The man was standing out in his yard when we arrived, not looking frightened, but definitely looking nauseated and confused. Another "good" sign, at least for our paychecks. All he was willing to say was "it's out back" and "you'll have to just...see it I guess." Oh yeah. This was the real deal. What we found in the backyard was not a worm. It was a pale, lumpy, slimy looking tube, blue-grey and translucent, criss-crossed with dark veins and steadily undulating along its positively staggering length. You certainly could mistake it for some kind of gigantic "worm," for sure. In fact, our resident marine biology student said there are these giant, white worms in the arctic that get meters and meters long, and look uncannily like what we all knew - but didn't want to admit - we were actually looking at.
The not-worm was strewn over ever corner of a private yard that must have been almost a half acre. Have you ever seen a place completely covered in toilet paper as a prank? Even in movies? It was like that, loops upon loops of it dangling from tree branches, snagged in stickerbushes, coiled around the owner's almost alarmingly impressive collection of plastic gnomes and draped repeatedly over his picket fence, leaving dark and greasy looking stains in the paint as it writhed.
And then... I heard the voice.
"Where am I? What's happening? I can't see!? Hello?! MARTHA!!!"
It sounded like an old man, pleading, almost sobbing until the sheer frustration evident at the end. I called back to it, but it just kept repeating those same nine words from the bushes. Careful not to step on the loops of slowly twisting flesh, we followed the sound to a rosebush where we finally found at least one end of the thing, snagged on countless thorns, shivering as it repeated that panic-stricken dialog non-stop from a ragged, floppy hole where it appeared to have been torn off.
We knew, with sinking hearts, that we now needed to find the opposite end, so we left someone to monitor the "head" while a newbie and I traced its path. This was the wealthiest part of town, BIG homes, BIG properties carved into otherwise untouched forest, and we eventually found where the slimy cable went twisting off into the trees. It wasn't easy to figure out which way to go, with how many times it circled back in on itself, and it kept fooling us into thinking there had to be more than one of them, until we'd finally figure out where it connected again. It was like having to visually untangle the world's largest and ugliest extension cord, and I hated every moment of it as it lead us out behind the property, down into a muddy creek, back up into the woods, through the backyard of someone's disused summer cottage, then back across the creek, across a long neglected dirt road and finally, finally into the open back door of a large, but dilapidated house on an overgrown lot.
The lights were off, and no one answered when we called out. There were no vehicles in the driveway, but there were fresh tire tracks in the gravel. Inside was deathly silent, except of course for the moist rustle of a pulsating tube that we followed through the kitchen, over a moldering couch, up a rickety flight of stairs and into a narrow bathroom, dimly lit as sunlight filtered through a window caked with mildew.
We had found where it ended, at long last, and we had also found where the former owner had ended, too. The poor guy, at least the rest of him, had died on his toilet, and our "worm" was still slowly winding, or perhaps continuously growing its way out of him. He was definitely long expired, reeking of decay, his eyes glazed over white, but damn if his mouth wasn't still moving. No sound was coming out, but I could tell by looking what those cold, lifeless lips were synching to. I'd just heard it several dozen times in a row: "Where am I? What's happening? I can't see!? Hello?! MARTHA!!!"
Over and over, the face of the corpse kept on mouthing the words I knew were still coming out the other, distant end of the unnaturally long, unnaturally lively human intestinal tract that we left tangled up in another man's prized roses. Maybe they were the first words the guy had spoken immediately after his consciousness, for whatever reason, shifted from his brain to his bowels, and maybe they became the last new words he would ever speak again as he seemingly forgot how to say or think anything else.
We named this one "The Creeping Colon." We never found a single clue as to what might have triggered its "birth." We never do for any of these things. I think one of the worst things about this one is that its ragged end was somehow still speaking those words after we cut it out of the bushes, chopped the rest of it into more manageable pieces and spooled it into four or five specimen drums. I heard through the grapevine that it still didn't stop speaking until the man's original body was eventually incinerated. Not "cremated," mind you, just "incinerated" up at the labs, like so much garbage...and that wasn't until nearly a year later. This single tidbit tells me more than I wanted to know about the "higher ups;" it tells me they kept the thing alive all that time, and I doubt the incineration was any act of mercy, but more likely they just ran out of tests to conduct. I really do hope his mind was gone, that the speech was just some sort of "recording" stuck on repeat, and not some looping purgatory of his final cognizant moment.
I did eventually figure out his name, but nobody knew anything about him, and he didn't have any surviving family or friends. I'll never know who he really was, and we never figured out who "MARTHA" could have been, either.