The Troop

One foot in front of the other, he told himself. You can always run. You can pelt out of here like your ass is on fire.

It amazed him that the voice in his head—confident, jokey—could be so different from the piss-scared boy it resided within.

At least he had a flare. The journey was much less disorienting with a light to go by. Salt sparkled on the sea-eaten rock, tinted bloodred by the flare light.

The rocky shelves were overgrown with patches of sickly yellow moss. Colonies of huge white toadstools jutted from the cave walls at lunatic angles; they hung like fleshy ears, their undersides frilled with soft gills—or in some cases, little spikelike teeth. Max’s neck came in contact with one as he rounded a sharp bend in the descent, and it felt horridly clammy and bloated, like the flesh of a waterlogged body coughed up from the sea.

The air was still sweet but didn’t seem as cloying. His breath came shallowly. He could hear the blood beat in his ears. The flare sputtered.

Don’t you go out, Max thought—prayed. Oh don’t you dare go out.

He came to the mouth of the chamber. The smell was strangely enticing: sweet plums packed in salt. The air was alive with sounds, curiously stealthy, over the drip of water. He held the flare aloft. The chamber’s ceiling was clad in the same yellow moss; tendrils of witchgrass draped down. Trundling over the moss, clinging to its spongy folds, was an army of sea creatures: sand crabs and pulpy slugs and huge sightless beetles Max had never seen before. The clicking of their pincers and other appendages created a mammoth chittering above his head.

The Shelley-thing lay to the side of the chamber. Its limbs were spiked out at odd angles; it looked like a dead spider pressed flat between the pages of a dictionary. So small. Death did that, didn’t it? Shrunk everything. It lay in the same position as it had yesterday… didn’t it?

He wasn’t so sure now. Maybe it had inched away from the cave wall—but how could it have done that? He pictured the things inside of Shelley doing that… somehow pulling Shelley’s lifeless body along the cave floor.

Max wondered if the chamber was fed by an aquifer leading out to sea. The tide might have rolled in, flooding the chamber. That would explain the sea life on the ceiling: he didn’t think they’d been there before. It would also explain the Shelley-thing’s positioning: the body would’ve floated up with the tide, bumping around the chamber, brushing into the walls, becoming saturated with seawater before settling on the floor as the tide flowed out.

Had some of those worms flowed out with the tide? Max imagined them wriggling through the water, latching on to a codfish, which got eaten by a seal, which got eaten by a shark, which got caught in a drift net and hauled on board a trawler and slit open on the dock, billions of worms spilling out in front of the perplexed crewmen…

Or maybe Shelley’s body was in the exact same position. It’d been dark and crazy. Yes, Max figured. It was in the same spot. Yes.

He squinted past the sputtering flare light. Was anything else moving? He thought he saw floating flickers in the air—but no, no, those were just vapor contrails from the nearby seabed. He could hear the seethe of the sea seeping through the rock.

The flare had already sputtered well down the paper tube—that shouldn’t happen, should it? Maybe it was an old flare. Its glow had diminished alarmingly.

He set one foot inside the chamber. His leg appeared to stretch out as if made of flesh-toned rubber, pulling the rest of his body with it. His throat was dusty-dry, filled with the ozone taste of the rock. The peripheries of his vision were blown out huge—he could see almost around the back of his head. His pupils were so dilated that they’d overtaken his corneas, turning them black.

He inched around Shelley’s body. A brittle strand of witchgrass brushed the back of Max’s neck. He bit back a scream but still, a breathless little moan came out of him.

Which is when he noticed them.

They were on the stick—the long one he’d sharpened yesterday, the one Newton abandoned in the madness. It jutted from beneath Shelley’s body at a weird angle. All along it, stuck to the wet wood, were tiny nodules. Clustered in white bunches that looked like tiny albino grapes. Tens of thousands of them. Others were larger. They dotted the stick like curlicues of white icing on a cake.

A sea slug fell from the ceiling, going plop in a puddle near the stick. The white nodules stirred in unison. The larger ones uncoiled and stood stiff.