Worm (4 page)

“I’m down here! Hurry it!”

God, this better be good. This better be something real good, something applicable. If he got down there and she was panicking because a stupid fucking spider had crawled out from under the dryer, he was going to lose it. Really lose it.

“Are you coming or what?”

She sounded frantic now.

He jogged down the steps, stopping about just before he reached the basement floor. “What?”

She grumbled in her throat. “Can you be bothered to come down all the way or do I have to come over there and guide you by the hand?”

Oh, that mouth.

He stepped down into the basement and smelled it right away, the same stink as outside but concentrated down here…an almost violent stench of moist rot, corruption, and sewer slime. The black gunk was foaming up out of the floor drain by the hot water heater, a slushy filth that popped with greasy-looking bubbles. To Pat, it smelled the way he imagined animal carcasses might when stranded by the receding waters of a flood.

Wrinkling his nose, he said, “Screw it. Let’s just get out of here.”

“Our house,” Kathleen lamented. “Our…
home.”

He put an arm around her. She was stiff as a plank. It was like trying to comfort a fencepost. “We’ll come back when this is over and fix everything up. The important thing is to get out of here.”

“Do you think it’ll really get that bad?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.”

“Maybe we should wait,” she suggested.

“No.”

“No?”

“No, Kathleen. That shit is getting deep in the streets. I think it’s still rising. If we wait too long, even my truck won’t go through it. I think we can clear it right now, but in another hour…I just don’t know.”

“I don’t like the idea of getting trapped out there, Pat. It’ll be dark in an hour. And with the baby…”

“We don’t have a choice.”

He didn’t wait for any more arguments.

He mounted the stairs and as he started to climb them, Kathleen coming after him for another round of debate, there was a sound from within the cellar wall like somebody had cracked an egg. It got louder. It became a grinding, tearing sound. The seam between two concrete blocks split and black ooze bubbled out like crude oil.

“Oh shit,” Kathleen said.

They rushed up the stairs.

“The ground’s saturated,” Pat told her, pulling on his rubber hip waders. “I read once that during floods, the water doesn’t come in under the door or through the walls so much as it just seeps up through the foundation. That’s what’s happening now.”

Kathleen started to argue again, but closed her mouth.

Abandoning her home did not come easy to her, but she knew he was right. They just couldn’t wait around. Maybe if it had just been the two of them, but baby Jesse changed all that. They couldn’t afford to take chances.

Pat pulled on his raincoat—he wasn’t really sure why—and stepped out onto the porch.

As he moved down the steps, Kathleen grabbed his arm. “No,” she said.

“What?”

“I’ve got a really bad feeling. Don’t go out there.”

He wasn’t in the mood for her premonitions. Now of all goddamn times. He went down and stepped into the muck. It was oddly warm, thick and slopping like oatmeal. It seemed to have the same degree of thickness. He trudged through it over to the Dodge. He would back it up to the porch and Kathleen and the baby could get in and off they’d go. A simple plan, really.

By the time he got to the truck, the muck was up to his thighs.

The Dodge was high-profile, but even so the mud was up over the tires. Maybe it was too late. Maybe they would have to wait it out. Get upstairs and hope for the best.

No, dammit. They had to get out.

Kathleen was on the porch.

“Get Jesse ready,” he said.

At the moment he said that, he felt something move against his leg. There were probably all kinds of things bobbing in the muck, but this one
moved.
It brushed against his knee, then against the side of his other leg. The muck moved with secret eddies and ripples like a moat in a fairy tale.

What the hell?

He was about to call out to Kathleen when something hit his right ankle, gripping it in a crushing embrace, twisting it. He made a grunting sound and dropped into the mud, submerging in it. It flowed into his mouth and down his throat. He fought and thrashed in unbelievable panic as he was towed away with a violent jerking underneath the truck.

Something seized his right arm, then his left bicep.

And something else bit into his throat, shearing his carotid. In a dreamlike haze, he remembered nearly drowning out at Black Lake when he was a kid…as he gagged on mud and his own dark, pulsing blood.

7

Glub-glub-glub.

More of the vile black drainage dropped into the sink. There was a good five or six inches of it in there now. Tessa did not believe it was all coming from the tap. Much of it, in fact,
most
of it, was gurgling up from the drain.

Though that was hardly her biggest concern.

Because there was something in there and it was alive.

It had not moved in the past ten minutes or so that she had been staring at it. She was beginning to seriously wonder if she had imagined it all. Maybe she had. Maybe—

There was a gurgling sound from deep within the black slop. It roiled and splashed, a few bubbles rising to the surface and popping one by one. Tessa stood there watching it, nearly transfixed. Her throat felt dry and her limbs felt weak. She wanted to get away from whatever was in there, but she seemed to lack the strength.

More gurgling.

A chunk of something about the size of a steel wool pad bobbed to the surface. It seemed to have the consistency of solidified grease. Whatever it was, it was disgusting.

Her stomach shifted unpleasantly.

It was times like this that she really missed Charlie, though she supposed she missed him just about every hour of every day. Tessa was old-school. If there was a creature in the house then it was the man’s responsibility to do something about it. She had no problem with traditional duties. The cooking and cleaning had always been her department—last thing she’d ever wanted in a kitchen was a
man—
and the fixing, sprucing, and creature-killing had always been Charlie’s.

But Charlie had been in the ground these long seven years.

Tessa knew she’d have to handle this, whatever it was. The idea sickened her. Last year when the mice came to visit, she could barely keep her stomach down when she removed their broken little bodies from the traps. Somehow, whatever this was, she figured it would be worse.

The slop moved again and this time it was from the motion of whatever was in there.

Tess felt faint with panic.

Perspiration beaded her brow.

She could hear people outside, calling to each other from porches. They were like shipwreck survivors shouting to each other as they clung to bits of wreckage. They couldn’t help her.

If you want this critter out of your sink, old woman, then you’re going to have to do it. Nobody but you.

Gah.
The idea was appalling. The only thing that gave her strength was that the monster was in the sink, in the kitchen, and the kitchen was
her
domain. She trucked no interference from intruders here.

A weapon.

There was a bag of old plates and utensils she was sending to Goodwill. She plucked a roasting fork out of there. It was nearly as long as her arm and would do quite nicely. If what was in the sink had come up through the drain, then it was small. It would be no match for the roasting fork.

But just to be sure, Tessa dug out a tenderizing mallet. With the fork and the mallet, she was armed like a medieval knight.

All right, whatever you are, I’m ready.

She wasn’t and she knew she wasn’t, but there was no choice. Trying to keep her stomach down, she prodded the floater with her fork. Just the motion of doing that disturbed the slop and ripened the already horrendous gaseous odor emanating from the sink. It made her think of dead, waterlogged things afloat in stagnant ponds.

She prodded it again.

It looked very much like a piece of greasy meat, though stained darkly from the muck soup. Clenching her teeth, she jabbed the fork around in there and felt the tines scraping off the bottom of the sink.

Maybe there wasn’t anything in there after all.

She jabbed around in there a few times.

Something moved.

She felt it brush against the fork, making waves of revulsion roll through her. She withdrew the fork…but,
dammit,
this was
her
kitchen! She was not going to be scared off by some stupid fish or whatever had swam up the pipe.

Getting angry, Tessa jabbed the fork around in there until…until with a physical shudder she felt it pierce something. Something thick. It felt like she had speared a summer sausage. It had the same sort of resistance to it as the tines went in.

Meaty
was the word that popped into her mind.

Whatever it was, she had it. The crazy thing was, if it indeed was alive then why wasn’t it moving? Shouldn’t it be squirming with pain or something?

Sucking in a breath between clenched teeth, she lifted up the fork. The thing was weighty, a few pounds at least. She lifted the fork up quickly out of the soup before she could change her mind.

What she saw made her freeze.

It looked like a snake. That’s what she thought in an instant of absolute atavistic terror. It was maybe two feet long, but swollen, thick-bodied, maybe big around as a can of beer. It was coiling with slow, oily undulations, dripping copious amounts of inky slime.

With a cry, she dropped it.

It splashed into the muck…and came right back out like a rocket.

Tessa had enough time to hold her arm up to protect her face before it hit her, the roasting fork dropping from it and clattering across the floor. It seized her wrist in its mouth, clamping down with a savage biting/sucking pressure and she clearly heard her wrist bones snap like green twigs.

First she screamed.

Then she went wild with hysteria.

Barely staying on her feet, she spun around, waving her arm up and down and to both sides to throw the thing. And as she did so, she felt more agony in her wrist. It was not just biting, it was
chewing.
Raging and flailing her arm, just wild with panic and pain, she managed to throw the thing. It thudded against the face of the cupboard, leaving a nasty brown-black stain like a splattered turd, and then dropped, hitting the breadbox and rolling off to the countertop.

It was not moving now.

Just sort of vibrating, trembling.

Tessa looked down at her wrist and nearly went out cold. It had eaten right through her skin to the muscles and tendons below. Blood ran down her arm, dyeing her hand red. She heard it striking the floor:
plop, plop, plop.

She staggered and swayed, feeling light-headed. Whether that was from shock and trauma or loss of blood, she did not know. She tried to keep on her feet. She tried to keep conscious. She knew that everything depended on what she did now. Stumbling over to the stove, she pulled a towel from the bar and wrapped her wrist in it, then wrapped another around it until it was swaddled like a baby.

But the blood…dear God.

It was all over her. It was on the floor. There was a crazy whorl of it on the wall, spattering the needlework GOD BLESS OUR KITCHEN hanging. There was dark irony there and she knew it. She had to call an ambulance before she bled out.

The muck…the muck in the streets! They’ll never get through it…not in time.

No, but her neighbors. The Desjardins, the Mackenridges…she’d seen them out on their porches watching the flooding mud. They would help her. But she had to get to them.

She started toward the kitchen doorway, her slippered feet crunching over the remains of her mother’s tea set.

She began to get woozy right away.

Her mouth tasted dry and sweet.

Her vision was blurring.

Oh, she was feeling it now and more than just her throbbing wrist. She was seventy-seven years old and she’d been jumping around like she was fifteen. Her back was filled with needles, her knees aching, and her left hip felt like it might pop out of its socket at any minute.

The phone.

She fumbled it from its cradle, leaving a bloody smear over the stainless steel face of the oven. She leaned against the counter above the dishwasher. She thumbed a few buttons.
No, dammit, try again!
But she couldn’t make her mind focus. For the life of her she couldn’t remember anyone’s number. The O’Connors. Yes. Just up the block. Their number was scribbled on the edge of the dry-erase board. She had bought Girl Scout cookies from their daughters.