“Oh, yeah.”
“Let’s be quick.” Just as I moved the flashlight away from the cocoons,
I thought I saw one of the dark, curled forms writhe inside its silken
sac.
I focused the beam on the cluster again.
None of the mystery bugs moved.
Bobby said, “Jumpy? ”
“Aren’t you? ”
“As a toad.” We ventured into the kitchen, where the linoleum cracked
and popped underfoot and where the reek of decomposition was as thick in
the air as a cloud of vaporized, rancid cooking oil in the kitchen of a
greasy-spoon restaurant.
Before searching for the source of the stench, I directed the light
overhead. The upper cabinets hung under a soffit, and in the angle where
the soffit met the ceiling, there were more cocoons than in the previous
two rooms combined. Thirty or forty. Most were in the three-to-four-inch
range, though a few were half again as large.
Another twenty were nestled around the boxy fluorescent fixture in the
center of the ceiling.
“Not good, ” Bobby said.
I lowered the flashlight and at once discovered the source of the
putrescent smell. A dead man was sprawled on the floor in front of the
sink.
At first I thought he must have been killed by whatever made the
cocoons. I expected to see a wad of spun silk in his open mouth,
yellowish-white sacs bulging from his ears, wispy filaments trailing
from his nose.
The cocoons, however, had nothing to do with it. This was a suicide.
The revolver lay on his abdomen, where recoil and death spasm had tossed
it, and the swollen index finger of his right hand was still hooked
through the trigger guard. Judging by the wound in his throat, he’d put
the muzzle under his chin and fired one round straight up into his
brain.
Entering the lightless kitchen earlier in the night, I had gone directly
to the back door, where I’d halted with my hand on the knob when a
monkey shadow leaped up the glass. Approaching the door and backing away
from it, I must have come within inches of stepping on this corpse.
“This what you expected? ” Bobby asked, voice muffled by the hand with
which he was trying to filter the sickening odor.
“No.” I didn’t know what I’d expected, but I was sure this wasn’t the
worst thing that had been lurking in the deepest cellars of my
imagination. When I’d first seen the cadaver, I’d been relieved as though
subconsciously I had envisioned a specific and far worse discovery than
this, an ultimate horror that now I would not have to confront.
Dressed in generic white athletic shoes, chinos, and a red-and-green
plaid shirt, the dead man was flat on his back, his left arm at his
side, the palm turned up as though seeking alms. He appeared to have
been fat, because his clothes were stretched taut over parts of his
body, but this was the result of swelling from bacterial-gas formation.
His face was bloated, opaque eyes bulging from the sockets, swollen
tongue protruding between grimacing lips and bared teeth. Purge fluid
produced by decomposition and often mistaken for blood by the
inexperienced was draining from the mouth and nostrils. Pale green with
areas of greenish black, the flesh was also marbleized by hemolysis of
veins and arteries.
Bobby said, “Must’ve been here what? a week, two weeks? ”
“Not that long. Maybe three or four days.” The weather had been mild for
the past week, neither warm nor chilly, which would have allowed
decomposition to proceed at a predictable pace.
If the man had been dead much longer than four days, the flesh would
have been not pale green but green-black, with patches that were
entirely black. Vesicle formation, skin slippage, and hair slippage had
occurred but were not yet extreme, enabling me to make an educated guess
as to the date of the suicide.
“Still walking around with Forensic Pathology in your head, ” Bobby
said.
“Still.” My education in death dated to the year I was fourteen. By the
time they enter their teens, most boys have a morbid fascination with
gruesome comic books, horror novels, and monster movies.
Adolescent males measure progress toward manhood by their ability to