Nick Cutter - The Troop

The temperature dipped by ten degrees as soon as he entered the cave. The air came out of his lungs in short, popping breaths—it almost sounded like he was hiccuping, or on the verge of having a good cry. The fear was as strong as ever: that disembodied ball of baby fingers relentlessly tickling his guts.

One foot in front of the other , he told himself. You can always run. You can pelt out of here like your ass is on fire .

It amazed him that the voice in his head—confident, jokey—could be so different from the piss-scared boy it resided within.

At least he had a flare. The journey was much less disorienting with a light to go by. Salt sparkled on the sea-eaten rock, tinted bloodred by the flare light.

The rocky shelves were overgrown with patches of sickly yellow moss. Colonies of huge white toadstools jutted from the cave walls at lunatic angles; they hung like fleshy ears, their undersides frilled with soft gills—or in some cases, little spikelike teeth. Max’s neck came in contact with one as he rounded a sharp bend in the descent, and it felt horridly clammy and bloated, like the flesh of a waterlogged body coughed up from the sea.

The air was still sweet but didn’t seem as cloying. His breath came shallowly. He could hear the blood beat in his ears. The flare sputtered.

Don’t you go out , Max thought—prayed. Oh don’t you dare go out .

He came to the mouth of the chamber. The smell was strangely enticing: sweet plums packed in salt. The air was alive with sounds, curiously stealthy, over the drip of water. He held the flare aloft. The chamber’s ceiling was clad in the same yellow moss; tendrils of witchgrass draped down. Trundling over the moss, clinging to its spongy folds, was an army of sea creatures: sand crabs and pulpy slugs and huge sightless beetles Max had never seen before. The clicking of their pincers and other appendages created a mammoth chittering above his head.

The Shelley-thing lay to the side of the chamber. Its limbs were spiked out at odd angles; it looked like a dead spider pressed flat between the pages of a dictionary. So small . Death did that, didn’t it? Shrunk everything. It lay in the same position as it had yesterday… didn’t it?

He wasn’t so sure now. Maybe it had inched away from the cave wall—but how could it have done that? He pictured the things inside of Shelley doing that… somehow pulling Shelley’s lifeless body along the cave floor.

Max wondered if the chamber was fed by an aquifer leading out to sea. The tide might have rolled in, flooding the chamber. That would explain the sea life on the ceiling: he didn’t think they’d been there before. It would also explain the Shelley-thing’s positioning: the body would’ve floated up with the tide, bumping around the chamber, brushing into the walls, becoming saturated with seawater before settling on the floor as the tide flowed out.

Had some of those worms flowed out with the tide? Max imagined them wriggling through the water, latching on to a codfish, which got eaten by a seal, which got eaten by a shark, which got caught in a drift net and hauled on board a trawler and slit open on the dock, billions of worms spilling out in front of the perplexed crewmen…

Or maybe Shelley’s body was in the exact same position. It’d been dark and crazy. Yes, Max figured. It was in the same spot. Yes .

He squinted past the sputtering flare light. Was anything else moving? He thought he saw floating flickers in the air—but no, no , those were just vapor contrails from the nearby seabed. He could hear the seethe of the sea seeping through the rock.

The flare had already sputtered well down the paper tube—that shouldn’t happen, should it? Maybe it was an old flare. Its glow had diminished alarmingly.

He set one foot inside the chamber. His leg appeared to stretch out as if made of flesh-toned rubber, pulling the rest of his body with it. His throat was dusty-dry, filled with the ozone taste of the rock. The peripheries of his vision were blown out huge—he could see almost around the back of his head. His pupils were so dilated that they’d overtaken his corneas, turning them black.

He inched around Shelley’s body. A brittle strand of witchgrass brushed the back of Max’s neck. He bit back a scream but still, a breathless little moan came out of him.

Which is when he noticed them.

They were on the stick—the long one he’d sharpened yesterday, the one Newton abandoned in the madness. It jutted from beneath Shelley’s body at a weird angle. All along it, stuck to the wet wood, were tiny nodules. Clustered in white bunches that looked like tiny albino grapes. Tens of thousands of them. Others were larger. They dotted the stick like curlicues of white icing on a cake.

A sea slug fell from the ceiling, going plop in a puddle near the stick. The white nodules stirred in unison. The larger ones uncoiled and stood stiff.

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.