by John Saul
Jeff Larkin banged the fender of Vic Costas’s ancient station wagon, his frustration at the car’s refusal to start growing with every passing second.
He’d been working on it for nearly an hour already, but was no further along than when he’d begun.
And Julie, who was sitting in the front seat, turning the key whenever he told her to, was worried about how late it was.
“I was supposed to be home at six,” she’d told him a few minutes ago. “I’m already half an hour late!”
He’d checked the battery, finding the cells full. The snapping spark he’d gotten when he grounded a screwdriver across the positive pole told him there was nothing wrong with its charge. Besides, the radio worked fine, and the headlights glowed brightly even in full daylight.
After that he’d started checking fuses, but quickly realized he was out of his depth—there was no manual for the car, and he didn’t know where half the fuses were, let alone what they might be for. Still, all the ones he’d found had been in good shape, so he almost eliminated a fuse problem from his list of possible causes for the car’s absolute refusal to start.
What the hell could it be, anyway?
He wracked his brain, trying to think, but all day long he’d been feeling strange, and the last couple of hours, since he and Julie had taken off in the car after he parked Ben with Vic Costas, he’d been feeling steadily worse.
But not so bad that he wasn’t hungry. They’d stopped at the A&W and gotten some hamburgers, and he’d been about to head up into the park when Julie stopped him.
“Do we have to go up there? The power lines drive me crazy.”
Jeff had glanced over at her. “Is that why you didn’t want me to take the county road when we came into town? Because of the power lines?”
Julie nodded. “I hate them.” But she hadn’t told him why.
So instead of going to the park, they’d driven up into the foothills, parked the car, eaten their hamburgers and talked.
He asked her about the bees that morning, but she just shrugged her shoulders. “How could I have done that?” she asked. But she didn’t quite say she hadn’t done it.
After that, they just talked for a little while, and then, at quarter of six, they decided to head home.
And the car hadn’t started.
With every minute that passed, Jeff was more pissed off.
Dropping the hood down, he went around to the driver’s door.
“I’m going to try pushing it,” he said. “Put it in neutral and let the parking brake off.” As Julie followed his instructions, he leaned hard against the wagon’s back door and pushed the car ahead a dozen feet, until it hit the downhill grade. “Okay, set the brake again,” he called to Julie. The car jerked to a stop, and as Julie slid over into the passenger seat, Jeff got in behind the wheel. Putting the car in second gear, he held the clutch in with his left foot and released the parking brake again. The car started rolling forward, gaining speed. When it was doing ten miles an hour, he let out the clutch.
The car jerked as the transmission grabbed, then the engine coughed twice and started up. Jeff shook his head in disgust as he braked the car and the engine idled.
“Almost an hour,” he groused. “I messed with it for almost an hour, and all it needed was a push! Do you believe it?” Then he felt a chill wash over him, and he shivered.
Jeff felt Julie watching him and heard her voice: “You okay?”
He turned to look at her and tried to speak, but just as at the corral that morning, when he’d tried to tell her stepfather about the horse, the words died on his lips.
Fear twisted his guts as he felt that strange force—a force he could neither fight against nor identify—once more refuse to let him speak.
Julie chuckled. “You’re fine, right?” she asked, her voice tense. She was leaning against the passenger door, her face pale, her voice trembling as she spoke. “Go on,” she whispered, her words almost pleading. “Tell me how you feel. Just try.”
Jeff hesitated, then opened his mouth, determined to tell her exactly what was happening to him.
But again something unidentifiable rose up in his mind, seizing control. “I’m fine,” he heard himself say.
And then, as he saw the knowing look in her eyes, he understood.
Whatever was doing this to him was doing it to her, too.
“What is it?” he whispered, barely trusting himself to be able to utter the words. “What’s happening to us?”
Julie’s whole body trembled as if she were gripped in a fever. “I don’t know.” She hesitated, then said, “Sometimes it seems to get better. Sometimes you almost forget it’s there. But then it gets worse again. And then …” She fell silent, as if searching for the right words. “It fills you up,” she whispered at last, her voice barely audible. “It fills you up, like it did with me yesterday. Then you have to do something.” Her eyes locked on Jeff’s. “You have to do something like I had to do yesterday.”
Jeff stared silently at her, waiting for Julie to go on, but she said nothing else. As he put the car in gear and drove them home, though, her words echoed in his mind and he remembered once again the horrifying black swarm that had erupted from her throat the day before.
Erupted out of her, and attacked him, penetrating his body through his mouth, his nose, his ears, even his very skin.
Was that the source of the terrible force inside him that twice today had seized control of his mind?
But what was it?
What did it want from him?
Was it filling him up now, too?
And when it filled him, what would he do?
And then he had another thought.
What would it do?
After it filled him up and took control of him, what would it do?
But even as he formulated the question in his mind, Jeff Larkin was already certain that he knew the answer.
When it was done with him, when he could serve it no longer, the thing—the strange force inside him—would kill him.
CHAPTER 16
Marge Larkin was getting angrier by the minute.
Not only had Jeff not been there when she’d arrived home from work, but he’d dumped Ben with Vic Costas, and left her a note saying only that he’d gone for a ride with Julie Spellman and would be back by six.
Julie Spellman!
Marge still didn’t know what had gone on between her son and Julie yesterday, and now they were together again and half an hour late getting home.
The worst, though, was that he’d left Ben with Vic Costas!
“As long as the kids don’t bother me,” the old farmer had told her when he’d reluctantly agreed to rent her the little house behind his barn. The building hadn’t been occupied since he’d sold most of the land off to UniGrow, keeping no more than he could easily tend himself. “I don’t really want no kids around the place. If I’d wanted kids, I’d have gotten married and had some of my own, and you don’t notice I ever did that, did I?” Marge had promised that not only would Jeff and Ben be no trouble, but that they’d help out, too.
Up until Jeff had turned sixteen three months ago, it had worked out just fine. But then Jeff found the old Mercury station wagon buried under a mass of weeds next to the toolshed. Though the car had been completely hidden by the dense foliage, he discovered that it looked far closer to ruin than it actually was. Fortunately, the windows had been closed tight, and the interior of the car had actually turned out to be pretty clean. So he’d hacked away the weeds and set to work getting it running again.
Vic Costas went along with it, albeit reluctantly, but again had given her a stiff warning. “Any trouble,” he said, wagging his finger severely, “any trouble at all, and out you go. I’d forgotten that old car was even there, so I guess it’s okay if he wants to use it. But he pays! He pays the insurance, and the license, and everything else.” His canny eyes had narrowed, almost disappearing into his weathered face. “And don’t forget who’s responsible,�
�� he told her. “Not me—you! He’s your boy, not mine.”
Though Marge suspected that Vic’s gruff manner was more bluff than anything else, she wasn’t about to risk finding out, for the tenant house on his farm was by far the best thing she’d been able to afford in the years since Ted Larkin had left her and the kids, simply disappearing one day, never to be seen or heard from again.
If Jeff got them kicked out of the tenant house, she didn’t know what she was going to do.
She glanced out the window once more. Still no sign of Jeff.
She was about to pick up the phone to call the Owens and ask if Julie was home yet when she spotted a car moving along the dirt road that edged the foothills. Her hand on the receiver, Marge didn’t move until she recognized the battered station wagon as it passed their driveway on its way to the Owen farm.
Five minutes later, when Jeff finally pulled the old Mercury up in front of the house, Marge was waiting by the front door, the first words of her angry lecture already rehearsed in her mind.
“Do you know what time—” she began, but the words died in her throat as she stared at her son.
His face was pale—ashen, really—and glistening with sweat.
His clothes were dirty and his hands black with grease.
“Jeff?” she asked. “What happened? What’s wrong with you?”
Jeff, his six-foot-two-inch frame looming over her own five and a half feet, felt the beast within him take over. “What do you mean?” he asked, uttering the words the force inside his mind chose for him. “Nothing’s wrong.”
Ben, who had sensed his mother’s anger and maintained a careful silence for the past hour, came back to life.
“It is, too!” he countered, pointing at his brother’s face. “You look just like Julie did yesterday! You look like you’re sick!”
Jeff barely glanced at his brother. “I’m not sick,” he told his mother, obeying the instructions of the dark entity hidden inside him. “I just had to work on the car—it wouldn’t start.”
Marge inspected her son more carefully. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously and she moved closer to Jeff. “Let me see your eyes.”
Jeff instantly understood her implication. “Oh, right,” he groaned. “Julie and I are going to go out and get stoned, and I’m going to come driving home drugged out! What’s with you, Mom? It just took a while to get the car started. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal,” Marge replied, her voice growing cold in the face of Jeff’s lack of concern, “is that according to your own note, you were going to be home at six!”
Jeff’s mouth dropped open. “I couldn’t help it! How was I supposed to know the car wouldn’t start? And I couldn’t even fix it, either!” Digging in his pocket, he produced the keys to the station wagon and held them out to her. “If you don’t believe me, go try it yourself!”
Her eyes steely, Marge snatched the keys from Jeff’s hand. Marching out of the house, she yanked the door of the station wagon open and slid behind the wheel. Inserting the key into the ignition, she twisted it.
The engine instantly roared to life.
She gunned the engine a couple of times, then shut off the ignition and returned to the house. “I thought you said it wouldn’t start,” she said coldly.
“Well, don’t ask me what’s going on! If you don’t believe me, ask Julie!” Then, with exaggerated politeness that crossed the line into insolence, he said, “May I go take a shower now, your majesty?”
Marge stared at her son, shocked more by his tone than by the words themselves. Though Jeff had never been anything close to a perfect child—far from it—he’d never been deliberately nasty to her.
Once again the question of drugs rose in her mind.
Despite what he’d said, she still wondered.
Was it possible that Julie had gotten Jeff into drugs?
She almost blurted the question out, then thought better of it. What was he going to do? Having already denied it, was he now simply going to admit that he and Julie had been out somewhere getting stoned? “Go ahead,” she said almost curtly. “We can talk about this later.”
When he was gone, Marge turned to Ben. “I think maybe you and I ought to have a little talk,” she said. Taking him by the hand, she led Ben out to the kitchen and sat him at the table.
Ben, suddenly suspicious, looked warily at his mother. “Are you mad at me?” he asked, his voice trembling.
Realizing how her words must have sounded to the little boy, Marge felt instantly contrite. “Of course not,” she assured him, reaching across to pat his hand. “I just want to talk to you, that’s all.”
“About what?” Ben asked, still not certain what was going on.
Marge thought quickly, wondering how to question Ben without letting him know exactly what she was thinking. “About Julie,” she said. “I mean, you said Jeff looked like she did yesterday. What did you mean?”
Ben shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just what I said. When she started acting so weird yesterday, she looked just like Jeff does.”
“You mean she was sick?”
The little boy shook his head. “She just looked funny, that’s all. And she was acting funny, too. Like when the horse—” He clamped his hands over his mouth as he realized what he’d done. He’d promised he wouldn’t say anything about Greta. He’d promised Jeff, and Mr. Owen, and everybody, and now he’d broken his promise.
“The horse?” Marge asked. What was he talking about?
Ben was regarding her fearfully now. “I wasn’t supposed to say anything,” he told her. “Not until they know what happened to it.”
“Happened to what?” Marge pressed, her exasperation growing. What on earth had gone on today? “It’s all right, Ben,” she went on. “I can’t believe they meant for you not to tell me, sweetheart. I’m your mother.”
“But I promised,” Ben pleaded. “You’re never supposed to break a promise, are you?”
“No, you’re not,” Marge sighed, trapped by her own teaching. “I’ll tell you what. You go on in and turn on the television, and I’ll start getting supper ready, so as soon as Jeff is finished with his shower, we can eat, okay?”
Relieved, and anxious to get out of the kitchen before his mother changed her mind, Ben slid off his chair and darted out to the living room. A moment later, when she heard the television go on, Marge picked up the phone and dialed the Owens’ number.
“Russell? This is Marge Larkin. Look, I know this is probably going to sound a little paranoid …” She hesitated. What would Russell know about Julie and what she might be up to? She’d better talk directly to Karen. “I guess I really need to talk to Karen,” she went on. “Is she there?”
In the kitchen of the Owens’ farmhouse, Russell wondered exactly what to say.
Karen was there all right.
She was in the den, with Julie.
And given the way she was talking to her daughter, Russell wondered if Marge Larkin was calling because she could hear Karen’s voice from her own house, even though it was half a mile away.
“Just a minute,” he said, betraying none of his thoughts. “I’ll see if I can find her.”
“It will be a lot easier if you just tell me what you two have been up to,” Karen said.
It was half an hour since she’d hung up the phone after her conversation with Marge Larkin, and she and Julie were in the front seat of the Chrysler, on their way into town. Russell wanted to go with them, but Karen insisted on dealing with the problem herself.
Drugs.
Was it really possible that Julie had gotten herself involved in drugs again? She had been so sure they’d left that problem in L.A., and when Marge Larkin first mentioned the possibility that Jeff and Julie might have been doing drugs, Karen’s immediate response was to dismiss it out of hand. This was Pleasant Valley, not Los Angeles! Where would Julie even have gotten her hands on any drugs? Yet Karen knew perfectly well that a drug problem wasn’t something anyone just put
aside and never thought of again.
Staying off drugs simply wasn’t that easy, and if she were completely honest, she’d admit the possibility that Julie might have brought something with her.
Or that Jeff had given them to her. She’d been careful not to mention that idea to Marge Larkin, who seemed to think that if drugs were involved, it had to have been at Julie’s instigation.
Julie had certainly been acting strangely the last few days, and she hadn’t looked right since the bee had stung her and she’d had that terrible reaction.
But if Jeff was looking the same way Julie was, and was acting strange, too …
And Jeff hadn’t been stung.
What was going on?
It had been her idea that they take both kids to the clinic right now and have them given drug tests. After all, the test was a simple urine analysis, no more difficult than a home pregnancy test. Marge Larkin, suddenly faced with the possibility of actually confirming what was now only a speculation, hesitated, but then agreed. So immediately after their conversation, Karen called Ellen Filmore, whose home number Russell had written on the wall by the phone. When she’d explained why she was calling, Ellen instantly turned professional.
“Does Julie have a history of drug abuse?”
“It depends on what you call abuse,” Karen replied, hedging. “She’s smoked a couple of joints, like most kids nowadays, but—”
“Not most kids around here,” the doctor pointedly interjected. “Bring her in and we’ll get to the bottom of this right now.”
Julie, of course, had steadfastly refused even to admit that anything was wrong at all, despite the way she looked.
Now, as Karen suggested one last time that Julie own up to the truth, her daughter only sat impassively next to her and stared straight ahead. “I don’t know why you don’t believe me,” she said yet again. “I’m fine.”
“All you have to do is look in a mirror to know that isn’t true,” Karen told her as she struggled to control her anger. Did Julie think she was stupid? Or did she think she could just lie her way out of this?
Minutes later Karen pulled into the parking lot of the clinic.
