by Cave, Hugh
"Olive, no," Mel said.
"Well, it's true, and I'm no saint. I have feelin's. She knows what she's scared of and won't tell us. You know and I know she's lyin' her head off about that other kid in the car at the nursery. We both know she herself tore up those plants and killed that kitten and drew that thing in the dirt. I don't see why we have to go through all this torment just because she won't tell us what's goin' on!"
Mel got up and put her hands on Olive's shoulders. She began to massage the shoulders as though to relieve them of pain. "Now, now, it's rough. We know it's rough. But you're oversimplifying it, Olive. There's more to it than just Jerri's refusing to talk."
Outside in the yard, Keith and Vin separated according to a plan agreed on while they were going down the stairs. Keith turned toward a clump of Chinese Hat bushes almost under one of Olive's bedroom windows. Vin made for a more distant part of the yard. In a moment Keith lost sight of his companion.
The yard was totally dark now. The warm air felt like a damp blanket, so smothering it seemed to muffle the engine noise of a car passing along the road. Keith went forward with caution, trying to make no sound. The wet ground sucked at his shoes. There were more than the usual number of light-producing insects floating about, he noticed. Fire beetles, apparently. At least, the glow they gave off seemed brighter and redder than the luminescence of ordinary fireflies. The rain must have brought them.
With his hands uplifted, he pushed into the clump of bushes and found himself in a miniature forest. Water from the disturbed leaves soaked him and he stopped for a moment, apprehensive. It was strange. He always enjoyed walking through his own place at night, breathing in the scents of unseen blossoms, but this yard gave him the creeps. He had no feeling of belonging here at all. He was an intruder. The fire beetles were alien eyes watching and mocking him. He was blind, but they could see.
From the part of the yard where Vin Otto had gone came a sudden cry with pain in it, followed by his name. "Keith! Keith!" He froze in his tracks and listened for more. There was no repetition. He broke into a run through the dark wet bushes, using his arms like a swimmer doing a furious breaststroke.
"Keith . . . " It was a moan this time.
He burst from spiky darkness into a place of open grass and Vin Otto was there on his knees, rocking back and forth. Vin's hands were pressed to his forehead. He made sounds of pain. Struggling to rise, he would have dropped back onto his knees or even collapsed had Keith not caught him.
Keith Wilding was always calm in a crisis. Holding Vin up, he said, "Where are you hurt?"
Vin moved his hands from his head to reveal where something had struck him above the right eye. The flesh was torn and bloody. "A stone," he said with difficulty. "Something moved in the bushes. I saw eyes watching me. I went for it, and bang."
Keith looked around but saw nothing. Fire beetles in a nearby clump of shrubs, perhaps, nothing more. "Let's get you back inside." As he said it a stone whistled past his face, missing him by inches, and a second one thudded into the ground and ricocheted against his ankle. The pain made him suck in a breath. "Come on!"
More stones barely missed them as they stumbled toward the house. It was uncanny, Keith thought, how the throwers could be so accurate in the dark. On reaching the building, he took Vin's key and hurriedly opened the downstairs door, half expecting the stone hurlers to be at their heels. He had to help Vin up the stairs. When Olive opened her apartment door to his thumping and saw Vin's injury, she cried out in dismay.
"Someone's out there," Keith said, helping Vin to the sofa. "More than one. You mind if I call the police?"
"Of course not! Call them!"
He walked to the phone and dialed. While he waited, just beginning to unwind, the room exploded in a crash of broken glass. The stone that flew across it miraculously hit no one before thudding into the wall opposite the shattered window.
Olive screamed. Vin Otto struggled up from the sofa and said hoarsely, "Get back from the windows!" In Keith's ear a voice said, "Nebulon Police. . . Say, what's going on there?"
Keith supplied the necessary information, and when the police voice crisply said, "We'll be there," he slapped the phone down. The others in the room were flat against the wall, staring at the broken window. They seemed fascinated by it. Melanie said, "Keith. Please. Don't stand there."
He reached them just as a second smashed window sprayed shards of glass about the room. Jerri began to whimper.
"I'm going to put out the lights," Keith said.
"Oh God, no!" Olive wailed.
"Have to. The windows are too easy with the place lit up like this." He snapped the living room switch, and then hurried into the bedroom and kitchen. When he groped back to the others, the apartment was in darkness.
In the dark they stood by the wall and waited. They asked one another who was out there, and why. There were no answers, only questions. After a while they became silent, and the only sounds in the room were their breathing, abnormally loud, and Jerri's steady whimpering. Then Melanie said, "Our police cars have radios, don't they?"
"Yes," Vin said in a voice that held pain. "They will not be long."
A car came fast along the road in front of the building and stopped with whistling brakes. Suddenly a missile from the yard noisily shattered one of the windows in the bedroom.
"That should be their parting shot," Keith said.
He went to the first window that had been hit, and looked down. Dark shapes of men moved through the yard behind probing flashlight beams. At the curb stood a car with its headlamps on and a blue light flashing on its roof. For a moment Keith entertained the bizarre notion that the fire beetles in the yard were retreating from the advancing policemen. Take it easy, he thought. You'll be seeing spooks next.
He turned the lights back on and said to Olive, "Hadn't you better look after Vin?" Nothing had been done for Vin yet; his forehead was dark with clotting blood and beginning to swell. Olive led him into the bathroom.
"Keith," Melanie said, "Olive and Jerri can't stay here after this. Can we take them to your house?"
"If they'll come."
It was a time of waiting again while the police completed their search of the yard. At last the bell rang and Keith pressed the button to release the downstairs door. He opened the apartment door when he heard plodding footsteps on the stairs. Worth Blair walked in, followed by two other men in uniform.
Blair was shaking his head. "We heard that window go. Sorry. I'm afraid we muffed it." He nodded to Melanie; everyone knew the girl who ran the gift shop. Just then Vin and Olive came from the bathroom, and he saw Vin's injury. "Good Lord," he said.
Keith said, "They broke more than one window. They broke three and stoned us in the yard."
"They?"
"It wasn't one person out there. It was some kind of gang."
"What did they want?"
"God knows."
Olive said, "They were out there watchin' this apartment for a long time before Vin and Keith went out to investigate. My God, I can't take any more of this."
Melanie said, "We want you and Jerri to come with us, Olive. You can't stay here. Vin, too, if he likes."
"Where?"
"Keith's house. There's room."
"Oh God," Olive said, staring wide-eyed at the fragments of glass everywhere and the unfinished meal on the table. "Vin, what must I do?"
"What Mel says, at least for now. In the morning we can figure things out." Vin put his arm around her. "Do not be afraid, darling. Everything is going to be all right."
"You're all going to Mister Wilding's place?" Worth Blair asked.
"Yes."
"We'll just follow you over there, then, and get a proper statement of what happened. First thing in the morning I'll check back here to see if they left anything we can identify them by. Footprints, for instance, in that wet ground."
18
At the cottage in the nursery Jerri Jansen was put to bed and the police were given the repor
t they had to have. Worth Blair and his men then departed. It was now nearing nine o'clock. "I don't know about the rest of you," Melanie said, "but I'm hungry. Suppose I scramble us some eggs or something."
Olive went with her into the kitchen and the two men sat in the living room. Vin Otto wore a homemade bandage around his head. He had refused flatly to call Doc Broderick. Below the bandage the scars were still visible where Jerri had scratched him in the park.
For a time the men were silent. Working together day in and day out at the nursery, they had found they did not always have to talk. Then Vin said, "Do you know something? I believe those things in the yard back there could see in the dark somehow."
"You said it, not me. But I've been waiting for one of us to stick his neck out."
"Two of those stones hit us and many others just missed. And it was dark, Keith. It was really dark."
"Yes."
"Then you put the apartment lights out and still they were able to smash another window. Did you see that window? It was hit dead center."
Keith allowed his gaze to travel across the tiled floor, now gleaming in lamplight, to the antique desk at the other end of the room. Almost reluctantly he said, "I'm convinced Olive's Jerri can see in the dark, too. At least sometimes."
"What?"
"When I surprised her here Saturday night, she was standing by that desk. The envelope she'd come for was on the desk but not out in the open; it was back where I'd thrown it among some other papers after I gave Chief Lighthill the negative. Let me show you something."
Keith reached out and switched off the one lamp that was burning. A glow still came from the kitchen, but the end of the room where the desk stood was instantly and completely dark. No light came through the windows from outside.
"It was as black as this, Vin. But her hand went straight to the envelope. What does Doc say about that peculiar color we see in her eyes sometimes?"
"I do not know if he has seen it."
Keith put the lamp back on. "Vin, I thought those red things in Olive's yard were fire beetles. Were they?"
Before Vin could reply, Melanie appeared from the kitchen. "Come on, you two," she said. "Come get some eggs and hot coffee inside you."
The rest of that evening and night passed without incident.
In the morning Melanie went to her gift shop, Keith and Vin worked in the nursery, Olive stayed in the house with Jerri. Keith tried to pick up the interrupted conversation of last night but realized there was no more to say on the subject. The notion that Jerri or anyone else could see in the dark was simply fantastic. He wished he could talk to Doc about that redness of the eyes, though. Could it be a symptom of some illness?
The day began much like any other. There was some pruning to do, some potting and transplanting. There were the usual customers. Vin spent time with a spray tank in the unending war against bugs and blight. Along with routine chores, Keith moved some potted jaboticabas to a walkway near the office, where customers would just about have to step off the path to get by them and thus might notice their beauty.
The first person to squeeze by was fulsome Mrs. Vetel, who wanted some flowers for her church. The lady could not help noticing Vin; he was spraying nearby. "I see you still have Mister Otto working for you," she said.
"Yes, Mrs. Vetel."
"With all that's been happening, you're not in the least suspicious, Mister Wilding?"
"Not in the least."
"Well, 1 must say I admire your courage."
"You sound as though you may have been talking to Leonard Quigley, Mrs. Vetel."
"Who is he?"
"A policeman with a red—er—face and a motorcycle."
"I'm sure I don't know him. Why should I have been talking to him?"
Keith sighed. "It's of no consequence, Mrs. Vetel. Some people just think alike, apparently."
"Well," she said, "just don't forget what happened to Louis Neibert, Mister Wilding."
Later in the morning Worth Blair drove in. Keith had finished moving the jaboticabas and was talking to Vin in front of the greenhouse. Blair walked over to them from his police car and said, "Good morning. I just stopped by to tell you we've been through the yard back there with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. I wish I had some information for you."
"Nothing?" Keith asked.
"I'm sorry. The only footprints we found were small and indistinct. The ground was too soft. It seems there are several children living in that apartment house, so what have we got?" He answered his own question with a shrug.
A little later, Olive came out of the house with Jerri. Finding Keith and Vin working together inside the greenhouse, she asked if he might walk the child about the nursery. "I suppose I shouldn't, after the diagram and all, but I promise nothin' will happen. It's hard to stay cooped up." She looked at Vin. "Did you ask him?"
"Not yet. I will."
"Ask me what?" Keith said when mother and daughter had gone down one of the nursery paths.
Vin hesitated. "I have no right, but we had an idea last night. That house I have rented . . . if perhaps I could borrow the pickup this evening and carry her belongings over from the apartment, we could move in there tomorrow. It has a stove and a refrigerator. Days may pass before those windows at the apartment are replaced." He frowned. "What are you smiling at?"
"So you're going to live in sin after all." And maybe already had last night, Keith thought, although there were twin beds in the room they had used. More likely Olive and Jerri had used one bed, Vin the other.
"Only for as long as it will take us to be married," Vin said. He was dead serious. "You and Mel should be married too, Keith. You will in the end. Why wait any longer?"
"Some things don't seem all that important to some people, I guess. About the truck, of course you can have it. We'll knock off early and I'll give you a hand."
Vin wagged his head. "I do not think we should leave the women and Jerri alone here, Keith."
"Well . . .”
"I will ask Don and Leo to help me." These were high-school boys who sometimes worked at the nursery. "And thank you. Believe me, I am grateful." His homely face took on a thoughtful expression. "There is something else I am grateful for, too. I know that certain customers have asked you to fire me since that unpleasantness at the concert."
"Only two," Keith said quietly. "Mrs. Vetel and Quigley. Maybe a couple of others hinted. But that's over and done with. With a drowned baby and three murders to think about and the mayor's son missing, what happened at the concert isn't even remembered now." Which was not quite true, he realized. Mrs. Vetel had remembered it this morning.
During the afternoon Olive and Jerri again walked about. They did not leave the nursery. About four thirty Doc Broderick drove in and found them back in the house. "I stopped by the apartment to see how Jerri was getting along, and the neighbors told me you were here," he said. "You were run out by prowlers, they said. What the devil happened?"
Olive told him what she knew. The recital made her realize how much she did not know.
"Was it kids, you suppose?" Doc asked, scowling. When she hesitated, he said, "The reason I ask . . . a couple of parents called me today to say they were having trouble. Mothers of Jerri's classmates, I mean. They said their kids were behaving strangely . . . disappeared for a time yesterday evening and came back defiant, refusing to say where they'd been."
"I don't know," Olive said. "Worth Blair said there were small footprints in the yard. No large ones. But there are children living there."
Doc walked over to the chair in which Jerri was sitting. "Hey, you," he said quietly. "Look at me."
She did and he leaned closer, peering at her eyes. "Okay. Evidently you haven't got it. Not now, anyway."
"Got what?" Olive said.
"Both mothers who called said their kids' eyes were inflamed when they finally did come home last evening. I realized then I'd noticed it before in some of these youngsters, including this one. Should have paid more attention to it
, I suppose."
"Jerri's eyes were a funny color last evening, Doc."
"Oh? And then it faded, you mean?"
Olive nodded.
"Maybe I should pay old Yambor a visit. He's forgotten more about eyes than I'll ever know."
"Who is he?"
"You don't know Doctor Victor Yambor over in Glendevon? He was Gustave Nebulon's doctor. Elizabeth Peckham goes to him."
Olive shook her head.
"Crabby old coot, but smart," Doc said. "How many times have you noticed this redness in Jerri's eyes?"
Olive tried to remember but had to shake her head again. "I don't . . . I can't really say. Not too often, I guess."
"It seem to follow any kind of pattern? When she's upset, say? Or enjoying a show of temper?"
"When she's . . . strange. I mean behaving strangely. But last evening she was only frightened, I'm sure, and I noticed it then."
Doc examined the child's eyes again, holding them open and taking longer this time. Straightening, he shrugged and wagged his head. "I'll have to do that," he said almost inaudibly, speaking to himself now. "I'll have to go pick the old boy's brains."
Soon after Doc departed, Melanie Skipworth arrived with bags of food from a supermarket. "I bought scads of goodies," she told Keith as he carried them into the house. "Tonight we'll have a real dinner with no prowlers breaking windows. Then—"
He interrupted to tell her Vin had gone to the apartment to move Olive's belongings. "He may be back quite late."
"We'll feed him when he gets here, then. You couldn't go along to help him?"
"He didn't want you girls and Jerri left here alone."
In the kitchen Mel frowned in silence as he placed the bags of food on the counter. She began to unpack them, and stopped. Turning to face him, she said, "Are you serious? You really think it may happen again? Here?"
"That diagram was drawn here, Mel. Not at the apartment."
An hour later it began.
19
Darkness did not fall on the nursery; it infiltrated.
