by John Saul
Suddenly an image came into her mind.
One day a year ago she’d been out hiking and stumbled across the remains of a small animal. Most of the larger bones were already gone, and all that were left were a few vertebrae, picked fairly clean by the scavengers that fed on carrion. Yet even what was left was still serving as a feast, for the vertebrae had been covered with ants—thousands of them—reaping a final harvest of the last fragments of meat the larger scavengers had left. A few hours later, when she returned along the same route, she’d stopped to look at the bones again.
The ants were gone, the bones having been picked clean.
As clean as the bones on the counter in front of her.
She stared at the bones, and the words of Harry Matson came back to her.
… the larvae feed on the blood …
But what did the adults feed on?
A thought began to form in her mind—a hideous thought.
Was it possible that Julie Spellman had been totally consumed by something that had been living inside her own body?
Her thoughts were interrupted by the intercom, and Roberto Muñoz’s voice. “Mrs. McL and Sara are here, Doc.”
Grateful for the distraction from her ruminations, Ellen Filmore turned away from the bones on the countertop.
“It’s not Julie!” Karen said, her voice louder than she’d intended it to be.
She sat at the kitchen table, flanked by Russell and Mark Shannon, who had just come back from town.
Karen had listened in silence, her jaw setting stubbornly, while a scream built in her brain. No! It was not Julie, could not be Julie.
“It simply can’t be Julie,” she said again, pushing away from the table and moving to stand, arms tightly crossed to stop herself from shaking, at the counter across the room. “If it was, I’d know. I’d—I’d feel it.” She ignored the furtive glance Russell and Shannon exchanged. “You’ll see,” she went on, hearing the desperation in her own voice, which made her wonder if she truly believed what she was saying, or if she was only trying to convince herself. “As soon as Julie’s dental records arrive, you’ll both see.” Russell stood up and came to put his arms around her. For a moment Karen leaned against his chest, but as her eyes began to moisten with tears, she knew that if she let herself give in to the impulse to collapse into his embrace, her emotional control, already stretched, would snap.
“You’ll see,” she said again, pulling away from Russell. Once again Russell and Shannon exchanged a glance, and this time Karen knew there was something they hadn’t yet told her. “What is it?” she asked, her gaze holding on her husband for a moment, then shifting to the deputy.
Mark Shannon hesitated, then handed Karen a sheet of paper.
She found herself staring down into the face of a girl.
A girl who looked to be the same age as Julie.
A girl who had long dark hair.
Hair like Julie’s.
“Wh-What is this?” she asked, though in her heart she already knew what Shannon was going to say.
“Her name is Dawn Sanderson,” Mark said. “She disappeared from Los Banos a week ago. Last seen walking out of town, heading toward 1-5. Presumably a runaway, and her friends seem to think she might have been heading to L.A. She wanted to be an actress.”
“And you think this might be the girl whose skeleton …” She trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.
“We’re checking her dental records, too,” Shannon said. “We should have them by late this afternoon. But the thing is, even if the bones are Dawn Sanderson’s, we might have a real bad problem. If it’s a serial killer—”
“No!” Karen burst out, her voice rising. “That’s not what’s happening! It’s not! I mean—what about Jeff and Andy? You thought they were all together, didn’t you? And if they’re all together—”
“We don’t know what to think,” Mark Shannon said. “All we’re doing right now is exploring possibilities, and one of the possibilities we have to be prepared for is that—” He cut off his own words as Karen’s face paled. “Well, we just have to be prepared for whatever we might find,” he finished.
“I think they’re together,” Karen said. “I think that Jeff and Julie and Andy Bennett are all together, and that we’re going to find them.” She forced a smile. “For all we know, Kevin is finding them right now.”
Karen and Russell both remembered the note on the refrigerator door, in which Kevin had assured them that he would be home by noon.
It was already nearly one. Nothing had been heard from Kevin; no one who had come down from the search in the hills reported seeing him.
Neither Karen nor Russell was willing to speak the thought they both shared, but each could read it in the other’s eyes:
Another of their children was gone.
Vic Costas crested the rise and paused to catch his breath, gasping from the unaccustomed exertion. Pitching hay was one thing, but tramping through the hills was another. Still, he’d come to like Jeff Larkin in the months the boy had lived on his farm, and if he could help find him, he’d keep on hiking, out of breath or not. A minute or two to catch his breath and he’d set off again.
Swabbing the sweat from his forehead with an ancient red bandanna, the old Greek farmer surveyed the valley below him. He could not remember having been up here before, for surely he would remember the sight of a valley as pretty as this one, with a stream meandering across its floor, oak trees studding its hillside, and what looked like a cave on the opposite side.
A cave …
When he was a boy back in Greece, he and one of his friends had found a cave in the hills behind their village, and used it as a place of refuge, a place to hide from their parents.
Costas frowned, an idea forming in his mind.
Could it be?
Stuffing the bandanna back in his pocket, he started down the hillside, half running, half sliding as he struggled to prevent himself from losing his footing. Coming to the bottom of the steep slope, he paused to catch his breath once more, this time dropping to his knees to scoop water up from the stream and pour it over his sweat-soaked head. The dust cleaned from his face, he scooped up more of the clean, fresh water, sucking it thirstily from his cupped hands.
Then, his thirst almost quenched, he sensed something watching him. He glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to see a coyote poised on the hillside, one foot trembling in the air as it studied him.
There was nothing.
He bent to take a final drink from the stream when a movement in the shadows at the entrance to the cave caught his attention. Standing, he shaded his eyes, squinting against the glare of the sun. Nothing.
Then a figure stepped out of the shadows, and Vic Costas gasped.
Julie Spellman.
He was certain it was she, for her long dark hair was cascading over her shoulders just as he remembered from the other day when she’d come over to baby-sit Ben Larkin.
Yet except for her hair, she looked nothing like the image he now conjured from his memory.
Julie Spellman had been slim.
The girl he beheld now looked almost bloated, her body distended in an unnatural way that made Vic Costas’s skin crawl and sent a strange anticipatory shiver down his spine.
The shiver coagulated into a stab of fear a moment later when her eyes fixed on him and she raised an arm to point a single finger directly at him, just as the ancient crone back home had when he was a boy.
The crone who cursed him when he and his friends called her a witch.
Suddenly the same irrational fear he’d felt when he was seven years old welled up in him, and he turned to flee from Julie Spellman’s pointing finger just as he’d wheeled around and fled from the old Greek woman’s gnarled hand more than half a century earlier.
He’d only taken a few steps when he stumbled, lurched on another two steps, then tripped once more, this time crumpling to the ground. He struggled to regain his feet and had started to push himself up
with his hands when he felt a burning sensation on his right palm and yelped in pain. Dropping to a sitting position, he lifted his injured hand and stared at it.
His palm was covered with red ants. Even as he thrashed his arm, wildly trying to shake them off, he tried to imagine where they had come from so quickly: an army of them that continued to prick him, their tiny stingers bombarding his bloodstream with venom.
Now his ankles were beginning to burn, too. He looked down to see more ants—thousands of them—swarming over his shoes, disappearing up under his denim pants.
Gasping with shock and pain, Vic Costas began swatting at his pants, and tried once again to struggle to his feet.
Then he heard the hum.
Faint at first, it quickly grew into a loud droning. By the time Vic realized it was coming from the direction of the cave, the bees were on him, a dense cloud swirling around him, landing on his face, his hands, the back of his neck—a0ttacking every inch of exposed skin.
As fast as one of them would pull away, leaving its stinger embedded in his skin, another replaced it.
Vic was screaming with pain now, his arms flailing as he tried to ward the bees off. Finally, he stumbled toward the stream, where the water, if it was deep enough, would protect him from the bees and soothe the burning agony that was quickly overwhelming him.
He was still a step or two short of the water when he collapsed. For a minute or two he lay in the dust, twitching like a snake whose back has been smashed with a rock, gurgling moans burbling up from his fast-constricting throat.
He clawed at his neck with his fingers as his windpipe closed and thrashed wildly, gasping for breath until, in mere seconds, his supply of oxygen completely cut off, he began to sink into a dark oblivion.
An oblivion where, mercifully, he could no longer feel the stings of the insects that were still attacking him.
The moment his heartbeat stopped and the last spasm of his diaphragm eased, the bees dispersed.
But now more ants came, welling up out of their subterranean nests, scurrying across the hard-packed ground to swarm over the corpse, already beginning their task of picking the meat from his bones.
Flies gathered, laying eggs which would soon hatch into maggots that would feed on Vic Costas’s entrails and brain.
Within a few hours the corpse of Vic Costas, like that of Dawn Sanderson, would have all but disappeared, leaving only a few bones on the floor of the valley, from which the buzzards that were already wheeling overhead could pick a meager meal.
Then the coyotes would come, and soon the bones, too, would be scattered over the hills surrounding the valley.
From the entrance of the cave, Julie Spellman watched Vic Costas die, then turned and moved slowly back into the coolness of the cavern, following the orders of the force within her, just as the bees and ants had when they attacked the old Greek farmer and brought him to his sudden, pain-wracked end.
CHAPTER 25
Sara McLaughlin was terrified.
She was in a room in the hospital in San Luis Obispo. A private room, with a television set, which she could watch as much as she wanted.
Until this morning, that would have been Sara’s idea of paradise.
But from the moment she woke up, she’d felt terrible—her whole body was itchy, and no amount of scratching relieved it. Nothing seemed to affect the burning, prickling sensation—not the calamine lotion she’d tried, or the sunburn spray, or anything else.
For most of the day she’d also been shivering with the same kind of chills she’d had ten years ago, when she almost died of scarlet fever.
A little while ago she’d felt so sick at her stomach she was sure she would throw up right there in bed, or maybe even pass out.
Yet no matter how hard she tried to tell the doctors and nurses how she felt, she couldn’t.
She would rehearse the words in her mind, even repeat them silently to herself over and over before trying to speak them. Yet each time she opened her mouth, it was as if someone else was talking, as if someone she didn’t even know had taken over her body and was speaking for her.
But at least no one believed what she was saying. At least they could see that she was sick, even if she couldn’t say the words.
But how could she feel so cold, so feverish, when her temperature kept registering normal?
She even looked sick. Every time she caught sight of herself in the mirror, her face seemed to have lost more color, and her hair was starting to look all damp and stringy, the way it did whenever she got the flu.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
The worst part was the relentless restlessness that would not release her from its grip. A feeling that she must get out of this room, escape from the hospital, flee up into the hills that beckoned to her from beyond the window. From the moment she’d gotten up that morning, she felt an urge to go up into the hills. The urge had kept getting stronger and stronger. If her mother hadn’t almost literally forced her into the car and taken her to the clinic, she was certain she would have given in to it.
But Sara hated the hills. She had always been afraid to venture away from town, afraid of becoming hopelessly lost, afraid of being bitten by a rattlesnake or attacked by a coyote.
Yet today the urge to climb up into the rolling brown wilderness was so strong she was losing the will to resist it.
Her stomach knotting with fear, Sara once more gazed up at her mother, and tried yet again to describe what was happening to her. But when she spoke, her voice once again betrayed her. “Why do I have to stay here?” she demanded, her voice taking on a petulant quality that made her want to scream with rage and frustration. Her fingers twisted and tugged at a lock of her hair. “There’s nothing wrong with me! If my dad were here—”
God! Why had she said that? Her mother hated it when she started blaming everything bad that happened on the fact that her mother had thrown her father out of the house last year. And she’d stopped doing it three months ago! Why had it suddenly come out now? Sure enough, the sympathy she’d seen in her mother’s eyes only a second ago now turned to annoyance.
“If your dad were here, nothing would be any different,” Jan McLaughlin said. “Believe it or not, your father has nothing to do with illness. And you have to stay here because they don’t know what’s wrong with you.”
Though Sara’s lips twisted into an angry pout and she turned to stare out the window, inside she felt a wave of relief. Don’t let them believe me, she prayed silently. No matter what I say, don’t let them believe me! “But I keep telling you,” she said out loud, helpless to keep from speaking the words that were tumbling unbidden from her lips, “there’s nothing wrong with me! I’m fine!”
Jan McLaughlin’s tortured eyes shifted from her daughter to Ellen Filmore, who had arrived from Pleasant Valley an hour ago to check on the condition of her patient. “Maybe I ought to take her home,” she fretted. “If she’s going to be this unhappy—”
No! Sara wanted to scream. Don’t take me home! Don’t take me anywhere! Lock me up in here! Please … please … help me.
Yet despite the anguished phrases she could cry only in the silence of her mind, she felt her mouth harden once more into an angry line. Don’t give in, she silently begged once more, praying that somehow, by some miracle, Dr. Filmore would hear the message she was desperately trying to send.
To Sara’s relief, Ellen Filmore held up a hand to cut the flow of Jan McLaughlin’s words. “Until we know exactly what is happening to Sara, I can’t approve her going anywhere. Not only do we not know what it is she’s got, but we don’t have any idea how she caught it, or how contagious it might be.”
Kevin Owen! Sara wanted to scream. I got it from Kevin!
But as with everything else that Sara McLaughlin wanted to say, the words died silently long before she could force them from her throat.
It was late in the afternoon by the time Ellen Filmore got back to Pleasant Valley. The drive through the hills from San Lui
s Obispo had gone quickly, for Ellen had been busy trying to fit together the bits and pieces of the puzzle that confronted her.
While she was at the hospital that afternoon, three specialists had come in to examine Sara, but none of them were able to make any sense of her condition. Though they’d muttered a few comforting platitudes in the presence of Jan McLaughlin, their opinions had been much less hopeful when they finally met to confer with Ellen alone.
The gist of it was that while they had no idea what the source of Sara’s disease was, they were very sure what it wasn’t.
It wasn’t a bacteria, but Ellen already knew that.
Nor was it a virus or a retrovirus.
They kept coming back to some sort of parasite, but even the specialist in tropical diseases—which were the most logical explanation of the presence of larvae in the bloodstream—hadn’t been able to come up with anything to fit the facts.
Indeed, the only real facts they had were that the same larval forms that had been found in Julie Spellman’s and Jeff Larkin’s blood had also been found in Sara McLaughlin’s.
Each of the specialists had ordered his own battery of tests, and samples had been taken from various areas of Sara’s body.
Some of the tests had been merely uncomfortable.
Others had been downright painful.
And through it all, Sara had steadfastly insisted that there was nothing wrong with her, that she felt fine.
Ellen Filmore didn’t believe a word of it, which was one of the things she was most worried about. What kind of disease would make a person who was obviously ill insist that he was not?
What kind of disease could mask itself so perfectly that its presence would not be betrayed by fever, or abnormal blood pressure, or a change in either respiration or heart rate?
Most frightening of all, what kind of disease could prevent its victim from even complaining of not feeling right?
The answer was that no disease fit the parameters of Ellen’s questions. At least, no disease that Ellen Filmore or any of the specialists who had examined Sara that day had ever heard of, nor any disease that was contained in the data banks of the three medical libraries that Ellen had tapped into through the computer at the hospital in San Luis Obispo.