“I'm still a boy,” said Evan, glaring straight at it. “I'll always be a boy, even if I have a worm's body. You're just a man with a disease, even if you don't know it.”
The thing widened its mouth, rubbed its nub arms harder. “Boys play outside, proem,” it rasped. “Boys go to school. Boys spend their time with other boys. They prepare to be men. But you do not prepare. You wait.”
“I may not go outside or go to school,” said Evan a little louder, “but I
will
be a man someday. I'll be strange and disgusting and I'll never see anyone but my mother, but I'll still be a man!”
The membranes surrounding the thing's body rippled a little as it leaned forward over Evan's bed. Its stink got even worse as it moved closer. “Proem, proem,” it rasped. “You are healthy, you are healthy!” Before Evan could stop it, the creature had pushed the blankets back with its nub arm, revealing Evan's membraned fingers. The thing pointed its sunken white eyes toward Evan's face.
Evan twitched his nose under the thing's gaze, and the membranes flapped lightly. They not only covered Evan's nose, but they also hung down from his eyebrows and seeped onto his cheeks. Evan knew what “proem” meant. He had asked the thing the first time he had seen it. It meant larva. That was what Evan was to them.
It seemed so long ago that the thing had first come, explained to Evan what none of the doctors could, what was really wrong with him. Evan had been scared but strangely relieved to have an answer at last. When Evan had asked how he'd caught it, the creature had laughed. A loud, gravelly, hearty laugh filled with malice.
“How did he catch it, he wants to know!” it had chortled. “He thinks he has a disease! Something he catches, something he cures. Oh no, proem, you are not sick.”
“I'm not sick? How can I
not
be sick?” Evan had screamed at it. The membranes had already been growing fast.
“You do not remember,” said the thing. And then it had told him. It had laughed as it told, showing its sharp fangs, pursing its shriveled lips in satisfaction.
“You must have a cure! Give it to me!” Evan had begged.
“Oh no, proem,” the thing had said. “You came to us. You have us in you, and we can no more stop this than your mother could stop you from growing in her womb.”
Evan had asked Dr. Allen, was it possible to catch something like this? Could he not be dying at all but be turning into something else, like a caterpillar turns into a butterfly?
Only the other way around,
Evan had thought. “Oh no,” said Dr. Allen. There were no diseases that did that. It wasn't possible. You couldn't turn into a completely different creature. Evan had been grateful that the old man hadn't laughed at him but had pursed his thin lips seriously before he answered.
As he remembered the past, the impossible future stared up at him, smiling with its shriveled hole.
“Get away from me!” said Evan loudly, pushing the thing backward with one hand. It stumbled for a second but then regained its composure and its nasty smirk.
“For now, proem, for now,” it said. “I will check up on you again.” Still smirking, it shuffled back into the bathroom. Using both nubs, it pulled the door closed behind it. Its stink did not leave with it, and Evan knew it would fill the room for hours.
He slept fitfully that night, like he always did after a visit from his future kin.
T
HE SUN WAS BRIGHT
on his frayed shoes. Too bright. He stepped out onto the sidewalk and looked both ways. The town was deserted. No one was behind him. No cars were on the streets. The streets glowed with too much light, as if the sun were also burning from below the ground.
Evan burned with it. Blood-boiling, skin-frying, eye-popping anger pushed him forward. He strode down the empty sidewalk, around a corner, and down the road. The houses got thinner and the yards got bigger. Instead of blocking the light, the trees magnified it, so that every branch created glare rather than shade. The heat from inside him sizzled the concrete beneath his feet.
He kept walking until the yards turned into fields. Manicured lawns became expanses of tall grass, stock-still and shining in the dead-calm day.
Suddenly, a chain-link fence appeared, rising high over his head. It cut off the field and stretched beyond the eye into the forest, which started at the edge of the field and thickened over low hills. Evan tromped up to the fence through the tall grass and gripped it with both fists, staring through the wire past the brown grass, into the evergreens. It seemed like a forest of pure light.
Next to his hands a large wooden sign hung, peeling faded yellow paint.
PRIVATE KEEP OUT,
it said, in once-black letters.
He lifted his hands to grip the fence higher, placed one foot on a low link and then the other.
No! Don't do it!
a voice screamed. But he didn't seem to hear it. He climbed swiftly, throwing himself over the top and landing softly on the ground. His anger had changed into excitement, and he walked swiftly toward the glowing forest. His feet pounded the solid ground, and the ground lifted each foot for its next step.
Stop!
His foot landed in something soft, and sank. Deeper and deeper into the pit. A sweet stink rose up and around him, and, suddenly, the sun went down.
Evan started awake. It was the same dream. Over and over and over again he dreamed it. He dreamed it often alone, and always when the worm was near. He pushed himself up, straining against the membrane. It was getting harder every day to sit up straight.
The sun had not been so bright in real life, nor had it cut out when he had walked into their trap. A few cars had rumbled down the country road. The grass had swayed softly in the breeze. He'd landed so hard after jumping off the fence that he'd screamed over his burning feet. But the essence of the dream was true. He had walked away from school on a bad day. No one had noticed him except to knock him out of their way. No one had noticed when he left.
He had climbed the fence because he could climb. It was one thing he could do better than the other kids. If climbing were a team sport, he would have been a hero. He had done the one thing he could do, and now he could do almost nothing.
In every dream he screamed at himself to stop, and every time he went on climbing, excited and oblivious.
He had struggled in the sweet pink goo, flailing with his arms, pushing with his free leg. He had pulled himself out and slowly wandered home, oozing a pinkish trail like slug slime.
Until the worm thing told him, he had never connected the pink goo with his illness. It seemed obvious in hindsight, the way the itching had spread from his leg to his whole body. How the light had burned on that leg first, and then the wind. How the membranes followed the itching, attacking his left side first. But it hadn't been obvious to him, nor to the doctors who had poked and prodded him.
He was in the hospital when sixth grade started, grateful to be missing it. He didn't have to brave the hallways of the middle school, where he'd be picked on by even more boys, sighed at by more teachers, and ignored when he wasn't being picked on. He had figured that the longer it took the doctors to cure him, the better it would be. It was several months before he realized they would not cure him.
Evan remembered everything he'd hated about school. The other kids. Reading aloud in class and being laughed at when he stumbled. His old clothes and free lunches. Never being noticed. He thought about recess, sitting alone under a tree. It had made him so angry then.
That night his mother's soft knock came again.
“Ready for dinner, honey?” she asked, peeking her head in. She was trying to sound bright, but Evan could tell that, as usual, she was dead tired.
Evan ate and listened to his mother talk. He couldn't stop thinking about school. What was it like? What were the other kids doing? He wondered what the popular kids were doing, the ones who had picked on him or, worse, ignored him. He desperately wanted to see their faces, to go back to the time when he had sat there in the back of the class and envied their every move. Evan hadn't talked with his mother about this for a long time because he didn't want to make her sad, but tonight he couldn't help it.
“Mom,” he said quietly, “I miss school.”
If he had said this two years ago, his mother would have laughed and asked him if he was sick. Tonight she just looked down at him. “I know, honey,” she said.
“I miss going outside!” he cried, suddenly loud. “I miss playing basketball and getting left on the bench! I miss getting grapes thrown at me in the cafeteria! I miss getting my report card with all Cs and Ds!”
His mother reached over to hug him.
“Don't!” he cried. “What if it's catching?” His mother had hugged him a thousand times since he'd gotten sick. If she was going to catch it, Evan knew she would have. But he couldn't think straight. How did he know the goo only worked if you stepped in it? What if his body was producing goo without him knowing it, and everyone he touched would turn into a worm too?
“Oh, honey,” his mother said. “I don't think it's catching. I don't care anyway.” And she reached down and hugged him.
Evan couldn't help himself. He felt the tears start to roll down his cheeks. They caught and puddled in his membranes.
“I'd give everything I have to make you well again,” she said tearfully. “I'd do anything God asked if He would cure you.” She hugged him tighter, so that his strangely shaped internal organs groaned inside him.
“I want to be alive again! I feel like I'm already dead.” He sobbed. And his mother sobbed with him until they couldn't cry anymore.
T
HE NEXT MORNING
Evan lay on his bed, eyes sore. He stared up at the ceiling, the way he had spent so many days. He had counted the cracks and made up stories about them. They were a map of an alien planet, a puzzle sent for him to solve. If he could go to the planet or solve the puzzle, he could get out of here, he would imagine. Now he saw them as just cracks in an old house that was falling apart.
He stared at the light fixture above him. It hadn't been used since before he got sick, when this was his mother's bedroom. The light it gave off was too bright now. It would burn him, melt his newly membraned skin.
As he stared at it, it began to move. Just slightly, as if shaking in a mild breeze. Then came the sound.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
Evan's heart beat loudly and he stared harder. The fixture was opaque white. He could see a shadow inside it. The shadow was so big that it was hard to make it out at first. It nearly filled the fixture, but he saw it flutter.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
“Who's there?” Evan called softly.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
“Are you trapped?” Evan pulled himself up. His skin groaned with the effort.
“Let . . . me . . . in.” The voice was shrill, inhuman. It made Evan's blood freeze.
“What do you want?” he whispered.
“To talk to you, proem,” the voice said. “To make a deal. To help you if you help us.” It was not a worm speaking; that much Evan could tell. A worm couldn't fit in there.
“What are you?” he asked.
“I am something else that lives in darkness. I am an enemy of the worms. We will help you if you help us.” The strange voice was still chilling. But Evan had heard its words.
“What do you want me to do?” Evan asked.
“Let me in, proem. Let me in and we will talk.” Its voice was too strange. There was something wrong about it. He did not want to let it in. He took a deep breath, which nearly made him cough. An enemy of the worms.
“All right,” said Evan. “I'm going to unscrew the fixture.”
The thing fluttered and the fixture clanged.
“All
right,
I'm coming.” He stood up on the bed and reached his arms up. A pain ripped through his stomach like a knife blade turning, and he gasped. He grabbed on to the fixture with both hands and twisted slowly. At least his hands could still do this.
The fixture fell suddenly, and something flew at Evan's face. He ducked quickly, swallowed a scream, and fell backward onto the bed, curling into a ball. His stomach burned.
Evan stared upward, into the glowing yellow eyes of a giant bug. It was a foot long from wingtip to wingtip. Its wings were black and so shiny they might have been made of a plastic tarp, except for dull patches that looked like hair. Its large yellow eyes were round with a tiny dot of pure black pupil. They sat at the front of its face and stared back at Evan with a light that seemed to come from far within. It had two sharp fangs that looked exactly like the fangs inside the worm's mouth. Above each fang was a large patch of coarse black hair.
The bug's slit for a mouth widened into a kind of smile.
“I hope I have not frightened you, proem,” it said.
“Don't call me that!” Evan cried, trying to sit up straight on the bed and not look scared.
“It is not what you want to be, but it is what you are.” The thing's voice softened into a hiss.
“You're right!” cried Evan. “I don't want to be one. You said you could help me, so talk.” Evan tried to look it in the eyes. Their brightness hurt him, but he didn't look away.
It fluttered its wings, then set down on the bed in front of him. The ends of its spindly legs were equipped with narrow, sharpened claws.
“You want to go back to school,” it hissed. “You want to go outside. To feel the sunlight, feel the breeze.”
Evan felt ashamed that the bug had heard him crying. But it was true. “You said I'm a proem,” said Evan. “That means I can't go to school and I can't go outside. Unless you can cure me?” Evan allowed himself to hope. But the bug shook its hairy head.
“No, no, proem. Trust me, we would cure you if we could.”