Restlessness passed from great roach to great roach as the vibrations came over the forest floor stronger and heavier. As Peter Hubbard would explain in the Yarkie laboratory later, people didn’t understand that when they saw household roaches scurrying for the kitchen cracks, it wasn’t so much that the light had been turned on. True, roaches preferred the dark, but their first alarm system was their sensitivity to vibration. It was the approaching footsteps that sent them fleeing long before a light switch was ever touched.
Bo was approaching his orgasm. Without his hands to lift him, he reared back and thudded down, sending clearer and clearer tremors along the ground.
The aroused roaches formed into wide columns and platoons, and began to march hungrily. They were handsome, even elegant, in their way, a burnished mahogany color that blended into the leaves. Their segmented exoskeletons formed the flexible shields that, with their folded wings, gave a jewel-like appearance in the light, the iridescence that had attracted Reed Brockshaw’s little girl.
These were not the common house cockroaches, which Peter Hubbard would describe as Bratella germanica. Nor were they what he would first suppose—the familiar “water bugs,” called by scientists Periplaneta americana, well-named as “wanderers.”
The Yarkie Island roaches bellying toward Bo Leslie through the leaves were three, four and five inches long, some almost an inch around. The size was unusual for the climate, though five-inch roaches—Blabbearus—are seen commonly in the tropics. Peter Hubbard and Wanda Lindstrom would wonder, later, at the mandibular development that had provided Yarkie roaches with mouths much wider than any normal species, together with jaw muscles so powerful and teeth so razored that nothing would be left of a skeleton. The two biologists ascertained that these unusual cockroaches on Yarkie could indeed attack as viciously on land as the legended piranha fish in water. Swarming by the thousands, as now at Bo Leslie, they could consume a prey with lightning speed.
The seeming delicacy of their legs belied the roaches’ strength and speed, except for the bulge of extraordinary muscle where the limbs—hairy in this section—joined the body. Working as a colony, in the way of insects like termites and ants, these roaches managed amazing feats for their size. Their speed, too, was remarkable. Even the ordinary house roach could travel at a rate of three-four miles an hour. These were even faster—the equivalent speed for a man would be well over two hundred miles per hour.
It was such creatures, incited and electrified by the violence of Bo Leslie’s thumping, that were coming at the man fast. He had tried to prolong his pleasure as long as possible, but now he was done. The roaches raced nearer, spreading into a crescent, to engulf the man before he had time to respond. In his shivering ecstasy, still gasping for breath, the man did not for a moment even feel the unexpected new caress—the feather-touch of thousands of soughing antennae exploring his hot body. He was hardly aware of the first needle-like bites that began to taste his skin. It was the searing fire in his eyes that was Bo Leslie’s first consciousness that he was being attacked—assailed in some way he did not understand. But he knew at once, deeply, that he was a goner.
His thrashing about was in vain. His skin, his muscles, his organs, his brains, his limbs, were being carved. Beneath the pulsating streams of blood carrying his life out of him, the man felt as if metal saws were ripping across his body, not so much devouring him as a jungle animal might, but slicing him apart.
Dimly, Bo Leslie saw himself in a mad magician’s crate, with sharpened swords slashing his viscera. Or, he was a side of beef on a butcher hook, and cleavers were hacking his carcass into small chunks. The man wanted to curse and howl, but there was no sound except hissing air because his throat was gone. It happened so quickly that the man’s body was still shuddering with his orgasm when his final breath issued, a crimson foam out of his decapitated torso. There was one last glimmer inside the man’s skull before his brainlight went out forever. It was a flashing black humor: This was like dying in the saddle—he had always joked that that was the only way to go.
The Yarkie cockroaches, in obedience to commands encoded in their preternatural genes, mounted the new food supply Nature had bounteously furnished again. After they satisfied their own hunger, much prey was left. Their reflex now was to apply their teeth and mandibles to splitting the carcass and its bones into pieces that could be handled by the worker roaches their scouts had already raced to the Nest to summon.
Pulling, pushing, tugging, rolling, the multitude of roaches carried away the remaining fragments of Bo Leslie’s flesh—as they had carried away the dog Sharky and the day’s bonanza of slaughtered rats—to the larder chambers that digger roaches had prepared surrounding their new Home Nest on Yarkie.
The only thing left of the man when the insects were done was the metal handcuffs. With an inner organic compulsion like that of magpies, some of the roaches pushed these, too, along with the food, although it was plain that this hard shining substance was not meat nor bone nor blood, was not edible like the rest.
Then, in a coda that Nature enforced upon them each time, squads of roaches remained behind the transport forces to push at the forest leaves with their bodies. Using their legs, wings, and mandibles much as dogs use their hind legs after defecating, the insects spread leaves and soil over the scene of their own saturnalia. In short order, the rustling and bustling movements ended, the last of the monstrous cockroaches vanished into the leaves, and no disarray was to be seen in that part of the forest.
Heavy with food and their burdens, this foraging cadre returned slowly to the Nest. Arriving, the individual roaches rested sluggishly while worker roaches took the new food supplies to the storage areas. A few strays crawled home late, but the Nest was for all purposes, quiet—including the mysterious, shadowy Dome that rose in the center of the cave.
Yet night was the normal time of activity for these roaches as for others, and there was an undercurrent of pulsing energy—as if it would take only a plugging into a socket to electrify the whole community into wild action.
THREE
About a mile distant in the woods surrounding the Tinton house that same night, another roach family was resting. When the vibrations of Harvey Tinton’s car first reached them, a few antennae responded alertly. Others joined when the man slammed doors in the house, and still others when the man’s uneven steps outside began to disturb the quiet in the trees.
Tinton decided to go for a walk. The path through the trees was familiar, but he kept stumbling in his intoxicated state. Each unsteady bump brought more cockroach antennae fluttering. The whole group of the insect troop bristled when the man fell to the ground heavily.
Harvey Tinton lay happily where he tripped. The pine cushions and the leaves made a comfortable mattress. Half-dozing, he heard a car driving up to the house. That would be somebody bringing Blanche home. He heard the car grind away. Good! Blanche wouldn’t find him inside, would realize he had gone for a walk. She’d come after him. But wait a minute—she would remember the warning about spray. He’d forgotten, damn it. Hope nothing poisonous is getting in my lungs, he thought dimly. He tried to stand, but his legs buckled.
The man laughed to himself as he lay back in the leaf mattress again. He’d surprise her when she came out, ambush her! Ha, she’d think she was being raped by one of those punks they had seen in town that morning. She might enjoy that—what the hell, hadn’t their sex therapist advised them to use fantasies?
Harvey Tinton fell into a drunken sleep.
The vibration stopped. Antennae lowered. The Nest signals they detected in the air were not for these roaches near the Tinton house. Other groups were active somewhere, these insects sensed, but they themselves were not being ordered to scout or forage or defend or return. So they waited, though uncertainly.
Unwittingly, Harvey Tinton aroused them to action again. The man heaved out of his sleep sick to his stomach. Cursing himself for having drunk too much, he coughed up the misery of his
insides. The rum tasted bitter and foul now, coarse as sandpaper in his throat.
Spewed and spattered on the leaves, Tinton’s sickness issued a caustic odor on the air like a signal—almost like the pheromonic chemical signals by which many species of insects are known to communicate.
When Tinton finally finished, feeling better but disgusted with himself, the roach column halted. When the man lay still on the ground, logy, so that no new vibrations reached them, the insects grew uncertain again. And waited. They had the patience of Nature itself—unless pressed by some need—to rest and conserve energy.
FOUR
It was midnight when the sheriff, with Reed Brockshaw, Ben Dorset and Russell Homer, left the lighthouse for their homes. They took Elias Johnson with them, to drop at his house. Craig Soaras stayed; he and Peter Hubbard would use cots next to the laboratory they had established.
The first floor of the lighthouse was of generous proportions and lent itself to the emergency. The building provided a pie shape of which the kitchen was one wedge. On one side, the big laboratory space waited for the apparatus that would accompany Dr. Lindstrom. On the other side of the kitchen, a rickety staircase spiraled to the unused second story. Beyond it, there was a good-sized chamber where Elizabeth and Bonnie would sleep on cots this night, with room for Wanda Lindstrom when she joined the team the next morning. The last portion, completing the circle, was a cubicle Hubbard and Johnson’s mate were sharing. Beds for all would be brought out the next day to replace the temporary cots.
Only a dent had been made in the accumulated junk accreted in the old building over the years. Elias Johnson broached bringing some village women out to help, but Elizabeth reminded him they wanted as few people as possible to know anything at all about the laboratory. The old man was proud when she declared, simply, that she and Bonnie would get the job done.
Spirits were high with the thought that at least some preparations were under way to solve the Yarkie quandary.
The first assignment was Craig Soaras’s. He was to sail to Chatham to bring Dr. Lindstrom across to Yarkie. Considering the number of crates ordered by Peter Hubbard, and the delicacy of some of the apparatus, all agreed that the work boat, the Jessica, was a more suitable craft than Stephen Scott’s yacht, though it would be less comfortable for the woman scientist.
Elizabeth wondered whether the crossing might not be rough. She had noticed that gulls in the harbor had flown high that evening—a sure sign to islanders that a “no’theaster” was on the way.
Craig and Johnson had sniffed the air and glanced at the sky. The captain promised, “She’ll be a big blast, but she won’t start till afternoon anyway.”
Craig said laconically, “We’ll manage.”
Elizabeth heard herself saying, without knowing exactly why, “I hope Wanda Lindstrom has a strong stomach.”
When all the others left the lighthouse for the night, the “crew” of four adjourned to the kitchen for a beer. It was pleasant sitting around the table talking casually, but Hubbard pointed to the moonlight streaming through the cracked, dusty window. “How about a walk before we turn in?”
Outside, Elizabeth hesitated, but let him take her elbow and steer her away from Craig and Bonnie, who headed toward a bank of sand dunes fringed with salt spray, roses, and plume grass. Elizabeth noticed approvingly that Bonnie seemed to be enjoying Craig’s company. And vice versa. A summer romance could be pleasant, she thought, recalling how Craig had been her vacation companion when she was just becoming aware of boys. Craig had grown into a fine, strong man, as she always knew he would. Maybe it was too bad that Bonnie Taylor was so clearly headed for a law career and not marriage to a Portuguese fisherman. It was hard to know where the best chances for happiness really existed these days.
Meanwhile, Peter Hubbard brought her back to her own interests. He was asking her about Yarkie, and that was eminently safe for conversation. Just because the moonlight was invitingly romantic on the sand and the waves, Elizabeth was glad there was Yarkie to talk about. Hubbard was saying he needed to know details of the island’s flora and fauna before he started his work.
She answered enthusiastically, starting with the formation of the Cape by glacial moraines. The glacier had left a fairly flat surface of meadows and green marshes into which fingers of ocean reached on the eastward side and fingers of blue water on the bay side. “On Yarkie,” Elizabeth added, “we have a lot of what Cape Codders call ‘kettle holes.’ Some of them are shallow, but the glacier dug some very deep.” She mentioned one near Woods Hole that dropped one hundred twenty feet.
Hubbard nodded. “I’ve heard of that one, but I didn’t know that’s what they called it.” He repeated, “Kettle holes.” He smiled. “People think we Californians have colorful language, but it’s nowhere near yours in New England.”
Without warning, he dropped to the sand and tugged Elizabeth down beside him. For a moment, she thought he was about to put his arm around her, and she was prepared to pull away, but the man was only reaching for his pipe. When he motioned to the moon and the sea it was to talk about the weather, not romance. “It’s so calm and clear,” Peter Hubbard said. “Is it really going to storm tomorrow?”
Elizabeth was relieved to talk weather. She pointed up to some very high clouds, just a few, but the harbingers. “That’s the start, right there.”
“Hard to believe.” His eyes dropped from the starlit sky to her face. “Like the way you have changed, Elizabeth,” he said as he had earlier that day.
Elizabeth got to her feet quickly. “I was telling you about Yarkie,” she spoke in a guide’s neutral voice. She pointed eastward toward Bonnie and Craig now sitting atop a distant dune, outlined against the light sky. “Past Bonnie and Craig there, about a mile due east along this north shore, we have a whopper of a kettle. It was covered over years ago, like the Yarkie pirate caves people talk about.”
“Interesting,” Hubbard allowed. There probably had been pirates on Yarkie, he considered. It was a swashbuckling thought for a Californian sitting on this New England shore with this lovely New England young woman so obviously avoiding anything personal between them. Her perfume mixed tantalizingly with the salty air of the sea. From this strand, Peter Hubbard thought, the Atlantic would be stretching north, past Newfoundland to the arctic, if he remembered his geography. To the east, the waves would be rolling in non-stop from Europe. It brought home again the vastness of the sea and land, and the inseparability of everything on the planet, inorganic and organic alike. As a biologist, this break in his university routine was doubly welcome, Peter Hubbard considered. It was good to get out of the classrooms and museums and into the air—this air, this moonlight, with this beautiful woman. But he had better not think of that. He was on Yarkie Island for other reasons.
To turn his mind, he asked, “What’s a lighthouse doing so far back from the water?” The sand spit before them did indeed run a good quarter of a mile out into the sea.
Elizabeth answered with the assurance of a local. “Everything keeps shifting all over the Cape shores. You can have a beach one year, and nothing the next. Over at Nauset, they had to build four lighthouses to keep ahead of the ocean.”
“So this light was once at the edge of the island?”
“It was once hundreds of feet out there on rocks you can’t see anymore.”
The man turned to look back at the building. It seemed haloed in the moon, tapering gracefully upward to the walkway with its spidery platform circling the old glass.
“It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” Elizabeth said. “When I’m on Yarkie, I sometimes think I never want to go back to Cambridge . . .”
He nodded. “I can understand the peace and quiet.” Then he asked, “But isn’t it fierce in the winter?”
She shook her head. “The Gulf Stream runs along here not far off the east shore. It keeps the weather quite moderate. We hardly ever get much snow.”
The man noticed her identification with the “we” of the Yar
kie residents. “I suppose that’s why your trees and vegetation are so thick.”
Elizabeth chuckled. A typical Cape Cod tale had come to her mind. “I don’t mean it can’t get bad. You’ll probably see a tree twister tomorrow. There’s a weather story my grandfather once showed me in an old New Bedford paper. It seems a man named Al Higgins was being interviewed about an unusual storm. Higgins told it this way: He had no sooner got to his hen house when the wind blew the door open and his best rooster hopped out. Next came a gust so fierce it whipped off all the bird’s feathers and bounced the rooster up against the chopping block—which the bird hit so hard that the axe dropped down and cut off its head. So there the rooster was—killed, picked, and ready to clean for eating. And Mr. Higgins wound up saying, ‘I don’t believe there ever was such a gale before!’ ”
Elizabeth enjoyed Peter Hubbard’s explosion of hearty young laughter. “Great characters, your Cape Cod people!” he said.
“They must be doing something right. Did you know that more people live to eighty or ninety in these parts than anywhere? Stephen Scott wants to can Yarkie air so people can take it home. They do that on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, you know.”
“It’s sort of fun, I suppose.” Hubbard had been trying to light his pipe, but the breeze was too much for his matches, and he gave up.
“We can go back in if you like,” Elizabeth said.
He shook his head. “Much too nice out here, Liz.”
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