Jeff Jacobson - Wormfood

But then what? Where would I take it? I couldn’t get to Sacramento to a pawn shop. I couldn’t exactly march into the town bank either, drop the buckle on the counter and demand to be paid for it. And it wasn’t like Fat Ernst wouldn’t know who had taken it. He’d hunt me and the buckle down and probably kill me without thinking twice about it. I didn’t have much of a choice.

“I’ve got it,” I called out. If I gave it to Fat Ernst, at least I had the possibility of getting a little cash out of it.

“You do? Oh, thank Christ. Give it here. Hurry!”

“It’s in my arm …” Bert started to cry and snot ran across his lips, leaving clear, glistening tracks in the mud on his face.

“Not yet. I want to make a deal first,” I said, trying to keep my voice strong, and unclipped the buckle from the belt and jeans.

“What kind of fucking deal? Just bring it over here and we’ll talk.”

“I want a bigger share. Five hundred bucks. That’s fair. If this thing’s worth fifteen, twenty grand, then you can pay me five hundred easy. If you don’t think that’s fair, then I’ll just toss it back into the grave, and you can fight those fucking worms for it,” I said, tossing the wet jeans back into the mud. I realized that might have been the longest speech I had ever made to Fat Ernst.

“Don’t you fucking dare. You stinking goddamn … All right. Fuck. All right. You got it. Five hundred. You got it. I swear. Just bring the buckle here.”

I edged around the grave, staying on the outside of the canopy. The last thing I needed to do was to fall back into that quicksand nightmare. As I reached the stone slab, Bert started shrieking, clawing madly at the white plaster, “It’s in my fucking arm! It’s inside!”

Junior grabbed Bert’s cast.

Fat Ernst sidled past Junior and Bert, hand out. “Okay, boy, you made your point. Five hundred. I won’t forget, I promise. Just give it to me.”

I handed it over. Fat Ernst smiled, jerking the buckle out of my hand and slipping it inside his shirt.

Junior said, “I can’t see shit, Bert. You sure it went in there?”

Fat Ernst drew himself up, saying, “Gentlemen, I’m going to clean up and then I’ll head to Sacramento first thing in the morning.” He nodded and added, “You fellas did a good job here.”

Junior gently wiped Bert’s face with the tail of his shirt. “Come on, Bert, let’s go home. Get you some more tranquilizers.” Then he wiped some of the blood away from his own mouth.

We splashed back through the long shadows thrown by the headlights, abandoning the pump, the sledgehammer, the shovels, and the lantern. The rain was still coming down hard, but it felt good as the water slowly washed away the mud and grit on my skin. Fat Ernst didn’t say anything else, just plopped into his Cadillac and took off immediately, roaring away through the walnut orchards. Junior helped Bert into the truck and paused long enough to reel the extension cord back in. Then they too were gone, leaving me alone in the darkness and rain.

But I didn’t mind walking home. Like I said, the rain felt good on my skin. Clean, somehow. And as I walked, I had plenty of time to think about Misty.

And those goddamn worms.

CHAPTER 22

When I got home, Grandma was asleep in her chair, her snoring softly echoing the white noise and static on-screen. I was glad. I didn’t want to have to explain all the mud and blood again. I’d been spending too much time with dead things lately. So I stripped out of my filthy clothes in the backyard and just sat on the steps for a while, letting the falling rain wash the rest of the mud away. After a while, I quietly crept inside and took another long, hot shower. Grandma was going to wonder why the gas bill was so high this month.

After the shower, I grabbed the W and X volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica that Grandpa had bought years ago. One winter he decided to work his way through all of the volumes. I carried the encyclopedia back to my room and turned to the section on WORMS.

It wasn’t much help. There wasn’t a lot of information that fit what I knew about the worms I’d seen. But what did I know about them, really? They ate meat, both alive and dead … So, let’s see, call ’em carnivores. And from what I could tell, they lived in water, both salt water and freshwater. It seemed like they burrowed into the body, eating it from the inside. But other than that, I wasn’t really sure. Whateverthey were, they sure as hell weren’t night crawlers. The only halfway useful thing I did find was something called a “Pompeii worm.” Those things lived in scalding water at the mouths of hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor and could withstand temperatures up to 176 degrees Fahrenheit. That would explain how the eggs or pieces or anything else could survive being cooked inside the hamburgers, if that’s what killed Heck.

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 …