The Troop

Before Trixy, Shelley had never killed anything that might be missed. Ultimately, he decided to burn her. He stuffed her in the pellet stove in the basement. Trixy went up in a burst of whiteness behind the grate. Shelley was fleetingly concerned that the smell of burnt fur would rise through the vents to permeate the house, but any suspicious odors were well gone by the time his parents got home.

It was here that Shelley had an epiphany: proper disposal was its own alibi. The kitten was gone. It wasn’t necessarily dead. It may have run away. Cats did it all the time. Cats were stupid and ungrateful.

When Trixy disappeared, his mother was in a state. She mooned around the house, gazing forlornly into the backyard—which made life harder for Shelley, as he conducted business in the yard and didn’t want his mom to see him at work. “Isn’t it awful about Trixy?” she asked. “The poor thing.” Shelley nodded deeply, sincerely, chin touching his chest. Every so often he’d catch his mother looking at him—not accusingly, exactly, but… questioningly. As if the son she’d given birth to had been poached in the night, replaced with an exact physical duplicate. This duplicate spoke in her son’s voice and aped his intellect and abilities, but there was something worrisome about this new one. He—it?—was a step outside of humankind, looking in. Did it like what it saw?

But if his mother indeed felt this, she’d never given voice to it. Parents held an intrinsic need to believe in the essential goodness of their offspring—their kids were a direct reflection of themselves, after all.

A week after murdering Trixy, Shelley lay in bed, a wedge of cold moonlight slanting through the curtains to plate his pasty, wasplike face. He replayed the scene in his head: Trixy, waterlogged and wild-eyed, rocketing from the tub. It brought the tingle back to his privates—the bedsheet tented at his crotch—but the sensation was pitifully diminished, a watery imitation of that galvanic rush. Shelley pondered: if he’d felt that rush with something so pathetic as a kitten, imagine how it’d feel with something bigger, stronger, more intelligent. The risk would only intensify the euphoria, wouldn’t it?

SHELLEY WALKED past the remains of the campfire and cut around the side of the cabin to the cellar. He crouched and tapped gently on the cellar door.

“Kent,” he called in a singsong voice. “Oh Keeeeennnn-tah.”

Something clawed up the steps at the sound of his voice—it sounded like a huge sightless crab. There came the hollow thip of bone on wood. Dust sifted down from the hinges. Shelley inhaled a gust of sweet air that stunk of rotted honeycomb. For an instant, Shelley saw a creature between the cellar slats: a thing composed of famished angles and horrible bone, the raw outcroppings of its face standing out in razored points.

Fingers slipped through the gap between the doors. They did not look like anything that ought to be attached to a human being: shockingly spindly and so awfully withered, like ancient carrots that had been left in a cold, dark fridge so long that they’d lost their pigment. None of them had fingernails—just bloody sickles rimmed by shreds of torn cuticle. Shelley assumed Kent had eaten them, one after another. This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home…

“I’m so hungry.”

The voice was ancient, too. Shelley pictured an ineffably old man-boy crouched on the stairs: a wrinkled horror with snowy hair and incredibly ancient eyes, the corneas gone a sickly yellow like a cat’s eyes—like Trixy’s eyes?

Shelley said: “You’re still hungry? Even after you ate all our food?” He tsked. “Do you think I should let you out?”

“I don’t know,” Kent said, sounding confused. A sulky child.

“I think you deserve to be there. Don’t you think, Kent? You made us lock the Scoutmaster up. So we locked you up. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

Silence.

“I asked you a question. Isn’t it fair, Kent?”

“Yes,” Kent said in a petulant tone.

“Tit for tat, right?”

“Yes.”

“The Scoutmaster’s dead.”

Silence again.

“Whose fault is that, Kent?”

The silence persisted.

“Hey!” Shelley chirped sunnily. “Remember the helicopter? It dropped a care package. Food. Juicy meat and buttery bread and candy and—”

“Please.”

Shelley had never heard a word wept before. But that’s what Kent had done. He’d actually wept the word please.

“Please what, Kent?”

“Please… feed me.”

“I could. But first, Kent, you need to answer my question. I’ll ask again: Whose fault is it that the Scoutmaster is dead?”

“It’s… it’s my fault. It’s all my fault. But I didn’t mean— I never meant to—”

“It doesn’t matter what you meant, Kent. It only matters what happened.” Shelley’s voice was silky soft. “So think about this. He died very badly. A tree fell on his head, you know. His skull got crushed like an eggshell. So yes, Kent, it’s really, truly, totally all your fault.”