Written by: Joshua Alan Doetsch

Edited by: Matt M. McElroy

Copyedited by: Colleen Riley
Cover art by: Sam Araya
Layout by: Michael Chaney

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2 DEARLY BLEAK
Prologue: Dinner Time 4
Chapter One 7
Chapter Two 10
Chapter Three 13
Chapter Four 16
Chapter Five 19
Chapter Six 24
Chapter Seven 26
Chapter Eight 28
Chapter Nine 32
Chapter Ten 34
Epilogue: Dinner Time 38
About the Author 40

3
 The delivery man drives through the night, and the sky above Research Trian-
gle Park glows green. It glows most nights. Not everyone agrees as to why. Some
nights, the sky luminesces as amber or violet or colors the viewer thinks they
recognize but find they cannot meaningfully describe. The more they grasp for
handfuls of useless vocabulary, the deeper they dig themselves into inexplicable
unease. The locals never verbalize this unease to each other. It only shows in their
eyes.
Research Triangle Park is the largest high-tech research and development park
in the United States. Seven thousand acres feature tech companies, research facili-
ties, and wooded corporate campuses. The area brims with countless labs and even
more theories about what goes on in them.
The delivery man continues on, admiring the sickly green heavens. Every-
thing’s lit up like a movie set — classic horror or gaudy pulp. The officially accept-
ed explanation is that the illumination comes from the industrial-sized greenhous-
es maintained by various biotech companies in Research Triangle Park. Locals,
however, cultivate wild theories both myriad and multiform, from UFO hangers
to radiation to quantum time machine testing facilities. Even the more sober den-
izens of the Triangle, who accept the greenhouses as the cause, harbor feelings of
foreboding. What are they growing in there? In Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill,
heads toss on pillows as the locals repeat the question like a prayer.
What the hell are they growing in there?
Yet night after night, the people go about their lives under the baleful dome.
The weird becomes mundane. Desensitization and normalization for the win.
“Amazing what you can get used to,” says the delivery man to himself. In the age
of information, he thinks, that’s how a conspiracy would conceal itself — not by
hiding but by inundating the mind until it chokes on apathy.
The delivery man philosophizes as he drives past the sign of a corporate cam-
pus:

4 DEARLY BLEAK
 LUMINESCE GLOBAL CORPORATION
“Lighting the impossible future!”
The delivery man does not understand the significance of the sign. This is
not his story, and very soon, he will make a sudden and terminal exit. He drives
through the whispering pines and lurking miasmas of pollen, past Research Trian-
gle Park, past Durham proper, up into the northwest. The road narrows and winds.
The sky no longer glows.
The van crackles and crunches up a long gravel driveway that leads reluctantly
to a house. The rundown structure squats pensively, as though it might get up and
lope away at the first knock upon the door. It’s the kind of house children tell sto-
ries about, but there are no children here, only amphibians and arthropods to sing
Paleozoic ballads about the domicile.
The delivery man grabs his boxed parcel, cardboard cool from the dry ice
within, and exits the vehicle. The air smells of tadpoles and rotting vegetation. A
bloated moon dangles above. There’s plenty of light.
“Oh,” says the delivery man. There is a child here. A boy, maybe eight years
old, maybe ten, sits alone on one side of a rusted seesaw, his little legs bouncing,
but his side never rises more than a foot. The delivery man instantly decides this is
the loneliest thing he’s ever seen. The pale boy has a mop of dark hair and wears a
little black suit and a single, oversized leather glove on his right hand.
“Hey there,” says the delivery man. “Back from a family function? You’re
dressed to the nines.”
The boy’s legs cease bouncing, his side of the seesaw touches the ground.
“The Conqueror Worm demands the vestments of a monarch,” says the boy.
“Oh,” says the delivery man. “Right… What’s your name?”
“We are a gestalt of thought and flesh, and you are a stranger.”
“Uh… Yeah, you’re right. Forget I asked. Is there… is there an adult who can
take this package?”
“Food?” asks the boy, pointing vaguely in the direction of the delivery man.
The man looks at the box in his hands. “Food? No. Heh. No, I doubt it. I—”
“Step closer,” says the boy.
“What?”
“Step closer.” The boy does not kick his legs, yet his side of the seesaw rises
slowly. The innards of the ancient playground device shriek a grinding, metallic
complaint at the impossible physics. The unoccupied side of the seesaw touches
the ground and stays. The boy’s legs remain dangling in the air.
The delivery man obeys, walking to the boy. Raised on the seesaw, the boy sits
eye-to-eye with the man.
“Put the package down,” says the dapper lad.
The delivery man obeys.
“There is nothing to worry about,” says the boy.

prologue: dinner time 5

 “No worries,” says the man. He feels a buzzing like cicadas behind his eyes,
and he knows very deeply that everything is going to be alright.
“We’re so hungry,” says the boy in half-apology.
“No worries,” says the man.
The boy raises his right hand, palm out, in front of the delivery man’s face.
Though the leather glove is many sizes too large for the child, it bulges with oc-
cupancy. Something writhes beneath the glove. Through it all, the delivery man
smiles. He smiles the way a fish might smile while floating in front of the biolu-
minescent glow just ahead of an anglerfish’s toothy maw. The boy reaches his left
hand out to remove the glove.
“Dearly, don’t spoil your dinner!” A woman’s voice from the house. The voice
says the mundane phrase in a tone that would better fit Don’t climb into the bear
enclosure!
The cicada buzzing ceases. The seesaw shrieks. The boy’s feet touch ground.
The seesaw’s empty seat again hangs in the air.
“You should go now,” says the child. “You should forget this.”
“Right-o,” says the delivery man, who then tips his hat with jolly suavity and
climbs back into his van. The road blurs and he does not remember the last few
minutes of driving. We’ve all done this a time or two. The delivery man drives
back the way he came. The pine trees sway in the wind. There are those who claim
the trees of Research Triangle Park sway even when there is no wind. It’s the sort
of thought you might believe at 3:00 a.m.
The automobile accident that will occur in the next ten minutes will prove fatal
for the delivery man. No trace of the other vehicle will ever be found. Hit-and-run
is not exactly unheard of. Yet and still, conspiracies teem in the midnight garden
of communal thought.

6 DEARLY BLEAK
 The suit-clad boy named Dearly Bleak enters the house, holding the boxed
parcel, calling out, “Momma Swarm!”
A tall, middle-aged woman rises from the basement stairway. Her dark hair
is tinseled with silver. She wears a well-worn white lab coat and a set of goggles
around her neck.
“That’s Doctor Swarm to you, mister,” she says. It’s her usual refrain, their
special banter. She wears the lab coat because it makes her feel incrementally like
herself. She wears the goggles because Dearly believes it’s the sort of thing a prop-
er scientist should wear and making Dearly happy makes her happy.
“Alright, Doc,” says Dearly.
The woman called Swarm smiles at the boy but looks out the window to make
sure the delivery man left under his own power… just to be safe. Satisfied, she
examines the box. The sender is one Simon Meeks, from Chicago, one of the last
contacts she dares to reach out to. The recipient name is not Doctor Swarm, nor is
it her real name, but one of those other names she’s now forced to use.
“Is it—?” says Dearly.
“Yes.”
“Can I—?”
“Sit at the dinner table, and I’ll get it ready?”
“But why?”
“Because. It’s important.”
“Alright.”
Dearly Bleak takes a seat at the scuffed wooden table. The yellow wallpaper
is faded, stained, and peeling, and every piece of furniture is mismatched. It was
home in the way that jigsaw pieces from different boxes forced together make a
puzzle, but it was their home for now.
Doctor Swarm cuts the tape of the box with a scalpel, revealing a Styrofoam
container within. Past that, past the dry ice packets, rests a heavy and sealed plastic
bag containing a human brain. Doctor Swarm gingerly lifts this treasure from its

Chapter One 7
 packaging. She indulges a momentary morbid thrill at the visual of it all, holding
that particular organ, dressed the way she is dressed.
“Dinner time,” she says.
She places the brain on a chipped dinner plate, because every scrap of nor-
malcy and structure is precious in these strange days. She sets the plate in front
of Dearly and takes her own seat at the table, because dinner tables bind families
together — families born into and families found.
The boy in his suit and the doctor in her lab coat share pleasant looks across the
table. Dearly closes his eyes a moment in what looks like mealtime prayer, though
Doctor Swarm suspects he is mentally cycling through the individuals from whom
he would rather extract this meal. That was an argument currently shelved.
Dearly Bleak smiles and removes the oversized leather glove. The boy’s hand
opens like a nocturnal flower. The manifested mass should not have fit in that
glove. Each digit writhes, not as a finger, but as a boneless tendril of cephalopod
design, each stretching nearly two feet from the palm. A membrane of skin joins
the five tentacles, midway out, like the mantle of the deep-sea vampire squid. From
the palm of the wriggling hand, a black parrot beak gnashes.
Doctor Swarm studies closely. She’s invested much hope and more money into
this gambit. She notes how the flesh of the tentacular hand slowly cycles in color:
black to red to white. Anticipation.
Dearly Bleak lowers the squid hand onto the plate and its glistening contents.
Squelchy mastication. Every tentacle contains hundreds of suckers, and each of these
puckers during the eating, singing in tiny voices. Doctor Swarm detects no known
language, yet the ululation has cadence, like a distant, discordant chorus of lullabies.
Eventually, the beak scrapes empty plate.
“Dearly?” says Doctor Swarm. She does not breathe.
The boy considers for a long moment. Then the tentacle hand pulses and vi-
brates. The flesh cycles through colors in staccato. Agitation.
“No,” says Dearly. “It’s no good. It’s not fresh enough!”
“I’m sorry, Dearly. I don’t know how to get it fresher. I could barely get—”
“We’re so hungry.”
“I’m sorry. Here. Let me get you…” Doctor Swarm grabs the cooking tray off
the stovetop and holds it out to the child.
“We don’t want THAT!” says Dearly as well as another voice inside Doctor
Swarm’s mind; a voice that grinds like tectonic plates against deep time. With a
flick of the squid hand, the tray flies from the woman’s grasp, scattering room-tem-
perature pizza Bagel Bites across the room. Doctor Swarm feels a pressure like
Jupiter’s gravity in her brainpan. Then it releases.
Dearly’s eyes go wide. “I’m sorry, Momma Swarm. I didn’t mean to.”
Doctor Swarm nods, shaking. She notes that Dearly said “I” not “we.” He is
sorry. The Worm is not.
“Dearly, I need you to… I, uh. I…” Slurred words and scattered thoughts, the

8 DEARLY BLEAK
warning signs. Doctor Swarm begins the breathing exercises, but they do not help.
Her thoughts and plans and ego all fly away, scatter like decapitated sparrows.
Only chaos remains. Her left leg kicks out from underneath, and she crashes to
the grimy linoleum floor. It is not unlike the dissociative states she occasionally
suffered back when her days could be construed as normal. Her body is no longer
hers. She is no one. She watches it all from outside her skull, up above, from a
grainy security camera. From that vantage, she sees her left leg literally detach
from her body with a hipbone pop.
The Judas limb slithers out of her pants and explodes into fleshy bits. Each
fragment crawls independently as something that might be a large centipede but is
not. The head of each creature is something that might be the bald, varicose head
of an infant bird, but is not. The squealing swarm scatters in every direction, along
with every hope of regathering her shattered thoughts.
This is it, thinks the scientist as she floats away from her body.
Dearly Bleak runs to the woman and helps prop her up. “Focus, Momma
Swarm. Here and now. Here and now!”
Now she feels a gentle, soothing pressure, like sluicing water, in her head.
She feels the powerful, communal mind of the boy and the Worm reach into hers,
reeling her back into her body, reaching out and grabbing her scattered thoughts,
suturing them together with messy, psychic stitches.
“No, Dearly,” she pleads. “You’re already so hungry.”
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” whispers the boy, over and over
in mantra.
One by one, the centipede monstrosities crawl back, crawling into Doctor
Swarm’s pant leg. At first, her body rejects them — she is disgusted with herself
— but Dearly soothes her, and she accepts, and the pant leg fills in. She flexes her
toes. Did every piece of her come back? Every time it feels like one or two get
away, another bit of her gone forever. The erosion is inevitable.
Somewhere in the elapsed time, Dearly gathered all of the Bagel Bites back
onto the tray. He eats them with exaggerated relish.
“These are good,” he says. “They really are.”
Doctor Swarm hugs the boy tightly.

Chapter One 9
 3:01 a.m. and Doctor Swarm startles awake to find Dearly Bleak standing over
her in the dark. He wears dinosaur patterned pajamas. It had taken some work to
convince the Worm not to sleep in suits.
“We can’t sleep,” says the child.
Doctor Swarm lifts the blanket and feels the warmth of the boy climbing into
bed and cuddling to her. She tries to ignore the occasional nuzzle of tendrils and
exploratory kisses of the suckers.
“I know you’re very hungry,” she says. “You must be careful about using your
gifts.”
“Momma Swarm, can you tell us a story to take our mind off it?”
“Heh. That’s Doctor Swarm. What would you like to hear?”
“Our story.”
“Even the sad parts?”
“Yes. Even those.”
Doctor Swarm sighs. “Alright.”
The story was assembled by Dearly Bleak, partially from firsthand observa-
tion, partially from investigation, and more than a little from thoughts ripped from
the skulls of others. Dearly collected these and poured them into Doctor Swarm’s
head, so that she might tell him the story. He liked it when she told it.
“Once upon a time…”

•••

Once upon a time, there was an impossible boy.

No.
First, there was a married couple. Roderick and Lavinia Bleak were well-to-do
and wanted for nothing. They could afford to indulge in each and every eccen-
tricity that tickled their fancy. What they really desired was a child. The day that

10 DEARLY BLEAK
Lavinia discovered she was pregnant was the happiest of both their lives. When the
doctors said it would be a boy, Roderick and Lavinia picked out the name of Derek.
However, complications arose. The doctors shook their heads grimly. The first
opinion, second opinion, and a dozen more all said the life inside Lavinia would
not survive the month. Yet month after month, the unborn Derek beat the odds.
More complications occurred. Lavinia went to the hospital in great pain. The
odds, it seemed, were closing in. The nickname started as a morbid joke. It was
a desperate reach at gallows humor, desperate as a stranded sailor drinking sea
water to quench a burning thirst. They called the unborn baby Dearly as in “dearly
departed.” It slipped out of one of their mouths, husband or wife, they could not
remember. It ought to have disgusted them, horrified them, yet it set inside them
bouts of giggling that transmogrified into full-bellied cackles. We mustn’t judge
Lavinia and Roderick too harshly. They stood toes over the edge of wits’ end,
hopes and nerves frayed. It’s times like this that Mr. Macabre Laughter might
come knocking, and sometimes we ought to answer, because it’s all we can do to
get through.
Then little Derek did the impossible thing and was born, premature but alive,
shattering the odds. The nickname might have died there, but emotions are a weird
alchemy, and what was a desperate reach at gallows humor transmuted into uncon-
ditional love. That is how “dearly departed” became “dearly beloved.” This is the
way Lavinia called out to her son when he entered the room. “Dearly beloved!”
It is the phrase she whispered to him when she lightly traced the lines of his palm
with her finger to sooth him. “Dearly beloved.”
Unfortunately, more complications soon followed. Little Dearly beat the odds,
but at a great price. The sickly boy survived ailment after ailment, year after year,
but the odds narrowed. Finally, they swallowed him up.
At eight years of age, Dearly Bleak fell into a coma. His parents had the money
to procure the equipment and staff so their son could lie in a bed at home. Cold
comfort.
Imagine the sad little kingdom of Lavinia and Roderick, the flow of years
eroding their hope. Imagine their desperation. Imagine their vulnerability. They
tried treatments ever more experimental. That is when the Starry Hope Foundation
slithered in.
Branded as forward-facing organization of alternative health and nutrition, as
well as metaphysical philosophy some might call esoteric, the Starry Hope Foun-
dation gave the Bleaks what they craved. But we know better. Whatever the trade-
mark names they might print on glossy pamphlets or upload to bright websites, we
know them as the Cult of the Worm.
In their cheerful, buzzing voices, the cult promised to save Dearly, and his
parents believed. They gave money. They swallowed the barbed hope hook, line,
and sinker.
“Do you know of probiotics?” asked the Starry Hope elder.
“Yes?” said Lavinia.

Chapter Two 11
 “It’s a lot like that. Something good goes to live inside of you, to help get rid
of the bad.”
The treatment was more ritual than medicine, but Lavinia and Roderick were
properly conditioned by then. The cult brought a ceramic urn to Dearly’s bed. The
cracked clay bespoke of time immemorial. Inside the urn, something pulsed. The
cult prayed to the godling grub within. Dearly’s parents prayed.
“Ever the praises to the Conqueror Worm!”
“Ever the praises to the Crawling Library!”
“The Knowledge that Eats!”
“The Broodsac Sultan.”
The Worm hatched from the urn and slithered inside Dearly Bleak. The impos-
sible boy and the Conqueror Worm joined, but something went wrong or at least
unintended. The ecstatic cultists died, every last one, and witnessing the ways they
died drove Roderick and Lavinia irrevocably insane. They still sit in an institution
to this day.
The boy and the Worm made a pact. They both hated the Starry Hope Foun-
dation and fled from the cult. Eventually, Dearly Bleak found a broken scientist
and put her back together again. Later, these two (or three depending on how you
count it) found a man named Matías, whom Dearly liked to call Mantis Shrimp
Man, because of his chitinous armor, his sonic punches, and his eyes that could
see colors no one else sees. Matías was held in a detention center in the southwest.
Shadowy government officials offered him a way out, if he would just submit to
certain experiments.
Dearly, Matías, and Doctor Swarm became a surrogate family. For a time,
they even achieved something like happiness. Eventually, however, the conspira-
cies found them. Matías died protecting his new family. Dearly Bleak and Doctor
Swarm go on. They are angry. They are sad. They are still a family. Every day, they
defy the odds.

12 DEARLY BLEAK
 Dearly sleeps. The tentacled hand crawls, pacing about the bed, manacled to
the boy by his little arm. Did the Worm ever sleep?
Doctor Swarm checks her own body in the dark. Nothing seems to have
crawled away. She rises out of the bed. Her mind won’t stop, but at least, for now,
her thoughts all move in roughly the same direction. She puts on the lab coat, hop-
ing this totem will help her hold it all together. She walks on legs she no longer can
afford to trust. Passing the bathroom, she avoids looking at the mirror. Sometimes
she doesn’t recognize the face staring back, and that can set off an episode.
Down the warped steps, Doctor Swarm pulls a dangling cord, igniting the
basement in harsh light. She calls it her lab. Doctor Swarm walks past disparate
pieces of equipment, taking a seat at a computer that rests on a makeshift desk
composed of wooden crates.
The glow of the screen and the keyboard’s click-clacking almost make her
feel normal. She checks email, news, and other sundries. She takes a Google Maps
tour of Research Triangle Park, but then closes the tab after an irrational pang of
paranoia — that they could see her seeing them. Was it irrational?
With a clumsily motion, she knocks the mouse to the floor with a plastic clat-
ter. She looks at her own hand with suspicion for a solid minute.
Back on the internet, Doctor Swarm investigates a suspicious online advertise-
ment she’d bookmarked, one that offered immediate student debt relief to those
who submitted themselves as test subjects in a trial for a “non-invasive” treatment.
A little due diligence and key-clacking reveals all of the red flags. She copies the
web address and posts it on the forums of the secretive groups she finds herself
associating with lately. Associating at a distance, that is. You could never be too
careful, never know who might be a plant, who served them, or even who they
were. Unknown multitudes lurked in the pronoun.
Doctor Swarm stares at the suspicious advertisement, does a breathing exer-
cise. She does not slow her breaths for calm but quickens them.
“There’s a student online right now,” Doctor Swarm says to the screen. “She’s
desperate. She’s looking at this ad. She wants to believe it can fix everything. Tui-

Chapter Three 13
 tion and rent have multiplied several times over in the last ten years. Wages haven’t
budged. All these things and more push this student to this ad. They are not flaws
but features. This is their design.”
Doctor Swarm looks at similar stories on the secret forums. She breathes. She
tries to be angry at the things that should make her angry. When that fails, she tries
to be angry at her inability to be properly angry. That almost works.
Doctor Swarm sighs. She closes the browser. She opens a file called “Journal,”
and she types.
My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.

From the Journal of Dr. Samara Chang:

My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.
My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.
My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.
Repetition helps. Typing my name. Saying it. It helps? Perhaps. Fuck. That
right there. I’ve been reviewing my voice (emails, correspondences, audio record-
ings, etc.) from before the incident and after the incident and beyond. See what
changes. I’ve noticed I used to use the word “mayhap.” It’s the archaic form of
“perhaps” or “possibly.” Stupid affectation, but it used to be mine. I don’t do it
anymore. I’m losing personality traits. Call me paranoid.
Anyway, I’m feeling pretty clear tonight, so I should type. Memories get tricky.
They scramble and reassemble out of order, and there’s always new bits missing.
It’s frustrating. You spend your whole life building your brain, just to have pieces
up and scuttle away every day.
I’m finding more of us online. There should be no “us.” We are all anomalies.
Unique. Freaks. I think what connects us is that we all have a THEM. Nothing con-
nects us yet something connects us, like the cells in my body. I say “us” and “we,”
but I’m not quite like Dearly or Matías. Something’s more broken in me, decaying.
Matías. I turned around when we fled, saw what they did to him. I hope Dearly
hasn’t seen that, when he looks in my mind. That was in New Mexico. We fled
back here. I didn’t think Luminesce Global would expect me to come back so close
to home. Stupid? Brilliant? Perhaps. Fuck.
Hand spasms.
My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.
My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.
My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.
Better.
I was a scientist. I worked for Luminesce Global Corporation. The memories
fragmentary, but each fragment is vivid. The biotech division. Those greenhouses
lighting the sky like diseased suns. The gleaming steel and squirming wires. The
hot metal quenched in spinal fluid. The team building exercises in the dark woods.
The computer code written with infernal ciphers.

14 DEARLY BLEAK
 The details of my work are the subject of a previous journal entry. I only re-
member the half of it. I only saw a fraction, but you heard things when you work
at Luminesce Global. It’s amazing what you get used to.
They did this to me.
God damn it. I can’t. They did this to me, and I can’t get angry enough. Dear-
ly’s current emotional state is defined by bouts extreme loyalty and extreme rage
(though, through the Worm, his anger burns cold and methodic). But I can’t. I’m
not like Dearly, Matías, and the others. They smolder with holy vengeance. I sput-
ter. I need the super gravity of love and hate, or my molecules are going to float
away.
This is Dr. Samara Chang signing off.

Chapter Three 15
 You see weird things on the red-eye bus. That’s what Nancy tells people. It
adds a mystique and a romance to it all. Truth to tell, she did it to save money.
Sleeping on a bus, instead of booking a motel, stretches her pension dollars fur-
ther. It’s her time to see the country. Sometimes there were interesting characters.
Often, they weren’t the sort Nancy wanted to talk to. Sometimes, on the red-eye
bus, weird things see you.
Nancy covertly watched them through the dark reflection of the bus window.
She stopped when the reflections turned frightful. There was a proper term for
that — the brain’s habit of creating grotesque images if one stares at a mirror in
the dark for just long enough, something to do with the brain’s hunger for sensory
input — Nancy had read an article.
Nancy turns now to face them instead of what’s living in the window. There
are eight of them. They dress a bit like Mormon missionaries, but with yellow
sweater vests. They all wear their hair in a buzzcut. All of them are thin, yet loose
skin dangles from some of their arms, suggesting they were not always so. Despite
the thinness, they all of have a certain puffiness to their faces. While the inner
lights of the bus flatter no one, these folks have a waxiness to them that causes
Nancy to repress a shudder.
“Pleasant trip?” Nancy offers with the politeness ingrained in her.
It’s the only opening they need. They are extroverted, eager even. They know
how to start a conversation. Their words wriggle happily, cutting off all exits. They
tell Nancy about the good work of their organization. They finish each other’s sen-
tences. Sometimes two or more talk in unison without seeming to notice.
The bus makes a stop. None of the missionaries get off to get food. They only
drink from thermoses labeled Starry Hope Foundation! — each of them has a
matching thermos and a matching book bound in yellow leather. They leave no
opening in the conversation. Pinioned by politeness, Nancy finds herself unable to
get food or even use the bathroom before the bus continues its journey.
Please go away, Nancy thinks through her smile. They only become friendlier.

16 DEARLY BLEAK
 “Hungry, friend of mine?” one of them asks, offering Nancy her thermos.
Nancy turns it down, and she’s glad for it. Whatever is in those thermoses is
thick by the smack of their mouths. Two of the missionaries vomit into barf bags.
They’ve been doing so for at least fifty miles.
“I assure you, it is only motion sickness, friend of mine,” one of them says.
None of them have given Nancy their names, though she’s given them her full
name, email address, phone number, and mailing address, and how did that hap-
pen?
“May I show you some literature, friend of mine?”
Nancy accepts the glossy pamphlet.
Distracted? Confused? Alone?
Find unity. Find alternative health. Find the Starry Hope Foundation! Join
our choir of serenity.
The pamphlet makes many compelling promises. Nancy flips to the back page.
Try our nutrient slurry shake: Comm-Union (TM).
Lose weight. Gain clarity. Achieve focus. Actualize your health! Now in three
flavors.
Nancy looks to the yellow leather book, now open in the lap of a missionary.
She sees words that appear to be nonsense jumbles of letters, though she may be
behind in updating the prescription of her glasses. The missionary smiles and clos-
es the book.
“We can mail you more material, friend of mine.”
Nancy nods. Her bladder screams. The two missionaries continue puking. One
of them looks up from his bag, smiling at Nancy. A neon booger runs out of his
nose. No. Boogers do not crawl. It slithers out of his nose, and his tongue comes
up to catch it.
Looking at the missionaries, Nancy notices that they all twitch in unison. The
image takes Nancy back to childhood. A large bush grew in the front yard of her
grandparents’ house. One year, a peculiar form of worm or caterpillar infested the
bush. “Wiggle worms,” her grandmother called them. Hundreds of worms jutted
out from the bush’s branches, taking the place of its needle leaves. They all undu-
lated in unison, as if of one mind. Something about them horrified little Nancy. She
sobbed whenever she was made to walk past them.
“Friend of mine?”
Nancy looks at these wiggling missionaries, and she wants to murder them,
wipe out their existence. She has never performed an act of violence in her life, but
Nancy feels compelled to take up her umbrella and cave in their soft heads. The
only thing stopping Nancy is not goodness of heart, but the tactile feel of it all, the
suspicion that those heads would have a give to them like rotten fruit.
“Next stop, Durham,” says the bus driver.
Is it just sleep deprivation and bad lighting, or is that barf bag moving?
“Friend of mine?”

Chapter Four 17
 Nancy says something polite that she instantly forgets. She turns back to the
well of night to her right. She takes her chances with the phantasms in the window.

From the Journal of Dr. Samara Chang:

My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.
Can’t sleep. Jesus. The faces appeared on my skin again. Felt them. Heard the
wet Velcro sounds. Then they crawled up my walls. Staring at me. Accusing.
My body has the capacity to split into discrete biomasses of various sizes (pos-
sibly as small as five microns). It’s messy. I’m not good at it. When I improvise,
the shapes are a chaotic stew. However, if I ingest an organism (say a sparrow, a
centipede, a fungal spore), my body saves the blueprint. Sometimes I can even
improvise off of a given blueprint.
Each discrete piece of me is its own separate cognitive entity following the
whole — much as each arm of an octopus contains enough of its nervous system
to do its own independent thinking. Unfortunately, a human brain is not meant to
split like that. There are complications. In my “normal” days, when I had a disso-
ciative fugue, I worried that my cells would just split and float away. Now, that’s
a literal danger.
When Luminesce Global did what they did to me, well, I really did split. I was
even more unstable than my freakish peers. I’ve seen the term “Feral” used in our
circles. I think I was that. I’m probably still that, held together by the chewing gum
of Dearly’s abilities.
The memories of those early days are so scattered. Near as I can reconstruct, I
was a barely sentient swarm, hungry and shape-changing, surging and devouring,
incorporating new biomasses. Some of those masses had human names.
When Dearly found me, I was almost done. I should have flown apart for
good. I’m not meant to exist. But Dearly recognized what I was. He reached out,
gathered my scattered thoughts and identity, and put me back together, mentally
and physically.
It’s a messy glue job, not a cure. I’m always sliding apart. Dearly’s psionic
treatments only slow the process. The orbit decays. I’ll spin off into space. I dis-
courage Dearly from using his abilities too frequently. The more he uses, the hun-
grier he gets. I don’t know how many people he ate before we found each other. I
guess I can’t really cast the first stone on that.
My body remembers the faces of the people I devoured. Sometimes they grow
on me like grimacing sores. Sometimes they slough off me and crawl up the walls.
Normally they stare vacant and mute. Tonight, they developed crude vocal organs.
This is Dr. Samara Chang signing off.

18 DEARLY BLEAK
 By night, the light pollution of the greenhouses and the haze of conspiracy
theories distort Research Triangle Park. A few years back, locals talked of a man-
bat creature, a mad scientist or a vampire or a mad scientist vampire. For a time,
the creature was to the Triangle what Mothman was to Point Pleasant, though the
stories never quite evolved into national urban legend.
But these are 3:00 a.m. thoughts shared by 3:00 a.m. people. The radiation of
the sun burns these specters to vapor. The daylight people are not the same as their
identical counterparts who occupy their skins in the small hours and mutter and
mumble and place crosses by their windows in the dark. Daylight people gaslight
and smother their 3:00 a.m. doppelgängers who shout muffled warnings in their
skull, and a crack forms in their faces in the shape of a big, bright smile.
“Ridiculous,” says the daylight person. “That would be too on the nose. A
nefarious laboratory plot wouldn’t happen in a place where the sky glows green.”
Research Triangle Park is picturesque — grass and trees and serenity. The
greenhouses are merely mundane glass structures by day. People go to work and
enact routines. They take refreshing walks along the wooded campus trails during
generous lunch breaks. Office managers never complain when employees leave
their open-plan desks to take smartphone photos of the deer and foxes who wander
right up to the company building windows.
It is 3:00 p.m. at Luminesce Global Corporation. The company recently en-
acted an afternoon nap policy. Rested, healthy, de-stressed employees are good
business, a good investment of that half-hour. The numbers agree. The numbers
are appeased.
Witness the Executive. He wears business-casual better than most wear for-
mal. Is he in his 30s? His 40s? His smile shines powerfully, but it is not plastic. He
is aggressively authentic. He attends every other Beer Friday with the employees.
He plays video games at lunch, is loud when he wins but gracious when he loses.
He sits, now, in a nice, but not too ostentatious, office. The walls are glass. He is,
above all things, accessible.

Chapter Five 19
 “That’s what I’m saying,” says the Executive to the empty air, Bluetooth de-
vice in his ear. “Answer me, honestly, how many times do you even use your pool?
And I don’t mean how many times you plan on using it, the actual number. Yeah.
Exactly. Divide that by the cost of your yearly upkeep.”
The Executive swivels in his chair.
“No. Not hard at all. Listen to me, John, your pool wants to be a pond. That’s
why you have to spend so much time and money, constantly pumping poison into
it. Stop chlorinating it, right now, and the transformation has already begun. It just
takes days for the chemicals to leach out. Then bugs and tadpoles find the water.
Add stones to give surface area for the beneficial bacteria — a sample of water and
stones from a living body of water kickstarts that. Add some fish. Add some aquat-
ic plants. Do it right and the water is clear and clean. No mosquitos. It’s a living
ecosystem and you just had to barely guide it along. It’s like a bowl of Zen in your
backyard. Melts the stress. It’s good for you, good for the environment, better than
a sterile death puddle. The local wildlife can use it. Gotta save the bees, man. Hell,
maybe you get really industrious and get into hydroponics and grow food from it.”
The Executive swivels.
“Knew you’d come around. How about I come by this weekend? I can bring
some stones, plants, and fish from my pond. We do a cookout. Your kids will love
it. Yeah? Sounds good, my man. Talk soon, John. Bye.”
The Executive checks his email. He sends several things down the pipeline
and one thing up. He indulges and allows his left leg to bounce in excitement for
a moment. With a cleansing breath, he swivels his chair, puts his back to this door
and the three glass walls, and faces the back wall of his office, dominated by a large
media screen.
The screen lights up, showing an enormous Luminesce Global logo that sil-
houettes the Executive. A Shape lurks behind the plane of the logo. If one were to
stare long enough, the Shape would gain definition.
“We have progress on the project,” says the Executive.
Warped sounds from the Logo.
The Executive nods. “Then, if it is alright, may I?”
Warped sounds from the Logo.
The Executive releases a wavering breath and whispers, “Thank you.”
The Executive unlocks a drawer in his desk. He removes a small device, a
palm-sized box terminating in a cylindrical attachment. It looks like a cross be-
tween a vaporizer and an automobile cigarette lighter. The Executive clicks a but-
ton on the device nine times, and the metal coils in the cylindrical extremity form
the Ninth Shape.
The Executive removes his smart casual work jacket. He unbuttons and rolls up his
left sleeve, revealing a series of interlocking scars seared into his flesh. The Executive
again lifts the handheld device and swivels his chair. He stares deep into the Logo.
“With humility and audacity, we light the impossible future. We illumine you.
We break the circle. We burn time.”
20 DEARLY BLEAK
 The Executive presses another button and the metal coils glow with heat. He
presses the cylinder to his arm. A faint, sizzling hiss accompanies the smell of
burning flesh and melting solder. The Executive does not allow himself to scream,
does not allow himself to look away from the Logo. The new brand connects to the
old. The scarred circuitry and code weave together to form names and the names
fit together like key teeth in the tumblers of a lock to a door the weak would call
blasphemous.
Meanwhile, the rest of the office sleeps.
The Executive swivels his chair. Behind him, the Logo vanishes, and the wall
display goes dark. He buttons up his sleeve and puts his jacket back on. He smiles.
He sends a company-wide email about the upcoming employee steakhouse outing.
The Executive picks up his phone. “Yes? Fantastic. Send them in.”
Eight of them ramble in, each with a yellow vest, a yellow book, a thermos, a
buzzed haircut, and waxy skin. They all give off a faint odor, sickeningly sweet.
They all smile with their soft heads that give the Executive the impression of
worm-eaten apples.
The Executive motions to the eight seats he had brought into the office, and
everyone sits.
“It is excellent to finally meet you all face to face,” says the Executive. “For
the duration, consider me the friendly face and voice of Luminesce Global Corpo-
ration. I’m at your service. Anything you need.”
The eight missionaries nod in unison. They all speak in unison. “We are the
Vermiculated Chorus. We—”
One of the missionaries vomits a gelatinous mass of neon yellow-green worms
on the floor.
“Apologies,” the missionaries say in unison.
The Executive raises a hand politely silencing the chorus. “Nothing to worry
about. I want to talk about what went wrong in New Mexico, but I’m going to need
you to speak one at a time. You.” The Executive points to the closest missionary.
“We lost the Slithering Nativity, swaddled in the manger of a boy’s viscera.
The boy must have perverted the Worm’s purpose. We must have chosen a poor
vessel. We will choose better, a better chalice for the Immaculate Slime.”
“Ever the praises to the Conqueror Worm!”
“Ever the praises to the Crawling Library!”
“The Knowledge that Eats!”
“The Broodsac Sultan.”
The Executive again raises a silencing hand and says, “Fair enough. But if I
look at the postmortem of these operations, and I’m being honest, I have to admit
we both botched this up. Neither party was aware of the other, and we accidentally
clashed in New Mexico. You lost personnel. We lost personnel. And each of our
objectives got away on their own two feet.”
“Agreed,” says the designated missionary.

Chapter Five 21
 “I propose we help each other,” says the Executive. He gives the Chorus a
potent smile and they reciprocate with their own wilted grins.
Meanwhile, several employees play a round of video games in the break room
and HR makes plans for the next themed team lunch.

From the Journal of Dr. Samara Chang:

My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.
I remember some things. I remember that sand shark embryos hunt and eat
each other in the womb. I remember being left-handed. I remember a childhood
friend used to joke that left-handed people born singly absorbed their twin in utero.
I’ve been ambidextrous since the change. I can’t remember that friend’s name.
I was having sand shark embryo nightmares at the height of my fertility anx-
iety. I was dipping into middle age. We’d suddenly decided we wanted a child.
Angela, my wife, was not interested in carrying, but I was. I guess my body had
other plans. There were so many treatments. Frustrations. Tears. Arguments.
There was a perfect succession of events and emotions that made me receptive
to an offer I would have turned down any other day. Luminesce Global is a very so-
cial company. The line between workmate and friend blurs. I confided. Word came
quietly from above (that is to say below). An experimental treatment. All expenses
paid if I only signed an agreement. Better care, better tech than I could get by any
more orthodox means. I knew how bleeding edge the company was, and I knew
that I only knew the iceberg tip of it.
I agreed. I didn’t tell Angela.
I don’t know if the anesthesia failing was an error. I don’t know if me being
conscious was a necessary component to the process. Were they just being sadis-
tic? I think it was a feature, not a flaw. I was paralyzed, but aware. I witnessed all
of it. The only thing worse than being made to scream is being unable to make that
scream.
Cutting edge, they said, and the device looked cutting edge, but it also seemed
ancient. It was shaped like an oversized, overly thick medallion made of something
that wasn’t exactly soapstone, not exactly metal, not exactly plastic. Deep grooves
marked its entirety with symbols that may have been writing. When one of them
ran her finger over the grooves, it all lit up green.
They placed it on my chest. It vibrated right through me, vibrated until every
cell in me was vibrating the same tune. I watched as it sank into the skin of my
sternum. I willed it not to, I did, but watched as my ribcage slowly gaped open, like
a Venus flytrap, and accept the device, swallowing it whole. Everything fragments
from there.
I realize now that the weirdness didn’t start with that night. There were other
events, other details — really from the moment I started working at Luminesce
Global, I was just unable to perceive the weirdness until after the fact. I’m not sure
I made that decision entirely in desperation as a would-be mother, but as a curious
scientist.

22 DEARLY BLEAK
 This thing is still inside of me. I don’t think my body can live without it now.
I don’t think I’ll live long with it.
I’m not sure where Angela is now. Every time I come undone, I lose another
fragment of her face. I lost her eyes recently. I’m not certain what color they were.
I still have her perfect nose. I still have her lower lip.
This is Dr. Samara Chang signing off.

Chapter Five 23
 An exhibit of Dahlia’s crayon drawings adorns the wall of her mother’s home
office. Dahlia’s imaginary friend stars as the chief protagonist of these drawings, a
boy in a dark suit. Her mother displays every drawing with pride. Her own parents
discouraged imaginary friends. Dahlia’s mother fancies herself more enlightened
and cherishes and encourages her daughter’s prodigious imagination. The back-
grounds of these drawings are always so vivid, imaginative, and surreal. The de-
tails are so very good, though Dahlia struggles drawing human hands. Hands are
tricky. The fingers of one of the boy’s hands stretch out too far, too distorted, in
every drawing.
Dahlia sits in her room, talking to her friend. No one else ever seems to see or
hear the boy in the suit. This does not trouble Dahlia. She can see Dearly Bleak
sitting on the bed with her. Then her bedroom dissolves, and girl and boy sit on
opposite ends of a seesaw. They bounce up and down, laughing. The moon hangs
large and pink overhead, before something in the sky devours it, then smiles gigan-
tically down at the children.
Dearly sinks as Dahlia rises.
“I tell them that you’re my imaginary friend,” says Dahlia.
Dahlia sinks as Dearly rises.
“That’s very smart,” says Dearly.
The seesaw melts away. The children sit on a log at the edge of a duck pond.
They splash their feet in warm, summer water that feels wetter than wet, more real
than real. A rainbow swirl of fish swim about. The ducks all have two heads, one at
each end, and argue constantly. This amuses the children to no end.
“This is fun!” says Dahlia.
“This is spooky action at a distance,” says Dearly.
“You’re my best friend,” says the girl.
“We’re your best friend,” says the boy.
“We?”
“When we agree, we say ‘we.’”

24 DEARLY BLEAK
 “What?”
“The Worm and I don’t always agree.”
“You don’t?”
“Yeah. Like… the Worm wants to infect the world with knowledge that will
dissolve reality. I disagree.”
“Oh.”
“But the Worm agrees about you. The Worm agrees that you are important.
The Worm agrees not to dissolve this reality as long as you’re still in it.”
“Oh.”
“Sometimes we get our thoughts mixed up. Sometimes I’ll think a Worm
thought is a Dearly thought. Sometimes the Worm thinks a Dearly thought is a
Worm thought.”
“You’re funny.”
Dahlia takes Dearly’s hand in hers.
Many miles away, Dearly blushes and smiles.

From the Journal of Dr. Samara Chang:

My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.
I can only speculate as to the nature of the parasite that inhabits Dearly. Some-
thing went wrong with the plans of the Cult of the Worm. A miscalculation? Maybe
they’re just making it up as they go. Maybe they’re just a bunch of clueless dupes
who happened to have an important urn. Dearly and the Worm have some sort of
tentative agreement. An agreement that makes their relationship more of a symbi-
osis, an unwritten contract punctuated and signed by devouring a number of those
cultists.
Sometimes, I think I should be more scared of Dearly than the cultists. Then
he smiles at me, and I forget to be afraid. I suspect the thing that resides in Dear-
ly’s body is only the barest fragment of the sum totality of the entity. The little bit
we see manifested is only the portion that juts out and exists in three-dimensional
space. Just speculation.
I’ve seen a copy of the book the missionaries for the Starry Hope Foundation
carry. Revelations of the Worm is written in a language I don’t recognize and can
find no likeness for online. This is the part where some eccentric scholar appears
and helps us decipher it, but I guess that’s not how things actually go.
Through the Worm, Dearly exercises mental talents that some might call psion-
ic. He can read thoughts, project thoughts, and do some… terrifying things. The
more he uses these talents, the hungrier the Worm gets. It’s a point of contention
between us. What will he do if he gets hungry enough?
When they are well fed, when the boy and the Worm are in total agreement,
their power is truly terrible.
This is Dr. Samara Chang signing off.

Chapter Six 25
 Late afternoon and the air is still. The old house squats and cringes at the fight
raging in front of it.
“You talked to that girl again.”
Surrogate mother and son argue over this point often.
“She’s my friend. I like her.”
“Dearly, that’s not the point.”
The dapper boy bounces angrily on the seesaw. Doctor Swarm stands in the
frame of the front door. Naked skies make her even more afraid that bits of her will
fly away. Perhaps she is correct.
“You said it’s important I talk to normal people,” says Dearly.
“I did.”
“You said it’s dangerous to talk in person. You said it’s dangerous to talk on-
line.”
“I did, but—”
“We found a solution. Find a better one if you like.”
“Dearly, that’s not fair. You can’t keep using those abilities. I can’t just keep
feeding you.”
“Get them fresher.”
Dr. Swarm slams the half-ajar door open all the way, shattering a small pane
of glass. “Damnit, Dearly! I can’t get them for you fresher. I’m not made of
black-market organ connections! Doesn’t work like that. I’m barely holding this
together. Hiding. Getting money. There is no goddamn plan!”
Dr. Swarm hurls her goggles into the yard, saying, “I wear those stupid things
and this coat, but I’m not some mad scientist with a scheme to save us. My so-
called lab? That’s mostly junk downstairs, missing bits and pieces. There’s no
supercomputer coming up with an algorithm to fix our fractured, fucking lives.
There’s no solution bubbling in beaker.”
Tremors fill Dr. Swarm’s limbs. She slides down the doorframe into a sitting
position. She says, “I’m not going to be here forever. Dearly, I—”

26 DEARLY BLEAK
 “No. We can keep you here.”
“Dearly, this… this is a conversation we need to have.”
“We can keep you here!”
“Dearly.”
“We just need to feed.”
“There’s no food.”
“There is. We go after them.”
“Them?”
“The cult. The corporation. We hunt them. We eat every one of them.”
“We?”
“It’s the thing me and the Worm agree the most on.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be listening to a demi-god grub that wants to eat the
world.”
“Maybe you should get mad! Maybe you shouldn’t hide like a coward!”
“Dearly beloved.”
The boy hops off the seesaw, the opposite end smashing into the ground with
a rusty clang.
“Mom said that. You don’t get to say that.”
“Dearly!”
The boy in the suit storms off. A voice like twin black holes eating each other
fills Doctor Swarm’s mind.
WE HUNGER.
Doctor Swarm breathes. She wills herself to stay together. In the end, only a
finger squirms away.

From the Journal of Dr. Samara Chang:

My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.
Success! A former colleague of mine recently worked on a project to create the
world’s first “living” nanobots. They took stem cells from an African clawed frog,
Xenopus laevis, and used them to construct these xenobots, about one millimeter
wide. These little blob bodies are built from living tissue, designed by computer
models, and evolved through algorithms.
I cannot, to my knowledge of the limitations of what I am, ingest and replicate a
non-organic nanobot. However, I acquired a sample of the amphibian-made xenobots
and was able to do just that! The applications, well, they could be very interesting.
I don’t know how to describe what this means to me. Any breakthrough or
success or just doing something proactive… Feels good. Feeling a fraction of my
old self in there somewhere. More tests to follow.
This is Dr. Samara Chang signing off.

Chapter Seven 27
 There exists a vacant, ghost town of a strip mall riddled with sores that were
businesses. No new commerce ever grew back on the blighted spot. It is a kingdom
of rats, trash, and opossums. Weeds reach up from the underworld through the
cracks of the empty parking lot.
Dearly Bleak enters the front doors of the graveyard of a restaurant. This is the
place he comes to think, a place that soothes both the boy and the Worm. He smells
the ancient grease. He listens to the quality of the silence, the quiet of chiropteran
wings flapping in a vacuum — silence so total, he can hear the faint, occasional
waves of roach phalanxes skittering behind the wall. Dearly takes a seat in his
favorite booth in utter blackness, but the dark can no longer hide anything from
his eyes.
Once upon a time, this place was alive. Parents brought children here. Fast
food sizzled and syrupy drink poured by the gallon. Tokens clinked into Skee-
Ball machines and arcade games. Tickets were traded for plastic treasures. Lights
blinked and sounds blared.
Dearly looks to the stage. There repose the cadavers of animatronic animals
holding instruments, tattered, spongy flesh still clinging to their skeletons. Missing
patches of fur reveal robotic innards. Dearly smiles at the rictus grin of a purple
hippo. Each undead cartoon stands frozen in poses of ecstatic performance, like
the ashy remains in Pompeii or nuclear shadows burnt into the walls of Hiroshima.
Dearly grimaces. He hates fighting with Momma Swarm. He said things he
should not have said. She’s coming undone, and there is only one way he can help
her. Sitting in the post-apocalyptic ruins of the happy kingdom, the boy and the
Worm come to an agreement.
Pulling a smartphone from his suit pocket, Dearly sends the electronic messag-
es that will set it all in motion. The Worm had convinced him to visit certain places
on the internet and cultivate a potential pantry. Time has proven the Worm wise.
The boy and the Worm wait for their meal. They pass the time by looking at
their silent, frozen stage show. Googly eyes, glaucoma-clouded with dust, stare
back. The ragged automatons pay silent obeisance to the Tyrant Worm. Grime and

28 DEARLY BLEAK
decay and Dearly Bleak hold illimitable dominion over all.
Tiny hands clap in the dark.

•••

Herman Blaire pulls into the desolate parking lot, reminding himself for the
thousandth time that this is too good to be true.
“If it looks too good to be true, it’s probably too good to be true,” he says
through a thick brush of mustache.
The last of the sunset afterglow quickly bleeds out of the sky, and it does not
look like the lights of the parking lot will ever return to life again. Herman rolls
slowly through. He reassured himself that he would just pull through, make visual
confirmation, and never get out of the car. He’d pull away and make an excuse.
There was always next time.
Herman’s hand, however, puts the car in park. He’s hungry. He feels a gentle
buzzing like cicadas behind his eyes. He feels a little drop of adrenalin, not enough
to bring panic but boldness. Herman gets out of the car.
Before the hollowed-out storefront, a little boy in a black suit stands with per-
fect suavity, hands in pockets. His crimson necktie flaps in the wind like a bloody
tongue.
Herman stands thirty feet away. His palms sweat.
“Oh, hey. Are, uh, are you…?” Herman says, checking his phone even though
he’s memorized it. “Are you VampSquid66?”
“I am.”
“Oh. Good. Great. I didn’t know if you’d show. Would you like to—?”
“No.”
“Um?”
“Step closer.”
Herman obeys.
“Kneel.”
Herman obeys. The little stones and blacktop bite into his bare knees, and
some distant part of his mind regrets wearing shorts.
“Remove your hat.”
“M-my hat?”
“You won’t need it anymore.”
The glove comes off.

•••

Dearly once prided himself on the number of horror movies he had seen for
one so young. When staring down the barrel of terminal disease, your parents

Chapter Eight 29
 pretty much let you watch anything. Dearly used to like movies featuring the trope
of the reluctant monster. Delving far enough into the internet is a lot like being
able to read minds, in that one quickly discovers the pitfalls of hearing everyone’s
every thought. Dearly had done both. The problem with the horror movie concept
of the reluctant monster, Dearly decided, was the idea that there would ever be a
dilemma, that you could ever run out of morally palatable options, that you could
eat all day, every day and never scrape the plate.

•••

They take Dearly Bleak at just the right moment. High-powered, magnifying
lenses show them the scene. A middle-aged man in shorts kneels by the child, the
mantle of the tentacular hand hooding the top half of his face like a cowl. The
unmarked vehicles enter the parking lot just as beak in the palm of Dearly’s hand
cracks bone. They exit their vehicles just as boy and Worm shudder and gasp, tast-
ing the fruit of the skull.
“Derek Bleak, you are to come with us.”
The hollowed head of Herman Blaire hits the blacktop. Dearly looks up at the
people in suits. Some carry guns, some carry stranger devices. How had they snuck
up on him? The boy and the Worm have fed but have not had the time to digest all
those messy thoughts. They are as sluggish as a prey-bloated snake.
In the gravid pause, the lead suit advances, gun raised, free hand outstretched.
“Come on, kid.”
“We think not.” The tentacular hand writhes, and Dearly shows the man the
exact succession of images that break his mind.
The man screams.
The suited folk yell to one another.
“Simons? What’s wrong? Simons!”
“Hold your fire!”
“Jesus!”
“I said hold your fire!”
Dearly turns, too late, to see the eight standing behind him. Yellow sweater
vests, waxy skin. Each holds a leather-bound book. They do not open their mouths
so much as the top of their soft heads flip back. It reminds Dearly of a Pez dispens-
er he once owned.
The Vermiculated Chorus sings. Each of the eight releases a cacophony of tiny,
wriggling voices. Swollen and slow, the Tyrant Worm falls asleep to the blasphe-
mous multi-lullaby. For the first time in what seems like forever, the boy is alone.
Dearly loses control of the right side of his body and falls to the ground.
Things move quickly. The Chorus and Dearly are brought into an unmarked
vehicle. The suited folk shout to one another.
“Christ. Simons, stop!”

30 DEARLY BLEAK
 “Tell them we’re coming in.”
“Simons… he tore his eyes out!”
“Get him secured.”
“He won’t stop!”
“Cuff his fucking hands!”
The cuffs don’t help. Even without his eyes, Simons still sees the things that
Dearly Bleak showed him. There are sights that live on past the feeble jelly. Si-
mons continues to scream. He does not stop.

From the Journal of Dr. Samara Chang:

My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.
Fuck. I’m not human tonight. I’m not me. This isn’t my body. It’s all unravel-
ling. I can’t.
I can’t remember my wife’s name. It’s written somewhere. I can look it up.
But I can’t fucking remember. Can’t maintain a proper emotion. They’re all erratic.
Anemic. Can’t even get angry at those I should be angry at. There’s just the ves-
tigial desire for a family. It’s faint, a ghost rattling its chains in me. Dearly speaks
to that ghost. I don’t know if that’s codependency or a healthy coping mechanism.
It’s all that’s holding my parts together.
And it won’t last. The next time I come apart might be the last. I’d like to say
that I’ve got it all figured out, that amazing things are happening in my lab. I would
like to.
Dearly says “we” instead of “I” with more frequency. I don’t know if that’s a
good or a bad thing. What will this all be like for him when I’m gone?
I suppose I’ve always known this would happen. I’ve been preparing for it. I
just don’t know how to tell Dearly.
This is Dr. Samara Chang signing off.

Chapter Eight 31
 Doctor Swarm wanted, very badly, to react by smashing her lab equipment in
a frothing wrath. Rather, she wanted to want to. Instead, she had a panic attack and
collapsed to the floor. Her head sprouted lampreys which bit her in bodily confusion.
Doctor Swarm breathed until her extremities reached their normal number.
She reabsorbed the one that tried to crawl away. Now, on the floor, she assesses
the situation.
Dearly’s smartphone contained an application that allowed Doctor Swarm to
look up his location at any time. That application was turned off. Dearly would
never turn it off, not even after a fight. That means They had him. That means her
double-back-to-North-Carolina plan was foolish. She’d delivered Dearly to them.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid—” Doctor Swarm quiets herself before the tirade splits
her in all directions. She breathes. Dearly deserves better than this. She thinks.
Doctor Swarm feels a movement inside her. It’s not entirely unpleasant. She
feels something that is not quite rage, but an ornate tombstone erected in ancient
memoriam of the emotion. The soil of that grave trembles.

•••

The rat wearily crosses the desolate parking lot, given how much unusual ac-
tivity and violence occurred there tonight. The rat scampers towards the figure of
a woman standing on the broken blacktop. Danger, says the rat’s instincts. Yet the
call of fellow rats, females in heat, coming from under the folds of the woman’s
long coat were too enticing by far.
The rat stops in front of the woman, stands on its hind legs, and considers.
Then, it crawls under the edge of her overcoat. The rat squeals once, once only.
Doctor Swarm ingests the rodents, both the rats that came from her and this
new specimen, absorbs them all into her totality. Then she knows. She paces across
the parking lot.

32 DEARLY BLEAK
 “Dearly fed,” says Doctor Swarm. “That’s when they took him. They removed
the bodies. They cleansed the scene.”
Finding Dearly was not the problem. She knows where they’re headed. What’s
more, she can feel where he is, roughly. She always kept a bit of herself with the
boy, just a tiny piece. Under a microscope, it would resemble a tardigrade or water
bear. It was quite resilient, lived in the fibers of Dearly’s suit, and called out to
Doctor Swarm.
Doctor Swarm looks down. While lost in her thoughts, she hadn’t noticed the
other rats gather about. She invites them all in.

From the Journal of Dr. Samara Chang:

My name is Dr. Samara Chang. I am on this planet.
Success. A month ago, I acquired a particularly nasty strain of fungal spore
(patented by Luminesce Global Corporation). I ingested the sample and, over the
weeks, have modified its design further. The applications could be aggressive.
This is Dr. Samara Chang signing off.

Chapter Nine 33
 It should be noted that the security guards only witnessed the horror. They did
not see the sadness. The horror was not that the surging cloud of spores entering
the greenhouse instantly irritated the eyes and caused an unlikely flow of mucous
from the nostrils, but that the cloud moved with will and purpose. The vengeful
miasma wasted no time with random drifting, instead it rushed, every particle of it
rushed, into the noses and mouths of the two men.
The security guards only had time to open the front doors before collapsing.
They drowned in the fluids of their own lungs. Then, they witnessed no more.
Now, seven minutes later, they do not see the lone, upper torso of a woman
crawling into the greenhouse at a pitiful pace. They do not see her crawling to-
wards their bodies, dragging the empty lower half of her overcoat behind her. They
do not see her sobbing, willing herself back together in a process both agonizing
and achingly slow. Gradually, the spores flow out of the corpses in wet masses of
bile, blood, and mucus, slithering to her. The overcoat finally fills in.
The sobs metamorphose into breathing and then into muttered mantras. Doc-
tor Swarm stands. She tests her body. She’d manage to get most of herself back,
no time to look for the rest. She takes the keycards and a handgun from the prone
security guards and limps across the greenhouse.
She ignores the cooing sounds emanating from plant pods the size of large
watermelons. She gives the hydroponic pond a wide berth. Her caution is rewarded
by the dim silhouette of something shifting below the surface, waiting.
Before entering the elevator, Doctor Swarm turns back to survey her handi-
work. In theory, the bodies of the security guards would form growths over the
next few days, then rise and move, motivated by a new set of biological impera-
tives. That, however, was only a theory. There was no time to test it.
Doctor Swarm enters the elevator and descends.

•••

34 DEARLY BLEAK
 The elevator opens many floors down and presents Doctor Swarm with a di-
lemma. She navigates the labyrinth of halls well enough, following the call of the
little bit of her living on Dearly. However, after a series of doors that open to her
pilfered keycards, she encounters a door that denies her access.
Doctor Swarm considers breaking down her entire body into components
small enough to get through, but she doubts she would be able to reassemble her-
self. She looks at the sidearm and searches the halls. There might be an employee
or researcher who has the correct keycard or fob, but she would likely have to
shoot that person, and a gunshot would bring unwanted attention.
The dilemma resolves itself in the form of an ajar door leading to a small room.
Laying on a table is a very fresh cadaver, a researcher. Blood cakes the fingers of
the corpse. The eyes are gouged out and the tongue swallowed.
Dearly did this, thinks Doctor Swarm. Recently too. They just brought the
body here until they can deal with it.
With the cadaver’s keycard, Doctor Swarm opens the impeding door.

•••

The door led to a massive, high-ceilinged, and mostly empty room. A few
items of equipment dotted the space, covered in sheets of plastic. Whatever the
room’s purpose, it had not yet been fully outfitted.
That is where Doctor Swarm finds Dearly Bleak. The boy lays weeping on the
floor, his right side paralyzed. Surrounding him stands a circle of eight individuals
in yellow sweater vests. The unhinged mouths and heads of the Vermiculated Cho-
rus hang wide open, singing their terrible multi-lullaby.
“Get away from him.”
Doctor Swarm steps out from behind a plastic-shrouded machine, gun pointed.
The Chorus ignores her.
“I said get away!” A gunshot. The soft head of one of the cultists explodes
with a pulpy squelch, showering yellow-green maggots all about. Yet the body
still stands. These lesser worms still sing, though the acoustic quality of the song
changes through the raggedy esophagus. Still singing, the eight turn towards Doc-
tor Swarm.
“Dearly?”
“Momma Swarm?” says the boy. The right side of his face sags like a stroke
victim. The left side of his mouth smiles when he sees that Swarm is wearing the
goggles around her neck.
A second, louder gunshot shatters the moment. Doctor Swarm’s knee disin-
tegrates in a splash of bone shards and gore. She drops to her other knee. In the
echoing moments, she watches her own spilled blood pool together, congeal, and
slither away shrieking and hissing. She sees a dozen security guards pour into the
room, armed with assault rifles. She sees Dearly’s half-smile dissolve.

Chapter Ten 35
 A familiar voice plays over many speakers saying, “Dr. Samara Chang, put
down the gun. Please. It’s all over. This doesn’t have to end on a bad note.”
“No?” gasps Doctor Swarm.
“No,” echoes the speakers. “The boy is in no danger, but you’ve seen what he
can do. We had to take precautions. We need you, because of your special connec-
tion with him. We’ve perfected a procedure to remove the disc from your chest.
You can go back to your old life, your normal life, or whatever amounts to normal.
We still value your work here.”
“Really?”
“Yes. You’re a scientific mind, aren’t you? Be rational. Be reasonable. This can
still be a win for you.”
Doctor Swarm looks at her ruined knee. She looks at the many guns staring her
down. She looks at Dearly. The tentacular hand lays limp. There is no Worm, only
a scared little boy. A snot bubble pops in his left nostril. The eight cultists still sing.
“Dearly?” she says. The boy looks up. “It’s going to be alright.”
“Dr. Chang?” say the speakers.
She knows that voice. She knows the smile attached to it. These days, she
knows what can hide behind a smile.
“Samara.”
She looks up, saying, “It’s Doctor Swarm!”
The security guards tense, and Doctor Swarm screams. Green light fills her
mouth and eyes in a jack-o’-lantern glow. She explodes. She does not come apart
so much as produce a surging and impossible biomass of voracious insects. Doctor
Swarm becomes a plague, a biblical wrath, filling the large chamber with a tornado
of winged arthropods. In the center of this hungry swarm floats the disc, glowing
green from its strangely circuited sigils.
Dearly Bleak watches it all from the floor. In a frozen moment, the boy glimps-
es one of the bugs — a sort of fist-sized beetle with bat-like wings, an exoskeleton
of black onyx and metallic gold, and razor mandibles. There are screams. There
are wild bursts of gunfire. There is the piping singing of the Vermiculated Chorus.
But the buzzing drone of the swarm drowns out all.
The glittering storm rages through the chamber. In the staccato of the green
light and darting beetle shadows, Dearly watches the flesh strip away from the
security guards’ bodies, as if in time lapse photography. The swarm rips apart the
eight cultists, the bugs devouring each of the little maggots inhabiting them. Ev-
eryone is devoured, all but Dearly.
Then the beetle horde scatters, through ventilation ducts, out the door, into the
halls. The relic disc falls to the floor. Its light goes out. It lies dormant. All is quiet.
Dearly Bleak stands up. With the song of the Chorus silenced, the boy is re-
united with the Worm. The tendrils of his right hand quiver back to life.
“Momma Swarm?” Dearly walks to the ancient disc and picks it up.

36 DEARLY BLEAK
 “Come back?” He shakes the disc and drops it. He picks up two dead beetles
and tries pressing them together.
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…” He drops the bugs. His little
voice cracks.
“Come back.”
Silence and tears.
“You are a dapper little man,” says the speaker voice only not from a speaker.
“I approve.”
Dearly turns and sees a handsome man in his own expensive suit. The man is
flanked by more armed guards.
“More than approve,” says the Executive. “I’m impressed. A proper Renegade
finds and brings a Feral back from the brink. Not only that, he stabilizes and main-
tains said Feral well past her expiration date, forming a rudimentary family unit.
It’s unprecedented. It’s remarkable what you’ve done. You should be proud. It was
Dr. Chang we were after, but I do believe you are the real prize.”
The Executive smiles the way mushroom clouds smile at the sun.
“And now, little man, you need to come with us. We have so much work to do,
and you’re all alone now.”
“We’re never alone,” says Dearly Bleak. In the shadow of a moment, the boy
and the Worm come to an agreement and make a deeper pact.
“We?”
“When we agree, we say ‘we.’”
There is little time to scream.

Chapter Ten 37
 Sunday night at the offices of Luminesce Global. The building is empty. The
company is very clear on encouraging employees not to sneak in hours on a Sun-
day. Proper rest and recreation boundaries are good for the workforce and their
families. It’s good for the company. Yet leadership comes with a price. The lights
in the Executive’s office burn bright.
“Yes, tragic… tragic,” says the Executive into his Bluetooth ear device. “In
the end, Dr. Chang and Derek Bleak both perished. We lost many personnel, and
you lost the eight missionaries you sent. However, does this really have to end on
a tragic note?”
The Executive grins.
“Well, let me answer that question with this one: what is the real prize of these
endeavors? I submit to you that the prize was our organizations coming together.
We respect what the Starry Hope Foundation brings to the table. Yeah? Good. I
agree. Now, let’s take it a step further. I want our leadership to meet directly with
yours. Yes. Exactly. Think of what we might accomplish.”
“Now let me sweeten this offer and say that we have something special for
you. It’s true that the vessel, the boy, expired, but we were able to save the Worm.
Yes. Well, I don’t know, you’re the experts on that. We offer it to you. Fantastic.
Your elders can all visit here. I’ll host you myself, and we’ll set you up comfort-
ably. And hey, no busses this time.”
The Executive chuckles.
“We have our own private jet that can accommodate you. No security checks.
I’ll set it all up with my assistant. Yes. Ever the praises. Bye.”
The Executive hangs up and makes another phone call.
“Hey, John, my man. I just wanted to say thank you for understanding. Emer-
gency dental work is a bitch. We’ll do a raincheck on getting your pond going.
Great. Thanks. Hmm? Oh, sorry. Yeah, my mouth is still a little numb. Say hi to
the family. Bye.”
The Executive ends the phone call.
“Bye. Bye. Bye.”

38 DEARLY BLEAK
 The Executive smiles. His eyes slowly roll back into his head as he drools with
a pitter-patter on his pant leg. The Executive slumps with loathsome plasticity into
his chair. Sitting, cross-legged on the back of this expensive office chair is Dearly
Bleak. The Executive dangles and bounces, like a marionette, at the ends of the
suckered tentacles of Dearly’s right hand. Dearly releases, and the Executive’s
hollowed-out head hits the desk, a large hole bored into the back of the skull.
Dearly jumps down. He rolls the chair and the smiling husk out of the way.
With quick fingers, the boy types on the computer keyboard, drafting a series of
emails to the Executive’s assistant. Dearly clicks SEND, setting it all in motion.
Reaching out into the void with his mind, Dearly thinks, Marco! A few min-
utes later, he hears the mental voice of Dahlia reply, Polo! He smiles. The boy and
the Worm were in agreement. They would not devour the world with Dahlia in it.
In the meantime, there is still so very much to eat.
Looking at the remains of the Executive, the dapper lad admires the man’s
necktie before removing it and tying it around his own neck.
Dearly Bleak awaits his next meal.

Epilogue: Dinner Time 39

 Joshua Alan Doetsch is a sentient word virus spreading across the collective
unconscious through the vector of human language. He’s taken on many forms as
short stories, coalesced as the novel Strangeness in the Proportion, and shaped
himself into an anthropomorphic guise as Lead Writer of such video games as Age
of Conan and The Secret World. He also writes for tabletop games like Vampire:
The Masquerade and Scarred Lands and occasionally does voice acting. Help
him spread the weird by visiting his Patreon, for stories and audio fiction, at pat-
reon.com/joshuadoetsch. You may also summon him, with offerings of cuttlefish
ink when the stars are right, at joshuadoetsch.com or @JoshuaDoetsch on Twitter.

40 DEARLY BLEAK
Once, there was a boy named Dearly Bleak. That's
not his birth name, but that's not the point.
Dearly became so deathly ill, his parents
allowed a smiling self-help cult to turn their
son's body into a home for a cosmic maggot god.
"Ever the praises to the Conqueror Worm!"
"Ever the praises to the Crawling Library!"
"The Knowledge that Eats!"
"The Broodsac Sultan!"
Dearly was healed, and then everyone
screamed. For a time, Dearly found
himself all on his own, though
never ever alone. One day, to his
delight, he found fellow misfits
and deviants like him.
This is the story of the boy and
the Worm and what they are willing
to do to the conspiracies that
threaten their found family. This
is the story of a boy who likes
toys, lunchboxes, and catching
bullfrogs. But most of all, he
likes brains.

COFD014