squid, with glaring inhuman eyes and a twisted mouth--but if it was
there, she couldn't catch a glimpse of it. Instead, the thing seemed
to be all ropy extremities, ceaselessly twitching, curling, coiling,
and unraveling. Though oozing and gelatinous within its skin, the
Giver occasionally bristled into spiky shapes that made her think of
lobsters, crabs, crawfish--but in a blink, it was all sinuous motion
once more.
In college, a friend of Heather's--Wendi Felzer--had developed liver
cancer and had decided to augment her doctors' treatments with a course
of self-healing through imaging therapy. Wendi had pictured her white
blood cells as knights in shining armor with magic swords, her cancer
as a dragon, and she had meditated two hours a day, until she could
see, in her mind, all those knights slaying the beast. The Giver was
the archetype for every image of cancer ever conceived, the slithering
essence of malignancy. In Wendi's case, the dragon had won. Not a
good thing to remember now, not good at all.
It started to climb the steps toward her.
She raised the Uzi.
The most loathsome aspect of the Giver's entanglement with the corpse
was the extent of its intimacy. The buttons had popped off the white
burial shirt, which hung open, revealing that a few of the tentacles
had pried open the thoracic incision made by the coroner during his
autopsy, those red-speckled appendages vanished inside the cadaver,
probing deep into unknown reaches of its cold tissues. The creature
seemed to revel in its bonding with the dead flesh, an embrace that was
as inexplicable as it was obscene.
Its very existence was offensive. That it could be seemed proof that
the universe was a madhouse, full of worlds without meaning and bright
galaxies without pattern or purpose.
It climbed two steps from the hall, toward the landing.
Three. Four.
Heather waited one more.
Five steps up, seven steps below her.
A bristling mass of tentacles appeared between the dead man's parted
lips, like a host of black tongues spotted with blood.
Heather opened fire, held the trigger down too long, used up too much
ammunition, ten or twelve rounds, even fourteen, although it was
surprising--considering her state of mind--that she didn't empty both
magazines. The 9mm slugs stitched a bloodless diagonal line across the
dead man's chest, through body and entwining tentacles.
Parasite and dead host pitched backward to the hallway floor below,
leaving two lengths of severed tentacles on the stairs, one about
eighteen inches long, the other about two feet. Neither of those
amputated limbs bled. Both continued to move, initially twisting and
flailing the way the bodies of snakes writhe long after they have been
separated from their heads.
Heather was transfixed by the grisly sight because, almost at once, the
movement ceased to be the result of misfiring nerves and randomly
spasming muscles, it began to appear purposeful. Each scrap of the
