Chapter Text
In hindsight, Jon really should have known nothing good could come of investigating Carlos Vittery’s statement.
“A waste of resources,” he’d insisted when Martin asked if he should do any additional follow-up. “See if the details line up and file it under the discredited section. We have more important things to worry about.”
He shouldn’t have given it a second thought. Carlos Vittery was dead, an admittedly strange end to the story of a man no doubt in desperate need of professional help. It might make for a compelling psychological case study, but one Jon certainly wasn’t qualified to tackle. Hell, he shouldn’t have even bothered archiving it among the drunken ghost sightings and amateur creative writing prompts.
Except his laptop refused to record it.
He made at least six attempts to type up a transcript, and on two separate occasions tried to record it aloud before his laptop spluttered and gave up on him completely.
Just a coincidence. It didn’t mean anything. The phantom feeling of spider legs creeping across his skin could be explained away by his own personal prejudice. No reason at all to believe this case warranted another minute of his time…Nothing but a feeling, a stray line that replayed in his head when he allowed his mind to wander.
Can you be haunted by the ghost of a spider that destroyed your childhood?
Jon’s hands shook when he filed the statement and didn’t stop until he stepped out of the archives under the guise of taking a lunch break to pick up a fresh pack of cigarettes.
When his grandmother died, he swore he’d give up the hobby for good, but it only took a week in the archives to break that resolution. He chain-smoked three in quick succession by the fire exit, just like he used to behind the dumpsters of his secondary school.
It soothed his nerves only as long as the last cigarette lasted, hardly worth the smell of smoke that clung to his clothes for the rest of the day. The shame stuck with him long after he tossed the rest of the pack. A waste, no doubt, but if he took it back to his flat it would nag at him until he went back for another. And another. And another.
Instead, the only thing to eat at him was the statement. The details he wanted to dismiss as psychosis. The image of Vittery’s body encased in spiderwebs burning into his brain.
Can you be haunted by the ghost of a spider that destroyed your childhood?
He moved on to new statements, but the line stuck fast and refused to be dislodged. Curiosity warred with the desperate urge to bury it and never look back, but for once working himself to the bone solved nothing. He holed up in his office until dawn every night that week, leaving only to issue instructions to his assistants who took in his frazzled appearance with growing looks of concern.
When Martin returned from the apartment building with a few sloppily written notes, he made it official. Case closed. Moving on. We’ve wasted enough time chasing delusions on the institute’s dime.
xxx
Jon stopped by the shops on his way home to pick up some paracetamol, knowing it wouldn’t touch the dull ache radiating from his clenched jaw. He asked the shop assistant to throw in a pack of cigarettes from behind the till without a second thought, the words slipping off his tongue before he could fully register the request. Feeding a craving he barely noticed building.
He swallowed two of the tablets along with half the lukewarm bottle of water, cringing at the tang of plastic. One that would be all too easy to cover with the ashy taste of cheap tobacco if he simply—
No. No more excuses, no more exceptions. Even if the stress of the job weighed on him at times, almost too heavy for him to bear. A waste of money, just like his grandmother used to say. “There are cheaper ways to rot your insides.” Not to mention the smell, and Georgie always hated that the most, didn’t she?
A foolish habit. He’d been right to quit the first time. Waste of money…
He glanced back at through the shop window at the teller and wondered if she’d let him return them. Tell her he made a mistake…No, probably not. Besides, what would he tell her? “I know you sold these to me not two minutes ago, but I changed my mind between the cash point and the door?”
Can you be haunted by the ghost of a spider that destroyed your childhood?
No, he had no good reason to return them. And he’d spent his own damn wages on them, as if his budget wasn’t tight enough living in Central London. He could have this, surely. One last indulgence before he quit the habit for good this time.
He took one out of the pack, then thought better of it and slipped out a second. Just in case the first failed to clear his head. He always did sleep better when he smoked, though he couldn’t remember if it actually eased the nightmares, or if they just seemed more bearable with a few years’ distance between them.
The taste of cheap tobacco couldn’t completely distract him from the memory of the statement, but it occupied his fidgeting hands as he walked the quiet streets. Stilled some of his unease as he passed empty alleyways, knowing there was nothing lurking in the shadows, but half expecting someone to call out to him anyway. Asking for a cigarette.
Better luck with the next one, he thought as he dropped the pack into a wastebin outside the station and stubbed out the cigarette butt on the metal lid. He rolled the spare between his fingers inside his jacket pocket as he boarded the train, his mind inevitably wandering back to the statement.
Can you be haunted by the ghost of a spider that destroyed your childhood? It rattled round and round inside his head, refusing to be put to rest.
He almost wished he could use the excuse that it was on his route home. Just following a hunch, like he used to back in research. He remembered the address listed on the research reports, and maybe he’d memorised it for this precise reason. Maybe, on some level, he’d known he wouldn’t be able to resist feeding this particular itch.
He caught the next train headed for Archway, pleased to find Boothby road only a five minute walk away from the station. A quick lap around the building and he discovered the same basement window Martin had mentioned crawling through, though it was hard to imagine him going to the effort of squeezing through that dirty basement window.
Still, Jon’s time in research and scrawny frame served him well. He slipped inside without issue, aside from almost landing flat on his face when he found the drop to the floor higher than he’d expected. The musty air caught in his throat, damp with mildew and dusty from neglect. He coughed, brushing the dirt off his trousers as he got to his feet. Hardly his most graceful entrance, but it wasn’t as though there was anyone around to—
“Jon?!”
He jumped at the sound, one hand on the windowpane before he could register his own name. Strangely, the first thought that leapt to mind was that Tim would never let him live it down if he managed to get himself arrested chasing down a damn ghost spider.
The voice sounded familiar, but the light from the street filtering through the grimy window tapered off after only a few feet. He squinted into the dark basement, cursing when his phone screen refused to turn on.
That’s what I get for spending three days in the archives without a phone charger.
“Jon, it’s me!” His eyes finally picked out the silhouette in the darkened basement, hardly an intimidating sight once he placed the oddly jovial tone.
“Martin? What in God’s name are you doing here?” he hissed, and the silhouette faltered.
“Um…Follow-up?”
“I thought I told you the case wasn’t worth any more of our time.”
Martin shifted his weight, muttering something about due diligence under his breath.
“Look— This is ridiculous. I don’t suppose you thought to bring a torch?”
“I did, actually.”
When Martin made no move to take it out, Jon resisted the sudden urge to smack his head off the bare brick wall behind him.
“Do you suppose you might be able to turn it on so we can see?”
“Oh, right!”
The weak beam failed to illuminate the wide open space of the basement, but it succeeded in blinding Jon when Martin aimed it directly into his eyes.
“Sorry!”
“May I ask why you were sneaking around in a pitch black basement?” Jon snapped.
“Well, I was investigating before I heard you open the window. I thought— Well, you’re going to say it’s silly, but I thought maybe I’d overlooked something the first time. There are quite a lot of spiderwebs down here.”
Jon’s skin crawled at the mere mention of them, but he swallowed down the sudden rising nausea. “I rather meant, why were you down here in the dark when you had a torch?”
“Because I didn’t know who you were?” Martin said, his voice rising at the end as if half-questioning his own motivations. “And…I mean, we are breaking and entering.”
“Trespassing, technically. The window was already unlocked. Unless you’re implying you broke it to get in?”
“No! I would never—”
“That was a joke, Martin.” Recovering from his surprise, Jon’s face settled back into its usual scowl. “Have you found anything useful, at least?”
“Well— Not yet, but I—” As he panned his torch around, a faint rustling sound broke through the quiet and they froze in place.
“Did you hear that?” Martin whispered. Jon swallowed, willing the moisture to reach his dry and scratchy throat.
“I’m sure it’s nothing. This basement clearly isn’t used often, it’s likely that some wild animal climbed in through the open window and—”
A sound cut through the quiet, the wet ripping of raw meat, and Jon went very, very still.
“Martin,” he said, his voice as low as he could make it while still being heard. “Give me the torch.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Martin.”
“Right!”
His hands shook as he accepted it, but loathe as he was to admit it, having Martin fretting over his shoulder made him braver. Not confident, and certainly not unafraid, but it was assurance enough for that nagging curiosity to rear its ugly head again. He came expecting to find something, didn’t he? He couldn’t just leave without seeing it first. Without knowing for sure what happened in that infuriating gap between the statement’s end and Vittery’s death.
He passed the thin beam of light over the cluttered shelves, scanning for any sign of movement. He might have missed the thin figure hunched in the corner, if not for Martin’s gasp.
“Hello?” he ventured, even as Martin hissed warnings in his ear. The woman didn’t respond, limp tangles of black hair obscuring her face. She leaned heavily against one of the shelves, as if struggling to support her own weight. Jon wrinkled his nose at the sight of her threadbare clothes and dirt-encrusted skin. “I can assure you we have no interest in calling the police on you if you’re squatting down here. We’re just here to look around, then we’ll be on our way.”
The woman didn’t reply, except to let out a low groan. The torch beam fell on her hand, still curled around the shelving unit. While her skin had clearly once been white, her fingernails were black with rot.
“Martin, I think you should call an ambulance.”
“Er, right…How do I explain how we found her?”
“We can figure the details out later. I don’t think she’s well.”
Martin scrambled for his phone, the small square of illumination almost blinding in the dim space. Jon took another step forward, so preoccupied with the woman that he almost missed the flash of silver on the ground.
“Jon, look out!”
He cursed as pain lanced through his leg, staggering backwards into Martin who cried out in surprise. The torch beam swept wide, Martin’s phone clattering to the phone as they collided. Before it hit the ground and audibly shattered, the light of the screen illuminated the woman’s face.
Jon caught a glimpse of her as she tipped back her head to look at them, peeling lips stretched back over blackened teeth and bared in a grotesque smile. A pointillist rendition of a face with more holes than solid skin, all of it either black from the rot or the angry red of infection, and beneath it all something squirmed in a way even Jon couldn’t attribute to muscle spasms.…but after the immediate shock of revulsion passed, he thought he glimpsed something familiar in the bone structure. In the odd twist of her crooked mouth and the acne scars still visible on the remaining skin of her jaw. Beneath the horror lay someone he knew, if only he could put a name to the—
“Jon!” Martin screamed as she let her filthy overcoat drop to the floor, and the flash of familiarity vanished in a wave of worms, worms, worms—
Martin hauled him backwards, and this time Jon let him. His leg screamed in protest, but the adrenaline overwhelmed the pain, and he allowed himself to be dragged away from that awful hive of honeycombed meat. He hadn’t even noticed the stairs behind them, but Martin certainly seemed to know the way. He took them two at a time, never once loosening his hold on Jon’s arm.
They fumbled through the dark, the sound of the writhing worms sprawling out on the floor behind them making his skin crawl. Getting closer, even if the rational part of his brain insisted it must be his imagination.
Gaining on them.
Martin threw open a door at the top of the stairs and dragged them into a well-lit hall. When Jon glanced back over his shoulder, he caught a glimpse of a teeming mass of glinting silver bodies before the door slammed shut behind them.
“Go on without me,” Jon said through gritted teeth, the pain in his leg sending spots flashing across his vision.
“You want me to leave you with that?”
“Of course I don’t want you to, but I can’t run. My leg, I—” Martin didn’t wait for him to finish his explanation. He took one look at the bloody tear in Jon’s trouser leg, then another at the flimsy wooden door separating them from the worm-riddled corpse in the basement, and his expression twisted.
“Sorry about this in advance.”
“It’s alright, Martin. I underst— Ack!” Jon squawked in indignation as Martin promptly lifted him off his feet, throwing him over his shoulder in a hasty fireman’s carry. In hindsight, Jon should have been more grateful about not being left behind.
Jon had never been very good at reflection, even with the benefit of hindsight.
He silently fumed through the crushing wave of relief as Martin bolted for the front door, shouldering Jon’s weight with surprising ease. No doubt they made an odd sight as they hurtled towards the underground station, but no one dared to stand in the way of Martin’s odd, stilted sprint.
The train was blessedly empty when they darted through the doors, catching them just as they started to close. Draped over his shoulder, Jon could feel Martin’s chest heave as he panted from the exertion.
“Martin,” he said, trying to keep the sharp edge out of his voice. “You can put me down now.”
If anything, it seemed to take more effort to place him back down than it had to pick him up. Jon managed to bite back the whimper as his feet hit the solid floor, but he couldn’t hold back the groan that escaped him as he collapsed back into the nearest chair.
“Think we lost it?” Martin asked, eyes still blown with panic as he gulped for air.
“I think it’s a safe bet. I don’t suppose you had a chance to grab your phone?”
He shook his head, patting his empty pockets as if hoping to find it had magically returned to him during their mad dash out of the building. Jon swore again more softly, letting his head fall back against the seat.
“Mine’s dead. We’ll need to report this to the ECDC.”
“You think the ECDC can handle that?”
“I think we have a moral obligation to inform them that she is still in London. This is the first time Jane Prentiss has been sighted since 2014. It seems likely that she’ll move on now that we’ve disturbed her…nest, but if there’s any chance she’s still contained in that basement, we—”
“That was Jane Prentiss? From the um…the statement about the guy who…?”
“From the statement of Timothy Hodge regarding his sexual encounter with Harriet Lee, yes.”
“Christ.”
“Indeed. I knew I recognised her from somewhere.”
“But…She didn’t get you, did she?”
Jon’s eyes flickered towards his leg, still bleeding sluggishly.
“No,” he lied, licking his cracked lips and wishing he’d drained the rest of that bottle of water when he had the chance…an hour ago? Less? It already seemed like an eternity since he’d stopped by that corner shop on his way home from work. “No, I— She startled me, that’s all. I fell against something in the basement. There was a lot of discarded junk down there, I probably cut myself on a nail or something.”
“Are you—”
“I’m fine, Martin. Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t cure.”
It wouldn’t, though, and he knew it damn well. He could feel it even now, squirming under his skin. Burrowed into the meat of his calf and gorging itself on the exposed muscle.
He shuddered.
“What line are we on?”
“Northern. It’s, um. It’s the line I get back to my flat.”
Jon made a face at the idea of spending a second longer than he needed to in Martin’s company, but with the adrenaline wearing off, the idea of putting any weight on his bad leg brought tears to his eyes. Even if he managed to somehow avoid getting mugged, making his way back to his flat on the other side of London would be almost impossible in this state.
He shot another glance back towards Martin who seemed torn between his own exhaustion and paranoia. He checked the row of seats thoroughly for any sign of worms, pacing up and down the length of the carriage several times before the fatigue won out. The pungent odour of sweat soon filled the confined space, broken only by the wash of fresh air when the doors opened out onto a new station.
He lost track of the number of stops they passed, trusting that Martin could at least handle finding his way back home. After a while his eyes slid shut, and he tried to think about something other than the sickening squirming in his leg. Just…just a psychological phenomenon, he was sure. His brain’s way of making sense of a traumatising situation.
Hail a cab when we’re back above ground, Jon thought dryly. Get it checked out at A&E…Probably just my imagination, but it might be worth getting a tetanus shot if nothing else. Just in case.
He never meant to drift off, but he awoke with a sharp jerk when Martin called out to let him know they were approaching his stop. He looked almost as tired as Jon felt, still drenched in sweat from running to catch the train with Jon draped over his shoulder like some bloody damsel in distress. Tim really wouldn’t let him live this down.
“Reckon we’ve put enough distance between us now. Do you need a hand?”
“I’m perfectly capable of managing on my own,” Jon snapped back reflexively, gripping the railing to ease himself to his feet. He managed alright with that, taking a few ginger steps without letting too much weight rest on the bad leg.
The train juddered, just enough to throw off his already unsteady balance. Years of riding the underground told him to brace his legs, but the redistribution of his weight reignited the burning in his calf. He cried out, falling back against the wall of the carriage, and biting back tears.
“Jon!”
He ground his teeth, reigniting the dull pain in his jaw, and counted out his breaths until the pain subsided. As the train ground to a halt, he closed his eyes again and let his clammy forehead rest against the cool glass of the window.
“On…on second thought, it might be a good idea.”
With Martin’s help, he managed to limp off the train and hobble up the station steps. He didn’t recognise the street they emerged onto, but the streetlights helped to alleviate any lingering nerves. It took them almost twenty minutes to walk a route that should have taken them five, and to Jon’s disappointment, he never so much as glimpsed a cab.
He almost wept when Martin unlocked the door to a ground floor apartment. Just the thought of tackling that single flight of stairs…
“Right. You just…Um, make yourself at home,” he suggested as he helped Jon onto the couch. “I’m going to see if my neighbour’s in. Maybe they have a phone we can use.”
Of course he doesn’t have a landline.
“Fine,” Jon muttered, eyes already sliding closed again. “Take your time.”
xxx
What followed next was a blur.
He awoke to the sound of the front door opening again, Martin shaking his head, then—
—Martin sitting in the armchair beside the couch, watching him with a nervous expression, his face drawn from exhaustion and—
The next time he opened his eyes, the room was dark. He blinked, eyes bleary and burning from sleeping with his contacts in.
“Martin?” Jon called out to the darkened room, his voice hoarse and raspy.
“Hnngh?”
“Martin.”
In the chair beside him, Martin jerked. “Hmm? Oh, Christ. What time is it?”
“You mean you didn’t…?”
In the darkness, Martin clambered to his feet and shuffled over towards the door. He hit the switch several times to no avail. The lamp on the dresser also failed, though the streetlights cast enough of a glow to see by when he moved over to the window and threw open the curtains.
“I think there’s been a power cut.”
Something about that struck a chord. Not unusual in of itself, but a strange enough coincidence to banish the lingering fatigue. “Power cut?”
“Funny, I can’t remember the last time I had one.”
Jon pushed himself up into a sitting position, ignoring the wave of dizziness washing over him. “Did you talk to your neighbour?”
“They weren’t in. Might not even live there anymore. People around here move a lot.”
“Right.” Jon’s mouth was the consistency of sandpaper, his tongue fuzzy as if still caked with dust from that damned basement.
He wanted a cigarette.
“I need to leave.”
“You’re welcome to the couch if you—”
“No, that won’t be necessary. Just…help me get to my feet, please. I’m sure I can manage from there.”
Martin gave him an incredulous look. “You’re really just going to go traipsing around London on your own? You can barely stand.”
“I don’t need to go traipsing all over London. We passed a few shops that were still open on our way here, from there I should be able to call a cab or a— Or an ambulance or something,” he said, bristling as he levered himself into a sitting position.
“Do you want me to walk with you, at least? Or I could—”
“You’ve done enough,” he snapped back, refusing to feel guilty when Martin wilted.
“Right. Well, um. I’ll just…” he trailed off, fidgeting with the hem of his shirt sleeve to avoid looking Jon in the eye. “I suppose I’ll just—”
A sharp rapping at the door cut through the room just as Martin reached out for the doorknob, and he recoiled as if burned. They both stared, neither daring to move another inch.
“What time is it?” Jon’s throat ached around the words.
“I don’t know. Usually I just use the clock on my phone. Sometimes the microwave if I get stuck, but if the power’s out it’ll be dead too.”
Jon rolled his eyes and held his own wristwatch up to his face, straining his eyes in the dim light to make out the tiny luminescent markers on the hands. “I think…It’s either quarter past two or ten past three. I take it you weren’t expecting anyone?”
Martin shook his head, eyes still fixed on the door. “What if it’s her?”
“…We couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few hours. There’s no possible way she could have found us again that quickly. It’s not as if she can catch a train across London looking like that.”
Another knock, louder this time.
“But what if it is? What do we do then?”
“You’re being ridiculous. Perhaps your neighbour was in after all and just…decided to come down to check on you.”
“You think my neighbour pretended to be out while I pounded on their door yelling that I needed to use their phone to call an ambulance, but decided to come follow up with me about it in the middle of the night out of the goodness of their heart?”
“It’s…I’ll admit, it sounds a bit farfetched, but it’s still more plausible than Jane Prentiss somehow hunting us halfway across London and politely knocking on your front door.”
“And how plausible would you have said finding her in Carlos Vittery’s basement was?”
Jon pressed his lips together but said nothing. Outside the door, the sound came again. Three knocks in quick succession, but no sign that they were growing impatient.
“Just…go take a look.”
“What?”
“Don’t you have a peephole on your door?”
“I never got one installed.”
“Christ, Martin. Alright then, just open the door a crack and peek out.”
“And if it’s her?”
“Then shut the door in her face.”
“And then?”
Jon didn’t have an answer for that one just yet. As it turned out, he didn’t need one.
“Martin.”
“I know you like to air on the side of scepticism when you’re reading statements but—”
“Martin.”
“—you’d think actually seeing her with your own two eyes would—”
“Martin!” he yelled. “The door!”
Something small and silvery squeezed through the crack beneath the door, its bulbous body straining as if on the brink of bursting. Martin shrieked, leaping forward to stamp on it before it could proceed any further. It crackled beneath his shoe, splattering a dark a liquid across the carpet. More followed the first, their blackened heads whipping back and forth in a wild frenzy as they struggled through the narrow gap.
“Get something to block them!”
Jon struggled to his feet, leaning on the arm of the couch for support when his leg failed. To his surprise, Martin leapt into action at once, snatching a drying towel off the radiator and jamming in under the door. Jon hobbled over to the adjoined kitchen while he raced into the bedroom to get more supplies and snatched a dishcloth draped over the drying rack. In the time it took him to make it back to the front door, Martin had already returned with his towels and linens, stopping just shy of emptying out his sock drawer.
“The window,” he said, already snatching the dishcloth from Jon’s hand. “Christ, do you think they’ll—?”
“I’m on it.”
Loathe as Jon was to admit it, they made an effective team when they set their minds to it. The bars over the first floor window certainly looked sturdy enough to keep Prentiss out should she grow tired of knocking. Of course, by the same, token, they also looked sturdy enough to keep them in, but they could worry about that later. They stuffed every gap wider than a credit card slot, sealing themselves inside the already claustrophobic apartment.
“I think that should do it,” he panted. His leg throbbed with the exertion, but once again the adrenaline kicked in to push him through the pain.
“No, we have to be sure. I’ll tear up a few of my old shirts. The seal on the window—”
“Is as close as we can conceivably get to making it airtight, short of sealing it with candlewax.”
Martin paused. “I do have a few candles around here somewhere.”
“That was a joke.”
“Well I’m glad you find this amusing!” his voice climbed to a worrying pitch as he paced, scanning the floor for any hint of an intrusion.
“For god’s sake, will you calm down?”
“There’s a living worm infestation banging on my front door, Jon!”
“And we’ve dealt with it as best we can, now will you please sit down?”
Martin dropped into the armchair, but it didn’t stop his eyes from flickering back towards the window. To the crack beneath the door, now packed tight with every spare scrap of fabric they could get their hands on.
“Right,” Jon said as he looked around the room for inspiration, half-hoping a plan would spring up out of nothing fully formed. “Well, this is…less than ideal.”
“Less than ideal?”
“We just have to hold out until morning. Tim and Sasha will notice when neither of us show up to the archives in the morning. With any luck, they’ll investigate when they fail to contact either of us.”
“…Right,” Martin repeated, still breathing hard. He gripped either arm of his chair tight, digging his nails into the fabric as he tried to calm himself. “Right. Tim and Sasha. Just have to hold out until morning.”
“Assuming Prentiss doesn’t wander off before that point. I can’t imagine she’s very coherent given her…condition.”
“No way was that thing human.”
“She was a very sick young woman with a rather unusual form of parasitic infect—”
“How can you still be trying to rationalise this?”
“Because it has a rational explanation.”
Martin shook his head, evidently too tired to form a decent argument. Jon squashed the guilt threatening to blossom in his chest.
Prentiss knocked.
“…Do you think she’ll try to break in?”
Jon’s eyes flickered back towards the door, then to the barred window. “We best hope not.”
“But…what do we do if she does?”
“I don’t suppose you have any weapons in here?”
“That would be effective against a pile of worms?”
“Martin.”
“No. Believe it or not, it never occurred to me to keep a stash of weapons in my flat on the off chance I had to defend it under siege. I suppose we would have been better off at yours?”
Jon thought about his own barren flat. The pile of still-taped boxes serving as a bedside table since he never got around to buying one. It worked for his purposes, he supposed, but it wasn’t the sort of place he could imagine defending.
“You must have something. Anything sharp or…or heavy.”
“I have the knife I use to chop vegetables sometimes?”
“Ideal. If we wanted to bribe her with stew.”
“Look, I’m trying here. I’m sorry I don’t sleep with a studded baseball bat beside my bed. This is just…this is my home.”
Prentiss knocked. Jon closed his eyes.
“You’re right. I’m…that was unfair.”
Martin didn’t reply, but he could still hear him fidgeting in the armchair. Picking at the fabric seams to occupy his hands.
“How’s the leg?” he asked at last.
“I think the bleeding’s stopped…sorry about the stain.”
“You want me to take a look at it?”
Jon couldn’t help but scoff.
“I have a first aid kit under the sink. I know you think I’m incompetent, but you should at least disinfect it if we’re going to be stuck here for a few more hours.”
“…Fine.”
Martin crossed the line between the carpeted living room and laminate kitchen floor in a few long strides. The first aid kit was more of a pouch than a box, stuffed to the brim with plasters and gauze that spilled across the coffee table when he unzipped it. He sifted through the mess and dropped to his knees beside the couch, a fistful of antiseptic wipe packets clutched in his hand.
Pain flared through Jon’s leg as he straightened it, almost as if protesting the idea of being treated.
“Um…I’m going to need you to lift your—”
“Yes, Martin, I’m well aware of that. Just…Let’s just get this over with quickly?”
Jon tugged at the hem of his trousers. Drying blood fused the fabric to his skin, but he held onto his resolve and peeled it back from the wound with a grimace. The break in the skin didn’t bleed much, no larger than the hole a pencil would leave in a clean sheet of paper, but the sight of it still made his head spin. It may have been small, but it went deep. His nerve endings burned along the narrow passage the worm drilled out of meat and muscle.
Beneath the skin, something bulged.
“Christ.”
“That about sums it up,” he muttered, letting his head fall back against the pillow. Closing his eyes did nothing to banish the image of the pitted hole in his calf, the skin around it stretched and bulging.
“That isn’t a cut, Jon.” Despite the accusation in his tone, he sounded unsurprised by the revelation. Either he was more observant than Jon gave him credit for, or the panic had burnt him out completely.
“You don’t say.”
“You knew.” It wasn’t a question.
“I…I suspected it might be a possibility.”
“And you didn’t think to, I don’t know, say anything?”
“I thought I’d be in a hospital by now, not that it would have made a difference. Just do what you can until help arrives.”
“…Is it still…? Um…?”
“Spit it out, Martin.”
“The worm. Do you think it’s still…in there?”
Jon imagined it coiled inside the home it hollowed out for itself inside his calf muscle. How small and unobtrusive it seemed now, as if trying to prove how little hassle it would cause him if he just let it be. Left it to grow. Left it to spread. Left it to eat.
“I don’t know,” he lied.
“This is bad.”
“I gathered.”
“Well…how long do we have before…?”
“…Before I explode into a pile of worms?
“That’s not funny.”
“Nothing about this is funny. I’m trapped in your crummy flat waiting for a pile of worms in a dress to break down the front door, and I may or may not have a parasite trying to eat me from the inside out. The answer is, I don’t know. Nothing in the hospital reports said anything about an incubation period which means all I have to go off of is the damn Hodge statement. Not exactly the most reliable source.”
“Why do you do that?”
Jon faltered. He couldn’t remember ever hearing Martin so frustrated. “Do what?”
“Dismiss people out of hand like that!”
“What am I supposed to do, take every bored teenager who wanders in off the street at their word? We’re here to look for evidence. Timothy Hodge—”
“Said a woman exploded into a pile of worms. I know it’s far-fetched, but you didn’t think the link to Prentiss made his story any more believable?”
Jon pressed his lips together into a fine line, biting back the insulting retort on the tip of his tongue. ”Even assuming Timothy Hodge was completely honest in his account, we have no way of knowing what Prentiss did to Harriet while she was unconscious. We know Hodge lived long enough to give us a statement, at least.”
“And the people she infected at the hospital?”
“All dead. Some…some took longer than others.”
Martin looked back at his leg, staring at the pitted hole as if concerned the worm might burst out of it and lunge at him. For all they knew, it might.
His expression settled on determination as he returned to his meagre assortment of medical supplies. “Well, we’ll just have to do what we can until emergency services get here. The Institute opens in a few hours, right?”
“Right,” Jon murmured, letting his eyes slide shut again. He wouldn’t sleep again, not with the intermittent knocks and the throbbing pain in his leg, but he allowed himself to believe someone would note their unusual absence. That someone would come looking for them, and against all odds, escape a face to face encounter with Prentiss without any serious injury. “Just have to hold out until the morning.”