Nick Cutter - The Troop

“You saw it, didn’t you?” Shelley asked dully. “The worm.”

Shelley noticed the yellowish tinge to Ephraim’s eyes. It was as if the oily madness in his brain had leeched into his corneas.

Ephraim’s upper lip quivered. His chin went dimply as a golf ball. “It’s still inside me, Shel.”

“Is that so?”

“Can’t you fuckin’ see , man? Can’t you see it ?”

The pleading note in Ephraim’s voice was auditory honey sliding into Shelley’s ears. He furrowed his brow and stared intently at Ephraim—then he drew back suddenly. His head swept side to side, a sad and solemn gesture.

“I’m afraid so. It’s still there. Didn’t you do as I said?”

Ephraim’s mouth twisted into a furious snarl; it was quickly replaced by a scrawl of breathless panic. “I tried! I did exactly what you said. You got to get it out.”

“Why couldn’t you do that?” Twisting the knife in a person’s psyche was nearly as much fun as twisting it in living flesh, Shelley had found. “Is it because you’re weak, like everyone says?”

Ephraim wept silently, clutching at Shelley. “I can’t do it. It’s sneaky.” Leaning to one side, he spat a reeking sack of blood onto the grass. “Can’t… I can’t…”

Shelley’s expression remained placid—hesitant even—but a mad light capered behind his eyes.

“Want me to get it for you?”

“Do you have a knife?”

Shelley nodded. “Of course.” He had a Buck knife with a five-inch blade, an inch and a half longer than the Scouts’ official limit.

“Do you really see it, Shel? The worm?”

After a beat, Shelley said: “I saw it, Eef. It was in back of your eyes for a moment. A ripply thread behind the whites.”

Ephraim made the most wretched, delightful sound Shelley had ever heard.

“You’ve got to get it out of me. I can’t stand it.”

“Okay, Eef.” Shelley smiled, a happy camper. His teeth looked much bigger now with the gums peeling back. “But first, you have to say one thing.”

“What?”

“You have to say please .”

“Please.” Ephraim clutched at the hem of Shelley’s pants, squealing. “Please.”

Shelley stifled his giggles—they built in his stomach like effervescent soda bubbles, rising up his throat in a hysterical wave. He didn’t find any of this genuinely funny; not at all. Ephraim had offered him a rare gift. The rarest. It took so much to penetrate the senseless jelly that enrobed Shelley’s brain—took so much to make him feel . But now he was feeling so, so much—needles of light streamed across his vision, unearthly and pure like a rift into Heaven.

He snapped the blade of his Buck knife into position. “I’ll do it, but only because we’re friends.”

A look of pitiful gratefulness came over Ephraim’s face. “Yes,” he breathed. “Get it out.”

Shelley’s eyes cut down to the beach. No sign of Newt or Max. He’d sharpened the knife the night before their trip. He was scrupulous about such matters. You could split a doll’s hair with the blade—split it into thirds .

He brought it down to Ephraim’s face. He circled the tip around his earlobe and up around the teacup handle of his ear. The skin broke easily, just the first layer of epidermis. Blood teared up along the cut.

“Did you see it there?” Ephraim asked.

Shelley said: “In your ear, yes. It poked out for a second. I saw it wriggling.”

Ephraim’s fingers whitened around the table’s edges. “Oh God . Please, Shel. I can’t stand to have it in me.”

“Mm-hmm,” Shelley said, casually flirting the blade around the basin of Ephraim’s ear. The steel tip brushed the microscopic hairs guarding his inner ear.

“Turn your head,” he said sternly. “I need to see down.”

Ephraim shifted onto his side. His eyes stared glassily at Shelley’s swollen belly. A few buttons had popped off Shelley’s shirt. Ephraim could see his lumped-up flesh through the vent. The inflamed anthills seemed to be twitching and breathing.

Shelley gripped Ephraim’s jaw with his free hand. How would it feel to sink the knife into Ephraim’s ear? Would he encounter resistance or would it be like stabbing a brick of cold butter? He pictured Ephraim staggering up with the knife hilt protruding from his ear, his smile beatific as he screamed: Did you get it? Did you? DID YOU?

Instead, he idly slid the knife up Ephraim’s head into his thick hairline. The flesh opened up as if by magic. A pair of red lips cut through the dark mane. Shelley thought of Moses parting the Red Sea. In the middle of the incision, he could see a vein-threaded rift of skull bone. Endorphins rushed through Shelley’s system, lighting his neurons up like a pinball machine.

Ephraim didn’t cry out. Instead he trembled with an outrush of powerful emotion and whispered: “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Shelley hacked a half-moon into Ephraim’s head. Blood of a shockingly vibrant red sheeted down the boy’s face.

“Thank you,” he kept mumbling with pathetic gratefulness as the blood bubbled over his lips. “Do you see it? Oh please find it. Thank you thank you thank you…”

Shelley was remotely disgusted by Ephraim’s behavior, but also fascinated. Ephraim’s psychosis had some weird narcotizing effect. He wondered: If he cut around Ephraim’s head until he hit the initial incision, could he tear his scalp off? Just like the Indians used to do. If so, would Ephraim even care?

The notion that he could be here for hours, hacking into a willing victim, sectioning Ephraim apart piece by piece, was thrilling in the extreme… and if things kept swinging his way, he wouldn’t have to dispose of the body as he’d done with Trixy. Once he’d relished Ephraim’s death, extracted from him the secrets Kent had witheld—and once Max and Newton were dead, too, a task he foresaw as daunting but still achievable—once they were all dead, Shelley would have their bodies all to himself. He could arrange them around the fire, posing their limbs and thumbing their stiffening faces into expressions he couldn’t quite comprehend, playing with the blood that wept like treacle from their wounds… or he could cut them to pieces and reorganize them—different heads on different bodies—insulting them in death by disgracing their corpses, which would be funny, terribly funny, so funny that the giggles started to rise in his throat again. Afterward he could leave them to the insects: their bodies would become shelter and nourishment for beetles and slugs and worms. Yes, they’d be worm food.

But Shelley had to be careful—the other two would soon return. Shelley thought he could hear their voices near the fire pit. He bit his lip, thinking.

Finally he said: “Wait here, Eef. I’ll be right back.”

He shambled around to the generator, rocking it to see if any gas was left. There was. He descended into the cellar and found an empty mason jar. Then he popped the valve on the generator and drained gasoline into the jar.

He returned to Ephraim and said: “I can’t cut it out, Eef. It’s too sneaky. The only way to get it is to burn it out.”

Ephraim’s eyes were very white and wide in the bloody mask of his face. Shelley’s words came to him as a revelation. They were the most sensible words anyone had ever spoken. Fire purifies all.

Shelley set the jar next to him.

“Burn it out, Ephraim. It’s the only way, my friend.” Shelley touched Ephraim’s twitching face with great tenderness. “You know that, don’t you? You’re my very best friend.”

Ephraim swallowed. For a moment it seemed he would bat Shelley’s grublike fingers away—but they dropped of their own accord. Shelley handed Ephraim his barbecue lighter.