“What do you think it’ll do for a sandworm? I mean, shootin’ a current through it?”
Grimes turned his palms up. “I’m not sure, but I’ll tell you one thing it does.”
“What’s that?”
“Brings ’em to the surface like they been goosed.” His mouth turned up in the closest thing to a smile that Willie Grimes was capable of.
“In spite of the light, you mean?” the boy asked, inching closer to the table.
“Uh-huh. Of course, soon as I stopped applying the juice, they burrowed home right away, but for the moment at least they lost their fear of light.”
Roger peered into the fishtank, then into the black depths of his father’s eyes. They gleamed unnaturally, like those of a hunter scenting a kill.
“You don’t grasp what that means, do you, boy?” Grimes said, shaking his head at the timid, disappointing kid who stood tentatively before him, body tensed as if prepared to leap out the door the moment something unexpected happened, like a wary fox approaching a baited trap.
“What you afraid of, boy?” he snapped. “Jesus, you work with me all day long shoveling thousands of these things out of the ground. So why should you be afraid now?”
Roger shrank from his father but avoided the question, choosing instead to answer it with a question of his own. “Why do you do this, daddy? Why can’t you be like other daddies? Preston Tinker, his daddy took him to the county fair the other n—”
Grimes smacked his fist into his palm. “I don’t give a fiddler’s finger what Preston Tinker’s daddy does, or anybody else’s! This is the only thing that interests me. Sure I know what some people say about me, that I’m worm-happy and gone off the deep end. Well, that don’t bother me none. Those are the kind of people who’ve never looked beneath the surface of things, who think a worm’s just a worm. Why, there’s so many kinds of worms nobody’s counted ’em all up yet. There’s earthworms, flatworms, marine worms, horsehair worms, flukes, leeches, roundworms, tapeworms, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of species within each of those classifications.”
Roger held up his hands. He’d heard his father’s speech before, a long diatribe the man always hauled out whenever scoffers put him on the defensive, and it was the last thing Roger wanted to hear tonight. All he’d come out here for was the human companionship. He just wanted his daddy to tell him it was all right, no need to be afraid of the dark, I love you son, ain’t nobody gonna harm you, maybe tomorrow I’ll take you to the fair too. Instead, Willie Grimes had gotten wound up on his endless oration on the subject of worms.
“. . . they cut open a worm, all they see is its guts. Guts, hah! Why, you dissect a worm, you’ll find as many organs as you’ll find if you cut up a human being, and some of ’em just as sophisticated. Look at these eyes I’ve collected . . .”
He rapped a sealed preserves jar with a horny knuckle. Roger glanced at it long enough to see hundreds of tiny eyeballs floating languidly in formaldehyde. He felt his gorge rising and cut his father off with a sharp chop of the hand in the air. “I’m sorry I asked, daddy.”
His father was not completely insensitive. He lowered his eyes, reached into his overalls, pulled out a soil-crusted red handkerchief, and mopped his forehead. “I’m sorry. I keep thinkin’ other folks are as interested in this stuff as I am. Look how I’ve worked up a sweat.” He reached out and placed a tender hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Whyn’t you get to bed, sonny?”
The moments of warmth between father and son were so rare, Roger reveled in this one and wanted to prolong it. He knew that the easiest way to do this was to express interest in his father’s work. “What about the electricity, daddy?”
“Huh?”
“You started to say somethin’ about the importance of this electricity business.”
Willie looked skeptically at his boy from under heavy black brows. “You don’t really care, do you?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
Willie shrugged, then an odd expression came into his face, one that Roger had rarely seen. It was a combination of craftiness and greed, and it was terribly discomfiting, like the face of a wizard, Roger thought, who has discovered a way to convert lead into gold. Willie’s eyes glowed and his lips parted in a grimace that seemed to confirm the madness of which his neighbors all suspected him.
“You know how much work we got to do to farm worms now, right?”
Roger closed his eyes and pictured the backbreaking toil to which his father, being too poor to afford help, had subjected the boy from the day he was old enough to know which end of a spade goes into the soil. “Sure.”
“Well, suppose we could bring the worms to the surface without all that labor? Suppose,” he said, illustrating by bringing his two index fingers together like the ends of two electrical cables, “we could apply a electrical current—I mean a real heavy dose, not just your everyday household current—di-reckly to the soil. Not just to a fishtank full of worms, like here, but to five or ten acres at a time. Hah? You see, boy? Hah?” Grimes began sweating again and his chest heaved with excitement.
Roger closed his eyes a moment and seemed able to read the image in his father’s mind as if it were being projected onto the screen in his own.
“That’s right!” his father panted. “You could harvest those sumbitches like so many stringbeans. We could do a day’s work in two hours and have eight hours to spare. We could be rich, boy! Rich! Come here. Come on, come on, come on,” he said feverishly, churning the air with his hand.
As if spellbound by his father’s vision, Roger stepped up to the table.
“Now, pick up those two wires, careful not to let the tips touch. That’s right. Now, stick the points into the soil here in the fishtank, about six inches apart. Soil is damp, see, so you’re gonna get a current. Don’t worry, you ain’t gonna get electrocuted. There.”
The clips sparked blue as they entered the damp dirt, sending wisps of smoke and an acrid odor of ozone curling under the boy’s nostrils. The yellow bulb overhead dimmed and flickered, making his father’s face as the man leaned over the fishtank, appear ghastly and unnatural. In fact, Roger found the sight of his father’s face compellingly fascinating. It was indeed the face of a wizard, flickering blue and yellow in the quavering light, tobacco-stained teeth bared in a mad smile, dark eyes, bulging out of their sockets, breath coming in short, evil-smelling gusts.
Suddenly his father’s face darkened. “Watch what you’re about, boy!”
“Huh?”
Roger looked down and started to withdraw his hand from the fishtank, but it was too late. At least half a dozen sandworms had burst out of their refuge in the dirt, like missiles popping out of their silos, and one of them had grasped Roger by the meat of his thumb.
The mouth of the sandworm contains a pair of sharp needle-like fangs, and Roger had been scratched or bitten by them so often he was practically insensitive to them. They were no more painful than the thrust of a mosquito’s proboscis, and a worm that fastened to one’s flesh was easily shaken loose with a flick of the hand.
Roger flicked his hand, and suddenly a pain shot down his thumb and up his arm such as he’d never in his life experienced. He looked at his thumb and the worm had not merely fixed on to the flesh like a leech but had bored through it like an auger bit and was now pulling its segmented anterior behind it into the meat of his thumb. Roger shrieked with pain and horror and beat his thumb against the glass wall of the fishtank, squashing the body of the worm in a splatter of blood and slime. But the head and about an inch of the worm’s body had still penetrated inside his thumb and continued boring their way inside. “Daddy, do something, do something, please!” the boy screamed hysterically. “It’s killing me, it’s killing me!”
His father held his wrist in a vise-like grip, staring in mute helplessness as the worm burrowed beneath the flesh. For what seemed like minutes the man was paralyzed with a mixture of scientific interest and fright. Then he twisted his head, casting around the room
for an implement.
He found one.
A scalpel.
The boy’s eyes widened with yet more horror. “Daddy, no! What are you gonna do?”
“Hold still, boy.”
“Daddy, no.”
“Hold still, I said!”
“Daddy, Daddy! DADDY . . . !”
CHAPTER
I
Willie Grimes’ bait farm hadn’t changed very much in the fifteen years since that traumatic night. Willie had aged, it seemed, two years for every chronological one and was now a grey-haired, round-shouldered, dour man given to cruel outbursts of temper. Roger had survived that incident with a rather brutal scar to show for it, but an even more brutal scar on his soul where no one could see it. He was a strapping lad, handsome with an abundance of black hair and soft cow-eyes. He still worked for his father, but there had been no more experiments from that night to the present.
The rest of the town of Fly Creek hadn’t changed much either. Andy’s Barber Shop was still there, its proprietor now an object of humorous derision for having lost most of his hair. Betsy’s Luncheonette had changed hands and was now owned by Millie, a buxom orange-haired woman fairly bursting out of her pink rayon waitress uniform. There were a few new gas stations, the courthouse had gotten a new flagpole, and the church a new coat of paint. Willie Grimes had hung a new sign in front of his bait shop but otherwise it was the same hole-in-the-wall squeezed between two other shops. Unless you were going fishing in Fly Lake or in the coastal waters around Sapelo Sound, you’d pass Willie’s shop and not even know it was there.
Tonight, that sign swung violently in the teeth of the fiercest storm the town had experienced in no one was sure how long. Oh, there’d been hurricanes, but Fly Creek had been lucky never to catch one squarely. This wasn’t a hurricane, but an odd confrontation of low- and high-pressure fronts that had worked up gusts of wind well over a hundred miles per hour. Buster Martin, not liking the sound or looks of it, had closed his tavern early and sent his patrons home to sit by their windows shaking their heads as the wind swept tree branches horizontal to the ground, bent saplings to low angles or tore them out of the ground by their roots altogether, yanked rotten tree limbs out of their sockets and flung them against buildings and cars.
The rain drummed maddeningly on rooftops, thundered down on pavements, made morasses out of lawns and even tore gulleys out of fields and farmland heavily planted with grasses and crops. Down at the inlet between town and Sapelo Sound, half the row-boats and small fishing vessels had either been driven together in a crunch of wooden planking or foundered with rainwater up to the gunwales. Lightning in jagged blue forks thrust angrily at trees, utility poles, lightning rods and television aerials, and on a few occasions the children huddling in their homes, taught to count the seconds between lightning flash and thunderclap (every second counting for eleven hundred feet of comfort and safety), found the two occurring all but simultaneously and hurled themselves into their parents’ arms, sobbing.
Were it not for an ominous occurrence on a hill behind the town, Fly Creek would have weathered the storm with little but average damage. But on that hill stood Tower #4511, a high-voltage tower carrying two hundred thousand volts of electricity from Sapelo Sound Station to the rural townships along the coast, including Fly Creek. Torrents of rainwater sluiced down Chickering’s Hill and lapped around the cement foundation of the steel tower, undermining it and exposing the platform supporting the heavy legs and girders. For a moment the rain mysteriously abated, but an instant later it hurled itself with even deadlier fury at the exposed tower. It swayed, tugging fretfully at the lines that carried the juice from the Georgia Power & Light booster station a mile or two to the north, and played havoc with the cable that carried current off to the Fly Creek transformer station.
The citizens of Fly Creek noted the dimming of their lights apprehensively, but without alarm. Lines do go down in heavy storms, but after a few hours of inconvenience the utility people locate the problem and restore power. Thus when the lights flickered one last time, then went out for good, there were many groans and sighs of resignation but nothing more.
The lights had gone out because Tower #4511 had collapsed.
The rushing waters had literally bored a tunnel under the tower and an enormous gust of wind had done the rest. A shudder, a creak, a sickening swaying and clangor of steel, the angry whine and hum of electric cables stretched to their limits of endurance, then a dreadful crash. Like a nest of disturbed snakes, the snapped live cables twisted and writhed, blue sparks spitting at the rain and earth. So hot were the cable-tips that in spite of the downpour they were able to set little brushfires that flared up momentarily before succumbing to the merciless beating of the rain.
Back in town, the same gust that had toppled the electrical tower had ripped from its chains the sign that said WILLIE’S BAIT: LIVE WORMS and flung it through the window of Ronnie’s Fishing Post across the street. An observer with a fine sense of irony would, in the light of what was to happen in the next twenty-four hours, have noted something symbolic about this. But then that observer would have had to know that Tower #4511 had been blown down and now lay in a heap of tortured metal, its cables beating the wet ground like so many high-pressure water hoses that might have twisted out of the hands of a firefighting team.
But there was no one present to observe this.
No one but the hundreds of millions of worms that inhabited every acre of ground in the vicinity of the tower, worms that, literally galvanized by the stinging electrical current that charged through their native soil, squirmed to the surface driven by desperate impulses far beyond their comprehension.
CHAPTER
II
Geri Sanders looked up at the shower head and frowned. Was it her imagination or had the pressure dropped?
She reached for the hot and cold knobs and turned them to their full open positions. There was a slight surge but the force of the spray was far from normal. “Damn!” she muttered. She’d been through this often enough to know what it meant: after last night’s storm, a power line was down. The pump that sent water to the top of the Fly Creek water tower was therefore not operating, and before long there’d be no water at all until the power company located the downed lines and repaired them. Then she shrugged. Things could have been a lot worse, considering the fury of the storm. Some people were lucky they still had a roof over their heads, let alone electricity.
Not knowing how much longer the pressure would stay up, she hurriedly soaped herself, running the cloth over her graceful neck, white freckled shoulders, and small, high breasts, then worked it down over her flat tummy, between her thighs, over her firm young buttocks, then finally down her long, prettily tapered legs. She raised her face to the shower head and let the needle spray course through her long auburn hair, sending the shampoo frothing over her face and down her body until it swirled around her toes and drained with a sucking noise out of the tub.
She reached for a green face towel, vigorously ran it through her hair and knotted it on the side of her head. Then she patted herself dry with a bath towel, wrapped it around her body underneath her shoulders, and rubbed the steam off the medicine cabinet mirror for a quick glance at her face.
It’s not so much that Geri was vain—at least, she was no more vain than any other good-looking twenty-two year old girl. No, it was just that today was a very special day, and she wanted to be absolutely sure of being as attractive as possible. She’d thought of little else for the last few weeks, and had been incapable of passing a mirror lately without scrutinizing her image for the faintest blemishes.
There were none this morning. Her skin, that translucent ivory color with which so many redheads are often blessed, was milkmaid pure, except for those darned freckles, and even they didn’t look so awful because of the merest blush of a suntan she’d acquired the past two days.
She touched the mirror with a long finger, then repaired to her bedroom where she linger
ed before her open closet trying to select the right dress. She finally chose a violet and blue floral print that had always shown off her hazel eyes to their best advantage. It didn’t hurt her figure, either; its scoop-neck displayed the crescents of her breasts, and the short sleeves called attention to her well-turned arms. A plunging back was the final touch: whether he looked at her front, back, or profile, Mick would get an eyeful. She cast an eye at her electric clock. Damn again! It had stopped. She rummaged around the top of her night-table and found her watch. Her pulse doubled as she realized that the bus carrying Mick was less than two hours away.
She tugged at the end of the towel tucked in the crease between her breasts, and it slid down her hips and fell to her feet. She held the dress up to her nose a moment, inhaling the crisp, summery, starchy aroma. Then she draped the dress over her arms and head and shimmied and wriggled until it slid over her frame and fitted itself to the contours of her shapely body. She donned the little heart locket she’d worn ever since she was a toddler, then opened her favorite perfume bottle and touched its tip to the pulse-points on her wrists, throat, and breasts. She went to the window, breathed deeply of the clean, still-damp air, and spun around once with a giggle in joyous anticipation of the moment when Mick would take her in his strong arms.
Then her eyes caught sight of Roger standing in the yard abutting their property. He stood there dumbly, gaping at her with a sheepish grin plastered on his face. She felt a hot flush of embarrassment racing up her shoulders and neck and infusing her cheeks. How long had he been standing there watching her? Had he seen her naked? The thought of it made her a little queasy.
They’d grown up together, she and Roger, and were close friends—in some way, closer, like brother and sister. Of course, that didn’t make Roger as happy as he’d have been if he could have been her lover. But for Geri that was out of the question. Oh, sure, sometimes she’d give him a big hug and a kiss, but that was teddy-bear stuff, and not to be interpreted as anything more serious. Though Roger was a good-hearted soul, he was also—well . . . a little weird. Many Fly Creek girls thought him goofy in spite of his dusky good looks and athletic physique. From time to time he got a dreamy look in his eyes and no one could penetrate its significance. All Geri knew was that it frightened her a little. There was a suppressed vein of violence deep down in Roger, and the thought that it might ever surface in her presence, might ever surface because of something she did or provoked, was a concern that never quite erased itself from Geri’s mind.
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