by Martin Mundt
That’s why he dropped the hand.
“It moved,” he wailed, and then he just stood there, trembling.
That’s how it happened.
That’s how Little Timmy got the Willies.
The air got real cold, real fast. Timmy shivered, like a conga line of Daddy Longlegs scrambled down his spine. Then he turned and ran, slowly falling behind Brad and Terry and Sean and even Heather, all of whom were running away much faster than he was.
Little Timmy’s hand started to itch that night after dinner. He was in his room, reading a story in a magazine about a flesh-eating virus from outer space. His right palm started to itch, so he scratched it.
Little Timmy had reported the severed hand to the police that afternoon, after everyone had stopped running. No one else had wanted to report it, so Brad elected Little Timmy. It was something that clearly had to be done, because they all wanted to see what would happen when the police found out, except Little Timmy didn’t get to see any of it. The police made him wait at the station for his Mom to come pick him up, and that made him look even littler in the eyes of the group.
So he read a magazine when he got home. Reading about flesh-eating viruses or zombies or slithery, slobbery aliens with mouths like knife-drawers usually made it easier to touch untouchable things.
He should have been doing his math homework, but stories about flesh-eating viruses were sugar for his imagination, and math homework was like ritalin. Creepy Larry had to take ritalin.
The girl had just entered the story again, and Little Timmy was just beginning to appreciate the magic of girls entering the story, when his hand started itching again.
Even itchier than before.
He scratched it again, harder, but he couldn’t make it stop. He scratched so hard it hurt, but the source of the itching escaped him, it was so deep beneath his skin.
Then it just got worse.
He tore his attention away from the girl and looked at his hand.
Three black bumps like warts formed an equilateral triangle on the back of his hand. They itched so much he could hardly hold his arm still.
Then a fourth bump appeared, squeezing out of his skin like a drop of black blood. Then a fifth, a sixth. Then there were ten, fifteen, as if he were a petri dish of agar growing bacteria. Twenty, thirty, swarming up over his wrist onto his arm, fifty, sixty.
The itching lurched into a burning sensation, as if he were holding his palm over a candle. He turned his hand over. His palm was filled with black warts, like a handful of raisins. All his fingertips were swollen black with warts growing on top of more warts on top of even more warts.
Right where he had touching the severed hand.
He shivered. There was no doubt.
He had the Willies.
“Mom!” he screamed, staring at the knobby, itchy, burning, warty blackness covering his hand like a mitten, creeping up toward his elbow. “Mom! Come quick, Mom!”
He was too scared to move.
He watched the warts, wild-eyed, as they grew and twisted and pulsed on his skin, in his skin.
His Mom opened the door.
“Timmy, what’s wrong?”
“Mom! Look!” He thrust his arm at her, holding his elbow with his other hand.
The skin was pink, utterly normal, no warts to be seen.
She held his arm, turning it over, inspecting every inch.
“What?” she said, looking at the arm, looking at his face. “Where? What’s wrong?”
Little Timmy’s mouth opened and closed.
“Warts,” he finally said. It was the only word he could manage.
“Warts?” said his Mom, frowning. She inspected his arm again. “There’s nothing here, Timmy.”
She spotted the magazine, which Timmy had forgotten to hide. She gave Timmy the Look. She picked the magazine up off the desk.
“I thought I told you not to read these any more. All they do is frighten you. You’re too little for things like this.”
She closed the magazine and saw the cover, a girl in a very curvy spacesuit whose immodestly uncovered flesh was being eaten by a virus. The magazine iced over in her hands. The pages cracked like spiderwebs under the weight of her Look.
“But…” he started.
“No buts,” she said. “Aliens. Flesh-eating viruses. Warts. Severed hands. Honestly, I don’t understand you any more since your Father left.”
She pointed the magazine at him.
“If you didn’t read things like this, you wouldn’t see warts where there aren’t any warts. You wouldn’t be fooling around looking for severed hands that are none of your business. Now get ready for bed.”
“But, Mom,” whined Timmy. “It’s only seven-thirty.”
“You’ve had a busy day, and tomorrow’s a schoolday. You need your sleep.”
She walked out of the room.
Little Timmy knew that each one of those reasons by itself was inarguable. Strung together, they probably meant that Mom was going to put him in a straitjacket, strap him in bed, turn out all the lights, including the nightlight, and then nail his doors and windows shut until morning.
She didn’t like getting called down to the police station, and today hadn’t been the first time. Brad had seen to that.
If he were asleep, then he couldn’t get into trouble.
He started getting ready for bed.
The shower hissed like a warm chandelier of water crashing down around his head. He couldn’t hear anything else. He was alone.
He kept getting the shivers, despite having the water turned up to nearly scalding. He kept thinking about the severed hand. He kept touching the hand in his head, except it was worse, slimier, squirmier, touching it in his head than it had been touching it in the weeds.
He started thinking about rabies or tetanus or parasites or some weird, crawly, dead guy’s disease from the Amazon, when his stomach began to itch.
He closed his eyes tight and let the water hit his face and drain down his body.
His stomach itched more.
He held his hand in front of his face and cracked one eye open only enough to see through the screen of his lashes.
His hand was squeaky clean.
His stomach started to burn, and the itching spread slowly up and down his body.
He looked.
Black warts covered him from thigh to chest, slurping the water like thousands of tiny mouths. Mr. Smiley had not discussed anything remotely like this in health class.
He shook.
The warts on his chest formed themselves into letters. Timmy stood frozen in the warm water, as if a python were wound around his waist.
The letters formed words, upside-down on his chest, but rightside-up from his point of view.
“YOU TASTE GOOD,” the Willies said.
“Mommmmmmmmmm!” he screamed, long and loud.
His mother tucked him into bed, molding the blanket to his body as tight as a series of straps.
“Now, there’s nothing wrong with you,” she said, tucking and tucking as smooth and neat as a Marine Corps tucking. “I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about warts, OK?”
She stopped tucking and waited.
“OK,” said Little Timmy, barely whispering.
The Willies had hidden themselves deep in his flesh by the time Mom had waded through the steamy bathroom to get to him. Mom had not been happy.
He could feel the Willies right now, swimming between the layers of his skin, waiting for his Mom to leave.
She stood up, hands on hips, no more wrinkles to smooth.
“Well, good night, then,” she said. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
She walked to the door and turned off the light, but she left the nightlight on. She reached for the doorknob, but hesitated. She went to a shelf and picked up Timmy’s stuffed, green apatosaurus, Boris, and set him on the pillow next to Little Timmy’s head. Timmy hadn’t needed Boris to sleep for two years.
“There,” she sai
d, smiling. “Boris will protect you.”
Fat effing chance, thought Little Timmy, but he didn’t say that out loud.
Mom closed the door and her sounds faded down the hallway, darkness rushing in to fill the space she had left behind.
He didn’t move, as if a rattlesnake were in his bedroll on the Nebraska prairie.
He fell asleep after a couple of hours, thinking, Maybe they’ll go away. Maybe they’ll go away.
He woke up in darkness and quiet.
His eyes itched.
He felt something crawling, creeping across his eyes, under his closed eyelids, like spiders were laying webs over his eyeballs.
He opened his eyes, but he still couldn’t see. He couldn’t see the nightlight, or the lighted numbers on his clock. He couldn’t see Boris.
“Mommmmmmmm!” he screamed, poking his fingers into the corners of his eyes, squeezing his eyeballs, feeling huge mounds of soft, squishy, nuggety warts filling his eyes and half his face, creeping into his nose. The Willies licked his face like a thousand tiny tongues.
He heard the door slam open, his lights click on, his Mom.
“What’s wrong?” she yelled. “Timmy, what’s wrong?”
He felt hands on his hands, pulling them away from his face. He opened his eyes and saw his Mom in her robe, standing over him. Morning filled his room. Boris smiled his usual toothy smile.
Timmy started to say, Warts.
“Nightmare,” he said, looking away from his Mother’s face. “Sorry, Mom. I had a nightmare.”
Little Timmy zipped his pants up and put on his sneakers. He reached for a shirt, and he saw words forming on his right arm.
“HA-HA! YOU SCREAM FUNNY!” said the Willies.
Then the words sank into his flesh and disappeared, like he was a Magic 8-Ball.
Little Timmy finished dressing, shaking all the while.
He was late for school.
Timmy excused himself from second-period math class to go to the bathroom. He felt sick to his stomach.
He felt heavy quarts of black warts inside him, rising up his throat, tasting the back of his tongue. It was all he could do to hold them down.
The bathroom had just been cleaned, empty and echoey.
He looked in the mirror. His teeth were black, his tongue swollen twice normal size, black and knobby.
His stomach churned, rippling his skin. He knew with what. He had a pot-belly, growing larger as he watched, rumbling like boiling mud. He couldn’t hold it in much longer. He knew he was going to puke and get the explosive runs at the same time.
His nose filled. He knew with what. Black warty tears crawled down his face from the inner folds of his eyes.
It was like being submerged in the La Brea tar-pits. He gasped, forcing short breaths through his clogged throat.
The Willies were eating him alive, eating him from the inside out, multiplying inside him. No one would help him. No one would believe him. The Willies would just hide if he went to the school nurse, just like they had hidden from his Mom. He didn’t think he could make it to the nurse anyhow.
He looked at his right hand. It was a shiny, black, writhing, fingerless mass. That was what had caused all this mess.
He knew he had only one chance.
The police found the guy who belonged to the hand. They did, after all, have his fingerprints.
He was, had been, a medical examiner, from Chicago. No one knew why he was in Littleton. They found him, or rather pieces of him, in a motel about thirty miles south of town.
He was dead when they found him.
He had methodically cut pieces off of himself, and then sealed the pieces in separate plastic bags, apparently over the course of several days. His hand, of course, was already in police custody.
He had also amputated his right arm, at the elbow, and again at the shoulder. Also his feet, then his legs up to the knees, several fingers of his left hand, his eyes. Possibly more. It was hard to tell, since the two responding cops weren’t particularly good at jigsaw puzzles. The body was a patchwork of soaked red bandages and the knotted ends of tourniquets. Blood and knives were scattered all over the motel room.
The first cop through the door puked in the trash can, but other than that, they didn’t touch a thing in the room. They did, as a matter of fact, close the door and wait, outside, for the Sheriff.
The dead guy had scrawled two words, in his own blood, over and over again across the walls and floor of the room.
“SHUT UP,” he wrote, all in big, scratchy, dripping capitals. “SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP.”
Little Timmy pounded on the mirror in the bathroom, pounded and pounded until he smashed the glass. It broke in long curves and sharp angles like knives chipped from obsidian. Pieces crashed into the sink, breaking into smaller pieces that lay angled like shiny, frozen waves.
Little Timmy couldn’t breathe any more.
He grabbed a mirror-shard in his left hand and sliced into his right wrist. He slashed and slashed into his own flesh, black warts like jelly oozing out of the gash, glopping onto the white tiles.
There was no blood.
He cut down to bone before his legs gave out, and he fell to the floor. He stopped breathing. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t lift the mirrored knife.
Words formed on his right arm.
“YUM, SWEET AS CANDY,” said the Willies.
Little Timmy’s chest heaved.
“Shut up,” he tried to yell, but he failed.
Then sticky blackness covered Little Timmy’s eyes, and he didn’t see anything anymore.
The janitor found Little Timmy.
The bathroom was an awful mess, broken pieces of mirror like razorblades everyplace, Little Timmy’s right hand nearly severed at a ninety-degree angle to his forearm, and a pool of blood a quarter-inch deep spreading all around the body.
The janitor didn’t feel like puking. He had, unfortunately, seen worse before, five years ago when three eighth-grade girls had hung themselves in the girls’ locker room in a suicide pact.
Little Timmy was a lot bloodier, but not quite as bad as three twisting little girls.
The janitor made a mental note that he really needed to find a new job, then he took a deep breath and stepped into the bathroom.
Little Timmy was dead. The janitor knew that, but he had to check. It was something that just had to be done, and, apparently, that task was becoming part of his job description. The kid might still be alive.
The janitor was careful not to step in the blood. He squatted and reached out with his right hand to touch Little Timmy’s throat, feeling for a pulse, finding none.
He shivered at the touch, like a conga line of Daddy Longlegs scrambled up his arm and down his spine.
“What gets into kids to make them do things like this?” he muttered as he stood up.
The air in the bathroom got real cold, real fast.
The janitor shivered again, then hurried into the hallway to lock the bathroom door.
“Damn,” he whispered, fumbling with shaky fingers for the right key on his two-pound key-ring. “That one really gave me the Willies.”
Stuck On You
er name was Lola. She wasn’t particularly cute. She wasn’t particularly smart. I didn’t love her. She didn’t love me.
We had been in a bar. Valentine’s Day. Last call. You know how it is. She wasn’t cute, and she wasn’t smart, and she didn’t love me, but she was desperate.
Me, too. The desperate part, that is.
I bought her a beer, and that took care of the courtship. Then I asked her if she wanted to go home with me, and she said yes, and that pretty much put the romance in the rearview mirror. I guess she was pretty cute, really, but what do I know? I was desperate.
We left before they turned the lights up. I figured it would all work out, since her name was Lola.
A little later, she got naked, and I got naked, and I started banging the top of her head against my headboard like the bongos of
love. The sound was strangely erotic.
I was in the middle of introducing her to my patented herky-jerky move – my patented herky-jerky move drives the women crazy – when I felt something odd.
Well, OK, I didn’t actually know that my herky-jerky move drove the women crazy. Don’t get me wrong – it definitely should have driven the women crazy, as far as I could tell, but I’d never really had any feedback of any kind on it, one way or the other. Anyway. I sprung my herky-jerky move on her, and she wasn’t complaining, when, like I said, I felt something odd.
“Oh, baby, baby, baby,” I said, doing Brother Barry proud, Brother Barry Manilow, white heat, the magic boogaloo moodman, and I was cruising in the groove of the nastiest, whitest rhythms this side of the BeeGees at their nastiest and whitest. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Come to Daddy.”
I was lite-rocking her world, taking it easy, a little herk here, a little jerk there, three minutes and forty-eight seconds of pure Copacabana hoochie-coo-climax and counting, maybe twenty seconds into Mandy already, a little ten-inch disco mix, an extended play of me – Peter – and my partner in love – Little Petey – well into new personal-best territory. Then I exploded. I figured I blew hot stars of passion all the way up into her head, but the way I saw it, my job wasn’t done, so I eased her down, cooled her off, brought her back to reality slowly.
And that’s when I noticed the something odd.
“Are you done yet?” she asked when I didn’t get off her right away.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think. Yeah. Yeah, I’m done. I think.”
She reached for the cigarettes she had in the pocket of her jacket, hanging on a chair next to the bed. She stretched her fingers towards the pack, but she couldn’t reach.
“Get off,” she said.
“I…” I said, and this was where the something odd became really important. “I can’t.”
