When Michael Calls

by Farris, John

  For his age the doctor was a strong and finely conditioned man and he enjoyed the work, but it was past dark by the time they had completely unloaded the truck and placed the bales against the steel sides of the barn, where they would serve as insulation through the winter.

  "Leave the truck by Sam's house when you go down the hill. Getting real foggy out, isn't it?" Ground mist was quite common four out of five autumn nights in The Shades: the roof of his house fifty yards away seemed to be floating on the heavy, motionless mist, with the lighted windows looking like pale indistinct flares.

  Once Harry Randle was gone, Britton went back inside the barn, shutting the steel door after him. The lights overhead were powerful and placed to eliminate shadows. They remained on twenty-four hours a day. He walked slowly across the tanbark-covered floor to a series of tables which contained positioning hives painted blue, yellow, black and white, the colors bees found most easy to distinguish. On other tables there were feeding stations, painted and unpainted.

  A few scout bees were hovering around the empty dishes; as Britton smiled, one of them took off and flew across the barn to the occupied hives a hundred feet away. When he turned back to the tables he felt something unusual and unpleasant: a gust of cold air.

  There was a second door in the back wall of the barn and from where he stood the doctor could see that it was standing open a few inches. He scowled; that door was almost always locked, from the inside, and he used it seldom. He walked quickly to the door, opened it wide and looked out.

  Behind the barn was a slope of about thirty feet, a few young trees and the new road that twisted up Blue Eye.

  The road was invisible in the mist, and the trees were vague presences.

  Most of the regular hands on the farm, not liking bees, stayed out of the barn unless they had excellent reasons for being there. Britton wondered who had come in during the day and found it necessary to unlock the back door . . . or perhaps the door had been unlocked for days, and he had never thought to check it. At any rate there seemed to be no point in tracking down the negligent hand, although if the door had blown wide open on a cold night it might have meant trouble for some of his bees. He was mildly angry as he set the lock.

  Nearby was a florist's refrigerated display case, empty now, and a curious-looking prefab building approximately twelve feet by ten feet, with three ordinary sash windows set into the front of it. From here the doctor watched his swarming bees, sometimes with a high-powered pair of German binoculars. The building also contained a work table, shelves, a filing cabinet and a beehive, the most recent addition to his apiary.

  The wall-mounted telephone in his workroom was ringing as he opened the wooden door at one end. Dr. Britton picked up the receiver.

  "Andy? I just got home, so I'm afraid supper won't be until six-thirty at the earliest."

  "That's all right; give me time to mark some bees. How was Helen?"

  "Still acting snakebit."

  "That's too bad. More calls?"

  "No. I expect that's over with, and she'll be all right in a couple of days."

  "I hope so. Well, ring me when you're ready."

  After talking to Elsa the doctor settled down to work. From an open shelf containing many similar bottles and jars he selected an amber bottle with a spray attachment, labeled chloroform. Then he opened several small cans of paint and laid out his delicately tipped brushes on the worktable. "Marking" or numbering bees so that individuals could be traced in a swarm was a fairly simple if tedious job. First the entire colony was put to sleep so the necessary bees could be selected. Then, using an elementary color code—red for 1, yellow for 2, and so on—the doctor could number up to six hundred bees with just five colors, dabbing the shellac-base paint on the thorax or abdomen of each bee. The paint would stay bright and wear for weeks, and from the windows of his prefab building he could observe their flights to and from the hive as he changed the locations of feeding dishes and secondary hives from day to day.

  The beehive on his table was nothing more than a square wood box with frames that slipped in and out, and a removable top. The bees had built their combs within the individual frameworks and, during spring and early summer, the relatively small hive might hold as many as seventy thousand bees. But now it was fall and as he had told Peggy Connelly, Dr. Britton expected to find no more than fifteen thousand bees grown to maturity after the height of the summer foraging season.

  He tied a white gauze surgeon's mask over his mouth and nose, slid back the lid of the hive, picked up a magnifying glass in one hand and the bottle of chloroform in the other and began carefully to spray the inside of the hive.

  He did not see the first bee that escaped and stung him, but he wasn't unduly disturbed—sometimes an individual bee wasn't immediately affected by the anesthetic and flew blindly to the light, and it was a mild sting, scarcely more than a pinprick. Despite the mask, he had been holding his breath, so he stepped back for a few moments to give the chloroform a chance to penetrate the cells of the comb. Then he reached out to slide the lid open a little more.

  A great gout of black bees seemed to leap from the interior of the hive to fasten on his uncovered hand and wrist, and a numbing shock hit him immediately. He jerked his hand back and the hive toppled from the table, cracking open, the lid falling off.

  In agony he brushed at the clot of bees on his hand, scattering a score of them. But already hundreds more were rising from the damaged hive. He stared in disbelief, first at the bees, then at the bottle of chloroform in his hand. He pulled the mast from his face and smelled, not chloroform, but the odor—the stench—of ripe bananas.

  With a cry of terror the doctor turned and started for the door, but the unexpected banana scent clung to him, and the bees were all around him, as they would swarm around any intruder threatening their hive.

  By the time he reached for the door he could no longer feel the individual stings on his neck and head: it was as if he had been seared by a blowtorch.

  Then they were at his eyes.

  Dr. Britton was screaming as he smashed into the door and fell to the tanbark outside. He was a beeman and he knew he was going to die, but horror and a mighty instinct for survival kept him going. He rolled and fought the bees, but there were too many of them. Each time he struggled to his feet they drove him down again. He had aroused them and they were furious. They had blinded him, and deafened him. They were wedged in his nostrils and in his open mouth. They covered him like a hideous mask, like a living shirt.

  He fell again, and was still.

  Elsa was about to put the steaks under the broiler when the telephone in her kitchen rang.

  She wiped her hands on her apron and picked up the receiver.

  "Elsa? This is Helen. I don't know if I should have called you about this, but Peg was so upset—"

  "Something happen to Peggy?" Elsa said sharply.

  "No, no, she's all right. But . . . Elsa, there was another call. From Michael. It came while we were on the way home from Gladden. I don't know where Brenda was—in the cellar, I suppose—and Peg answered."

  "She talk to him? You sound—"

  "Yes, she talked to him. Elsa, where's Andy?"

  "With his bees. Why?"

  "Michael told Peggy that . . . bad things are going to happen in The Shades, to friends of ours."

  "Ha?" Elsa said, forgetting the steaks.

  "And that's why I asked about Andy. Michael said . . . he said that Andy—"

  Helen didn't have a chance to finish. Elsa dropped the receiver to the wall telephone and hurried across her kitchen to peer out the window over the sink. She could see the lights of the apiary barn through the thickened fog, but little of the building itself. For a few moments she stared in dismay, then returned to the telephone.

  "Hang up now, I'll call you back," she said brusquely to Helen.

  "Is something—"

  Elsa cut her off, then quickly dialed the three digits that would ring the telephone in the barn wor
kroom. The ringing went on for a half minute. When no one answered Elsa replaced the receiver, half ran to the back door, knocking over a chair that was in her way.

  "Andy!" she cried.

  It was not far across the lot to the barn, but the ground sloped and fog obscured her path. Twice she almost fell, and her heart felt as if it were being pulled apart. She was afraid of another coronary but she was more afraid of this last, ominous phone call from Michael. She wanted to see her husband, and she didn't care how much of a fool she would look when she burst in on him.

  "Andy?"

  The metal door resisted her the first time she tried to open it. Sobbing for breath, Elsa kicked at it, and stepped inside.

  In the shadowless, mild air she was confronted by a nightmare of swarming bees.

  Beside the door, hanging on the wall, was a beekeeper's veil, heavy protective gloves, a full-length coat of heavy denim and a red cylinder like a fire extinguisher which contained insecticide. After several shocking seconds during which she thought her heart must surely fail, Elsa fumbled for the veil, put on the protective clothing and opened the valve of the tank of insecticide.

  I will die, she thought, and found herself praying to die, because he hadn't moved.

  Poisoned bees leaped up from the tanbark, stinging futilely at her horseman's boots as she walked deeper into the barn. Bees fell like rain against the impenetrable veil, glanced off the denim coat.

  He's strong, she thought. He may survive this . . .

  She saw his face, and gave up hope.

  Elsa stood over her husband spraying in every direction, until the noxious fog inside the barn was nearly as heavy as the fog outside, until the furious bees were dead, or had retreated. Then she dropped the red cylinder, knelt clumsily, picked her husband up and carried him in her arms to the nearest door. She was forced to put him down long enough to snap the dead bolt back, and when she tried to pick him up again she found her strength was almost gone. So she grasped Andy under the arms and dragged him outside, into the cold air and the cold fog.

  Elsa turned, and caught a glimpse of someone standing close.

  Help, she said, or thought she said. Help me.

  And then she saw him more clearly, as if the fog had suddenly dissolved where he stood, silently, looking on, his young, round, fair face expressionless, his dark eyes sad and inquiring. He seemed to have an air of abandonment about him; he had always looked that way to Elsa.

  "Michael!" she screamed, and toppled down beside her husband in a faint.

  Chapter 5

  Aron Landers' cousin Chuck was over from Round Spring for the day and, although it was early, he was already making Aron's life miserable, as only Chuck knew how. Chuck was nine, barely two years older than Aron, but he was tall for his age and had the kind of insolence which uncritical children accept as sophistication.

  He'd started off by commandeering Aron's bike—which Aron wasn't too good at riding yet—and now he was showing off on it for the benefit of the two girls, Aron's sister Melissa and her friend Carol-Sue. He'd pedal lazily down the gravel road, barely holding on, then come back furiously, jam on the brakes, skid the bike halfway around in the gravel, winding up with a flourish, left foot on the ground, the other carelessly astride the leaning bike. Aron had said, "You'll ruin the tires," and Chuck had said, "Not if they're good tires." Aron was willing then to let him go on until he wrecked the bike and skinned himself, giving double satisfaction, but it wasn't too likely Chuck would goof, and if he did he'd find some way to blame Aron or Aron's bike for the mishap.

  It looked like a day impossible to survive without some sort of personal disgrace (he still cried too easily when provoked, the ultimate disgrace with two younger girls looking on) when the possibility of salvation appeared: a fuming, grimy-red motor scooter came chugging down the road at a dead-game twenty miles an hour, carrying a bespectacled man so tall that his knees were nearly at the level of the handle bars as he rode.

  "Doremus!" Aron shouted gleefully, and went running toward the oncoming scooter, passing and ignoring Chuck, who was trying to bring the bicycle to a stop with the front wheel in the air.

  His motor scooter shuddered pathetically as Doremus Brightlaw slowed and said loudly over the racket of the engine, "Aron, how are you this morning?"

  Aron jogged along, keeping half an eye on Chuck, who was turned around on the bicycle seat watching from the middle of the road. Melissa and Carol-Sue, who also knew Doremus, were scampering toward them.

  "Are you going to town, Doremus?" Aron asked hopefully.

  "I thought I would; see if it's still there." He peered at Chuck, still taking up the road. "Who's that on the bike?" He reached for his klaxon, to Aron's delight, and gave Chuck a couple of honks.

  "That's my cousin; he doesn't live around here."

  "Hi, Doremus!"

  "Hi, Melissa. How's that cat of yours?"

  "She's still at the vet."

  "Been there a long time. Awful sick, is she?"

  Chuck continued to stare at the oncoming Doremus with a certain amount of resentment, and then at the last possible instant he pushed Aron's bike to the side of the road.

  Aron said, panting, "My dad's downtown, Doremus. He'll run me home if I can ride along with you." He'd seen a few of the older kids hitch rides with Doremus, but he was appalled by his own temerity.

  Doremus came to a full stop and frowned as he struggled to keep the engine alive. Then he sneaked a casual glance at Aron. Doremus Brightlaw was in his forties; he had a slightly emaciated look, was comfortably weathered and a little bit gray. When he took off his sunglasses to blow the dust of the road from the lenses, his eyes were a light shade of blue and markedly judicial. He took in Aron and Chuck without appearing to and said, "I was about to ask if you'd like to ride along, Aron. Hop on back there."

  When Aron was firmly in place, Doremus drove on. The girls ran along beside the road. Doremus waved but Aron was too thrilled to do anything except cling to Doremus' windbreaker.

  "Your cousin looks like he's OK," Doremus yelled as they puttered into the village at fifteen miles an hour.

  "Yeah, he's OK," Aron allowed, from the heights of his triumph. He saw a couple of kids he knew in front of Rockwell's Café, but he pretended he didn't see them. He was hoping Doremus might be going clear across to the other side of town, but instead Doremus swung into the parking lot behind the post office.

  "Where's your dad now?"

  "Oh, he's at the MFA. Doremus, if you're going back before lunch . . ."

  Doremus smiled. "No, I'll be a little longer than that, Aron."

  "OK." Aron raced off. "I'll see you," he shouted back. "Thanks, Doremus!"

  "Come over when you get the time, Aron." Doremus went on into the post office, mailed the once-a-week letter to his sister in Berwyn, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago which he visited dutifully once a year, and then he mailed the once-a-month letter to a man named Vladislav Arshenko, who lived in a suburb of Moscow, a place he'd never laid eyes on and had no desire to visit. Afterward he unloaded his mailbox and went through the accumulated mail leisurely, dropping half of it unopened into the closest wastebasket.

  "Might lose out on some big sweepstakes doing that," someone observed.

  Doremus glanced up. "Well, you see, it's necessary, Hap. I'm probably one of the world's luckiest men. I mean money's just always stuck to my fingers somehow, and I'm afraid I'd get to winning so many of these things the Treasury Department would set up a branch office in my spare bedroom."

  Hap Washbrook leaned against the bank of mailboxes, thumbs hooked over the wide leather belt he wore; because of his girth and the tilt of his Stetson hat, he looked to be a caricature of a county sheriff, all gimme and graft; his bashed and sun-reddened face reinforced the impression. But he was neither dishonest nor a dummy. He'd been a colonel in the Military Police until his retirement from the Army, and his county was annually visited by over a quarter of a million people, including a preponderance of hunters, who
brought a lot of guns with them and frequently shot each other, sometimes out of malice. In twenty years Hap had become expert at sorting out the accidental deaths from the suspicious ones, and he knew as much about gunshot wounds as a good medical examiner.

  "Now," Hap said thoughtfully, "if I was lucky and won a Cadillac full of cash, I think I'd drive that Caddy down to Acapulco, Mexico. All week I've been thinking about Mexico. You know anything about Acapulco?"

  "Not a thing, Hap."

  "It's my idea of paradise. Lots of sun, gorgeous women. Of course, I always get like this a few weeks before the deer hunters come in. Give me any other place on earth but Shades County during deer season. Buy you a cup of coffee?"

  Doremus agreed and the two men left the post office, walked leisurely down the sidewalk toward the center of the village, past the Little Theater and Weldon's Antiques and the Village Center Art Gallery.

  "Haven't seen you around the village last couple of weeks," said Hap. "Occurred to me you might have had some second thoughts about settling down around here."

  "Hap, I've been in The Shades two years now, and I look on that as being settled."

  "Well, I figured you had a change of heart and threw in with that detective agency that's been after you."

  Doremus smiled slightly and said nothing. "Biggest detective agency in the Middle West," Hap mused, pushing open the front door of the Hartshorn Pharmacy. "Wouldn't mind a deal like that for myself."

  "They'd make you wear a tie to work, Hap. Besides, it's dull. Like selling shoes."

  "This morning I wish I was selling shoes."

  They sat down in a booth and Hap signaled a waitress. Doremus glanced a second time at the sheriff's reddened weary eyes and said, "Got yourself a bad one, Hap?"

  "Andy Britton died last night. Know him?"

  "The doctor? He treated me for frostbite last winter. What happened?"

  "Some of his bees stung him to death."