Impossible Places Read Online Free

backwards, frantically wiping his hands against his dirty pants. Staggering out of the room, he stumbled back toward the lodge. After weeks of unending rain the sun had finally emerged. Steam rose around him as accumulated moisture was sucked skyward. The mist impeded his vision.
    Thin lines crisscrossed his line of sight. The lines were moving.
    Crying, babbling, he flailed at his own eyes, delighting in the pain, digging at the hair, the omnipresent hair, the memories of
him
and what had been done. He felt the crawling now, no more than a slight tickle, but everywhere. On the surfaces of his eyes, in his ears, his nose, pain in his urethra and anus, tickling and scratching and burning, burning. He fell to his knees, then onto his side, curling into a fetal position as he dug and scratched and screamed at himself, at his wonderful body which was betraying him without reason, without explanation.
    The doctor’s assistant gagged when he saw the body in the garden, and the Indians muttered to themselves and drew back. The doctor, who was an old man, thin and toughened from forty years of practicing medicine in that part of the jungle known as the Infierno Verde, forced himself to bend over and do his job. There wasn’t much left to examine.
    The smell led them to the rear building. This time the Indians wouldn’t enter at all, and the doctor had to use all the strength in his elderly frame to drag his reluctant assistant with him. Up till now the young man had made good on his internship. Eventually he would return to a fine hospital in Lima where he would issue papers and prescribe pills at excessive fees for wealthy
Limineros
, while the doctor would remain in his sweltering office in Maldonado, treating insulting ungrateful tourists for diarrhea and locals for promised payment that the government sometimes sent and sometimes didn’t.
    The corpse on the bed had been that of a woman. If possible (and until he had actually seen it the doctor would not have thought it was), it was in a state of even more advanced desiccation than the one on the grass outside. He examined it closely, careful not to touch any of the small, squirming shapes that were burrowing through what remained of what had once been a human form.
    “Here, give me a hand.”
    “What for?” The intern held a handkerchief over his face, protection against the odor.
    “I want to look at the back.”
    They used towels to protect their hands. Turning the body was a simple matter. Having been consumed from the inside out, it weighed next to nothing. The sight thus revealed forced even the old doctor to jump back involuntarily.
    Beneath where the body had been lying, the entire bed was a seething mass of millions of tiny, twitching brown shapes.
    “Nematodes,” the doctor announced with a grunt, though if he was worth anything at all, his youthful companion had already reached the same conclusion on his own. “Without question the worst Secernentea infestation I have ever seen.” He leaned fearlessly over the boiling mass. “Here, see? The mattress is stuffed with horsehair. That would provide sufficient protein for them to propagate within. These unfortunate people were infected through the bed.” He extended a hand. “My case.”
    The intern barely had enough presence of mind remaining to hand over the doctor’s kit. The old man rummaged inside and removed a small stoppered tube and a tweezer. Carefully he extracted one of the millions of swarming worms from the mattress, slipped it into the glass container, where it coiled and twisted frantically, feeling for meat.
    “This would appear to be a particularly virulent species. The selva is full of thousands of such loathsome parasites, many of them still unclassified. See how they seek the darkness inside the bed? I would venture to guess that this variety feeds nocturnally and is dormant during the day, which might explain how an infection could be overlooked until it was too late. Treatable at a