Worm

2

Three doors down, Tessa Saldane gripped the arms of her recliner as a low-level rumbling shook everything up, knocking knickknacks off shelves and pictures off hooks. The windows rattled. A Currier & Ives print thudded to the hardwood floor of the dining room, its glass face shattering.

This more than anything got her out of the recliner. She originally thought it was one of those damn jets again, coming in low on its approach to the Price County airport. Now and again, whether by design or accident, they liked to swoop down and set things to rattling as they passed over the rooftops of Pine Street and Twenty-first Avenue.

But this was no jet.

In fact, Tessa didn’t know what in the hell it was.

When she got to her feet—and sometimes when she was settled in like that, it took some doing—it felt like the house was… well, wobbling. Like it wasn’t sitting on solid terra firma but something loose and rolling like Jell-O. As Tessa stood there, not daring to move, everything seemed to be in motion and she was sure she would be spilled to the floor violently. And when you’re on the wrong side of seventy like Tessa, an impact of that sort had a way of dislocating your knees and breaking your hips, neither of which would knit up quite the same again… if at all.

So she stood there, feeling a disturbing fright down low in her belly that pushed cold, reaching fingers up into her chest.

The house shook again and, dammit, she heard her mother’s Haviland eggshell tea set hit the kitchen floor and break into pieces.

Lord, what now? Whatever now?

Of course, she was thinking earthquake… but whoever heard of an earthquake in Camberly, which sat smack-dab in the middle of solid green-grassed, blue-skyed, hay-mowed Price County? This was the Midwest for godsake. Things like that might happen out in California and god-awful places like that—and Tessa wouldn’t have been the one to say they didn’t have it coming with the way they carried on out there—but not here.

Now the rumbling, which sounded oddly like a very hungry belly, had ceased and was replaced by a glub-glub-glub sort of noise. It reminded her of wet cement poured into a well-tamped sidewalk frame. Only it sounded not so much like it was poured, but gurgling up from a drain.

By the time Tessa made her way to the picture window that looked out on green, serene Pine Street, the vilest sort of sewer smell filled the house. It definitely stank of drains, the backed-up kind. It was a rank odor of decay, subterranean drainage, and hot rotten egg sulfur. Gah.

At the window, she felt herself deflate.

So much for green and serene Pine Street. There was some kind of black muck oozing up through cracks in the street, flowing up and over curbs and washing into yards. As she watched, dumbfounded, the green grass was drowned in a sluicing black, fetid flow and a great mound began to rise from Bertie Kalishek’s front yard across the street. It was like a great bubble expanding beneath the grass. It had to be twelve or fifteen feet across.

It kept rising like a cake, the sod splitting open above it like the flesh of a diseased sore, black muck draining from it like pus. About the time the bubble, or whatever it was, had the circumference of a child’s wading pool and stood tall as a man… it burst. Like a boil, it popped open, exploding with a spray of black goo that spattered the exterior of the Kalishek house.

It looked like a giant had thrown a handful of loose, runny shit right at the neat white clapboarding.

The black muck that built up under the bubble flowed through the yard, slopping up against the porch steps. Like an open wound, it continued to bleed in copious quantities until the Kalisheks’ yard was… gone, drowned under a good two or three feet of gushing black foulness.

Tessa didn’t know what it was.

She thought at first it was oil.

But this wasn’t Oklahoma and this stuff was too thick, too congested, too much like plain old mud from a river bottom… smelled like it, too, only worse. It occurred to her—and not without some humor—that it looked much like diarrhea, black and sloshing and even foul (though foul isn’t the word she thought originally but unclean).

God only knew what diseases and contaminates the stuff might carry.

The very idea made her shudder.

As Tessa continued to watch, the spit drying up in her mouth, she noticed more bubbles rising. Immense things that expanded with a rubbery, tearing sort of sound as they split open lawns. One of them—at the Desjardins’ down the block—rose up an easy ten or fifteen feet and another—at the Jungs’—was twice that size, like an immense cancerous blister on the good old earth. It lifted up most of the Jungs’ front yard, the sidewalk and driveway cracking open like sheets of ice. A rickety potting shed in the side yard tipped over and shattered.

You should call somebody, you should do something, Tessa thought as the Kalisheks’ front porch was turned into scrap wood by yet another bubble. Black goo flooded through the neighborhood in a rising tide. There was another low rumble and the ground shook.

Pressure was building below.

One after the other, more bubbles popped like suppurating wounds, their blood splashing out in dark, fluid tangles. There was a thudding, creaking noise and a manhole cover exploded into the air and hit the curb with a clanging sound, gouging out a chunk of concrete. Instead of sinking into the goo, it rolled right through the Mackenridges’ front yard, splitting Kathleen’s wishing well right in two before smashing into the porch. Though the mouth of the manhole itself was underneath the black, boggy river now, its location was marked by a constant glub-glub-glub as more of that filth bubbled out, gushing and rippling.

Two doors down, Tessa saw Mr. Green waddle through the slop to his car and jump in. He backed out into the street and became instantly mired. He tried rocking the car back and forth; then it stalled. He jumped out, swearing and shouting, slipping beneath the muck and coming up looking like he’d been tarred.

Tessa couldn’t help giggling under her breath at that.

Glub-glub-glub.

She turned. This time it was coming from inside not outside. It made her shiver… it was a very bad sort of sound.

A piercing scream echoed outside, somewhere down the block, and Tessa tensed with terror. The scream came again, then faded off into a lot of yelling and shouting. She tried to see through the window where it was coming from, but couldn’t.

“God, what now?”

When she looked back for Mr. Green, he was nowhere to be seen. His car looked like an island out there in the fuming cesspool of mud. One door was still open. People were gathered on porches but no other fools were willing to join him for a dip in the slimy muck.

Glub-glub-glub.

Dammit. There it was again.

Tessa crossed the living room and traced the sound to the bathroom. The sink was half-full with bubbling black sludge. The toilet water looked like ink. And again, using bathroom analogies, she decided it looked like the mother of all messy dumps.

Glub-glub-glub.

From the kitchen!

Pained and distressed, Tessa arrived to see glops of chunky black ooze dropping from the faucet into her shiny clean stainless steel sink. Plop, plop, plop. More of it dropped, looking almost like it was ejected from pressure.

Oh, not my new sink, not my new sink.

She instinctively grabbed the spigot, hoping to wash that filth down into the drain. No water came out, just more of the glistening ebon slush.

And this was all bad enough with the mess and the stink that reamed out her nose, but in the three or so inches of slop, she saw movement.

Not bubbling.

Something else.

A weird, almost serpentine shape.

There was something alive in the sink.