The Troop

A thin bar of sunlight wept under the door. Tim ran his fingers along the dissolving edge of light. Hugely comforting. A link to the world outside the closet. To the mainland and the sureties it held. To his cold cellar and its shelves stocked with preserves. To the glass canister of tongue depressors in his examination room.

He breathed heavily and focused. He could untwist a coat hanger and thread it under the door and… what? Jab someone in the ankle? Trip one of the boys? Why bother? Maybe he deserved to be here.

There’s no maybe about it, Tim, said HAL 9000.

He was trapped. Impossibly, inescapably. Maybe it was for the best. Fact: he was ill. The boys may have been right to lock him up. It hurt tremendously that they’d done it—a sudden feral act that made a mockery of all those years they’d been together, a close-knit group under his command. And now, cooped up in here, he couldn’t help them anymore—and that scared him profoundly.

Were you helping them, Tim? Really?

“Shut up, HAL,” he croaked, sounding like a drainpipe clogged with sludge. “You’re not my pal, HAL.”

You’re becoming irrational, Tim. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Good-bye.

“Good. Scram. Get lost.”

Tim’s thoughts returned to his Scouts. They were running wild, a quintet of lost boys. Did they have any inkling of the peril they were in? How could they, really? Boys didn’t process fear the same way as adults, especially when it came to sickness. Their scabs healed like magic, their coughs dried up overnight. But Tim knew the frailty of human bodies; he’d seen how even the stoutest ones could collapse into a sucking pit of disease and death.

Not to mention the fact that they’d also laid their hands all over him while doing the deed. They had breathed in the air he’d exhaled in fear-sick gusts. He may have even spit at them. Dear God, had he actually spat on the boys?

Part of him—a shockingly large part—was okay being in here. Perhaps he was unfit for command. Fact: he was paralyzed with hunger. He kept catching whiffs of cotton candy from someplace. His eyes blinked uncontrollably. He kept hearing his mother, dead six years now, calling him home for supper. Timmy, chowder’s ready!

Eat, said this funny little voice. It wasn’t HAL or the Undervoice. This one was different—sly and insistent, like baby rats clawing the insides of his head.

But there’s nothing to eat in here, he told the voice.

Sure there is. There’s always things to eat, silly.

The rats kept clawing, clawing; before long they’d claw through the soft meat of his brains and scratch through the bone of his skull. Tim pictured it: his skull bulging, his scalp and hair stirring with antic life, the skin splitting with the sound of rotten upholstery as a tide of hairless pink ratlings spilled from the slit, slick with blood and grayish brain-curds, squealing shrilly as they sheeted clumsily down his face, past his unblinking eyes, bumping and squalling over his lips spread in a vacant smile.

Okay, he answered that funny niggling voice. But what should I eat?

Oh, eat anything, it said with cold reasonableness. Any old thing you can find.

The closet was wallpapered. Who the hell wallpapered a closet? The paper was torn in flimsy tatters. He tweezed a curl between his fingers. It ripped down the wall with a lovely zippering sound.

He placed the strip of wallpaper on his tongue. The ancient paste was vaguely sweet. He swallowed hungrily.

Lovely, the voice said. Just lovely. Now eat more.

Tim did as the voice asked.

Peeling and eating and peeling and eating.

The funny little voice was easy to obey. It didn’t ask for much and what it did request was simple to accomplish.

Just eat.

And eat.

And eat.

A body settled against the other side of the door. Tim licked his paper-cut lips; his tongue had gone thick and gluey with paste. He whispered:

“Max? Is that you?”

Silence.

“Newt? Ephraim?”

A song—sung in a low mocking warble:

Nobody loves me
Everybody hates me
I’m going to the garden to eat worms, to eat worms
Big fat juicy ones, long thin slimy ones
Itsy-bitsy crawly-wawly woooorms.

The singer was plugging up the space between the door and the floor.

Shelley?

Tim’s precious bar of light vanished in heart-stopping chunks.

“No,” he moaned. “What are you doing? No, please, no, please don’t…”