The Nest

by Gregory A. Douglas

  After supper, they moved from the kitchen into the large room taking shape as a laboratory. Craig had already set up several counterlike tables borrowed from the summer-­closed school cafeteria.

  Amos Tarbell brought out a small envelope. “We did spot some track,” he told Hubbard, starting the session off. “There may have been a lot of it, but the leaves were so messed up that we couldn’t tell.” He tapped a small pellet onto the table. “Doesn’t look like any rat dropping to me, though.”

  Hubbard said at once, firmly, “That’s cockroach!”

  “Cockroach?” The word went around the table with inflections of surprise.

  Elias Johnson asked, “Isn’t that pretty darn big for a roach?”

  Hubbard replied, “Yes, if you’re thinking of the usual house variety. These droppings are from what you call water bugs. And unusually large ones at that, I’d say.”

  Russell Homer contributed, “Lots of them crawl around the dump all the time!”

  Hubbard asked, “How big, Mr. Homer?”

  The man answered as if he were a Harvard student in class. The professor had called him Mr. Homer! “Some are about an inch and a half, but they run to two inches . . .”

  “Normal,” the scientist nodded. He nudged the dropping aside. “That’s not your problem, gentlemen. Roaches can be a nuisance, but they don’t fit what we’ve been hearing today.”

  Elias Johnson thought of his dog’s ear, which Craig had given to the scientist earlier that afternoon. No roach could be big enough or strong enough to chew off Sharky’s ear.

  As if reading the man’s mind, Hubbard reported, “I’ve been studying the dog’s ear. I have to wait for the equipment Dr. Lindstrom will bring tomorrow morning, but I can tell you right off—rats do not bite the way the ear seems to have been torn off.”

  Bonnie felt the nausea again, though with less sense of personal guilt.

  Hubbard was going on, “At least not any rats I’ve ever seen or heard of before.”

  Craig Soaras asked with surprise, “You mean our rats might be different?”

  Hubbard replied, “It’s possible. There may be some kind of mutation out there. I seriously doubt it, but it’s one of the things we need to consider.” The scientist turned to Russell Homer. “You said before that there were dead rats all over the dump. Did you get any specimens?”

  The man shook his head, miserable. “I tried, but it’s the damndest thing, Doctor Hubbard! There isn’t a one of them to be seen now!”

  Elias Johnson supported the young man. “When Russ told me that, I went out to look for myself.” He slapped the table. “Something or somebody has cleared off every damn rat these fellows saw before.”

  Craig Soaras confirmed it too. “I went back. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Russell Homer added, “And not a one in my car, either! Craig saw them this morning, piled in there like it was a hearse!”

  “What could go after dead rats that way?” Johnson asked the scientist with open anxiety.

  In Peter Hubbard’s scientifically moving mind, the Harvard man was scanning his memory for parallels in the realm of animal behavior. It was common knowledge that many vertebrate predators dragged prey back to hidden caves and burrows to feed themselves and their young. In the insect world there were also many examples. The classical case of the Polyergus refusens was one. This was the species of ants that enslaved other ants, specifically the Formica. The way they went about it made a fascinating pattern even to a scientist whose business was the amazing variations of natural conduct.

  If a scout of a Polyergus colony came on a nest of the genus Formica, she would hurry back to her home nest. Along the trail the scout would deposit on the ground the specific odor that signaled the presence of the Formica. Promptly, a phalanx of Polyergus workers would go slave hunting. After they overcame the defenders, they would seize the Formica pupae in which young were developing, and bring them back to the Polyergus nest. There they would hatch into the slave workers.

  Hubbard tapped his pipe on the table thoughtfully. There were hundreds of similar instances in biology. Few people other than trained biologists, he considered, had any real notion of the complicated adjustments Nature used to accomplish her purposes. Sometimes they seemed like exquisite clockwork parts all fitted together with fantastic precision.

  The ability of insects to move objects many times their own weight was remarkable, to be sure, but it was a relatively undramatic example of Nature’s inventiveness. Peter Hubbard reflected on what his students called The Case of the Dichocheles.

  This insect was a mite that lived in the ears of moths. The trick was that one moth ear had to be left open, so that the infested insect could still have enough hearing to detect the sonar of the bats that came after moths for food.

  If both of a moth’s ears were infected, it would be deafened and soon fall prey to a bat—and the mite would perish along with its host.

  The ingenious answer was the laying down of a chemical scent in the moth’s second ear by the first mite intruder. This chemical successfully kept other mites out. In this way, the host moth could fly to live another day, and the mite could survive with it.

  The relevance to Yarkie of the myriad examples like this in the natural realm was that a scientist found it hard to label a development “unnatural” or even “abnormal,” except in the strictest statistical sense. Nature made its own rules. From one point of view, Peter Hubbard could argue, there was no such thing as a “freak,” except by man’s definitions; everything that happened had to be deemed natural just because it had simply happened.

  It was only when man interfered that terms like “artificial” should properly be used, Hubbard observed to himself. One question confronting him on Yarkie was precisely this: whether what was happening was “natural” or induced. Upon the answer might depend his course of action.

  Hubbard realized that his thoughts had preoccupied him while the people were impatient for him to continue.

  He questioned the waiting group, “Do you have any special trouble with ants here?” It was a wild shot. No ants he had ever heard of could move a dog, even though some species had the capacity to transport many times their own weight.

  The men looked at each other puzzled, and shook their heads. They could see that Peter Hubbard was as unsure as they were, and it increased their distress.

  Amos Tarbell spoke his own concern to Hubbard, “You said before it wasn’t roaches that got Sharky, and not rats that cut his ear off. If it isn’t roaches and it isn’t rats, what the hell is out there, and what the hell has cleaned off all the dead ones?”

  Hubbard shook his head. “At this point, I don’t know what we’re dealing with any more than I know why all of you found everything so quiet in the woods and at the dump.”

  To the group, Elizabeth voiced her own new puzzlement. “First I was afraid you might be attacked, now I’m scared that you weren’t. I mean, with nothing at all out there now, it’s certainly mysterious, isn’t it?”

  “To put it mildly,” Peter Hubbard said to her wryly.

  Elias Johnson said, “Well, I’m grateful for small favors. Hildie Cannon has been wandering around looking for her daughters, and if those rats had been rampaging, she’d be a goner.”

  Bonnie asked with genuine concern, “Has she found the girls, Elias?”

  The captain’s head turned negatively. “I told her they likely sailed over to Chatham to visit their aunt. They do that sometimes. Must have left her a note she missed. Hildie was going to phone her sister as soon as she got back home.”

  “Which reminds me,” Peter Hubbard interjected, “can we get a phone out here?”

  Amos Tarbell told him there had once been a connection, and they could have it in service by the morning. The sheriff went on, after a deep breath, “And speaking of missing persons, we still haven’t found the fellow with the beard or his friend. Even if the woods are quiet, I hope they’re out of there.” He couldn’t restrain a little smile.
“Though I hope they don’t show up in Hildie’s garden again! She’s upset enough as it is.”

  What none of them knew was that a kind of nature’s truce had occurred in the Yarkie forest. The cockroach attackers were sated after their gorging on fresh meat and hot blood. The rats, reprieved, were in their own nests. All was quiet on the forest front . . . for the night.

  DREAD

  ONE

  Coming from Stephen Scott’s party at about eleven-­thirty that night, summer resident Harvey Tinton was driving alone on High Ridge Road. He had disregarded his wife’s warning and taken the one drink too much that always pushed him past discretion; after that, he kept holding out his glass for refills. Hell, he told himself, a man needs to relax on vacation. All year he worked uptight as an investment analyst. Millions rode on his calculations and predictions. It was an onerous burden, because he had the responsibility for people who were seeing inflation burn up their hard-­earned money.

  His wife refused to understand him, Harvey Tinton fumed. She didn’t realize how lucky they were to be renting on Yarkie. It was only because he handled Stephen Scott’s account. No, Blanche kept complaining about how primitive it was. She hated what he loved—the steady putt-­putt of the little generator that kept their house lit, and the vacation-­camp look of the propane gas tank for their cooking fuel, and most of all the way the woods came right to their front door. In fact, you had to walk through an isle of beautiful birches to get to the house.

  Aside from Blanche’s bitching, he was relaxing better this summer than anytime he could remember. The people were friendlier than he had been led to believe, and the beaches even cleaner and more beautiful. The days were flowing as peacefully as the Garden of Eden—better, because there were no snakes on Yarkie. But Blanche was after him to leave before their month was up. Their quarrel that afternoon was another reason he had let himself go at the Scotts. Hell with Blanche.

  Leave Blanche and move out here for good! Go in with Scott on the marina, and do some fishing. Harvey Tinton laughed aloud in the car, relishing again a fishing story told at the party, so typically Cape Cod. Seems a native was instructing a vacationer like himself. “You get some molasses and put it on your hook instead of bait, see? That will attract bees. The bees will stick in the molasses and go into the water when you cast. Now, bees don’t like water, so they’ll get sore, and soon as a fish comes near they’ll sting it to death!”

  Fishing and easy living, what could be sweeter! Come home at night to woods like these, the fresh air—in his drunken state he forgot the warning about a spraying—take a nice walk with a drink of rum in your hand before bed. That’s how God meant a man to live, not crowded on sidewalks with muggers and graffiti and blaring radios!

  As Harvey Tinton’s car swerved on the winding road, he was glad he had got away from his wife. She’d get her own ride home okay. Let Blanche come after him in the woods. He smiled and wet his lips. Maybe they’d get to do it under the trees. He had fantasized that and it had been super. But fat chance to get Blanche to lift her skirts in a bed of leaves and pine needles. She, the silk-­sheet cunt of all times!

  It was the curving road that made the car scrape trees now, he told himself, not his lax driving. It was his clear eyes that were seeing the man in the middle of the road.

  What the hell! Maybe he was drunker than he believed. Could that be a real person jumping up and down in the headlights, a man balls naked with his prick flopping around like a misplaced white tail?

  Harvey Tinton went for the brake automatically. If the guy was for real, he was in some kind of trouble. If he wasn’t for real, Harvey Tinton was in trouble, and he’d better stop driving before he wracked up the car and himself.

  As Tinton slowed down, the man charged the car, crying, “Take me to your sheriff!”

  Tinton spied handcuffs. The man was a criminal. A crazy! Rapist! Sodomist!

  Tinton’s foot hit the accelerator. The man fell to his knees on the road. Tears were streaming into his black beard. “Please, please,” Bo Leslie wailed miserably, “take me to your sheriff!”

  By then the car was too far away for his words to be heard. The bearded man staggered to his feet. His chin went down to his hairy chest in his desolation. He headed back into the woods. He had to get some sleep. What a day this had been. What a predicament he was in! He had lost Tony. He was lost himself. He was scratched, bitten, bleeding, and exhausted. He staggered to a bed of leaves and let himself down thankfully. The sharp, dry edges stuck his skin but he was too weary to care. Clumsily without the use of his hands, he rolled over on his stomach and let his eyes close. He thought, that fucking driver could have helped me—and then laughed despite himself. He must have been one mean apparition in the night, enough to scare the shit out of anyone, much less a drunk like that jerk.

  As Bo Leslie burrowed into the leaves for warmth, the prickliness began to soften under the weight of his body. The man pressed deeper down. It began to feel good, he’d be damned if his cock hadn’t found itself a place like the old butter groove. Hey, this wasn’t bad! he smiled, licking his lips. Funny habit, to lick his lips as soon as he felt an erection coming on, like the way he always spit into the toilet to help himself pee . . .

  Hey, this wasn’t pussy but not bad at all, man! He began to heave up and down. Pretty okay. Good. Okay. Okay, okay, okay good good good! Why not?

  The moonshafts through the trees struck the man’s faster-­pumping buttocks.

  TWO

  Mrs. Hilda Cannon, driving High Ridge slowly because she was bone-­tired, was worried sick. The girls were not at her sister’s in Chatham. She couldn’t find the sheriff. He wasn’t in his office or at home, and by the time she finally learned he was at the old lighthouse—for some reason she couldn’t fathom—there was no way to phone him. Well, she couldn’t go chasing him all over Yarkie. He was prob­ably in the woods looking for the drifters. She had no choice but to wait until morning.

  If her girls weren’t in Chatham, where, where, where in the name of Old Scratch could they be?

  Her sputtering thoughts were snapped off by a movement in the trees that caught the corner of her eye. Might that white fluttering be Rebecca’s dress? The girl had worn white today! She stopped the car, and sat for a moment considering. She never much liked going into the woods alone at night, and they said they sprayed today, though she’d smelled nothing. But there was something there, in the trees, ahead to the right, bobbing around. What would Rebecca and Ruth be doing there? Helping some animal out of a trap? Hunting was against the law, but some of the summer kids were tempted.

  Hilda Cannon got out of her car purposefully. With her eyes glued to the moving white object, she missed a hole and twisted her ankle a little. She sat on a rock at the edge of the woods to rub the pain out. In the quiet of the night, she thought she heard a rustling noise behind her. She got up with a start. It came to her that there was no sound of the crickets that usually made a commotion in the Yarkie air at this hour, no hoot of an owl. She listened harder. The rustling sound was distinct. She sat down again, relieved. It was mice, she nodded, or the muskrats she knew lived in this part of the forest. But then it was almost as if her ears rather than her nose picked up the faint, foreign odor. It wrinkled her nose with both its strangeness and its pungent unpleasantness.

  She rose again, and followed her new curiosity toward the movement in the trees. She wondered whether the bitterish taint in the air might be the new poisons at the dump, or the stuff the town had sprayed on the trees. Strange they would do that on such short notice, but she was glad she remembered. It was another reason not to go too far into the woods. The heavy woman’s mind kept circling as she walked on, sniffing. The foreign smell couldn’t be from the dump because the wind was southwest, as usual, she knew that very well. It might be some dead animal rotting in the forest.

  As Hilda Cannon neared the target of her inquisitiveness, she thought she heard a human sound ahead. As if someone couldn’t catch his breath. S
he quickened her pace. It might be one of her girls, at that! Maybe a foot caught in a trap! She was running now.

  There was a human body in those trees! It was covered with a blanket of leaves except for what appeared to be—oh, impossible!—appeared to be the back of a man. A man thrusting up and down as if in the act of—!

  Mrs. Cannon’s mind shut off. Branches hit at her face as she withdrew from the bushes she had parted. She didn’t notice the little whips, or the small cuts they made on her cheek. That could not possibly be a human being! But the sounds now coming all too clearly from the forest mound were explicit.

  The woman turned, but could not leave. The image was a magnet she could not resist. She scolded herself for a wanton, but her hands moved of their own accord to part the bushes again and let her look in with burning eyes. Quick glances at the road assured her she was alone. The man did not know she was watching. Oh, what an abysmal act! How outrageous for him to be doing this thing! In her woods! She wanted to scream at the pervert to stop, to get out, but her voice was imprisoned by her own undeniable if unbidden excitement. She wanted to run back to her car, but her feet were rooted by an inner wish she did not suspect she owned, beyond her conscious control.

  Suddenly, as the man heaved up in his own excitement, moonlight gleamed on metal handcuffs. Now it was plain to her who the man was. A scream flared in her throat, but she stifled it. The last thing in the world was to let this beast know she had seen him in his obscene act. He would vent his lust and brutality on her.

  Hilda Cannon fled to her car, while Bo Leslie, blissfully unaware that he had had a visitor, continued his unanticipated satyric tryst. He plunged harder and harder in his mounting lust. He did not know that the vibrations of his act were reaching nearby creatures. Their antennae were lifting, rising, dipping as his signals told them of his presence. This swarm of roaches had been pleasantly ensconsed in an old snake burrow, had not been called back to the Central Nest. They had fulfilled their mission for this day, but if there was new food now—or possibly new danger, as from the dump rats that had suddenly become Enemy—then they were ready to move again, at once.