Worm

4

Eva Jung sat at the kitchen table, studying her fingers on the tablecloth. They were the one thing she took great comfort from, those long, slender fingers of hers. Though the knuckles were now arthritic and swollen, the fingers themselves were still quite handsome, she thought, the nails smooth and manicured.

Though she was by all appearances a frail woman and most on Pine Street believed she wasn’t exactly baking with a hot oven, Eva’s mind was quite sharp. Sharp enough to know her neighbors were conspiring against her. They disliked her because her grass was often too long and her weeds unplucked, her fence falling over and the house badly in need of painting… but these things were not her fault. Leonard was no longer here and he had always taken care of such things. She hired a boy to attend to the yard work in the summer, but only once a month.

Ever since Leonard died, she came out of her big old house only rarely and mostly at night when her neighbors could not watch her.

She did not like to be watched.

Or listened to.

Or even noticed.

When the muck rose from beneath the earth and laid waste to her yard, she was really not that surprised. In the back of her mind she had been expecting catastrophe for years.

Through carefully parted Venetian blinds, she watched it flow and gurgle.

It would be dark soon. She knew what would happen then: the monsters would come… just as they came for her when she was a little girl shivering in her bed. Long-armed and red-eyed, they’d come creeping out of the darkness, slithering and hungry.

When Ivy Desjardins screamed, distracting the others, Eva kept her eyes on Mr. Green out in the road, fighting his way from his stalled car in the mud sea. She was the only one on Pine Street that saw him go under for the last time just as she was the only one that saw what grabbed him.

Monsters. There are monsters in the muck.