The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Case of the Three Eye Man, Part 1 of 2

Mickey Malloy thought his tenure dealing with South Carolina weirdos was up, but now a fellow official is missing. Mick must descend into the balmy underworld beneath Columbia to find her, where things are nastier than he thought possible.

Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, All the Time is available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

The Case of the Three Eye Man directly follows The Case of the Skunk Ape, which should be read first.

Content warnings: Violence, Gun Violence, Body Horror, Mild Swearing, Alcohol Use, Tobacco Use, Drug Use, Creeps

TUESDAY NIGHT, JULY 14, 1942
THE HORSESHOE, THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA

“Worms,” Wendall Godard whispered to himself. “Run through with worms.”

He watched the couple walking hand-in-hand and shuddered. If the boy could only see her how Wendall did, he wouldn't let her skin anywhere near his. Though the boy wasn't much better. Wendall slunk in closer, trusting the summer night's darkness to cloak him. He moved with a practiced smoothness, a slow slide that prevented his insulated suit from brushing against itself.

The crotalinograph was warm on his face. Sweat dripped down his cheeks. It shouldn't have been this hot. Too much thermal discharge would begin to infect his view. Still, he was convinced, that could be fixed with further calibration of the viewing screen.

Some things, though, he wanted to see. The hidden things that people kept secret.

The worms.

He was only yards away then. The girl giggled, the boy threw his arm over her shoulders and drew her in close. The worms infesting her jumped and brightened, crawling faster at his touch. Wendall held his breath. It was all he could do stop himself from crying out, from warning the boy about the vermin inside her that would eat him alive.

Wendall took a deep breath and held it. He was a scientist, an observer. He was not to intervene, not even against the worms. He knew this. Even that idiot Professor Maddox knew this. It was part of their creed as researchers and inventors.

Why then, he wondered, did he bring the knife?

It was heavy in Wendall's hand, a motorized model designed to slice bread. He'd found it cut worms free from the flesh as easily as it sawed through a warm rye loaf. He had yet to attempt extraction of larger parasites, such as those inside a human, but it worked on chickens and rats well enough.

“Not yet,” he whispered, his voice hardly louder than the evening breeze rustling the oak leaves above him.

“Did you hear that?” the girl asked. She stopped in place and whirled around.

Her worms knew they were seen: they were nearly dancing inside her. Wendall's guts tightened. She was more worm than human.

Through his crotalinograph screen, he could trace the foul parasites coursing through her as golden, glowing lines. They started in her chest, bundled up in a tight, blazing knot that throbbed as they worked her like a marionette. From her chest, they twisted and spread and branched. They burrowed down her arms and legs and into her fingers and toes. The orange lines reached up her neck, drilling into her eyes, her lips, her tongue.

“I didn't hear a thing, doll,” the boy said. He pinched her, eliciting a near-convincing giggle. Wendall was disgusted. The worms wore her like a suit, and they played her part with flair.

He focused on the boy. The worms were coursing through him, as well. As a male, he should be strong enough to fight their influence, but he wouldn't recognize his coming downfall until he had been cored like Eve's apple. Golden threads blazed through every part of his body, even those most intimate. Wendall shuddered. He needn't guess which avenue the worms had used to transfer their progeny from her to him.

“Say babe, come here,” the boy said wryly. He took the girl's infested hand in his own and ran, pulling her along under they stood in the middle of the green, with only open sky above.

“What?” she asked, laughing and smoothing the wrinkles from her dress. The worms were pulsing within both of them now.

“Watch this,” the boy said confidently. He put two fingers in his mouth and let loose a peeling whistle. He put his arm around the girl's shoulders and pointed westward. Their parasites were squirming in unison.

Wendall did his best to avoid losing his lunch.

Something screamed a couple streets over, making him duck. A pop bounced between the old buildings.

“Fireworks?” the girl exclaimed, her worms wiggling with excitement as they twisted her gaze upward.

“Donnie and and the guys are putting on a show just for you and me, baby,” the boy told her. A trio of pops and crackles followed. Wendall watched the sky with them. The fireworks show continued for some minutes, each bursting rockets punctuated by the girl's giggles and claps. In Wendall's eyepieces, he could see neither color nor light. Instead, only a quick nova of hot gases that flared and expanded before trickling down to Earth to be swept away and cooled by the breeze.

The little show reached a crescendo within a few minutes. The girl squealed. Wendall found the man before her on one knee, whispering something only she, and the worms, could hear. Her interlaced network of parasites was practically rattling in anticipation. It had claimed a new host. Wendall stood up all the way, shocked that he'd let something like this happen. Despite his dedication to non-interference, he should not have let the parasites take a new victim.

The couple twisted around and stared at him. His aluminum-coated suit, so perfect for keeping his radiant body heat from fouling the crotaliograph's view-finder, was not designed for subtlety. It rasped if he moved too quickly, and the airborne barrage would light up its reflective skin in every color as surely as if he were wearing a mirror.

“Hey, you!” the boy shouted. He was on his feet again. The worms aligned in him, all directing him toward the silvery observer.

Wendall briefly considered the knife. Instead, he ran.

“Hey, stop!” the boy shouted after him. Wendall had never been strong enough to win a fight, nor friendly enough to talk himself out of one. But frequent practice had made made him good at running. Twisting and turning between the brick faculty buildings and near-empty residence halls, he lost the boy in short order. He didn't worry about further pursuit: the worms would call him back to the girl.

Wendall slipped between some bushes. His chest was tight, and his breath was coming in pained wheezes. He need to be home. He was near Sumter Street, near the College Hall, an area he knew well. His hidden avenues ran beneath this area like they'd been woven in. On these secret roads, in the warm dark, no one would bother him.

The manhole cover he was looking for glowed a dull orange half-a-block away. The leaky steam pipes below kept it warm from within and created a beacon that only the crotalinograph could detect. Wendall slipped his cat's paw out of his hip bag as he scuttled over. He hooked it into one of the finger holes and dragged up and away with all his strength.

He grunted and strained from the effort. The manhole cover grated against the cement, loud and obtrusive. His heart felt like it was going to burst, and his muscles tear. He held his breath, afraid if he let the air out he'd deflate like a balloon. He nearly had it clear when he heard someone else shouting.

“What in the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing?” an old man shouted. Wendall dropped the cover with an echoing clang. The person stalking over to him was riddled with parasites and waving a lit cigarette like a flare.

Wendall clenched his jaw and froze. The stagnant air whooshed out of his lungs and hissed between his locked teeth. The old man stopped in his tracks. The worms within him seemed to freeze as well. They knew that he knew.

The darkness beckoned him, and Wendall scrambled down the hole and ran. The old man's shouts followed him, but there was nothing he could do. The university's steam tunnels were so dark that Wendall might as well have dived into an ink pot. To his eyes, this place glowed like gold. The steam warmed every surface down there, lighting it up so brilliantly that he might as well have been prancing through the vaults at Fort Knox.

Rats scuttled out of his path as he ran, their little infestations guiding them away. Wendall was developing a theory about the worms. He had of late considered the possibility that they communicate. Not by verbal means, but by an as-yet unknown method. Rodents and birds infested with them ran from him. Every person he spoke to dismissed his observations as if reading from the same script. Professor Maddox, who Wendall had analyzed several times with the crotalinograph, not only denied the worms outright, but demanded that he stop using the device altogether. Maddox himself was lousy with the squirming things.

It made sense about Maddox. The worms knew he knew. They wanted to dissuade him. The professor had control over Wendall's time and resources. Maddox demanded all of his time. His only opportunities to test the crotalinograph existed because he went without sleep or food. The sample pills from Crown Pharmaceuticals had replaced both. More troubling was that he was becoming tolerant to his antiparasitic treatments. Despite increasing his dosage to one comparable to that of a full-grown horse, the worms' effects remained: the rash, the muscle ticks, the yellowing skin. They were desperate to grow within him.

He thought he'd found relief some weeks back when he'd taken the meeting with the man from Chicago. Word of his advances had reached some esoteric engineering circles who were excited about what he was doing. That slicking-talking salesman said he was an industrial technology broker, an agent representing a private firm that dealt wares to discerning clients all over the country.

Or so the worm-riddled puppet claimed.

The worms were desperate to derail Wendall's work. They had people from all over the country in their slimy coils. They knew he knew. He’d left the salesman and his untouched dinner at the table and bolted out of the restaurant's side door. That very evening he moved all of his work out of his dorm and into the abandoned machine room he'd found while the exploring the tunnels. No one near him could be trusted anymore.

The worms were taking control.

Wendall was an engineer, not a biologist, but he had done the research and found it wanting. No scientist dared to prove his theory. None were brave enough to challenge the worms. None were brave enough to confirm what he'd seen. Or they were already infested themselves. No, Wendall would have to be the one to prove this, to show those few who weren't being eaten alive what was happening.

He had tried to extract them from animals before, to mixed success. The worms infesting smaller beings were smaller and less-developed, he theorized. They degraded quickly, if they could be extracted at all. He would need the larger worms, the denser knots of them. He would need to extract them from a person. That much was clear to him.

Wendall stopped at a T-intersection and studied the markings he'd left on the wall. The heat-resistant gel he'd used showed him the way back home with letters and arrows that stayed cool and black against the radiant gold. He smirked. His map was invisible without the crotalinograph, and the vast network of interlinked thirty-year-old steam tunnels, hundred-year-old sewers, and hundred-fifty-year-old cargo passages was as perplexing as Minos' labyrinth.

His hideaway was only a few minutes' travel away. There, he would put on his disguise, his mask of ignorance. He could slip back into the basement of the engineering dormitory through the grate behind the boiler and pretend he had always been there, sleeping or reading. He would hide among them, pretending he didn't know.

They knew he knew.

They would treat him like he was one of them to further their game. Him, the cat, and the worms, mice. And then they would switch. He would talk to them and work alongside them and eat with them. Then, when they trusted he was one of them and left him alone, he would take his antiparasitics, wipe their taint from his body, and begin the real work.

The time to carve open one of their puppets was soon, and he would learn their secrets.

Wendall Goddard would save them all, whether they wanted saving or not.

SATURDAY NIGHT, AUGUST 29, 1942
BENEATH COLLEGE HALL, THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA

“You hear that?” Mickey Malloy asked. He and Gator Wayne stood still and listened. There were whispers bouncing up the tunnel from behind them. Gator recognized the voices before Mick did.

“Your new friends,” he hissed. “I knew you laid the 'asshole' bit on too thick.”

“What bit?” Mick grunted.

They both capped their Franklin torches and squeezed into a shallow doorframe. It was pitch black, but the cops he'd provoked had flashlights. They'd see them coming, but their hiding place wouldn't do them much good, either.

“This ain't it,” Gator whispered. “I'm picking it. We'll lock it behind us.”

“Fine, do it,” Mick said. Gator's picks suddenly seemed so loud in the door, like he was chiseling it open.

“Hurry,” Mick urged. The cops were close enough that Mick could hear them clearly.

“We can't just string him up,” one objected. Mick was glad there was a voice of reason among them.

“And why the hell not?” a second asked incredulously.

“Too much evidence. We're better off sinking him in the canal,” the first replied. Okay, Mick might have jumped the gun on the whole ‘reason’ thing there.

“Fair enough, that water's brown year-round. Nobody'd find either of him,” a third one agreed.

“Or we rope up the big one and sink the other one,” the second offered. “He looks like the type to kill a fed and bolt. Long as they're looking for him, they ain't looking at us.”

“Can’t wait to find him, shut him up. The money's just a bonus.”

“You sure it's the same fed from Bishopville?”

“How many six-foot-two G-men with a face like a bulldog do you think there are running around in this state?”

“We got to leave one of 'em to talk. Radio's paying for whatever they caught, not them.”

“You think I'm a moron?”

There was a click and Gator tapped Mick on the shoulder. They both slipped through the door and eased it shut behind them. Gator flipped the lock and they backed away from the door. Soon as it was shut the voices cut off.

“Yeah, you poked that bear,” Gator whispered.

“I was trying to motivate them,” Mick claimed.

“You threatened to can them all and replace them with Fort Jackson recruits, then to lock them up as accessories in a woman's death,” Gator said.

“I know what I said,” Mick grumbled.

“You don't provoke Southern cops. That's a rule.”

“I used to be one,” Mick said.

“So you know that they're vindictive sons of bitches. You shit on their authority, their competency, and their manhood. Those boys out there ain't the type to take that. They'll knock the eyeballs out of your head, badge or not.”

“I might've called 'em 'crooked,' too.”

“You covered a lot of topics.”

“Those sons of bitches let a woman with a broken arm go down in these sewers by her damn self, then refused to go look for her. For two days!”

“I know what they did, and you ain't wrong. But they ain't used to getting challenged, and their go-to response is always beating the hell out of someone. If they get to do it in the dark, all the better. That bounty pushed 'em over the top.”

“This could be good,” Mick whispered.

“How is having the entire campus security force hunting us good?”

“Case we ain't the only ones down here. If they find that Three Eye character, they'll take care of him for us.”

“Or herd him straight at us, if he even exists. And if they find the doc first?”

Mickey hadn't considered that.

“They wouldn't hurt a woman,” he said, though he wasn't sure. Doctor Ladybird Ogden had been a thorn in these local cops' sides since she'd shown up. She'd made 'em spill the beans on her gestating local legend, one that scared and embarrassed them, then badgered them into showing her where they'd seen it. On top of all that, she was the reason Mick had coerced 'em all into these sweltering tunnels in the first place.

Gator didn't say anything for a moment; he was having the same thoughts Mick was. If nothing else, Birdie'd look like good bait to draw Mick out.

“Lord, it is hot,” Gator wheezed. He was soaked in sweat and had unbuttoned his shirt to the navel. With his padded vest, Mick had no such luxury. All he could do was occasionally fan his sopping armpits.

“They kept saying 'steam tunnels' and I don't think I appreciated what that meant,” Mick replied.

The area underneath the University of South Carolina's campus was run through with twisting, meandering, intersecting, and splitting tunnels from at least three eras of the city's development. Old wood-blocked transport tunnels that once ran down to the canal twisted between arched, brick-walled sewers in and out of active use that ran alongside cement and the school’s cinder-block maintenance tunnels carried miles of steam pipes, plumbing, and electrical conduits.

“I thought a South Carolina swamp in August was the nastiest placed you'd take me,” Gator said.

Mick blindly shuffled to the door and leaned his head against it. He couldn't hear anything. Maybe the cops had passed them by. The door itself was as warm against his cheek, warm as a body. The steam pipes had to be leaking somewhere, everywhere. Everything was hot and damp. There wasn't an intact light bulb in the place. And Birdie was lost in this snarl, possibly with an animal-slaughtering weirdo and definitely with a small army of cops with chips on their shoulders.

“Maybe we should have taken that professor up, gotten his dolphin rig,” Gator suggested. He didn't like being silent in the absolute darkness. Mick understood that. Dark like this was meant for the dead.

“You want to be the one with eighty pounds of speakers strapped to your back right now?” Mick asked.

“Least we could see,” Gator mumbled.

“I don't hear them anymore,” Mick said and pulled away from the door. He retrieved his Franklin torch out of his coat and flipped the cap open. Cool blue fungal light flooded the room. The bioluminescence revealed a much larger space than he'd assumed, filled with equipment. Both men recognized the setup immediately.

“This is what I'm talking about,” Gator said, staring in wonder at a full-on hand-made copper moonshine still. The bulbous pot glowed under the light, and the spiraling condensation tubes almost reached the ceiling.

“Engineering students,” Mick said with a chuckle. He strolled over and ran his finger across it. A thick coat of dust came off with it. “It's been a while.”

“Maybe there's a bottle around here,” Gator said.

“There ain't time,” Mick said. “If those boys out there don't find us or Birdie, you know where they're going next.”

“Yeah, after the sheriff,” Gator replied.

“He's probably dead asleep. Won't see 'em coming. And who knows what they do when they find his pal, either,” Mick grunted. Hoke had agreed to stick around long enough to see them get on the train with the Lizard Man. When they found out Birdie was missing, his stay in Columbia got extended. The guy was posted up in Professor Maddox's office. The Lizard Man was in a supply closet with a bowl of water and a chair jammed under the knob. He'd be the next best target when the pissed-off locals couldn't find Mick and Gator.

“We got to get moving,” Mickey said. “How's your torch?”

Gator flipped his lid open and shined the blue light around.

“Little dim.”

Mick took a wrapped ham sandwich out of his jacket pocket and tore off a corner. Gator unscrewed his torch's cap and fed it to the quivering, glowing goop inside.

“Got any more of those?” he asked.

“One for me, one for you, one for the lights,” Mick said. He handed Gator a whole sandwich before feeding his own torch. He swirled the fungus around with his finger to make sure the food got distributed evenly.

“Ain't it gonna chew on you?” Gator asked around a mouthful of bread and lunch meat.

“It tingles, sure, and if I did it too long it might melt my fingerprints off, but it'd take a while to get to the bone,” Mick answered.

“Gross. Odd, weird, and gross,” Gator replied. He re-wrapped his remaining sandwich and put it in his pocket, his appetite apparently subdued.

“That's the job, pal.” Mick wiped his finger against the wall, leaving a glowing blue line down it. He adjusted his torch's cap until only a thin sliver of light escaped, just enough to see by. “I figure we keep heading east, get deeper under the main campus.”

Gator agreed and they left the decrepit distillery behind and re-entered the maze. No matter whether the floor was coated in accumulated dust or oozing mud and filth, there were dozens of prints marring it. The tunnels were frequented daily. With this many curious underclassmen, reticent maintenance workers, spiteful police patrols, nosy folklorists, and maybe some kind of space goblin, it was a wonder they hadn't run across anyone else yet.

“Kids,” Gator grunted. He was shining his light into a little alcove littered with empty beer bottles.

“Yeah,” Mick said. This place wasn't as abandoned as everyone made it out to be. If there was really some Three Eye Man wandering around, he'd've gotten seen.

The tunnel capped off at a 'T' intersection. Gator shined his light either way. The freshest sets of footprints went to the right. Mick started heading the opposite direction. Last place he wanted to be was riding the cops' bumper.

“Looks like we're headed - !” he started, but the crack of a gunshot cut him off.

“Where'd he go?” one of the cops shouted from down that long tunnel. His voice careened off the brick walls. More cries joined him.

“You get him?”

“Trip's bleeding like crazy!”

“There he is, there he is!”

Two more gunshots sounded, loud as thunder.

A man screamed.

“My hand!”

“Bill, Bill! Put pressure on it!”

Mick sighed.

“Right,” he said. He hefted his club and Gator readied the Band-It. Together, they took off toward the chaos.

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Copyright © 2023 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Bruce Conners.