20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill Page A

which meant Ella was awake. Ella was his father's mountainous girlfriend, a woman with fat legs and varicose veins, who spent the entire day on the couch.
    He was hungry; he would have to get up soon. It came to him then that he was still an insect, a realization that surprised and galvanized him. His old skin had slid down off his arms and hung in a rubbery mass from his—what were they, shoulders?—anyway, lay beneath him like a wrinkled sheet of some stretchy synthetic material. He wanted to flip over, get down on the floor, and have a look at the old skin. He wondered if he could find his face somewhere in all that, a shriveled mask with holes where his eyes had been.
    He tried to reach for the wall, meaning to use it to turn himself. But his movements were uncoordinated, and his legs jerked and twitched in every direction except the one he wanted. As he struggled with his limbs, he felt a gaseous pressure building in his lower abdomen. He tried to sit up, and at that instant, the pressure blew out his rear end, with a hard hissing sound, like all the air going out of a tire at once: paffff . He felt an unnatural warmth around his back legs, and glanced down in time to see a rippling distortion pass through the air, like heat rising off a distant, sun-struck road.
    This was funny. A monster insect fart; or maybe a monster insect bowel movement. He wasn't sure, but he thought he felt wetness down there. He shivered with laughter, and for the first time became aware of some impossibly thin, impossibly hard plates, trapped between the curve of his back and the bunched-up lumps of his former flesh. He considered what they might be. They were a part of him, and it felt as if he might be able to move them about like his arms, only they weren't arms.
    He wondered if anyone would check on him, imagined Ella rapping on the door, then sticking her head in ... and how she would scream, mouth falling open so wide it would make four double chins, her piggy close-set eyes shiny with terror. But no; Ella wouldn't check. It was too much trouble for her to get off the couch. For a while he daydreamed about marching out of his room on all six legs, walking straight past her, and how she would shriek and cringe. Was it possible she might die of a heart attack? He imagined her cries becoming choked, the skin under her pancake make-up turning an unpleasant cast of gray, her eyelids fluttering and the eyes themselves rolling back to show the glistening whites.
    He found he could hump his way along by heaving his whole body up and to the side, moving in little increments towards the edge of the cot. As he twitched closer to the edge, he tried to imagine what he would do after giving Ella the heart attack. He envisioned letting himself out into the hot glare of the Arizona morning, scrabbling right down the middle of the highway. He could see it already: cars swerving to avoid hitting him, horns blaring, the shrill whine of tires, people driving their pickups into telephone poles, hillbillies screaming, What the fuck is that thing , then grabbing for their shotguns on the rifle rack ... on second thought, maybe it would be better to stay off the highway.
    He wanted to make his way over to Eric Hickman's house, scuttle into the basement and wait for him there. Eric was a scrawny seventeen-year-old with a skin disorder that had caused dozens of moles to erupt on his face, most of them sprouting bunches of wiry pubic hair; he also had a filmy black mustache, growing thick at the corners of his mouth, like the whiskers of a catfish. He was for this reason known around school as the cuntfish. Eric and Francis met for movies sometimes. They had seen the Vincent Price picture The Fly together; also Them! twice. Eric loved Them! He was going to wet himself when he saw what had happened. Eric was smart—he had read everything Mickey Spillane had ever written—and they could make plans about what to do next. Also maybe Eric would get him something to eat.