Slugs Page 12

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘No one is allowed into the dining room. If you’d just like to wait…’

  Brady cut him short. ‘I’m the Health Inspector,’ he said, producing a small plastic ID card which bore a very old and poorly taken photo of him.

  The man looked at the card then at Brady, as if the likeness didn’t fit but he handed it back, regarding the official suspiciously.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ the man wanted to know.

  Brady snatched the card back, irritably.

  ‘It’s why I’m here, you should be worrying about,’ he rasped. ‘Now, what happened?’

  ‘There was an accident in the dining room,’ said the man. ‘We’re not really sure what it was.’

  Brady regarded the man indifferently. ‘Are you the manager?’

  He shook his head. ‘He’s away for the day. I’m the assistant manager, anything you…’

  The Health Inspector cut him short again. ‘Can I see your…’ he paused, ‘…accident?’

  The man in the suit snapped his fingers towards a young waiter who Brady guessed must be in his early twenties. The lad looked round.

  ‘Show this gentleman to the…er… the body,’ he said.

  ‘Why can’t you show me?’ asked Brady.

  The man blenched and swallowed hard. ‘Robinson will show you.’

  The Health Inspector smiled to himself and followed the young waiter. As he walked past tables he noticed that most of them bore plates of food; some still steaming. The aroma reminded him that he hadn’t had lunch.

  ‘There,’ said Robinson, pointing to a blood-stained cloth. Beneath it lay the body of David Watson.

  Brady knelt and lifted one corner of the tablecloth.

  ‘My God,’ he whispered, pulling the cloth back further to reveal the upper torso as well as the face. He looked at the corpse, the blood now thickly congealed on it, the ruptured eye socket looking as if someone had filled it with rancid crimson syrup. Watson’s other eye was open. It reminded Brady of Ron Bell’s head with its single staring eye.

  ‘Who called the ambulance?’ Brady said, swallowing hard.

  ‘I did,’ the waiter told him.

  Brady looked up at the youth. ‘Was it you who called my office?’

  Robinson nodded.

  It was then that Brady noticed the worms.

  He took an involuntary step back and nearly overbalanced, the tablecloth falling from his grasp and uncovering the body. For long seconds he remained crouching, looking at the motionless forms of the worms both lying in the congealed gore, then he moved closer. He estimated that the worms must be around seven or eight inches long, but, unlike ring-worm they were not segmented. Just long white threads about as thick as two spaghetti strands.

  ‘Was that why you called my office?’ asked the Health Inspector, glancing over his shoulder. The group of waiters and the three men in suits were out of earshot but, nevertheless, the older man kept his voice low.

  Robinson nodded. ‘I thought those… worms might have come from the food.’ He paled. ‘I mean, the fucking things came out of his eye.’

  Brady reached for a knife which lay on the floor nearby. With it, he carefully lifted one of the worms into the air, making sure he kept it at arm’s length. The limp body hung there without moving.

  ‘It seems dead enough,’ he said, quietly.

  ‘What is it?’ Robinson asked, revolted by the sight of the foul thing. A jellied blob of coagulated gore dripped from one end of it and narrowly missed splashing Brady’s trousers.

  ‘Give me a glass or something,’ he said. ‘Anything I can put them in.’

  The young waiter turned and saw an empty pint glass, he snatched it up and handed it to the Health Inspector who hurriedly dropped the first worm into the bottom. Then, he scooped the second creature up out of the puddle of congealed blood and deposited that in the glass as well. The task completed, he dropped the knife, draped a serviette over the top of the glass and hurriedly fastened it to the lip with an elastic band from his pocket.

  He held the glass up, studying the blood-flecked white forms inside.

  It was as he was straightening up that he caught sight of two ambulance men pushing through the dining room doors. One was carrying a furled stretcher, the second a red blanket. The latter of the two recognised Brady and nodded affably, then he looked down at the body of Watson.

  ‘What happened to him?’ said the ambulance man, holding the blanket while his companion unrolled the canvas stretcher beside the corpse.

  Brady shook his head slowly, holding the glass and its vile contents down by his side. He watched as the two men lifted Watson onto the stretcher. The red blanket was draped over him and they lifted the body. The Health Inspector walked behind them, keeping the glass by his side but the people outside were more interested in the shape on the stretcher and he pushed through the crowd unnoticed. A couple of police cars, their blue lights turning silently, had just pulled up across the street and Brady saw three or four uniformed men crossing towards the ambulance. He, himself, reached his car and propped the glass up on the passenger seat. He sat still for long moments, his eyes fixed on the monstrous creatures inside and he was thankful that they were dead. Now he had to find out just what they were.

  He twisted the key in the ignition and the Vauxhall engine burst into life. He drove off, for some reason, feeling the need to look at the worms every so often. The glass rocked on the seat and, once, toppled over. Brady hastily stood it up again.

  He drove quickly and, this time, he knew that the perspiration which stained his forehead wasn’t caused by the heat.

  He brought the Vauxhall to a halt in the museum car park next to Foley’s battered Volkswagen. There were a couple of other cars parked there as well and a bus with ‘MERTON JUNIOR SCHOOL’ emblazoned on the side.

  The Health Inspector snatched up the glass, locked his door and sprinted up the short flight of steps to the main door. He entered the lower gallery and was immediately surrounded by a group of kids about ten or eleven years old. They swarmed round the gallery, note-pads in hand, scrawling down the names of the exhibits while a bespectacled woman in her forties called out to them to make sure they wrote down every name. The kids babbled excitedly, one or two banging into the Health Inspector who finally fought his way through the throng and reached the stairs. He hurried up them to the enquiries desk and rang the bell, looking around impatiently when no one came. Once more he rang the bell and still no one appeared so he turned and took the three or four steps which led to the laboratory. He knocked and a familiar voice told him to wait.

  A moment later, the door opened and Foley stood there. The young curator smiled broadly and ushered Brady inside.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he said, wiping his wet hands on his jeans.

  Brady held up the glass. ‘You tell me. ‘

  The younger man took it from him and set it down on the work top, carefully removing the makeshift cover. He reached for a specimen tray and tipped the worms into it, prodding them with the tip of a scalpel.

  ‘Where did you get these?’ he asked, his voice heavy with foreboding.

  Brady caught the note of concern in the curator’s voice and stepped closer.

  ‘A man just died in the City Hotel,’ he said. ‘One of the waiters called me, he thought these worms might have come from the food.’ Brady paused, sucking in a laboured breath. ‘He said he saw one of them come out of the bloke’s eye. Now what the hell do you make of that?’

  Foley didn’t speak, he just leant closer to the dead worms, noticing, as Brady had, that they were unsegmented.

  ‘Well,’ the Health Inspector persisted. ‘That’s impossible isn’t it?’ The question hung heavily in the air. ‘I’ve seen ring worm, other parasites, dozens of times but never anything like this. Foley, for Christ’s sake. It’s not possible is it?’

  The naturalist turned round to face Brady.

  ‘Those slugs you brought in the other day,’ he said
. ‘I ran some tests on them.’

  Brady interrupted, irritably. ‘All right, we’ll talk about the slugs in a minute. I need to know about these bloody things.’ He pointed at the worms.

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ said Foley, raising his voice slightly. ‘The slugs and these worms are linked.’

  ‘How for God’s sake?’ asked the Health Inspector, sitting down on a stool nearby.

  ‘After you left that day, I dissected one. I found out everything I could about it. I read as many books as I could find about the bloody things.’

  ‘And?’

  Foley exhaled deeply. ‘Well, for one thing, they’re not a new species. As far as I can tell they must be a kind of hybrid.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ Brady wanted to know.

  ‘Because they’re ordinary garden slugs,’ said Foley, flatly.

  Brady almost laughed. ‘Foley, the damn things are eight inches long. That one you measured was five and a half inches and that was a small one. Now, anybody will tell you that a common black slug is about three-quarters of an inch long and what’s more, they don’t usually bite.’

  ‘That’s what I meant about them being hybrids,’ the curator explained. ‘They must have inter-bred with another species. There are three species of carnivorous slug in this country. Testacella maugei. Testacella haliotidea and Testacella scutulum. Now those three hunt and kill earthworms and other insects, sometimes other slugs.’

  Brady interrupted him. ‘Then they wouldn’t mate with garden slugs, they’d eat them.’ He paused. ‘Besides, you said that these large slugs were the ordinary garden variety.’

  ‘They certainly share all the same physical characteristics apart from the fact that they seem to eat meat,’ said the curator.

  The Health Inspector exhaled deeply.

  ‘I just haven’t got a clue why or how ordinary garden slugs could grow to sizes like we’ve seen, or why they should have become carnivorous;’ said Foley, wearily. ‘My theory about inter-breeding is all we’ve got. ‘

  ‘But slugs are hermaphrodite aren’t they?’

  Foley nodded. ‘But they rely mainly on ordinary mating to reproduce. That just compounds our problems. They can cross-fertilize and fertilize their own eggs.’

  There was a long pause the silence finally broken by Foley.

  ‘It might interest you to know that each female can lay up to one and a half million eggs a year.’ He reached for his coffee and took a sip, wincing when he found that it was stone cold.

  Brady didn’t speak.

  Foley tried to qualify his statement. ‘There’s a tremendously high mortality rate. These slugs seem to be cannibals too, the younger ones are eaten by the larger animals in the clutch. Out of a hundred eggs laid, only three or four slugs will actually reach full maturity. Even so, when each female can lay one and a half million eggs a year, that’s still a hell of a lot of slugs. The only thing is, they must have damp conditions to lay them. ‘

  The Health Inspector nodded. ‘Like the sewers,’ he whispered to himself.

  ‘I also found out that the irritant in the slime trails of these particular slugs is lethal,’ said the curator.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I gave some to a laboratory rat. The damn thing was dead in three hours. Now, working on that example I’d say that the slime would be fatal if consumed by, say a child for instance. What it would do to an adult I couldn’t say.’

  ‘How would it affect a child?’ Brady wanted to know.

  ‘Well, judging by the symptoms which the rat manifested,’ he paused, momentarily. ‘I’d say the victim would appear almost rabid. They’d probably undergo convulsions, mental disturbance. The rat turned savage, it killed the female that was in the cage with it.’

  Brady wiped a hand across his forehead. ‘I can’t believe this,’ he said, incredulously.

  Foley nodded. ‘I wish it wasn’t true.’

  ‘How do they move around?’

  ‘Crawl. Burrow. Swim. Lots of ways.’

  ‘So they could be using the sewers to move around in?’ said Brady, although it sounded more like a statement than a question.

  ‘Without a doubt,’ said the curator. ‘Anywhere there’s plenty of moisture, and it would suit their egg laying habits.’

  ‘But if they need moisture, how come there’s so many of them about now? It’s hotter out there than it has been for years.’

  ‘These particular slugs have a very large mucus gland. They secrete huge amounts of slime so there’s no danger of them “drying up” even in the hottest weather. That’s what makes them so much more dangerous, they’re not reliant on a damp environment. Although we’re more likely to find them in one, they don’t need it like ordinary slugs do.’

  ‘My God,’ groaned Brady.

  ‘I don’t know how long these slugs have been breeding,’ said Foley, anxiously. ‘But either way, there must be thousands of them by now. Maybe even tens of thousands.’

  ‘You’ve certainly done your homework,’ said Brady, trying to smile.

  ‘It’s best to know as much as possible about your enemy.’

  ‘You make it sound like a war.’

  Foley grinned cryptically. ‘Perhaps it is and the way I figure it, they outnumber us about five hundred to one.’

  Brady ran a shaking hand through his hair. ‘I’ll tell you something else. They’re immune to ordinary repellents. I put some down in my garden and it didn’t have the slightest effect.’

  The curator frowned.

  Neither man spoke for long moments then Brady suddenly turned his attention to the worms.

  ‘And those?’ he said, pointing to the tray. ‘You said they were linked with the slugs. How?’

  ‘Come here,’ said Foley, getting up. He led the Health Inspector to a nearby microscope. There was already a slide set up beneath the powerful lens and Brady squinted down the eye-piece, adjusting the focus until everything merged into crystal clarity. Floating around before him were dozens of minute, hair-like organisms which, on closer inspection, he saw resembled tiny versions of the two worms which lay in the tray.

  ‘What are they?’ he asked.

  ‘Schistosomes,’ said Foley. ‘Blood flukes. They’re a type of parasite found in the blood stream of slugs. I took that sample from one of our slugs but they’re found in every species.’

  Brady stepped back from the microscope.

  ‘I still don’t see the tie-up,’ he said.

  ‘The schistosomes live inside the slugs, right? Now, if a slug is accidentally eaten, even if it’s only the tiniest fraction of it, those parasites somehow transmit themselves to the human blood stream. They travel to the brain and form cysts. The worms grow inside these cysts.’

  Brady swallowed hard as the curator continued.

  ‘The disease is called Schistosomiasis. Once the worms encyst in the brain it causes nausea, headaches and, more often than not, death.’ He paused. ‘And there are at least three documented cases in Britain every year.’

  ‘The that was what happened to the bloke in the restaurant.’

  Foley nodded. ‘He must have, somehow, eaten part of one of the slugs. Everything about these bloody things is bigger or more lethal, it stands to reason the strain of disease carried by them is going to be more virulent.’

  Brady sat down heavily. ‘And the more of them there are, the more people they’re likely to infect.’ He sighed. ‘The slime trails I kept seeing, Ron Bell’s body and now this. It’s been slugs all along.’

  Foley nodded. ‘Should we tell the police?’

  ‘What the hell can they do? Arrest the damn things? Besides, if we went to them and said that there was a plague of killer slugs in the town they’d probably lock us up.’

  ‘I wouldn’t blame them,’ said Foley, sardonically.

  Brady drummed on the desk top with his fingers. ‘So what the hell do we do?’ He glanced across at the dead worms.

  ‘I can try and perfect a poison of some kind,’ Foley offered
. ‘Something we can use on them but, like I said, there must be thousands by now. And,’ he paused, ‘if they are using the sewers to move around in, they must be everywhere.’

  The words hung ominously in the air and Brady felt cold fingers of fear plucking at the back of his neck.

  Eighteen

  Clive Talbot fiddled with the controls of the Ferguson hi-fi, trying to find the button which activated the record player. Perplexed by the profusion of dials and buttons which faced him he turned to face Donna Moss, who sat on the sofa.

  ‘How does this fucking thing work?’ grunted Clive, still holding the record in one hand.

  Donna smiled inanely at him, put down her glass of Bacardi and crossed to the set. She flicked a switch and the turntable buzzed into life.

  ‘Smart arse,’ said Clive, dropping the record into position. He watched Donna make her stumbling way back to the sofa then flop down. There was a half empty bottle of Bacardi at her feet which she had drunk since eight o’clock. He noted that the solid silver carriage clock on the mantelpiece said nine fifteen p.m. Clive adjusted the volume as a thunderous bass line roared out of the twin speakers and the singer’s voice rose over the strident wail of guitars.

  ‘… what did I see? Could I believe, that what I saw that night was real and not just fantasy’.

  Satisfied with the volume, he got to his feet and slouched across to the sofa where he flopped down beside Donna. She looked round and moved towards him, her mouth seeking his, the taste of liquor strong on her tongue as it sought the warm moistness of his own. Clive responded fiercely, simultaneously sliding one hand up the inside of her skirt until he felt it brush the cool material of her panties. Donna pulled away, giggling.

  ‘Stop it,’ she said, her face flushed.

  ‘What would your old man say if he could see us now?’ said Clive, a triumphant grin on his face.