The Troop

It looked silly. Like a balloon, maybe: one of those long, skinny ones that the clowns made balloon animals with at the Cavendish County Fair. Max had gotten one last year—a giraffe. The clown who’d made it had approached Max near the Shetland pony pen. He’d been short and dumpy, in slappy red shoes with the toes all squashed like they’d been stamped on by an elephant. The greasepaint on the clown’s face had been badly applied over his stubbled cheeks; the red circles around his eyes were melting down his face in the heat, making him look like a sick beagle. His clown suit was dingy, with yellow patches under the armpits. When he smiled, Max saw brown grime slotted between his teeth. When he blew up the balloon, Max got a good whiff of him: rank sweat and something odder, scarier—a hint of shaved iron. The clown gave the balloon cruel twists with his nublike fingers; the balloon squealed as if in pain. The giraffe was all neck: a bulb of a head, thumblike legs. Max pictured the poor thing dragging its neck through the dirt across the Serengeti…

What now came out of the man’s stomach reminded Max of that.

A balloon. Or as though the man’s belly had blown a funny little bubble. Except this bubble was solid—Max could tell that immediately—solid and weirdly muscular.

Whatever it was, it relaxed back inside the man. The balloon or cord or tube—which was maybe the closest corollary: a thick shiny tube, like an inner tube but white instead of black, filled not with air but with some kind of thick pulsing fluid—the tube flattened back into the incision. Tim and Max watched, transfixed in the perfectly still eye of horror. The tube curved around in the man’s stomach; it seemed to be made of different parts, different elements—it reminded Max of the snake ball Eef had found that afternoon. A few dozen snakes twisted into a ball, having sex.

Copulating, as his health teacher, Mrs. Fitzhue, would say, stringing the word out—coppp-hugggh-late-ting.

The thing flexed, constricting; the man’s spine curled up as if parts of the thing were twined all through him—when the tube constricted, his body did, too. The idea that this tube could be spread out into every part of the man was terrifying.

“Scoutmaster Tim…” Max’s words came out in a papery whisper, his mind tightening shut in baffled horror. “What…?”

Tim didn’t answer. The only sound was the creak of the floorboards beneath the man. A few of the cauterized veins split open; dark arterial blood wept down the man’s pale skin.

The tube swelled monstrously, pushing itself out of the rubbery slit in a sudden surge. It emerged incredibly fast, its whiteness stretching to a milky translucence. Tim and Max shielded their faces instinctively, petrified it would explode, splattering them with the contents of its alien body—what could possibly be inside such a thing? Its guts were visible through that sheer web: crazed threshings and phantom pulsations—Max felt as if he were staring through a lard-streaked window into… God, into what? His fear was whetted to such a fine edge that he could actually feel it now: a disembodied ball of baby fingers inside his stomach, tickling him from the inside. That’s what mortal terror felt like, he realized. Tiny fingers tickling you from the inside.

The tube deflated back inside the man’s stomach for an instant, inflated even more so, and deflated again: its movement echoed a huge lung inhaling and exhaling. Only a few seconds had ticked off the clock, but Max felt as if a minor eternity had passed. Everything moved in slow motion…

Then, with a brutal whiplash, the world sped up.

The tube propelled itself out of the man’s side in a series of fierce pulsations, or what Max’s science teacher, Mr. Lowery, would have called peristaltic flexes. It came with a sly squishing noise, like very wet clay squeezed in a tightened fist.

The balloon or tube or whatever it was became something else. It twisted and split and became a thick white loop: it looked a little like the U-magnets Max used to push around iron filings in Mr. Lowery’s class.