The Tent: A Novella (6 page)

But the scream never comes.
Like a javelin thrown with great force from inside the tent, a long wormy, segmented appendage with an end that tapers to a wickedly sharp point of bone explodes from inside the thing and punctures his wife’s throat just below her larynx. She jolts, her eyes opening wide as moons that stare upward at nothing. She convulses, feet kicking at the ground and releases the breath in a gurgle that forces red bubbles out around the spike of bone that has penetrated her. The appendage shudders as if in desire as Emma’s body sags, the life draining away even as her mucous-slimed hands beat weakly at the thing that has invaded her, but her protests are feeble and short-lived.

For a moment, it seems to Mike as if the world has been paused. Even the rain seems to slow. He drops to his knees, knowing he could still reach out and grab Emma’s hand, knowing too that it’s too late. In a panic, he sleeves tears away from his eyes, fearing they will blind him to some supernatural reversal of this horrific moment, or to some opportunity to undo it, and sees only the retraction of that
appendage, withdrawn as quickly as it came, pulling his wife off her knees as if she were a rag doll. And then she is gone, with a small pool of blood the only sign that she was there at all, and the rain works hard to erase even that. The tent begins to undulate, the light within flickering and throwing the shadow of his wife against its skin as it feeds on her. His wife, and a hint of what murdered her.

A
t the sight of it, he feels or imagines he feels a small pop as the bubble of his sanity breaks, and an involuntary sob escapes him.

As if in respons
e, the undulation of the tent halts.

Listening.

Mike claps his hands over his mouth, one over the other, madness and stark, raving terror pulsing between his eyes.

He cannot move, cannot breathe, doesn’t dare. All he can do is watch, as, after a prolonged moment, the creature resumes its feeding. And as the rain grows heavier, each drop that taps against his head brings with
it words he has learned in the years since Mrs. Edgerton’s biology class. Words like:
bioluminescence
,
lure
,
camouflage
,
adaptation
,
imitation
, and perhaps just as accurate:
stingray, scorpion, crawfish, bat, arachnid
. None of these attributes or comparisons seems outlandish to him now, for in the shadow theater the interior of the tent-that-is-not-a-tent has become, he sees the impression of something that is all of these things and none of them. The large black mass at the epicenter calls to mind a fat black spider in its web, legs working busily as it rends his wife’s body asunder, the bulk of its body extending down from the ridged spine. Spindly, knuckled arms connect bat-like to the sides (wings?) of the tent. Looking at it in its real form, Mike wonders how anyone could have mistaken it for something benign, but then, isn’t that the point of camouflage? How many others, he wonders, as he slowly, ever-so-slowly rises to his feet, have gotten lost in the storm and been lured to their deaths at this creature’s hands/claws/wings by the promise of shelter?

The answer, he supposes, lie
in the tumbleweed-like mounds around him.

And it is to one of these mounds that he moves,
limping around the puddles, careful to make as little noise as possible. Facing the tent-thing, but averting his eyes as his wife’s blood splashes the inside of its membranous walls and the thing shudders in ecstasy, he tries to keep the shock from turning him to stone.

It’s okay to run now
,
Mr. Sellers
, says the counselor.

“No, it isn’t,” Mike whispers. “It never was. And the first thing I’m going to do when, and if, I get back to Columbus, is
punch your perfect fucking teeth in.”

The counselor is quiet, and Mike finds solace in his anger
, finds that it is all he has left. As he inches away from the tent toward the mound nearest the point where he and Emma entered the clearing, he tries not to think of Cody, because whenever he does, he sees him not as he was in life, but as a collection of stained and scratched undigested bones nestled in a clotted ovum of this creature’s waste. As likely a fate as that might be, Mike refuses to believe it until confirmation presents itself, assuming it ever does. If there is a modicum of relief to be found in the chaotic nightmare his world has become, it is that the bone he saw inside that mound was adult-sized.

Cody then, might yet be alive, and this alone is reason enough to even consider resistance in the face of such an impossible aberration.

When he bumps up against one of the mounds, he stops, and reluctantly casts a glance at the tent. Blinks his eyes clear of the worsening rain. Whatever is left of his wife is not anything resembling a human now. The silhouette of the spider/crawfish/bat-thing is poking with spindly legs at a ragged, shapeless shadow it holds in its clutches, as if testing its tenderness.

Mike, trembling uncontrollably, and wishing the calm he felt were a good thing instead of an obvious sign that he has jumped headlong into the abyss he has feared as long as he’s been on the earth
, drops his gaze to the sodden ground between his feet, and the long leg-bone he spotted earlier. This close, it looks smaller and thinner, but given the circumstances, he figures it will be better than harsh words as a weapon. He drops down and tugs the bone free from the tangled latticework of the creature’s waste, wonders as he rises if he has time to try and break it, to make it sharper, wonders if there’s any point. And then he realizes it is not a bone at all, but a lovingly carved walking stick with a knuckled top. Remembers his own grandfather having a similar one, though perhaps it was a little less intricate and well-cared for as this one. Remembers because the old man used to hit him across the back with it when he was drunk.
You’re just as worthless as your father, you little shit.
And the memory angers him.

And what do you plan to do with that?
the counselor pipes up, sounding sulky from his earlier chastisement.
What do you think it will
let
you do with it? It’ll snatch it away from you and use it to pick pieces of you and your poor wife from between its teeth.

“Sh-shut up,” Mike says, through chattering teeth.

Why not just throw stones at it instead?

Mike begins to limp his way back toward the tent, his body numb but his senses honed to
the same sharp point absent from his weapon, as they must be when facing death. Emma is dead, Cody is missing, and no matter what hope he might try to siphon from the situation, on the only level resistant to denial, he knows everything is lost. His world, which he has fooled himself into thinking has always been some broad, endless thing, has been reduced to this clearing, and the thing that lives here, the hostile creature that has removed from him all that ever mattered. And though he is aware that the chances of inflicting damage on the creature are practically nonexistent—he imagines that appendage shooting out and killing him before he even has a chance to draw back the walking stick—there is quite simply nothing left to do. If he runs, if he was able enough to run, it would be on him in an instant. And even if it turns out that the malevolent thing is confined to this clearing and as such cannot give chase—so what? What kind of life awaits him now outside of this killing ground, beyond the place where everything was taken from him in a few short hours? No, he led his family into this horror, into this slaughter, and without them, there is no reason to leave.

Because instinct tells him his son is dead. He has not explored the other mounds, nor will he. The odds of his son’s survival, already significantly reduced when they lost him, are, in the face of the unexpected horror these woods have been hiding, now practically nonexistent.

So here it must end, with a being he would never have dared believe existed outside of mad fantasy, a creature that if he were forced to describe to any rational person would no doubt elicit laughter and doubts about his sanity. They would label him a murderer because it would be the logical verdict.
No, Officer, it wasn’t me, it was a tent!
He snorts involuntary laughter and then raises his free hand to stifle it. But it’s difficult because indeed his enemy, the true murderer,
is
a laughable, incredible thing. But quickly the humor ebbs away, replaced by that welcome numbness as he brings his gaze to bear on the monster before him.

In the flesh, what he’s looking at is not
funny in the least. It is the stuff of nightmare, of the horror shows his mother kept on mute. And how he wishes he could mute all of this now, just shut out the world and wait for the broadcast to end and his life to go off the air.

Not for your ears, Mikey
.

And not for his eyes.

Five feet from the tent, the light inside it goes out, and the creature is still.

Mike stops too, his breath coming in harsh rasps that send clouds of vapor steaming into the air, heating his cheeks only
briefly. The rain continues to sizzle down around him. Uncertainty keeps him immobile, and faced with the abruptly dormant antagonist, a feeble red pulse of panic flares deep within him.

I could run
. He envisions himself dropping the walking stick—and he admits now that he is in complete if reluctant agreement with the counselor regarding its efficacy as a weapon—and quietly making his way out of the clearing, imagines the darkness between the trees appearing to go on forever, walking for miles in the rain, defeated, drained by grief. And then a light, a break in the trees, another clearing, only this time the light that finds him is not the insidious lure of some unknowable predator, but the real light of a log cabin, its chimney trailing smoke he can smell from where he stands, dumbfounded. He sees the cabin door opening, revealing the firelight within, and a man standing in the doorway, beckoning him inside. And behind that man, perhaps being tended to by his kindly wife, a boy sits swaddled in a blanket sipping from a mug of hot chocolate. Cody. His son. Alive.

The tent moves.

Startled, Mike takes a panicked step backward.

Go, if you’re going
, he tells himself.
The window is closing
.

Body juddering from the force of his own he
artbeat, Mike’s grip on the walking stick tightens. He looks down to his right, to his flashlight lying forgotten on the ground, the beam directed forward at the tent. He rehearses the steps it will take to grab it and hobble his way out of there through the dark between the trees on the opposite side of the clearing. But then that instinct, so prevalent since first they stumbled upon the clearing, returns, and this time it has a very simple message for him, one he can read as clear as a neon sign through the rain:
Too late
.

Whatever opportunity there might have been up until now, it has passed.

The flashlight is too far away to risk retrieving it. Instead, he unzips one of the pockets in his slicker and plucks out his phone. His hand is trembling so violently, it takes him three tries to hit the ON button. Two seconds later, it glows to life with a hum of vibration and a cheery series of tones that have no place in a situation so grim. A clumsy but hasty series of swipes and button-presses on the rain-smeared screen and he chooses his FLASHLIGHT app, previously only used to help him find dropped items in the car at night, now a potentially life-saving tool in circumstances he doubts the manufacturers ever predicted. The strength of the light as it flares from the back of the phone puts the abandoned flashlight to shame. As he sweeps the blazing blue beam up and out toward the tent, it unveils itself before him, as if it, perhaps possessed by some perverse love for the theatrical, has been waiting for the spotlight to do that very thing.

Mike forgets to breathe as the
whole tent flattens and the front folds back like a hood, exposing a pale white triangular shape that might be an angular head with blind, boiled egg eyes. Long thin jaws with curved and curiously blunt yellow teeth snap at the clouds of breath that spume from its narrow throat, and Mike gets another whiff of methane, or perhaps sulfur. The vellum walls of the tent rise up and out before collapsing to the saturated ground with a splash as if abandoning the idea of flight, like kites in a day that has lost its breath. The wings, heavily veined and shaped like those he has seen in illustrations of dragons, now lie flat at right angles to its body, and he can see small thorny nicotine-colored protrusions along the ridge of the wing closest to him. In the center of the creature’s mass, beneath its knuckled spine, the skin ripples as something moves beneath it, the same arachnid-like thing he glimpsed in silhouette, the thing that killed his wife. The bulbous light, the lure, pulsates as if in warning, or alarm. For a moment, the cow skull-like head of the creature seems to writhe in protest or in pain, its wings beating clumsily and uselessly at the ground, spattering Mike with rain water. And though he can’t be certain of anything given his pedestrian knowledge of such matters, a suspicion floats up through the murk of horror in Mike’s mind: He is not looking at one creature, but two, one of them feeding off the other, controlling it. A parasite and its host.

Before he can discover what that parasite
might be advising its host to do next, Mike braces himself and allows all the terror, the grief, and the rage to come rushing up from the core of him. The resulting maelstrom of adrenaline is as unknown to him as a foreign language being whispered into his ear, as alien as his enemy, and with a lunatic scream, he closes the distance between them with a series of ungainly steps, and throws himself on top of the flailing creature. He is immediately struck by the fetid stench of the thing and the repulsive feel of its skin against his own. It is like nylon coated in glue and as he scrambles for purchase, tries to dig his nails into its skin, it thrashes beneath him. Struggling not to slide or be thrown free of the creature, thereby losing the only advantage he might get, he brings the walking stick up high, his gaze fixated on the agitated movement in the center of the creature’s mass, the engine fueling this horror, the spider-thing that tore his wife from him, and, teeth clenched, brings the stick down with every ounce of strength he has left. It connects with a satisfying crunch, and the skin above it rips, allowing the light to shine through. It is pulsating faster now, and darkening to an orangey-red. The parasite does not make a sound, but wrenches itself away, which has the simultaneous effect of forcing the larger creature to do the same. And when it does, the wing to which Mike clings pulls away, revealing the ground underneath, and any sense of victory he might have felt is quashed as his grip begins to slacken and he begins to slide. Because there
is
no ground underneath, only a deep dark hole, the hole he suspects with mounting horror is the place from which this creature—both of them—came, their ecology forced aboveground perhaps by their own conflict, or hunger, or by man. Such questions will never be answered for Mike, or anyone else, unless these monstrosities grow bolder still and force themselves out further into the world.