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.