by Ben Farthing
“Good,” Cessy said. “As soon as we find Kate.”
Jackson scratched furiously at his neck. “There’s probably nothing to find. We should go now. Before whoever’s playing that instrument,” he jabbed his thumb back toward the Maple Table, “notices we’re here.”
Cessy swept the shotgun and flashlight across the cavern. “You think there’s a chance they haven’t noticed us already?”
“We’re still alive, ain’t we?” He pointed his light the opposite direction of Cessy’s. “Not sure how we’re gonna keep it that way.”
Cessy’s plan was to find Kate, then book it back down the tunnel to the mine entrance. Gamble that Jackson would be slowest, and thus an adequate distraction to let Cessy and Kate escape. She didn’t expect Kate to be happy with the plan.
“This cave shouldn’t fit in this mountain,” Jackson said. “We were halfway to top at the mine entrance, and then we walked another thirty minutes uphill inside. Not enough space.”
Cessy’s flashlight revealed a junkpile on the cavern floor. They approached cautiously.
Corrugated steel panels, ripped blue tarp, splintered two-by-fours. Canned food, a broken cot, a shattered laptop.
Cessy remembered where she’d seen this before.
“That’s my old truck,” Jackson gasped.
Beyond the remnants of Valerie’s shed, the green camo painted F-150 sat half-crushed. Windows busted, and frame bent into a “V,” as if something monstrously heavy had fallen into the bed.
“The truck you sold to Valerie Watkins,” Cessy said.
Jackson swallowed a scream. He pointed his flashlight above them. “Shit. I told you, we gotta go.”
Cessy looked up.
The cavern ceiling was lower. Lowering.
Descending towards her, a mass of tubes, slithering over each other. It made up the ceiling in every direction, far as her light revealed. Each was as big around as a semi truck. They were translucent, distorting the rocky cavern ceiling that they covered, or moved through. Cessy couldn’t tell which.
Her fight or flight reflex short circuited and she froze. Her mind shut down, forgot her problems, ignored the cavern, to focus on the impossible movement above her.
It was a sea monster. It was a sidewalk on a rainy day, if earthworms were fifteen feet across and of incalculable length. It was a mudslide, forced into a tube and wrapped in winding loops.
The impulse to flee woke up. Cessy shoved it down. Kate was in here somewhere, but Cessy couldn’t take her eyes off the horror above her, all around her.
Jackson kept his eyes glued upward. He stepped towards the ever present conversation of the Maple Table. “Oh god, it’s one thing.”
He was right. Cessy saw no ends or tails or heads. But she saw sharp bends where the tube turned to continue in another direction.
And it did continue. If she traced it with her eye, the chaotic swarming had a pattern. It was all one body, moving in a single direction. With purpose.
She couldn’t focus on any single point on the thing’s body. Her eyes jerked away like she’d looked into the sun. But she’d come this far. She couldn’t run now. “Follow it,” she said.
“What?” Jackson was shocked. “We gotta run.”
Cessy watched the worm’s movement, tracking it in the periphery of her vision. She followed where it came from.
They hurried through the cavern.
Another twenty feet ahead, a scattering of beer mugs and barstools.
Then, a pile of broken furniture, carpet, and drywall.
Hundreds of childrens books, pages waterlogged and torn.
Black tarp and silver ductwork.
Cessy’s breath caught. This thing wasn’t just in the mountain.
Everywhere the worm had been in Hamlin, it dragged and stretched reality behind it.
The rushing darkness she’d seen in the mine and in the rental house, it was the worm’s slithering profile. The stretched crawlspace and attic, remnants of where it had been.
This thing was a tapeworm, and Hamlin was an infected intestine.
The swarming mass lowered, inched down, not thirty feet above her head. Fear bulged in her mind, sharper, more surrounding than anything she’d faced before. She tried to zone out, to push the fear aside to deal with later, like she did with a bank robber shooting at her, or like she had with yesterday’s unnatural assaults. But she had no immediate goal to focus on. No escape route--because it wasn’t time to escape yet; she hadn’t found Kate. No target--she harbored no illusions that shotgun pellets would hurt this thing.
Fear threatened to swallow her.
She found a focal point. In the roiling movement above, Cessy searched for a goal, a destination, a direction. It was all one body, moving together. Where was it going? Where had it come from?
Cessy locked onto the latter. That’s where she’d find Kate.
Jackson tugged at her arm. “It’s coming for us!”
Cessy shrugged him off. She traced the body above with her flashlight, backwards against its slithering. She looped back through tangles. It took her deeper into the cavern, towards the exit tunnel, spun in circles. She found a wall fully covered in this thing’s endless form. Back up the ceiling, which descended even lower now, twenty feet, fifteen.
She’d be turned around and lost, if not for the constant noise of the Maple Table.
Finally, in the deep corner of the cavern, thirty feet short of the back wall, the tube hung down from the ceiling, reached the floor where it sank into the dirt without disturbing so much as a pebble, despite its steady movement out.
A figure sat on the dirt next to the emerging worm.
Hope exploded in Cessy’s chest. “Kate!”
47
Cessy ran to her sister, collapsed on the ground next to her and threw her arms around her shoulders.
Kate carefully returned the gesture. Her arms shook against Cessy’s back. She opened her mouth, coughed, and then said, “I could go for some bacon mac n’ cheese.”
At the diner where they shared lunch on Wednesdays, Kate always ordered the bacon mac n’ cheese.
“You don’t want to say how shocked you are to see me? Nothing like that?” Cessy pulled back to look at her sister.
Kate had always been a little overweight, with round cheeks that turned rosy with exertion or embarrassment. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail, now streaked with dirt and grease.
“I’m just surprised it took you so long. I thought you were an ace detective. Sherlock Holmes of the suburbs.”
Kate’s playful sarcasm stunned Cessy. It didn’t fit in this cavern, not with the human-shaped instruments at the front of it, or the wriggling worm above them, or the section of worm as big as a semi-truck slithering out of the ground next to them.
“I’m sorry,” Cessy said. “I should have called you sooner. I’m sorry you didn’t trust me.”
Kate’s lips were dry and cracked. Her face was pale, blurring together with her light blond hair to make her look like a washed out ghost.
Cessy touched her sister’s cheek.
“Some big sister you are. Did you at least bring me some water?”
It annoyed Cessy that Kate wouldn’t shift out of sarcasm long enough to let Cessy apologize. And it annoyed her that Kate could speak so sarcastically, and still come across as charming. Her innocent grin and tone conveyed respect and compassion that was the opposite of her words.
“Water’s in my backpack.” She dug through it. It wasn’t there. Neither were the energy bars. She’d left both in the truck. Stupid. “Nevermind, it’s in the truck. Which is where we’re going to get you. Can you walk?”
“With some help. But we can’t leave yet.” Kate’s playful sarcasm had masked her exhaustion, but when that sarcasm was replaced with determination, the mask fell away.
Kate looked broken down. Her rasping voice and long blinks betrayed her nausea and thirst.
Jackson caught up. “Hell in high waters. You found her.�
�
“Help me get her up,” Cessy ordered.
“We can’t leave yet,” Kate insisted.
Jackson crouched down to help Kate, ignoring her protests. “How long have you been sitting in the dark?”
Kate patted the dirt floor blindly. She found a plastic LED flashlight. “Batteries died maybe ten hours ago. I’ve been hacking away like a bat without sonar since then. It hasn’t worked.” She motioned to the ground.
An angle grinder, reciprocating saw, hammer, chisels, hatchet. Dad’s missing tools.
Not six feet away, the impossible worm body continued its emergence from the dirt. Cessy didn’t see any evidence of Kate’s attempts to destroy it, but it was moving at least as fast as Cessy could run--any damage to it would be somewhere in the tangles above.
Now that she knew Kate was safe, Cessy mind allowed her surroundings to penetrate. “What is this thing?” She followed the vertical worm with her flashlight up to the ceiling. The worm folded back on itself a thousand times.
“I don’t know. It’s hungry. It’s almost full.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s a long story. I thought I was coming here to sabotage some radio equipment. Or at least get some photos of the cultists to take to the FBI. I found this instead.” She tilted her head back. Her mouth fell open, revealing a white, dry tongue.
Cessy needed to get some water in her sister as soon as possible.
Kate looked back down, her head swinging wildly like an infant learning to look around. “None of Dad’s tools would do anything to it. It’s like it’s there but not really.”
Cessy could feel terror and madness creeping in from the edges of the cavern, the edges of her mind. This was impossible. “We can’t fix this. We need to leave.”
“It’s eating Hamlin,” Kate said.
Jackson looked up. “This is what killed Olivia?”
“This is what’s got everyone so angry.”
“No,” Cessy said. “That’s where I draw the line. I can buy that there are giant animals I’ve never heard of. But there’s no magical spells it’s using to turn people crazy.”
“Nothing magical about hate.” Kate crawled to her feet, using Cessy for balance. “It made Lockler and the Maple Table say the right words, and our scared parents gobbled it up.”
“Our gullible and hateful parents,” Jackson said.
“Either way,” Cessy said, “we can’t stop this thing. We should leave.”
Kate looked into the swarm above. She quickly diverted her eyes.
Cessy tried to track what she’d seen. It all looked the same to her.
“We can’t leave yet. Not until you try.” Kate could make an order sound like a polite request.
“Try what?”
Kate pointed to Cessy’s shotgun.
“That’d be like poking a tiger with a needle.”
“I’m not leaving until we try.”
Cessy looked around. The worm had covered the walls and ceiling, which closed in ever further.
Jackson jerked his head around, aiming the pistol wherever the worm drew closest. “If that’ll get her to move, do it and let’s get.”
Cessy took a breath. She couldn’t drag Kate all the way through the mine. “One shell. We book it whether it works or not.”
“Do it,” Kate said.
Cessy shouldered the shotgun. “Cover your ears.” She squeezed the trigger.
The roar deafened her. The barrel’s flash overwhelmed her vision.
She grabbed Kate’s elbow and lunged toward the exit, even as the brightness died down.
The worm’s body emerged faster.
The ceiling dropped.
Jackson looked up and screamed.
Kate looked intensely at Cessy. Her voice was muffled. “Keep walking to the exit. You’ll think you aren’t getting anywhere, but you are. Don’t look in its mouths.”
The swarming worm collapsed atop them.
48
Four years ago, before he proposed, Pat had taken Cessy whitewater rafting. He’d insisted she sit in the very front, “to get the full experience.”
A troop of Boy Scouts made up most of the group, young teenagers. They lacked the physical strength to paddle the raft where the guide ordered.
On the first class five rapid, the guide shouted for the left side to paddle harder. The river spun the raft counter-clockwise to drop over a partially submerged rock. The front end slammed onto the water below, and Cessy popped off the raft like it was an inflatable trampoline.
She landed in roaring waters which bashed her against the riverbed, rocks, and the underside of the raft. She survived only because of a quality helmet, and dumb luck that the rapids spit her out the bottom, instead of trapping her in an inversion.
Now, six years later, when the roiling worm collapsed atop her, she was back in the New River, a ragdoll at the whims of an indifferent torrent.
It lifted her off her feet. Sections of the worm’s body knocked her through the darkness, crushed her between them while pressing through her as if she weren’t there. It felt like gritty gelatin against her exposed skin, then under her clothes, then beneath her skin.
Through the scraping and rushing of the worm’s movement, Cessy heard the Maple Table say goodbye to their listeners.
Cessy squeezed her fingers tight around the shotgun and flashlight. She kicked, like she had underwater. The first kick pushed through undecidedly ethereal wormflesh. The second caught nothing. Cessy’s leg hyperextended. Pain exploded in her knee.
She shouted for Kate. Her mouth filled with sweet grit that passed through her cheeks.
She shook her flashlight but it offered no light.
An earthy green glow slid through the darkness, curved and slithered along with the section of worm it lit up. It came closer.
Cessy kicked her good leg, searching for traction.
The green glow enveloped her.
She felt purpose, but with a distraction. She was searching for something--no, somewhere. It’d been all she’d done for centuries, millennia, epochs before this patch of dirt had formed in this space.
Darkness returned. Cessy gasped for breath.
She couldn’t fathom what she’d just felt. Memories, more ancient than she could articulate, and through senses she didn’t possess.
Cessy kicked, swung her arms.
A coil of worm knocked her backwards.
She closed her eyes, tried to regain her cool.
Kate had yelled to Cessy as the worm fell on them. She’d been through this already. You won’t think you’re moving but you are.
Cessy put one foot forward, then another. She couldn’t feel the ground beneath her feet, but she pantomimed walking. Her knee protested.
Shifting wormflesh flipped Cessy upside down. Her hair hung over her face.
One foot. Then the other.
She saw three other earthy green lights dragged along with the slithering worm. She turned away from the closest and mimicked a faster pace.
Her pantomime didn’t influence her position relative to the worm. The glow rushed towards her.
Hunger. Boredom. A need to be satiated, or a whim to be humored, or something similar which Cessy wouldn’t interpret. Prey spotted. That was an instinct that Cessy understood. The course every-so-slightly diverted.
The change in course rattled Cessy’s mind. Her brain tried to interpret these foreign memories, match them to her own body. It wasn’t like walking to the living room, then deciding to swing by the kitchen for a snack. It was like walking through a tight doorway, and swinging her hip to brush the doorway. Except even that didn’t feel right. It was like she’d tapped a single molecule of her hip on the doorway.
Cessy snapped back to the cavern.
Her body felt tight, diminutive.
She squeezed the flashlight and shotgun, anchoring herself in the real, fighting off claustrophobia.
This thing around her, its invasion into Hamlin was a thoughtless whim. I
t was a diversion infinitesimally small.
The section of worm that squeezed past and through Cessy, that filled this cavern, that’d tunneled under Hamlin to collapse houses, that must be miles and miles long, was only a molecule of its full structure.
Inside its memories, she’d felt no beginning, no end.
Only a foreign impulse that was something between feeding and fun.
Gritty muck passed over the wound in her gut, loosening the scabs.
Cessy moved one foot, then the other.
She was desperate for Kate to be right.
It won’t feel like you’re moving, but you are.
But if she was right about that, then her other warning was equally valid.
Don’t look in its mouths.
She hadn’t realized she was moving until she jerked to a stop. Something held her from her hipbone to her breast. It squeezed.
Impulsively, she dropped the shotgun to feel what restrained her.
The worm’s flesh was more solid here. She felt it under her palm. Warm, pulsing, covered in thick drips of gritty gelatin. She patted her way down to where it had grabbed her.
The worm’s surface rose in an oblong bump, then gave way to a gash. Her side was six inches into that gash.
Cessy pushed against the worm, but it squeezed tighter. Her knitting needle wound reopened. Blood ran into the gash.
Cessy reached inside to pry herself free.
Damp, spongey flesh filled with hundreds of teeth.
Flat and small like human molars, they slowly crushed Cessy’s side.
She forced her arm deep for more leverage. Teeth lined the top and bottom of the gash as far as she could reach. She squeezed her fist between the teeth. The flesh beneath gave enough for her to force her fist deeper, but not enough to pry open the mouth.
Cavern air whipped against her cheeks as the worm dragged her along its tangles.
Cessy brought the flashlight over, moving her free arm through the coils of worm like through a dream. She jammed the cold metal in until it wedged between top and bottom. She levered it open, enough to pull loose.
As she yanked her flashlight free, she caught the button. The light turned on.
