Frank Moort shot up from his recliner, throwing it back and toppling it like it was only a cardboard cutout. It crashed and sent crickets scurrying and jumping. The noise rose. “Dammit all to hell!” he shouted at the screen. “You stupid-ass cunnies!” It didn’t sound like the voice of Frank Moort or my Da, didn’t sound like language he’d use either. He kicked the TV and it skidded on its wooden feet, the box of it colliding with the wall and the whole thing canting backward and clipping the speakers, knocking them back. The tube exploded and sparks flew. Frank Moort went crazy on it and the speakers, kicking them and cursing. This was more like the frothing animal-man we’d seen in Ma’s kitchen yesterday.
I cringed from the racket thinking we could slip out now. But I knew we couldn’t leave the doc. And then, to my right, I saw a big wide, shadowy movement.
Mac let out a muffled grunt as something rammed into him.
An arm reached out like a tentacle and locked around Mac’s throat. Another came around his waist, startling him. It was Doc. The doc had a hold of Mac and I saw the crazed black eyes, same as Frank Moort had when he peered through the pantry’s peeky hole yesterday. It was Doc, but not Doc, his face twisted into a toothy scowl, the tendons on his arms standing out alongside the purple veins under his skin. He shouldn’t have the strength to hold Mac, at least thirty-five years younger than he, but he had my brother contained. Mac groaned and strained, his face starting to turn a shade that matched Doc’s veins.
Frank Moort turned back to us. He was a different man now, more like he had been when we’d first come through the tunnel. “Ah, how nice,” he said, as though he hadn’t just been rolling up his sleeves on a TV set and Hi-Fi.
“Our guests have come down to join us for dinner…”
10.
I saw Zeke in the corner of my eye. He was still wearing his coveralls and he had his trash spear hoisted like Mac had held the broom yesterday. He moved in a blur from the far doorway—the one that led from the tunnel under the breakwater—across the room to Frank Moort, who was walking through a parting tide of bugs. Moort was moving towards us. And, unseen to him, Zeke was moving towards him.
A long shaft of blood spurted into the air. Only it wasn’t red. It was dark maroon, almost black. And it shot out from the side of Frank Moort’s neck. The trash spear had been driven through the opposite side with a loud squelching noise. Frank Moort froze. His eyes locked on us, and then flashed to a blank stare. His head tilted towards the spurting leak of fluid that looked more like motor oil than life-giving blood. It eased to a thick dribble down his neck and into the collar of his shirt, then blooming on the fabric at his shoulder. The interlocked mass of Doc and Mac near me stopped their struggling. I lurched to stillness.
Frank Moort shifted. He looked like he would fall forward. Behind him, I could see Zeke moving around him slightly, his hands still gripping the shaft of the trash spear. I saw the black blood pouring down onto his hands now, covering the shaft of wood and dripping to the floor.
But then Frank Moort’s eyes moved. They darted and I saw a black flicker in their whites. He looked off to his side to Zeke, who was mostly hidden behind him. Then Frank Moort’s head clunked around to meet Zeke’s eyes. It was like watching a broken gear, mangled by damage, try to turn. Only Frank Moort did turn his head. He turned it all the way around, nearly backwards, clunking like busted bone grinding on busted bone.
In one motion, Frank Moort leaned into the spear, driving it even deeper through his own neck. The spear splatted farther out this side. And at the same time, he shot out his arm and snagged the man I once called the town retard. Grabbed him by his throat and picked him up off the ground, his feet dangling, his glasses tumbling and his face filled with terror.
A gurgle-spurt of bubbling liquid from Frank Moort’s mouth and a matching sound of anguish from Zeke’s lips as he let go of his spear and banged his fists on Frank Moort’s face and chest. Now Frank Moort fully faced the feller the boys in town probably still called the town retard.
Frank Moort leaned in and gave Zeke a sloppy open-mouth kiss. Then he let out a huge guffaw of laughter, from right down in the pit of his belly.
Frank Moort drew himself away from Zeke. And in the newly formed gap, I saw both their mouths open, Zeke’s black inside and Frank’s painted a dark red. Out from Frank’s crawled a black insect, fat, oily body and long legs, maybe six, maybe eight. It rested a moment, perched on the wet lips of the man-thing and then the man-thing brought his face near Zeke’s, closing the gap between him as though he was bringing a glass jar to his mouth for the purpose of spitting tobacco.
The insect crossed the distance and padded onto Zeke’s lips then crawled into the open cavern of his mouth and winked out of existence. Zeke’s face changed. He squirmed hard in Frank Moort’s grip. He made as if to heave but nothing would come. Frank Moort put his other hand over the man’s mouth, waited a beat, then smiled.
Moorty dropped Zeke to the ground, where he landed in a pile of khaki-coloured limbs. Zeke brought his hands to his throat, and tried to pull in a gasp against a windpipe that may have been crushed.
I stood like a ventriloquist’s lap dummy with my own mouth hung open and eyes doing much the same. I could only watch as this unfolded. Beside me, Mac had stopped struggling against Doc’s grip. I could only hear both men breathing heavily.
Calmly, and with no to-do at all, Frank Moort turned back to Doc, Mac and me. More of that chunk, chunk, chunk movement as his neck gears ground his face back around. His neck looked like it was made out of stairs under his skin, a set of haphazard juts and corners. He made eye contact with each of us, then reached beside him and grabbed hold of Zeke’s trash spear, which wobbled from its angled housing in his thick neck. He blinked his eyes closed and reefed on the spear, yanking it free with another loud squelch and more fluid. Chunks of skin and other bodily debris came with it. He put the spear over his knee and broke it easily, then let it fall harmlessly to the brick floor with nothing but the clatter of old wood and a piece of steel.
He reached up and grabbed hold of his head like a chiropractor about to make an adjustment, but on himself. He shifted his head on his shoulders and I heard a dull clunk again.
A smile drew itself across his lips. He opened his eyes.
“Cheap parlour tricks, boys,” he said through his grin. “And we ain’t seen nothing yet.”
11.
I didn’t know what else to do. I creaked out of my stiff state and blinked hard. I felt like I’d been entranced by Frank Moort taking control of Zeke like that. Poor feller must have followed us out here. He might have been worried about us or thought he could help us find Mac. I just didn’t know.
I went to Zeke in his pile on the floor. His coveralls wore patches of thick black liquid. As I got closer, they looked dark red at certain angles in the dim light. It was the blood from Frank Moort’s neck that had spurted out and coated the spear, but it didn’t look like real blood. I’d seen a dozen bad cuts and missing fingers in my years on the trawlers. I knew blood and learned to deal with it. But this was...different.
I put my hands out towards Zeke’s shoulders, hoping that I could, I don’t know, comfort him, help him, get him back to his feet. I would need him if I was going to stand off against Doc and Moort and get out of here. But when I was about to touch Zeke, he turned his face up at me. The look in his eyes matched Frank Moort’s beady black ones. Solid, shiny black. No pupils, no whites.
Mac called out my name. It was a loud, percussive plea in the humid lighthouse underground.
Zeke flung his arm at me. It felt like a steel beam, winding me and knocking me backwards. Crouched when the impact came, I had no balance and fell on my ass first, then down to my back. He was atop me, baring his teeth much like Frank Moort had done to him. Up close, I felt his hot breath on my face and could only glare into his. The thick old pair of specs were gone and I saw that all the colour had seeped away from his pupils and he looked like a different man. In one nostr
il was a thick round blob of throbbing black, like a dried ball of tar. Strands of matching black that might have been legs pierced his skin and ran from the orb like veins to the underneath of his eye where they still stretched up to grab at his corneas. It was like the tick-thing burrowed in at the back of Doc’s scalp and I had no doubt this was at least part of whatever insect had crawled out of Frank Moort’s mouth and into Zeke’s. He took hold of me and the force of his grip was unnerving. He was like steel. His grip was like plates of a ship’s hull welded on to me.
“Le’ go,” I hollered. “Zeke, le’ me go.”
He groped and struggled with me and I fought back weakly, my feet kicking out as if Zeke was suddenly eight feet tall and three hundred pounds of tight, toned muscle. He hauled me to my feet and got around back of me, likely mimicking my brother’s captivity at the hands of Doc. Neither Zeke nor the doc were of right mind now. Whatever Frank Moort had done to them, it made them irrational. I needed to get free and help Mac. We needed to get to his truck and back to town, to get a hold of Chief Birkhead and tell him what was going on down here. In my desperation, I clawed hopelessly at Zeke, tearing the arms of his coveralls into long shreds. He was oblivious. Even when I got fingernails into his skin and drew his blood in long lines on his forearms, he said nothing. I only felt and heard the hot breath from his nostrils on my ear and neck.
I didn’t understand the trouble brewing here.
Frank Moort finally spoke again. “Wonderin’ how he got the better of you, aren’t yuh?”
I said nothing. Mac said nothing. The Doc and Zeke stood silent.
“Well,” Frank Moort said. “We have ourselves an interesting...situation...here.” He took a handful of steps, closing our gap enough that I saw his yellow, corn-cob teeth and hints of his dark red mouth as he spoke. I pictured that critter climbing out from between his lips and into Zeke as they kissed and I shivered against Zeke’s grip. “Things can go one of two ways, I s’pose,” Frank Moort said as he came close enough that I needed to turn my head and squint away from his stench. I peeked enough to see him turn his head to one side as if he was listening to an invisible earpiece. “What’s ‘at?” he said, but not to me. “Oh, yuh. I do. Uh-uh.” Then he looked back at me and clapped his hands in front of his wild, ear-to-ear grin. “It’s decided then.”
He closed his eyes and threw his head back. His neck performing the way a normal neck ought to. He lolled his head around on his shoulders as if he was warming up. He went faster now. And then he started bouncing and shadow boxing. He was warming up. For what?
Then, like a phone rang and startled him out of his thoughts, he interrupted himself and stopped.
“Alrightee, boys,” he said.
“Here it is.” He looked at me. “You wanna know how Zekie here got ya. I bet you do. I really bet you do, son. Well, the, uh, how do I put it, the dumber ones, they get that bugger in their booger-hole and they can get the signals quicker than someone say, a little sharper. Like ol’ Doc there.”
Frank Moort looked around the air in front of him as if following a buzzing fly that only he could see. “Yuh,” he said. “Signals. Like think of it as uhm, say a radio tower northeast o’ here. And all these voices, these signals are coming out o’ that tower.” He looked around, surveying the white crickets at our feet, the ones now crawling up my legs with abandon as I flailed and kicked to get them off me. “These guys here, they get the signals too, like on the air. Like the antenna at the back of the TV, what brought in Game Six there--I know, I know, Everett. I told ya not to put yer money on the damned Dodgers. Might as well a’ just wiped yer ass with those bills and flushed ‘em straight down. Where was I? Oh right. The signals. Yuppers. So Zeke here, he gets ‘em faster, once he’s got his, uh, receptor hooked up good ‘n proper. But Doc, his equipment takes a bit longer to get operational. Brighter bulb upstairs. Would hope so. For reading X-rays and writing up prescription slips n’ all.
“But once the signals are coming in, it’s like, well, like a radio-controller, I guess. And we’re all connected. All thinking together, like one brain in a million and one bodies. Some ‘er the little critters here. Some are a lot bigger ‘n ‘at. And they’s all powerless against it. Oh, the doc, he’s still in there, I think. Somewhere. Just like I am. But we all bow down to the signals. The signals, they the King. Get me? And we all kneel before the King.
“So the King, he says, jump. We jump. You jump. The King, he says, watch while Frankie Moort here plays another one of his parlour tricks. Well, then, we all gotta watch, don’t we?
“Yuh. We all kneel before the King.
“Let’s try this again.”
Frank Moort threw his head back and I saw the gaping wound where Zeke had stabbed through him with his trash spear. The blood had stopped up now, though. It was a sloppy, festering bubble in his grey flesh, mixed red, black and a bit of green. Like before, Frank lolled his head back and around in circles on his shoulders. Round and around, faster, faster. He started humming.
The sound of the crickets rose with his humming. He got louder and so did they. The noise grew so intense, I threw my hands to my ears. I saw that Mac did the same, still held by the doc. Then, from behind me, I heard Zeke start to hum. And I wasn’t entirely sure because of the volume but I think the doc was humming too. I saw him put his head back, as if humming a bay to the sky we couldn’t see way down here under the lighthouse.
I heard a bleating noise amid the cacophony. It was approaching from out in the tunnel and behind the shifted metal door that Zeke had left askew when he’d come in and attacked Frank Moort.
The noise drew my eyes over to the canted doorway.
Something was leaving the heavy shroud of the breakwater tunnel and finding its way in here with us.
Coming through the doorway into the half-light was an off-white goat, laying on its side. It wasn’t on rollers. It was teetering along atop a pile of the writhing white crickets. Its head strained back to see where the mass of crickets was carrying it. It saw me and bleated again with sallow, pink eyes. It looked ill, its belly showing patches of bare, pink skin as though it had been prepared for surgery. Its legs ended not in hooves, but in stumps. Two front legs pressed against one another, tied together with what looked like fine sinew looped around them. Same with the back legs. But the skinny stumps looked more like birth defects than surgical amputations. I heard Frank Moort’s words echo in my head.
…some blocks from this box, some from another…
Did this mass of albino crickets rebuild the goat from scratch and decide he didn’t need legs? Moort had said the little shiny black ones took him apart and the white ones put him back together. Humpty Dumpty and all that. I shivered against Zeke’s grip. I didn’t want a look at the black ones.
The goat made its way in to this underground room, like the Queen of Sheba foisted by her servants. Only the goat had a few hundred tiny insects porting it.
The goat came to rest near Frank. The crickets scattered. Their scampering made them look fearful, like they knew what was coming next.
Parlour tricks, Moort had said.
Moort unsheathed a blade from the back pocket of his dress pants. It was a long, dingy hunting knife, like one that Da used when I was a kid. I remember him stropping it on a leather strap readying to cull a bird for Thanksgiving.
Frank Moort got down on his knees before the goat’s hairless belly and the goat bleated. Its eyes strained and I saw them big and white in the faint light. The goat’s pointed tongue quivered in its open mouth. Horns shook and it struggled to stand against the binding of his two sets of legs. Moort readied the hunting blade. He looked up at me and Mac with a look of pending satisfaction. Then he drove the blade into the goat’s belly, down near his hind legs and his face broke to something akin to post-coital elation.
The goat screamed and laid its head down to the side, rolling its eyes back to show only pinkish whites. Moort wore a look of epic release and that sound only made him look more pleased. Th
e bleating faded to nothing while Moort carved his blade in a sawing motion, in and out, to slice open the belly of the goat. Blood poured out and darkened its white hair. It pooled under its belly on the brick floor. Moort withdrew the blade after it reached the goat’s sternum. He wiped each side on the neck of the motionless animal and laid it to rest on the floor. Like he had done when hunting for the key, he reached into the steaming innards of the animal’s stomach. He fished for a moment, then pulled his wet, gooey hand out.
He held a bulbous sack and a long, translucent film of skin covered in goopy mucus that ran back inside the tear in the animal’s gut. With that, my nostrils found the tang of fetid vegetation in the air, as if someone was boiling rotting cabbage leaves. Moort set down the sagging pouch and then reached back in. He pulled out a second muck-covered pouch, this one smaller and darker. They looked like water balloons made of stretched flesh with fish swimming in them, but the sacs were barely see-through. Inside, blurry shapes moved.
Moort got to his feet with the conjoined bubbles of goo, still tethered by that long floppy band of what looked like skin. He had one sac in each hand and he came over to me. On his face, he had a devilish look but one mixed with repulsion.
He stood before me and looked up at me from his ugly prizes. That rotting smell was strong and I wrinkled my face at it. I curled my mouth and felt tears grow in my eyes.
“When I was lying in the bed I shared with my wife once upon a time,” Frank Moort said, “there was awful pain in every joint. I cried for the good lord to just take me. Hell, my bowels had been pushing out watery dung without my say-so...and my stomach had heaved until there was nothing left. Black. Everything black...but then morning sun through my wife’s lace curtains. I couldn’t believe I’d lived another night. There was this man standing over me. I don’t remember his face, but he had bright red hair, that I remember. I thought I might know him but it didn’t matter. There was nothing left in me except that loud ache. My eyes clouded. I reached out for him, begged him to end it all fer me.
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