The Orangefield Cycle Omnibus

by Al Sarrantonio

  Grant parked behind the police cruiser already there. He was immediately approached by a young uniform who started to tell him he had to leave until he recognized Grant.

  “Oh, hello, detective.”

  Grant acknowledged him with a short wave. “What the hell happened here?”

  The uniform shrugged. “Beats me. Looks like a war zone. House is all torn up. There are empty honey combs out back — there’s no honey in ’em and looks like they haven’t been used in a while. But that’s not the strangest thing.”

  “I heard about him hanging himself next to a hornet’s nest—”

  The uniform was grinning lopsidedly. “Stranger than that …”

  Grant heaved himself out of the car.

  “Let’s have a look, Jerry.”

  The uniform turned and led him around the back of the house. They passed what indeed looked like very old honey combs, their doors open on rusted hinges. When Grant had been out here last they had been full of humming happy bees making honey, and had looked almost brand new.

  There was a grove of trees beyond the lawn. They made their way toward it, avoiding numerous holes in the ground. Grant stopped to look into one of the ditches and saw a few sluggish insects that looked like small bumblebees moving around at the bottom.

  “All the holes are full of ’em,” the uniform explained. We called it in, and Jack Phillips back at the station looked it up on the internet. They’re ground nesting bees.”

  Grant looked up from the hole and counted twenty others, just in their vicinity. The entire yard was filled with holes.

  “Let’s see him,” Grant said.

  They approached the trees, and the uniform stopped. “Pretty gruesome,” he warned. “And really strange.”

  “Stranger than this?” Grant said, indicating the back yard, the wrecked house.

  The uniform nodded. “Yup.”

  They went into the grove, and immediately the hairs on the back of Grant’s neck stood on end. A roiling, hissing sound got incrementally louder. Ahead of them the trees thickened, and he saw an aluminum ladder propped up against one in particular.

  Something brushed past Grant’s ear and he swatted it away.

  They reached the ladder, and Grant looked up. A body was hanging limp, back to him, a dried stain down one pant leg. Red and gold leaves, not yet fallen, hid most of the head and the branch to which the rope was tied.

  Grant moved to the other side to look at the face.

  “Jesus.”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  Grant turned away for a moment, bile rising into his throat. He hadn’t thrown up on the job in ten years. But this …

  A good portion of the upper part of Willims’ face was gone; his eye sockets were cleaned of flesh, showing white bone and two gaping dark holes. The head was canted to one side, the tongue stuck thickly out.

  In and out of the eye holes and mouth crawled hornets, which were transporting between Willims’ head and a huge nearby hanging paper nest. He watched one insect take off from the bee keeper’s face, make the short journey, and then land at the bottom of the hole, crawl into the opening at the bottom and disappear.

  “What the—”

  Grant’s eye was drawn to what looked like a second nest in the same tree nearby — it was haloed by hornets like a cloud. There was a third in a neighboring tree, and then another, and another …

  All of the trees around them were burdened with hornet nests, two or three to each, hanging like ripe fruit.

  The air above them was filled with a fog of hornets.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Grant said.

  “I’m right behind you.”

  The uniform didn’t hesitate to follow him out. “Got to tell you, detective, at first I didn’t want to go in there. Just had me a peek. But a peek was enough.”

  The hum of hovering insects retreated.

  “You can go if you want,” Grant said.

  The uniform nodded. “No problem. You gonna stay?”

  “Just for a little while. I knew this guy. If you haven’t already, tell the coroner to get out here, and tell him to bring a couple of insect experts with mosquito netting and equipment with him.”

  “Right-o.”

  They stepped around holes and the uniform went to his car and got in, while Grant headed for the house.

  He didn’t know what he was looking for, if anything. He didn’t feel as if he owed Willims anything in particular. It was more wanting to understand what the hell was going on.

  Weird shit.

  He entered the house through the open front door, briefly examining the axe, and immediately the hairs on his neck stood up again. It felt like there was electricity in the air. The place was a shambles, and dark; he flipped on the nearest light switch but nothing happened.

  His shin hit an overturned coffee table; there were broken pieces of chairs, and the sofa’s stuffing was pulled out in bunches.

  Grant examined the sofa: there were insects of some kind crawling around the holes.

  The kitchen had been trashed, the single bathroom, the hallway filled with torn books and broken dishes; something nailed to the wall with a railroad spike that proved to be a recent copy of the Orangefield Herald. The headline on the first pages proclaimed “Pumpkin Days Coming!” and showed a happy first grader holding a pumpkin nearly as big as he was.

  There was something scribbled on the wall next to the paper in what looked like blood. On closer examination Grant determined that it was kitchen fat scooped from an open coffee can which lay on the floor on its side.

  In big bold letters it read: SAMHAIN.

  Grant remembered Samhain from the Kerlan case — he was the Celtic Lord of the Dead who supposedly brought them back to life on Halloween — Kerlan had written a children’s book called Sam Hain and the Halloween that Almost Wasn’t.

  Samhain had supposedly brought Kerlan’s dead wife’s skeleton, covered in hornets, back to life …

  Again something brushed by Grant’s ear, and he swatted it away — then thought of D.A. Charley Morton, who had just died of anaphylactic shock from an insect sting.

  Grant gave an involuntary shudder as something else brushed by his ear, his face.

  He was standing outside an open door blocked with broken furniture. He became aware that a sound had been building all along, a hissing hum like the one he had heard in the grove of trees outside.

  He tried to peer through the blockage, but the pieces had been fit together so exactly that he could not see into the room beyond, which he guessed to be Willims’ bedroom.

  He pushed at the base of a lamp which was fitted into the hole like a puzzle piece. It fell off into the room and hit the floor with a clatter.

  He only had a peek — a cloud of hornets outlined by light from the window, almost too thick to see through; the ceiling bulging down into the room, broken apart like the burst skin of a gas-filled bag, a huge, bulging paper hornets’ nest, some five feet in diameter, hovering just inches over the unmade bed—

  He backed away, gagging, and stumbled his way out of the house, barking his shin on the same broken coffee table as he did so.

  He stood gasping for air in front of the house; saw in his peripheral vision that a cloud of something from the grove of trees was moving his way.

  Behind him, in the gloom of the house, the hissing sound was building.

  Again he swatted something from his face; and again.

  He stumbled to his car, got in, closed the window.

  The two clouds, one from the house, one from the tree grove, were merging, building like a tornado.

  He threw his keys into the ignition, rammed the car into drive and kicked dirt turning it around and tearing down the driveway to the main road.

  He didn’t stop breathing heavily till he was halfway back to town, checking his rearview mirror all the way.

  Weird shit.

  Very weird shit.

  Chapter Five

  Corrie Ph
aeder awoke from another black sleep. It was as if someone had thrown a switch, taking him from slumber to wakefulness.

  Where am I?

  For a moment, he had no idea. It was dark, and smelled close and stuffy, and his hand, when he reached it out, hit something solid that he didn’t recognize.

  For a second he thought he was back in L.A., at a friend’s house after Monica kicked him out—

  Then he thought he was in the Rainier Hotel—

  Then—

  Home.

  He knew the place now; knew it in the dark or light. He was prone on the living room sofa, the Sheridan that his mother had re-upholstered twice while he was growing up. It had originally been a wine color, and he remembered being sick on it when he was little, with a blanket over him while he sweated out a fever … then it had been a golden yellow, which his mother had loved in a swatch but hated when the entire piece of furniture was done …then, finally, it was a red embroidered fabric, which it was now …

  There was a familiar pillow under Corrie’s head.

  How long had he slept …?

  He sat up, feeling as sluggish as he had before he closed his eyes. Like no sleep at all. He looked at the picture window facing him, what must be gray moonlight drifting in, illuminating the dust motes in the air.

  He fumbled to his right, the tall brass lamp with a silk shade, his fingers under the shade, twisting the switch.

  The room was bathed in soft yellow light.

  She always liked 40 watt bulbs …

  Yawning, stretching, he got up and turned on three other lamps, which merely deepened the yellow glow in the room. All 40-watters …

  The room was exactly as he had remembered it. Dark mahogany furniture, Victorian style for the most part, with other out-of-date touches. A Tiffany chandelier out in the hallway — he remembered thinking it was magic light when he was little. No carpeting, but dark Persian rugs, tasseled, covered the wood floors. An imposing bookcase guarding the wall next to the opening into the dining room. Another childhood memory: standing on his tip-toes to try to reach Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was on the third shelf.

  He walked over to it now and almost had to bend down to slide it out of its accustomed spot.

  A line of dust across the top. He blew it off and it clouded away, briefly forming a shape: an all-too-distinct head of a pumpkin, mouth grinning.

  He turned cold — the cloud dissipated into dust motes …

  Already …

  The book’s faded buckram cover, an inset picture of Alice cowering, surrounded by a whirling pack of cards, one of Tennyson’s line drawings which had been tinted.

  He opened the book at random. There was another colored Tennyson drawing: the enraged Queen pointing at a composed Alice and screaming “Off with her head!”

  He smiled, then the smile froze on his face as the drawing moved.

  The picture abruptly deepened, became three dimensional. The Queen turned with her finger still pointing to look straight at Corrie. There was unimaginable fury in her eyes. She straightened her finger at him and screeched, in a piercing high voice: “OFF WITH HIS HEAD!”

  Alice, arms folded, turned to regard him with detached interest—

  He dropped the book, breathing heavily.

  It’s starting again.

  His eye was drawn to a flash of color. He turned to the picture window and saw something wink again, redly. The river? No, it was beyond the river.

  He quickly turned all the lamps out in the room.

  He stood before the picture window, and waited for it to repeat. He could see the river moving blackly under the light of the moon, stunted now by trees which blocked the sinking orb. The water looked like boiling lava. Through a break in the trees on the far bank he saw it again—

  A red flash.

  Something flaring into life.

  It lit, and stayed on.

  Not red, but deep orange.

  The round head of a pumpkin …

  He closed his eyes, and then made a map of Orangefield in it.

  The cornfield he had passed as the train drew into Orangefield was indeed in that direction.

  He opened his eyes again: the orange head glowed brighter.

  Corrie closed his eyes, and when he had made up his mind he opened them again and the light in the distance was gone.

  Chillier still. Corrie had forgotten what weather and seasons were like in the East — after more than a decade in California, his wardrobe had become almost seasonless. His brown sports jacket was about the heaviest garment he owned — he would have to go to Meager’s Sporting Goods tomorrow and buy a fall jacket with a zipper.

  He crossed the footbridge a quarter mile downriver, passing to his surprise a new house on River Road. It was well hidden by trees from his own, but the plot was new enough that grass had not yet grown in on the front lawn. It was nicer than the current McMansion style of big house; looked like it had been designed by an architect. A huge farmhouse, it somehow looked right. There were lights on in many of the windows, and Corrie heard a childish squeal from the backyard.

  The footbridge had been mended somewhere along the way. There were new cedar planks all the way across, and strong thick rope fencing on each side. In a way Corrie was disappointed; part of the fun of crossing it when he was young was to see if you or one of your friends would fall in. It had happened a few times, but Sagett River was not wide or dangerous at this point, and a dunking meant little more than a swim to shore while your buddies hooted derisively.

  The path through the woods was still there, too, as worn as ever. A carpet of new leaves covering last year’s pine needles made it soft as a rug.

  Corrie was out of the woods too quickly. He remembered it as being a long and scary walk.

  Something else that had been sized down by time …

  He stood on a small hill, with a breathtaking view in front of him.

  The moon was sinking before him, but still cast orange-gray torchlight on a scene from a Brueghel painting. Below him the fields were cut into blocks as if by the hand of God — mostly separate pumpkin fields, bursting with fruit ready to be picked (Corrie thought of the Pumpkin Tender, as he had been known — he wondered if poor Aaron Peters was still doing the job he was known for, which was to take care of the lion’s share of pumpkins in Orangefield. The man had an orange thumb) but also the occasional plot of onions (which also grew well in Orangefield’s rich black soil) and corn.

  Corrie’s eye was drawn to the railroad tracks a half mile to his left; he moved his eye up the briefly viewed tracks, until he spied a corn field.

  The orange light flashed, a faraway beacon.

  Hugging himself, Corrie walked down the hill and headed that way.

  The night was still, and colder, the chill of pre-winter with the sharp bite of a hard apple. Dry cornstalks crackled beneath his feet. Nearby, amidst the lights of Orangefield, he heard a dog howl mournfully, hungry or afraid.

  The moon was sinking above the corn to his left, off the path he had found, making everything whiter, colder …

  Why had he come here, this was madness—

  He heard something rustle in the stalks to his left, off the path. He stiffened, waiting for a cold breeze to brush his face. But the corn stalks were perfectly straight, unbowed.

  He heard the rustle again and thought of that dog; he did not like dogs …

  “Hello.”

  The wet whisper brushed his ear at the moment a dry arm was thrown around his shoulder. He felt heat, and saw the glow of the orange face between himself and the cornfield. It had stepped swiftly out of the ranks—

  “Let’s walk, shall we?”

  Petrified with fear, Corrie turned to look into the pumpkin face inches from his own. He felt heat from the candleless glow within; saw wet seeds adhering to the scraped inside of the head, through the sharply-etched nose, eyes, smiling mouth.

  The scarecrow laughed, pulled him closer with boneless fingers. It m
ade a dry, ticking sound as it walked—

  “You can call me John, if you like.”

  Corrie, holding his breath, said nothing.

  “Be afraid, if you must, but listen to me. You’re going to see a lot of me in the next couple of weeks.”

  The scarecrow stopped walking, his dry stalk fingers digging into Corrie’s shoulder to make him halt also. The scarecrow urged him around with his dry fingers until the two of them were face to face.

  The face, though horribly unreal, looked alive.

  Corrie felt as if he were going to faint.

  The head regarded him squarely.

  “I’m not an illusion,” John said. When he spoke, his grinning jack o’lantern mouth did not move, but Corrie could nevertheless feel the breath of his speech. “I’m not a dream, even though you think that sometimes your dreams are real. You always have, ever since you were seven years old.”

  Corrie’s mouth was dry, but he managed to say, “Yes.”

  “They’re not dreams. They never were.”

  Corrie tried to speak, but said nothing. His body was cold as ice.

  This has to be a dream. All of it has to be a dream.

  “If it makes you feel more at ease,” John said, “make believe that you are dreaming. That you’ll wake up any moment on the Sheridan couch in your mother’s house.”

  “Ever since I was seven—”

  “I know,” John said, cutting him off. “I’m afraid all that will come back to you. There’s no other way. If there was, I wouldn’t be here now …”

  “Who are you?” There was a desperation in his voice that Corrie didn’t know he possessed.

  Corrie swore that the corners of the pumpkin head’s smile widened ever so slightly, though they looked as hard and fresh as if they had just been carved. “I told you: call me John.”

  “Who are all of you! Why has this been happening to me! I went to California to get away from you! And now I’m here again, and I don’t know why!”