As the Worm Turns

by Matthew Quinn Martin

  “With you, Agent Ross, you and . . .” Thorne remembered that there was another man in the room with them. “You and Dr. Kander.”

  “Very good. And why are we all here?”

  “You needed to show me something . . . something that’s on the other side of that.” She pointed to the blocked window, realizing as she lifted her arm that it was the first time she’d moved since before the shutters had opened.

  “And what was on the other side?”

  “A . . . a man.”

  “What did he look like?”

  She willed herself to speak, but no sound came. What had he looked like? Handsome? The word seemed so thin, a spectral second cousin of what she knew to be the truth.

  “Can you describe him? Physically? Hair color? Eye color? Height? Build? So on?”

  Thorne, like all Division agents, had undergone extensive memory training. Normally, she could walk into a room, spend a minute there, and a week later tell you if the cushions on the couch had piping or not, if the wall clock had been a minute fast, what page the TV Guide had been left open to. But not now. Not this time. The man’s image—so clear a moment ago—slipped from her mind, the way dreams do at first light. What remained was nothing but so many patches of fog broken up by dawn. “I . . . I can’t . . . no.”

  “Try again. Dig deep.”

  Thorne did as she was commanded. She squeezed her consciousness until a single drop of memory began to coalesce. Just one word was all she could extract, but it would do. “Perfect,” she said. “He was perfect.”

  “I think we’ve proven our point.” Ross stepped from his place behind the chair to face Thorne. He removed his black sunshades and folded them with a crisp clip before tucking them into the breast pocket of his slate-gray suit jacket. “Do you agree, Doctor?”

  “On that point, perhaps.” The doctor’s voice was a grating nasal whine. He clipped his words short, as if they were wasted on the likes of her and Ross.

  “Who was he?” Thorne asked.

  “Not a he,” Kander said, as he, too, came around to the front of the chair. Like Ross, he wore wraparound sunglasses. And like Ross, he now took them off. “Not a he at all. A what.”

  Thorne bit the inside of her cheek and kept quiet. She suspected that her near-instant distaste for Kander and his amoral genius shtick wasn’t a minority position. But she knew Division protocol when it came to handling its more egocentric assets. She didn’t need to be friends with Kander, only to survive working with him.

  “Fine, then. What?” she asked, rising from the chair and stepping toward the shutters. She could still feel the pull. It was much fainter now but still there, a phantom longing. “A what what?”

  Ross shot the cuffs of his crisp two-button suit, the type favored by all Division agents. Suits that came in shades of deep mulberry, abyssal graphite, midnight coffee, and so on. But all of them riffs on the same color: black. He turned to face the shuttered window, staring at it as if he could peer through the steel. “It’s a vampire, Agent Thorne. That is what we found down there, in the remnants of the New Harbor aqueduct. That is what was beneath the silver isolation tent you were so curious about. A vampire.”

  Thorne opened her mouth. Then just as swiftly shut it with a clack that echoed in the hollow room. “A vampire? Like, with fangs and a cape and all that? Sleeps in a coffin? Hypnotizes virgins? Turns into a bat? Drinks blood? That kind of vampire?”

  “Fangs, yes. Blood, yes,” Ross answered, his voice as flat as imported tile. “The rest is bunk.”

  It had to be a joke or another one of Ross’s head games. But no, his tone was serious. Deadly serious. Ross had just told her that the man she’d been staring at, the one who’d put her in such a trance she’d forgotten almost everything but her name, was a vampire. “A vampire,” she said, not really believing she’d spoken that word aloud. “Why do you have a vampire in there? And what’s he doing in Connecticut?”

  “Not he,” Kander corrected again. “It.”

  “Sure looked like a he to me.”

  “I’d imagine that it would,” Ross said. “But that is what it does. Part of what it does. It creates an illusion.”

  “Illusion?”

  Ross nodded. “An illusion. One that the thing inside there masks its true form with. And that illusion is best seen—or perhaps felt—for oneself. That is the reason you are here. I’m going to hazard that what you saw was an object of sexual desire.”

  Sexual desire? Sexual desire was an atoll, a barren, deserted slip of land lost in a churning ocean. What she’d felt was a continent. And now Ross was telling her it was all just an illusion, some psychic necromancy.

  “And the illusion,” Ross continued. “It is different for each person. Your mind perceives what it wants to. Again, usually what it finds most sexually attractive. Usually but not always.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Nothing,” answered Ross. He tugged out the sunshades that both he and Kander had worn, showing them to her. “The window is polarized horizontally; the lenses in these glasses are polarized vertically. When the shutters went up, we saw only blackness. If we hadn’t done that, the thing would have held us spellbound in here until we’d all starved to death or killed each other to get to it.”

  Thorne again tried to summon the image. It was even fainter now, but the longing still tingled, vibrating at the base of her femininity. “How did it know? How did it know what I’d want to see?”

  “It didn’t.” It was Kander who answered this time. “The illusion is a construct of the victim’s mind.”

  So she was already a victim to Kander. And Thorne supposed he might be right, in a way. Whatever the Division’s pet “vampire” was in reality, the illusion had claimed her as completely as a fatal car crash.

  “The victim provides the raw material. The creature simply activates it.” Kander produced a tablet and showed it to her. “This is what your vampire really looks like.”

  The image frosted Thorne’s every nerve. The thing’s body was slender, segmented, and wormlike, rising to a broad-shouldered torso. It stood on stumpy pseudopods, had spindly tentacle arms with flippers as wide as boat oars. Its head was little more than a bulbous mound, on either side of which protruded black orbs the size of racquetballs. Beneath was a jawless mouth open in a wide O down which spiraled a myriad of needle teeth. Thorne swallowed hard against a chalky lump in her throat.

  “We also have video.” Kander tapped the screen, and the creature began to move. It slithered around the inside of its cage with blinding speed. Moving from wall to wall, sometimes climbing them, hunting for a way out. Occasionally, those horrible black eyes would turn to them. It was as if that thing—that slug—could see through them all right through the screen. See them through time.

  “What is it?”

  “I told you,” said Ross. “It’s a vampire. Or at least, that’s what the people in Europe decided to call it at one point. And the name stuck over here. Other cultures have other names.”

  “But what is it, really?”

  “We don’t know,” admitted Kander. His voice rang with a queer sadness. “At first, we thought it might be a highly evolved parasite. Something related to leeches or, more likely, blood flukes. At least, that’s what my predecessor believed. But now . . . I’m . . . we’re not so certain. Attempts at coding its genetic sequence have been totally futile. We’ve found traces of human DNA, but we can’t be sure that that isn’t just from its diet.”

  Diet? Thorne suppressed another shudder. Did the doctor just casually refer to human DNA as a component, perhaps the sole component, of that thing’s diet?

  “Other than that,” Kander continued, “there have been zero corollaries. It shouldn’t exist. It’s almost like it slipped in here from someplace else. From some other reality.”

  “How does it . . .” Thorne fought to find the right combination of syllables. “How does it make you see it like . . . like what you want?”

  “We believe th
e creatures emit a series of viral compounds that invade and recode human DNA.”

  “Recode?”

  “Yes,” Kander continued. “By inserting some of their own genetic matter. This is why we thought they might be related to blood flukes, which have a similar ability to trick the immune system into seeing them as red blood cells.”

  Thorne fought hard not to vomit.

  “In addition, the compounds target the sex drive and certain higher brain functions in the visual cortex, which results in the hallucination.”

  She tried to process what she was hearing, but something about it didn’t make sense. “Wait,” she said. “I thought this room was airtight. If it’s emitting chemicals, I should be safe in here. We all should be.”

  “No one is safe,” Ross answered. “No one is safe from it anywhere. We have yet to find a test subject that hasn’t already been recoded.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Again . . . we do not know.”

  “And—” Dr. Kander started, but Ross held up a hand, cutting off any further ruminations the doctor might have had.

  “We can bandy about theories later,” Ross said. “For now, just the broad strokes. We’ve known about the existence of these creatures for decades. But we’ve never had one in captivity for this long until now. And this is the first time we’ve ever been able to photograph one. For some reason, they appear invisible to almost every photographic process—conventional, magnetic, infrared, thermal, echolocational, you name it. We don’t know how, but they are.”

  “They produce an energy field that renders them invisible to anything but a biological visual cortex,” Kander offered. “Hypothetically.”

  “Hypothetically? Biological?” Thorne tried to square that statement with the other information. “How did you get that footage, then?”

  “Through some rather messy trial and error,” Ross admitted. “Which proved to be an unreliable process.”

  Thorne looked again at the steel chair. From the angle of the footage, the POV would have been that of someone sitting there. She felt a chill crawl up her back as she realized just what—or whom—they might have used for a camera.

  “Let me ask you another question, Agent Thorne,” Ross said. “When you saw that thing in its true form, what did it look like most to you?”

  She thought about it. Even with the squat, almost vestigial legs and those serpentine arms, there was only one word that fit. “A worm.”

  “And what better use for a worm, Agent Thorne, than as bait?”

  “Bait? Bait for what?”

  “The Division keeps secrets even from itself, Agent Thorne,” Ross said as he strode to the exit hatch. “You are about to learn a few of them.”

  Nine

  PLEASANTVILLE, NEW JERSEY

  Jack surveyed the parking lot. The extensive damage relayed by the EMT had all been neatly removed. There was nothing left but a few stray cubes of shattered safety glass and a single tattered strip of crime-scene tape fluttering in the breeze like the world’s saddest party streamer. Jack felt another cough welling up inside and couldn’t check it. The deep, watery hack rattled his entire body.

  “Maybe we should get you some Robitussin,” Beth said.

  He waved her off and wiped his lower lip. The back of his hand came back wet with phlegm but no blood at least. “How many cars did that EMT say got wrecked?”

  “Five, I think. You ever seen one of the creatures do that?”

  “No. Nothing like it. They’re strong but not that strong.”

  “I wish we could have gotten here sooner, but . . .”

  Jack knew what the rest of the sentence would have sounded like. She wished they could have gotten there sooner, but if they’d come here while the place was still crawling with cops and CSU, then someone was bound to notice the two of them. And that could have been very bad indeed.

  “What do you think she meant by that last bit?” Beth asked. “What do you think she meant by ‘it changed’?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack admitted. And it was the truth. At first, he’d thought the cocktail waitress might have caught sight of the thing’s true form reflected in one of the car windows. A mirror flash was rare, but they did happen, another legend with a smear of truth.

  “You think it was nonsense, maybe?” Beth asked. “That she was just high out of her mind on cocaine and the neurotoxin?”

  “Maybe.” Jack felt a twinge of longing at her mention of the venom. It was a twinge that would only grow. He shoved it deep and meandered to the back of the lot. Blood followed.

  “What should we be looking for?”

  “Something the cops wouldn’t notice,” he said. “Something like that.” He pointed to a spot on the fence where one crossbar had been torn from its yokes. The chain link dipped slightly in the middle, and desiccated flakes of white clung to the twisted wire points. A low growl formed deep in Blood’s throat.

  “Is that from the creature?”

  “Looks like it raked itself going over. I think it was scared. I think it was trying to escape.”

  “Escape from who?”

  “I don’t know. But someone, or something, interrupted the attack. Those things don’t like to leave prey alive.”

  “You think the creature’s still out there?”

  Again, the dog growled, then dug through a gap at the bottom of the fence.

  “Blood does.” Jack gripped two fists full of chain link and began hoisting himself over. “Come on.”

  They descended into a steep ditch, dry except for a thin strip of soft mud that snaked its length. Blood led the way, stalking what only he could scent. Occasionally, Jack would spot more flakes of white on branches or tree bark.

  The sun was hidden behind a featureless scrim of clouds, but it baked them just the same. The air soon turned fetid and muggy, breeding battalions of gnats and mosquitoes in puddles lying unseen among the trees.

  As they followed the dog, first along the twisting path of the ditch and then into a patch of forest, Jack thought about how much he still needed to teach Beth and how little time he had left. That time was all he had left. Was he just wasting it?

  He’d turned himself into little more than a machine. He knew that, he accepted that. The years had transformed him into something as single-minded as the creatures he hunted, and almost since the moment he’d met her, he’d been doing the same thing to Beth. He was wasting the only life he had left. He should be spending his last days comforted by the woman he loved—no matter how platonically, how secretly—not dooming her to the same fate as his.

  Was this selfishness or mercy? Jack couldn’t tell. And, as always, he focused on the work—the work that would not mourn him, the work that had used him until there was almost nothing left. The work that, even now, demanded more, demanded all.

  • • •

  It was well past noon, nightfall still hours away, when they finally came within sight of the house. Blood came to a dead halt, his eyes fixed on the structure that loomed ahead of them in the middle of a vast clearing that was choked with tall grass.

  The three-story Victorian’s peeling paint was faded to the point where its original color was lost to history, now a mildew-spotted mottle of greenish gray. What was once a grand turret had caved in on itself like the rotten stump of a hollow bone. The entire house listed east, sinking low on one corner of its crumbling foundation. Every opening on the ground floor had been nailed shut with sheets of warped and weather-beaten plywood. The windows on the upper stories stared at them, black and shattered like the eyes of the blind.

  Jack felt Blood’s flank press tightly against his leg and looked down to see that the dog’s snout pointed directly ahead to a wooden cellar hatch. Beth drew up on the other side and stood shoulder to shoulder with him. Her presence was a comfort he wanted—and wanted just as much to shun.

  “I think this is the part in the horror movie where one of us suggests that we split up,” she said. “Then the other one says, ‘G
ood idea,’ and then I strip down to my underwear for some reason.”

  Jack didn’t smile, but her jolt of black humor was welcome just the same. And here, where the sun hanging high above them cast only short shadows, he almost felt as if he could laugh. In the dark confines of whatever lay under that ruin, however, there would be no laughter, only mockery. “Let’s go.”

  The rusted hatch handle pulled almost free of the rotted wood when he hauled up on it. The musty stench made the walls of Jack’s throat itch, but the smell came mingled with one he knew well—that of grave earth and corroded copper, the smell of those creatures. He spotted a fresh trail of viscous slime glistening on the concrete steps. It led directly into the black recess of the cellar.

  “I can smell it in there.”

  Beth stepped forward, already pulling a vial from her belt.

  Jack stopped her, gently tugging the snap vial from her hand. “Just me this time.” He couldn’t let her inhale the same gas that had given him cancer, not without her knowing the risks.

  “I need to see it, too. We’re in this together.”

  Jack’s grip was firm. He could never know what damage the gas might have already done to Beth—if it was killing her as it was killing him. Perhaps it was a sacrifice she’d be willing to make. But it should be one she’d make knowingly. “We need to ration it,” he lied, and cursed himself for doing so. “I wasn’t able to make a full batch last time.”

  “Okay,” Beth said finally.

  Jack felt her trust lance his heart. He turned from her and drew his pistol. Then he planted one boot sole on the first of the steep and narrow steps that led down into the dark. Blood took his place, standing guard behind them.

  “Cover me. And keep—”

  “And keep my focus slack,” Beth said as she flicked on her caving lamp. “Don’t look it in the eyes. Got it.”

  The basement was small, just a stone-and-mortar room that might have once been a coal cellar. Rough-hewn, pitch-covered beams brushed the top of his scalp as he crept farther into the dark. Cobwebs broke across his face, the itch clinging even after the spider silk had been brushed away.