Other than that, there wasn’t much. There weren’t any pictures of worms that came even close to the things in the meat that I’d seen. Most of the worms in the encyclopedia were segmented, while the worms I was looking for were quite smooth. The section on parasitic worms looked hopeful at first, but then I realized they were all too small. You couldn’t even see most of them with the naked eye. Then it struck me—these things lived underwater. In the pit, they squirted around in the water as if propelled by rockets.
So I replaced the W and X volume and grabbed the F volume. The FISH section was huge, so I skimmed through most of it. It wasn’t a simple trout or goddamn goldfish swimming around in Slim’s pit. It wasn’t sharks either. But then I started reading about primitive fishes and knew I was getting closer. Especially when I saw a picture of a lamprey. Lampreys are like eels, almost snakelike in their appearance. Their mouths are round, and they seem more like a leech than anything else.
The lampreys in the picture didn’t have the tendrils around the mouth. Close, but not quite. Something else was mentioned in that section, something called a hagfish, or “slime eel,” but there weren’t any pictures.
Hagfish, I thought. Something about the name sounded right.
I grabbed the H volume, flipped through a few pages, and there it was, staring at me, in full color and ugly as anything I’d even seen. Even Fat Ernst on the toilet couldn’t compare. A goddamn hagfish. The picture wasn’t exact; the worms I had seen had black spots running the length of their bodies, and it seemed like the tail was a little different, but it was awful close. Then I started reading, and wished I hadn’t.
Hagfish lived in the cold mud on the bottom of the ocean, in dense groups, up to fifteen thousand in one area. My scalp started itching, and it was all I could do not to scratch, because then I’d be scratching wildly at my whole body, chasing phantom worms all night. They would burrow into dead or dying fish and eat them from the inside. They had a large, circular mouth with a muscular tongue and two rows of strong, sharp teeth. I rubbed the circular wound on my hand. The scab was healing nicely, but it still hurt like hell.
The hagfish could reach lengths of up to three feet.
I swallowed, trying to not to picture one of those worms that big. Hagfish mostly fed off of dead whales, crawling in through the mouth, the eyes, or the anus. Ray’s voice popped up in my head, talking about Earl, “… and I ain’t talking about his goddamn mouth, neither.”
Everything fell into place, into perfect clarity, as if I had suddenly managed to focus my binoculars. Earl falls off the boat, dies, and sinks to the bottom, right there at the mouth of the Klamath River. Then these things, these hagfish, or something close, some kind of mutant aberration maybe, don’t ask me, slide into his body, chowing down on his insides, and lay their eggs, or simply go to sleep in there or whatever. A week later, his body gets pulled out of the water and shipped home. He’s in his coffin, being taken to the cemetery, when I manage to hit the hearse with the Sawyer brothers’ truck and knock the coffin into the ditch. And the baby worms get set loose in the ditch water. I figured the difference between freshwater and salt water didn’t bother them much. Look at salmon; they’re born in freshwater, swim downstream into the ocean, into the salt water, then swim back upstream into freshwater to spawn. So the worms, they headed upstream, up the ditch, maybe smelling meat from Slim’s body pit, I don’t know, but they end up in the pit and God knows where else. But they’re in the pit, that’s for goddamn sure, feasting on all those dead carcasses …
And then we had to go and pull one of the steers out for meat.
I shut the book with a snap. I’d read enough. I’d read more than I wanted to. I shook my head to clear out some of the images of those things, of hundreds, even thousands of hagfish inside of a dead whale; those things eating Earl’s guts; the colony of worms in the pit; the worms in the middle of the steer intestines; and the burning pain in Heck’s eyes as he died. I crawled into bed but I didn’t sleep much. And when I did finally drift off, I wished I hadn’t.
I blinked once, twice. I shook my head and looked around. I was sitting in the middle of a small rowboat as it floated out across endless ocean swells that melted into a dull sky. I couldn’t find any oars, so I just hung onto the bench tightly. The wood felt soft and wet, like an old sponge, and I was scared the seat would crumble into wet splinters under my fingers. Fishhooks and old fishing lines lay in a tangled heap at the bottom of the boat.
I sensed a pale sun somewhere behind me, floating just beyond the low clouds, giving the water and sky a flat, gray color. I risked turning my head to look behind me for any sign of land and the little boat tilted to one side with a sickening feeling. For one gut-wrenching moment, I felt the tiny craft lurch over and I thought I was going to fall in. So I whipped my head back, desperately trying to find the balance that had kept me safe this long. Naturally, the boat rolled over unsteadily the other way. I clutched the wooden sides and shifted slightly, and the boat’s rocking slowly subsided.
The wind died.
I felt something on my head and looked up, felt soft wetness splash my face. It was raining. The drops felt unnaturally warm, like a shower. I spread my arms, momentarily forgetting where I was, and let the rain gently wash my fear away. The water ran down my naked chest and back, cleansing and refreshing. It felt … wonderful. I opened my mouth, drinking in as much of the rain as I could. It tasted sweet, and I swallowed. But as it trickled down my throat, it left a foul aftertaste, like something had died long ago and had been soaking in the water ever since.
I closed my mouth suddenly and opened my eyes.
The raindrops were now a dark, unsettling color. I pulled my arms back in and tried to wipe off my face, my shoulders, my chest, but it was no use. I was covered in slimy, brackish water. It gave off a sick odor as well, like fish that had washed up on a cold, desolate beach and had taken a long time to decompose. The rowboat was rapidly filling up with rainwater.
And it was beginning to sink.
I spit off to the side, trying to clear my mouth of the ugly aftertaste, and breathed through clenched teeth. The gob of spit floated slowly away on water that was now flat as glass. I looked down; the discolored water was now up to my ankles. The hooks and lines floated around in it like a confused spiderweb. I pulled my bare feet quickly out and propped them in the bow of the boat.
A splash.
The floating ball of spit was gone, leaving nothing but expanding circles of ripples.
Despite the color of the rain, the ocean seemed clearer somehow, as if the lack of swells made the depths more visible. I could see speckled, constantly shifting bands of weak sunlight stabbing down into the gloom. Something dark was moving down there. It glided slowly, almost lazily, into the shafts of light, moving upward.
My heart began to beat a little faster and I felt a sudden sense of vertigo, as if I were floating above an immense sky, so I cautiously centered myself in the boat. The gut-churning vertigo made my hands shake. It felt as if I was about to fall from an immense cliff.
The rain continued, and the water in the bottom of the boat got deeper. I brought my hands together and cupped them, trying not to upset the balance while flinging water out of the boat. A crack appeared in the floorboards, growing silently until it disappeared beneath me. A tiny group of bubbles grew from within the narrow space of the crack and floated gently to the surface. They broke and fizzed quietly.