by John Saul
The six kids left the theater, with Julie breathing deeply of the night air. Away from the flickering movie screen, she felt all right again.
They all piled into Jeff’s car.
“Where we going?” Kevin asked.
“The power lines,” Jeff replied.
Five minutes later the car pulled into an old county park that, having been built under the high-voltage power lines that supplied the town with electricity, had years ago been all but abandoned by the town as people began worrying about what the magnetic fields under the lines might do to their children. For the last ten years or so the park had been left pretty much to the teenagers.
Tonight, as dusk was rapidly turning to darkness, it was totally deserted.
Jeff pulled the station wagon to a stop as Andy Bennett fished around under the seat, then triumphantly held up a six-pack. “Here it is,” Andy crowed. “Right where I left it!” Pulling the cans from the plastic web that held them together, he began passing them forward.
As one of the cans was put into her hand, Julie’s fingers closed on it. She’d started feeling better as soon as she’d escaped from the theater, and by the time they pulled into the park, the weird itching was completely gone. But now it was starting up again, and she could once more hear the strange humming sound in her ears.
Trying not to think about it, she looked at the can of beer she still held clutched in her hand.
She’d tasted beer a few times, back in L.A., but hadn’t really drunk it before.
Maybe it would make her feel better.
Popping open the top of the can, she raised it to her lips. The fluid, warm and bitter, filled her mouth, and for a moment she thought she was going to choke on it. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sara McLaughlin drinking thirstily from another can.
If that’s what the kids in Pleasant Valley did …
She choked down the mouthful of beer, and took another one.
The humming in her ears was getting worse now, and so was the itching that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her.
And now something else was happening to her—she felt an urge to get out of the car.
Pushing the door open, she scrambled out, and a moment later Kevin got out, too. “You okay?” she heard him ask.
Nodding her head, Julie took another swallow of beer, and moved away from the car into the shadows of the evening. Kevin hesitated, then started after her.
“Hey,” Sara McLaughlin asked. “Where are you guys going now?”
“Want to go with them?” Shelley Munson teased, seizing the opportunity to needle Sara about her ongoing crush on Kevin Owen. “Can’t you stand to have Kevin out of your sight for a few minutes?”
Sara burned with embarrassment, and told herself never again to trust Shelley with any of her secrets. Besides, she was pretty sure that since Julie had arrived in town, Kevin hadn’t been interested in anyone else, let alone herself.
Kevin, though, appeared not to have heard what Shelley said. “We’re just going for a walk,” he called back. He glanced toward Julie, who was still moving quickly away from the car, and wondered what was wrong with her. “We’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Jeff leered at him knowingly. “Taking a walk, my ass,” he said. “Get real, man—we all know what you guys are going to do.” He started giggling. “Want to borrow a blanket?”
But Kevin was hurrying after Julie. “Hey,” he asked as he got closer, “you okay?”
Julie, who was once again starting to feel better, smiled at him. “Of course I am,” she said. She cast around for an excuse not to go back to the car. “I—I just thought it might be fun to walk home,” she said. “I mean, it’s so warm.…”
Kevin stared at her, but in the last of the rapidly failing light, her face was completely unreadable.
Was it the other kids? Didn’t she like them?
Then another thought came to him.
Maybe she just wanted to be alone with him.
“I—I guess we could walk,” he stammered. “It’s a couple of miles, but we can just follow the power lines.” He pointed up to the thick wires above the car. “The right of way goes straight out to our place.” He started toward the twin rows of enormous stanchions that supported the high-voltage lines, but Julie reached out and took his hand, stopping him.
“No,” she said.
Kevin, puzzled, strained once more to see her face in the darkness.
“No?” he asked. “What do you mean, no?”
Julie’s mind raced, for the moment he pointed to the high-voltage wire, she realized where the humming she’d thought was inside her head must have been coming from.
The power lines!
First it had happened on the way to the movie, when they’d been driving along right next to them.
Then again, when Jeff had parked under them a few minutes ago.
“I—I just don’t want to,” she said. “I mean, everyone says power lines are really bad for you.”
“Come on,” Kevin teased. “It’s not like we’re gonna be living under them or anything!” Once more he started toward the double row of stanchions and the utility road that ran between them.
“No!” Julie said again, her voice rising sharply. She dropped his hand and started off by herself. “You can go that way if you want to, but I’m not!”
Kevin stared after her. What was she, nuts? For a second he had half a mind to let her go off by herself, and to take the easy path home himself.
But what if she got lost?
So what if she did? a voice inside him asked. Who cared?
But he already knew the answer to that question.
He cared.
Abandoning the power lines, he went after Julie, wondering how they could get home without having to walk along the country road, where the lines would be practically over their heads.
It seemed really stupid, but if that’s what she wanted …
Kevin suddenly had a sinking feeling, as he realized how he was acting.
He was acting like he was in love with her.
His heart suddenly throbbing with excitement, he ran to catch up with her, and once more slipped his hand into hers.
Julie smiled at him and squeezed his hand happily.
Now that they were away from the power lines, she felt fine again.
CHAPTER 9
Liar!
Otto Owen sat on the sagging sofa in his living room, his eyes fixed on the television screen but his mind so consumed with anger that he was barely aware that the set was even on.
Liar!
That’s what they’d called him, even though no one had actually come right out and said the word.
Liar!
That’s what Mark Shannon thought he was.
Either a liar or a confused old geezer who didn’t know what he’d seen that morning.
And Karen thought he was a liar, too, even though she hadn’t had the guts to say the word any more than the deputy had.
But what really hurt was the way his son and grandson had looked at him as he told Mark Shannon what he’d seen Carl Henderson doing to Julie. Not that they’d said anything, but after a while Kevin had looked away, and he’d seen Russell shaking his head.
Like he was pitying me! Otto thought bitterly. They all thought he was old, or blind, or didn’t know what he saw.
Or that he was lying.
How the hell could they have believed that scumbag Carl Henderson?
’Course, it hadn’t helped that Julie couldn’t even remember, but after what had happened to her, how could anyone expect her to? She’d almost died from the bee stings, hadn’t she? So how could anyone expect her to remember what Henderson had been doing to her?
Otto had been turning it over in his mind all day, trying to figure out if maybe he could have been wrong, if maybe his eyes had deceived him some way. After all, he wasn’t as young as he used to be; he couldn’t even read without glasses anymore. Finally, that afternoon, he’d gone b
ack up to the hives and taken another look.
He’d paced off the distance from the spot where he’d come around the berm of rocks to the place where Henderson had been sprawled out on the ground, Julie pinned under him.
No more than fifty feet.
Then he’d gone back to the spot by the rocks and started looking around.
He’d not only been able to see the hives perfectly clearly—and they were ten feet or so past the spot where Henderson and Julie had been—but had even been able to read the word “UniGrow” stenciled all over them, as if someone was just waiting to steal the damned things.
He’d come back home and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening stewing about it.
And the more he stewed, the madder he got.
By tomorrow everyone in town would be talking about him, spreading the word that Otto Owen was starting to lose it and couldn’t be trusted anymore.
Which was a damned lie! He’d seen what he’d seen perfectly clearly, and he didn’t care what anyone said, or didn’t say, or couldn’t prove.
Even if Henderson hadn’t actually been raping Julie, he had sure as hell been on top of her, and she had sure as hell been struggling. And whatever the son of a bitch was trying to do, he was going to get away with it, Otto thought, unless he himself did something! And there was something he could do, too! He could go over to Henderson’s and make him tell the truth.
He might be pushing eighty, but he was pretty damned sure he could still take a creep like Carl Henderson!
His mind made up, Otto picked up the remote control, switched off the television, and left the house.
Ten minutes later he turned his three-year-old Ford pickup onto Walnut Road. At the end stood the house where Carl Henderson still lived. The man must be nuts, Otto reflected. What with his mother having died years ago and his sister gone to live somewhere back East, the house was far bigger than any normal person would ever need. Not that he could consider Carl Henderson any kind of normal, Otto reminded himself, not after what he’d seen!
He slowed the truck as he approached the house. Standing a half mile from its nearest neighbor, it was almost concealed in a grove of trees, and didn’t appear to have been painted in twenty years. Though still occupied, it had begun to take on a derelict air that told Otto even more about what kind of man Carl Henderson was. A man who didn’t take care of his own house couldn’t be trusted, not as far as Otto was concerned.
Darkness was falling rapidly and he saw no sign of Henderson’s car. Swearing under his breath at the loss of the confrontation he’d spent the whole afternoon working himself up to, Otto was about to start back home when suddenly he slammed on his brakes.
Almost completely hidden in the trees in front of the house, he spotted Henderson’s gray Cherokee. His lips tightening into a thin line, Otto backed the truck up a few yards and turned into Henderson’s driveway. A few seconds later he was parked in front of the house. Getting out of the truck, he mounted the steps to the front porch, pressed the button next to the door, and, when he heard no sound from within, knocked loudly.
Otto waited, but still heard nothing from within the house.
Scowling, he moved to the front window and peered inside. He was looking into the living room, where a bright bulb burned in a brass lamp. The room contained a Victorian sofa, two overstuffed chairs, a coffee table, and two side tables, both of which were covered with the kind of knickknacks Otto’s wife had loved but which he himself had cleared out of his house within a year of her death. Framed photographs, china figurines, a collection of cheap glass objects of the sort Otto could remember winning at the midway of the county fair years earlier. Dust collectors was all they were, as far as Otto was concerned.
Then Otto’s eyes were drawn to the walls.
Everywhere he could see, the walls of Carl Henderson’s living room were covered with display cases.
Display cases filled with insects mounted on pins.
Even in the failing light, Otto could make out dozens of glass-covered boxes, some of them filled with butterflies and moths, others with beetles, wasps, grasshoppers, and locusts.
Though many of the insects were as familiar to Otto as houseflies, some of the boxes on the walls contained exotic specimens he’d never seen before.
Beetles with immense horns and midsections that looked strong enough to break your finger.
Flies twice the size of any Otto had seen before.
Otto’s eyes swept the cases and he felt a faint shudder as he tried to imagine living with these morbid displays, confronted by dead insects everywhere you looked.
Finally moving off the porch, he slowly circled around the house, but it wasn’t until he was in the backyard that he noticed, through a dirt-encrusted window in a small ventilation well, a dim glow of light coming from the basement.
Climbing the steps to the back door, Otto rapped sharply twice more, waited, then called out Carl Henderson’s name.
Nothing.
His scowl deepening, he pulled the screen door open and tried the doorknob.
Locked.
Locked, but so loose in its frame that the latch seemed barely to be catching in the striker.
In fact, if he were to just sort of push on it …
A second later he was standing in the utility room of Carl Henderson’s house.
Barely glancing at it, he moved on into the kitchen, treading so lightly that he made practically no sound as he crossed the worn linoleum floor.
And yet, despite the care with which he stepped, there was sound in the near darkness of the kitchen.
The sounds, Otto realized, of a summer night. Except that here the sounds were coming from within the house, instead of from the fields beyond the walls.
Groping in the gloom, Otto found a light switch and flipped it on. Bright fluorescent lights flickered for a moment, then came on, flooding the room with a harsh white light almost as bright as day.
In the kitchen sink were the dirty dishes from a makeshift supper, most of which looked as if it had come out of the microwave oven that sat on the counter next to the refrigerator.
Otto, though, barely noticed the dishes, the microwave, or even the leftover mess from Carl Henderson’s supper.
For everywhere in the kitchen—arranged on metal shelving that covered one of the walls, spread across the area of the counter that the microwave wasn’t occupying, even covering all but a tiny corner of the kitchen table—were glass tanks. Terraria.
Instead of containing the usual lizards, turtles, or even small snakes, each and every terrarium in Carl Henderson’s kitchen was alive with insects.
Insects, and spiders.
Unlike the house itself, the glass enclosures were carefully tended, each of them filled with a carefully constructed environment developed to suit its primary tenants.
One of them, sitting on the corner of the table closest to Otto, seemed to be empty save for some leaves scattered across its bottom, but when he leaned closer, he was able to make out dozens of green caterpillars feasting on the leaves.
Others had already spun cocoons and were starting the metamorphosis from pupa into butterfly.
In one of the smaller tanks a large, hairy tarantula crouched, seeming to stare out at Otto as if ready to pounce.
Otto shivered as he gazed at the ugly spider, and quickly turned away.
Leaving the kitchen, he moved through the dining room into a hall that led toward the front door and the stairs to the second floor. Like those in the living room, the walls of the hall were covered with more display cases containing Carl Henderson’s vast collection of insects, each creature carefully mounted and labeled, all arranged in precise rows in their boxes.
Beneath the staircase was a door, and when Otto opened it, he found exactly what he was looking for.
The stairs to the basement.
He paused, listening, but heard nothing from below save the same soft humming that was coming from the tanks of insects in the kitchen.
“Henderson?” Otto called.
There was no answer from below, nor could he see any light.
Then there must be more than one room in the cellar below the house.
Again Otto groped for a light switch, and again he found one almost exactly where he expected.
A naked bulb came to life in a socket above the door. His shadow preceding him, Otto started down the stairs into the basement. At the bottom of the steep flight he found three more light switches, and flipped one of them on.
As in the kitchen, a bank of fluorescent lights flickered on, filling the basement with bright light. Blinking as his eyes adjusted to the glare, Otto looked curiously around.
The basement had been converted into a laboratory, and the stale air contained within its walls was heavy with the smell of strong disinfectants. Along one wall ran a long counter made of white marble, broken only by a gleaming stainless steel sink. Several different kinds of microscopes sat on the stone counter, and above it were bookshelves filled with reference volumes.
Along the back of the counter was an array of chemicals and tools.
A display case sat open, partially filled, and on a thick piece of cardboard next to it were a dozen insects, each of them mounted on a pin, awaiting labels before being added to the case.
Against the opposite wall were more shelves filled with terraria. Even from ten feet away Otto could see that several of them contained large ant farms, though not of the sort you could buy in any toy store, meant to amuse children for a few days and then be thrown away. Carl Henderson’s ant farms were large, and only a few tunnels were visible, but the surface of the ground within the farms was teeming with the tiny insects, assuring Otto that thousands of ants were thriving in each of the large tanks.
Otto was still staring at the tanks when he heard a sharp voice behind him.
“What are you doing in my house?”
Startled by the sound, Otto jumped, then turned to see Carl Henderson standing in a doorway on the far side of the basement. It was so lost in shadows that Otto hadn’t noticed it when he’d come downstairs, and now Carl’s figure, framed against the light in the room behind him, was no more than a black silhouette. But as he snapped off the lights in the room behind him and stepped into the larger portion of the basement, Otto caught a glimpse of something.