“Yeah, well fuck that, Doc. ” Homer’s voice was hoarse. “I already know. I’ve known all my life. The Black Eye shows me everything. The Red Mouth tells me everything I need to know. Maybe you fooled it, you cocksucker, but the Red Mouth will whisper to you. Oh, hell yes and no doubt about it. Ain’t that right, Auntie?”
Selma said nothing.
“But what did you do to me, you Frankenstein fuck?”
He pressed thumbnail against his skin. Below the surface it felt like something popped. Something wet and small. Setting his teeth in a grin that was wired in place by pain and hatred, Homer pressed his nail into the skin, rubbing it back and forth until it made a pale groove. Not a red welt, but a pale trench. That only made him madder. He pressed the thumbnail in, finding a cracked section and using that like a plow to cut the flesh, constantly rubbing back and forth, squeezi
ng his fist to force the blood out.
Only it wasn’t blood. It was a black muck, thicker than oil and filled with white threads. No, not threads. Worms. Or maggots. They wriggled and twisted in each black drop that rolled outward from the cut.
Homer Gibbon stared at the goo … and what swarmed and thrived inside of it. Inside of him.
“No,” whispered Homer. The truth of it—what Volker had told him over the phone and the proof crawling from his veins—staggered him. He backpedaled drunkenly until his back crunched into the wall. He slid down to the floor, his mouth opening and closing as a scream kept leaping up from inside his chest to rip loose and break the world.
“Auntie?”
That word, small and plaintive, was the only sound he made. It was faint, nearly a child’s voice. A lost voice.
Aunt Selma did not answer.
She could not.
She had no mouth with which to speak. No lips. No tongue.
She sat amid the debris from the table, her robe soaked scarlet from the blood that flowed from all the red mouths Homer Gibbon had opened on her skin.
Homer stared blankly at her, and it took him almost a minute to understand what he was seeing. There were black spots in his mind, obscuring memories both recent and old. But not Dr. Volker’s words. No, each and every one of them were as clear as if he were crouched behind Homer and whispering in his ear, but Selma…?
Homer knew what had happened to her.
He could feel the weight of meat in his stomach. He understood what that meant. It’s just that he had no memory at all of having done it.
Homer had not wanted to do this. Not to Selma. Not to her.
He sat and stared and tried to weep. He strained to force out a single tear.
“Come on, you fucker,” he yelled, as if Volker was right there in the room. “Give me that much. Let me still be human enough for that. ”
He felt a tingle at the corner of his eye, and with great relief he touched his fingers there, needing to see the ordinary glistening wetness of that tear. The world began spinning around him. The drop of liquid on his fingertips was as black as the Black Eye. Tiny worms wriggled in it.
Homer Gibbon screamed. And this time the scream was real, full and charged with all of the power of his hate and rage.
He screamed and screamed. He jumped to his feet and raged through the house, tearing it apart. Be damned to the pain in his muscles; he took that pain and fed it in like fuel to his fury. He shattered windows and threw chairs across the rooms. His hands swept pictures from the walls and his feet kicked side tables to kindling. He overturned the sofa and slashed at the curtains with fingernails and teeth and then with knives from the kitchen.
And then he stopped dead in his tracks.
Aunt Selma stood in the doorway to the dining room. Her face was a death mask of exposed bone and empty eye sockets. Her clothes hung in stained tatters exposing wrinkled, bloodless skin. Some of her fingers were broken and bitten.
“Auntie?”
Selma raised her hands toward him and moaned. A deep, aching moan of blind and unbearable hunger. Homer stared at her, watching as she shuffled toward him. Even from ten feet away he could see the black goo leaking from between the exposed teeth, and inside the goo … the worms.
It was then, in a grand leap of understanding, that everything Volker had told him about Project Lucifer, the coupe poudre, and the parasites coalesced into a shared body of knowledge with the things the Black Eye had witnessed all of Homer’s life, and which the Red Mouth whispered incessantly in his ears. Homer looked at the ripped skin on Aunt Selma and touched his own mouth, making intuitive leaps. Making connections.
Over the years, in the service of the Red Mouth, Homer had used every kind of tool. Knives, saws, drills, pliers, hatchets, clubs, forks, and even dentist tools. Each of them had opened red mouths in the people whom he sacrificed to his inner gods. But now …
He ran his fingers over his teeth, feeling each one. Shape and size and sharpness. Ordinary teeth, but not really. Not anymore. He could feel the worms wriggling beneath the flesh of his gums and within the meat of his tongue and the walls of his mouth.