SCRATCHING THE SCAB                                                                                                         By Tim Johnson

Artwork by Rachael Otto

 We were all gathered around Bailey’s poker table that day. At first it had seemed proper to wait for Bill, but eventually, impatient as we often are, we just started playing without him. It was strange that I didn’t immediately remember what Bill Trenor had told me, about the mosquito. But the conversation with him crept back into my mind as cigar smoke swirled in the air.

 Jeff Bailey mentioned Bill’s name, and all of sudden it hit me. “Where the hell’s Bill?” Bailey asked, exhaling a mouthful of thick cigar smoke.

 Stan Hartford, or Doc, as we call him, only grumbled in reply. He was down forty bucks by now. But he shouldn’t complain; he can afford to lose money.

 “I haven’t seen him in a week,” I said, throwing a red poker chip into the pile. “I ran into him at the store last week. Told me a crazy story, he did.”

 “What’s that?” Doc asked, folding his hand for the fifth time that evening.

 And so, I told them what Bill had said.

 “About a week ago, I ran into a package store to grab a six-pack and a few scratch tickets. When I was in there I ran into Bill. He seemed awfully shook up about something. I asked him what was the matter. At first he seemed like he didn’t want to talk about it. But I asked a second time, noticing him scratching wickedly at his neck. ‘It itches,’ Bill told me, ‘Goddamn does it itch!’ I asked him what was itching him, and he told me all about it. He had a worried look in his eyes, but at the time, I paid little attention to it. 

 “You see, about a month ago Bill ordered some antique over the internet. Some fancy vase from Argentina, or some place in South America. There are plenty of rainforests down there, with all sorts of weird creatures.”

 I paused to take a swig from my beer. Bailey was rolling his eyes. 

 “Well, the vase was shipped off from down there, I suppose, and sent to Bill. You guys know how he collects strange shit like that. Anyhow, just a few days before I ran into him, he got his package in the mail. He opened it up, and there inside, sure enough, was the vase he had ordered. Now, when he looked into the vase, he sees something funny. It was a bug of some kind, only bigger than any normal bug. Bill said, ‘It looked like a mosquito, a huge mosquito, the size of a damn bird.’ At the time I just nodded my head, not sure what to think.”

 “What does this have to do with Bill missing poker?” asked Bailey. He got up from his seat and went to the fridge to get another beer.

 “Now I’m getting to that,” I told him.

 Bailey sat down, cracked open the beer and continued to listen.

 “So Bill sees this giant mosquito at the bottom of the vase he ordered. The bug seems to be dead. Then Bill tips the vase over and shakes it, trying to get the bug out. Only the bug doesn’t come out. It’s stuck to the inside. Bill puts it down and goes to get something to pry the dead insect out with. He grabs a ruler, or something like that. When he’s reaching to pick the thing up, he hears this tiny buzzing sound. He said it didn’t even occur to him that the noise might be coming from the bug inside the vase. So, with the ruler in his hand, he picks up the vase and takes a look in. Just as he looks down the deep, dark neck, he said, the damn bug comes flying out and brushes against his damn face.”

 “I don’t see how a mosquito could live in a vase, packaged up in a box for nearly a month,” Bailey complained.

 “Well, I’m not sure of that either,” I said. “But let me finish.”

 Doc nodded supportively. I continued.

 “Anyway, Bill gets startled by the bug flying into him and he drops the friggan vase, shattering it on the ground. So then Bill bends over to pick up the broken pieces, really pissed off, not really thinking about the bug, perhaps figuring it flew away. Then, Bill said, he hears the buzzing again, louder this time. Something lands on his neck, really pushing against him. And before he can reach up and swat it away, he feels a prick, like a needle from a doctor’s office, pressing into his—”

 I paused to ask Doc, pointing to the big vein in my neck.

 “The jugular,” Doc said calmly.

 “Right,” I said.

 Bailey rubbed at his neck.

 “Well Bill feels this needle in his jugular and nearly pisses his pants. By now he’d figured it was that damn mosquito. Bill said he could actually hear the sucking sounds made by that friggan bug while it feasted on his blood. Sounded pretty sick to me. So then Bill reaches for the bug and grabs it. He said he had a hard time pulling it away. It held on to him rather tightly. Eventually he gets the bastard off. He said it felt like pulling out a long, wooden sliver. Then he crushed the bug in his hand. Squeezed it real tight until it burst, he did. Bill said it was hard to crush it at first, but when he tightened his fist, eventually the damn thing popped like a damn water balloon, spilling blood all over his hand.”

 “That’s absurd,” Doc said with a cringing look on his face.

 But I told him that it was just what I had heard from Bill and to not tell me what’s what. Then I finished.

 “Bill said that when he reached up and felt his neck where the little sucker had got him, he felt that it was bleeding. And like most cuts, the blood began to scab over. He said that the scab seemed to have gotten just a little bigger the next day. He said it was itching badly. 

 “Now, my mother always told me not to scratch at a scab. It’ll only make it worse, she said. But apparently, Bill’s mother never gave him the same advice, because he did scratch at the scab. He said it didn’t take much to break it open and get it bleeding again. Then, he said, the next time it scabbed over it was a lot bigger than it had been. The scab seemed to be spreading, getting worse. Just like my mother had said.”

 “So he’s missing poker over a scab?” Bailey asked, almost incredulously.

 “I suppose,” I replied.

 “Sounds like bullshit to me.” Bailey seemed upset that evening. I suppose it had something to do with his wife. She and Bailey were separating, or so I’d heard.

 And that was when the phone rang. At first I didn’t think Bailey was going to answer it, he let it ring for a while, probably figuring that it was his wife calling. But after four rings, he got up from his seat, picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

 “Perhaps that’s Bill calling,” Doc suggested.

 I just nodded my head, I figured Doc was right.

 Now it didn’t take long before we noticed the look on Bailey’s face change. He didn’t seem to be doing much talking, mostly listening. Every now and then he’d ask, “What?” or, “Are your sure?” And then, after what I figured to be about five minutes, he put the phone back down, looking real confused.

 Doc and I had been sitting still, trying to figure out what was going on. “Was that Bill?” I asked Bailey when he sat back down at the table. He didn’t blink. He only looked forward, confused. “Well,” I asked again, “was that or wasn’t it Bill?”

 Bailey nodded his head real slowly at first, then he said, “Yes. Yes it was.” And he seemed to be thinking. He was awfully nervous. Now I didn’t realize it at the time, but he had every damn right to be nervous.

 “So what did he say?” Doc asked.

 Bailey didn’t say anything at first. Then finally he looked at us, like he had just woken up. “Well,” he began, “Bill sounded horrible. He sounded like he had something caught in his throat.”

 “Was he choking?” Doc asked, quite concerned.

 “No,” said Bailey. “No I don’t think he was choking. It was hard to hear what he was saying. He kept telling me, ‘the scab, the scab’s gettin worse.’ Just like what you said, Gus.” Bailey looked at me. “He kept asking for help. Said he needed help because the scab’s getting worse.”

 “I don’t see how a scab could give a grown man such a fright,” said Doc plainly.

 Bailey said to him, “Bill said the scab’s been growing. Getting bigger and bigger. He said to me, ‘Help, it itches.’ He told me the scab was gettin bigger.”

 “Well,” I told Doc and Bailey, “when you pick at a scab, that’s what happens. It gets bigger. Isn’t that right, Doc?”

 “I suppose so,” Doc agreed.

 “Then he asked if you were here,” Bailey said to Doc. “He said he needs to talk to you. I guess he wants your help. Medical advice, perhaps. Boy, he sounded awfully shook up.”

 “I still don’t see how he could be upset over a little scab,” I said. “When I saw him at the package store, the damn thing was no bigger’n a quarter.”

 “Well,” Doc said, “if a mosquito was able to come all the way up here to Massachusetts from South America, I suppose that it’s possible that the insect brought with it some kind of virus or infection. Mosquitoes carry blood borne viruses and things. Typically mosquitoes are too small to carry any substantial amount of blood to transfer a virus. But if it was as big as he said it was, I suppose that Bill could have extracted a bit of a virus. Probably nothing much to worry about. But if the wound became infected a little, I could understand why he might feel a bit jumpy.”

 “Maybe we should go and see him,” I said, now a little worried.

 “I don’t know,” Doc said. “Perhaps I ought to call him and speak with him myself.”

 “I’m not sure about that,” Bailey said. “I had a hell of a time understanding what he was saying to me. The bitch of it is, he sounded like it was getting worse, his talking I mean. It was like each time he said something it got harder for him to talk. Come to think of it, he kept coughing too. Maybe he’s losing his voice.”

 “A possible side effect of an infection near the throat,” Doc said. “Alright, what can it hurt? Let’s go have a look at him.”

 “We can take my car,” I suggested. 

 Bailey and Doc agreed. And we headed out of Bailey’s house and drove towards Bill’s. We had no idea of the horror that we were heading for. If we had known, well…we sure as hell wouldn’t have gone.

 I pulled the old station wagon into the driveway at the two-family apartment building where Bill lived. His car was covered in over six inches of thick, untouched snow. It seemed funny to see, being as it hadn’t snowed in four days. That made me nervous. And I can only assume that it made Bailey nervous too. Doc, having a cool head on his shoulders, didn’t react much. He’d always figure that there was a good reason for everything. Doctors are like that.

 Bailey climbed out of the back seat of my wagon; Doc stepped out from the shotgun seat. We all stood still for a moment. There was a sign in the downstairs apartment’s front window that read, FOR RENT. It seemed as if there was a strange smell in the air at that moment. Of course, I’d take that tiny smell over the ass-kicker that hit us once we walked into the hallway of the apartment, and even that wasn’t the worst.

 The smell was rotten, that’s the only way I could describe it at the moment, when the three of us timidly walked up the dark stairwell, closer to…well, the smell, I guess.

 “Oh, come on you two,” Doc said calmly. Perhaps his nose was stuffed up, or maybe being a doctor gave him a better grasp on what it could have been. But I’m sure there’s nothing that he ever read in any medical book about what we were all about to see. No sir.

 So with Doc leading the way up those narrow, creaking stairs, we eventually ended up at the doorway leading into Bill Trenor’s apartment. Before saying a word, Doc grabbed hold of the doorknob. The door was unlocked and we all walked uneasily in.

 “Bill?” Doc called. “Where are you Bill?”

 And at first, there was nothing. Just that horrible rotten smell. It was the same stink that lingers after you pull off a bandage that you’ve been wearing for weeks. The stench was just like that, only about a thousand times worse. Like pulling off a thousand bandages after wearing them for a thousand weeks.

 Then, we heard Bill call out to us. “Come in,” he said, in a voice that really did sound like he was choking.

 “Where are you, Billy?” Bailey asked nervously. He sounded like a frightened kid calling after his lost dog.

 We heard Bill cough. The guy sounded like he was in awful pain.

 “He’s in here,” Doc said to me and Bailey. “Over here.”

 So we followed behind Doc. He crossed the apartment and came to a door. I had never been in Bill’s apartment before, but I pretty much assumed that the door lead into a bedroom. It did. Doc slowly pushed the door open. It creaked like a dying animal and made me jump nervously.

 The three of us, Doc, Bailey, and I, walked into Bill’s bedroom. That damn bandage smell was stinking the room up like no smell I’ve ever know. I could damn near taste it in the air. It’s funny I didn’t realize it at first, that the smell was coming from Bill himself.

 You see, the room was dark, real dark, so we couldn’t see Bill too well. The shades were drawn down tightly and there were no lights on. Doc found a lamp to his right and flipped the switch. The lamp didn’t give much light—thank God for that—but it gave enough to see Bill. What a horrible fucking sight it was. All three of us stopped breathing when we saw him.

 Bill was sitting, very carefully, on a chair in the corner of the room. It was a small wooden chair. He sat on the very edge of it. There was a large puddle of blood on the floor beneath him. Now, I didn’t notice it at first, but Bill was completely naked. His entire body no longer had the appearance of human skin. It was red and purple and pink and even black in a few places, and scaly. It was like his whole body was one giant…well, one giant…scab.

 Bailey turned around quickly and threw up all over the floor behind us. Even the stench of his puke couldn’t mask the horrible stink that was coming off of poor Bill.

 Doc started whispering, real quietly to himself, “This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real.” He couldn’t look away. It was like nothing he had ever seen before and he simply couldn’t look away. It was like watching a goddamn monster movie. “This isn’t real,” he continued to whisper.

 But it was real. As real as the fresh puddle of puke steaming grossly on the ground behind us. I looked at Bill carefully, trying my hardest not to seem disgusted, but I was. Bill’s hair was completely gone. His entire body was reddish and scaly. One of his ears was missing and there was a bright red splotch where the ear had once been. I didn’t see any sign of his…well, his genitals anywhere.

 “The scab,” Bill struggled to say. I suppose I was the only one who was really listening. Bailey kept gagging and Doc went on whispering to himself. “The scab,” Bill said, “I scratched it and it got bigger.” I could see that he was trying his hardest not to move his tongue. The thing looked like a reptile shedding its skin. Hell, Bill looked like a reptile himself, a big, red reptile. “It kept itching, so I scratched. It wouldn’t go away. I tried to—”

 Then he broke off in a fit of coughing. God, he looked like he was in pain. Although I couldn’t see his eyes, because the scabbing tissue around them had swelled up, it seemed like he kept looking at Doc.

 Now Doc didn’t give much of a response. He just gazed blankly, in shock, and kept on whispering to himself, “This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real.” It was as if he was somehow hypnotized.

 As he continued to cough, I realized that the entire inside of his mouth had scabbed over too. I figured that the scabbing must run all the way down his throat to God-knows-how-far.

 When Bill carefully leaned forward, the scale-like tissue that covered every square inch of his body began to crack, leaking the very slightest drips of fresh blood. Now he didn’t spit, he just opened his mouth slowly, careful not to break open his flaking cheeks too much, and the blood flowed out of his mouth in thick spurts, carrying with it big globs of torn, scabbed skin. How much blood could one man have?

 Doc broke from his trance of whispering for just a moment. “That’s some virus,” he said in a bit of a daze. “Some fucking virus.” And then he was lost again in shock, repeating to himself in a whisper, “This isn’t real.”

 After most of the soupy blood had drained from his mouth and throat, Bill continued. “I tried to go out and…get help…but the sun…it made the scab itch more, it bled more in the sun. It itches so much. It—”

 And again, he was cut off by a horrible bout of coughing.

 When he stopped coughing, he looked to each one of us slowly, focusing the most on Doc. Then, cautiously, he reached up with his right arm towards the side of his head. The scabs broke open at the elbow with sounds like that of paper tearing. Blood ran down his arm. His hand, which no longer looked anything like a hand, appeared as it had lost a few fingers. Bill took careful hold on his remaining ear, and with a quick yank, he pulled the red, dry ear away from his head. It was like pulling a cork from a tilted bottle. The blood flowed steadily in streams that seemed to make the sound, glug, glug, glug.

 Bailey shrieked like a woman, turned, and ran like hell. As the blood quickly began to crust over where the ear had been, sealing up the hole, I could hear Bailey damn near tumbling down the stairs of the apartment building. Doc’s hands were trembling at his side. Strangely, I was the only one who had kept my cool. Although I will say, on the inside, I was scared shitless.

 “Help m—” Bill said. And if I could’ve seen into his eyes, I’m sure I’d have seen pure terror. “Please hel—”

 Then, again came the coughing. And it was true about him getting worse each time he spoke. I figured that if he kept trying to talk, eventually his insides would tear apart the way his outsides were. This time when he coughed I could see a faint ring of red wetness forming around his otherwise completely dry, scale-like nose. The blood around the nose became heavier. And just like that, the nose began to slide slowly down the red, bleeding face, the way a falling drop of water will cling to the side of a windowpane. Then that bloody drop that no longer even resembled a nose hit the gap at Bill’s mouth and fell off of his reptilian face, landing with a plop in the expanding pool of blood at his feet.

 Apparently that nose sent Doc over the edge. His whisper turned into a shout the moment that nose hit the floor. “This isn’t real!” Doc shouted. “THIS ISN’T REAL!!”

 You see I figure that Doc had lived most of his life believing that he had a firm grasp on things and that he knew most of what’s important to know. Seeing Bill, the human scab, shit all over Doc’s viewpoint and was enough to break his typically sturdy actions. At least, that’s the way I figure it.

 Bill did not like Doc’s reaction one bit. I supposed he’d been hoping for Doc to be his same old rational self and help him with his…scab problem…infection I guess you’d call it. But when Doc shit the bed, Bill must have realized that there was no hope for him. So he started shouting.

 “It itches!” Bill yelled, moving with less care than he had a moment ago. “Christ-All-Mighty, it itches!” He began to thrash violently. Blood began to leak from the endlessly cracking scabbiness of the poor guy’s skin.

 Then Doc, shaking like a cold puppy, looked at me. Real serious, he was. “It might be contagious,” Doc said, quietly at first. Then it looked like a light bulb had sparked in his head, a real nasty one. “It might be contagious!” And having shouted that in my face, he turned and sprinted out the door.

 Bill began to scratch at every itching scab on his body, which I guess was his entire body. He seemed relieved, but he also seemed to be in excruciating pain. As he scratched, his dry skin became soggy and soaked with blood. Flesh tore away in large, thick, wet clumps. 

 The blood was spraying everywhere, but I felt so damn bad for the poor guy, I could find it in me to leave. I really should have.

 “Calm down, Bill!” I shouted at him. It was useless, though.

 I watched as he began to scream. The blood came heavier now. Soon Bill looked like he had been covered with red paint. A whole damn bucket of it, too. And the smell never faded. It got worse and worse. I felt myself gag as I finally backed for the door.

 As the giant scab continued to scream, I saw what must have been his tongue fall out of his mouth. Following that, his right arm tore away and dropped with a thud to the ground. Oh, Lord, why didn’t I hurry my stupid ass out of that stinking room just a little quicker? Just as I backed out of the door I saw Bill’s red head loll forward. The skin ripped away from the rest of the body. When the head broke away, it hung for just a second by one last scabby strand before falling to the floor and rolling towards my feet like a basketball. And I’m not ashamed to say it, but I pissed my damn pants right then and there.

 I sprinted out of that stinking house so damn fast that I don’t even remember leaving. I just remember being out in cool, clean air, cleaning a small amount of the sprayed blood off of my arm with snow.

 Doc and Bailey were outside waiting. I was actually surprised that they were still there.  I only told them that I had watched Bill die, I didn’t mention how. 

 So we left the house. I was in the worst shock of my life, and I assume that Doc and Bailey were the same. We hardly spoke. 

 The three of us decided that it would be best not tell anyone about what we had seen.  Thankfully, we were sure that no one had seen us there. We’ll let Bill be discovered eventually and pretend that we know nothing about it when we finally hear something. How would we be able to explain such a strange thing, anyhow?

Well that was two days ago. I haven’t seen Doc or Bailey since that day when I drove each of them home. And now, here I sit nervously. Waiting in this sitting room for my turn to come up, so I can go in the other room and see my doctor. I’m trying my hardest not to scratch the little scab on my right arm. But, my God, does it itch.