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 pooclass="underline" 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.”