What the Hell Did I Just Read

18. ONCE AGAIN, MARCONI SELFISHLY TRIES TO STEAL THE SPOTLIGHT

Amy slid back into the Jeep, took one look at our faces, and said, “What?”

I said, “I don’t know how to put this, but while Maggie appears to you as an adorable eight-year-old child, she is in reality a huge carnivorous larva that is slowly eating her mother.”

Amy said, “I guess I don’t have to ask if that’s just a metaphor. So during your drug trip, you left yourself a note to come here, so you could see that, right? So now what?”

“We have to kill it, Amy.”

“You’re going to kill Maggie in front of her mother? You’d have to kill Loretta, too.”

“No. I guess we’d have to get her away from here…”

“Kidnap her, you mean. As in, the thing you were accused of doing in the first place. Will you listen to yourself?”

“Amy, it’s a larva. That means it’s going to grow into something, right? We can’t let some monster hatch and go on a rampage through the city. Again.”

“Okay, let me ask you this. You see one thing, me and Loretta see another. How do we know your version is right?”

“Is this like some kind of Socratic thought experiment? We already know it’s a monster. I mean, you see a girl but it’s actually a monster.”

“But I talked to her.”

“So?”

“She was able to think and express feelings. Fear, affection, all that. Why doesn’t she qualify for all the same protections we’d afford to a human who can do the same thing?”

John said, “You didn’t see what we saw. That thing is killing Loretta. Eating away at her. Like, taking literal bites from her flesh. I don’t even know how she’s still walking around.”

“She looked fine to me. Looked exhausted, but relieved.”

I said, “All right, this is exactly what you were afraid would happen. Do you need us to slap sense into you now? Just know that I intend to do the slapping on your butt. Slowly.”

“If I’m not thinking clearly, show me where I’m wrong, I’ll listen. In Loretta’s mind, it absolutely is her daughter. Did you see the look on her face? That love, it was real. You kill Maggie, that loss she’ll feel, that’ll be real, too. Same as if you actually killed her kid.”

I said, “Maybe after the thing dies, the spell will be broken, like it was with Mikey. Let’s put it to a vote.”

Amy said, “My vote is that I’m not going to let you do it no matter how you vote.”

“That’s not how democracy wo—”

John’s phone chimed an e-mail notification.

“Oh, hey, it’s Marconi. He says he got the specimen and wants to talk about it. Wants to know if we can do a Skype call.”

“What specimen?”

John shrugged. “I guess we sent him something? While we were tripping?”

“That doesn’t sound like something we’d do. And by that I mean it sounds like a really good idea.”

Amy said, “That settles it. We go back to my laptop and talk to Dr. Marconi and we do that instead of murdering this child.”

I said, “For now. But if in the interim Maggie hatches and eats an orphanage, it’s on you.”

Amy

They were several blocks from Loretta Knoll’s modest rental house before Amy felt her guts start to loosen up just a little.

This whole thing was giving her flashbacks.

After the car accident that killed her parents and mangled her left hand, Amy had stayed with her Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty for three long, nightmarish years. The couple’s marriage had always been a tire fire and Amy could feel the tension crackling in the air every time she walked in the door. The two of them hated each other. They devoted all of their energy to inventing reasons to be outraged, each desperate to be the wronged party at any given moment, as if they were both keeping track on a scoreboard they kept under the bed. Adding Amy to the mix had been the proverbial bottle rocket to the hornet’s nest. The aunt was the blood relative, Amy’s mother’s sister, and it had been her decision to take Amy in. Aunt Betty then kept insinuating that Uncle Bill had sexual urges for their fourteen-year-old houseguest. Betty had known it wasn’t true, it was just the worst thing she could think to accuse him of. That’s how it worked.

Still, this meant that Amy couldn’t just stay out of their vicious arguments, because she was now a party to them. She was also the only one of the three who didn’t seem to thoroughly enjoy the conflict. The tension made her physically ill. She wasn’t used to it. Her parents had been best friends, her father an enormous man with smiling eyes who had once spent six hours driving a young Amy from store to store trying to find a copy of Final Fantasy II for the SNES. His little princess.

But at Bill and Betty’s, if there was ever to be peace for an evening, it would only be because Amy had devoted all of her energy to maintaining it, moment to moment. She would see signs of conflict on the horizon—say, noticing Aunt Betty had bought Wonder Bread instead of Bunny, Bill’s preferred brand—and 100 percent of the burden for smoothing it over would fall on her. The bread-brand controversy had once resulted in Bill smashing a plate against a table and slicing his hand open on one of the shards. Amy remembered on one occasion throwing on her coat in the middle of winter and walking to a grocery store five blocks away, seeing they didn’t have a loaf of Bunny Bread on the shelf, and bursting into tears right there in the aisle. The next morning she had stood there in the kitchen with a ball of heavy acid in her guts as she watched Uncle Bill go to make toast. He uttered a sarcastic grunt when he noticed the brand … and that was it, he just proceeded to make breakfast like normal.

On another day, that’d have been cause to punch the wall and scream the c-word over and over, to sneer to himself and tell Amy about the time he had sneaked into the bathroom at night and put his own bodily fluids in his wife’s face cream. The uncertainty was what made it terrifying—if the outbursts had been constant, she could have started to brace herself in advance, to turn it into some kind of routine. Instead, the periods of peace would last just long enough that the explosions would be jarring again when they came.

To this day, she gets this little thrill of fear up her spine when she passes a bread aisle. Every. Single. Time.

Amy was getting that sick feeling today, the sense that she was going to have to play referee in a fight that was just around the corner. But even that wasn’t right—a referee at least has rules to fall back on. This was more like throwing yourself between two speeding trucks in hopes your squishy organs will be enough to blunt the impact. They don’t make movies or video games about that person, do they? The nervous, muttering thing tasked with convincing the knight and the dragon that there’s more than just the one kind of courage?

She reached up between the front seats and squeezed David’s hand.

Me

Academic, man of the cloth, author, adventurer, and reality show host Dr. Albert Marconi’s most recent book mentions me several times and each time makes me look like an asshole. So, he’s good with research. He does specials for the Discovery Channel about strange phenomena and his production company has sent crews to Undisclosed at least half a dozen times. But Marconi himself has only shown up once in person and in general, he only returns our calls when our situation sounds like something he could parlay into another book. Kind of like a doctor who’ll only take your appointment if your symptoms sound like some kind of horrific undiscovered tropical disease that he can name after himself.

We were back at Fort Beanie Wienie, and Amy was dicking around with Skype (if you’re reading this in the future and Skype is no longer a thing, it was just a piece of video-calling software people used back then. Or back now. Whatever).

I said to John, “You stuck the fuckroach in the mail? There was no concern that the thing would brainwash every postal employee who came within a hundred feet of it between here and wherever the hell Marconi is?”

“The memory is still fuzzy, but when I was on the Sauce, I think I figured out a precaution. I don’t remember what exactly it was, but I know it involved throwing a handful of sulfur inside the container, surrounding the interior with small mirrors, and then wrapping the whole thing in a dozen layers of aluminum foil. I also had thrown a couple of Oreos in with the creature but I can’t remember if that was part of the precautions or if I just wanted to give it something to eat during the trip.”

Marconi appeared on Amy’s laptop screen. A man in his sixties with a neat white beard, wearing a cream-colored suit. He was sitting at a desk and, as I always did in situations like this, I wondered if he was pantless and only threw on the top part for the camera. It looked like he was in a cramped office, with various framed certificates on the wall behind him. I wondered how long he had spent framing up the shot to get those in there. Or, maybe he was just the type of guy where you could point the camera in any direction nearby and find a cluster of accolades.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “And lady. It is a pleasure to see you again.” Now there’s a fucking lie. “I’m speaking to you from the road, we are en route. I have the specimen safely behind foil once more, and inside of a locked safe for which only I have the combination. Keeping it contained has been an adventure, to put it mildly. One assistant became convinced that we had locked her house cat inside the safe, and became so hysterical she had to be restrained and sedated. As camouflage goes, it is impressive, to say the least.”

I said, “You say you’re on the way, I take it you’re bringing a camera crew?” I knew Agent Tasker would be very annoyed by that.

Instead of answering, he said, “Tell me of how you encountered the specimen, from the beginning.”

We quickly told him all of the stuff that’s in the story you’ve heard up to now, minus the parts about my depression, and John’s implausible cock boasts. Marconi listened to our tale and said, “Fascinating.”

John said, “Chastity—the second mother we dealt with—says there’s a parasite that tricks ants into thinking they’re fruit. They’ll actually volunteer to be eaten. She thinks it’s like that.”

Marconi nodded. “A more appropriate example in this case may be a certain species of fruit fly, whose female has evolved to look exactly like an army ant grub. It will land itself right among a pile of the ant’s larvae and the ants will unknowingly feed, clean, and protect it as one of their own. And, while I do want to be cautious about drawing too close a parallel—these organisms are not of our world, after all—what we have encountered here very much appears to be a hive, in that we have multiple organisms working in conjunction, each of which appears to be very specialized.”

I said, “Okay. So whatever’s in the mine, that’s like the queen?” I was really just waiting for him to get around to the part where he tells us what magic is required to slay it, but Marconi likes to hear himself explain things.

“Let us for the moment speculate that the specimen you sent me is what in a hive we would call a worker. Let us further speculate that what is inside that coal mine is in fact a queen. So, the queen reaches the point in its life cycle when it lays its larvae. But, for some reason, its larvae need human hosts to survive—presumably for food, but that is just a presumption at this stage. So, the workers’ only job is to obtain those human hosts, by any means necessary. It would appear to my eyes that these workers went into the world with the intention of duping humans into adopting larvae as their own.”

“By imitating human children.”

“By imitating human children who are in need of rescue. Note how far it went to present the supposed children’s situation as dire.”

I said, “Okay. So, Maggie went missing and then—”

“Maggie did not go missing. There was no Maggie. The queen laid a larva in that pond near the mine and the worker swarm went about convincing some humans to come retrieve it. Maggie never existed before that moment—the entire story, including memories of the kidnapping, was a brain imprint created after the fact.”

I rubbed my temples. “Right. Okay. So ‘Maggie’ was found at Mine’s Eye, but ‘Mikey’ just turned up in my apartment somehow.”

“After you went to the mine.”

“Yeah.”

“You must have brought it back with you, unknowingly.”

“What, like, stuck to my shoe or something? These things are huge.”

“But invisible, if they choose to be. And that one was destroyed, you say?”

We all glanced at each other.

John said, “Uh … maybe? Last time we saw it, some guys at a motel were shooting it with shotguns. That should do it, right?”

Marconi said, “They were shooting at the larva, or the worker swarm that accompanied it?”

We didn’t answer. Marconi read our faces.

“Let us assume, then, that that specimen is also still loose out in the world. But let’s be clear—hive-based organisms reproduce by volume. It is in fact the single reason they are successful. In this case, the queen presumably needs to continue to draw people to the mine. So, now ten more ‘children’ have gone missing, in the minds of the townspeople. Do we need to guess where the clues are going to lead the manhunt?”

I said, “Holy shit, that’s a convoluted reproduction process right there.”

“Have you seen what the human reproduction process is like, Mr. Wong? Here’s a hint—the automobile you drive was almost certainly designed with reproduction in mind.”

Well not my car, but point taken.

Amy said, “So, we have to keep everyone away from the mine.”

I said, “Hell, they’re probably already out there. Everybody knows where Maggie was found, it was in the papers. You’ll have the bikers out there, even the cops have to at least make a show of it.”

John said, “Oh, and before we go any further, we need to name the creature in the mine, the queen. It’s Amy’s turn. I think she referred to it as the Creature with a Thousand Butts earlier, so is that what we’re going with?”

I said, “She didn’t, and that takes too long to say.”

Amy said, “Millibutt.”

John said, “Done. Also, where does Nymph fit into all this?”

Marconi shrugged. “There likely was never such a man, or being. Just a manifestation of the swarm.”

I said, “But why?”

Amy said it before Marconi could. “To give us something to save the kids from. We each saw the villain we needed to overcome.”

There was some sadness in Amy’s statement that I didn’t fully understand.

“So,” John said, “we go into the mine and fight the main boss. What can we expect to find in there?”

I said, “And before you say it, yeah, we know to expect the unexpected or whatever. But let’s make some educated guesses.”

Marconi nodded. “Well, there are no uninitiated in this conversation, correct? Behind the veil of this world is a realm beyond the physical. The undying entities that dwell there do not have a shape or a size, but can only be measured in terms of their ability to exert will. I have reason to believe that the physical offspring we’re encountering are one entity’s way of inserting itself from that dimension into ours.”

I said, “Sure, so it’s an evil spirit or whatever. I guess that means it’s not flammable?”

“Ask yourself how such entities would do battle with each other. The question is not merely academic within my school of thought—we believe we will find ourselves in just such a battle in the moment after death. Will versus will. Imagine a mortal body as an egg. When broken, what emerges might be a soaring bird or a runny yolk.”

“And here I thought it was just a monster that wanted to eat us.”

“In a sense, it is. Such a being would grow by subduing the will of others to its own ends. In our mythology, devils are always about possession and temptation—chewing up a human will until only a hollow puppet remains. You can decide for yourself at what point we can separate the symbolism from the reality.”

John nodded, knowingly. “Exactly. It’s just like those haunted puppets in your junk room, Dave.”

Marconi said, “Not in the least. To give you just a hint of the complexity of the task at hand, you will note that I have carefully avoided uttering the true name of the entity. It wants to be spoken of. I would suggest you do the same if and when you repeat this story to others.”

I was getting lost again. “But how do we kill what we can’t even—”

I was abruptly cut off by the sound of shattering glass.