Five World Saga 01 Hornets and Others

by Al Sarrantonio

  We left, and I was escorted to Molson's car, where I was made to sit between the two uniformed policemen in the back.

  "Would you mind telling me what this is about?" I asked.

  "When we get there, Mr. Corman."

  Willie grinned at me, and I noticed that his bottom teeth were horribly crooked.

  "Soon enough, mate," he said.

  I closed my eyes as Willie and his friend began a seemingly endless conversation about who had bet on what horse the weekend before, and what horse was bound to win this coming weekend.

  "Of course, I may not be able to go this weekend, Jack, being with my mum sick and all."

  His friend concurred.

  "Well, the following weekend, then."

  "Right."

  I opened my eyes as we topped the hill to the greenhouse. The car braked to a stop by the door, and Detective Molson said, "Out, please, Mr. Corman."

  Both Eagleton and Marsha Reed were waiting for us by the door.

  Administrator Reed had a pinched, nearly hysterical look on her face, and Eagleton's face was unreadable, since he was staring down at his shoes.

  When we had all arranged ourselves by the door to the nursery, Molson said, "Would you please tell me again, Mr. Eagleton, what you told me earlier this morning?"

  Eagleton continued to study his shoes.

  "Only," he said quietly, "That I saw Mr. Corman working late last night."

  "And what time was that?"

  "I left at seven-fifteen. I noticed his light on at that time, and caught a glimpse of him at his desk as I walked to the parking area."

  "And was Ms. Abigail Smyth still here when you left?"

  "Yes, she was. She said she had work to catch up on."

  "Thank you, Mr. Eagleton."

  Eagleton shrugged, unwilling to raise his eyes.

  "And Administrator Reed, would you tell me what time you left?"

  "Five o'clock, detective."

  "And Mr. Eagleton, was Administrator Reed's car gone when you entered the parking area at seven-fifteen?"

  "Yes it was."

  "Thank you."

  Again, Eagleton shrugged.

  I felt all eyes on me, and waited.

  "Mr. Corman," Molson said, with barely disguised animosity, "what time did you leave?"

  "It was approximately eight o'clock."

  "And did you see Ms. Abigail Smyth before you left?"

  I hesitated, then said, "Yes. I saw her walk up the hill from the administration building and enter the greenhouse."

  "How were you able to see that?"

  "The moon was just rising. I saw her silhouetted against it."

  "Administrator Reed," Detective Molson said, turning to Marsha, "did Ms. Smyth report for work this morning?"

  "She did not. She normally comes in early, at seven-thirty or so."

  "And did you check with her boarding house when she didn't show up?"

  "I did. And I was told that she never came home last evening."

  Again Molson addressed me.

  "You saw Ms. Smyth enter the greenhouse, Mr. Corman?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you see her leave the greenhouse?"

  "No. I went home before she came out."

  I registered the fury in Molson's eyes a scant second before the back of his hand hit me across the mouth.

  "I don't like what you're telling me, Mr. Corman. I think you've murdered two people, and we're going to find them."

  Blood flowed, and as the pain of the blow spread through me, my eyes observed shock on Marsha Reed's face. Even the uniformed policemen looked momentarily shocked, before Willie guffawed.

  "Get your shovels," Molson said to the two officers, who went to the boot of Molson's car; to Administrator Reed and Eagleton he said, "You don't have to come in there with us."

  Administrator Reed said, "I think we should. In fact, I insist."

  It was Molson's turn to shrug. "If you insist, Administrator Reed. But I must warn you that what we find in there might be quite gruesome."

  In a near-whisper, Eagleton said to his shoes, "I'll stay outside, if you don't mind."

  Impatiently, Administrator Reed said, "All right, Eagleton. But don't go away. We may need you again."

  Willie and Jack stood ready with their shovels, and Detective Molson said, "Let's go in, then."

  The metal door was opened, letting out the hot, sickly sweet odor of perfumed flowers and decay. Willie and Jack went in first, with myself between the two officers and Molson behind me. Administrator Reed brought up the rear.

  "Try anything in here, Corman," Detective Molson whispered close by my ear, "and I'll tear you to pieces myself. Better yet, I'll let the two lads at you."

  Ahead of us, Willie and Jack had reached the thickets of vines about halfway through the building.

  "Same place as last time, guy?" Willie said.

  "This is strange," Marsha Reed said behind us. She sounded genuinely puzzled. "Everything in here seems to have been rearranged."

  I glanced back and saw her studying the place where my former experiments had been.

  "All of this was clear—"

  It grew very dark, and things happened very fast.

  First, there were hands on me, but not human ones. The sky overhead blotted out as vines crawled up and overhead, making an artificial jungle of green vines. In the midst of the vines I saw two shapes, one of them vaguely that of Abigail Smyth, only now she was green and her limbs flowed like liquid. Things closed in around us. I heard Marsha Reed cry out, and then Detective Molson was no longer standing close behind me but was overhead, being both lifted and absorbed by a carpet of purple violets which covered him simultaneously from head to foot. In front, both Jack and Willie lifted their shovels but the weapons were pulled from their grips as flowers covered them also. They disappeared into the thicket before us in a gargle of swallowed cries.

  I heard my own screams, and felt the floor pull away, but it was not an unpleasant sensation. As through cotton wool, I heard glass breaking and Eagleton's own distant call for help.

  And then, for a while, there was silence—until I felt Lonnigan' s slim hand on my own, which was a beautiful limb to behold.

  The Quiet Ones

  The first case was reported to the police around June 28th. A man, who was later found to be intoxicated, swore that a newspaper vendor who had been standing not ten feet in front of him was suddenly yanked into nowhere. The man who claimed to have seen this was not that intoxicated though, so two rookie policemen were sent to investigate. They found nothing.

  The next case occurred outside the city limits, in a nearby suburb. A young girl ran in screaming to her mother, saying that she had been playing jacks with a friend on the sidewalk, when one of the slabs of concrete suddenly lifted like a trap door and a hand snaked out, grabbing her companion and pulling her underneath.

  There was a lot more attention paid to this report, since what the police ended up with was a missing child case; the surrounding sixty miles were combed over the next weeks but nothing of the child turned up. It reached the point that even her playmate's story was taken into account and a half-block of sidewalk churned up; but all that was found here was, predictably, dirt and worms. The playmate stuck to her story and was eventually taken to a child psychiatrist.

  The first week of July brought, as I recall, three more cases, and now one of the yellow newspapers started to pick up on the "Sidewalk Snatcher" angle—though it was buried in the back of the paper. The one link in all these occurrences was that one or more witnesses swore that a person was literally stolen off the sidewalk by something reaching up out of holes which appeared and then disappeared again.

  When a politician running for re-election disappeared in front of twenty witnesses, including two newspaper people and a TV cameraman, things began to heat up. The cameraman was able to shoot two very controversial feet of film which may or may not have shown the congressman being pulled downward into the ground; there were a
lot of milling bodies in the way. But there was no doubt that he was there from the waist up in front of the camera one second, and then not there the next. The Associated Press ran a still photo produced from the footage; UPI refused to pick up the story. Most papers ran the AP picture, and though a hundred different conspiracy theories were set forth, at the bottom line they all came to the conclusion that there was absolutely no possible criminal link among the twenty witnesses, and that something out of the ordinary had happened.

  The following week, after the Fourth of July weekend, there were over a hundred incidents.

  Now something had to be done about it. The sheer weight of eyewitnesses (and the concurrent political clout they could command) forced the city government to declare war on the "Sidewalk Snatcher" and a special task force was set up. A high police official was named head of the operation, and was answerable directly to the mayor.

  He disappeared off the sidewalk the following day.

  The sidewalks were becoming much cleaner of pedestrian traffic these days, with most people either walking down the center of the street or staying in as much as possible: one man had gained a bit of instant celebrity by walking the streets in a pair of overlarge, floppy clown shoes—his smiling picture was seen in many papers the following days—but the levity disappeared when he too was whisked off the concrete, floppy footwear and all: he had been walking across a particularly wide walkway at the time, it was noted.

  The mayor himself barely escaped kidnap on his way to a press conference following the latest snatch. On stepping out of his limousine and placing his foot on the sidewalk, the mayor suddenly found his foot in what he later described as a "bear trap of vise-like grip"—but he instantly jumped backward, his two aides helping him, and he escaped. Nothing was seen of the perpetrator, and when the section of walkway from which the attack came was pulled up, nothing was found underneath that was out of the ordinary.

  Though the mayor was lucky that day, 450 or so others weren't.

  It was just at this time that I returned to the city, after a long and deserved stay in the mountains, where I had been blissfully unaware of the events transpiring by now all over the country. I hadn't, in fact, seen a newspaper in three weeks, and I must admit I greeted the news of these disappearances as something of a joke.

  I quickly revised that impression.

  Just off the bus in front of my apartment, my folded newspaper under my arm, I witnessed the man who disembarked before me get sucked underground. The buses and city streets were nearly empty these days and only he and I had gotten off; the bus driver averted his eyes, closed the door behind me, and sped off.

  I must admit I was alarmed. I tried to pry up the block of sidewalk by the curb where the man had vanished, but was unable to budge it. As I was bent over, I felt a firm tug beside me and looked over to see the next section of sidewalk raised up like a door and the hint of a hand on my trouser leg. With a cry of alarm I pulled away and the sidewalk slammed back down into place.

  Needless to say, I no longer considered these events a joke.

  But I was fascinated. When I returned home, by a circular route to the back of the building and employing a curious method of walking that resembled a game of hop-scotch coupled with a long-jumper's finest moves, I turned on the television to discover that a total of six thousand people had disappeared that day across the country. There were now cases being reported from all over the world—even from behind the Iron Curtain, which had just a few days before scoffed at the whole phenomenon as another Western figment of the imagination, akin to flying saucers and the Soviet threat of aggression.

  The following day I spent mostly indoors in front of two windows—one the real window in the front of my apartment, overlooking the absolutely empty streets below, and the other the window of the television which told me that martial law had been declared in this and other large metropolises, and that, despite denials by military officials, there were unconfirmed reports that as many as four hundred and fifty military personnel and National Guardsmen had been swept from the face of the earth while on patrol. The mayor came on during all of this and tried to calm everyone down, but it was obvious that he didn't believe a word he was saying and so kept his speech short.

  I ventured out only once that day, to buy groceries to stock my vacation-depleted larder. Even then I barely made it back, with my trouser cuffs a bit frayed from being pulled at from below. One never thinks about the essentialness of sidewalks—but after trying to avoid using them I realized just how dependent the city dweller is on them.

  The next morning, one of the television stations went off the air, announcing that there were not enough personnel left to manage it; that evening, another station followed.

  The streets were quietly deserted now. I made one more trip to the grocery, amazed that more looting had not gone on. Though the shelves were nearly stripped clean, it seemed to have been done in an orderly fashion. The front doors had been left open, and no windows were broken. The only shops along the way that seemed to have suffered any sort of damage were the jewelry stores, though I couldn't imagine why, since a goodly number of the thieves must have found their fate just outside the doors as piles of gems lay scattered about after being thrown into the air as the felons were pulled under.

  Making it back to my apartment this time proved extremely difficult, and I only managed it by employing on my feet a pair of large and uncomfortable snow shoes from a sporting goods store which I was obliged to jump into just after leaving the grocery. It was here that I met a compatriot—an extremely frightened girl of nineteen who seemed so glad to see me that she threw her arms about me; after these preliminaries I learned that she had seen both of her parents disappear just outside the door of this store two days previously, and she had been in a sort of shock since, thinking herself the only person left alive in the city.

  It was decided that she should accompany me back to my apartment, an arrangement which she was at first reluctant to go along with not because of any mistrust of me but because she was terrified of venturing outside. When I came up with my snow shoe plan, however, she warmed to the subject, not having eaten in forty-eight hours, and she even improved on the scheme by putting on herself a pair of cross-country skis. We double-lashed this gear to our feet and made our way homeward.

  Even still we barely made it. Sections of concrete were popping up like jack-in-the-box covers all over the place. They had an almost comically obsessive quality about them which thoroughly frightened the two of us, as if they were impelled to carry us below ground at all costs. And try as I might, I could not peer into any of the momentary openings to discern what was doing all this.

  We did manage to arrive at my apartment safely, though one of Julie's skis was wrenched loose as she made a dash from the road to the front door of the building: during one skip, an opening appeared and something firm and strong grabbed her leg. It was only by making a heroic (if funny-looking, considering that I was wearing snow shoes) leap onto this concrete door, forcing whatever it was (I thought I caught a glimpse of what resembled a human arm) to let go and pull back underground, that she was able to free herself, the ski coming off in the process. With one terrified leap, she fell into the doorway of the apartment building, and I followed none too gracefully behind.

  One television station of importance was still left in operation, and it was here, huddled before the blue-gray lens with cans of cold soup and blankets wrapped around us (the heat and all other normal services of course had disappeared faster than anything else) that I learned that my worst fears had been realized. Up until this time I had nurtured some vague hope of making it back to the countryside I had so recently quitted, planning now to bring Julie along with me. But a jiggly camera bearing film that had been shot outside the city showed scenes even more horrible than those we had witnessed here, entire roads arching up at the center and dumping their contents—people, cars, whatever else had been moved there off the sparse sidewalks—off to either sid
e and underground, spilling over and down below each curb, so now even the streets were not safe. The pun didn't occur to me at the time, but now, at last, this phrase was literally true.

  That night Julie and I spent huddled together not so much for warmth as for the reassurance that there was still another human being within reaching distance; while outside and all around us the sounds of a city, and a world, slowly emptying itself underground went on, with huge groanings and slidings and horrid burpings, like the bowel movements of giant beasts. I remember the sound of the street in front of my building buckling as I fell off to sleep.

  When I awoke Julie was gone. There was a note, taped to the television, stating that she could not live like a hunted animal and that the loss of her parents had been too much of a blow. I ran to the window to see, on the ravaged street below, her pair of cross country skis; I felt a moment of anger at her decision to abandon hope, but quickly recovered, resolving that I would survive at all costs.

  Even the television had degenerated into madness now. The one operable station had apparently been abandoned by all of its normal staff, and had been commandeered by a bearded prophet of doom utilizing, of all things, a ventriloquist's dummy. I had seen this character in the park at one time or another; first he would spout his message of coming destruction and then the dummy, dressed in frayed evening dress, would echo the same words in a falsetto voice. So this is what was left of the world—but that wasn't entirely accurate, since as I was about to turn him off he abruptly announced that he would now go to his salvation, and ran shrieking off camera, apparently to meet his fate outside the studio. Fading away in the distance, the dummy's voice was crying, "Be saved! Be saved!"

  The television was now completely useless in all bands, exhibiting either station call letters or an empty stage set. My multi-band radio, little more than a toy actually, proved of little help either; the lone station I managed to pull in, from somewhere in Europe, died an hour after I located it with the eerie words reminiscent of the famed "War of the Worlds" broadcast initiated by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre in 1938: "Is anyone there? Is.. .anyone?" The voice sounded English, and frightened. I wished I could have answered it. A little after nine that night it faded and could not be recaptured.