Keeping his back to Evelyn, he picked it up.
He put it in his mouth.
He swallowed.
What have I done? he thought. Aloud, he said, “As an operating hypothesis I’d say that the manipulative structures have been deliberately, make that consciously, grown. There, I’ve traced one of those veins back to the alembics. So that explains why there’s no uniformity, these things would grow exterior manipulators on need, and then discard them when they’re done. Yes, look, the muscles don’t actually connect to the manipulators, they wrap around them.”
There was a sour taste on his tongue.
I must be insane, he thought.
“Did you just eat something?”
Keeping his expression blank, Hank said, “Are you nuts? You mean did I put part of this… creature… in my mouth?” There was a burning within his brain, a buzzing like the sound of the rising sun picked up on a radio telescope. He wanted to scream, but his face simply smiled and said, “Do you—?” And then it was very hard to concentrate on what he was saying. He couldn’t quite focus on Evelyn, and there were white rays moving starburst across his vision and—
When he came to, Hank was on the Interstate, doing ninety. His mouth was dry and his eyelids felt gritty. Bright yellow light was shining in his eyes from a sun that had barely lifted itself up above over the horizon. He must have been driving for hours. The steering wheel felt tacky and gummy. He looked down.
There was blood on his hands. It went all the way up to his elbows.
The traffic was light. Hank had no idea where he was heading, nor any desire whatsoever to stop.
So he just kept driving.
Whose blood was it on his hands? Logic said it was Evelyn’s. But that made no sense. Hate her though he did—and the sight of her had opened wounds and memories he’d thought cauterized shut long ago—he wouldn’t actually hurt her. Not physically. He wouldn’t actually kill her.
Would he?
It was impossible. But there was the blood on his hands. Whose else could it be? Some of it might be his own, admittedly. His hands ached horribly. They felt like he’d been pounding them into something hard, over and over again. But most of the blood was dried and itchy. Except for where his skin had split at the knuckles, he had no wounds of any kind. So the blood wasn’t his.
“Of course you did,” Evelyn said. “You beat me to death and you enjoyed every minute of it.”
Hank shrieked and almost ran off the road. He fought the car back and then turned and stared in disbelief. Evelyn sat in the passenger seat beside him.
“You… how did… ?” Much as he had with the car, Hank seized control of himself. “You’re a hallucination,” he said.
“Right in one!” Evelyn applauded lightly. “Or a memory, or the personification of your guilt, however you want to put it. You always were a bright man, Hank. Not so bright as to be able to keep your wife from walking out on you, but bright enough for government work.”
“Your sleeping around was not my fault.”
“Of course it was. You think you walked in on me and Jerome by accident? A woman doesn’t hate her husband enough to arrange something like that without good reason.”
“Oh god, oh god, oh god.”
“The fuel light is blinking. You’d better find a gas station and fill up.”
A Lukoil station drifted into sight, so he pulled into it and stopped the car by a full service pump. When he got out, the service station attendant hurried toward him and then stopped, frozen.
“Oh no,” the attendant said. He was a young man with sandy hair. “Not another one.”
“Another one?” Hank slid his card through the reader. “What do you mean another one?” He chose high-test and began pumping, all the while staring hard at the attendant. All but daring him to try something. “Explain yourself.”
“Another one like you.” The attendant couldn’t seem to look away from Hank’s hands. “The cops came right away and arrested the first one. It took five of them to get him into the car. Then another one came and when I called, they said to just take down his license number and let him go. They said there were people like you showing up all over.”
Hank finished pumping and put the nozzle back on its hook. He did not push the button for a receipt. “Don’t try to stop me,” he said. The words just came and he said them. “I’d hurt you very badly if you did.”
The young man’s eyes jerked upward. He looked spooked. “What are you people?”
Hank paused, with his hand on the door. “I have no idea.”
You should have told him,” Evelyn said when he got back in the car. “Why didn’t you?”
“Shut up.”
“You ate something out of that Worm and it’s taken over part of your brain. You still feel like yourself, but you’re not in control. You’re sitting at the wheel but you have no say over where you’re going. Do you?”
“No,” Hank admitted. “No, I don’t.”
“What do you think it is—some kind of super-prion? Like mad cow disease, only faster than fast? A neuroprogrammer, maybe? An artificial overlay to your personality that feeds off of your brain and shunts your volition into a dead end?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re the one with the imagination. This would seem to be your sort of thing. I’m surprised you’re not all over it.”
“No,” Hank said. “No, you’re not at all surprised.”
They drove on in silence for a time.
“Do you remember when we first met? In med school? You were going to be a surgeon then.”
“Please. Don’t.”
“Rainy autumn afternoons in that ratty little third-floor walk-up of yours. With that great big aspen with the yellow leaves outside the window. It seemed like there was always at least one stuck to the glass. There were days when we never got dressed at all. We’d spend all day in and out of that enormous futon you’d bought instead of a bed, and it still wasn’t large enough. If we rolled off the edge, we’d go on making love on the floor. When it got dark, we’d send out for Chinese.”
“We were happy then. Is that what you want me to say?”
“It was your hands I liked best. Feeling them on me. You’d have one hand on my breast and the other between my legs and I’d imagine you cutting open a patient. Peeling back the flesh to reveal all those glistening organs inside.”
“Okay, now that’s sick.”
“You asked me what I was thinking once and I told you. I was watching your face closely, because I really wanted to know you back then. You loved it. So I know you’ve got demons inside you. Why not own up to them?”
He squeezed his eyes shut, but something inside him opened them again, so he wouldn’t run the car off the road. A low moaning sound arose from somewhere deep in his throat. “I must be in Hell.”
“C’mon. Be a sport. What could it hurt? I’m already dead.”
“There are some things no man was meant to admit. Even to himself.”
Evelyn snorted. “You always were the most astounding prig.”
They drove on in silence for a while, deeper into the desert. At last, staring straight ahead of himself, Hank could not keep himself from saying, “There are worse revelations to come, aren’t there?”
“Oh God, yes,” his mother said.
It was your father’s death.” His mother sucked wetly on a cigarette. “That’s what made you turn out the way you did.”
Hank could barely see the road for his tears. “I honestly don’t want to be having this conversation, Mom.”
“No, of course you don’t. You never were big on self-awareness, were you? You preferred cutting open toads or hunching over that damned microscope.”