Nick Cutter - The Troop

Eef said: “Do you have any idea how stupid you are, Max?”

“Don’t lock the door,” Max said, holding Ephraim’s gaze. “We’re coming back. Come on, Kent.”

THREE BOYSskirted the cabin’s edge. The wind blew with such gale force that it elicited shrieks from everything it touched. The logs shrieked as it lashed at their unflexing angles; the trees shrieked as gusts threatened to uproot them from the ground; even the grass shrieked—a thin and razor-fine whistle—as the wind danced between every blade. Rain needled down so hard that they felt as though their faces and arms would be sliced open: like walking through a storm of paper cuts.

Kent stumbled, arms outflung. Max reached impulsively—Newton’s hand manacled his wrist. Newton shook his head and mouthed: You can’t touch him .

Kent dragged himself out of the muddy stew, his boots slipping—they looked too big all of a sudden, his feet swimming in them—and followed Newton to the woodpile. It was rung by stacked cinder blocks and edged by trees; the wind wasn’t quite so bad.

“Stay here!” Newton had to holler to make himself heard.

Kent knelt, too tired to argue. The boys folded the woodpile tarp and settled it over Kent’s shivering shoulders. Earwigs and millipedes and wood lice and deer ticks squirmed from the dead logs, startled by the storm. Crawling and twitching through the mud, they skittered up the tarp. Max reached out to brush them away, revolted at the thought of touching them but even more revolted at the possibility they’d alight on Kent’s skin and hair. Newt grabbed his hand again.

Kent didn’t seem to mind. His eyes darted, charting the course of those milling bugs.

Newton said: “We’ll come get you soon!”

Kent’s head swiveled. A mechanical motion, like a toy abandoned in the rain. Lightning creased the sky and seemed to penetrate his flesh, igniting his bones in skeletal relief. His lips split in a grin that sent gooseflesh up the nape of Max’s neck.

An earwig squirmed round the cup of Kent’s ear, tracked across his face, and hung like a squirming fat raindrop from the boy’s lower lip.

“Kent,” Max breathed, horror twining up his spine like a weed. “There’s a…”

Kent’s tongue snaked between his teeth, curled lovingly around the earwig, and drew it into his mouth. His eyes never left theirs.

WHEN EPHRAIMwas eight, his mother took him to visit the mausoleum where his grandmother was kept. He remembered feeling slightly curious beforehand. Back then, Ephraim still held a healthy curiosity about death.

He remembered the thin acrid smell that had attended their entrance into the granite rostrum. The sterilized smell of death. It wasn’t the flyblown battlefield reek with its sweetness that was kissing cousin to a truly good smell—barbecued pork, maybe—a sensual similarity that made it all the more sickening. This was sanitized and tolerable. An ammoniac mothball smell overlying subtle decay.

Ephraim caught that same pungent smell as he’d crept down the cabin’s cellar steps. His heart made a giddy leap—what had died down here?

Ephraim had watched as Max and Newton guided Kent behind the cabin, wind snapping their clothes against their frames like flags flapping on a pole. A thin needle of regret had lanced through his heart. He’d argued with Max about abandoning Kent—and they never argued. Rage had pounded at Ephraim’s temples as his neck flushed with heat. No fists had been swung, but it’d been a fight all the same.

That bothered and confused him. Ephraim possessed a keen sense of fairness. He’d inherited that from his father; the only phrase he could ever recall him saying was: You pay what you owe . And his dad was paying now, in prison. Kent had earned his ills, hadn’t he? He needed to pay what he owed.

But where did that leave Ephraim now? In a cellar with Shelley Longpre—the last alignment he’d ever seek.

He pulled the doors shut, latching them from the inside. The wind and rain roared and bashed the cabin above. The swaybacked steps groaned under his feet. Long, straggly tendrils trailed lightly across Ephraim’s face: they felt like the dangling, unnaturally long limbs of a daddy longlegs spider.

He lit one of the candles he’d scavenged. It illuminated Shelley’s face—his skin seemed to radiate a light all its own, a greasy luminescence as if glowworms were stitched under it. Shadows, made misshapen and monstrous by the wavering candlelight, scurried along the cellar walls. The root systems of trees and plants dangled down from the roof.

Ephraim walked the perimeter. Empty, barren. A musty boat tarp was heaped in one corner. The heap seemed to expand and contract in the fitful light.

“Sit down, Eef.”

Shelley sat cross-legged on the dirt. With his long limbs folded, knees and elbows kinked, he looked vaguely insectile, like a potato bug curled into a protective ball, only its gray exoskeleton showing… or one of those cockroaches that would scuttle up the drains during island storms—the ones that hissed when you squashed them.

“Nah, I’m good.”

“You were right,” Shelley said. “About Kent. He deserved it. He brought it down on himself.”

Something unshackled in Ephraim’s chest. He didn’t hate Kent—it was a question of fairness, was all. You pay what you owe .

“Max will understand,” Shelley said softly. “Even Newton. Before long they’ll see how right you were.”

There was something oddly narcotic about Shelley’s monotone drawl. Ephraim felt sluggish and just a bit queasy—that happy-sick feeling he got in his belly after riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Montague Fair.

“Come,” Shelley patted the dirt. “Sit.”

It seemed less a request, more a subtle directive. Ephraim sat. Shelley’s body kicked off ambient warmth, moist and weirdly salty like the air wafting from the mouth of a volcanic sea cave. He slid one pale, whiplike arm over Ephraim’s shoulder—an oily, frictionless, hairless appendage slipping across, smooth and dense like a heavy rubber hose. His fingers thrummed on Ephraim’s bare flesh; Ephraim wanted to brush them away, their tacky warmth making him mildly revolted, but that narcotic sluggishness prevented him from doing so. Shelley’s arm constricted just a little—he was stronger than he looked—pulling Ephraim close.

“You’re in charge now, Eef. Isn’t that just awesome? That’s how it should’ve been all along, isn’t it?”

“I don’t… don’t really care about that.”

Shelley smiled—a knowing expression. “Sure you don’t.”

“I don’t. Sincerely.” Rage crept up Ephraim’s throat, burning like bile. “Shut your fucking mouth, Shel.”

Shelley’s smile persisted. The edgeless grin of a moron. His teeth were tiny—Ephraim had never noticed before. Like niblet corn. Bands of yellow crust rimmed each tooth. Did Shelley ever brush his teeth? Did something like Shelley even think about stuff like that?

Some thing like Shelley? Ephraim thought. Someone, I mean. Some one.

“Relax, Eef. I’m on your side.”

Where the hell were Max and Newt? Ephraim wished like hell they were here now; anything was better than being cooped up

( trapped? )

in this dank cellar with Shelley. Lightning flashed, igniting the slit where the cellar doors met in camera-flash incandescence. Thunder boomed with such force that it seemed to bulge the planks overhead, rattling Ephraim’s heart in its fragile cage of bone.