The Maggot People Read Online Free PDF Page A

like other people. In about a week you’ll start realizing the maggots are taking over your body. You’ll be in a lot of pain and no painkillers will be of any use because the maggots will eat the painkillers.”
    Panicked, he moved towards the door, but she followed him.
    â€œJust for your sake I will stay here another ten days. Ten days, Michael. But don’t tell anyone, especially not your doctor. If you do, and I think it’s possible you will, you mustn’t mention me at all, or they’ll come here looking for me. In fact, your doctor will call the authorities if he realizes you’re a maggot person.”
    He touched her arm. “I’ll come and see you.”
    â€œI’m taking a big risk telling you all this. Most of my kind would just clear off now. But I’m not like them.”
    He stepped out of the door into the slanted, early-morning sunlight. The mistral was blowing, and he watched the frothy sea rolling in. He breathed deep, steered his steps back through the sandy, grassy pine woods along the rutted track where people took their four-wheel-drives down to the dunes in summer.
    He took one last look at the house, where she was still standing by the gate, her hair blowing in the wind, then shook his head to be rid of her.

6 .
    A few times in the days that followed he made his way to the dunes and lay in the sand behind a tuft of sea grass, with his binoculars trained on the house—like a regular psychopath. Nothing ever moved there. Just once he saw the Alsatian emerge and flop down on the front step. Minutes later Ariel came out with a morning coffee and sat down beside him. They stared out at the sea, a sort of deep moroseness hanging over them.
    At the sight of her face so far away, he found himself missing her; all that caustic wit and energy of hers, wasted on a sourpuss dog when she might have used it to much better effect on him.
    A few days later he woke up in the night with an excruciating pain surging through his body. He twisted in the bed, listening to the strange grunts he made when the pulsating pain grew too much to bear, especially in the region of his heart. He seemed to hear the sound of tiny teeth methodically working their way through his edible mass.
    Like a succulent plant being stripped of its leaves and flowers.
    His thoughts turned to Ariel in her scruffy bungalow, all by herself and struggling with her delusions. Should he not have stayed and helped her?
    This pain is psychosomatic, he told himself.
    But before long he began to wonder; her predictions came back to him. The pain turned to waves of cramp passing across his skin with a sort of churning effect that he recognized from the evening in the hammock, as if his muscles were being resynchronized by maggots moving in ranks beneath his skin, passing like an infestation of locusts from one organ to another.
    His heart—he felt—had already been vanquished, replaced by a tight ring of maggots flexing their tiny bodies to pump the diminishing bloodflow through his disappearing veins. The hours passed in excruciating torment. At first light when he left his bed to go to the bathroom, he was stunned with fear when he filled the toilet bowl half to the rim with thick red blood and unspeakable lumps he dared not even think about.
    She was right, he thought, glittering with sharp terror.
    He’d read somewhere that when the human body comes to the end of its life, the mind often goes through a moment of light-headed clarity. But if these were his final moments, how could it be that he felt himself trembling with such energy—like a battery fully charged? He felt strong enough to kick the door down and sprint up and down the hills for miles. And how could he explain this sudden raging hunger that drove him into the kitchen, where he methodically worked his way through an entire honey melon and peeled off slice after slice of sticky prosciutto, swallowing almost without chewing?
    As he