He shrugged. “Even if I didn’t, it’s not my place. You’ve got a lovely family.”
Turk sucked on his cigarette so hard that it looked like the insides of his cheeks touched. Then he tossed the ember into a ceramic flowerpot that had some soil and bottle caps in it. “You want to know why else I can’t leave?” he said, his voice lower now.
“I don’t know,” David said. “Do I?”
“You gonna be cool?” Turk asked. “If you’re cool, I’ll show you.”
“Sure. I’m cool.”
“Come with me, you’re so cool,” Turk said, and went back into the house.
David stood, tossed his own cigarette into the flowerpot, then shouted to Ellie that he would be right back. She regarded him the way a puppy might, with a cocked head and no expression. He went inside and followed Turk through the house and up a flight of creaky stairs. The upstairs hallway was outfitted in the same rooster-patterned wallpaper as the kitchen. Doors lined the hall, each of them closed. Hanging in the center of each door was a crucifix. The sight of them all lined up like that gave David a chill.
Turk went to the end of the hall. He dug around in his pocket as they came to the last door, and ultimately produced a ring of keys. David noted that there was a dead bolt attached to the door frame, right above the knob.
“What’s in there?”
“He won’t hurt you. Just don’t say nothing or move around a whole lot. Too much stimuli seems to set him off.”
Turk unlocked the dead bolt, opened the door, and flipped on the light switch.
David recognized it as a child’s room only because there was a child sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor. It was a boy, perhaps Sam’s age, though it was difficult to tell because the kid had his back to them. The walls were covered in quilts, the mismatched patterns nearly seizure-inducing, and there were smeary brownish-black handprints stamped on some of them. A mattress sat on the floor, soggy and yellowed with stains. Several white balls were scattered about the floor and atop the mattress; it took David a second or two to realize these were tufts of stuffing that had been torn out of stuffed animals, whose gutted carcasses lay strewn about the room. Lastly, he spotted what looked like some dog toys near the head of the bed—a short length of rope; a stuffed animal whose classification in the animal kingdom was no longer evident due to its missing limbs and mangled, threadbare face; a plastic Frisbee stamped with teeth marks; a few rubber balls.
There was also the distinct odor of shit in the air.
“Jimmy,” Turk said.
The boy turned his head the way a ventriloquist’s dummy might. He had a face similar to Sam’s, though less meaty, and there was dried blood crusted around each of his nostrils. His eyes looked like twin mirrors facing each other, with no comprehension behind them whatsoever. Just idiocy.
“He’s sick,” David said.
“Yeah,” Turk said. “He’s got the Folly, all right. Had it for nearly two months now.”
“Two months?” It must have been a record.
“Far as we can tell, anyway,” Turk said.
“There’s butterflies in your hair, Sam,” Jimmy said to Turk. The boy’s voice was raspy, ruinous. Probably from screaming himself hoarse. Some of the infected screamed until their throats ruptured. Yet there was an eerie singsong quality to this boy’s voice, and somehow that was worse.
“All right,” Turk said.
Jimmy turned those dead eyes on David. “Your hair, too, Sam.”
Turk put a hand on David’s shoulder and said, “He knows, sport. You hungry?”
“No, Sam.” An almost musical cadence.
“Okay. Good boy. Check on you later.”
“Good boy, Sam,” Jimmy intoned. A fresh trickle of blood began to seep from his left nostril.
“Jesus,” David said once Turk had shut and locked the door.
“He’s Sammy’s twin. Been callin’ everyone Sam for the past two weeks or so. Lord knows what delusion he’s riding now. It’s better than before. Used to be he’d scream himself raw, day and night, until his goddamn throat bled.”
“He hasn’t been to a doctor?”
“For what? So they can let him die in some hospital room? No, thank you. Besides, we’ve been taking care of him. His family. Ain’t no one could do it better for him. You think he would have lasted this long in some hospital?”
“Trust me, I’m no fan of doctors,” David said.
“Never have been, m’self,” said Turk.
“And he’s been like that for two months?”
“Give or take. Maybe been sick with it even longer than that, though with kids, it’s harder to tell. They’re always half-stuck in some dream world as it is, am I right?”
Not Ellie, David thought. Never Ellie. She has always been a practical child, a girl not prone to fancies or silliness. A pragmatic soul. Like her mother.