Shivers 7 (40 page)

He could remember the low, red-swollen moon casting dim fire on the broad green leaves, the jumbled scarecrow that fluttered and dangled on the fence like a horrid and grinning Halloween treasure, the sound of crickets. And that…that other sound. It had scared him then, although his daddy said it was perfectly natural. It had scared him plenty. But it hadn’t scared him like this.

This sound was like an earthquake whispering deep down in the earth, working itself up through bedrock, shunting boulders aside, moving the ground, getting ready to make plates waltz off their shelves and coffee cups tap-dance from counters to shatter on the linoleum. It was at the same time the smallest and the biggest sound he had ever heard.

Jordy turned and ran back to his house.

Now you can explain why a smart man will do something, because a smart man goes by the facts. If a smart man gets car trouble, he goes to a service station. If he gets wasps in his house, he calls the exterminator. And if a smart man gets sick somehow, he calls the doctor.

Jordy Verrill wasn’t a smart man. He wasn’t feeble or retarded, but he sure wasn’t going to win any Quiz Kid award, either. When God hands out the smart pills, he gives some people placebos, and Jordy was one of those. And you can’t predict what a man will do in a given situation after he reaches a certain degree of dumbness, because the man himself doesn’t know if he’s going to shit or put his fingers in the fan.

Jordy didn’t call another doctor, not even after lunch when he looked into the mirror on the back of the closet door and saw the green stuff growing out of his right eye.

There was another doctor in Cleaves Mills besides Dr. Condon. But Jordy had never been to Dr. Oakley because he had heard that Dr. Oakley was a son of a bitch. Dr. Condon never acted that way, and Jordy like him. Also, Oakley was reputed to be fond of giving shots, and Jordy still retained his childhood fear of being injected. Doc Condon was more of a pill man, and usually he would give you the pills free, from samples. Paying up, that was another thing. Jordy had heard that Doc Oakley had a little sign on his waiting room wall that said IT IS CUSTOMARY TO PAY CASH UNLESS ARRANGEMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN ADVANCE. That was hard scripture for an odd job man like Jordy Verrill, especially with the hay as poor as it had been this year. But Doc Condon only sent out bills when he remembered to, which was rarely.

None of these are smart reasons for not going to the doctor, but Jordy had one other, so deep he could never say it in words. He didn’t really want to go to see
any
doctor, because he was afraid to find out what was wrong with him. And what if it was so bad that Doc Oakley decided to stick him in the hospital? He was deadly afraid of that place, because when you went in it was only a matter of time before they lugged you out in a canvas bag.

Still he might have gone to Doc Oakley if the answering service had said Doc Condon wasn’t going to be back for a week. But just until tomorrow, that wasn’t so bad. He could call Doc Condon tomorrow and get him to come out
here
, and not have to sit in anybody’s waiting room where everyone could see that revolting green stuff growing out of his eye.

“That’s the ticket,” he whispered to himself. “That’s what to do.”

He went back to the TV, a glass of rum in a water glass by his hand. Tiny green fuzz was visible, growing on the white of his right eye like moss on a stone. Limber tendrils hung over the lower lid. It itched something dreadful.

And so the eye, of course, resorted to its old tried-and-true method of cleansing itself, and that’s why Jordy, had he been a smart man, would have gotten over to Doc Oakley’s office just as fast as his old Dodge pickup could travel.

His right eye was watering. A regular little sprinkling can.

He fell asleep halfway through the afternoon soap operas. When he woke up at five o’clock he was blind in his right eye. He looked in the mirror and moaned. His faded-blue right eye was gone. What was in the socket now was a waving green jungle of weeds, and some of the little creepers hung halfway down his cheek.

He put one hand up to his face before he could stop himself. He couldn’t just rip the stuff out, the way you would hoe up the witchgrass in your tomato sets. He couldn’t do that because his eye was still in there someplace.

Wasn’t it?

* * *

Jordy screamed.

The scream echoed through his house, but there was no one to hear it because he was alone. He had never been so dreadfully alone in his life. It was eight o’clock in the evening and he had drunk the whole bottle of Bacardi and he still wasn’t schnockered. He wished he
was
schnockered. He had never wanted so badly to be out of sobriety.

He had gone into the bathroom to piss off some of the rum, and that green stuff was growing out of his penis. Of course it was. It was wet down there, wasn’t it? Almost always a little bit wet.

Jordy went just the same but it itched and hurt so much that he couldn’t tell which was worse. And maybe next time he wouldn’t be able to go at all.

That wasn’t what had made him scream. The thought of having that stuff
inside
him, that had made him scream. It was a million times worse than the time he had gotten the bat caught in his hair while he was insulating old Missus Carver’s attic. Somehow the green plants had picked the two best parts of him, his eyes and his pecker. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair at all. It seemed like Jordy’s luck was always in, and you spelled that kind of luck B-A-D.

He started to cry and made himself stop because that would only make it grow the faster.

He had no more hard liquor but there was half a bottle of Ripple in the ice box so he filled his tumbler with that and sat down again, dully watching the TV with his good eye. He glanced down at his right hand and saw green tendrils had wriggled out from underneath the cotton…and some stalks had pushed right up through it.

“I’m growin,” he said emptily, and moaned again.

The wine made Jordy sleepy and he dozed off. When he woke up it was ten-thirty and at first he was so muzzy from everything he had drunk that he didn’t remember what had happened to him. All he was sure of was that his mouth tasted funny, as if he had been chewing grass. Awful taste. It was like—

Jordy bolted for the mirror. Ran his tongue out. And screamed again.

His tongue was covered with the fuzzy green growth, the insides of his cheeks were downy with it, and even his teeth looked greenish, as if they were rotting.

And he itched. Itched like fire, all over. He remembered once when he had been deer-hunting and he had to take a squat right that minute, or else. And he had gone and done it right in a patch of poison sumac—Jordy’s luck was always in. That had been a bad itch, the rash he had gotten from that, but this was worse. This was a nightmare. His fingers, his eye, his pecker, and now his mouth.

Cold water
!

The thought was so focused, so steely, that it didn’t seem like his own at all. Commanding, it came again:
cold water
!

He had a vision of filling up the old clawfoot bathtub upstairs with cold water, then ripping off all his clothes and jumping in, drowning the itch forever.

Madness. If he did that it would grow all over him, he would come out looking like a swamp-log covered with moss. And yet the thought of cold water wouldn’t go away, it was crazy, all right, but it would be so
good
, so
good
to just soak in cold water until the itch was all gone.

He started back to his chair and stopped.

Green stuff was sprouting from its overstuffed right arm. It was all over the worn and stringy brown fabric. On the table beside it, where there had been a ring of moisture from his glass, there was now a ring of green stalks and tendrils.

He went out into the kitchen and looked into the trash-bag. More of the green stuff was growing all over the Bacardi bottle he had dropped in earlier. And a Del Monte pineapple chunks can next to the Bacardi bottle. And an empty Heinz catsup bottle next to the Del Monte can. Even his garbage was being overrun.

Jordy ran for the phone, picked it up, then banged it back down. Who could he call? Did he really want anyone to see him like this?

He looked at his arms and saw that his own sweat-glands were betraying him. Among the reddish-gold hairs on his forearms, a new growth was sprouting. It was green.

“I’m turnin’ into a weed,” he said distractedly, and looked around as if the walls would tell him what to do. They didn’t and he sat down in front of the TV again.

It was his eye—what had been his eye—that finally broke him down. The itching just seemed to be going deeper and deeper into his head, and creeping down his nose at the same time.

“I can’t help it,” he groaned, “Oh my Jesus, I can’t!”

He went upstairs, a grotesque, shambling figure with green arms and a forest growing out of one eye socket. He lurched into the bathroom, jammed the plug into the bathtub drain, and turned the cold water faucet on full. His jury-rigged plumbing thumped and groaned and clanked. The sound of cool water splashing into the tub made him tremble all over with eagerness. He tore his shirt off and was not much revolted by the new growth sprouting from his navel. He kicked his boots off, shoved his pants and thermals and skivvies down all at once. His upper thighs were forested with the growth and his pubic hair was twined with the limber green tendrils that sprouted from the plants’ central stalks. When the tub was three-quarters full, Jordy could no longer control himself. He jumped in.

It was heaven.

He rolled and flopped in the tub like some clumsy, greenish porpoise, sending water sheeting onto the floor. He ducked his head and sloshed water over the back of his neck. He shoved his face under and came up blowing water.

And he could feel the new growth-spurt, could feel the weeds that had taken root in his body moving forward with amazing, terrifying speed.

Shortly after midnight, a slumped, slowly moving figure topped the rise between Jordy Verrill’s farm and Bluebird Creek. It stood looking down at the place where a meteor had impacted less than thirty hours before.

Jordy’s east pasture was a sea of growing green weeds. The hay was gone for a distance of a hundred and sixty yards in every direction. Already the growth nearest the creek was over a foot and a half high, and the tendrils that sprouted from the stalks moved with a twisting, writhing movement that was almost sentient. At one point the Bluebird itself was gone; it flowed into a green marsh and came out four feet further downstream. A peninsula of green had already marched ten feet up the bank of Arlen McGinty’s land.

The figure that stood looking down on this was really not Jordy Verrill anymore. It was hard to say what it might be. It was vaguely humanoid, the way a snowman that had begun to melt is humanoid. The shoulders were rounded. The head was a fuzzy green ball with no sign of a neck between it and the shoulders. Deep down in all that green, one faded-blue iris gleamed like a pale sapphire.

In the field, tendrils suddenly waved in the air like a thousand snakes coming out of a thousand Hindu fakirs’ baskets, and pointed, trembling, at the figure standing on the knoll. And on the figure, tendrils suddenly pointed back. Momentarily Jordy had a semblance of humanity again: he looked like a man with his hair standing on end.

Jordy, his thoughts dimming with the tide of greenness that now grew from the very meat of his brain, understood that a kind of telepathy was going on.

Is the food good?

Yes, very good. Rich.

Is he the only food?

No, much food. His thoughts say so.

Does the food have a name?

Two names. Sometimes it is called Jordy-food. Sometimes it is called Cleaves Mills-food.

Jordy-food. Cleaves Mills-food. Rich. Good.

His thoughts say he wants to bang. Can he do that?

What bang?

Don’t know. Some Jordy-thing.

Good. Rich. Let him do what he wants.

The figure, like a badly controlled puppet on frayed strings, turned and lurched back toward the house.

In the glow of the kitchen light, Jordy was a monster. A monster in the true sense, nearly as ludicrous as it was terrifying. He looked like a walking privet hedge.

The hedge was crying.

It had no tears to cry, because the growth was mercilessly absorbing every bit of moisture that Jordy’s failing systems could produce. But it cried just the same, in its fashion, as it pulled the .410 Remington from its hooks over the shed door.

It put the gun to what had been Jordy Verrill’s head. It could not pull the trigger by itself but the tendrils helped, perhaps curious to see if the bang would make the Jordy-food more tasty. They curled around the trigger and tightened until the hammer dropped.

A dry click.

Jordy’s luck was always in.

Somehow it got the shells from the desk drawer in the living room. The tendrils curled around one of them, lifted it, dropped it into the chamber, and closed the slide mechanism. Again they helped to pull the trigger.

The gun banged. And Jordy Verrill’s last thought was:
Oh thank God, lucky at last
!

* * *

The weeds reached the edge of the highway by dawn and began to grow around a signpost that said CLEAVES MILLS, TWO MILES. The round stalks whispered and rubbed against each other in a light dawn breeze. There was a heavy dew and the weeds sucked it up greedily.

Jordy-food
.

A fine planet, a wet planet. A ripe planet.

Cleaves Mills-food.

The weeds began to grow toward town.

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