Body Surfing

it smelled like gasoline, aching for a match.
    “OUT!”
    John Van Arsdale quivered as though the ground he stood on wasabout to open up and swallow him. Jasper backed out the door, began to walk away. The door closed with a click, but it was enough to set off the usual wave of barks from Gunther. But Jasper kept his ears focused on the house as he walked away. Forty-six seconds later—twenty-three heartbeats—he heard the faint sound of his dad setting the bottle on the TV tray, the creak as the old man’s tired bones sank into the chair Jasper had just vacated.
    “Cold out today,” he heard his dad say. “Wet. Need a little something to warm me up.”
    “There we go,” Jasper whispered in reply. But the only voice he heard was Larry Bishop’s.
     
    If Jasper’s senses hadn’t been so focused on his father, he might have noticed that Gunther hadn’t started barking when the back door closed. He was already barking. He’d been barking all morning, and intermittently throughout the night, and most of the previous day—not at the stone dwelling at the top of the hill, nor at the barn where Larry Bishop’s body had hibernated for the past three days, but at a tiny structure much lower down the hill, on the southern edge of the property, all but hidden inside a stand of second-growth oak and maple. This was the farm’s old wellhouse, unused since 1962, when John Van Arsdale’s father, Sam, had finally ponied up the cash to get on city water. The building would have fallen down years ago save for the fact that it was made of bricks—dark brown homemade bricks, which also lined the fireplaces in the house on the hill—and, despite one sizable hole in the ceiling that had allowed a colony of bats to settle in the eaves, it was as solid as it had been when it was built in 1847.
    A little over three thousand bats hung from the wellhouse’s exposed joists, and a foot of guano had accumulated on the floor. The grayish carpet looked like a moonscape, made even eerier by the half dozen bat corpses scattered about—pups mostly, fallen from the ceiling before they’d learned to fly—but it was actually spongy, and provided a soft bed for the naked figure that lay atop it, snoring fitfully,and starting each time a splat of bat shit fell on its face or torso or twitching legs. The figure’s fingers scrappled in the bat shit while it slept, releasing clouds of histoplasmosis that it breathed into its lungs and neutralized almost immediately, but its augmented immune system had more trouble handling the lyssavirus contracted from a bat bite when it had first made its way into the wellhouse yesterday morning, as the bats were returning from their nocturnal hunt. Rabies typically takes several weeks to become symptomatic, and, left untreated, is almost universally fatal; the coming battle between virus and antibody would have been an illuminating gauge of Jasper’s ability to make permanent changes to a host’s endocrine and nervous systems–that is, if Jarhead West lived long enough to put those changes to the test.

6
    W here is Dr. T anyway?” Q. looked around the living room as if their host might be hiding in a corner. “I got the impression he never goes out unless he has to.”
    Ileana beckoned Q. with a crooked finger. “Come with me.”
    The door to the basement lay behind a bookcase that opened by pulling on a copy of a fat leatherbound tome called The Malleus Maleficarum . Ileana had explained to Q. that it was a witch-hunting guide, a medieval predecessor to Mein Kampf that had contributed to the execution of untold numbers of witches—tens, possibly hundreds of thousands—over the course of two centuries. The text’s fundamental argument was that a witch had no innate powers, but was rather the host of an agent of Satan—i.e., a demon. As with so many superstitions, the truth of it was fundamentally sound. It was only in the application that it went wrong. Now, as she pulled the leather spine and the shelf slid open, she said,
    “Have you noticed how the doctor has internalized the Mogran’s modus operandi?”
    “Have I, um, what?”
    Ileana bit back a sigh. Even if the boy had been up to par on other fronts, she would have rejected him simply for the way he spoke. “Have I, um, what?” was not something she was prepared to hear every day for the next several years.
    “The false front behind which hides an alien entity. This bookcase, for example. There is no reason to conceal the