The Homing

by John Saul

  If she didn’t, she might lose sight of him, and then she’d never find her way home.

  The thought of being out in the hills all alone, lost in the middle of the night, spurred her on, and she managed to run a little faster. But still, with every step she took, Ben got farther away, and now he’d almost disappeared into the darkness.

  Then she would be alone.

  Just the thought of what might happen terrified her so much that she missed her footing, tripped, and sprawled headlong onto the path they were following. “Ben!” she screamed, his name bursting from her lips as a high-pitched wail. Lying on the ground, she sobbed from the pain of her skinned elbow, and with terror—not because Ben had left her by herself, but because his brother might find her here.

  The image of Jeff, his face pale and scary in the moonlight, his fingers—with long, pointed nails—reaching for her, was still vivid in her memory.

  “Ben, wait! Come back! Don’t leave me here!”

  Her whole body shaking, Molly curled up, tears streaming from her eyes, sobs choking her throat. She wrapped her arms around her legs, and for what seemed like forever, she simply lay there. Slowly, her sobs began to ease and her breathing evened out into its normal rhythm. But then the skin on the back of her neck began to tingle as she sensed that someone was behind her.

  Someone, or something.

  She froze, her heart pounding again, her breath caught in her throat. Then she heard a voice.

  “Molly? Can’t you get up?”

  Ben!

  It was Ben!

  Sitting up, she rubbed her eyes with her fists, then peered up at him, his face clearly visible in the moonlight. His head was cocked and he looked almost as frightened as she felt.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did you hurt yourself?”

  Now that she was no longer alone, Molly’s fear began to ebb, and she rubbed at her skinned elbow. “I tripped,” she said. Then her voice took on an accusing note. “How come you didn’t stop when I called you?”

  “I did,” Ben told her. “Soon’s I heard you, I came back. And I’ve been right here all the time, too. You were just crying so hard you didn’t see me.”

  Sniffling, Molly rolled up her pant leg, inspected her injured knee, then stood up. “Do you know how to get home?” she asked.

  Ben hesitated, then slowly shook his head. But as Molly’s eyes once more flooded with tears, he pointed off in the direction they’d been running. “I—I think we have to go that way,” he stammered.

  Molly looked around. In the darkness everything looked the same to her. “What if that’s the wrong way?” she challenged.

  Ben hesitated. Somewhere in the back of his mind a memory was stirring.

  A memory of something Jeff had told him a long time ago, when they’d been outside one night, staring up into the sky.

  “See that?” Jeff had asked, pointing up into the sky. “That’s the Big Dipper.” Carefully, Jeff had shown him how to recognize the seven stars of the constellation. “If you follow a line up the side of the Dipper away from the handle, the brightest star you see is Polaris. That’s the North Star. And as long as you can see that, you know which way is north.”

  Now Ben peered up into the sky, and picked out the bright stars of the Dipper, then followed the line Jeff had told him about.

  And there, shining brightly, was the star he was looking for. “There,” he said, pointing to it. “That’s the North Star, so that way’s north, so we live that way!” His arm shifted around to the east.

  Molly, her terror starting to abate in the face of Ben’s certainty, slipped her hand into his. “But how far is it?” she asked.

  This time Ben didn’t hesitate at all. “Not very far,” he declared, though the truth was, he didn’t have any idea how far from home they might be. “It might even be right over the next hill. Come on.”

  Hand in hand, the two children started down the slope into the saddle between the hill they were on and the next one. Before they’d gone more than a dozen steps, the quiet of the night was shattered by a noise that froze them in their tracks.

  The same howl of a dying animal that had awakened Manny Gomez at exactly that instant.

  “Wh-What was that?” Molly asked in a quavering voice.

  “I don’t know,” Ben replied, his hand tightening on hers. “But I think we better get out of here.” Breaking into a run, he half led, half dragged Molly up the slope of the next hill, not pausing to catch his breath until they were both at the top.

  And this time, as their panting slowly eased, they heard something else.

  It was the same humming sound they’d heard in the valley in front of the cave.

  Now, though, it was coming toward them, growing steadily louder every second.

  CHAPTER 29

  “Hold it right there, Henderson,” Mark Shannon said. He was standing at the foot of the steep flight of stairs that led from the foyer above, Roberto Muñoz right behind him.

  Pinned like one of his own insects by the bright beam of the deputy’s flashlight, Carl Henderson blinked, then started to raise one arm to shield his eyes from the glare.

  “Don’t move!” Shannon barked. “Tell me where the light switch is.” When Henderson said nothing, Shannon spoke over his shoulder. “Find it, Roberto. It’s probably on the wall right next to me.” He heard Roberto moving behind him. A naked bulb came on, flooding the basement with harsh white light. Shannon’s eyes darted around the basement, searching for Ellen Filmore, then bored in on Carl Henderson. “Where’s Ellen?” he demanded.

  Finally Henderson spoke, his voice trembling almost like that of a frightened little boy. “I didn’t hurt her,” he said. “I just locked her in the darkroom, that’s all.”

  Almost before Henderson had finished speaking, Ellen’s voice, muffled and distorted, came through the door that was all but lost in the shadows at the other end of the room. “Help! Oh, God, someone get me out of here! Please!”

  While Shannon held his gun steadily on Carl Henderson, Roberto dashed to the far end of the basement, found another light switch, then fumbled for a moment with the dead bolt that was mounted on the outside of the door. A second later it turned in his fingers and he pulled the door open.

  For a moment he thought he must be hallucinating.

  Sitting huddled against the far wall, her face ashen, was Ellen Filmore.

  Crawling on her skin, creeping over her clothes, caught in her hair, were spiders.

  Dozens of them—scores of them.

  Even as he watched, still more of them were dropping down from the rafters above her head, spinning out webs as they went.

  Roberto gasped, his eyes darting around the room. The spiders were everywhere, spinning webs, creeping over the walls and the floor. A violent shudder seizing him, Roberto fought against a sudden urge to slam the door again, to rid himself of even the sight of the crawling predatory creatures. But instead he rushed in, brushing as many of the spiders off Ellen Filmore as he could, then lifting her to her feet and half carrying her through the door. Only when she was outside the room and Roberto had closed the door behind him did she suddenly come back to life, stripping off the long-sleeved blouse she was wearing and shaking it violently. Sobbing partly from the horror of what had happened to her in the locked and darkened room and partly out of relief at being released from her torture, she leaned over, shaking her head violently and running her fingers through her hair.

  More spiders dropped to the floor and scurried toward the dark corners of the basement, away from the light that exposed them.

  Finally free of her tormentors, Ellen at last gave in to the emotions she’d been struggling to hold in check through the hours of her imprisonment in the blacked-out chamber. Sobbing, she sank onto a worn and sagging chair. “I thought I was going to die,” she breathed, her voice breaking. “Oh, God, I thought they were going to kill me!”

  A few yards away, Carl Henderson laughed.

  It was a dark, brittle laug
h, the laugh of a man whose last few shreds of sanity were starting to unravel. “Kill you?” he echoed, spitting the words contemptuously from his lips. “I don’t think so. If I’d wanted to kill you, I certainly would have. They were only spiders, Ellen! Just harmless spiders! Not even any of my lovely brown recluses.”

  Mark Shannon felt a shiver go down his spine, remembering what had happened to someone down south who had been bitten by one of the shy little spiders. Though the victim hadn’t died, Shannon suspected she wished she had, since she’d been left armless and legless as one limb after another began to rot away under the poison. “Brown recluses?” he repeated. “You keep them here?”

  Henderson turned to face the deputy. “Of course I do,” he said, speaking as if to a particularly dense student. “Arachnids aren’t my specialty, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in them. I’m interested in anything that—” Henderson cut his own words off abruptly.

  “Interested in anything that what, Henderson?” Mark Shannon asked.

  When Henderson made no reply, Ellen Filmore spoke, her voice far more composed now, her sobs abating. “I think—” she began, then her voice faltered. Steeling herself as if she were about to tell a patient he was terminally ill, she went on: “I think he’s been killing people down here, Mark. He said something about a girl from the freeway—”

  Dawn Sanderson, Shannon thought. What in hell is he—But before he could even finish the thought, Ellen’s next words hit him.

  “—and Otto Owen.”

  “Otto?” Shannon echoed, suddenly puzzled. “He killed Otto?”

  “Nobody will ever prove that,” Henderson sneered.

  As Ellen Filmore repeated what Henderson had told her of the life-form he’d created in his laboratory, Mark Shannon felt a dark rage take possession of him. For a moment he wondered what would happen if he simply executed Henderson on the spot.

  Even as the fleeting thought went through his mind, he knew he wouldn’t act on it. Yet with Molly Spellman and Ben Larkin now missing as well, he couldn’t waste any time transporting Henderson to the nearest jail, either, not when it was forty miles away.

  Then his eyes fell on the darkroom door, and he knew what he could do. There was an elegance to it, a certain justice to holding Henderson captive—even temporarily—in the same room in which he had imprisoned his own victims.

  “In there,” he said, opening the door to the darkroom and switching on the light so that the interior was dimly illuminated by the light of the bare bulb. “If Ellen couldn’t get out, and Otto Owen couldn’t get out, I don’t think you’ll be able to, either.”

  As Carl Henderson gasped, Mark Shannon gazed at him once more. All the confidence he’d shown a moment ago, all the superciliousness, was gone. In its place was a look of stark terror. “Move it,” Shannon said, inclining his head toward the room at the far end of the basement. “And one word out of you, one complaint about your rights, and I won’t just lock you in, Henderson. I’ll turn the lights out, too. You’ll be in the dark.”

  Though he uttered no complete words at all, Carl Henderson whimpered with terror as Mark Shannon propelled him toward the open door. As the deputy shoved him through, a dark wet stain spread across Henderson’s pants.

  Karen Owen had never felt more helpless in her life than she did at this very minute.

  How could she have let it happen?

  She had promised herself—sworn to herself—that she wouldn’t fall asleep for even a minute, but now her baby, all she had left since Julie had disappeared, had gone, vanishing into the darkness so completely that she could still barely believe it had happened at all.

  Why hadn’t she heard them going? Surely they must have been talking to each other, whispering between themselves the way children Molly’s and Ben’s age did. And what had possessed them? What could possibly have lured them outside tonight?

  Once again Karen found herself moving almost involuntarily to the door, going out onto the porch, staring into the darkness, searching.

  She didn’t know how many times she’d gone outside since Russell had called 911 to report that the two children had disappeared. She’d already been to the barn twice, searching every corner of it, just in case Molly and Ben had decided to play some game, never thinking how much it would terrify their mothers. But she had found no trace of them, not in the barn, or in any of the sheds, or even in the pigpen or the chicken coop, where she’d looked the last time she was out.

  Then, perhaps ten minutes ago, she’d noticed that something about the night didn’t feel right.

  At first she tried to ignore the strange sense of something being different from usual, telling herself that of course things felt different—her baby was gone! But it was something else, something much subtler than that, and the more she tried to ignore it, the more it began to bother her.

  It wasn’t until Russell had come out that she suddenly realized what it was, and even when she did, she thought maybe she was mistaken.

  The night was silent.

  The soft cacophony of insect song she had grown so used to over the last two weeks was silent tonight.

  She’d been just about to ask Russell about it when the strange silence was broken by a sound that chilled her to the marrow.

  An animal screamed.

  It hadn’t barked, nor howled, nor even bayed at the moon the way coyotes sometimes did in the hills above the San Fernando Valley.

  This had been a short scream of terror and agony, cut off in an instant, gone so quickly she would have wondered if she had imagined it had Russell not tightened his grip on her shoulder, pulling her close.

  “It’s only some animal,” he said. “It’s not one of—”

  He’d broken off before finishing the sentence, but Karen had had no trouble completing it in her own mind.

  —not one of the kids, he’d been about to say.

  She let him lead her into the house, but ever since then she’d been pacing back and forth from the living room to the kitchen, looking first out of one window, then another. From the kitchen window, which faced north and east, she could see nothing at all, and from the living room window, where the view was to the south and west, there had been only an unbroken curtain of darkness until a moment ago, when she spotted a pair of headlights moving slowly toward them.

  So at last something was happening! “There’s someone out there,” she called. Russell and Marge Larkin joined her. Together they watched the car make its slow way along the dirt road that wound north from Vic Costas’s farm and would eventually bring it to their own farm. “Who is it?” she breathed. “What are they doing up there?”

  “Maybe it’s Shannon, looking for the kids,” Russell said. “I’ll go see.”

  “We’ll all go see,” Karen told him.

  Together the three of them went out the back door and got into the big pickup truck that, until a few days ago, had been Otto’s. “There’s a flashlight behind the seat,” Russell said as he started the engine and put the truck in low gear. “See if you can get it out. It’s a big halogen that plugs into the cigarette lighter.”

  As the truck bounced up the rutted driveway toward the foothills, Karen climbed up onto the seat and fished around among the jumper cables, flares, and other miscellany Otto had stashed in the space behind it. And suddenly, now that she was doing something, making some positive effort to find her missing children, some of the terror in her heart began to abate.

  We’ll find them, she told herself. We’ll find Molly and Ben tonight, and tomorrow we’ll find them all.

  But even as she uttered the words, she wondered if perhaps they weren’t more hope than reality.

  Though Mark Shannon knew there was practically no chance of finding Molly Spellman and Ben Larkin until the sun came up, he also knew there was no way he could call the search off, either. By the time he’d joined up with Manny Gomez on the dirt road behind the Owen farm, Russell and Karen were already there, along with Marge Larkin, and for the next t
wenty minutes more cars and trucks had arrived, everyone determined to begin the search immediately. So, even while knowing that seeking lost children at night was only slightly less futile than the proverbial hunt for the needle in the haystack, he’d broken the searchers up into groups, giving them strict orders not to lose contact with each other. “I’m going to need all of you in the morning, and the last thing I’m gonna want is to have to send people out looking for my search party. Clear?”

  For almost three hours the search had gone on, but so far, just as Mark Shannon had expected, there had been no results.

  Now, from his command post midway between the Costas farm and the Owen spread, he was trying to stay in radio contact with everyone at once, producing an often unintelligible jabber of overlapping conversations.

  Up in the hills, lights glimmered as the searchers made their way slowly along the paths, pausing every few minutes to sweep their flashlights in wide circles.

  Clouds had begun drifting in, and the moon, so bright two hours ago, was now only intermittently visible. If it disappeared entirely, Shannon wasn’t sure how the search could continue. Half an hour ago he’d started issuing warnings to the searchers to watch their batteries, to make sure they had enough light left to get themselves back down to the road in the event the moonlight failed.

  Still, in a few more hours dawn would begin to break, and then at least they’d have a chance. Except that Shannon kept thinking about the sound he’d heard just before he and Roberto broke into Carl Henderson’s house.

  The sound that Manny Gomez had heard too, along with Karen and Russell Owen, and Marge Larkin.

  “I don’t know what it was for sure,” Manny told him when he first arrived on the scene. “But I can tell you it sure sounded to me like something was dying out there. A coyote maybe.” Then he’d glanced over to make sure Karen and Russell were out of earshot. “Or maybe that dog of theirs, Bailey.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking, too,” Shannon had admitted.