As the Worm Turns

by Matthew Quinn Martin

  She nudged Jack. “What about that?” she asked, pointing up.

  An enormous Ferris wheel jutted out through the roof. It had been stripped to just a skeleton, the cars long gone, but the crisscross lattice of the yoke’s support beams were close together. It would be as good as a ladder—if they could get to it.

  “That’d work. Think you can scale a drainpipe?”

  There was a time, not long ago, when Beth would have answered a question like that with little more than a laugh. But that time was gone. “Piece of cake.”

  • • •

  Once again, Blood was left to stand sentry. Beth went first up the rotting drainpipe, the rusted straps cutting into her fingers as she climbed. By the time she’d made it to the overhang, her stomach was doing backflips. She reached out one hand for the ledge, then the other—fingertips clinging to the flaking tarpaper—and heaved herself up. She couldn’t resist a glance down. More than a hundred feet separated her from a very messy, very flat demise. She pushed the thought deep and rolled onto the roof, huffing as she gazed up at the star-filled sky. Jack followed a moment later.

  “What do you think we’re going to find in there?”

  “I don’t know. If it’s the same thing I saw in that clearing, it looked human.”

  “But the waitress said it changed. Audrey said it grew tentacles.” Right before it used them to tear the head off one of those creatures.

  “And when I saw it, there was something about its skin that seemed artificial, almost like plastic.”

  “Audrey said the same—that her face looked like a doll’s. What do you think it means?”

  He turned to her. “Have you ever heard of an alligator snapping turtle?”

  She hadn’t.

  “It’s big, about four hundred pounds. It’ll lie still at the bottom of a pond. It waits, mouth open, and waggles its tongue. To fish, the turtle looks like a rotting log, the tongue a worm. And when the fish go to get that worm . . . there they are, right in the turtle’s mouth. To catch its prey, it appears as food. And food to the creatures . . .”

  “Is us.” Beth was struck by the simple elegance of it all. If natural selection had allowed those things to arise from common blood flukes and leeches, it stood to reason that some other species would also evolve to feed on them. It was the circle of life at its darkest and most primal. “That’s why it looks human.”

  “It’s a theory,” Jack admitted. “But it’s the best I’ve got.” They approached the Ferris wheel. The roof felt as if it were about to crumble, and still the nearest crossbeam was yards away. When Jack got within a few feet, the roof buckled even more. They wouldn’t be able to make it without jumping.

  “Ladies first, I guess,” Beth offered, and leaped. One hand landed on the angle iron with a ringing clang. The other missed it. She flailed for an eternity, toes barely brushing the bar beneath her. The rickety tower swayed with a sick metallic moan. She felt her fingers grow elastic, stretching to the snapping point, but she gripped hard, brought her other hand around, and clamped on vise-tight.

  Jack waited until Beth was halfway to the ground before jumping himself. The century-and-a-half-old ride lurched as he landed on a crossbeam above her. And Beth’s stomach lurched right along with it.

  As soon as they touched down on the cracked concrete floor, they clicked on their flashlights and spotted the stripped remains of a carousel. The wondrous hand-carved stallions, mares, and mythical beasts that might have once been there were gone. The pneumatic calliope with its mechanical melodies had been ripped out and carted away. All that remained was a listing disc and a striped canvas canopy black with mold.

  An arching entranceway stood to the left not far off. A sign hung above it, silver plywood letters with bits of mirror tile stuck to them in places, reflecting back their flashlight beams in random spokes. It read, The Crystal Palace.

  “Hall of mirrors,” Beth said, remembering how the creatures would instinctively avoid mirrors, and she wondered if whatever was in here might act the same way. In the darkness, past the reach of their flashlights, hovered the shades of other attractions long abandoned. “Any idea where you want to start?”

  “I wish we could have brought Blood in here. That would have made it easier.”

  “We’ll work on his wall-climbing skills for next time.”

  Jack nodded distractedly. “Look at that.” He pointed his flashlight beam into the long darkness. It landed on the façade of a storybook castle. Looming over the decaying battlements was a leering plaster giant. His face was twenty feet wide, eyes crossed and beard split in a maniac’s grin, and his arms reached out over the castle wall, grasping the air with gnarled hands.

  Between that and the imp painted on the side of the building, Beth was beginning to have doubts about the sanity of the architect who’d dreamed up Castle Amusements. And further doubted her own sanity for having ever set foot inside.

  “It’s as good a place as any, I guess.” She took a few steps toward the castle, and her flashlight beam glinted off something on the cement floor. Oblong in shape, about a foot long, it had the milky translucence of a sun-faded soda bottle. And that’s what she thought it was—at first. But something about it told her otherwise.

  She bent down to examine it. It was hollow, she could see that. She prodded it with one finger, and the thing flipped over. It was split down the center, and clinging to the edges were brushes of stiff cilia.

  “Jack, check this out. It looks like, I don’t know, like a shrimp shell.” She flicked her flashlight beam forward. More shells littered the floor in a line that led right to the castle gates. Jack was a pace or two ahead of her. She went to him. “Jack? Jack, did you hear . . .”

  Her voice died as she saw what he held. In his hands was another one of the translucent shells. But this one was different. No simple tube. Empty holes stared out from the hard membrane where the eyes and mouth would have been. It was a face. A woman’s face.

  Twenty-Two

  Thorne and the other agents parked five blocks away from Castle Amusements, pulling their cars to the curb in ghostly silence. They didn’t risk bringing in a helicopter. Jackson and the girl had proven elusive enough as it was; no need to give them even an ounce of warning. Not this time.

  “What are they going in there for?” she asked, eyes locked on the abandoned amusement park.

  “What do you think?” replied Agent Diamond, his tone like burlap. “Heard the corn dogs are to die for.”

  Thorne ignored Diamond, but she couldn’t ignore the unease swimming lazy circles in her gut. Couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea of Jackson hunting again so soon after he’d slipped their noose in Camden. There had to be more to it.

  “Agent Ross?” piped up Lamb as he stepped from the rearmost car. “If there is one of those things in there, should we attempt to subdue it?”

  “If one of those things is in there,” Ross said, “shoot to kill. Or it’ll kill you.”

  “But Dr. Kander—”

  “Kander is back in New Harbor, where he belongs. Focus on Jackson. He is—”

  “Priority one,” Agent Lamb said, resigned.

  They’d caught a break with the car Jackson and Becker had stolen. The owner of that Detroit dinosaur had left his cell phone inside. He’d reported the theft of both, and the phone’s GPS made it an easy track.

  They would have gotten them sooner, but Jackson had been clever enough to ditch the Lincoln the day after stealing it. The proprietor of the only used-car lot within walking distance, however, was more than happy to cooperate after Thorne produced the standard Division compensation. He IDed both Jackson and Becker and even gave them a picture of the shitbox hatchback they’d paid cash for.

  “This will be surgical,” Ross said. “Police frequencies?”

  “Hacked,” answered Thorne, although she suspected Ross knew that by now, most of Asbury Park’s finest had been routed to dead-end calls. The Division would have the streets surrounding Castle Amusements
totally to itself for the next few hours.

  “Then let’s begin, shall we?”

  A quick scan showed them that all the entrances had been welded shut. That explained why Jackson and Becker had elected to enter through the roof. Ross, however, ordered agents stationed at every door just the same. He wasn’t taking chances. Even the mighty Agent Ross had superiors to report to. He couldn’t risk a repeat of what had happened in Camden. None of them could.

  They checked their gear. In addition to Tasers and standard sidearms, they’d been issued modified paintball guns she was told were similar to Jackson’s own pistol. The chambers had been loaded with sodium silver-nitrate pellets designed to kill the creatures. Beneath their suit jackets, each of them wore a tunic of woven carbon fiber that would, in theory, protect them from those same pellets. And in their pockets, they carried bags of salt, plain old table salt. It was a weapon of last resort.

  They positioned themselves in front of a sealed door that, according to the schematics, would lead to a narrow hallway that connected to all branches of the complex. Once inside, they could fan out from there. If Jackson or Becker tried to escape through this same opening, they’d find themselves trapped like lobsters in a pot.

  Lamb applied a thin strip of putty to each of the steel door’s metal hinges. After he touched the first strip with a small device, it started to sizzle and glow red. He touched the other three strips, and they did the same. The putty smoked away, and soon the heavy door fell outward. Lamb and a few other agents caught it, laying it on the sidewalk in total silence.

  Thorne heard a dog bark. And it was a familiar bark. She turned to spot the mongrel standing dead in the street, glaring at them with cold intent. She hadn’t seen the dog that had alerted Jackson back in Camden, but she’d recognized that bark. This was his dog. It had to be.

  And it seemed that she was not the only one who’d figured that out. “Not making that mistake again,” said Agent Diamond, drawing his sidearm. He took aim at the dog’s skull.

  Before she knew what she’d done, Thorne shoved herself forward, knocking into Diamond’s shoulder just as he squeezed the trigger. The muffled shot hit the dog in the hind section. It hurtled into the night, baying, leaving a dotted trail of blood behind it.

  Diamond wheeled on her. “What the fuck!”

  “That was Jackson’s dog.”

  “No shit that was Jackson’s dog! Why do you think I shot it?” He stepped to her, fists balled and looming a foot taller than she. “It would have given us away.”

  “We need Jackson alive,” she said, not budging an inch. “Alive and cooperative. How willing to cooperate do you think he’d be if he came out here to find his dog’s brains splattered all over the pavement?”

  Diamond opened his mouth to speak but said nothing. He just stood there, fists clenched and jaw hanging. Then he turned to the direction where the dog had run off. The drops of blood glistened black in the moonlight. “Probably bleed out anyway.”

  Thorne looked over to see that Ross had been watching the exchange with fox shrewdness. “Come on,” he said, and stepped through the door of Castle Amusements.

  She was about to follow when she felt Diamond’s hand wrap around her bicep. He gripped her bruise-tight and pulled her close. A wave of sweat, Old Spice, and Juicy Fruit washed over her as he whispered, “You might be Ross’s pet, but that don’t mean shit to me. I shot Jackson’s dog, don’t think I won’t do the same with Ross’s. So watch your step, hot pants. Lot can happen in there . . . in the dark.”

  Twenty-Three

  Beth stared into the open mouth of a turret sculpted into the face of a clown king. Black and barred portals for eyes, a jutting overhang for a nose, and a ring of square blocks for the coxcomb crown. Inside the top lip of his mouth hung a drop gate, its pickets a row of fangs glistening in the pitch void. Jack took the first step inside, and she followed.

  Jack had kept two of the translucent shells, tucked away for future analysis. Although they looked as fragile as isinglass, they were shockingly resilient—bending but refusing to break, even underfoot. The image of that face still haunted Beth as they gazed into the abyss awaiting them.

  “Use the flashlight sparingly.”

  Beth nodded and trailed behind him. She reflexively reached for her pistol, only to have her hand hit nothing. Her gun, along with her belt and everything on it, had been left abandoned in that Camden trash bin. They hadn’t had time to replace it, and while Jack had offered to let her take his gun, she knew he was still the surer shot.

  She’d taken a couple of stakes and a few road flares. And salt, of course; she’d packed two pockets of her jacket full of salt. How effective any of it would be against what they might find in here was a total crapshoot.

  They hit a sharp dogleg and turned left. Around the corner, their flashlights lit up the open end of a tube large enough to walk through. The interior walls were a spiral of green-black peppermint stripes.

  As they stepped inside, the cylinder began to spin, the rasp of ancient bearings hissing as the stripes swirled hypnotically. “Barrel room,” Jack said.

  “Oh, what fun!” Beth felt like throwing up.

  “Be careful. I’d be surprised if this is the only thing like this we’ll pass.”

  And he was right. Next was a hallway. The black walls were flanked by red-framed windows down the entire length. As they pressed on, Beth caught the soft groan of leaf spring beneath her feet. She tumbled forward, slamming into Jack, as the whole hallway listed right. They tangled, trying to find their footing, as the floor tilted left, then back again, under their shifting weight.

  Plaster heads snapped through the frames on jack-in-the-box springs. There was a devil, a rabbit, a pirate, a skull, a jester, and more—cartoon boogeymen from the nightmares of children everywhere. And all of them here, all of them waiting.

  They stumbled through the hallway like drunks and finally hit a deck of sturdy plywood. Beth had never been so glad for the comfort of solid ground. “Why do people pay for shit like this? Pay for fake scares?”

  “So they don’t have to pay for the other kind. So they don’t have to pay the other way,” Jack answered. “Guess up is next.” He pointed to a spiral staircase and the hatch at the top of it.

  Beth wondered what tricks the stairs would pull on her senses. Would they spin like a treadmill so they never left this floor? Would they collapse into a slide the moment she reached the top? Something else? Something worse? She’d never been one for fun houses. But in here, she couldn’t help but think of Axis. Of her bartending days. What was a nightclub if not an alcohol-fueled fun house for grown-ups? One with flashing lights instead of twisting tunnels, demon patrons instead of plaster heads, and floors that swayed not because of springs but because of the substances you’d swallowed.

  They followed the stairs up and into a narrow black-walled chimney, continuing on for two more stories, before it spit them out on the castle’s upper landing. The stairs, it seemed, were nothing but stairs. And Beth thought that might have been the most devious trick of all.

  They stood directly behind the concave hollow of the giant’s head. Past the low plywood parapets was a sheer drop that ended in flat concrete. She could easily imagine an inquisitive child taking a tumble over the side. Safety regulations were still a thing of the future when this place had been built.

  She spotted a pagoda-like mound hugging the back wall. At first, Beth pegged it as nothing more than the crumbling remains of the castle’s uppermost ramparts. But as her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw it more clearly. And she knew it was something else, something wrong. “What is that?”

  Jack stepped toward the mound almost as if he were sleepwalking. She followed. As they got closer, she saw that the skin of it was rough and organic, the shape of the mound helical, with long hexagonal chambers radiating from the center, overlapping like roof tiles as they climbed toward the ceiling. It reminded Beth of a paper wasp nest, only one made by wasps the size of predat
or drones.

  And then one of the chambers twitched.

  Beth clamped both hands over her mouth, holding the scream so tight it kicked her kidneys from the inside.

  Jack knelt by the twitching chamber. It was made of spun fiber and was as big as a coffin. It twitched again. Jack reached out a hand to press against its side. “It’s warm.”

  “Warm . . .” And a single thought tore from the stable and went thundering through Beth’s brain. Oh, fuck! Not again! Another nest. Another egg sack. Another unimaginable fight with creatures beyond comprehension. “Please don’t tell me this is just like what we found under New Harbor.”

  “I don’t know, but there’s something inside.” Jack’s voice was vibrant with hushed awe. “And . . . it’s alive.” He tugged out a pocketknife and unfolded the blade.

  “Jack, what are you doing?”

  He said nothing, only jabbed the knife’s tip into the capped end of the chamber and began working it gently into the seam. A thick metallic stench filled the air as the blade slid down the length of the pod, tearing through the skin with the whisper of cut construction paper.

  A man slid from the breach, landing on the deck with a wet thud. He was naked, his body covered with a network of fine tendrils that crept across every inch of skin and trailed back into the chamber like vines.

  Beth wasn’t sure what she’d expected to see, but this was not it. “What the—”

  The man jolted up. Head and heels slammed against the floor, back bent in agony, as he vomited out strand after strand of thick, viscous liquid. He sucked in one quick breath, then let it out in a death rattle. Then silence and stillness.

  “It’s not the creatures it wants,” she said. “It’s us.” That, at least, was clear enough to Beth when nothing else was. What was it doing with that man? Were those chambers nothing more than spider cocoons? One big pantry stuffed with people? And past that, the big why. “But if it wants us, why is it killing creatures?”