The Homing

by John Saul

  The moment of hope that she might be dead faded away, to be replaced by the same deep, cold anger she’d triggered in him the day she’d gotten stung.

  That day, she hadn’t remembered what had happened up at the hives; but that didn’t mean she would never remember. Carl had done his best to avoid her since then, not only because he was afraid of what she might suddenly remember, but also because of the fury that rose within him just at the sight of her.

  The fury that made him want to reach out to her, to capture her, to add Julie to his collection.

  But he couldn’t do that, not now.

  Maybe not ever.

  He was almost certain that Mark Shannon was watching him. The deputy had come to his house the day after Otto died, and even though Shannon had pretended he only wanted to talk about scorpions, Carl Henderson knew better.

  Shannon was spying on him.

  He’d known it instantly, felt it in the way the deputy’s eyes had fixed on him, then flicked through his house, prying into the corners, searching the crannies for …

  What?

  Whatever he was looking for, Carl knew Shannon wouldn’t find it. There was nothing left to find; not upstairs, nor down in the basement, either.

  Dawn Sanderson was gone—even before he’d driven Otto home in his own truck and deposited him behind the toolshed, Carl had taken Dawn off the wall and put her into his special box.

  A wonderful, perfectly constructed box, eight feet long, four feet wide, and four feet deep—like a huge coffin—half filled with a special mixture of earth that he himself had compiled.

  The box of earth stood in the back corner of the darkroom.

  In the earth lived a colony of ants.

  A special colony that had been multiplying for years and now comprised millions of insects.

  Insects that needed to be fed.

  When he’d taken the girl off the wall and put her into the box, the ants had swarmed up out of their underground colonies and set to work.

  By the time he’d walked home from the Owen farm, Dawn’s face was already gone, her jaws and cheekbones picked clean of flesh. Carl, entranced by the spectacle, had watched the insects devour Dawn for almost three hours.

  By morning there was little left on the surface of the earth in the box but Dawn’s skeleton—barely held together by remnants of cartilage—and her hair.

  The thick, dark hair, the very sight of which had triggered Carl’s fury the morning he had first seen her.

  In the dead of night, Carl had driven the skeleton far up into the hills west of town, where he’d hidden it in thick brush in the midst of a huge tract of empty wilderness.

  Nevertheless, Mark Shannon was watching. And no doubt waiting for him to betray himself, Carl Henderson thought.

  That meant he would have to keep his dark anger under control.

  He would have to stay away from Julie Spellman, who aroused more fury inside him than any other girl he’d ever seen.

  But it would be all right. If he had to control his rage, then he would control his rage.

  At least for now.

  Taking a deep breath, telling himself to ignore Julie Spellman as if she weren’t there at all, Carl strode toward the corral to see what had happened.

  Karen Owen was kneeling down by the fence, her arms wrapped around her youngest daughter. “Are you all right, honey?” she asked. “The bees didn’t sting you again, did they?”

  Molly shook her head. “But they killed Greta, Mommy,” she wailed. “They killed her!”

  “Greta?” Karen asked. “Honey, what are you talking about?”

  The little girl pointed through the rails of the fence, and both Karen and Carl Henderson followed her gesture with their eyes.

  The mare lay on the other side of the corral, surrounded by Kevin and Russell Owen, Jeff and Ben Larkin.

  As Karen held her sobbing daughter in her arms, trying to comfort her, Carl Henderson climbed through the fence and started across the corral. “Russell?” he called, injecting just the right mixture of curiosity and concern into his voice. “What the hell’s going on out here? What happened to the horse?”

  But it wasn’t Russell who answered him. Instead it was Kevin, standing next to his father. The boy’s eyes stayed on the fallen horse as he spoke. “The bees, Mr. Henderson,” he said. “You never saw anything like it—anyway, I didn’t.” As Henderson moved in to join the group around the horse, Kevin tried to explain what had happened. “She shied. I’m not sure what spooked her, but all of a sudden she just jerked away from me and reared up. Molly fell off, and then …” His voice trailed off for a second as he remembered watching helplessly as the horse nearly trampled Molly. “I couldn’t do anything,” he finally went on. “I couldn’t even get to Molly.” He shrugged helplessly. “Then all of a sudden the bees came.” He shook his head, remembering the sight of the swarm of insects streaming across the fence from the direction of the house. “It was really awesome—I mean, you wouldn’t believe it unless you’d seen it!”

  “They flew right over me,” Ben Larkin cried, his voice piping loudly as he picked up the story. “The horse was going to kill Molly, but then the bees came and killed the horse!”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Russell Owen interjected, moving closer to the fallen mare. Frowning, he turned to Carl Henderson. “You ever hear of bees that could do this?”

  Carl Henderson composed a perfect demeanor of puzzlement. “Well, technically, any kind of bees could kill an animal if enough of them stung it,” he offered. “But the domestic species we keep is far too docile to mount a major attack on a horse. Hell, they rarely attack much of anything—that’s what makes them so perfect for domestication.”

  “What about Africans?” Russell pressed. “Could your hives have gotten Africanized?”

  Henderson’s mind worked quickly. “I don’t see how,” he said. “Africans just haven’t gotten this far north yet. But of course,” he added, carefully planting the seed that would direct any suspicion away from himself, “there’s always the first incident in any area they penetrate. Down south, it was a dog that first got attacked.”

  Russell squatted down to begin examining the dead mare, then glanced up at Jeff Larkin. “Is that what you saw, too, Jeff? The bees just came out of nowhere and attacked her?”

  Jeff opened his mouth to speak, ready to tell them how he’d watched Julie as the bees attacked, and had the strange sensation that somehow she had actually summoned the insects, had directed them to attack the horse.

  But he couldn’t speak.

  It was as if something inside him had taken control of his will and was refusing to let him utter the words that formed in his mind.

  He stood still, his mouth half open, terror building inside him as he struggled to make sense out of what was happening to him.

  Then, without warning, the strange force that was keeping him from speaking compelled him to turn his head and look at Julie.

  No longer sitting on the fence, she was standing near her sister and mother now.

  But she was looking at him.

  Their eyes met and, for just a moment, locked.

  And Jeff gave in to the force inside him. Shrugging, he turned back to Russell Owen. “It was just like Kevin told you,” he said. “Really weird.”

  Ben Larkin piped up once more, his hand tugging at his brother’s sleeve. “But what about Julie? Aren’t you going to tell them about that?”

  “Julie?” Russell Owen asked, frowning. “What’s he talking about? What did Julie have to do with it?”

  Once again the strange force inside him wrestled Jeff’s words into silence, but even as he shrugged off any knowledge of what his brother might be talking about, he heard Ben excitedly start to tell the tale:

  “It was really weird, Mr. Owen. It was almost like Julie sicced ’em on die horse.” Ben’s voice rose excitedly as the words tumbled from his mouth. “You should’ve seen it, Mr. Owen! The horse was bucking all over the place, an
d Molly was trying to get away from it, and all of a sudden I looked up and Julie was just sitting there, watching it, with a real funny look on her face! And a second later there were bees everywhere! It was just like she made them go after the horse!”

  Russell’s eyes narrowed and he turned to look at Julie, who had entered the corral and was standing a few feet away from them. “Julie?” he said. “Did you hear that? What’s Ben talking about?”

  As she looked at her stepfather, Julie clearly remembered the strange burst of energy that seemed to explode from somewhere deep inside her brain. But when she opened her mouth to tell Russell what had happened, she, like Jeff a few moments before, found herself struggling, as if totally confused by Ben’s story. “I don’t know,” she heard herself say as the awful, formless entity within her swelled, robbing her of the will to speak her own thoughts. Julie tried to fight it, tried to tell her stepfather the truth, but even as she struggled against the strange force, the unbidden words began to roll from her lips: “All I remember is Greta bucking, and being scared that Molly was going to get killed. And then all of a sudden the bees were all over Greta.”

  “But it was like you did it!” Ben cried. “I saw it, and it was just like you did it! And you looked funny, too, just like you did yesterday!”

  Above Ben’s head Carl Henderson caught Russell’s eyes, and the two men exchanged a resigned shrug as the little boy went on talking, his words pouring out in a rush as he tried to convince them that somehow Julie had made the bees attack the mare. Only when he finally ran out of steam did Russell give him a gentle pat on the back and turn him back toward the fence.

  “Okay, Ben. Now, why don’t you go over there with Molly, and let us figure out what happened here?”

  “But I just told you,” Ben wailed, his voice reflecting his indignation. “If you don’t believe me—”

  “It’s not that we don’t believe you,” Russell broke in, knowing he had no chance of convincing the boy that despite how it might have looked, Julie couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the bees’ attack. “It’s just that right now we’ve got a lot to do.”

  Ben, his face stormy, finally stamped away, and at last Russell turned his attention back to the horse. “Well?” he asked Carl Henderson. “What do you think?”

  Henderson shrugged. “Hard to say, without an autopsy. Tell you what—I’ll have one of our trucks pick up the carcass, and our lab boys can do a postmortem. And we’ll check some of those bees, too.” His eyes darted toward Ben, then back to Russell. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped so low, only Russell could hear him. “I think maybe we’d better keep this quiet, if we can,” he said. “At least until we know exactly what’s going on.” When Russell made no reply, Henderson pressed a little harder. “The last thing we need around here is a panic, Russell. And if these bees are turning lethal, a panic is exactly what we’re going to have. All I’m saying is there’s no use letting it start until we know for sure.”

  Russell glanced at his wife, who was still crouched down by Molly, her arms wrapped around the little girl.

  The panic, he suspected, had already started.

  Sighing heavily, he agreed to say nothing to anyone until they got the results of the autopsy.

  A few minutes later, as Carl Henderson walked back toward his Cherokee to call UniGrow’s offices in San Luis Obispo on his cellular phone, a chill of apprehension crept into him.

  The kind of chill that means someone is watching you.

  Don’t turn around, he told himself, instantly certain he knew whose eyes were boring into his back. Just keep walking, and don’t turn around. But even as he silently repeated the words to himself, his step faltered and he couldn’t resist glancing back over his shoulder.

  Julie Spellman’s eyes were fixed on him, and even though she was almost fifty feet away, he could read their expression perfectly.

  She knows, he thought. She remembered, and she knows what I’ve done.

  His heart suddenly pounding and his skin breaking out in a cold sweat of fear, he tore his eyes away from hers and almost ran back to the Jeep.

  CHAPTER 15

  The sun was starting to drop, but the temperature was still climbing as desert heat poured into the valley on a wind that had shifted to come from the southeast. In the distance the lush green carpet of the valley floor shimmered, while out toward the horizon a mirage lake that had appeared that afternoon spreading its phantom waters over a vast area of the flatland was now rapidly vanishing as the angle of the sun dropped too low to support it. Karen Owen hadn’t noticed the phenomenon, however, for though she was in the midst of fixing supper, and the view of the valley was spread out before her as she stood at the kitchen sink, she was concentrating neither on her work nor on the panorama beyond the window.

  Rather, her mind was still focused on what had happened that morning.

  Now she did glance out the window, but it had nothing to do with enjoying the splendor of the valley. The potato peeler she was wielding paused in its rhythmic movement for a moment as she warily eyed the bees hovering over the lawn.

  Russell, following his wife’s gaze, shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know how else I can explain it to you,” he told her, knowing that despite everything he’d told her, Karen was convinced that the bees were waiting to strike at anyone who showed their face outside.

  Molly hadn’t been allowed out of the house for more than a few minutes at a time, no matter how much Russell insisted that what happened to the horse was a freak circumstance and none of them was in any danger.

  “But they’re still out there,” Karen told him, nodding toward the yard where, indeed, a few dozen bees were humming around the clover blooming in the lawn.

  “Of course they are,” Russell replied, and Karen heard a note of irritation in his voice. But then, as he saw how truly frightened she was, he softened. “Look, I know how scared you are, and I don’t blame you. But you have to understand that this is a farm, and there will always be bees around. We’ve gotten rid of the ones that stung Molly and Julie, so let’s at least wait until Carl has a report from the lab before we jump to any conclusions.”

  “But the kids all said—”

  Russell silenced her by wrapping his arms around her, stroking her hair soothingly. “Who knows what the kids really saw? If Greta stomped on a bunch of bees while she was spooked, it stands to reason that more bees are going to come. Injured bees exude an odor that attracts their hive mates. It’s a defense mechanism of the hive, pure and simple.”

  Karen looked up into her husband’s face. “And after they killed that poor horse, they came back here, Russell. Not to one of the hives half a mile away. Here! Doesn’t it bother you at all that they’re inside the house?”

  Russell frowned. “You mean they’re not just in the wall? Have you actually seen them in the house? In our room or Julie’s?”

  Karen hesitated, then reluctantly shook her head. “But I can hear them,” she said. “That awful buzzing.”

  “It’ll stop,” Russell assured her. “When it cools down—”

  “I know,” Karen broke in, slipping out of his embrace and moving to the refrigerator. “ ‘Bees don’t move if it gets below fifty-four degrees,’ ” she went on, parroting what he’d told her earlier. “But it’s almost a hundred out there right now, and it’s not going to drop fifty degrees tonight. What if …” She floundered for a moment, searching for an argument she hadn’t already used. She understood that they couldn’t just move the swarm, the way Otto and Kevin had taken the one out of the tree the day they’d been married. Short of ripping the wall apart, there was no way of getting at the queen, and Karen knew you couldn’t move the swarm without moving the queen. Tearing a gaping hole in the wall was the one thing absolutely certain to fill the house with bees.

  “All right,” she sighed, pulling a head of lettuce out of the vegetable bin at the bottom of the fridge, then straightening up and facing Russell again. “I’ll make you a deal
. I won’t leave you if you promise me we’ll call someone in the morning and have them come out and fumigate the swarm.”

  “I promise,” Russell replied.

  “But I won’t sleep in our room, either,” she went on. “Not with that awful humming. I’d be afraid they were going to come through the wall any second.”

  “They’re not carpenter ants,” Russell observed dryly. “Those guys don’t make holes, they fill them up.” He grinned as Karen shuddered. “Hey, think of the money we could save on insulation if we just let them fill the walls with honeycomb!”

  Karen’s eyes blazed. “Don’t make jokes,” she told him. “You may think this is all very funny, but in case you’ve forgotten, both my daughters have almost died from bee stings. How would you feel if it had been Kevin we’d flown to the hospital instead of Molly?”

  His laughter dying, Russell said, “You know how bad I feel about what happened. I guess I was just trying to lighten things up a little.”

  “Well, you can’t do it by making jokes,” she said. “And I mean it about having an exterminator out tomorrow. And I mean it about sleeping downstairs. And the kids can sleep downstairs, too, if they want to.”

  “Sounds like it’s going to be a slumber party around here,” Russell observed. Then, as he started out of the kitchen, his eyes fell on the large clock that hung on the wall above the door to the dining room.

  It was almost six-thirty, and he clearly remembered Karen telling Julie to be home no later than six when she’d gone into town with Jeff Larkin.

  Instantly, he thought about what had happened a few nights before, when she and Kevin had come home along the back road, reeking of beer.

  Now she’d taken off with Jeff in his car, and was already half an hour late getting home.

  Maybe, he reflected, giving her an early release from her grounding hadn’t been such a good idea after all. One day, and already she was breaking a promise.

  Well, when she got home, the two of them would have a talk.

  And the later Julie was, the longer—and more unpleasant—the talk would be.