“Honestly, Felix, I don’t want to do this,” Shelby stammered, her voice cracking. There were tears pouring down her cheeks and she was speaking quickly, words spilling out of her so fast that he felt like they were flooding the car, like he would drown in all those frantic words. “I didn’t want to come,” she sobbed, “and I still don’t want to be here. I don’t want to see it again. I don’t want to know if … if it copied her. If it gave her face to one of those things. I’ve probably already lost my job. My girlfriend keeps calling and I don’t know what to tell her. How did you do it? How did you do this alone for so long? I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, Felix. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
He took her hand, not knowing what else to do, and for a few nerve-wracking moments drove on one-handed through the storm until, with a gentle press of her lips to his knuckles, she released her grip and let him focus on the road.
“I don’t want to do it either,” he said after a while, laughing a little past the sudden knot of grief in his chest. The Impala’s engine growled as they started up a hill. “I never wanted to do any of it.”
Lara hadn’t been home in sixteen years, not since the summer Needful Things had come out and she and Jason Proulx had gone to see it half a dozen times, making out discreetly in the air-conditioned gloom of the dilapidated Boise Regal. No one from Saint Michael’s ever went there; they liked the big AMC a few miles down the drag with its high, soaring ceilings and its arcade where you could play WaveRunner on a lacquered model Jet Ski that moved with you when you shifted your weight in the seat. The summer her parents had sent her to Camp Resolution.
The house hadn’t changed much. Same off-white trim—the plastic kind, machined to look like wood grain—same aboveground pool covered with the same frayed blue-and-silver tarp weighted down by bricks. The place where she’d grown up was a sprawling cape with a two-car garage attached and a pair of dormers on the street-facing side, like a chameleon’s bulbous eyes peering out at the infrequent traffic and the cyclists and dog walkers. Lara couldn’t see the road from where she stood up at the tree line with the others, but if she closed her eyes she could recall the way the glare from passing headlights had washed over her bedroom in the night. She could imagine the two maple trees in the front yard and the snow-covered field, wild wheat pushing through the frozen crust, stretching out and up the rocky hillside toward the belt of pines between her parents’ property and the Wingardt farm.
They were forty minutes from the nearest grocery store out here. Not quite in the sticks, but sticks-adjacent. Miles of woods behind them. Miles more across the street where the ground fell away into wetlands and rose up again under thick carpets of rust-colored pine needles and clearings where in the spring lady slippers bloomed from beds of soft green moss and fiddleheads swayed, curled and dreaming. It was out there that she’d sucked off Max Shannon on a hot, sticky summer day. Out there that she and her dog, a border collie mutt named Eli, had found the doe laid out on the logging road, hit by a truck and left blowing blood and mucus in the dirt and struggling hard to get her legs under her. It was land where you could hide things, sink them into murky water or leave them lying far out in the woods, past the sound of cars, for the black bears and the buzzards.
“There,” whispered John, pointing. His nose and lips were red and chapped with the cold and raspberry brambles had left his thick forearm ribboned with scratches. They’d been in the woods to the west of the property for most of the morning, waiting for the things that had once been Lara’s parents to leave for work. “The window. See?”
Lara followed the line from his finger to the shadow gliding black across the kitchen curtains. A man in silhouette, tall and slender against the red fabric. They weren’t her mother’s curtains, which had been white linen with a simple fringe of lace, but heavy doubled panels of red wool. The same kind hung in every window, all drawn flush and heavily backlit by some unseen light source.
It must be sweltering in there, thought Lara as the shadow vanished, gliding on toward the breezeway. Hot and wet and thick. Like morning in August.
“We should just burn it down,” hissed Shelby. Her pale, round face was flushed from hiking through the woods, her black hair plastered by sweat to her throat and forehead even in the biting chill. “I don’t want to go in.” She swallowed. “I can’t. We should burn it. We should burn it and watch the doors. So it doesn’t get out.”
“We have a plan,” said Lara, wiping spit and perspiration from her upper lip with the sleeve of her worn, greasy flannel shirt. With her free hand she tested her backpack’s frayed left strap. Her shoulders were raw where the straps had rubbed against them during their hike through the snow in from the woodlot off the nameless logging road at the town limit. “No fire.”
We can’t get what we need from a corpse.
They began their advance across the snowy lawn not long after, John looking up from his watch and giving Lara the nod. It was just past eight in the morning. The sun shone pale on the backs of their necks and the wind blew loose powder over the frozen crust that cracked and gave under their boots. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been outside like this in winter.
Near the western corner of the house, a red door stood out against the oyster-colored siding. In front of it sat a decaying wooden stoop, a single step built flush against the few inches of concrete foundation exposed under the trim. Lara knelt down beside it, squinting into the dark between the short, stout wooden legs she’d watched her father measure and cut in his workshop on a muggy afternoon seventeen or eighteen years ago. His big, callused hands, his sweaty blue-gray T-shirt with the Horn & Carter Building and Remodeling logo on the chest, the text stylized to fit within the outline of a two-story house.
You wanna hand me the level? Can’t have your mom tripping on her way out to the pool.
Lara groped along the underside of the rotting stoop, fighting to breathe past the lump in her throat as her fingers encountered nothing but spongy wood and empty spiderwebs. It’s gone, said a small voice in the back of her mind. They found it, took it. You’ll have to break a window and he’ll hear you, and he’ll get you, and—Her forefinger found blessed plastic, pebbly and cool to the touch. She slid the hide-a-key’s tongue out, pressing down to pop the plastic teeth loose from their tracks, and the key fell into her palm. Still there, the same one she’d copied at the Home Depot in the Heights the fall before her parents had sent her to Camp Resolution. She straightened up, brushing her sweat-damp hair out of her face, and tried the back door. The lock hadn’t been changed. She nearly sobbed with relief when the key turned without sound or resistance and the flaking red door drifted open.
They took off their boots and went single file into the bathroom, slinking past their own reflections in the water-stained mirror over the robin’s-egg-blue sink and peeling Formica countertop, opposite the washer and dryer. The stifling humidity settled over them like a film, smothering all memory of the chill outside. The yellowed linoleum was cool under Lara’s bare feet. Felix eased the outer door shut as Lara wrapped her hand around the inner’s handle, pressing down on the thumb plate. A low growl of metal on metal, burrs or rust scraping away, and a wave of humid air broke over them, bringing with it a sugary-sweet stench. Orange soda drying to a sticky chemical mess in the heat. Aspartame dissolved in sour milk. Lara gagged, hand flying to cover her mouth and nose as her eyes began to water.
The heat was on full blast in the living room, boxy humidifiers gurgling in three of its four corners, condensation sliding down their sleek white plastic casings. Pale greenish light leaked from a single bulb in the uncovered overhead. Mold grew in feathery gray-white swathes over the upholstery of the couch against the east wall and the love seat against the south under the big bay windows, now curtained. The television burbled, a sitcom wavering on a magnet-spoiled screen behind a partial skin of mold and lichen. Jim Belushi gesticulating in dead silence. The closet door and beside it the door to the westernmost part of the house, the old part from before the fire, looked sealed by how much they’d swollen, bulging in their frames so that wood deformed against wood in rolls that seemed to Lara almost fleshlike. Only the bathroom door’s heavy coats of varnish had preserved it from the same fate.
East to the kitchen, clammy sweat beading on her forehead and running into her eyes. The air was thick and wet enough to chew. Something black leaking out from under the refrigerator. Fungus forcing its way up between the narrow floorboards in spongy clamshell ridges of brown and orange and something—spores or seed pods—drifting gauzy in the air. Her father had slapped her there for the first time, between the cabinets and the breakfast island. Clang of pots and pans from under the butcher-block countertop and then the window seat where her mother’s little dogs had stood, forepaws on the windowsill, to bark at the cars that pulled in and out of the long driveway. Across the room, the door to the breezeway stood open and shadows moved over the wood-paneled stretch of wall beyond it. The sound of running water drifted through the doorway, a steady gurgle underscored by sonorous plops and plunks. Felix stepped into the lead, pistol drawn.
She looked to the others. Bloodless faces. Watering eyes. They looked sick, and the sticky-sweet smell was getting stronger. John had a crowbar they’d bought in town. Shelby gripped a can of mace. Mal hung back a little, face ashen. Lara chewed the inside of her cheek and fingered her backpack’s shoulder strap, the feathery-soft fibers of its fraying edge gliding over each other beneath her touch. The music of the falling water seemed like the only sound in the world. She wanted more than anything to run from this place, to forget it existed, to forget all these people she loved and the things they’d been forced to know and to carry, alone.
Felix was first through the door. John and Mal followed, Jo behind them, and then Lara was stepping down from the cracked wooden threshold, the inside of her mouth coated in that cum-and-melted-Skittles smell, gluey and saccharine, her skin washed in fierce blue-white light from the banks of rack-mounted grow lights overhead.
Somewhere, she knew, were the front door and another, leading into the garage and the barn above it where her father’s business had been headquartered, but all that she could see were rows of hydroponic towers, and all that she could hear was the low snarl of the tower motors circulating water out of the cisterns at their bases where dark shapes like tadpoles wriggled and squirted among vascular traceries of vines. Sticky green-white fronds caressed her bare arms and slid over her cheeks, leaving behind snail trails of slime. Other things, fleshy and half-formed, twitched among the vegetation. The air was almost unbreathable now. She heard the dull thunk of metal striking flesh.
They had it pinned by the time she reached them. It lay on its back, Jo holding its legs, Shelby kneeling on its right arm, Felix on its left, John behind it with its head pressed against his belly and his crowbar against its throat. Its eyes were squeezed shut, swollen and red, and blood matted its short, light hair, but she knew its face. Knew and loved and hated it. Had filled in its thin, colorless eyebrows and plucked the fine wisps of its mustache from its upper lip a thousand times. Had traced its jutting cheekbones with a contouring brush and tugged turtlenecks up over its protruding Adam’s apple. It had stared back at her from the mirror every morning of her life.
It wasn’t a dream.
She approached and knelt at its left shoulder between Shelby and John, swinging her backpack off her shoulders as she did. Overhead a ceiling fan turned slowly, its blades dragging skeins of ghostly moss. She fished through the bag, pushing past power bars and bottles of Gatorade, and found what she was looking for. She flicked the safety toggle on the butt of the cordless drill. It was heavy in her hands, a satisfying weight.
“Hurry,” John puffed, pulling back on both ends of the crowbar as the thing squirmed, nails scratching at the flagstones.
Lara set the bit against the thing’s high forehead, forcing herself not to look into its puffy, Mace-burned eyes as it forced them open, forcing herself to ignore the things that it was saying, the sound of her own voice pleading for its life, offering them money, and with a squeeze the drill came whirring to life, the molded black rubber of the grip deforming under her fingers. The bit churned skin with a rough, chugging squelch. The drill bucked in Lara’s hands. The whine of the electric motor deepened as it caught and began to grind through bone. A fine thread of white smoke rose from the bloody wound.
“Jesus Christ,” said Jo, and for a sickening moment, as the thing screamed itself hoarse with the drill’s bit between its eyes, Lara was convinced they’d made a horrible mistake, that this was just some weird, reclusive botanist and they were about to murder him, that they’d had some kind of trauma when they were teenagers and it had broken them and the story they thought they remembered was nothing more than fragments of science fiction and Stephen King paperbacks glued together over the years.
Bone broke. The bit plunged in.
The thing’s skull opened up like a time-lapse clip of the world’s most disgusting crocus blooming. Wet flaps of meat lined with mismatched and broken teeth snapped at Lara as John hauled back on the crowbar across its throat.
“Now,” said Felix. He looked so calm, even with the Gabe-thing clawing at his forearm with its free hand. Mal had its other arm pinned tight. Shelby stepped forward and tipped the little plastic dime bag into the red gape of the thing’s writhing face. Blue-white dust coated raw flesh. Malformed tongues lashed in drooling panic, only succeeding in licking up more of the crushed pale blue crystal. A yellowish eye rolled in the soup behind its opened face. It sneezed, spraying blood through its teeth, and its back arched like a bow as it began to scream. Lara lost her grip on the drill. She fell back, her mind blank.
The thing boiled. There was no other word for it. Its flesh heaved and bubbled. Its bloodied and distorted features swelled, splitting down the middle. Its scream de-synced like a corrupted video file, the right half of the face gibbering unintelligibly as the left gaped in a raw wail of anguish, strings of muscle and sinew struggling to form some kind of throat. There was a little half face taking shape halfway down its right forearm, a whimpering mouth sliding like a fried egg on a greased skillet toward the back of its hand. Bones unstuck themselves from joints and sockets, dragging sails of skin behind them as they fragmented and reformed, serpentine vertebrae squirming away from the shrinking knot of matter. Fingers wriggled like maggots away from waggling metacarpals. Belly splitting, intestines slithering between withered thighs from which skin hung in gummy tatters.
The others backed away from it as something in its chest collapsed, flesh tearing, slick lumps of meat worming their way out through the holes. Lara couldn’t move. She sat pinned to the spot, watching. A lung. The heart. Raw, stubby limbs propelled them over a morass of sagging skin. Wattles of excess dermis. For an instant, amid all that writhing ugliness, its face, Gabe’s face, came back together, the halves of its discordant scream united in an ear-splitting shriek, and then its jaw popped from its hinge and folded back over itself, inverting to show only slimy membrane and the bizarre architecture of a mouth reversed, teeth raining down onto the floor like a fistful of dropped M&M’s, and the sound became a wet and stifled moan, and ceased.
A toddler-sized chunk of its torso, which fell free and dragged itself on rejointed rib bones a few inches across the mold-furred tiles, was the last thing to stop moving, folding over on itself again and sagging from its bones. The smell of it burned Lara’s nostrils. “Come on,” said Felix, taking her arm. “Come on, Lara. Let’s go.”
It was only as Felix pulled her to her feet that she saw the sad little forms lying curled among the overgrowth. Withered lips peeled back from blackened gums. Eyelids sagging into empty sockets. Felix caught her as she threw herself against him, sobbing.
“Mom,” she moaned past the lump in her throat, a knot of love and hate and loss swelling huge in her chest. “Oh God, Mom.”
They filed out of the house the same way they’d come in. Lara tried not to think about the grasping hands she’d seen among the leaves, the kneeling figures clinging to each other in a grotesque human archway, bodies scaled with fungal growths and flaking skin. She tried not to think of her mother’s hand—the same hand—twitching there on the warm, dirty stone tiles, of the shell of her father staring vacantly at nothing, pale vomit dribbling down his chin, and behind him something that might have been her sister. She tried not to think of her own face unzipping itself like a plastic bag full of spoiled soup.
“Okay,” said Lara, not looking at the others. Her breath smoked in the air. She started back toward where they’d left the gas cans in the shadows under the trees, snow crunching underfoot. The cold stung her face as she looked back over her shoulder at the house. “Now we can burn it.”
XXI CLUSTER B
It was past three in the morning when John pulled off the highway on the outskirts of Boise and navigated a maze of empty streets to the parking lot of the Motel 8 Shelby had mentioned in her text. He took the space next to Felix’s Impala and killed the rental’s engine. Jo had ripped the GPS out of the dash for him and changed his plates not far outside of Reno; the agency had called repeatedly for days until they’d all tossed their phones and bought burners at a strip mall. He wondered, as he hauled himself out of the driver’s seat and stamped his aching feet on the cracked pavement to force some feeling back into them, if he’d ever be able to rent another apartment after all of this.
