Nick Cutter - The Troop

Tim didn’t answer. The only sound was the creak of the floorboards beneath the man. A few of the cauterized veins split open; dark arterial blood wept down the man’s pale skin.

The tube swelled monstrously, pushing itself out of the rubbery slit in a sudden surge. It emerged incredibly fast, its whiteness stretching to a milky translucence. Tim and Max shielded their faces instinctively, petrified it would explode, splattering them with the contents of its alien body—what could possibly be inside such a thing? Its guts were visible through that sheer web: crazed threshings and phantom pulsations—Max felt as if he were staring through a lard-streaked window into… God, into what ? His fear was whetted to such a fine edge that he could actually feel it now: a disembodied ball of baby fingers inside his stomach, tickling him from the inside. That’s what mortal terror felt like, he realized. Tiny fingers tickling you from the inside.

The tube deflated back inside the man’s stomach for an instant, inflated even more so, and deflated again: its movement echoed a huge lung inhaling and exhaling. Only a few seconds had ticked off the clock, but Max felt as if a minor eternity had passed. Everything moved in slow motion…

Then, with a brutal whiplash, the world sped up.

The tube propelled itself out of the man’s side in a series of fierce pulsations, or what Max’s science teacher, Mr. Lowery, would have called peristaltic flexes . It came with a sly squishing noise, like very wet clay squeezed in a tightened fist.

The balloon or tube or whatever it was became something else. It twisted and split and became a thick white loop: it looked a little like the U-magnets Max used to push around iron filings in Mr. Lowery’s class.

Could it be a hernia? Max’s uncle Frank had one of those. He’d taken off his truss at a family picnic and showed it to him. It had looked like a fist pushing against the flatness of his stomach. I tried to pick up two sacks of cement, Maximilian , Uncle Frank had told him. One sack too many. The pressure forced a little-bitty bit of my innards to squeeze right through the muscle . Uncle Frank had then made a rude farting noise. Out she come, slick as goose poop! It’s peeking through like a clown nose, huh? See it there? Peek-a-boo, Maxxy, I see you! Uncle Frank had given the herniated intestine a little squeeze. Honk, honk! Oh! I feel my lunch moving through… yup, there goes the corn bread . Uncle Frank had not been invited to the following year’s picnic.

But this wasn’t a hernia. Logic told Max so. A hernia was just what his mind had feverishly cobbled together to excuse what he was seeing. A hernia didn’t move. A hernia didn’t pulsate like that.

This thing…

This thing …

The loop became a pale ribbed tube roughly seven inches long. Thicker than a garden hose. Tapered slightly at its tip. It seemed to be made of millimeter-thick rings stacked atop one another. Each ring was gently rounded at its edge. Pearlescent beads squeezed from its surface, clinging to the tube like grains of sand to wet skin.

“Get back,” Tim breathed. “Max, you get the hell back —”

The tube paused. Max got the weirdest sense that it was presenting itself. The gaudiest belle at the debutantes’ ball. Appendages began to unglue themselves from its trunk. It reminded Max of the time he’d come upon a half-hatched bird struggling out of its egg, its wings pulling free of its body all stuck with webby strands of mucus… this looked much the same—or like a Swiss Army knife unfolding its many blades and attachments. These smaller appendages unkinked with the slow, showy grace of a contortionist; they unfurled tortuously in the cabin’s dim light, making gluey lip-smack noises. They looked like the fleshy leaves of desert plants— succulents , those plants were called. Max learned that in science class, too. The very tips of these appendages split in half, lolling open. Max saw tiny fishbone teeth studding each mouth—it was sickeningly beautiful.

Peek-a-boo, Maxxie, I see you .

There is an emotion that operates on a register above sheer terror. It lives on a mindless dog-whistle frequency. Its existence is in itself a horrifying discovery: like scanning a shortwave radio in the dead of night and tuning in to an alien wavelength—a heavy whisper barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues could never speak.

Watching that lithe tube now hunt toward his Scoutmaster like a blind snake, Max hit that register.

“Tim Tim TIM!”

AS Adoctor, Tim had seen plenty of things in human stomachs. Rubber bath plugs and toy cars and Baltic coins and wedding rings. Most of these could be purged using simple regurgitative or saline laxative procedures. The human form held few surprises for him anymore.

But when that white tube threaded out of the incision and tip-tip-tipped toward him as if it were ascending an imaginary staircase, Tim squealed: a shocked piglike sound. He couldn’t get a grip on his sudden fear: it slipped through the safety bars of his mind and threaded— wormed —into the shadowy pockets where nightmares grew.

His scalpel slashed wildly, severing the leading inch of the flickering white tube. The amputated nub fell between Tim’s feet. It writhed and leaked brown fluid. Its plantlike appendages studded with tiny mouths gawped open and shut.

Tim’s arms pinwheeled madly as he tipped backward, landing awkwardly on his ass. The remainder of the tube sucked itself back into the incision like a strand of spaghetti going into a greedy child’s mouth, whipping and snapping and spraying stinking brown gouts.

“Cover your mouth!” Tim screamed. “Don’t let any of it touch you!”

Fists battering the door so hard that dust sifted down from the rafters. The boys’ massing voices, dominated by Kent’s.

“Tim! Max! What’s going on? Open the door!”

The stranger’s body rocked side to side. His feet slipped off the chesterfield and hit the floor with a brittle rattle.

The tube now shot straight up out of the wound, rising in a monstrous ripple. A foot. Two feet. Three feet of oily tube weaved out of the man— the dead man , Tim prayed, the dead man who please God feels none of this —like a headless albino cobra out of an Indian fakir’s basket. It threshed like some obscene bullwhip, leaking brownish fluid. It stood quivering for a long instant, flicking back and forth: it looked as if it was tasting the air, or hunting for smaller and weaker creatures within striking distance.

Which was when the stranger woke up.

His eyelids fluttered, then his eyes went wide—wider than ever should be possible. It was as if the man had awoken from a terrible dream only to find that those terrors were dwarfed by those in the waking world. He loosed a volley of piercing screams—they almost sounded like the snarls of a terrified dog.

“Stay away, Max!” Tim yelled. “Stay back!”

The stranger reached instinctively for the thing coming out of him—his hand died before reaching it, his fingers softening into a caress. His eyes were miserably bright and aware, bulging with pure shock and horror: the eyes of a little boy who’d come face-to-face with the nameless horror lurking under his bed.

“Ug…” was the single syllable that came out of his mouth. A caveman’s grunt of disgust. “Uhg… ug…”

“ Tim! ” Kent screamed. “Open this freakin’ door right now !”

The tips of a boy’s head bobbed at the cabin’s lone high window, a pair of hands hooked on the sill—Ephraim’s hands; they had to be Eef’s—set to boost their owner up for a look inside.