The Nest
Page 28
Relief and prayer tingled through Elizabeth body and soul. She was still in deadly peril, but she had assistance and she could hold the roaches at bay until the rescue ladder touched. She could hear it bumping against the roof behind her, and she heard Peter calling her stoutly to its safety.
Elizabeth whirled from the door and dashed for Hubbard’s outstretched arms where he stood atop the now steady ladder. A rotted plank snapped under her feet just as her fingers touched his. The woman found herself plummeting away. She tumbled and fell amid a concussion of broken boards, dirt, and avidly hissing roaches. Crashing to the floor below Elizabeth Carr struck her head so hard she almost fainted. She wished she had, for she felt the insect teeth going at her body at once. She covered her face hopelessly against the stinging bites.
Elizabeth knew she was beyond help. As a girl she had wondered how it would feel to drown—no other form of death had seemed real. Sometimes in bed she would hold her breath as if she were underwater and her life depended on it. Then she would suck in the life-giving air, drenched in sweat with the effort. She felt that way now, but knew it was the wetness of the insects on her skin, not her perspiration but her blood.
In the doom that was hers now, Elizabeth Carr had only one thought: She was sorry, not glad, for the night with Peter Hubbard. To know how much she was losing made dying more intolerable and tragic.
Through her torment, Elizabeth thought she heard Peter’s voice nearby. She could not look, dared not expose her eyes to the roaches she felt biting the back of her hands. With her last strength she cried out, “Don’t come in here, Peter! It’s too late! They’ll only get you, too!”
A curtain drew down inside the woman’s head, slowly at first, then more quickly into the sheer dark of nothingness.
As she submerged, there were fire bells and sirens in some receding distance. The bells were tolling her funeral. The sirens were all the mourners lamenting the tragic end of all the victims of Yarkie Island’s unspeakable travail, and the end of Elizabeth Carr.
NINE
Elizabeth came to consciousness in her own bed in her grandfather’s house. It took time for her eyes to focus. She wondered whether she was on the other side of life, but the sound of Peter Hubbard’s anxious voice was no illusion, and her grandfather’s hovering face was no mirage. There were no angels or devils, no harps or pitchforks, only the two beloved countenances, and dear Bonnie behind them, distraught.
“We have the doctor coming over from Chatham,” Elias Johnson said as soon as he saw his granddaughter’s eyes open.
“Oh, Liz!” Bonnie wept. “You’re going to be all right!”
Peter Hubbard did not speak, only held her sore hands tenderly, and looked his love into her eyes.
Elizabeth found the strength to say, “I—I’m all right.” Her voice sounded strange to her. It seemed underwater, coming from the bath of pain in which she was swimming. She said no more. Her head hurt from her fall, her body was a mass of stinging needles—like the time she had stepped on sea urchins, she thought, only this was every inch of her skin, not just her feet and legs. She gave up talking, it was too difficult to form words.
But Hubbard saw the questions in her eyes, and knew she impatiently wanted answers.
He explained, in a soft voice. “We got to you in time, Liz, yes. And we got the damn things off you with lights.”
The curiosity in the woman’s face increased.
“You know the firemen have what they call Wheat Lights—portable but extremely powerful. To the roaches, it was almost like fire. They couldn’t take the beams. They scattered the hell away.”
“Thank God!” Elias Johnson muttered from the foot of the bed.
“We killed as many as we could get to,” Hubbard went on. “We got you safely out, and I went on with some of the men to follow the roaches. They ran from our lights, directly into their nest . . .”
Elizabeth gasped, “Another nest?”
“You were right this morning, Liz! Those confounded roaches in the flask were pointing to another lair. I know just what happened . . .”
Bonnie interrupted Hubbard bringing coffee to the bed. She lifted Elizabeth’s head to help her drink it.
The scientist went on, “It turns out the first nest wasn’t large enough to hold the expanding colony. In the same way that a rival queen will appear in a crowded bee hive, a rival brain apparently developed or split off. The original tribe battled the others until they were driven out. The ‘exiles’ were the roaches that attacked you. They formed a new home base in the graveyard at the Cannon house. The graves provided convenient, ready-made excavations in which to start up the new community.”
The coffee helped clear Elizabeth’s head and throat. Her voice was still uncertain. “Then there could be other nests?”
“No! I am certain of that,” Hubbard declared without qualification. “I don’t even have to look, though we will as a precaution. You see, this has been exactly what ants and bees do. They spin off one new colony, not more. There isn’t vigor enough for more, and here there certainly hasn’t been enough time. In fact, one reason you survived is that these roaches from the new colony were weaker and slower than the older society—and hadn’t yet fully developed the kind of brain that directed the original group. We’re lucky to that extent.”
Elizabeth needed to know, insistently if weakly, “But they’re still out there?”
She saw both men shake their heads negatively.
“No,” Hubbard stated again. “We fired the nest.” He added sadly, “We had to burn the Cannon house, too, I’m afraid, but we had no choice.”
Elizabeth took it unhappily. She recognized the necessity, knew it bitterly, but the house had meant so much to her as a child. To all of Yarkie it was a symbol of the wealth and security of the island.
Security? Not in the universe of Nature’s whims, Elizabeth considered astringently. The reality of life was not lovely houses on High Ridge but earthquakes, tidal waves, cyclones, volcanoes, meteors, epidemics, massacres—mutated insects!
Elizabeth Carr groaned inwardly with her own confrontation of Nature’s indifference to the individual. Now the Cannon house was gone, as Hildie and the girls were gone. Sic transit gloria, and all vanity. How grievously true we find those old clichés to be, the woman contemplated unhappily.
But she should be thankful that she herself was safe, after giving herself up for lost. Peter Hubbard was her renewal in so many ways. It seemed she was to be granted the years she had thought were eternally gone. She, prayerfully, would never forget how closely death had come to ending it all. She would praise God—even while asking endlessly in the recesses of her soul how and why He came to create such evil. Job’s never-answered question, she remembered as her tired eyes closed in welcome sleep again.
EPILOGUE
On the Jessica sailing spankingly to Chatham a week later, Bonnie Taylor was at the wheel under Captain Johnson’s fond supervision. The woman’s eyes were bright with the pleasure of handling the boat, but her mind would never be free of the remembrance of human vulnerability, and her heart never free of the soul-reaching smile of Craig Soaras.
Elizabeth Carr and Dr. Peter Hubbard stood aft watching the bowler-hat outline of Yarkie Island recede into the haze of the horizon. The sailing was pleasant, the ocean was as easy this day as it had been murderous during the northeaster. The open blue above seemed a lighter color than usual, as if the sky itself were drifting higher, upward into outer space.
Gazing back at Yarkie, the woman felt as if she were leaving another planet, returning to earth. It was a fearsome paradox that the island she had loved so deeply should now forever be an alien place.
Perhaps the harrowing memories would fade eventually, and Yarkie return in heart as in fact to the lovely oasis it had been with its fresh woods and pristine beaches. But now, though safe with Peter Hubbard’s arm around her still-bandaged body, Elizabeth Carr shivered. As she faintly made out the bowler shape, she saw not High
Ridge and its stately homes and bright flowers; she saw the slimy dome in the abominable cockroach cave, the detestable “brain” whose “cerebral cells” in the form of the tiny insects Peter was bringing back—oh, safely packed!—to Harvard.
The biologists of the world would come to understand what had transpired. They would bestow Latin names and learned theories to relate the freak cockroach colony to known natural developments. But for her the Yarkie aggressors would remain a black mystery of the impossible.
Elizabeth turned her back on the island in a gesture of finality. Her life was elsewhere. Secretly, she doubted whether she and Peter would even return for the wedding. She would do almost anything to please her grandfather, but there would be too many ghosts in that hall—the lost children off the Tub, Craig Soaras, Wanda Lindstrom, the Cannons, the Tintons, the Laidlaws, the unknowns. No, she wanted to dance at her wedding without tripping over phantoms, dance with the man holding her tightly and safely now.
She lifted her face for his kiss of promise. He gave it with a man’s love as full as her own.
From the wheel beside Bonnie Taylor, Elias Johnson looked back at the two and wiped a moist eye with a rough wrist. “Keep her straight into the wind,” he admonished Bonnie. “You’re kicking up too much spray!”
The first faint sight of Chatham caught everyone’s attention. Boston and Cambridge—the world—were close and real again. Life would resume.
None of the people on board saw the small blot that skittered on the Jessica’s scrubbed deck for a split second before disappearing in a coil of Elias Johnson’s neatly arranged rope.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gregory A. Douglas was the pseudonym of Eli Cantor (1913-2006). A man of many talents and interests, Cantor was a businessman, novelist, playwright, composer, artist and poet. He studied philosophy at New York University and earned a law degree from Harvard before getting his professional start in the legal department at CBS Television. While working there, he began to pursue a writing career, winning the O’Brien Short Story Award in 1940 and publishing his work in Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, the Saturday Review and other publications. His other novels include Enemy in the Mirror (1977) and Love Letters (1979). His lone horror novel, The Nest (1980), was the basis for a 1988 cult classic film.