The guinea pig’s body relaxed. Clayton quickly ducked underneath the lab bench and came up with what looked like a pair of sterling silver bolt cutters. They were Bethune surgical rib shears—an instrument used for splitting the cartilage between human ribs during open-heart surgery.
Clayton was singing now. A familiar children’s song, sung in a toneless, dial-tone voice.
“The itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout; down came the rain and washed the spider out…”
He brought the shears down. The blades formed an inverted V around the guinea pig’s neck.
“What the hell are you doing, Clay?”
“Look closely.” Clayton’s eyes glittered. “Part its hair so you can see the flesh.”
Luke didn’t want to touch the thing again, but curiosity overrode his squeamishness. The guinea pig’s fur was stiff like the bristles of a dirty broom, the flesh under it pink and oily. Its body pumped off the noxious warmth of a compost heap.
“Do you see it?” said Clayton. “That shine?”
Its skin held the barest scintilla, as though dusted with powdered diamonds.
“It’s the ambrosia,” said Clayton.
“Is it leaking out of its body?”
“I don’t think it was ever inside its body. I think it covers bodies in the thinnest skein, so thin it would take electron magnification to spot it. Think of a spider’s web. It doesn’t take much pure matter at all; an ounce of ambrosia, stretched into skeins, could cover the entire population of our home city.”
Luke couldn’t help but picture it. The citizens of Iowa City covered in downy threads of ambrosia, finer than baby hair, unnoticeable to the naked eye but coiling deep into their bodies, fastening around their organs and bones. Everybody shimmered in the sunlight, their bodies aglitter…
“It might send roots inside.” Clayton wiped the feverish sweat collecting above his lip. “Roots so slender that they can slip between molecules of flesh and blood; so small they can even twine around atoms. Think about it.”
Phloooopppp…
That dripping sound again, coming from somewhere inside the lab—
That old childhood memory Luke’s mind had been chasing entombed itself in his skull with a concussive thump…
4.
THE STANDING PIPE on Old Langtree Road in Iowa City. A concrete tunnel with a grate over its mouth to prevent idiot kids from clambering into its damp, moss-crusted darkness. An overflow pipe—when the river rose, excess water jetted out of it to saturate the floodplain. But the river could go months at low ebb, meaning that the area ringing the pipe was most often a stagnant swamp that on high August days smelled like a pile of mildewed gym trunks.
Clayton visited the swamp often, as its microclimate hosted prize specimens. Unsurprisingly, he favored the most disgusting life-forms. If its body had the texture of a snot-filled bath bead, chances were that Clayton wanted it. Sometimes he’d let Luke tag along, needing an extra pair of hands.
One long-ago summer day, the young brothers had arrived at dusk, when the coolness brought the best specimens out of their hidey-holes. Luke never visited the standing pipe alone. Its wide, cavernous mouth jutting out of the gray caliche—which reminded him, disconcertingly, of elephant skin—sent an unpleasant shiver down his arms. The pipe’s interior was hung with rotting strands of moss that dangled down in stiff stalactites. Sunlight couldn’t penetrate it more than a few feet; after that it turned grainy, the shadows swimming with clever movements.
It was stupid to think. It was just a tunnel. Sure, it was dangerous; you wouldn’t want to squeeze past the grate and walk down it—not because there was something waiting for you in its gloomy guts, but because you could trip and fall and bust your fool skull wide open, as Luke’s mother was apt to say.
By the time the boys reached the pipe that day, the surrounding swampland was hovering with shadows. The inverted bells of the carnivorous pitcher plants lay bronzed in the dying sun. The creatures that had lain dormant during the day were slithering and spidering from their resting places.
Clayton forged into the swamp in a pair of hip waders, sending up swarms of no-see-ums. Luke’s sweatpants—he couldn’t bear wading through that bug-infested swamp barelegged—were soaked to his crotch. The fluffy tops of cotton grass poking out of the swamp reminded Luke of Peter Cottontail, the bunny, which led him to envision the grass-wads hiding a thousand drowned rabbits submerged in the brown muck with their tails sticking out of the water.
The brothers reached the mouth of the pipe. A new moon glossed its concrete lips, a silver O enclosing a solid pool of darkness.
Clustered along the pipe were translucent vein-strung sacs, each roughly the size of an oxblood marble. They were arranged in gooey clusters—bunches of albino grapes, or mutant fly eggs.
“They’re hatching,” Clayton said. “Perfect.”
The sacs were breaking open to disgorge tallowy creatures with flagellate tails. They squiggled to the edge of the pipe and—
Thhhwhooolloop…
Dropped into the water.
“Pollywogs are interesting creatures,” Clayton remarked. “No other amphibian undergoes such a massive change as it becomes an adult. Humans have a few more bones as babies, which fuse together as we grow, but we don’t grow new arms or legs or lose any part of our bodies as we mature. Humans,” he said with something approaching sadness, “are boring.”
Luke always felt unbelievably grateful for these moments when his brother treated him like a human being. In such moments Clayton seemed most like a human being himself, full of childlike wonder.
The mama bullfrogs croaked in protest as Clayton dragged a net and deposited pollywogs into the bucket Luke had brought. Luke heard something from inside the pipe—a sound that vibrated the sensitive hairs of his ear canal.
It came again. A gelatinous sliding like something coughed up from a kitchen drain… and what was the pipe, anyway, if not a drain? A huge, long drain. It stood to reason that the things coughed out of a pipe that size would be massive, as well.
Ghostly spiders scuttled up the back of Luke’s neck. His mouth filled with a dry wash of horror—the taste of mothballs covered in a choking film of dust.
The swamp stilled. The bullfrogs stopped croaking, even the insects seemed to stop buzzing. Only the sucking, slurping sound coming from the pipe.
The sound, or its maker, was drawing nearer in a stealthy kind of way… but not too stealthily. Maybe it wanted to be heard. The sucking sound was joined by an icy clickety-click reminiscent of cockroaches scuttling behind water-fattened drywall… or ragged claws dragged along mossy concrete.
The pipe’s mouth was covered with a checkerboard rebar grate to keep stupid kids out. Because kids were stupid sometimes. Even the smart ones, like Clayton. They would come to an isolated swamp past dark, say, to collect pollywogs. Far from the reliable streetlit world—hell, they may as well be on another planet. They could disappear and nobody would even know until morning. It was tragic, but it happened all the time…
Even a smart kid had to be stupid only that one time.
Clayton’s jaw was clenched tight, his eyes fixed above the tunnel’s mouth as if he couldn’t quite bear to stare directly into it.
The sound came again, closer now: a choked and mocking gurgle, an enormous mouth laughing around a wad of rotting meat.
Pollywogs fluttered against Luke’s sweatpants as they flicked past, racing away. He wished he could shrink somehow, become as small and insignificant as they were, and flee with them. He wished he had a minuscule and idiotic pollywog brain, because his own was an inferno of fearful images and possibilities.