Martin peered at the thing inside the box with interest.
“Where did you find it?” he asked Jess, feeling on its strangely shaped shell carefully, making sure not to break it.
“I saw something moving around the sill of my bedroom window, so I went outside and tried to figure out what it was. And, well, it was this.”
She leaned over the box again; she had looked at it many times already, but it still seemed just as strange as it was when she first saw it.
It was a normal snail- mostly. Normal head, normal eyestalks, and a mostly normal shell. But at the innermost curve of the spiral, instead of simply ending, it grew out.
There was a human ear made of shell on the snail’s back.
“We have been having a lot of snails lately”, pondered Martin. “Maybe it’s some kind of strange fungus, one that we haven’t noticed until there were more snails about.”
“In the exact shape and size of a human ear?”
“Who knows. I’ve seen stranger resemblance in unrelated things. Does anybody else know about this?”
“I haven’t told anyone yet. Why shouldn’t I tell them, though?” asked Jess.
“I was mostly just wondering if anybody else had found them. We may as well show some people, though.”
They packed it carefully, so it wouldn’t jostle as they drove their car down the steep dirt road. They enjoyed the rustic mountain scenery as they avoided cart ruts and potholes in the road.
When they arrived at the town, it was already in quite a hubbub. As soon as they had parked their car, in a small flat place off the side of the road, a small child came running up to them with something in his hands.
It was one of the snails.
Slightly shocked, they watched the mass of children play with the misshapen things, holding them like vile war trophies, whispering into them and holding them by the sides of their heads like a second pair of ears, startlingly human for their shell-brown color.
Stumped, they drove back home, stopping on the way to place the snail carefully in the bushes quite some distance from their house.
They woke to find that the yard was swarming with them. There was one every couple feet, and more clustered around their doors and windows, ears rocking back and forth slightly as they moved.
“Do you think they can hear us?,” asked Jess.
“Surely not; well, actually, maybe they could,” admitted Martin. “I have no clue of what's going on.”
They still found it eerie to have so many maybe-listening things around. They kept finding themselves talking in whispers, and would try to laugh it off; “Why are we worried about what the snails hear?”, they would say, and attempt to grin.
The next day they woke to find that their listeners had been joined.
Hundreds of eyes stared unblinking from the lawn.
The assembled snails looked like a garden of ear-shaped flowers and scattered eyeballs, which shifted their gaze across the house, eyes mounted inside their snail shells like wet jewels set in an organic jewelry case.
This time there was no question. The eyes followed them around, sure marks of something watching them.
Martin stepped out of the door, conscious of the eyes trained on him. Grimacing, he touched one of the eyeballs. It was slick and wet to the touch, nothing like the ears.
Once they realized that they didn’t bleed, they were a lot more enthusiastic about stomping on all of them. They crushed all the ears, too, for good measure.
They decided to stay in the house. They didn’t exactly feel like driving all the way to town while being stared at by so many eyes.
They decided to latch the doors that night, extra tightly. They usually didn’t, but they decided they should take some more precautions. They couldn’t exactly explain why they felt that way, but they wanted an extra anchor of safety.
Martin woke up to the sound of screaming; harsh, loud, but still distant. After shaking Jess awake, he put on his jacket and tried to run out the door before realizing he had locked it. Cursing briefly, he quickly opened it and grabbed one of the lanterns that they kept by the door. He ran toward the source of the sound, hearing Jess getting ready to follow after him, but still moving as fast as he could. He could hear the crunch of countless snails underfoot, and tried not to imagine the eyeballs that he was squishing underfoot, and the small soft and slimy bodies left as shards of shattered shell and gray flesh.
After he left the confines of his own yard, he slowed down a little. He was not as familiar with the terrain here, and didn’t want to trip. He could hear that the screaming was quite a bit louder now. He had trouble identifying it, but knew that whoever it was, he needed to save them.
He burst into a small clearing, and saw, in the lantern light, a large snail with two large fleshy lips on its shell, parted into an unceasing scream.
He dropped to his knees, exhausted by the run towards it. He heard Jess emerge behind him.
He almost laughed.
“It’s another snail, Jess,” he said, pointing at the lipped creature.
He took another look at it. It didn’t have any teeth, or a tongue, or anything like that. Just lips, and a small shallow throat.
He wondered how it could scream so loudly, so long, with such small lungs, if it had any at all.
After they had looked at it for a while more, Jess brought the screaming to an end with a swift, forceful stomp.
Soon after, they heard another, similar scream. This time, they didn’t run to check it.
They woke to the sound of thousands of snails screaming. It was a bit like the whistle of wind through a forest, but more organic, and it produced a more visceral reaction. They tried not to listen to it more closely; it tapped right into something ancestral and primal, the signal of something terribly wrong. It was a human sound coming from inhuman creatures.
The lawn was once again full of the things, but more crowded than before. It looked like a mess of faces, weird and jumbled features, an ear here, a mouth there, and a pair of eyes somewhere off to the side.
They decided, once again, not to go to town. They likely had the same problem there. They stayed in the house, ate a little of the stored food they had, and tried to forget about the horrors outside. It was hard trying to relax, and then go to sleep.
They woke up in the middle of the night, Jess first this time, then Martin.
“Can you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
They listened for a moment, trying to figure out what it was.
Then it dawned on them.
It was silence, the first time they had heard it since two days before when the snails had first started screaming.
It was silence, shortly broken by a scrabbling sound at their front door.
They crept up in silent fear towards the screen door, and peered through the netting into the moonless dark.
There was a hand rattling the doorknob, and a snail at the base of the hand. Below it, pushing at the bottom of the door, were hundreds of other snails, mindlessly shoving against it, pushing the immovable thing until the hand managed to get it open. They could see now that the hand moved clumsily, with an awkwardness to its movements, like a child who has not yet learned how to use their hands with precision. It lacked the expertise to properly turn the door knob, but it would only be a matter of time until it managed to correctly turn it around.
Jess wondered how it knew how doorknobs worked, and then looked at the eyeballs in the heap by the door.
Martin came out with a gun. Jess almost laughed.
“You think that’s going to be any good against snails?”
He stared at it for a second, then shook his head. “No, I guess not.”
He walked back, and this time came out with two shovels and a large bag of salt, the kind they would spread on the road when it got too cold in the town.
“It’s time to kill some snails,” he said, handing the shovel to her.
He opened the door quickly and started scooping the small wretched creatures away as fast as he could, and managed to clear a small space around the door. He dumped out a bunch of the salt onto the ground in front of it, and then beckoned Jess through before closing the door again.
She hoisted her shovel, and got to work. Lantern in one hand, shovel in the other, they cleared the area directly around the house of snails, sprinkling salt around it as they did. They did one final check, and then realized that there were snails on the roof as well.
They started throwing stones at them, and got a few, but didn’t really worry about them until they saw the chimney.
Jess dashed inside wordlessly, and Martin followed close behind.
“What is it?”
“The chimney- they could get in through there.”
Martin nodded wordlessly, and ran to get some logs as Jess searched the area around the fireplace in fear. She didn’t see any snails, which was a good sign, but some still could have gotten in.
Martin returned with the logs and the matches.
They slumped back, breathing heavily, after the fire was lit, and watched the small bodies of the snails fall into the flames, shells cracking and popping in the heat, bodies charring, eyes boiling and skin peeling from hands. For the first time they, they got a good look at the hand-snails. They had only a small stub of shell before the hand emerged, grey-skinned but otherwise human, except for a lack of fingerprints and fingernails.
They sat there for a few more minutes before they heard a close rumble.
They looked at each other wordlessly.
“The car,” Martin whispered.
“But how did they get in?”
“I left the door unlocked, as I usually do. We’re pretty secluded up here, so there’s no danger of it being stolen.”
“They must have managed to open one of the doors,” Jess concluded.
She was about to say something more when they heard the car start moving, slowly as a mass of snails pressed the gas pedals and hand-snails grasped the wheels. They had a couple seconds to back away from the wall before the car crashed through the door.
They grabbed their shovels, and opened the car door.
Hundreds of snails spilled out, writhing and crawling over one another, a melange of grey flesh, brown shells, and human organs.
They crunched easily with a few swings of the shovels, and the few stray ones were swiftly dealt with, snuffed out by a quick stomp.
The hand snails still grasped the car wheel, but their turning did nothing without the mass of snails on the gas. Martin plucked them off individually and killed them, cracking shells and hand-bones with a steady grind of his boots.
They checked the car for more snails, having made up their mind to go to the town. Their house now had a huge hole in the wall; the snails could get in easily enough. After cleaning out most of the dead snails and sprinkling salt throughout, they climbed in (though not without a bit of nausea, feeling the leftover moisture from the squished snails).
They drove in silence, unspeaking, listening to the sound of gravel hitting the underside of the car and the cracks of countless snail shells.
They had been driving for a while before the screaming started again.
This time it was deafening. They had to pull over and acclimate to it before they felt they could drive safely again.
They wondered how the town was dealing with the snails, wondered how they had reacted. They probably thought they were dead.
Jess spotted somebody standing by the side of the road, surrounded by the snails. They were hard to see in the darkness, but as they pulled up closer they could see their face in the car headlights.
It was a mass of snails. Organs were scattered indiscriminately, with eyes and ears and mouths everywhere, hands holding the whole structure together, a vague facsimile of a human form.
They didn’t hesitate to run it over, but as they pulled away and continued towards town they could see it start to reassemble from other nearby snails.
As they pulled into the town, they could see lights flicker on as people stepped out onto their porches and walked towards them. They breathed a sigh of relief, grateful that there was somebody around to help them with the invasion. They turned the engine off, and started to get out of the car.
And saw their rescuers' features slowly moving on their faces.