The Troop

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 pool: 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.