He was resigned to the fact he’d forever be known as the Scoutmaster who’d been mutinied by his own Scouts. That ought to make “Big” Jeff Jenks bust a gut.
Tim sat with his spine flush to the closet wall and his knees drawn tight to his chest. He tested each joint for weak spots. No luck. Solid wood nailed at inflexible angles.
A thin bar of sunlight wept under the door. Tim ran his fingers along the dissolving edge of light. Hugely comforting. A link to the world outside the closet. To the mainland and the sureties it held. To his cold cellar and its shelves stocked with preserves. To the glass canister of tongue depressors in his examination room.
He breathed heavily and focused. He could untwist a coat hanger and thread it under the door and… what? Jab someone in the ankle? Trip one of the boys? Why bother? Maybe he deserved to be here.
There’s no maybe about it, Tim, said HAL 9000.
He was trapped. Impossibly, inescapably. Maybe it was for the best. Fact: he was ill. The boys may have been right to lock him up. It hurt tremendously that they’d done it—a sudden feral act that made a mockery of all those years they’d been together, a close-knit group under his command. And now, cooped up in here, he couldn’t help them anymore—and that scared him profoundly.
Were you helping them, Tim? Really?
“Shut up, HAL,” he croaked, sounding like a drainpipe clogged with sludge. “You’re not my pal, HAL.”
You’re becoming irrational, Tim. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Good-bye.
“Good. Scram. Get lost.”
Tim’s thoughts returned to his Scouts. They were running wild, a quintet of lost boys. Did they have any inkling of the peril they were in? How could they, really? Boys didn’t process fear the same way as adults, especially when it came to sickness. Their scabs healed like magic, their coughs dried up overnight. But Tim knew the frailty of human bodies; he’d seen how even the stoutest ones could collapse into a sucking pit of disease and death.
Not to mention the fact that they’d also laid their hands all over him while doing the deed. They had breathed in the air he’d exhaled in fear-sick gusts. He may have even spit at them. Dear God, had he actually spat on the boys?
Part of him—a shockingly large part—was okay being in here. Perhaps he was unfit for command. Fact: he was paralyzed with hunger. He kept catching whiffs of cotton candy from someplace. His eyes blinked uncontrollably. He kept hearing his mother, dead six years now, calling him home for supper. Timmy, chowder’s ready!
Eat, said this funny little voice. It wasn’t HAL or the Undervoice. This one was different—sly and insistent, like baby rats clawing the insides of his head.
But there’s nothing to eat in here, he told the voice.
Sure there is. There’s always things to eat, silly.
The rats kept clawing, clawing; before long they’d claw through the soft meat of his brains and scratch through the bone of his skull. Tim pictured it: his skull bulging, his scalp and hair stirring with antic life, the skin splitting with the sound of rotten upholstery as a tide of hairless pink ratlings spilled from the slit, slick with blood and grayish brain-curds, squealing shrilly as they sheeted clumsily down his face, past his unblinking eyes, bumping and squalling over his lips spread in a vacant smile.
Okay, he answered that funny niggling voice. But what should I eat?
Oh, eat anything, it said with cold reasonableness. Any old thing you can find.
The closet was wallpapered. Who the hell wallpapered a closet? The paper was torn in flimsy tatters. He tweezed a curl between his fingers. It ripped down the wall with a lovely zippering sound.
He placed the strip of wallpaper on his tongue. The ancient paste was vaguely sweet. He swallowed hungrily.
Lovely, the voice said. Just lovely. Now eat more.
Tim did as the voice asked.
Peeling and eating and peeling and eating.
The funny little voice was easy to obey. It didn’t ask for much and what it did request was simple to accomplish.
Just eat.
And eat.
And eat.
A body settled against the other side of the door. Tim licked his paper-cut lips; his tongue had gone thick and gluey with paste. He whispered:
“Max? Is that you?”
Silence.
“Newt? Ephraim?”
A song—sung in a low mocking warble:
The singer was plugging up the space between the door and the floor.
Shelley?
Tim’s precious bar of light vanished in heart-stopping chunks.
“No,” he moaned. “What are you doing? No, please, no, please don’t…”
He pushed his fingers under the door to dislodge the barrier but his fingertips met with resistance. Next came the whooonking sound of duct tape stripped off a roll. The last meager particles of light filching under the door disappeared entirely. Tim sat in total darkness.
He opened his mouth to beg for his light back. It was all he had, for God’s sake. The childlike plea died on his lips. Somewhere down inside of him—not too far down, either—he could feel that relentless squirming. His teeth snapped shut.
EAT.
The voice wasn’t so small or funny anymore.
Tim did as it said. He wept softly without realizing.
18
SHELLEY PLACED the tape back in the kitchen drawer. His heart was beating a little heavier than normal. His eyes were hot and watery with dull excitement. The Scoutmaster was making faint pleading noises from inside the closet.
Shelley tried very hard not to laugh. He did not think the Scoutmaster’s noises were very funny—Shelley didn’t find anything funny, really. Not ever.
He inhaled through the alcohol-soaked gauze over his mouth and nose. He understood the danger—he could practically see the microscopic eggs ringing the scotch bottle’s rim, the one Kent had drunk from last night. He saw the eggs hovering in the cool air above the dead man’s chest. This didn’t scare him. If anything, it excited him.
He glanced at his handiwork on the closet door. He’d wedged two dish towels underneath and taped them in place. Now the Scoutmaster had no light at all. If the other boys asked why he did it, he already had an excuse: Shelley had heard the Scoutmaster’s consumptive hacking and sealed him in so they wouldn’t all get what Tim clearly had.
Shelley opened the cabin door and slipped quietly outside. A fine band of golden light striped across the horizon. The others still slept round the fire.
He went round the side of the cabin and found a spiderweb suspended between the east-facing wall and the overhang: an intricate hexagonal threadwork hung with beads of morning dew.
Shelley plucked a strand of gossamer near the web’s center as if he were strumming the world’s most fragile guitar. A spider crawled out of a knothole in the log. Its legs pushed out of the hole as one solid thing, all bundled tight like the ribs of a shut umbrella. To Shelley, it looked like an alien flower coming into bloom.
This one was big. Its bell-shaped body was the size of a Tic Tac. Its color reminded Shelley of the boiled organ meat his mother fed their dog, Shogun. The spider picked its way nimbly across its web. It had mistaken Shelley’s gentle plucking for a trapped insect.