The glass cracked and with it the peace. The calm of the night convulsed with tension as the once contained cabin leaked. A current, corpulent and corroded with carrion, breached the atmosphere.

The boy crept to the curtain, his face frothing with fear as he peeked in. Originally he'd intended to look only for an instant, hoping to find his ball and then leave, but when he looked, that instant became infinite as his body became immobile.

Paralyzed by a terror that weighted his veins, his eyes could not move, could not help but stare as if magnetized to the man. 

Th man lay slumped against a desk. His identity, a mystery, masked as his face was with maggots, which were ceaselessly swarming in what seemed a configuring of innumerable Rorschach tests for the boy to answer. They seemed to wriggle within his spine and his mind.

His olfactory sense, before stifled by shock, suddenly rushed back as simultaneously building bile clamped his mouth shut. A revolting rush ran over him, a reek. The work of weeks upon a body, decaying undiluted within an airtight room and warmed by light from long summer days, filled him to the brim.

The boy threw up.

A vitriolic volley of vomit, gushing like an unclogged geyser, his mouth did so pour. And long after that sweet meringue his mother had baked him had become clumped and cold upon his face, still he heaved.

Recovering from the throes, he lay gasping, grasping for any spare air, until he heard a slight tap on the glass . . .