“I touched it, and it hurt me.” Daniel said, finally, his voice sounded tiny, barely a whisper.
“You touched what?” his father asked . 'Tell me what it was.”
“I don't know what it was, I never saw it before.”
“What did it look like?”
“I don't know. It was like, clear. I could see into it. And it was...” Daniel searched for a word to describe the shape of the thing. “...mushy.”
A look of understanding came to his father's face. “And did it have tentacles?”
Daniel though of the black eye reaching out to him. He nodded. “Uh-huh.”
He father let out a relieved sigh, wrapped his arms around him and held him tight. “Okay, it was just a jellyfish. You're going to be alright. Does it still hurt?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright, we'll go in the house and see what we can do about it. It's probably going to hurt for a few hours, but I think after that you'll be better.”
The house was jarringly bright and blasting with noise. Sissy was at the small table in the kitchen, coloring and watching her mother cook dinner. She had the radio turned up to inhuman levels and was singing along to Neil Sedaka. Cameron was sprawled across the couch watching, what his father could only guess by the sound was, a documentary about explosions at a competing volume with the radio. The din seemed to cease immediately when they all saw him cradling Daniel in his arms. In the harsh light, he looked anemic, like some delicate bird, pale white and frail as glass.
The family looked at him with stunned silence. His mother rushed to him and took the boy in her arms.
“Daniel, what happened to you?”
“He got stung in the hand by a jellyfish. Looks pretty nasty, too.” His father answered.
She grabbed his arm and turned the hand over, delicately. Her eyes widened in shock. “A jellyfish did this? I've never seen one so bad.”
By now Cameron and Sissy had crowded around, motivated by their own morbid curiosity to see their brother's mangled hand.
“I heard on TV that if a jellyfish stings you, you gotta pee on it,” Cameron announced.
At this Daniel burst into tears again “No! I don't want a doctor to pee on me!” He sobbed.
His mother became annoyed. “Cameron , go watch TV, Daniel, nobody's going to pee on you. I think what you're supposed to do is put ammonia on it.” She opened a cabinet under the sink and rearranged various bottles until she found the one she was looking for. She went back to Daniel, reading the label to see if it was safe to use on skin. She moved a footstool in front of the sink and hoisted Daniel up onto it. “Now hold your hand out and I'm going to pour just a little bit of this on it. Tell me if it hurts, okay?”
Daniel didn't think his hand could possible hurt any more than it already did. He nodded and held out his hand obediently. She tipped the bottle and the cool liquid ran over his hand. At first he felt nothing. And suddenly, his hand flared with pain, it felt like he was holding it to a fire. A great howl of pain rose from within him, low and terrible. He jerked his hand back and covered his ears to block out the awful wail. He looked around at his family, they didn't seem to hear the scream at all. He tumbled off the stool and came down hard on the linoleum. He was on his back, staring up at the dull glow from the light fixture spreading itself into the edge of darkness that closed in around his vision. And the last thing he thought before he lost consciousness was: something inside of me is screaming.
He dreamed: images he would barely recollect upon waking, terrible things, things that hurt, fragments of memories. He was small. Small and floating. Bobbing in a tiny tank, hateful light all around. He couldn't shut it out. It burned him. He was surrounded by masked men dressed in white. And then he was lifted from the tank. Outside the tank he was dying. Why had they put him here? Writhing, agony, torture, he hated it, hated them, the men in white. And then, a mouse. Curious, sniffing, mouse. He entered the mouse. It hurt the mouse. He was the mouse. He found he could shut the mouse's eyes against the light. He could hear the mouse's heart beat. He fed. He grew. He moved the mouse to freedom. He took the mouse to where it was cold, and dark, and wet. He left the mouse.
Daniel awoke. He was in bed, it was dark and he could see the door outlined in a rectangle of light. He heard the TV in the living room. Did the ammonia work? He wondered. Am I alone? His hand didn't hurt anymore. He reached for the lamp beside his bed and turned it on. He tried to move his right hand into the light and found it wouldn't budge. Panicked, he sat upright and flung the covers from his right side, grabbed the lamp and shone the light on his hand. A thin moan escaped his lips as he stared at what lay under the covers. His entire hand, up to the wrist, was black and withered. He could see little black trails tracing upward from his shrunken fist like a spreading infection. He stared in horror, whispering No no no.
The light under the door disappeared and he heard small bare feet approaching on the hardwood floor. He threw the covers over his arm and lay back down, pretending to sleep. The bedroom door swung open. It was Cameron . Daniel shut his eyes as tight as he could and tried to even his breathing. Cameron wasn't convinced. Daniel felt the heft of his older brother as he climbed onto the mattress.
“I know you're awake.” He said in hushed voice that still managed to be intimidating.
Daniel tensed as if preparing for impact.
“You're as bad at faking sleep as you are at faking sick. Mom said if you aren't better by, tomorrow then we're going to have to go home. I sure as hell ain’t ready to leave just because your little faggot ass wants to play baby for attention. And I promise: if we do have to leave early, I'm going to fuck you up all summer, every chance I get.” He slapped Daniel in the back of the head, hard, to show just how serious he was. “So I suggest you start feeling better real fast.” He rolled off the bed and left the room.
Daniel didn't hear that last part. As soon as his brother's hand made contact with his head he was overcome with a feeling of blind rage that surged through his body like black water through an open floodgate. He felt his right hand moving. He watched his fingers spread out and then curl into a fist. He started to feel himself sinking deep into the bed. He struggled to stay awake but it was useless. He drifted off to sleep.
He was thrust into consciousness by a high-pitched shriek that felt like an icepick being shoved between his eyes. He felt ill, and when he sat up he saw droplets of blood from his nose had splattered onto the white sheets. There was a silence, like a merciful void in his head, and then, it spoke. BROTHER. It didn't speak in words, it didn't have to, it was inside of him. It spoke in thought and mental images pulled from Daniel’s own memories. It showed him Cameron: blowing out candles at his eleventh birthday party, holding up his little league trophy, Cameron riding the bike he got for Christmas. It showed him the slaughtered seals on the beach, a dog he saw get run over by a car last year, images of gunshot wounds he briefly looked at on the internet before feeling disgusted and exiting the page. His mind was bombarded with image after image, memories of his brother spliced with every instance of death he had ever experienced. He didn't think he had to speak out loud for the thing to understand him but he did anyway, just for something else to exist other than the horrible repetition and imagery. “NO,” he said. “You need me to take you to him, but I won't do it. Do you understand me? No!”
Pain rocked his body and he toppled out of bed. He saw his arm had been taken over by the black abscess up to his elbow, dark, sinewy tangles that glistened in the moonlight. Inside, his head screamed with a pitch only dogs were meant to hear. Blood gushed from his nose and ran down his mouth and chin. He was beginning to feel blood trickle out of his ears as well. He could endure the pain no longer, and he began to move. He took pained steps leading out of his room and down the hall to where his brother and sister slept. With each step, the thing inside of him grew more excited, the images flashed through his mind more rapidly. He stopped outside the door.
“Please,” he begged. “Don
't make me go in there, I don't want to hurt him.”
The thing inside paid no attention, and the black right arm reached out to turn the knob. Another burst of blinding pain forced Daniel to step through the door. The room was small, it hardly had room to contain much more than the two twin beds where his siblings lay. Cameron was sleeping under a Pittsburgh Pirates poster he had taped to the wall. Daniel stood over him, shaking, tears welling in his eyes, blood drying around his nose and mouth. He watched as the fingers on his right hand stretched like black taffy until they were nearly a foot long and then converge, twisting to form a point.
“I'm sorry, Cameron. I'm so sorry,” he whispered.
Cameron stirred. “Wha you doin in my room," he murmured, still half asleep. He rubbed his eyes and immediately started at the sight of Daniel's hand. It looked like his brother was standing over him with a bullwhip. Except he wasn't holding it, he had no hand, it just seemed to come out of him. He looked from the dangling tendril pouring from Daniel's upper arm, to his gore streaked face, and back again. “Daniel, what th-”
The arm, like dripping black tar, lashed out at him, shearing off the side off his face. The entire left half of his head became a gaping red hole, his top row of teeth arced back through his head like a terrible grin. His remaining eye widened as he frantically tried to suck air through the hole in his ruined face. Daniel could see into his mouth, all the way down to his throat. The arm positioned to strike again and Cameron put his hands out in defense. With a blur of movement and a sound like a willow branch whipping through the air, the fingers on Cameron 's right hand and his left arm from the forearm, fell from his body and landed soundlessly on the mattress. In that same motion, the black tendril tore into his throat and punched through the back of his neck. The arm withdrew itself, and Cameron 's body slumped forward onto the bed, blood still trickling from his severed fingers and the angled stump of his arm.
Daniel stood paralyzed by shock. He barely registered the warm liquid soaking into the crotch of his pajamas, running down his leg. From behind him, he heard a pitiful whimpering. Oh no, he thought, Sissy.
The thing inside showed him an image of his neighbor's two mean-looking German Shepherds killing a cat. He remembered how they fought over it, how they shook it in their jaws and played tug-of-war with it, finally ripping the cat in two. He remembered the satisfied look in their eyes, the blood-matted fur around their muzzles.
“Oh God, no. Not her too. She never hurt you. She never hurt anyone, she's just a little kid. Please don't.” He begged.
The thing laughed deep inside him. It was a sound like someone gleefully choking on motor oil. The laugh swelled in his head as another hot gush of blood exploded from his nose. Daniel fell to his knees beside her bed.
Sissy was huddled on the edge of her bed, pressing herself into the corner of the wall like a terrified rabbit in a cage. She was crying and trying to pull the blanket over her head. Daniel looked away. An instant later he felt hot blood splatter over him, and he heard something heavy drop to the floor by his knees. He opened his eyes and an inarticulate moan passed his lips. There, looking up at him from the floor, was his baby sister's head, the face frozen in a rictus of terror.
Daniel closed his eyes. He realized what this thing inside of him was now. It was a bad dog with no loyalties, with no boundaries, with no territory, killing everything it came across just because it could. It just liked to hurt. To kill.
The long tendril hanging from his arm began to shrink and thicken, it split into five fingers at the end, taking the form of his hand once more.
Fueled by a sudden burst of anger, he attacked. With his good hand he grabbed the arm, pulling it to his face. He bit into it as hard as he could. His mouth was instantly flooded with the viscous tar-like liquid and the thing screamed from within him. The black arm pulled away leaving a dripping hunk of itself in Daniel's mouth. He tried to spit it out, to lash out at the arm again, but he couldn't. It forced itself deeper into his mouth. He struggled to breathe, but it pushed itself even deeper until it was all the way down his throat. Daniel leaned back against his sister’s bed and gasped. He could feel the dark mass oozing upward, through his nasal cavity. He tried to cough the black chunk up like phlegm but he only succeeded in making himself dizzy. He began to feel enormous pressure behind his eyes as the thing continued to flow through his head. And then, he felt bone being forced apart inside his skull. The pain was immense. He panicked and began frantically clawing at his face in a desperate attempt to get at the thing. Chunks of his flesh were embedded beneath his fingernails and his face became a mask of deep red scratches trickling blood.
And then his arms dropped. He was paralyzed. His brain screamed to raise his arm, to fight back, even to twitch a finger but his entire body remained limp. Somehow this thing inside him had made it impossible to move.
The thing made Daniel’s body rise slowly. It took a few clumsy steps, stumbled, and reached out to steady itself on the dresser. It forced Daniel’s lips back into a hideous grin and left the room. It shambled down the dark hallway, to the last door and pushed it open.
Daniel witnessed all of this through his own eyes, looking out of them like windows. He watched his body move without his will. He felt those awkward movements growing more adept with every step as the thing became more comfortable controlling him. He wanted to scream, to warn his father. His father could save him. If he could just make a sound, his father would leap out of bed, grab him and shake this awful monster out of him. But he couldn't scream. He was a prisoner now, in a cage of bone and flesh, just a voice in his own head, an echo in a black room.
Daniel stood at the foot of his parents' bed. His right arm became a sinister vine, growing in the darkness of the room. It stretched around the bed, then up. It hoovered over his sleeping father like a snake poised to strike. The arm shot deep into his father's throat, and in the same instant, pulled his spinal cord through the gash it had made. There was an audible snap as the cord severed and he watched his father's head jerk upward, grotesquely contorted with the ragged piece of spine jutting out of his neck. The blood was black in the moonlight and it soaked into the bedspread.
Daniel moved to the side of the bed where his mother slept. The thing killed as silently as death could ever be and she remained undisturbed by the carnage that lay beside her. She slept on her side and he could see the outline of her body beneath the cover, the angle of her arms and legs, the swell of her belly. The arm slid under the sheets without a sound. It crawled between her legs and pushed its way inside of her. Her body tensed and shifted. A look of discomfort passed over her face and disappeared. The arm continued to slither inside of her until it reached her womb.
Daniel's mind was invaded by images of his unborn sibling resting in its amniotic sac. It looked like a mound of pink bubble gum with vaguely human features. Crude legs curled against a body dwarfed by an oversized head. Small pieces broke free of the black tendril and wormed their way through the sac and into the fetus. The thing showed him black worms growing inside the fetus, how they would consume it over time and take its place and multiply. It showed him his mother, days from now, starving and weak, driven insane by the signals they use to communicate with their host, urging her to consume gallon after gallon of the saltwater they needed to survive. He saw her stomach finally burst open and spill forth thousands of black slugs. A brand new generation of plague with only the simple instinctual urge to kill, devour and multiply. Kill, devour and multiply, until there was nothing left.
The tendril withdrew from his mother and became an arm again. He noticed the first three fingers on his hand were missing, all that remained of them were three stumps ending at the knuckle. As he walked through the dark house, he caught a brief glimpse of himself in the mirror that made him wish he could shut his eyes
Daniel stood atop the hill cresting the beach and looked out over the ocean. The reflection of the moon cut a long bright path through the black waters that made the waves sparkle as
they swelled and fell. His skin began to ripple and pulse. As he made his way down toward the beach, his flesh split apart like a torn seem from his chest to his stomach. He grabbed the loose flaps of skin around the tear and pulled it wider, revealing the gray translucent body inside. It pulled until Daniel's skin lay in a pile on the sand.
In the darkness of night, the thing looked like a little boy... almost. It turned its misshapen head toward a sound in the distance. A boat motor. The men from Peach Island had no doubt seen the light from the bungalow and were coming to escort Daniel's family off the beach. The hum of their motor grew louder as they approached. The thing raised a single hand against the darkness and waved.
LEAD LOBOTOMY
1
“Do you know why you are the way you are?” The little guy just comes right out and asks it, bold as anything, then sits across the table waiting for an answer. This is a question that would demand serious reflection and introspection in the average person provided, of course, they were willing to answer at all, but not me. I've already got an answer loaded in the chamber, so to speak.
A lot of people can trace their social defects, foibles or whatever back to some childhood trauma: Daddy touched my asshole, mommy made me eat lima beans with a gun pressed to my head, a priest put my feet in his mouth and jerked off. This stuff gets buried under layers of subconscious because you don't know what to fuck to do with it and you harbor this little psychic time-bomb until somewhere in latency it goes off; those experiences and emotions you were never able to process start to manifest themselves in adorable quirks and the next thing you know, you're a 35-year-old volunteer firefighter who spends his free time burning down warehouses and apartment complexes; or you're a mother of three who never takes off her dish washing gloves and only lets the kids out of the closet long enough to wash their hands every 44 minutes.
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