There was the sound of frantic knocking on the front door.
“Don’t let him in!” she screamed at Tony. She pushed him away from her, pushed him toward the bedroom door, and he started running, spurred by the urgency in her voice. “Make sure everything’s locked! Make sure he can’t get inside!”
She didn’t know what had gotten into her, why she was suddenly so frightened by the child, but she had always been one to trust her instincts, and she wasn’t about to question her reactions now. She had pulled back from the window, and the outside world was just a uniform black with her own reflection, horrified and ghostlike, on the glass.
The knocking on the front door had stopped, and she held her breath, listening, heart racing. She wanted to yell at Tony not to open the door under any circumstances, not even to open it a crack to see what was going on outside, but she was afraid to call out in case he had already done so.
What if the boy was in the house?
So what if he was? He’d been in here this morning and the only thing he’d done was leave them with enough diamonds to ensure that they would never have to work again.
Of course, that was before she’d trapped him in the hot garage all day long without food or water.
“Let me in.”
She started at the sound of the voice. It was clear and close, and when she looked at the window, she saw the boy’s dirty face next to the glass. She backed carefully toward the bed, afraid to look away.
“Let me in,” the boy said, and this time his voice was a sly whisper that should not have been able to penetrate the closed window.
“No!” she screamed.
“Let me in.”
They were the only words he said, the only words she’d ever heard him say, and she wondered now if that meant something, if he was like a vampire or a witch or whatever that monster was that had to be invited inside before it could do any harm. God, she hoped so.
The backyard light was flipped on, illuminating the lawn area and the patio and the front of the garage. Tony. He was in the kitchen. “Don’t go outside!” she yelled. “Stay in! Don’t go out!” He didn’t respond, but the back door didn’t open, so she assumed that he’d heard her.
In the glare of the floodlight, she could see the boy more clearly. He had moved away from the window and was squatting on the grass, going again. He cried out in pain—he was obviously passing something large—and while Helen watched, something big and dark dropped from between his legs. Vaguely round, it rolled a few inches, then stopped, caught on a straight irregular side. He reached underneath him and lifted it up.
By its hair.
Helen’s hand automatically went to her mouth, and she backed away from the window, her legs threatening to buckle beneath her. The boy had just shit a human head. She still hadn’t gotten a good look at it, but it was female, she could tell that much, and—
Oh, God, he was bringing it up to the window to show her!
Let me in, the child’s lips were saying, but either no sound was coming out or she couldn’t hear the words. He was holding the head high, like a lantern, and when he reached a spot where the floodlight’s beam was not obstructed by the roof of the house, she saw that it had her own face; eyes wide, mouth open in an expression of surprise that no doubt echoed her own.
The boy threw the head at the window, and with a frightened yelp Helen ran across the bedroom to the door. Behind her, she heard it hit the glass: a muffled thump followed by a sickening squeegee sound. Was it sliding down the window? She had to turn and look, but all she saw was the boy picking up the head—
her head
—by its hair and cocking his arm to throw it again.
Let me in, his lips mouthed.
She ran into the dark hallway but stopped almost immediately. Where was Tony? He should have been back. He should have returned by now. But the house was silent. She didn’t hear his voice, didn’t hear his footfalls on the creaking floor.
Maybe he’d been captured. Or killed. Maybe there was an army of these boys, all look-alikes, and when the first one had ran off, he’d gone to get his friends and now they were back and out for revenge.
Behind her, in the bedroom, the head—
her head
—hit the glass again.
Helen screamed, a wrenching gut-deep cry of terror and frustration, and Tony came running out of the kitchen, into the hall. She threw herself at him, held on tight. “Thank God,” she sobbed. “Thank God.”
“I was watching him through the kitchen window,” Tony said, and he sounded rattled, his voice shaky. “He was … he…”
“He shit a head!” Helen cried. “My head! And now he’s throwing it at our bedroom window trying to get in!” She looked up into her husband’s face. “Why’s he doing this? What the hell is he?”
“I don’t know,” Tony admitted.
Behind them, in the bedroom, the head hit the glass.
“Don’t let him in!” Helen said, clutching Tony tightly. “Whatever you do, don’t let him in!”
“I won’t.”
“Let’s call the police,” she suggested. “I’ll tell them everything. I’ll show them the diamonds and the rubies and … and … everything.”
She blinked, stopped.
The diamonds. The rubies. The emeralds. The sapphires. The topaz. They were still in the house, wrapped up in bags in the den. But were they still the same? The boy had changed with the coming of night, turned into something else. Had the gemstones changed, too? Were they now eyes and teeth and fingers? Somehow, such a thing wasn’t hard to imagine.
Wiping her eyes, taking a deep shuddering breath, she pulled herself away from Tony and grabbed his hand, leading him into the den. She was prepared for anything, but the diamonds were still diamonds, the rabies still rabies, all was as it should have been.
The pounding had stopped. Either he’d broken through the window with that excreted head or he’d given up that tactic and was now trying to get in some other way. She knew that he would never give up completely. He might cease a specific action, but his ultimate goal would always remain the same.
Whatever that might be.
Tony was picking up the phone to dial 911 when suddenly there was noise all around them, a papery, whispery chittering that seemed to come from every side. He dropped the phone and they quickly ran out of the room, but the noise was in the hallway, too. And the living room.
“Come on!” he said, and led the way into the kitchen. Here, through the windows, they could see the bugs. There were hundreds of them, thousands, and they swarmed over the grass, over the patio, over the house, moving up the walls, starting to cover the windows. Even through the roof and ceiling she and Tony could hear the chittering sound, and Helen was about to ask why they were making such a weird noise when she finally figured it out.
They were trying to get inside by eating their way through.
“Oh, shit.” Tony pointed outside. The boy was squatting and straining, and what dropped from between the cheeks of his buttocks this time was a cascade of pitch black beetles with visibly snapping pincers. They spread out, moving impossibly fast, and they kept coming, spewing out in a torrent. These were what was engulfing the house, and even as they watched, their view of the boy was obstructed as a black mass of moving beetles inched up the window glass.
Helen started crying again. Why had she opened the front door this morning? Why had she let that boy inside? If she had ignored him, he would have gone elsewhere and right now instead of fighting for their lives they would be peacefully sleeping in their bed, just like their neighbors were.
Their neighbors! If these beetles were covering the whole house, the other people on the circle should be able to see what was going on. Maybe one of them would come over and try to help, maybe one of them would call the police.
Of course, it was late. And the chance that anyone was up right now and looking out their front windows at their neighbors’ houses was pretty damn slim.
Gi
l, maybe. He worked at night. He could come home and see what was happening and get help.
Tony, standing as far as possible from the blackening windows, was dialing 911 from the kitchen phone, but she could tell by the confused frown on his face that he was having no luck. The beetles had probably overrun the phone line and gnawed through it. He threw down the receiver, swearing.
“Where’s the cell phone?” she cried.
“I left it in the car.”
“Oh shit. Oh shit.” Helen took a deep breath, swallowed her sobs. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.” Tony got two big knives out of the top drawer, handed one to Helen. “Let’s go to the front door. If it looks like we can make it, we run. If not, I guess we’ll hole up in the small bathroom. It doesn’t have any windows. It’s probably the safest room in the house.”
A loud screech cut through the low noise of the beetles. Or, rather, a loud series of concurrent screeches. The windows shattered, hundreds of the black bugs tumbling over the sink, over the counter onto the floor. Helen had time to register that the glass had broken in clean even lines; then the beetles were teeming over the breakfast nook, up the walls, onto the ceiling, a dark unstoppable wave.
She clutched Tony hard with her left hand while holding tight to the knife with her right, ready to slash at anything that came at her.
She was concentrating so hard on the hordes of beetles swarming over the floor that she neglected to keep track of the insects on the ceiling. When Tony’s grip tightened on her own, however, and his knife motioned upward, she saw that the bugs had covered the area directly above them and were moving toward the open doorway into the hall. One fell on her knife hand, pincers clacking crazily. But it was the opposite end of the bug that rent her flesh, that sliced through the skin next to her thumb, and she saw, protruding from the beetle’s hind end, a small sparkling diamond.
That was what had cut through the window glass, she realized.
More bugs started to fall, landing on her arms, her shoulders, her head. She tried to shake them off, tried to pull off the one in her palm, but the diamond was sunk into her flesh. Suddenly… it was released. The tiny gem was pushed into her and others followed, a steady stream of them.
The beetle was shitting diamonds inside her.
Screaming, jerking her shoulders, waving her knife wildly, Helen tried desperately to rid herself of the insects. Next to her, Tony was doing the same thing as beetles landed on his shoulders, scurrying both down his arms, and up his head. Pinpricks of pain erupted all over her skin as diamonds cut her, sinking into her skin, piercing through her clothes. She scraped some off of her left arm with the knife, but the diamonds remained embedded and more beetles took the place of the old ones.
She was going down.
And then the boy walked in. The insects had eaten through the door and pan of the wall, and he stepped through the ragged hole, loincloth flapping, even his dirty skin looking bright against the blackness of the bugs. He carried nothing with him—no head, thank God—and the expression on his face was one of total and utter calm, a far cry from the wild agitation of the morning. His eyes still seemed luminescent, eerily so, and there was something in his poised slow approach that seemed defiantly unnatural. The wave of beetles parted before him, allowing him to pass, and even on the ceiling above a clear swath appeared.
Helen was sobbing, crying not so much from the pain but from the complete sense of defeat that had engulfed her and seemed to be the only emotion she could conjure. She closed her eyes… .
And the bugs were gone.
She felt their absence instantly. There was no retreat, no movement, only what seemed to be a spontaneous disappearance. She opened her eyes—they could only have been closed for a few seconds—and the kitchen was clear. Evidence of their invasion still remained. The wall and door they had eaten. The scratches and welts all over her and Tony. They were not part of a false vision or hallucination. They’d been here. But she had no idea what had happened to them.
Tony was standing next to her, dead on his feet, still clutching the useless kitchen knife. Before them stood the boy, and he stared for a moment as if studying them.
“What do you want?” Helen cried.
The child smiled, and it was the most horrifying thing she had ever seen. Slowly, he squatted down on his haunches, shifting aside his loincloth, preparing to evacuate.
“NO!” Tony cried, his voice filled with terror.
Neither of them had any idea what was coming next, but they both knew that this was the end, the grand finale, the climax of what had begun this morning when Helen had allowed the desperate child into their home.
The boy grimaced, his face turning red, the muscles in his neck bulging, and what emerged from between his legs was—
a single red rose.
It arrived perfectly, petals intact, leaves on stem, though how that was possible Helen did not know. The flower was dark burgundy, with a single white spot on the topmost petal, and she recognized it immediately. A rose with exacdy that rare coloration had been growing wild in the woman’s yard next door. Helen had seen it last spring when they’d trimmed the oleanders. She’d reached over the chain-link fence with her clip-pers and cut the rose, thinking it would make a nice centerpiece for the dinner they were having that night with Fincher and his wife, but when she put it in a vase she saw that it was overrun with scoTes of nearly microscopic bug£, and she threw it outside in the garbage.
The two couldn’t be connected … yet she knew that somehow they were. The boy took the flower in his fingers and with a flourish that seemed inappropriate for both his age and the circumstances, handed it to her.
Maybe this was it, she thought, maybe it would all be over now. She glanced at Tony, who nodded slighdy. Sniffling, trying hard to rein in her emotions, she reached out and accepted the proffered rose. A thorn stabbed her thumb, and whethe her blood touched the plant, it withered, blackened. She looked into the center of the flower and saw that it was crawling with teeny tiny bugs, and when she squinted and looked closer at them, she saw that they were miniature versions of the beetles that had been attacking her and Tony.
The boy started dancing. “Let me in!” he said/sang, and rather than a request or a demand, it was a jubilant announcement, a celebratory taunt. They let me in, he was proclaiming, although he left off that first word. “Let me in!” he said/sang/ danced.
Suddenly, the child stopped dancing and doubled over in pain. A harsh spasm wracked his body and he fell to the floor. It looked like he was being hit with a hammer, and though she knew that was impossible, so many other impossible things had happened that she thought it might be true.
Yes! she thought.
She hoped that invisible hammer beat the hell out of him.
With each blow or spasm, the boy seemed to diminish slightly. He wasn’t growing smaller or shrinking; he was becoming less human, his legs looking more spindly, his arms shortening and losing inner solidity, the features of his face fading into blandness. He rolled toward the hole in the wall and door through which he’d come, still buffeted by the physical impact of something unseen, and by the time he reached the ragged opening, she could not see any mouth or nose or eyes. He looked like a large piece of Silly Putty shaped into the general form of a person and tied with a piece of dirty cloth.
Then he was outside and gone, and with grateful relief, Helen threw aside the rose and collapsed into the arms of her husband. Tony was battered and bleeding, but his arms were strong and felt good, and both of them looked toward the hole in the wall, waiting to see what, if anything, would come through it next.
When several minutes passed with no sign of movement, no sound from outside, Tony, holding her tightly, limped toward the ragged opening and looked into the backyard. It was clear. No boy, no head, no bugs, nothing.
It was over.
They didn’t know what had happened, didn’t know how or why it had stopped, but they were grateful that it had a
nd, still leaning on each other, they made their way through the house to make sure they saw nothing out of the ordinary. They didn’t. In the den, the bags of gemstones lay on top of Tony’s desk, undisturbed. They had not disappeared, not turned to shit, they were what they had always been: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphire, topaz.
Helen refused to touch them. She turned back around, re-turned to the hallway. “Give them away,” she said. “Throw them away.”
She never wanted to see another jewel or gemstone again.
Tony nodded tiredly.
Neither of them seemed to know what to do next. It was late, they were exhausted, and they should probably clean up, tend to their wounds and go back to bed, but instead they stood there for several moments, leaning against the wall in the hallway. After awhile, Helen started to notice a distinct pressure in her abdomen, an uncomfortable yet very familiar urge. She looked at the clotting wounds on her arms, saw the sparkle of diamonds in the drying blood. Next to her, Tony shifted uneasily, pressing his legs together, bending forward slightly. She looked at him.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Tony admitted. “And I’m afraid to.”
“Me, too.” Helen felt a sharp cramping in her bowels, and wondered what was in there, what would come out.
“We have to go sometime.”
Across from them was the bathroom. The light in there was on, but that did not lessen the ominous atmosphere. She thought that she would never forget the sight of those diamonds in the clear water, piled like a pyramid.
“I’ll go first,” Helen said. She walked over to the bathroom, stepped inside. Looking at the toilet, she felt a sharp cramp, then turned back toward Tony. “Wish me luck,” she told him.
“Luck,” he said softly.
She closed the door behind her.
FRANK
“It tastes like honey.”
“Nuh-uh”
“It says so right here. ‘His tongue slid into her moist opening, and he tasted her delicious golden nectar, the sweet honey of her love.’ “
Four Dark Nights Page 2