by Paula Guran
Edging closer, he crouched nearly to the ground, turning his head to examine beneath the siding.
There was a gap there in the wooden sill plate on which the house rested above the concrete foundation; it looked like the two boards which met at the corner had either not been properly butted, or that the butting board had shrunk, leaving an opening into an area between the house’s first floor and basement.
“Jesus,” he said, as a hornet crawled out from the space, flying past him with a rush as another crawled into the opening.
They had obviously built a nest back there.
“Damn.”
Filled with fury and resolve, he got to his feet, returned to the house and kicked his slippers off in the living room, looking for his deck shoes; they were no where to be seen and his searched down the hallway, almost reaching the back bedroom before finding the shoes nestled one against the other just outside the bedroom door.
He slipped them on, checked the pockets of his shorts for his car keys and then moved back outside, slamming the house door behind him.
I’ll take care of you, you bastards.
He got into his Honda, nearly leaving rubber as he backed out of the driveway, and was back in twenty minutes with two cans of Hornet and Wasp Killer. Barely reading the instructions, he pulled the safety tab from the top of one can, shoved the thin, hard plastic straw that came with it into the can’s top nozzle and shook the can as he marched back to the outside corner of the house.
Want to eat this? Enjoy it!
He stopped before the spot, watched a hornet alight and then crawl into the hidden opening, watched another crawl out and fly off. He crouched, thrusting the can’s nozzle forward and awkwardly trying to fit it under and into the opening.
The hard plastic straw missed, sliding away as a hornet, angered, crawled out, followed by another.
Flinching, he pressed the nozzle, watching the acrid spray cover the two insects; they froze and dropped to the ground.
And now the rest of you bastards.
Still spraying, he crouched lower, his eye level below that of the foundation, and found the opening.
He angled the nozzle’s straw in and tightened his grip on the can’s trigger.
A single hornet fought its way out, dropped immediately to the ground. Another, coming from the outside, circled the opening, caught a wiff of escaping spray and also dropped.
He emptied the can, pushed himself back as three returning hornets began to circle the hole widely; one of the insects ventured into the hole, immediately retreated and then dropped to the ground. There was a long stain of spilled pesticide spray down the foundation under the hole, which began to dry as he watched.
A cloud of hornets circled the sprayed opening, darting toward it, landing tentatively on the lowest level of siding over the opening, took off again.
He shook the can, let a final spray cover them; all but one dropped to the ground as the remaining one flew off.
That’ll take care of you.
Breathing deeply, the adrenalin rush that had sustained him for the past hour receding, he went into the house, scooping up the second can of insect spray where he had deposited it on the front stoop, in time to hear the telephone begin to ring.
It was Bill Revell again.
“Pete, I’m sorry to bother you again but you didn’t let me finish before. Parade was so wild about that Halloween piece you did that I showed it to Doubleday and they flipped. They’d like you to do more, and turn it into a book. We’re talking high five figures, maybe low six for this one—”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Jeez, what’s to think about? Just say yes and I’ll take care of the rest. They’re talking about publishing next Halloween, cash register dumpster display, a real push. These characters of yours could become perennials—you could turn one out every Halloween, have the kids waiting in line—”
“I said I’d think about it—”
“I know you’re worried about Ginny, bud, but this one could set you up with a guaranteed every year for the next five years at least. Can I at least negotiate a three-book deal?”
He said nothing, and Revell went on: “The characters are great, Pete! A real Halloween character! Named Sam no less! And I love Holly Ween! I’ve got feelers out already to television, and I think we can expect a big bite on that—half hour like It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. We’re talking ancillary—lunch boxes, tees, the whole nine—”
“Do whatever the hell you want!” Kerlan shouted, and slammed down the phone.
He gripped the receiver tightly as he suddenly began to cry.
If she wasn’t with Revell, she was with someone else.
And he’d driven her away.
She’s gone and I know it.
Gone for good.
He let the second can of bug spray slip to the floor as he covered his face with his hands and wept, and kept weeping.
After trying to watch television, and trying to eat, he went to bed early and as a consequence rose early the next morning.
With a tepid cup of instant coffee in his hand, he made his way down to he basement office.
Even before reaching it, the faint, acrid smell of bug spray tickled his nostrils.
”Christ,” he said, wincing as he walked into the room; it was even worse than the faint, musty odor the basement room sometimes held in the summer months, when the foundation walls behind the sheetrock-covered studs picked up humidity from the ground. The smell had been particularly noticeable this year.
He stood up on his swivel chair, cursing sharply as it tried to turn sideways with his weight, then leaned out over his desk to open the room’s single casement window.
“Shit.” he said, recoiling; in the casement box were the bodies of five small hornets, all but one seemingly dead; the live one moved feebly, its small wings opening once, then again. Behind the casement, somewhere behind the room’s wall, he heard a faint buzzing sound.
He climbed down from the chair, nearly ran to the workbench area, and returned with the basement’s wet/dry vacuum.
He plugged the vacuum into the wall socket between his desk and the printer stand, turned it on, and angled the hose nozzle up into the casement, sucking up all of the hornets.
His eye caught movement by the printer, and he saw another small insect body crawling up the wall over the machine.
I thought I wiped you bastards out yesterday!
He covered the hornet with the sucking nozzle, then looked wildly around the walls, then at the floor.
“Shit!”
There was a cluster of dead bodies fanned out in the corner just to the left of the printer stand, where a heat register ran across the wall at floor level; two live hornets were just crawling out of the bottom of the register itself.
“Shit! Shit!” he said, fighting an uncontrollable chill, thrusting the vacuum head around the area and plugging it into the corner under the register as far as it would go.
He heard the tap of insect bodies rushing up the vacuum’s soft plastic accordion hose and into the wet-vac’s drum.
Another crawled out onto the rug from behind the printer stand, and he speared it, then put the nozzle back into the corner. He kept it there, feeling another tiny body sucked up into the machine, and then another.
He gave up all thoughts of work, and fled the office; at the doorway he saw a feebly moving hornet on the rug by the sill, and mashed it with his foot, closing the door behind him.
“Sounds weird enough, Mr. Kerlan, but they all sound weird to me. One time—”
”Can you come today?” Peter said into the phone, cutting the bee keeper off before he went into yet another anecdote. “This infestation is in the place I work, and I need it taken care of.”
“Sure,” the other said, slowly. “I suppose I can be there this afternoon. We’ll take care of you.”
“I hope so,” Kerlan said, slamming down the phone.
He stole a glance into his office, open
ing the door a crack. By now all sorts of nightmares preyed on his mind: the room filled with flying insects; a swarm waiting for him, covering him as he opened the door—
All inside seemed quite; the casement window threw a rectangular shaft of light against the far wall’s built-in bookcase.
He opened the door wider, listening for buzzing.
Maybe I wiped them out after all.
His relief was short-lived; as he stepped toward his desk his foot covered three squirming hornet bodies, and he saw a few more scattered here and there, some unmoving, others moving as if drunk; there were three or four on the walls, also, and more, perhaps a dozen, covering the casement’s window itself, silhouetted dots against the light.
He reached for the wet/dry vac, recoiled as a hornet brushed his hand as it fell from the hose; others were crawling over the instrument’s drum, one hiding coyly by one of the rolling wheels.
Once again he fled, and closed the door.
“What you’ve got here is a classic case of wall infestation,” the bee keeper, whose name was Floyd Willims, said. He worked part time as the local exterminator, but he looked like a bee keeper, was tall and thin-haired and preoccupied when he stepped from his dirty white van; and now even more so, dressed almost comically in a pith helmet whose brim was ringed with mosquito netting; from the back of his van he pulled a thick pair of rubber gloves from a soiled box. He held up the gloves for inspection. “Triple thickness,” he said, almost proudly; “stingers can’t get through.” After retrieving a powder filled canister and what appeared to be a pump hose from the van, he turned back to Kerlan and said, “Proceed!”
Kerlan had already showed him the corner of the house where the hornets had gained access; they returned to that spot now and the bee keeper knelt, put the thin end of the hose which led into the canister in the opening, and began to puff powder into it.
”This’ll kill ’em dead,” he said. “Whichever ones return will carry the powder into the nest and spread it to the others.”
As if on cue, as the bee keeper removed the hose from the opening a hornet alighted and crawled into it.
“Now let’s have a look at the nest,” the bee keeper said, heading for the house with Kerlan.
They had already studied the office on the bee keeper’s arrival, and the bee keeper had helped Kerlan move furniture so that the upper corner of the wall, behind which the bee keeper said they would find the nest, was exposed; luckily, there would be access through a nearby panel, behind which the house’s electrical box was located. To either side of the box was packed insulation, which the bee keeper began to remove.
The smell of insect spray became stronger in the room.
The bee keeper lay the strips of insulation on the floor; Kerlan was repulsed to see hornets crawling feebly over the pink spun glass fibers of its back.
The bee keeper held up a strip, examined the five hornets on it carefully.
“You zapped them pretty good with that off-the-shelf stuff you sprayed into the nest yesterday,” he said. “If you’d gotten them at dusk, when they were all in the nest, you might have killed them all. What we’re looking at are the dregs, I think.”
“How did they get in here to begin with? How many openings does the nest have?”
Willims had shown him a picture of a typical paper hornet’s nest; a nearly round structure with a single opening, usually at the bottom.
“They either made another exit, or left an opening near the top,” he said. “This isn’t quite a typical nest. They were drawn to the light in your office.” He pointed to the baseboard, the corner of the floor where the heat register butted the wall. “There’s an opening down there, I’m sure. Doesn’t take much, just a quarter inch.” He squinted through his mosquito netting at the molding along the rug where the printer stand had been before they moved it. “There may be others. Like I said, a quarter inch is all they need.”
An involuntary chill washed over Kerlan as a hornet crawled onto the bee keeper’s glove and onto his shirt sleeve. The bee keeper regarded it for a moment and then flicked it to the floor. “Like I said, you must have hit them good. If they were healthy they’d be all over us, because of the light.” He turned to Kerlan as if having a sudden thought. “Sure you don’t want to leave?”
“I’ll stay, if you think it’s safe.”
The bee keeper laughed. “Safe enough. If they pour out of the walls when I remove the rest of this insulation, I’ll yell and you can run.”
Kerlan’s eyes enlarged in alarm but the bee keeper added, “Not likely to happen.
At that moment the bee keeper pulled the last strip of insulation out with a grunt.
Nothing happened; the bee keeper angled his head, aiming a flashlight up into the exposed cavity, and called back, “Yeah, you hit ’em pretty good.”
Kerlan leaned over, trying to see; pulled back and a fist-shaped clutch of dead hornets fell from the space between the open cavity and the bee keeper’s body.
The bee keeper angled his arm up into the cavity.
“I’ll . . . get it out if I can—”
He pulled a huge chunk of dark papery gray material out of the cavity, let it drop to the floor.
“Nest,” he said in explanation. It was followed by a bigger chunk, mottled and round on the inside; within it’s crushed interior were dead hornets and a few feebly live ones.
“Ugh,” Kerlan said.
“Pretty big nest,” the bee keeper said, continuing to pull sections of the structure out. Mixed with the leavings now were the familiar honeycombed sections that Kerlan knew contained the pupae. Most but not all were empty. “About the size of a soccer ball. They built it right up in the corner beneath the floor above. As they built the nest it forced the insulation back. Amazing critters.”
He continued his work, and Kerlan shivered.
An hour later the office was more or less back to normal, and Kerlan was writing the bee keeper a check.
“You’ll want to caulk that hole they used in a couple of weeks,” Willims said. That powder I sprayed around it will take care of any stragglers.”
“Why not plug it now?”
“Well, you could, but there could still be a few females outside the nest; they’d just start another one.”
Kerlan had forgotten that each nest held a queen.
“Didn’t we kill off this nest’s queen?”
“You can be pretty much certain of that. But even so, any female can become a queen. They’ll just start another nest.” He grinned. “Summer’s not quite over, you know. I’ll be getting calls like yours ‘till mid-November, if the heat holds out.”
“Christ.”
The bee keeper folded the check and turned toward his dirty white van. Kerlan had a sudden thought.
“You’re sure my nest is dead?”
The bee keeper shrugged. “Pretty sure. You may see a few strays wander out of your baseboard gaps looking for light, but believe me, that nest is dead. Only other problem you could have is if two females got in there originally and the second one started another nest somewhere else inside the wall, farther down.” Seeing Kerlan’s eyes widen he laughed. “Not likely that happened, though. Plug the gaps in the baseboard if you can; you can use a wad of scrunched up cellophane tape. Call me if you have any more problems.”
Kerlan nodded as the van drove off.
A single yellow jacket brushed by his face as he entered the house.
The next morning he entered his office to work. The evening before, he had moved along the edge of the baseboard where he could get at it, pushing cellophane tape into anything that looked like an opening. By the baseboard he had found a huge hole surrounding the heat pipe that let into the register; around it were tens of dead yellow jackets and a very alive spider as big as a thumb nail, feeding on them. There was a sour smell emanating from the vent: a mixture of fading bug spray and the strong damp smell from the cavity behind. After recoiling he cleaned the area out with the wet/dry vac and then plugged
it with insulating material. The smell receded.
He vacuumed the rug thoroughly, sucking up dead hornet bodies, and then replaced his furniture and turned on his computer.
There came a tapping at the casement window above him and he started, looking up; it was just a fat bumblebee, probably the same from the other day, which ambled sluggishly off.
He let out a deep breath and turned to the screen.
He typed out the words Sam Hain and the Halloween That Almost Wasn’t and suddenly, for the next hours, he was lost in the characters as words poured out of him in a torrent. Nothing like this had happened to him in the last twenty years. Page after page scrolled down the screen, and he knew they were all good. He finished one story and the ideas for two others came into his head unbidden. He typed so fast his fingers began to ache—something he hadn’t felt since the days of electric typewriters, when the constant kickback of the keys would rattle his knuckles and literally make his fingers sore. It was a marvelous feeling. And still he wrote on, completing outlines for two more stories before finally letting himself fall back into his swivel chair, breathing hard. It was as if he had run a marathon, and he couldn’t believe the mass of material now stored on his hard drive.
Without thinking, he sent it all as an attached file to Bill Revell, with a curt note: “Like I said, do whatever the hell you want.”
He knew that would keep the bastard busy for a while, and off his back.
Even now, he felt another itch at the back of his brain, which would turn into more work tomorrow. He knew it. It had been so long since this had happened to him, this creative torrent, that he’d forgotten what it was like.
Oh, Ginny, if only you were here now! The problem’s gone! I can write again!
It was the only sour note in what had been a marvelous day. He looked up at his casement window and saw that night had fallen, and that a waxing moon was rising. It looked huge and orange-tinged, and even that gave him a new idea for a story: Sam and Holly and the Halloween Moon.
Quickly he wrote it down in outline, and when he looked up again the moon was high and the clock said it was midnight.