She set the tools on the edge of the bed. Gently, she placed her palm on Artie’s forehead.
— “Help me,” she whispered to no one in particular—maybe to him, maybe to her father. “Please.”
She unwrapped the tongue depressor, her fingers fumbling with the plastic. She picked up the penlight and found the button. Leaning over Artie, she used one hand to gently tilt his chin down. His jaw was slack and unresponsive. She applied slight pressure to open his mouth. Her own breathing sounded like a gale in her ears. Her heart was thumping so hard she thought it might burst.
She clicked on the light and aimed the narrow beam into the darkness of his throat. At first, she saw only pink, moist tissue—the tongue, the palate. And then… then she saw it.
Deep in the back, behind the tonsils, something moved. Something dark and slick, something that didn’t belong in a human body. It seemed to recoil from the light, pressing itself against the wall of his throat.
Lily nearly cried out. She swallowed hard. It was exactly what she thought. She clicked the light off. Her hands were shaking so violently that the tongue depressor slipped and hit the floor with a dull thud. In the silence of the room, it sounded like a gunshot.
The nurse’s head snapped up. She blinked, bleary-eyed, and saw a little girl standing over the patient with a penlight in her hand.
— “What the—?” the nurse gasped. She scrambled up, her chair clattering backward. “What are you doing in here?!”
— “Oh my god!” Lily recoiled from the bed.
She was caught. All her courage, all her secret knowledge, shattered under the nurse’s sharp, angry gaze. She opened her mouth to explain, but only a small, choked sound came out.
At that exact moment, as if triggered by the noise, Artie convulsed on the bed. His body arched in a violent spasm. A horrific, wet, gurgling sound erupted from his throat—a sound no child should ever make. And right before the eyes of Lily and the nurse, something black and glistening appeared at the corner of his mouth. A tip of something. It twitched, then slid back inside, as if retreating from the light and the noise.
The nurse froze. Her face, flushed with anger a second ago, went deathly pale. She wasn’t looking at Lily anymore; she was staring at Artie. At the spot where that thing had just been. An oppressive silence filled the room, broken only by the boy’s ragged, heavy gasps.
The nurse slowly turned her gaze back to Lily. She saw the pale, terrified face of the girl. She saw the penlight. She saw the dropped depressor. The anger was gone. In its place was a different kind of horror. The horror of realization.
They stared at each other through the heavy silence. Lily saw the shift in the nurse’s eyes: shock, then disbelief, then a cold fear. Not fear of the girl, but fear of what she, a professional, had missed. Something monstrous.
— “What… what was that?” the nurse whispered, her voice cracking.
Lily swallowed the lump in her throat. It was now or never.
— “It’s… it’s in his throat,” she breathed. Her own voice sounded foreign to her. “It’s alive. It was in my dad, too. It’s what killed him.”
The nurse covered her mouth with her hand. She looked back at Artie. The boy was still again, but his stillness felt wrong now—deceptive. Like the eye of a storm.
— “I need… I have to call the doctor,” the nurse said, but she didn’t move. She seemed afraid to look away, afraid the thing would show itself again.
— “They won’t believe you!” Lily said, her voice a desperate whisper. Tears were streaming down her face now, hot and bitter. “They didn’t believe me before. They didn’t believe me about my dad. They’ll say you’re seeing things. Or that I made it up…”
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