envelopes. He had to send his answers back via e-mail, as the teachers expressed concern over actually handling the papers he’d touched.

One morning he found a poster tacked to his front door. It was supposed to look like a carnival poster—like, for the Freak Tent.

The Amazing Worm Boy, read the blood-dripping type underneath.

His mother made sweet-and-sour pork for dinner one night. The smell was so familiar to Max—that high stinking sweetness—that he started to scream. He didn’t stop until his father tossed the pan of pork outside in a snowbank. It took him a while, on account of the fact he limped real bad; the MPs had shattered his right kneecap after he and Kent’s dad stole Calvin Walmack’s cigarette boat.

Max kept to himself. No choice, really. He wandered the woods and down by the sea.

He thought about his friends: Kent and Eef and Newt, especially. He’d recall the strangest, most trivial things, like Cub Kar rally night. One year, his car had lost to Kent’s car in the finals—except everyone thought Kent’s dad helped him build the car. Its wheels were thin as pizza cutters. Eef’s mom had said it was cheating. Newt’s mom agreed. Things got pretty heated. Kent’s dad kicked over the canteen of McDonald’s orange drink and stormed out. Eef’s mom’s eyes had popped out and she’d said: And that man is our police chief.

Max missed them all so much.

It was weird. They’d all had other friends. But now, Max couldn’t think of any friends who’d mattered as much.

He’d give anything to have one more day with them. Even one of those piss-away ones they used to have in Scouts: roaming the woods on a fall day with the smoky smell of dead leaves crunching under their boots. Playing King of the Mountain and Would You Rather? while nerdy Newt collected samples for some dumb merit badge or another. Stealing away with Ephraim to stare at the stars and dream their crazy dreams. And they would all be just like they were before. Not skinny or hungry or trying to hurt one another.

There was nothing Max wouldn’t give to have that again. Just one more day.

And Shelley? Well, Shel wasn’t in these daydreams. If Shel popped up at all, it was in his nightmares.

Max had a shrink now—the same one Newton and Ephraim used to visit. When he’d told Dr. Harley about wishing for one more day with his old friends, he’d been advised against wishing for things that couldn’t happen. Harley called this negative projection. Max thought Harley was an idiot.

If there was one thing he wanted to tell his lost friends, it was that lots of adults didn’t have a goddamn clue. It was one of the sadder facts he’d had to come to grips with. Adults could be just as stupid as kids. Stupider even, because often they didn’t have to answer to anybody.

Of course, Harley wore a face mask during their sessions, same as a doctor would wear when he’s operating—same as Scoutmaster Tim had worn, probably.

Sometimes Max wanted to rip it off and cough into his stupid sucker-fish face. The Amazing Worm Boy strikes again!

50

ONE EVENING, Max borrowed his uncle’s boat and piloted it toward Falstaff Island.

His heart jogged faster as the island came into view, rising against the horizon like the hump of a breaching whale. It was charred black. Nothing but the odd burnt tree spiking up from the earth. The water had the sterile chlorine smell of a public pool. It was the most desolate place he’d ever seen. It echoed the desolation inside of him.

The emptiness…

The emptiness?

Max leaned both hands on the gunwale. A nameless hunger was building inside of him. It gnawed at his guts with teeth that called his name.