by John Saul
“Who all’s going?” Russell asked.
Kevin reeled off four names that sounded vaguely familiar to Karen, though she could attach a face to none of them.
“What do you think?” she heard Russell ask.
She shrugged. “If Julie really feels well enough, I guess it’s okay.”
Ten minutes later Kevin and Julie came out. “We’re going to walk over to Jeff’s house,” he said. “He’s going to drive.”
Karen looked questioningly at Russell, who pointed toward the next farm toward town, which spread out from a haphazard group of buildings a half a mile away from their own house. “Marge Larkin’s oldest son,” he explained. “She rents an old tenant house from Vic Costas, next door.”
Karen, still worried about what had happened that morning, gazed up at Julie. “You’re sure you’re all right?”
Julie’s eyes rolled with adolescent scorn. “How many times do I have to tell you?” she said. “I’m fine, Mom!”
“All right,” Karen sighed. “Just checking. What time will you be home?”
“One?” Julie asked, obviously using the hour as an opening bid.
“Ten,” Karen countered.
“Mom!” Julie wailed. “The movie won’t even be over by then! And it’s summer—we shouldn’t have to be in until midnight.”
“And this is a farm, where everyone has to get up early,” Russell interjected. “You’ll be home by eleven, and that’s it.”
Julie, unused to having to bargain with anyone but her mother, looked as if she were about to argue with Russell. And Karen, in that instant, knew the moment had come to establish the rules of the new family unit. “Eleven it is, then,” she said. Her eyes held her daughter’s, and for a moment she thought Julie might still try to argue. But before she could say anything, Kevin spoke.
“Nothing’s open later than ten-thirty, anyway. Let’s go.”
“What about you?” Russell asked as Kevin and Julie left the porch and started off across the fields toward the farm next door. “Ready for your walk?”
“What about Molly?” Karen countered. “We can’t just leave her here.”
“Why not?” Russell asked. “This isn’t L.A., honey. Dad’s right next door, and she’s playing with a dog who would cheerfully tear the throat out of anyone or anything who tried to hurt her. She’s fine by herself.”
Karen shook her head. Not tonight—not after what had happened just that very morning. This evening, at least, she wasn’t about to leave her daughter alone with no one but the big dog to look after her.
Russell, reading her worries perfectly, whistled to Bailey, then called out to Molly. “Come on! We’re going down by the creek!” As Molly and Bailey dashed off across the field, Russell stepped into the house and picked up the flashlight that always sat on the table in the foyer.
When he’d come back out of the house, Karen slipped her hand into his and they started toward the stand of scrub oaks that bordered the field. Through them a brook wound its way down from the foothills to the valley floor. A few minutes later, sitting on a rock at the edge of the stream, Karen peeled off her sneakers and socks, and dipped her feet into the water, sighing in contentment as she felt the coolness of it penetrate her skin, and watched Molly and the dog explore the shore a few yards downstream. “Perfect,” she sighed. “This is just perfect.” She leaned back, resting against Russell’s chest, and felt his arms tighten around her. “It’s all going to work out, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Of course it is,” Russell assured her. “From now on, everything’s going to be wonderful.”
DAWN
FINALE
Dawn had no idea how long she had been praying for death. A while ago—maybe minutes, maybe hours, maybe only seconds—she had thought her torture had finally ended. The blackness around her had begun to recede, and she heard music playing. Heavenly music, like she had always imagined the harps of angels would produce.
She felt a gentle caress, as if loving fingers were stroking her skin.
But then everything began to change—the swirling colors turned into a glaring light, and what had been music before was now the furious buzzing of thousands of insects.
The stroking fingers became instruments of torture as mandibles and stingers sank into her naked skin.
Her mind felt as if it were about to shatter as it was wrenched once more out of the safety and comfort of sleep by the torture her body was undergoing, and again she tried to force a scream from her ruined vocal cords.
All that emerged was a bubbling gasp as her final plea for rescue dissolved into a barely audible gurgle of defeat.
It was the laugh—the shattering, maniacal braying—that cut through the last defenses of her crumbling mind and made her open her eyes.
He was standing in the open doorway, silhouetted against the glare of the naked lightbulb behind him, a black shadow against a blinding white background.
She knew who it was, though, even knew why he had come.
She was dying, and he wanted to see it happen.
A surge of rage energized Dawn, and from somewhere deep within herself she found the strength to lash out once more, to kick out at him, even though she had no hope of reaching him. As he laughed once more, she fell limp and her head flopped forward.
For the first time, her eyes beheld what was happening to her.
Paralyzed and totally muted by the awful sight, she gazed in horror at the thousands of insects crawling over her skin. But they weren’t just crawling on her.
They were killing her.
Killing her and eating her at the same time.
Ants.
Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands of them.
They were everywhere, not just on her body, but on the floor around her as well For a second Dawn tried to pull her feet up, but her strength was gone now. Her bloodied feet, the skin gone from the raw flesh, dropped back to touch the sticky mass of insects—mixed with her own dripping blood—that squirmed beneath her.
Some of the insects were attacking each other, responding to ancient instincts of enmity, but most of them were answering a much more powerful call.
The summons to feed.
To feed, and to kill their prey.
They swarmed over her, and in the glare of light streaming in from the open door, Dawn could see tiny fragments of her own flesh clutched in the mandibles of the ants as they scuttled down her legs, over the mass of their blood-ensnared cohorts and across the floor, to vanish into the shadows.
Eaten alive!
She was actually being eaten alive!
As her gorge rose in a violent and involuntary protest against what was happening to her, and her throat filled with the taste of vomit, she heard the man yell at her.
“Look at me!” he screamed. “Look at me and let me see your eyes!”
But it was no longer possible for Dawn to obey his order, for the last of her strength was ebbing from her body now, and the realization of how she was dying had, finally, crushed her sanity.
Though her body still breathed, Dawn herself was dead.…
He stood in the doorway, watching Dawn die, as he’d watched others die before her.
But he’d experimented with Dawn.
With the others, he’d simply brought them home, put them in the room, and turned the insects loose.
He’d gagged the other girls, to keep their screams from being heard, but with Dawn, he’d left the gag off, so he could sit outside the door and listen to her screams as she cried out in the darkness before he even loosed the insects.
With the earlier girls, he’d enjoyed listening at the door as they thrashed around in the darkness, trying to escape the swarms of insects.
With Dawn, though, he’d decided to try something new, and suspend her from the floor joists, leaving her in helpless immobility when at last the insects attacked.
His greatest joy, though, was now; as he watched her die.
It was the fire ants—his beloved
Solenopsis saevissima—he knew, that were actually killing her. They’d been swarming over her for hours, each jab of the tiny stinger at the end of their abdomens releasing a minute drop of poison into her system, making her feel as if her body was on fire.
Now; though, she was dead, and suddenly he had an idea.
Turning away from the room at the back of his basement, he went in search of something to use. When he returned, he carried with him a rusty piece of reinforcing bar and a large mallet. Holding one end of the re-bar—the end he’d carefully ground to a point—against Dawn’s chest, he began hammering it with the mallet, driving it through her chest and into the old wood of the post behind her.
Mounting her, adding her to his collection.
He wondered how long he could keep her there before her body would begin to rot away.
The girl, he decided as he surveyed his work, wasn’t nearly as good as an insect.
Insects, at least, didn’t deteriorate after he mounted them, but stayed eternally in their state of perfection, hovering on pins, always waiting for him to admire them.
Yes, in so many ways insects were superior to humans. Perhaps that was why he loved them so much.
CHAPTER 8
Julie stared at the car that sat in front of Jeff Larkin’s house. She’d seen some pretty crummy cars in L.A., but nothing quite as bad as this one. “This is it?” she asked Kevin as Jeff came out the front door of his house. “This is what we’re going to the movies in? Does it even run?”
“Most of the time,” Kevin told her.
“All it needs is a little body work, and some paint,” Jeff told her, his voice defensive as he moved almost protectively to the ancient, rusting station wagon. He’d discovered the car in a shed right after he, his mother, and his kid brother had moved onto the farm two years ago. He’d finally managed to get it actually running a few months ago, and Vic Costas had told him he could use it as long as he insured it and kept it going. So far, though it had cost him almost every nickel he managed to scrape up, Jeff thought it was worth it. “It’s better than walking, isn’t it?”
Julie shrugged, got into the car, and tried to pretend she didn’t notice the moldy smell that permeated the upholstery. But as they started driving toward town, she suddenly started feeling funny again.
It began as a hum in her ears, right after they turned out of Jeff’s driveway.
For a few minutes it didn’t bother her too much—nothing at all like the terrible things that had happened to her at the doctor’s that morning—but the closer they got to town, the worse it got, and finally, certain it must be coming from somewhere outside the car, she cranked her window closed, even though the smell emanating from the seats was making her feel nauseated again.
But the humming didn’t let up at all, and now something else was happening to her.
She was starting to feel as if the car itself were closing in around her, and her whole body was starting to itch again.
Within a few minutes she wanted to jump right out of her skin.
A couple of times she felt Kevin’s eyes on her.
Could he see that something was wrong with her? But if he did, why didn’t he ask her what was wrong?
Even as the question took shape in her mind, a knot of fear constricted her chest, for she could almost hear herself repeating that she was just fine, even though she felt awful and was afraid she was going crazy.
Oh God, what was she going to do?
What was happening to her?
Her nerves kept getting edgier and edgier. Finally, as the heat in the car built up, she rolled down the window, and breathed deeply of the night air. And then, as they came into the village itself, the humming died away, and a few seconds after that, the terrible itching inside her body began to ease as well.
Was she going to be all right after all?
But for how long?
Jeff found a place to park the car, and they walked the half block to the theater, where the rest of the kids were waiting for them.
Inside the theater, for a few minutes, things were fine.
Then, as soon as the lights went down and the previews began, the humming started in her ears again.
But now it wasn’t just the humming sound that threatened to drive her crazy.
It was the flickering image on the screen, too.
At first she tried to ignore it, but even before the feature began, her head was starting to throb with pain, and the nausea was rising in her stomach.
Leave, she told herself. Just get up and go sit in the lobby until you feel better.
But when she tried to leave her seat, to stand up, her body refused to obey.
It was as if some force inside her were holding her down, commanding her to stay where she was, taking control of her body from her own mind.
The fear she had felt in the car seized her, ballooning into terror.
Now she tried to ignore the humming and the headache and concentrate on the movie itself. She’d already seen the first six—or was it seven?—movies in the series, and had been waiting for this one to come out.
But tonight she just couldn’t follow the plot at all. Even glancing at the screen made her head throb.
Now the itching she had felt as a vague, restless sensation deep inside her body had crawled outward, onto her skin. It felt as if thousands of tiny insects were creeping all over her—under her clothes, in her hair, her nose, her eyes—everywhere.
But no matter how she tried to scratch herself or wriggle in her clothes, she couldn’t get rid of the itch.
The worst of it seemed to be in her fingers, and she kept scratching and kneading them until she became afraid she might dig right through her skin and make them start bleeding.
And as the humming in her ears and the pounding in her head and the itching in her body continued to worsen, so also did the terror inside her.
It was happening—she was sure of it now.
She was going crazy.
Kevin gazed up at the screen in the darkened theater and tried one last time to get involved with the plot of the movie.
But it was impossible.
And not just because the movie, which was the seventh—or maybe the eighth?—in a series involving some kind of rampaging slasher, made no sense, though he suspected it didn’t since he remembered enough of the plot to know that so far none of the killings he’d witnessed seemed to have a motive.
It wasn’t just the movie.
It was Julie, too.
Ever since they’d gotten into the car at Jeff Larkin’s house, she’d been acting weird.
Now they were sitting next to each other, with Jeff and Shelley Munson to Julie’s left, and Andy Bennett and Sara McLaughlin to Kevin’s right. Right after the lights had gone down, he’d nudged Julie. “Look at the ceiling,” he whispered, and she looked up, giggling at the phony projected clouds that swirled overhead.
He’d slipped his hand into hers and squeezed it, and she’d squeezed his back.
But as the previews had played, and then the movie’s opening credits had begun to run, she pulled her hand away from his. Ever since, she’d been fidgeting in her seat, her hands twisted together, rubbing and scratching her fingers so constantly that even he was starting to get nervous about it.
A couple of times he’d glanced over at her. Although she didn’t look back at him, he didn’t think she was watching the movie, either. In fact, her head was down, as if she were deliberately not looking at the screen.
Once, he leaned over and whispered to her, asking her if she was okay. She hesitated, then nodded and said she was fine.
And for a few minutes it seemed as though she was. Then she’d started fidgeting again, and scratching her hands and fingers.
When she looked away from the screen again, he leaned over to whisper in her ear. “Why don’t we just get out of here? If neither of us likes the movie, why don’t we leave, and go get a Coke or something?”
Saying nothing at all, nearly certain th
at her body would refuse to obey, just as it had earlier when she’d wanted to get up and flee from the theater, Julie tried to stand.
And to her own shock and relief, she found herself rising from her seat.
Barely trusting her ability to move, she quickly began working her way past Jeff Larkin and Shelley Munson.
“Where’re you going?” Shelley whispered as Kevin struggled by a second later.
“We’re leaving,” Kevin whispered back. “The movie’s so dumb I can’t even follow it, so we’re going for Cokes or something.”
“We’ll come too,” Shelley said. When Jeff Larkin groaned, she shrugged elaborately. “Stay if you want,” she told him in a voice that clearly belied her words. “I can walk home alone.”
“Come on, Shelley,” Jeff protested. “We all wanted to see this movie!”
“You mean you and Andy wanted to see it,” Shelley replied. “And I just told you—I can walk home!”
As people in the area began to shush them, Shelley Munson, followed an instant later by Jeff Larkin, hurried up the aisle. A few seconds after that, Andy Bennett and Sara McLaughlin emerged into the lobby as well.
“What’s going on?” Andy demanded. “The movie was just getting good! Did you see that last one? Jeez, I never saw so much blood in my life!”
“Gross!” Sara told him. “I hate that movie! It’s so dumb!”
“It’s not dumb,” Jeff protested. “It’s neat!”
“So you and Andy go back and watch the rest of it,” Shelley Munson suggested. “The rest of us are going for Cokes.”
“How about beer instead?” Andy asked. “Jeff and me got—”
“Will you just shut up?” Jeff demanded, turning to check out the lobby of the theater. “What if someone hears you, man? What if we get caught?”
“Nobody’s gonna catch us,” Andy told Jeff. “The only person here is Josh Carter, and he’d go with us if he didn’t have to work.” From behind the candy counter one of their classmates looked up, his eyes hopeful.
“I get off as soon as the next show starts,” he began.
“Too late,” Jeff told him. “We’ll have it all drunk by then.”
