Tim Curran - Worm

When she opened her eyes, it could have been two minutes later or twenty minutes for that matter. Her vision was blurry and unfocused for a moment or two, her mind slowly sweeping the cobwebs away. She was lying in a pool of the horrible inky drainage, sopping wet with it. It had coagulated and clotted around her like thickening, wet concrete.

She sat up, her head spinning. There was a dull throb at the back of her skull.

God, she was covered with the stuff.

Jesse. Get to Jesse.

She pulled herself to her feet. She saw that the bathroom was nearly drowned in muck. It was dark and slushy and smelling. A slimy trail of the stuff led down the hallway toward the door at the end which was Jesse’s room. The nursery, as Pat’s mother had called it.

Oh God no…

Grabbing up the poker, she ran down there and charged through the doorway, praying, hoping, calling out for any god that would listen to help her, help her now. It had never been so important. So vitally important. She made it maybe three steps through the door when she tripped over something, going down face-first, her poker clattering across the floor.

What is that… what did I trip over… something soft…

As she pulled herself up, she saw with grim and fateful clarity all the black slime on the crib, how it dripped and ran down the spindles and dropped to the floor— plop, plop.

Kathleen screamed and raced over to it, gripping the side as she looked down in there and saw… nothing. It was empty. The crib was completely empty, save for the black filth all over the baby blankets and bumper pad, something that looked like a foul mix of mud, seeping rank water, and moist black clotted leaves from the bottom of a pond.

As the scream came out of her mouth and the room seemed to spin round and round, her heart thundered in her chest and her own breathing sounded like wheezing bellows in her ears. The room was dimming as the sun set and her face was rinsed of color. She felt the blood drain out of her head and trunk and down into her lower extremities. Darkness filled her brain and she dropped to her knees, devastated by fright, completely numb and senseless. This was the aftereffect of absolute horror, of looking the worst-case scenario dead in the eye.

How much time passed before she was able to move or process even the simplest rational thought, she didn’t know. Shadows were beginning to crawl across the floor. The light coming in through the blinds was negligible.

She began to move.

She had to turn on the light and proceed very calmly now. A voice in her brain was giving her the same pep talk as when she went to look for Pat. She knew beyond a doubt that something very dirty and hideous had come into this room and snatched her son. She did not know what it was, but her mind kept telling her it was the snake that had gotten Pat.

Now it was in the house.

It was in her house.

It had killed her husband and now her infant son. Though part of her wanted to rage and scream, she did neither. There was no point in screaming. Screaming was to vent horror and to bring help, but there was no valve that could release the horror inside of her and no help to be found.

What she would do, she would do alone.

The snake was here somewhere and she would find it.

There was nothing left inside her now but the need to hunt the thing and bring about its doom.

Yet, for all her hate and all her resolve, she sank to the floor, sobbing… at least until her mouth opened and a wailing voice came out: “WHERE’S MY BABY? WHERE IS MY BABY?”

Eva Jung lay on her bed, not asleep and not quite awake, thinking, dreaming, wondering about arteries and veins and capillaries. These are the words she used even though she knew what she was really thinking about were pipes. All the pipes that connected the town to the freshwater pumping stations and the wastewater treatment plant. An absolute network that united homes and factories, office buildings and apartment houses as arteries, veins, and capillaries connected organ systems into a common whole.

Wasn’t that funny and wasn’t that strange?

In came the water and out went the waste, just like a living thing. The good, clean water came up through narrow pipes and aqueducts, all the bad stuff was sucked below into subterranean channels of night and dank brick catacombs where rats scratched and things bobbed in rivers of filth. It all went down there—the piss and shit, gray water and bacon lard, hairballs and menstrual blood, old spaghetti and animal fat, all the rotting waste, the vegetable and animal matter, the organic detritus of the human kind.

Down there, down below, down in the black, diseased, and reeking bowels of the city.

And it was there, she knew, that things mutated and took shape in the sunless, polluted, steaming channels and pipework. Oh yes. The very same things that were rising now and spilling into the streets and homes on bubbling rivers of black muck.

Knowing this, Eva decided the veins and arteries of the town were more like conduits that linked the dark underworld with the sunlit world of men. They were highways that led into every single house.

In the end, Marv O’Connor left Fern with the kids because there was no damn way he was letting her go out into the darkness with that goddamn reeking mud flowing in the streets. Fern weighed about 105 pounds soaking wet. He could just picture her getting washed away in the slop never to be seen again. No, this was a job for someone a little meatier and that was him. At 6’3” and 260 pounds, it was going to take some real mud to wash him away.

Besides, he was just as worried about Tessa Saldane as she was.

Help me… I’ve been attacked…

Those were the words Fern said Tessa used on the phone. Marv knew Tessa pretty damn well by that point. She wasn’t someone to call and say something like that unless there was a very real threat. She was far too old and far too proud for such theatrics.

But attacked …?

It was crazy.

It was no easy thing getting over to her house. Tessa lived at the very end of the block and that was a long, slow slog when the muck was up above your thighs. Marv was wearing his rubber chest waders or he would have been soaked to the skin with the filth which was not just mud and muck but sewage as well, judging by the vile stink of it.

After a good twenty minutes of chugging along, he finally got to Tessa’s.

He dragged himself up the porch and pounded at the door. His legs felt weak and weightless after pushing through the mud for so long.

“Tessa!” he called. “Tessa! It’s me, Marv O’Connor!”

There was no response. He threw the door open and charged in, calling her name and clicking on lights as he went. He got a bad feeling right away and wished he had brought something to defend himself with. Even a penknife. Anything. All he had was a flashlight.

It was the smell in the air that bothered him.

It wasn’t the gaseous, noisome stench of the black muck, but a smell that he was all too familiar with as a deer hunter: blood. The house was a ripe, reeking envelope of it. It smelled the way the gut shed up at hunting camp smelled in November… like a slaughterhouse. The stink of bowels and marrow, animal fat and oceans of draining blood.

But here… in Tessa’s house?

He moved faster until he reached the kitchen. Then he came to a dead halt as he reached for the light switch and clicked it on. The smell was so bad in there, so concentrated, that it brought his stomach up the back of his throat.

Then, in the light, he saw.

Tessa was dead. In fact, she was more than dead. She looked like she had been torn right open. She was laying in a pool of blood, more of it splattered against the counters and smeared on the cupboards and appliances.