The Troop

Tim turned and shut the door. The man breathed tortuously off to his right. His face radiated an unearthly light all its own, as if his veins ran with phosphorus. His features gave off the sick light of those poisonous mushrooms that grew in dank island caves.

An image came to Tim, plucked from the deepest recesses of his memory. A man’s face in a parking garage. Tim’s mother had taken him grocery shopping. He was five. The underground lot was nearly empty. They’d passed a huge cement stanchion, the load-bearing ones that kept the supermarket from collapsing, burying them under shelves of creamed corn and Frosted Flakes. A shape leaned against it. A pile of water-fattened trash bags? The pile stirred, shifted, and a face materialized. Tim told himself—he told himself today—that the man must’ve fallen prey to the commonplace decays, drink and drugs and disease… but his younger eyes, his boyhood eyes, had seen something else entirely.

The man’s face had been black, but that was not its birth color: it was the lumpen, withery, rotted black of a banana forgotten at the bottom of a fruit bowl. Had he touched that face, Tim was certain his fingers would’ve sunk into it. The man’s nose looked as though it had been subjected to enormous pressures, or else eaten away by something: a caved-in pit above his lips, which were cracked and bloated and coated in unknowable glaze.

Tim’s breath had locked in his lungs, his upflung eyes finding his mother—who was obviously scared, too, a fact that deepened his own fear.

The man had been sick in a way that didn’t seem possible—nothing on this earth, not disease nor the elements nor the tortures of mankind, could do that. He looked like a man who’d been abducted by a vengeful alien race who’d done terrible things, reduced him in some unspeakable way, then delivered him back to earth in order to examine how the rest of his species would react.

He’s seen hell, was Tim’s childish thought.

Worst of all were the man’s eyes—always the eyes, wasn’t it? A calm ongoing shade of brown, and the most awful part was that something continued to live in them—because normally there’d be nothing, right? Defeated and foggy and unthinking, to match the body. But these eyes harbored a remote intellect, a keen awareness. Which was the scariest part: this man had to confront the devastation of his body. He was cognizant of his own ruin. How could he possibly cope with that?

The man didn’t ask for anything. He simply watched, those coolly considering eyes socked in that tragedy of a face, until they passed from sight.

As he remembered this, the veil of disquiet that had settled over Tim shifted and something terrible peered through from the other side—the squirrelly, squealing face of terror. That man’s nightmarish face. Then it was gone.

Tim slipped into an uneasy sleep. Sometime before dawn and without quite realizing it, he rose out of the chair and stumbled to the cupboards.

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News item from the Montague (PEI) Island Courier, October 21: