The Troop

by Nick Cutter

  Shelley plucked a strand of gossamer near the web’s center as if he were strumming the world’s most fragile guitar. A spider crawled out of a knothole in the log. Its legs pushed out of the hole as one solid thing, all bundled tight like the ribs of a shut umbrella. To Shelley, it looked like an alien flower coming into bloom.

  This one was big. Its bell-shaped body was the size of a Tic Tac. Its color reminded Shelley of the boiled organ meat his mother fed their dog, Shogun. The spider picked its way nimbly across its web. It had mistaken Shelley’s gentle plucking for a trapped insect.

  Shelley pulled a slender barbecue lighter from his pocket. He always carried one. Once, his teacher Mr. Finnerty had caught him burning ants near the bike racks after school. The fat carpenter ants had made weird pop! sounds as they exploded: like Shelley’s morning bowl of Rice Krispies.

  Mr. Finnerty confiscated his lighter. He’d given Shelley a frosty, revolted look as if he’d just accidentally stepped on a caterpillar in his slipper. Shelley smiled back complacently.

  He’d simply bought another lighter. He bought one every few weeks from different stores around town. He also bought mousetraps and ant traps. One time, a shopkeep had remarked: You must live with the Pied Piper, son, all these mousetraps you buy. That had concerned Shelley a little, and he’d made sure to steer clear of that store. It wasn’t wise to establish a pattern.

  He flicked the ignitor. A wavering orange finger spurted from the metallic tip. Shelley worked carefully. It wasn’t a matter of savoring it—he’d done this so many times that his heartbeat barely fluctuated. He was simply methodical by nature.

  He touched flame to the web’s topmost edges. The gossamer burnt incredibly fast—like fuses zipping toward a powder keg—trailing orange filaments that left a smoky vapor in the air. The web folded over upon itself like the finest lace. The spider tried to scurry up its collapsing web, but it was like trying to climb a ladder that was simultaneously ablaze and falling into a sinkhole.

  Shelley idly wondered if the spider felt any confusion or terror—did insects even feel emotions? He sort of hoped so, but there was no way to be sure.

  He set fire to the web’s remaining moorings. The web fell like a silken parachute with the spider trapped inside. Shelley harassed the spider through the grass, nipping it with the flame. He liked it best when he could sizzle a few legs off or melt their exoskeletons so some of their insides leaked out. He tried not to kill them. He preferred to alter them. It was more interesting. The game lasted longer.

  He harried the spider until it scuttled under the cabin. He exhaled deeply and blinked his heavy-lidded eyes. Soon the spider would crawl back to its hole and build another web. Spiders were very predictable. When it did, Shelley might return and do it all over again.

  Shelley scuffed his feet over the charred grass. It was best to leave no evidence. Take only photos, leave only footprints. He worked carefully, reflecting on the fact that this—what he’d just started with the Scoutmaster—was something new entirely. Something terribly exciting.

  Spiders couldn’t tattle on you; mice couldn’t squeal—well, they could . . . but now Tim, he might just tell the boys what Shelley had done. But Shelley had an innate sense of leverage, a sixth sense he must’ve been born with; he understood that people in compromised positions were less believable. And even if the boys did believe Tim, or only a few of them—Max might; Newt definitely would—well, Shelley wasn’t sure that mattered now. He felt the pull of the island in his bones, a strong current anchoring him to it. The sun crawled over the water, and Shelley felt this day, which had only begun, might go on forever.

  The boys had not yet stirred. When they did, talk would turn to tiresome matters: when the boat would show up, how badly their folks would flip out, the identity of the dead man in the cabin. Most of all, they’d talk about how they’d be safe, real soon.

  But Shelley was positive the boat wasn’t coming.

  Shelley wasn’t particularly intelligent, at least according to the methods society had developed to measure that. He’d scored low on his IQ test. In school, he earned Cs and the odd D. His teachers gazed upon his pockmarked cheeks and slug-gray eyes and pictured Shelley fifteen years later in a pair of grease-spotted overalls, his slack and pallid moonface staring up from the oil-change pit at a Mr. Lube.

  Shelley was aware of their opinions, but it didn’t trouble him. Shelley was actually happy with this perception. It made it easier to engage in the behaviors that gave him pleasure—though he failed to experience pleasure in the ways others did.

  Shelley was far more perceptive than most gave him credit for. His impassive face was the perfect disguise. His expression hadn’t changed when he’d seen the dead man on the chesterfield, but his practical mind had immediately aligned it with the black helicopter that had hovered overhead during the hike.

  He had also aligned the thick white rope that had come out of the dead man with the thin white rope that had come out of his dog’s bum a few years ago.

  Shogun, the family sheltie, had gotten into some spoiled chuck in a neighbor’s trash can. He passed a seven-foot worm weeks later. Shelley was home alone when it happened. He heard Shogun yowling in the backyard. He found the dog squatted in the zinnias. A white tube was spooling out of his butt, some of it already coiled up in the cocoa shells his father had spread over the flower beds.

  Shelley crouched down, completely fascinated. He flicked at the white tube, mesmerized. The thing wriggled at his touch. Shelley giggled. He flicked it again. Shogun reared and snapped at him. Shelley waited, then touched the tube again. Flicking and flicking it gently with one finger. It was slick with the dog’s digestive juices. Shogun mewled pitifully and craned his skull over his haunches to stare at Shelley with wounded, rheumy eyes.

  After shitting it out, Shogun tried to bury the worm. Shelley shooed the dog inside. He wanted to study it. It was dying very fast. Its head was a flat spoon shape. Many smaller spoon shapes branched off the biggest spoon: it looked like a Venus flytrap—the only plant Shelley found even remotely interesting. Each of the spoons had a slit down the middle studded with tiny translucent spikes. That must’ve been how it had moored to the dog’s intestines . . . fascinating.

  Shelley thought back to that sunny afternoon in the garden, Shogun’s plaintive yipping as that greedy tube spooled out of its bottom. He was filled with a certainty as keen as he’d ever experienced.

  The boat wouldn’t come. Not today. Not for a while. Maybe not ever.

  And that was just fine with him. That meant he could play his games.

  And if he played them patiently enough, carefully enough, he might be the only one left to greet a boat when—if?—it did show up.

  He turned his vaporous test-pattern face up to the new sun. It was warm and not unpleasant. It would be an unseasonably hot day. New life could grow in this kind of heat. He walked back to the fire to rejoin the others.

  19

  WHEN THE boys awoke, the cooler was gone.

  It contained all the food Scoutmaster Tim set aside. Wieners and buns. A six-pack of Gatorade. A bag of trail mix. Hershey’s Kisses. All they had left until the boat arrived. Max had placed it next to the fire the previous night. When they woke up, it was gone.

  “Where the hell is it?” Ephraim said. He stamped around the campsite, knuckling sleep-crust out of his eyes. “I’m hungry, man.”

  The others roused themselves slowly. Their sleep had been fitful, thanks to the ominous howls and sly scuttlings of the wild creatures lurking beyond the fire’s glow.

  Newt said: “The cooler’s missing.”

  “No shit, Captain Obvious,” Ephraim said. “Which one of you guys took it? Was it you, Newt, you lardo?”

  Newton beheld Ephraim with bruised eyes. “Eef, why would I . . . ?”

  “Because you’re a big fat fat-ass,” Ephraim stated simply.

  “Newt slept next to me the whole night,” Max said; he knew it was wise to calm his best friend down befor
e he “lost it,” as Eef’s mom would say. “If he’d tried to take the cooler, I’d have heard him.”

  Shelley came round the side of the cabin.

  “Where the hell were you?” Ephraim said, the challenge clear.

  “Hadda take a piss.”

  “What happened to the cooler?”

  Shelley set his flat-hanging face upon Ephraim’s. “Dunno, boss.”

  Ephraim balled his fists. He wanted to plant one between Shelley’s cowish eyes. But he was distantly fearful that his fist would sink right into the placid emptiness of Shelley’s face. It would be like sinking into a bowl of warm dough studded with busted lightbulbs. Worst of all he got the queasy feeling that Shelley wouldn’t exactly mind it—and that his face would eat his fist. Dissolve it somehow, like acid.

  Ephraim inhaled deeply, willing himself to stay calm. His mother said he had a temper just like his father’s. The father who’d headed out to catch the afternoon stakes at Charlottetown downs and never came home. The shithead who’d busted his own son’s arm and didn’t even remember. The father who was currently a guest of the province at the Sleepy Hollow correctional center following a string of convenience store thefts—one of which netted the princely sum of $5.02.

  He was also the man whose footsteps many figured that Ephraim would inevitably follow. The apple never falls far from the tree, went the whispers around town. It didn’t help that Ephraim looked almost exactly like his father: the same antifreeze-green eyes and open-pored olive complexion.

  And, Ephraim knew, the same temper.

  One afternoon he and his mother had come across a construction site. An open sewer with a nest of hoses running down into it. Workmen had set up a large reflective warning sign. The top left side of the sign was crimped so that it read:

  ANGER

  KEEP

  CLEAR

  You should heed that warning, his mother had said.

  And Ephraim tried to. But people were always pushing his buttons—which he had to admit were more like huge hair-trigger plungers. Whenever his emotions threatened to spill over, he’d follow his mother’s suggestion to breathe deeply and count slowly backward from ten.

  10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . 4 . . . 3—

  “Wild animals must have dragged it off while we were sleeping,” Kent said. “We should have hung it in a tree or something.”

  Kent looked nothing like last night’s world beater. A dirty ring of sweat darkened his T-shirt collar; the same dark patches bloomed under his armpits. His eyes sat deep in his skull, the flesh around them netted in fine wrinkles: it looked a little like the wattle on an old biddy’s neck.

  “Bullshit,” said Ephraim. “How would we not have heard animals making off with it?”

  “I was pretty zonked,” Max said.

  Ephraim pointed at Newt. “You figure the Masked Skunk made off with it, too?”

  Newton winced. “I was wiped last night, too. I mean, it could have—”

  “Fuck, man—if one of you took it, just admit it,” Ephraim said, his voice taking flight to an upper octave. “What do you think I’m going to do—go crazy? Start laying you guys out?” He raised his hands, all innocence. “You couldn’t have eaten it all, right? So we’ll just say you’ve had your fill and leave it at that.”

  “Animals,” Kent croaked.

  White-hot rage pounded at Ephraim’s temples. His molars ground together so hard that he could hear them in his skull: thick plates of shale scraping against one another.

  He stalked away from the campfire in the direction of the cabin . . . but he took a wide berth around it, continuing on into the sparse woods behind.

  He pulled a battered old Sucrets cough drop tin from his pocket. Three lonely cigarettes jostled inside. He’d hoped to duck away with Max, sharing a smoke down by the shore while they stared at the stars. Max didn’t smoke, but Eef planned to convince him to be his smokin’ buddy. Otherwise it was just him, alone, launching off lung rockets. Snacking on cancer sticks. Which painted a pretty lame picture, actually.

  He poked a cigarette into his mouth, flicked his brass Zippo, and touched the flame to tobacco. He inhaled, coughing as the gray vapor rasped his throat—at first it’d felt like swallowing fiberglass insulation, the pink kind stacked in bricks at the hardware store—hissing the smoke between his teeth. He tried to blow smoke rings, puffing out his cheeks, but the wind rose out of the west and tore them apart.

  Birds called in a metallic rhree-rhree-rhree: a sound like a rusty axe drawn across a cinder block. The nicotine hit his system, nerve endings a-tingle.

  Settle down, he chastised himself. So what if one of those assholes ate the food. You’ll be at your own kitchen table with a big plate of spaghetti in, like, what, two hours, right? Away from this island. Away from . . .

  From the dead man. Which, truth be told, had freaked Ephraim out more than anything in his life. Seeing the man laid out stiff with his limbs jutting at weirdo angles and his chest slicked in brown gunk—that had been the worst part: that he’d died streaked in filth—Ephraim had barely managed to tamp down the high-pitched wail that had threatened to spill over his lips.

  He’d never seen a dead person before. The closest he’d ever come to anything remotely like it was the time he’d been walking home from school and saw a hydro worker get blown off a power pole by a jolt of electricity. The guy had been thirty feet up in a cherry picker. A current surge must’ve ripped through the transformer. Ephraim remembered the guy’s face and body lighting up like a Fourth of July sparkler. The flash was so bright that it printed everything on Ephraim’s eyes in negative for a minute afterward.

  The man rocketed out of the cherry picker as if there were dynamite in his boots. He hit a sapling on his way down; the limber little tree bent with his weight before snapping with a crisp green sound. By the time Ephraim ran over, the workman was up and walking a dazed circle. The electricity had melted the treads of his boots: the rubber pooled around the soles as if he’d stepped in black jelly. Ephraim found it painful to breathe: the dissipating electricity left a lingering acidic note. Smoke spindled out of the man’s overalls, right through the coarse orange weave of the fabric, rising off his shoulders in vaporous wings.

  “Ah God ah God,” the guy was saying over and over. Mincing around in stiff stutter-steps like a man walking barefoot over hot coals. “Ah God ah God ah God ah God . . .”

  The flesh over his skull had melted down his forehead. The electricity had somehow loosened his skin without actually splitting it. Gravity had carried the melted skin downward: it wadded up along the ridge of his brow like the folds of a crushed-velvet curtain, or the skin on top of unstirred gravy pushed to one side of the pot. His hair had come down with it. His hairline now began in the middle of his forehead. The man didn’t seem to realize this. He kept hopping around saying “Ah God ah God . . .”

  In the calm eye of horror, Ephraim became aware of the tiniest details. Like how the hairs on the man’s head were melted and charred, like the bristles of a hairbrush that had drawn too near an open flame. Or how the skin on the man’s head—sheerer and hairless and now stretched with horrifying tension over the dome of his skull—was threaded with flimsy blue veins like the veins on a newborn baby’s skull.

  Ephraim had run to the truck and babbled into the CB radio. He was still babbling for help when the paramedics showed up.

  That was the closest Ephraim had ever come to death until last night. And the dead man here (who the hell was he, anyway?) had been so much worse because he had been so much more final. The dead man couldn’t get skin grafts and a hair weave like the workman could. All that lay in wait for the dead man was a lonely hole in the dirt.

  And now Scoutmaster Tim was pretty sick, too. Maybe the same way the dead man had been?

  They’d locked him in that stupid closet; Ephraim hadn’t quite felt right about it—he got carried away, was all. And now Kent looked like he’d been attacked by vampire bats in the night; t
hey’d sucked a gallon of blood out of him and soon—

  He inhaled deeply. Held it. Let it go.

  10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1

  Are you angry, Eef? came his mother’s voice. Or are you scared?

  Ephraim realized that those emotions existed on two sides of a razor-thin line. One bled into the other so easily.

  Anger. Keep Out.

  Fear . . . Keep Out?

  It’s always good to have a little fear, son, especially at your age, he heard his mom say. Fear keeps you honest. Fear keeps you safe.

  Ephraim stubbed the cigarette, dug a small hole in the earth—a little grave for my coffin nail, he thought cheerlessly—and buried the butt. He headed back to the campfire, confused in his thoughts.

  * * *

  From the sworn testimony of Nathan Erikson, given before the Federal Investigatory Board in connection with the events occurring on Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island:

  Q: Dr. Erikson, please describe the discussion between Dr. Edgerton and yourself regarding the selection of a human test subject.

  A: I wouldn’t really term it a discussion at all. Edgerton said he was doing it and I could come along for the ride if I wanted.

  Q: And you agreed?

  A: In for a penny? But I also thought . . . maybe I could help things somehow. Keep it under control.

  Q: You could have kept it under control by informing the police.

  A: I could have.

  Q: But you didn’t. Why not?

  A: It’s a tough thing to describe. Now that I’m away from it, the answers are so simple. Men like Edgerton are obsessives. Notions of right or wrong have this awful way of draining away to irrelevance with men like that. The only things that matter to them are answers. Progress. Unlocking doors. And if you can’t unlock them, you just kick at them until they give. I guess I was sucked up in it, too.