The Troop

Could it be a hernia? Max’s uncle Frank had one of those. He’d taken off his truss at a family picnic and showed it to him. It had looked like a fist pushing against the flatness of his stomach. I tried to pick up two sacks of cement, Maximilian, Uncle Frank had told him. One sack too many. The pressure forced a little-bitty bit of my innards to squeeze right through the muscle. Uncle Frank had then made a rude farting noise. Out she come, slick as goose poop! It’s peeking through like a clown nose, huh? See it there? Peek-a-boo, Maxxy, I see you! Uncle Frank had given the herniated intestine a little squeeze. Honk, honk! Oh! I feel my lunch moving through… yup, there goes the corn bread. Uncle Frank had not been invited to the following year’s picnic.

But this wasn’t a hernia. Logic told Max so. A hernia was just what his mind had feverishly cobbled together to excuse what he was seeing. A hernia didn’t move. A hernia didn’t pulsate like that.

This thing…

This thing…

The loop became a pale ribbed tube roughly seven inches long. Thicker than a garden hose. Tapered slightly at its tip. It seemed to be made of millimeter-thick rings stacked atop one another. Each ring was gently rounded at its edge. Pearlescent beads squeezed from its surface, clinging to the tube like grains of sand to wet skin.

“Get back,” Tim breathed. “Max, you get the hell back—”

The tube paused. Max got the weirdest sense that it was presenting itself. The gaudiest belle at the debutantes’ ball. Appendages began to unglue themselves from its trunk. It reminded Max of the time he’d come upon a half-hatched bird struggling out of its egg, its wings pulling free of its body all stuck with webby strands of mucus… this looked much the same—or like a Swiss Army knife unfolding its many blades and attachments. These smaller appendages unkinked with the slow, showy grace of a contortionist; they unfurled tortuously in the cabin’s dim light, making gluey lip-smack noises. They looked like the fleshy leaves of desert plants—succulents, those plants were called. Max learned that in science class, too. The very tips of these appendages split in half, lolling open. Max saw tiny fishbone teeth studding each mouth—it was sickeningly beautiful.

Peek-a-boo, Maxxie, I see you.

There is an emotion that operates on a register above sheer terror. It lives on a mindless dog-whistle frequency. Its existence is in itself a horrifying discovery: like scanning a shortwave radio in the dead of night and tuning in to an alien wavelength—a heavy whisper barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues could never speak.

Watching that lithe tube now hunt toward his Scoutmaster like a blind snake, Max hit that register.

“Tim Tim TIM!”

AS A doctor, Tim had seen plenty of things in human stomachs. Rubber bath plugs and toy cars and Baltic coins and wedding rings. Most of these could be purged using simple regurgitative or saline laxative procedures. The human form held few surprises for him anymore.

But when that white tube threaded out of the incision and tip-tip-tipped toward him as if it were ascending an imaginary staircase, Tim squealed: a shocked piglike sound. He couldn’t get a grip on his sudden fear: it slipped through the safety bars of his mind and threaded—wormed—into the shadowy pockets where nightmares grew.

His scalpel slashed wildly, severing the leading inch of the flickering white tube. The amputated nub fell between Tim’s feet. It writhed and leaked brown fluid. Its plantlike appendages studded with tiny mouths gawped open and shut.

Tim’s arms pinwheeled madly as he tipped backward, landing awkwardly on his ass. The remainder of the tube sucked itself back into the incision like a strand of spaghetti going into a greedy child’s mouth, whipping and snapping and spraying stinking brown gouts.

“Cover your mouth!” Tim screamed. “Don’t let any of it touch you!”

Fists battering the door so hard that dust sifted down from the rafters. The boys’ massing voices, dominated by Kent’s.

“Tim! Max! What’s going on? Open the door!”

The stranger’s body rocked side to side. His feet slipped off the chesterfield and hit the floor with a brittle rattle.