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  THIS WAS THE NIGHT

  OF THE CRAWLING

  TERROR!

  SQUIRM is the blood-curdling shocker calculated to make you writhe with horror. A sleepy Southern town doesn’t know what’s hit it when a freak nightmare of a storm brings down the overhead electric power lines which then direct a massive electrical charge into the wet mud. And that’s just the beginning. For the slimy, oozing, crawling horror which results—an angry, rampaging mass of carnivorous superworms—is the most terrifying threat ever to be unleashed on (or under) the surface of the planet . . .

  TERROR IN THE EARTH

  Geri stepped into the tub, eager to feel the shower wash the disgusting slime off her body.

  She turned the faucets and waited. There was a hollow gurgle, a sputter, and a cough. But there was no water.

  Fortunately, she didn’t look up at the shower head. For, probing their way through the holes in the outlet were the heads of a dozen plum-colored worms. Slowly, they oozed out of the shower head.

  Geri spun the faucets this way and that, unaware that a horde of vicious, hungry worms was inching its way to drop on her bare flesh, ready to fall into her long hair, to burrow into her scalp and skin, and destroy her . . .

  An Edgar Lansbury–Joseph Beruh Production

  starring

  Don Scardino • Patricia Pearcy

  R.A. Dow • Jean Sullivan

  Executive Producers

  Edgar Lansbury & Joseph Beruh

  Producer

  George Manas

  Music composed by

  Robert Prince

  Written and directed by

  Jeff Lieberman

  Colour Released by

  Brent Walker Film Distributors Ltd

  First published in Great Britain by Sphere Books Ltd 1976

  Reprinted 1976, 1978 (twice)

  Copyright © American International Pictures, Inc.

  Ace Books Novelization Copyright © 1976 Ace Books

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN: 0-7221-2731-6

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Hunt Barnard Printing Ltd,

  Aylesbury, Bucks

  PROLOGUE

  It was a sultry night in July of 1960. For four straight days the white sun had baked Long County on the east coast of Georgia until the rich black loam became almost concrete-hard, the crops drooped like troops of parched soldiers, and the air seared the lungs of those brave or foolish enough to venture out in it. And at night there was scarcely any respite. The sea breeze that normally drifted in from Sapelo Sound at dusk seemed reluctant to challenge the solid wall of stagnant hot air lying over the shore, and half-heartedly rippled through a fringe of moss-festooned live-oaks before faltering and finally dying.

  Little Roger Grimes, age seven-and-a-half years old, lay atop his sweat-damp bed, clad only in a rough linen nightshirt that his mother had cut down from one of his daddy’s worn-out workshirts. He probably could have slept naked, but the shirt reminded him of his mama, now dead two years, and it comforted him, protected him like armor against the scary thoughts that had lately begun to obsess him.

  Thoughts about—worms.

  Having grown up on his daddy’s bait farm, Roger should have been able to take worms for granted by now, should have been able to regard them the way, say, his friend Bobby Brinton regarded the manure on his daddy’s cattle farm. After a while, Bobby had told him, you could walk through the stuff up to your ankles, even eat a sandwich while working in it, and you wouldn’t even smell it, wouldn’t even know it was there, really.

  Same way with worms. Until his mother had died, God rest her soul, of influenza complicated by fatal double pneumonia, Roger had thought of worms the same way he thought of the air he breathed or the soil he trod on or the rain that trickled over his face. Worms were just part of his environment. Worms were the medium in which he existed. Worms were the way his daddy made his living, a commodity like cotton or soybeans, a currency like coins or paper money. Though the city people who came to Fly Creek to fish sometimes shuddered at the sight of a six-inch sandworm writhing on a hook, or the touch of a dozen of them, like so many greasy segmented rubber tubes, responding to a hand thrust into the bait-box, Roger was scarcely aware that these creatures were any different from a pet cat or dog. Hell, he’d once seen this lady, a wife of a Savannah businessman come to Fly Creek to try his hand at the fabled bass that haunted these estuarial waters, faint dead away when Roger reached into a crateful of sandworms right up to his shoulder. After that he tried to remember that most folks didn’t regard worms quite the same way he did.

  At any rate, that had been his attitude till his mama died. Then something happened at her funeral, and he’d never been able to look at a worm again without feeling a wave of nausea in the pit of his stomach. His mama’s casket, a plain pine box that his daddy had lovingly hewn out of some loblolly timber on their farm, rested on a little wooden platform above the yawning hole into which it would soon be lowered. It had been drizzling, and now it began to pour in earnest. Clutching his daddy’s hand tightly, Roger leaned forward to stare with curiosity into the grave.

  As he looked, rivulets of water trickled over the rim of the grave and washed dirt and clay into the hole. Reflexively, his eyes accustomed to seeking them in rain-soaked soil, Roger noticed the shiny purplish heads of earthworms, disturbed by the trickling rain-water, poking out of the fractured walls. Suddenly, his grief, which Lord only knows was unbearable enough, was suffused with horror as he realized that in due time the box in which his mother’s body resided would rot and be invaded by those very worms—no, not just the box, but her body itself.

  At that moment Preacher Borden, the purple-faced minister from Fly Creek First Baptist, raised his voice over the splatter of torrential rain on the muddy cemetary grounds, and read a familiar passage from the Book of Job, Chapter xix, verse 25:

  “I know that my redeemer liveth,” he shouted hoarsely, “and that he shall stand at the later day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.”

  Roger’s eyes widened and the black eyeballs bulged like two rounded chunks of anthracite. His body began to tremble and his fists clenched involuntarily. “No!” he screamed. “NO, NO, NOT WORMS, NOT MY POOR MAMA!” His father clutched at the boy’s wrist but Roger yanked away, sobbing hysterically, the rainwater spilling down his ebony locks and mingling with his tears. “DON’T LET THE WORMS EAT HER, PLEASE! DON’T LET THE WORMS GET MY MAMA!”

  The poor distracted boy leaped into the grave and began pounding the walls with his fists, pulping the soft heads of the earthworms as they ventured out of their sodden abodes. Roger’s daddy and two strong farmhands had leaped into the grave and hauled Roger out, and one of the hands hustled the boy to a car while the shock-stricken preacher, congregation, and the bereaved husband finished the ceremony in triple-time.

  Still insane with grief and fear, Roger refused to return to the bait farm. His daddy had to put him up with his cousins in town until, no less than three weeks later, the boy returned to his senses and came back to the farm.

  Though the incident was eventually submerged in the minds of Willie Grimes and his son Roger, Roger could never quite look at, touch, or even think about worms the way he had before his mother’s death. He could scarcely bring himself to visit his mother’s grave, and now when he worked with worms on the farm it was with ill-disguised repugnance. He had dreams so ghastly it was a blessing he
forgot them the next morning—except for one recurring one he could not forget, a dream that he himself was a worm, a huge sandworm three feet long, comfortably ensconced in the soil where the world and the bright light of the sun couldn’t find him until one day his father thrust a spade into the ground and found him and grasped him by the neck and yanked him out of the earth, thrusting him into a sack with a thousand others like him. Then one day his daddy pulled him out of the sack and impaled his belly with a fishhook . . .

  Now, on this sultry night in July of 1960, the restless boy sat up and thrust his long legs over the side of the bed. The broiling night smothered him like a blanket and he stuck his head out of the window, sucking air into his mouth in the foolish hope of catching some errant pocket of coolness. No such luck.

  He looked up at the moon, a football-shaped blue-white jewel hanging high on the throat of the night, and though the sight of this lovely satellite inspired romantic or philosophical or inspirational thoughts in the minds of just about any other soul who happened to look at it that night, to Roger it said only one thing: There would be no worms tonight.

  For, light is the enemy of the worm. Not just the brilliant sun, but even the subdued moon, indeed even a flicker of heat lightning on an otherwise black night, is enough to keep a worm from surfacing. In the obsessive mind of Roger Grimes, where everything had begun to have associations with worms, a moonlit night meant that his enemies remained underground where they would give him a few hours’ surcease from tortured thoughts and dreams.

  Then he noticed another light—no, two.

  One was the glow of an electric globe filtering through the window and cracks of the small clapboard outbuilding, formerly tenanted by chickens, where his father crated and stored his worms. In the southwest corner of this building, his father had created a little area for himself which he alternately referred to as his office, laboratory, or library. There, when the day’s work was done, Willie Grimes repaired to read about, examine, and experiment with his worms, an occupation which Roger found almost beyond belief. It was bad enough his father worked with the creatures all day long; it was incomprehensible that the man should work with them at day’s end too, when any other laboring man in his right mind settled before the television set to watch a baseball game, or drove into town to hoist a beer with the boys or seek the companionship of a woman. But then Roger correctly wondered whether his father was indeed quite in his right mind.

  Had the yellow glow of the unshaded lightbulb in his father’s office been the only light coming from the building, Roger probably would have pulled his head in and tried to wrestle with sleep again in his bed. But after a moment he saw a brilliant blue flash as well. It lasted only a second, but it was so strong it left its imprint on his retina for a whole minute afterwards. A couple of minutes later, it happened again. It reminded him of the unbearably bright blue sparkle of an acetylene torch on steel, except that the source was probably not gas but electricity. Roger was able to conclude this because he’d noticed the yellow light in the office dim almost to extinction where the blue light blazed, meaning the blue light was draining electricity substantially.

  Though normally apprehensive about visiting his daddy’s office, even at a reasonable daytime hour let alone the cusp of midnight, Roger’s curiosity propelled him to the slat-back chair in his room where his trousers were. He stepped into them hurriedly, hitched the straps to the studs at the waist, and stepped into his heavy work-boots. He clomped down the steps of the farmhouse, the tails of his nightshirt fluttering behind him, and through the screen door, down the porch steps, and across the twenty-five yards of dirt path to the outbuilding. As he was halfway there the blue spark illuminated the building and its environs magically, casting the surrounding trees into azure-limned silhouettes and hurling grotesque blue shadows across the expanse of tilled soil where the worms were farmed.

  “Daddy?” Roger decided to call out as he approached the outbuilding so as not to scare his father.

  “Son? That you? Come in, come in! See what we got here.”

  Roger stepped on the split log that served as a step up to the door, then shouldered his way apprehensively into the building. The office was small, about ten by ten, with the low ceiling typical of chicken coops, which Willie Grimes always complained about but never got around to doing anything about. On the wall opposite the door Willie had erected some simple pine shelves that sagged in the middle, like a swayback mule, beneath the weight of dozens and dozens of heavy volumes. Willie Grimes was self-educated and had trouble reading the Savannah newspapers, but when it came to any literature pertaining to worms, he not only grasped it but seemed to grasp beyond it, to Latin terms, to physiological structure, to cell composition, to the intricacies of the nervous and vascular and digestive and reproductive systems. Never in a rush, he might spend several nights in a row hunting down the exact meaning of the term podial papilla or fitting some family member like Scalibregma into its class, Polychaeta, and that into its phylem, Annelida. He had the amateur’s passion, determination, curiosity, and patience, and had he had a formal education might well have made important contributions to the story of these creatures.

  Roger stared for a moment at the books piled on his father’s shelves: “The Physiology of the Vascular System of Invertebrates,” “Properties of the Nervous Systems of Annelids,” “Catalogue of the Polychaetous Annelids of the World,” and on and on. Even a few books in foreign languages, which the man had brought to doctors and teachers and other professional people in the community well versed in those languages, and prevailed on them to translate passages for him.

  On the wall to his left stood an old kitchen table that his father had converted into an experimental station, with trays of dyes, chemicals, and bottles and beakers of multi-colored solutions too exotic for Roger to begin to figure out. On the wall to his right was a crate of worms about the size of an orange crate but with slats fitted tightly together unlike an orange crate. His father was hunched over it sorting out a tangle of sandworms.

  Roger sniffed the air and inhaled the familiar odors of freshly turned loam, the ammoniac stench of worm excreta, the variety of chemical smells mingling disagreeably, and yet another smell, one which he had difficulty identifying though he had smelled it before. It was something he had sniffed—where?—yes, down by the high-voltage electric towers after a rainstorm. He had no name for it, but as if reading his mind, his daddy, without looking up, said, “That’s called ozone, boy.”

  “Ozone?”

  “Uh-huh. You get it when an electrical spark jumps through the atmosphere. I don’t know exactly how it works, but it’s like it burns up some of the air and causes it to stink somewhat.”

  Willie Grimes straightened up and looked a little crossly at his son. He was a rough-hewn man with straight jet hair and dark, humorless eyes. His shoulders were rounded from the double burden of farming and hunching over books and laboratory apparatus, and his face was stubbled with the salt-and-pepper of a prematurely greying beard. Willie Grimes was thirty-eight but he looked Close to fifty.

  “Am I bothering you, daddy?”

  “No, no. Just shut the door before every moth in the county flies in.”

  Roger stepped into the room and closed the wooden door behind him. His father had just draped a sandworm over the back of his fist and now carried it to the table. He deposited it in the soil that filled an old fishtank and pulled the lightbulb that hung from the ceiling close to the creature. It bunched its segmented body together like an accordion, plunged its head into the soil, convulsed and squirmed for some thirty seconds, then disappeared entirely, drawing its quivering tail into the dirt behind it. Then he reached behind the fishtank and grasped two wires, a red and a black, tipped with alligator clips at one end and plugged into a socket at the other. He made sure not to touch the clips together. Roger realized that the blue flashes were connected with these electric wires somehow and gazed with fascination at his father’s hands.

  G
rimes turned his back on his son and tried to settle down to his experiment, but after a moment, as if feeling the boy’s eyes boring into his spine, he put the wires down carefully on a wooden block and turned around to face Roger, a scowl reddening his cheeks. “Something bothering you, boy?”

  “I just couldn’t sleep. It’s hot as an oven in there, daddy.”

  “Well, what can I do about it?”

  “Nothin’. I just thought I’d come by and see what you’re doin’. Saw these blue sparks comin’ from your window.”

  His father tilted his head and looked gimlet-eyed at his son. “You don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind.”

  “I know how you are about . . .” He clipped off the sentence and simply gestured in the direction of the worm crate.

  “I said I don’t mind, daddy,” Roger said. It wasn’t really true, but the boy had no way of conveying that he’d rather be with his daddy in this creepy room than alone with his fears in the house.

  Willie Grimes ran a knuckle over his stubbly cheeks. “I’m testing the effects of electric current on these here worms,” he said, tapping a talon-like fingernail on the glass of the dirt-filled fishtank.

  “What’s it supposed to do?” the boy asked, taking a step closer but keeping his distance respectfully.

  His father thrust his chin in the direction of a scientific journal propped up delicately against an empty beaker on the corner of the table. “S’posed to stimulate ’em.”

  “Stimulate ’em to do what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know about sandworms,” Grimes replied. “The experiment in this journal was done on a different kind of worm, a tubeworm known as . . .” He wrapped his lips around the Latin term, then shrugged. “Well, what the hell’s the difference what it’s called? Anyway, they ran a current through the saline solution this worm was swimming in. Doubled its length in half the time it usually takes, meaning it consumed its food at twice the usual rate. Don’t ask me why—just did.”