by John Saul
Ellen Filmore was beginning to understand exactly how the doctors who had encountered the first AIDS cases must have felt.
Puzzled, then baffled, then terrified.
As the car wound through the hills along Highway 41, Ellen reviewed over and over again what she knew.
And over and over again she kept coming back to Julie Spellman.
Somehow, it had all started with her. Was it something she had brought with her from Los Angeles?
But if that was true, then the organism she was carrying must have had a dormancy period, since Julie had been fine for the first week she’d been in Pleasant Valley.
Yet the other kids had begun showing symptoms almost immediately.
Could something have triggered the organism?
Ellen suddenly felt a chill, recalling the first time she’d seen Julie, after the girl had been attacked by the bees from the hives on her stepfather’s farm.
She had treated those stings with the new antivenin that had saved Molly’s life a few days earlier.
Could the antivenin have somehow triggered whatever organism was in Julie’s blood, transmuting it from a benign presence into an active parasite, which she then passed on to Jeff Larkin, Andy Bennett, and Sara?
But if that were the case, why had they all begun to show symptoms at different times?
Neither Andy nor Sara had seen Julie since they’d all gone to the movies the day Julie had been stung. If she’d passed it on to them that night, why hadn’t they all begun showing symptoms at the same time?
Varying incubation periods, possibly. But would parasitic life have a varying incubation period, particularly in environments so similar as various human bodies?
Instead of turning toward her house on Third Street when she came into Pleasant Valley, Ellen drove on through town, finally pulling into the parking lot at the clinic. Except for her own car, the lot was empty—even Roberto Muñoz had gone home for the day. She let herself in, going into her office and pulling the Rolodex to a position directly in front of her.
Then she began making telephone calls.
Shelley Munson, who had been at the movies with the rest of the kids the day Julie had been stung, was still feeling fine, and, more important, looked fine to both her parents.
Kevin Owen had begun looking a little strange after he’d gone up into the hills with Jeff Larkin yesterday morning, and was now missing.
And Shelley had seen Kevin with Sara yesterday afternoon.
Part of the sequence, then, was clear: Julie, to Jeff, to Kevin, to Sara.
But what about Andy Bennett?
If he’d gotten it from Julie the night they went to the movies, then why hadn’t he been infected then, too?
Why Jeff, and not Andy, until later?
And then, from the depths of her mind, the truth suddenly came to her.
It had been there all along, of course. She had simply refused to let herself see it.
It wasn’t that the antivenin had triggered anything.
The antivenin itself was the culprit.
She herself had injected it into Julie, and into Andy Bennett, and by the next day, each of them had fallen sick.
But what about Molly? Molly had been given the same antidote when she’d been stung, hadn’t she?
Suddenly, scenes began flashing through her mind.
The vial in San Luis Obispo, labeled with a word so polysyllabic she hadn’t even been able to pronounce it.
The vial Carl Henderson had handed her the morning he’d brought Julie into the clinic.
What if he’d handed her the wrong vial?
Alone in her office, Ellen Filmore groaned out loud.
How could she have given her patient a shot of something whose name she couldn’t even pronounce? And not just one patient, but two?
Her heart pounding, she left her office and went into the examining room where she’d treated both Julie Spellman and Andy Bennett. Crossing to the counter, she pulled one of the drawers open, frantically searching for the tiny brown bottle.
There it was, exactly where she’d left it.
She snatched it up, her eyes fixing on the label, her memory scrambling to bring up an image of the label that had been on the vial in San Luis Obispo.
But even as she struggled to recognize the name of the chemical, she saw something else.
The level of fluid in the bottle.
After she’d given Andy Bennett his shot, the vial had been reduced to only half its capacity. She remembered it clearly, because she’d made a mental note to ask Carl Henderson for more.
The bottle in her hand was full.
But that was impossible!
Unless Roberto had called UniGrow and gotten more.
The small brown vial clutched tightly in her hand, she went back to her office, picked up the phone and rang Roberto’s number. When the answering machine picked up on the sixth ring, she hung up, for now more memories were rising up from the depths of her mind.
The story Otto Owen had told, of finding Carl Henderson trying to rape Julie.
A story Otto had stuck to, even though Julie herself had denied it.
Denied it, but only after Ellen had given her a shot from a vial that Carl Henderson himself had given her.
Was it possible that Carl had deliberately given her the wrong bottle?
Her mind raced as she remembered Carl trying to take the vial back from her, and she refusing to give it to him.
And Carl had come in yesterday, complaining of a stomachache. She had examined him in the very same room from which she’d just taken the vial.
As the pieces all began to fall together, a terrible fury rose in Ellen Filmore.
If Otto had been right about what he claimed to have seen, then maybe Carl hadn’t been trying to save Julie Spellman’s life at all! Maybe he’d actually been hoping she’d die!
And when she didn’t, he’d simply walked out, leaving her to administer whatever had been in that vial to other people!
Furious, she snatched up her purse, dropped the vial into the jumble inside it, then left the clinic once more, driving directly to the sheriff’s office behind the city hall.
It was locked and deserted, and instantly Ellen knew why.
The deputies were still up in the hills, searching for the missing kids.
The kids Carl Henderson had poisoned.
Poisoned deliberately.
She sat in her car, seething with anger.
At last, gunning her car’s engine, she pulled away from the curb.
Part of her mind knew that what she was about to do was a mistake. Instead of allowing her rage to dictate her actions, she should simply go home, fix herself a drink, get herself calmed down, and decide rationally on the best course of action.
At least she should wait until she could talk to Roberto, and make certain that he hadn’t, after all, simply picked up more of the antivenin when he’d driven over to San Luis Obispo yesterday.
But even as the fleeting thoughts of rationality drifted through her mind, her rage at Carl Henderson overpowered all reason.
She had to confront him.
Now.
Carl Henderson was in his basement lab when the doorbell rang. He was tempted to ignore it and let whoever was there keep ringing until he finally gave up and went away.
But his car was parked in front of the house. So whoever was out there knew he was home, or at least close by, and might not give up at all.
Yet what he was observing in his laboratory was so fascinating that he hated to leave, even for the few minutes it would take to get rid of whoever was at the door.
He was staring into the acrylic box that contained the rat he’d injected the night before with the serum from the vial he’d removed from Ellen Filmore’s office.
The incriminating vial, which he couldn’t allow to be found there.
Now, staring through the transparent panels of the box, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d been right to retrieve the
tiny bottle.
Not that he understood yet exactly what had happened inside the box. That would take hours, perhaps days, studying the remains of the rat through his microscope.
The doorbell rang again, and Henderson finally turned away from the acrylic box, shut off the bright lights above the counter, and quickly mounted the steep stairs to the first floor. Switching off the basement light before he stepped through, he made sure the door under the stairwell was closed securely before moving down the hall to the foyer. There, he pushed aside the shirred linen that covered the beveled glass panels of the front door.
Standing on the porch was Ellen Filmore—with a look on her face that sent fear coursing through him.
Carefully masking his nervousness with his best smile, Henderson opened the door. “Ellen,” he greeted her. “What a nice—”
“Don’t,” she cut in, her voice ice cold, her words sharp as razor blades. “I know what you did, Carl. I know what you gave me to inject into Julie Spellman wasn’t the antivenin that saved Molly.”
Henderson did his best to feign surprise. Pulling the door wider, he drew her inside with a gesture. “The antivenin?” he asked. “What do you mean, it wasn’t what saved Molly? Of course it was. And it worked on Julie, too.”
“Did it?” Ellen asked, her voice turning bitter as her rage swelled. “Is she dead now, Carl? Were those her bones they found up in the hills today?”
Carl felt another shiver of fear go through him. What bones was she talking about? Was it possible that—
He put the thought out of his mind. Even if they’d found a bone or two, what could it possibly prove? “Ellen, I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” he said, his voice still betraying nothing of his roiling emotions. “Perhaps you’d better let me fix you a drink, and you can tell me exactly what’s on your mind.” He turned and started into the living room, switching on the chandelier as he passed through the door. The light, refracting through the crystal prisms of the fixture, made the iridescent shells of the hundreds of beetles glitter in the display cases that lined the walls. From every table arrays of butterflies seemed almost ready to rise through the glass panels and begin fluttering through the room.
Ellen Filmore, stepping through the doorway on the heels of Carl Henderson, stopped short, gasping at the display.
Henderson, already at the small butler’s cart that served him as a bar, turned to smile at her. “You’ve never been here before, have you? Do insects interest you?”
“They didn’t,” Ellen Filmore replied coldly, “until today.”
Even as she spoke the words, she realized her mistake, for something in Carl Henderson’s demeanor suddenly changed.
Not much, really—just a faltering in his smile and a darkening in his eyes.
But it was enough to tell Ellen that he knew exactly what she was talking about, and that it had been a mistake to come here.
A mistake to give in to the fury that had possessed her when she pieced together what he’d done. Instinctively she took a step backward, then turned to start toward the front door.
Carl Henderson, though, was far faster than she expected him to be. She was barely reaching for the doorknob when his left arm snaked around her neck and his right hand grasped her wrist, easily pulling it away from the door and twisting it into a painful lock behind her back. “You can scream if you want,” he said. “Believe me, no one will hear you.”
“Let me go,” Ellen demanded, but even she could hear that the anger that had strengthened her voice only a moment ago had now turned to fear.
“I don’t think I can do that, Ellen,” Henderson told her. He was propelling her down the hall now. For a moment she thought he was taking her into the kitchen. But he stopped abruptly, jerking painfully on her right arm, and opened a small door beneath the stairs.
Partly pushing her, partly restraining her, Henderson worked Ellen down the stairs into the basement. “If you really want to know about that shot,” he said, his voice grating harshly in her ear, “I suppose there’s no reason not to show you.”
He propelled her across the floor. Then, still clasping her right arm in the agonizing hammerlock, he reached up and jerked the string that lit the fluorescent fixture above the counter.
Ellen blinked in the sudden glare of light, then her eyes focused on the acrylic box and the rat inside it.
The rat was dead.
Its skin was torn from the fury with which it had scratched the terrible itching that had afflicted it the night before, and its nose was bleeding from the battering it had taken as the swarm in its body had tried to escape the humming of the ventilation fan.
Now the remains of the rat lay on the floor of the cage, but it wasn’t that bleeding pulp that drew Ellen’s attention.
It was the black film on the side of the box farthest from the ventilating fan.
Though she couldn’t distinguish one individual from another, she could see that the whole mass was moving, undulating, crawling across the acrylic panel to form an ever-changing mass.
“What is it?” she breathed, her eyes locking onto the dark mass.
“A swarm,” Carl Henderson told her. “A swarm of something that seems to behave exactly like a hive of bees, or a colony of ants. They invade, they feed, they multiply, and then, when the swarm becomes too big, they divide. An invasion force sets out, conquers a new host, and colonizes.” He smiled. “And I created it,” he added. “A new form of life, which I created.”
As the words sank into Ellen Filmore’s consciousness, she stared numbly at the dead rat. “They killed it, didn’t they?” she asked, her voice hollow as she realized what must be happening to the four missing adolescents.
“I’m not sure yet,” Henderson replied, his voice reflecting no emotion at all. “They may have killed it, or they may have simply driven it insane, so that it killed itself trying to escape.” He smiled again, but since he still stood behind her back, Ellen couldn’t see the coldness in the expression. “I’ll know more by morning,” he said. “And perhaps I’ll tell you what I find out.”
He began moving her once more, propelling her toward a door at the far end of the basement. “You won’t like it in here,” he said as he opened the door. He shoved her inside, then pulled it quickly closed. “Neither did the girl I found on the freeway,” he added more loudly, so she could clearly hear him. “And Otto Owen hated it, even though he wasn’t really in it very long.” He turned and started back toward the counter to begin his investigation of the organisms—his organisms—that were trapped inside the acrylic box.
A new strain of microscopic bee, if it truly was a bee at all, which Carl Henderson had developed in his basement lab. Even if it wasn’t what he had intended to accomplish, it would still be the crowning achievement of his life.
A new form of life, never before seen on the planet.
His form.
Apis hendersoni.
He turned to speak to Ellen Filmore through the door once again.
“You’ll learn to like my specimens,” he said. “And they’ll like you, too.”
CHAPTER 26
“I don’t think I can stand to go home,” Marge Larkin said, gazing bleakly out into the gathering dusk. It was almost eight, and the search had been called off for the night, the last of the volunteers straggling down from the hills half an hour ago. Now Marge sat in the living room of Karen and Russell’s house, her mind numb, her emotions exhausted. Even her body felt far more tired than it normally did at this hour. Though she wasn’t really hungry—hadn’t been all day—she reached out to the coffee table and picked at the platter of ham someone—she didn’t even remember who—had brought over that afternoon.
“Don’t go home,” Karen told her, understanding how Marge would feel as the night wore on. Karen recalled the night after Richard had died, when she finally forced herself to go to bed, then lay awake all night, loneliness gathering over her like a physical force, a slowly growing weight that made her wonder if she would ever find the
strength to get up again. Tonight it would be like that for Marge, she thought. Karen had Russell to cling to, while Marge had only Ben.
The little boy was now sprawled on the floor of the den with Molly, both of them staring at the television. As Karen glanced through the open doors into the other room, she almost envied the nine-year-olds their ability to lose themselves in the images on the television screen, to forget, even if for a few minutes, that something in their lives had gone terribly wrong. No, Ben simply wasn’t old enough to help get his mother through the desperation that would come as the night wore on.
Turning back to face Marge again, Karen reached out and squeezed the other woman’s hand. “We’ve got plenty of room, really.” When Marge still looked hesitant, Karen said, “It’s time for Molly to go to bed, so why don’t we just have Russell tuck Ben in, too?”
“You’re sure you don’t mind?” Marge asked. “It would sure—well, it would sure just make things a little easier. The way I feel right now, I just don’t know how I’d make it through the night.”
“We’ll make it,” Karen told her, injecting a lot more confidence into her voice than she really felt. Even as she spoke the words, though, an anguished sob rose in her throat. She quickly got to her feet. “Molly? Time for bed.”
“Not yet,” Molly replied, automatically shifting into her bargaining mode, just as she did every night. “It’s only—”
“Eight,” Karen told her. As Molly started to argue again, Karen shook her head. “Not tonight Molly. Please don’t argue, sweetheart.” Moving into the den, she reached down, lifted Molly to her feet, then stood there for a moment, her fingers resting on the soft skin of Molly’s cheek. Be all right, she prayed silently. If something happens to you, too, I won’t be able to stand it. I really won’t.
“But I’m worried about Julie and Kevin, too,” Molly insisted, as if she’d unconsciously picked up on her mother’s thoughts.