His foot landed in something soft, and sank. Deeper and deeper into the pit. A sweet stink rose up and around him, and, suddenly, the sun went down.
Evan started awake. It was the same dream. Over and over and over again he dreamed it. He dreamed it often alone, and always when the worm was near. He pushed himself up, straining against the membrane. It was getting harder every day to sit up straight.
The sun had not been so bright in real life, nor had it cut out when he had walked into their trap. A few cars had rumbled down the country road. The grass had swayed softly in the breeze. He’d landed so hard after jumping off the fence that he’d screamed over his burning feet. But the essence of the dream was true. He had walked away from school on a bad day. No one had noticed him except to knock him out of their way. No one had noticed when he left.
He had climbed the fence because he could climb. It was one thing he could do better than the other kids. If climbing were a team sport, he would have been a hero. He had done the one thing he could do, and now he could do almost nothing.
In every dream he screamed at himself to stop, and every time he went on climbing, excited and oblivious.
He had struggled in the sweet pink goo, flailing with his arms, pushing with his free leg. He had pulled himself out and slowly wandered home, oozing a pinkish trail like slug slime.
Until the worm thing told him, he had never connected the pink goo with his illness. It seemed obvious in hindsight, the way the itching had spread from his leg to his whole body. How the light had burned on that leg first, and then the wind. How the membranes followed the itching, attacking his left side first. But it hadn’t been obvious to him, nor to the doctors who had poked and prodded him.
He was in the hospital when sixth grade started, grateful to be missing it. He didn’t have to brave the hallways of the middle school, where he’d be picked on by even more boys, sighed at by more teachers, and ignored when he wasn’t being picked on. He had figured that the longer it took the doctors to cure him, the better it would be. It was several months before he realized they would not cure him.
Evan remembered everything he’d hated about school. The other kids. Reading aloud in class and being laughed at when he stumbled. His old clothes and free lunches. Never being noticed. He thought about recess, sitting alone under a tree. It had made him so angry then.
That night his mother’s soft knock came again.
“Ready for dinner, honey?” she asked, peeking her head in. She was trying to sound bright, but Evan could tell that, as usual, she was dead tired.
Evan ate and listened to his mother talk. He couldn’t stop thinking about school. What was it like? What were the other kids doing? He wondered what the popular kids were doing, the ones who had picked on him or, worse, ignored him. He desperately wanted to see their faces, to go back to the time when he had sat there in the back of the class and envied their every move. Evan hadn’t talked with his mother about this for a long time because he didn’t want to make her sad, but tonight he couldn’t help it.
“Mom,” he said quietly, “I miss school.”
If he had said this two years ago, his mother would have laughed and asked him if he was sick. Tonight she just looked down at him. “I know, honey,” she said.
“I miss going outside!” he cried, suddenly loud. “I miss playing basketball and getting left on the bench! I miss getting grapes thrown at me in the cafeteria! I miss getting my report card with all Cs and Ds!”
His mother reached over to hug him.
“Don’t!” he cried. “What if it’s catching?” His mother had hugged him a thousand times since he’d gotten sick. If she was going to catch it, Evan knew she would have. But he couldn’t think straight. How did he know the goo only worked if you stepped in it? What if his body was producing goo without him knowing it, and everyone he touched would turn into a worm too?
“Oh, honey,” his mother said. “I don’t think it’s catching. I don’t care anyway.” And she reached down and hugged him.
Evan couldn’t help himself. He felt the tears start to roll down his cheeks. They caught and puddled in his membranes.
“I’d give everything I have to make you well again,” she said tearfully. “I’d do anything God asked if He would cure you.” She hugged him tighter, so that his strangely shaped internal organs groaned inside him.
“I want to be alive again! I feel like I’m already dead.” He sobbed. And his mother sobbed with him until they couldn’t cry anymore.
Three
THE NEXT MORNING Evan lay on his bed, eyes sore. He stared up at the ceiling, the way he had spent so many days. He had counted the cracks and made up stories about them. They were a map of an alien planet, a puzzle sent for him to solve. If he could go to the planet or solve the puzzle, he could get out of here, he would imagine. Now he saw them as just cracks in an old house that was falling apart.
He stared at the light fixture above him. It hadn’t been used since before he got sick, when this was his mother’s bedroom. The light it gave off was too bright now. It would burn him, melt his newly membraned skin.
As he stared at it, it began to move. Just slightly, as if shaking in a mild breeze. Then came the sound. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Evan’s heart beat loudly and he stared harder. The fixture was opaque white. He could see a shadow inside it. The shadow was so big that it was hard to make it out at first. It nearly filled the fixture, but he saw it flutter. Scrape, scrape, scrape.
“Who’s there?” Evan called softly.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
“Are you trapped?” Evan pulled himself up. His skin groaned with the effort.
“Let . . . me . . . in.” The voice was shrill, inhuman. It made Evan’s blood freeze.
“What do you want?” he whispered.
“To talk to you, proem,” the voice said. “To make a deal. To help you if you help us.” It was not a worm speaking; that much Evan could tell. A worm couldn’t fit in there.
“What are you?” he asked.
“I am something else that lives in darkness. I am an enemy of the worms. We will help you if you help us.” The strange voice was still chilling. But Evan had heard its words.
“What do you want me to do?” Evan asked.
“Let me in, proem. Let me in and we will talk.” Its voice was too strange. There was something wrong about it. He did not want to let it in. He took a deep breath, which nearly made him cough. An enemy of the worms.
“All right,” said Evan. “I’m going to unscrew the fixture.”
The thing fluttered and the fixture clanged.
“All right, I’m coming.” He stood up on the bed and reached his arms up. A pain ripped through his stomach like a knife blade turning, and he gasped. He grabbed on to the fixture with both hands and twisted slowly. At least his hands could still do this.
The fixture fell suddenly, and something flew at Evan’s face. He ducked quickly, swallowed a scream, and fell backward onto the bed, curling into a ball. His stomach burned.
Evan stared upward, into the glowing yellow eyes of a giant bug. It was a foot long from wingtip to wingtip. Its wings were black and so shiny they might have been made of a plastic tarp, except for dull patches that looked like hair. Its large yellow eyes were round with a tiny dot of pure black pupil. They sat at the front of its face and stared back at Evan with a light that seemed to come from far within. It had two sharp fangs that looked exactly like the fangs inside the worm’s mouth. Above each fang was a large patch of coarse black hair.
The bug’s slit for a mouth widened into a kind of smile.
“I hope I have not frightened you, proem,” it said.
“Don’t call me that!” Evan cried, trying to sit up straight on the bed and not look scared.
“It is not what you want to be, but it is what you are.” The thing’s voice softened into a hiss.
“You’re right!” cried Evan. “I don’t want to be one. You said you could help me, so talk.” Evan tried to
look it in the eyes. Their brightness hurt him, but he didn’t look away.
It fluttered its wings, then set down on the bed in front of him. The ends of its spindly legs were equipped with narrow, sharpened claws.
“You want to go back to school,” it hissed. “You want to go outside. To feel the sunlight, feel the breeze.”
Evan felt ashamed that the bug had heard him crying. But it was true. “You said I’m a proem,” said Evan. “That means I can’t go to school and I can’t go outside. Unless you can cure me?” Evan allowed himself to hope. But the bug shook its hairy head.
“No, no, proem. Trust me, we would cure you if we could.”
“Well, how can you help me, then?” Evan sighed, turning away.
“We cannot cure you, but we can take you away,” it hissed. “For a while, proem. So you can see what you are missing.”
“What do you mean?” asked Evan.
Just then something fell from the open light fixture onto the bed, landing with a soft plop. It fell right between Evan and the bug. It was square and thin and made of wood, not much bigger than Evan’s hand. Evan reached down and picked it up. When he brought it up close to his eyes, he could see that it had etchings on it, but they didn’t seem to be in any pattern.
“What is it?” Evan asked.
“It is a gateway to the world, proem,” the bug said. “When you have given yourself to it, it will take you into the world of the minds. They are all connected, you know, all the minds of all those things that have them.”
Evan didn’t know. He stared at the bug blankly.
“You feel all alone, you humans. You think no one understands you. But you are closer to others than you think.” The bug blinked for the first time. Even its eyelids appeared hairy as they slowly closed over the yellow eyeballs and opened again.
“You mean there’s another world?” asked Evan. “A place where I can live without my body?”
“Oh no,” said the bug, “the world of the mind is like a web. It connects your minds to one another like your computers are connected to each other.”
“So, I can go into this web and outside somehow?” Evan asked.
“You stay here in this room,” said the bug. “And your mind travels. To whoever you would like to visit. Whoever you would like to be.”
Evan thought about this. “I can go to someone else’s body?” he asked finally.
“Anyone you like,” the bug replied. Its fangs pulled up slightly and then extended down again.
Evan’s mind raced. He could be anyone! He could walk around outside. Go to school. Go wherever he wanted! “For how long?” he asked. “Is there a limit?”
“For as long as you are human,” said the bug. This sobered Evan up. Two years ago it would have been a joke. It would have meant forever.
“And how long is that?” Evan asked fiercely. “You know what I am, so you must know how long I have.”
“I do not know for sure, proem,” the bug said. “Longer than tomorrow, but not more than a year.”
“A year?” Evan cried. He was sure it was much less. “Don’t you know better than that? Look at my hands!” He held them in front of the bug’s eyes. “Can’t you tell me what this means?”
“All proems are different,” said the bug. “But you have been human a long time.”
Seeing he could get nothing better from it, Evan clenched his fists and pulled them back. The membranes liked the clenching. They tightened happily around his fingers.
“My name isn’t proem,” said Evan. “It’s Evan. Do you have a name?”
The bug screeched, a high-pitched, wailing, awful sound.
Evan covered his ears.
The bug opened its mouth in a wide grin, making the hairy part above its fangs nearly rub into its yellow eyes. “That’s how we say it,” it said. “You may call me what you want.”
“Foul,” said Evan, without thinking.
“I like it,” the bug hissed.
“But what do you want?” Evan asked, remembering, turning his head away. “You said you wanted a deal. That you’d help me if I helped you.”
“We are a race that lives in the dark,” Foul said. “We are one of many races. There are things that crawl and things that fly. Things that talk and things that only mutter. The worms are another race like us.” Foul’s fangs moved up and down a little as it talked. Its shrill voice was quiet and serious.
Evan sat silently. His heart pumped.
“We eat them,” Foul said. “And they would eat us—if they could.” The thing let out a screeching chuckle.
Evan shrank back from it and pulled his hands under the blankets.
“Don’t worry, proem,” it hissed. “We do not eat proems. They are still human in their way.”
“Do you want to eat me when I change? Give me my life back in exchange for taking it later?” Evan cried. “I won’t do it! Take it back!” He picked up the square of wood and held it out so that it nearly touched the bug’s face.
“Oh no, proem. You shall walk away a free worm if I have anything to do with it. If you perform the little service that we ask.” Its wings flapped. Evan set the object down again and pushed himself backward, as far as he could, into the wall.
“What little service?” he asked, his voice barely coming out.
“When you change over, they will come for you. They will lead you to their home. It is down in the sewers, guarded by falling water, which they know we cannot pass through. Yet we are sure there is a dry route in. Or, if not, a way to force them to come out. You will help us find it. You will help us eat them.”
Evan stared at the bug, speechless. “You want me to help you eat them?” he asked finally.
Foul slowly blinked again. “Help us destroy them, proem,” it said. “There will be no more like you. No more children stolen. You will be free.”
“If there are no more of them, won’t you starve?” asked Evan. He thought the creature was trying to trick him, to make him feel like he would save others when it wasn’t true.
Foul chuckled, a strange vibration of its belly that came out as several squeaks. “There are other creatures in the darkness who taste just as good. But they are weaker and would not destroy us.”
“You want to kill every single one,” said Evan. Why did this bother him so much?
The creature’s fangs grew. Its smile was as much like the worm’s smile as an expression could be when made by a creature shaped so differently.
“I’ll still be one of them. I don’t like it, but I will be!” Evan said, not believing he had said it.
“You have vowed never to go with them,” Foul said. “I heard you speaking with it. It wanted you so badly, I could smell it.” The bug suddenly raised its two front legs and rubbed them together, making a faint humming sound.
“I hate them,” Evan said. He stared down at the wood square. “How does it work?”
“You put your hand on it, stretched out flat. It will enter you and pull you out.”
“And into someone else’s mind?”
“You will be able to travel. To look and to choose.” Foul put its front legs down and moved forward almost imperceptibly.
Evan looked down at the wood square, half believing, half not. Did he care about the worms at all? Would he be better or worse off without them, once he’d turned?
Foul seemed to be reading his thoughts. “I am giving you a chance at life,” it said, moving just a little closer. “You can be the other boys and also save them from your fate.”
Evan thought about the school, the picture he had made up in his mind. It seemed to sparkle in the sunlight. The boys and girls walked happily up and down the hallways, their hands and feet flexible and normal. They stood perfectly straight. They laughed and chatted and were light and free.
“Try it,” Foul squeaked. “Try it and decide.”
Evan picked up the wood square with his left hand and looked down at it. It seemed like the scratches on it had a pattern after all, but he sti
ll couldn’t make out what it was. He looked at the bug, who had slid even closer, so that the light from its eyes lit up the wood.
He took a deep breath and put his right hand on the square, stretching his fingers out as best he could. It felt too cold. He and the bug stared at each other for a few long seconds.
Suddenly, the wood became hot. It was so hot that Evan tried to jerk his hand back, but he couldn’t. Frightened, he tried to shake it off. It was stuck to his hand like glue. It began to mold around his hand, no longer like wood at all.
Foul continued to stare at him, its fangs shaking slightly.
“I don’t want to try it anymore!” Evan cried. “Make it stop!” But the bug just stared at him and shifted even closer. The square now covered his hand and started growing up his arm.
“Make it stop!” he cried again. He reached out for the bug with his left hand, but it lifted itself off the bed and out of reach. And then Evan was gone.
Four
HE COULDN’T SEE OR FEEL anything but lightness. A scary, unbelievable lightness, like he might float into space. His body was gone, and with it the membranes tugging, breath wheezing, head pounding. He was free! But the absolute darkness was like nothing he had felt before. He seemed to be expanding. Expanding and expanding and—
What do I do? he thought, desperate for someone to hear him. How do I get back?
A voice came straight into his mind, with almost no pause. He wasn’t sure if he even heard the words, or if he just knew their meaning.
Go where you want to go, proem, it said. Wherever you want to go, you will be there.
Evan tried to close his eyes, but nothing happened. He had no eyes to close. He thought wildly. School. He wanted to go to school. He thought it so hard he imagined he was shouting.
Suddenly, he saw light. It surrounded him and blinded him. For all he knew, he was in the middle of the sun. But, slowly, the light became manageable. He was not in the middle of the sun at all. He was hovering over the new middle school, staring down from some invisible place in the air, watching the people file in.
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