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  Simon had begun having dreams too. The hive of oil-black creatures were there when he slept, not just when he was awake and the temperature was right. The wave of them would wash over his body and he couldn’t stop them with any number of light bulbs, no matter how strong they were. But there were also other things in the dreams, unseen things, things with no faces that chased him and would not let up. Would they catch him as they had caught our daddy?

  Part IV

  Kept

  1.

  The same November that Daddy fired his hunting rifle into his own head, the power plant out beyond Predis Field was shut down. Officials said it was cutbacks and the island just didn’t have near enough uranium to make the plant feasible anymore. It had been an experimental housing on the island, a smaller plant than most with only one cooling tower, constructed and operated to see if it would be a feasible model for the rest of the country.

  It had been built some fifteen years earlier when nuclear power was supposed to be the wave of the future. There was a deposit of uranium within the rocky elevation on the north side of the island and the creek that ran between our house and the town wound its way back towards the power compound. It was vital for the cooling of the station. I was only ten when it closed and hadn’t been born yet when it opened. Nor did I even fully understand the implications of it closing when it did. People on the island talked of the jobs lost and the blow to the economy, but I remember that things around the island went on pretty much as they had before. Except that Daddy was gone, and people had to get their electrical work done by companies on the mainland.

  Simon wondered aloud on two occasions whether the power plant’s closing and the situation with Daddy had anything to do with one another. The first was the day of the funeral as we sat in the shade, hoisted up on the workbench. The second was in that same place, two and a half years later, after my first encounter with the hive.

  “I wonder if they knew,” Simon said, not really to me, not really to anyone. “I wonder if they all knew that the plant was killing people, drivin’ them crazy and making them wither away like that. I wonder if they knew that there were some new little critters with no eyes, burrowing around under the ground on this side of the creek. Maybe they just wanted to close the plant and slip away quietly before anyone started noticin’...?”

  There was only one lane of bungalows on this side of the creek, the north side of town. A wide wooden bridge connected us to the rest of the town and overhead lines brought us our power and telephone. Two street lights, one at each end of the lane were all we had to light up the night and the six lathe and plaster houses all sat in a somewhat straight line running east-west on large, bushy blocks of property filled with trees and wooden sheds. Two of the houses didn’t have basements. Instead they sat on concrete bricks, having been the first houses erected on our lane. The four others were sitting empty by last year, having been vacated through the last three years or so. Simon wondered if the people who had lived there knew about the hive. Did they have the little visitors in their basements at night too? Was that what made them leave?

  He suspected that out of all the homes on the island, these ones were nearest to the plant, and probably the only ones that were affected by the little critters. Since they didn’t like water and they didn’t like the cold, Simon thought, the creek that ran between our lane and the rest of the north side of town acted as a barrier for them. In an odd way, after Simon shared his plan with me for the night when Mama was to go to the Walsh’s for dinner, I felt lucky about that.

  2.

  I suppose it shouldn’t have really surprised me that Mr. Parson was on to us. Although we figured he saw us as pretty good kids and that he’d never for a moment suspect we’d try to steal from his store, there must have been some doubt in his mind. Daddy had shot himself and, well, kids in situations like that tend to have problems. Perhaps in that moment, when he looked down and saw Simon clutching his bottle of Johnny Walker, grabbed from under his counter, he suddenly realized we were in desperate need of help.

  “Please, Mr. Parson!” Simon quickly wailed, “Don’t hurt us. Ar step-daddy sent us to git his liquor. If we don’t come back with a bottle, he’ll beat us!”

  The look of shock on Parson’s face was quickly replaced with concern. “Come here, son. No one’s going to hurt you. Listen to me now, you tell me what’s going on.” His stability and calm was remarkable. He took us into the back room and he sat us down in front of the shelves of overstock. I wondered if Simon would tell him everything.

  3.

  I returned home from Parson’s Hardware, near dinner time—alone, just as Simon had instructed me. I went down to the cellar while it was still light enough to make my way down the stairs without turning on the switch. It was dim at the bottom of the stairs and the cement block floor was cold on my feet. When I closed the cellar door almost tight behind me, I was met with complete darkness. It was cool and dank in there and smelled of potatoes and dirt. There were shelves of canned corn and pint sealers of peaches and tomatoes. Mama kept it well stocked with as much as she could harvest from our garden because we never knew how much money we’d have for groceries from week to week. Everett worked a lot of extra shifts during the rainier stretches but his work was much slower for the rest of the year. I guess the house payments and all the other expenses were just too much because we often went for long periods of time without any store-bought food.

  That was okay, though. Our mama was smart. She could stretch the twenty dollar bills that Everett gave her every couple of weeks. Simon and me never went hungry, that’s for sure.

  I sat down on the small, cool brick floor of the cellar and pulled my knees up to my chin. Again I felt the shivers trying to overtake me and I fought them off as my eyes tried to adjust to the dark.

  It was late in the afternoon and Everett was out in the yard trying to get the mower to work. I could hear his muffled swears as he got the engine started. Moments later it would stall and I’d hear him say, “Goddammit. Stupid piece of—-” or something like that. I had returned to the house without him seeing, and before creeping down here to the cold cement floor, I had placed a bottle of Johnny Walker Black in the liquor cabinet above the stove just as I had been told.

  Before that, Mr. Parson, Simon and I had had a good long talk. After he’d caught Simon with his liquor and taken us back to the stockroom where we thought we’d get the beating of our lives, he said, simply, “Yer Daddy didn’t really ask you to git this bottle for him, did he?” Simon looked at me and then back at Parson. He shook his head, no. We didn’t know what was going to happen to us. He’d caught us red-handed stealing from his store and now he knew that we were lying about it. “Not that I would be surprised, mind you,” he went on, leaning down to us slightly, looking right into Simon’s eyes, “That bugger ain’t done an honest lick o’ work in his life. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if he threatened to hit you if you didn’t come back with his liquor for him...” My relief was overwhelming. Mr. Parson was neither angry nor upset. Instead he seemed calm and gentle. “But I know that there’s more to it than that,” he continued on, eyeing my scar, “Much more. Isn’t there?”

  “Yessir,” Simon said. He was beginning to calm now. The red was leaving his face and it almost seemed like he was curious about what exactly Mr. Parson was getting at.

  Parson had sat us both down on an empty crate. He pulled up another crate for himself opposite us. His voice was even and unwavering as he began to tell about his Uncle Samuel and the terrible fate that had befallen him.

  Two years back, around the time that Simon was experiencing his first visits from the swarm in our basement on the north end of town, Mr. Parson’s Uncle Sam died of heart failure. I remembered the coroner’s wagon at his house then, the third bungalow from the other end of our lane, on the same side of the creek. The old man was in his mid-eighties and he refused help from any of his family. Nor would he let himself be placed in one of those nursing homes on the ma
inland. With his wife long dead, Samuel was bound and determined to remain alone in his house, the house he’d lived in all his adult life, the house he and his brothers had built themselves, years before.

  When it looked like poor old Sammy had died in his sleep or fallen down in the night, the neighbors called Mr. Parson as he was the only relative of Sam’s still living on the island. The Sheriff and Parson went to the house and discovered Uncle Sam in his under shorts lying at the top of his basement stairs, dead, apparently from heart failure. The strange part, Mr. Parson told us, was that Sam’s dogs, he must have had six or seven of them, were gone. The neighbours had begun complaining about the big dogs roaming freely about town and the sheriff had nagged him and nagged him to do something about it so Sam started keeping them downstairs in the cool of the basement. He’d go down there to feed them and and Mr. Parson always warned him on his occasional visits, “Sammy, you be careful. Going up and down those stairs like that, what if one of those dogs bounds up at you as you’re carryin’ his supper dish? He’ll knock you clean over and you’ll fall to the concrete, break your hip or somethin’.” Sam was adamant that it would never happen. But when Mr. Parson and the sheriff came to his place that summer day, he was dead just the same, laying there with his fingers dug into the carpet just outside the basement doorway, his legs splayed down the wooden steps and his face in a tight grimace of terror.

  “He looked,” said Parson as his brow wriggled, looking down at his own hands in a mock-clawing gesture, still trying to understand, “like he’d been trying to get away from his dogs. Like, I dunno, they’d gone mad and tried to attack him.” He removed a white hanky from his back pocket and dabbed it at his beaded forehead. It was mid-afternoon then, and the temperature was soaring. It was especially hot back there in that little stockroom where we were piled in on stacking crates beside tall rows of shelves, listening as Mr. Parson told about his dead uncle and the strangeness of it.

  “But they hadn’t. They hadn’t laid a fang on the old man. He had some scratches on his legs, long thin ones, but nothing like what a dog bite would do...And the weirdest part, the part I just couldn’t figure out, was that the dogs were gone. All of them. Just gone.” When the neighbors reported to Parson that his uncle hadn’t been seen out in the yard for three days or more and they hadn’t even heard a single dog bark in about the same time, they thought the worst.

  And they were right.

  Old Sammy’s house was quite similar to ours, except the basement had no cellar, no rooms or partitions of any kind. Except for the old grate furnace and a similarly aged water heater, it was just a large open space of cold red brick with one light fixture in the rafters near the centre and a staircase of open steps that led up to the ground floor. The bare bulb in the fixture had been broken when they found the man’s body lying across the stairs. The shattered remnants of glass were scattered on the floor and it hadn’t been replaced by the time Parson got to cleaning out his uncle’s belongings. He was going through stacks of old receipts and file boxes one night in the basement, using a trouble-light that hung in the beams overhead and ran an extension cord up the stairs to an outlet in the kitchen when he heard a strange hissing noise from under the stairs.

  The sump hole was under there, he told us. “I took the trouble-light and hung it up on one of the copper pipes near the stairs and peeked my head back there. I expected to find a leak or some water draining out of the hole, that would surely be making the noise, but as I looked down into the hole, I noticed that it was bone dry. The sump motor had strange markings on it. Black, like the whole thing had burnt itself out and spilled a bunch of sparks and smoke out of its vents. It was laying there askew in the hole and I could see the bottom of the shaft, clean and dry. That hissing faded for a moment, then it came back louder than before.” It was so sudden that it startled him. He flinched back from the sudden noise and accidentally bumped the trouble-light from its resting place hooked to the rafters on a copper pipe. It rocked back and forth sending light cascading in all directions before it finally fell to the floor, smashing the bulb against the concrete blocks. Mr. Parson found himself disoriented in the sudden darkness and as he tried to step around where he thought the glass was, he fell. The only thing that allowed him to retain his bearings in the almost complete darkness was the thin shaft of light coming from the basement doorway. It was partly ajar to allow the trouble light’s extension cord through.

  On the floor, as the hissing noise grew louder and more imposing, he scrounged for the flashlight he’d been using to thumb through Sam’s old banker boxes of papers. The sound rushed into the basement. It grew all around him, he told us, swelling like a wave stuck to the walls, washing over everything. He clicked on the switch of the flasher after fumbling with it hastily in the dark. And what he saw next, caught in the beam of light as he scoured the red brick of the walls with it, scared the living crap out of him. He was up the stairs as quick as he could manage, stumbling on the wooden steps out of clumsy panic. He yanked that cord out of the way, slammed the basement door shut behind him and has never gone back down there.

  Parson’s forehead was dotted with beads of sweat but he had stopped dabbing at them with his hanky. “That was the same summer that I really noticed you,” he said to Simon, his eyes looked kind and sad, “coming in here every few days to buy light fixtures and bulbs, stronger and brighter ones each time. You had them scratches on yer legs and arms just like Sammy. And you sometimes had bruises and bigger cuts.” He paused, looking for some response in my brother’s eyes. “You always told me they were errands for your mama or yer step-daddy, that you were just picking up a spare bulb or some supplies for them. I wondered if maybe I had gone crazy and what I’d seen in my uncle’s basement that night was all in my head. I wasn’t too close with him, but maybe the grief over his sudden death was enough to make me see things that weren’t there. But maybe you’d seen the same things. Maybe those scratches on you were the same ones as on Sammy. Or maybe that Everett was up to no good on you and your mama...But just as soon as all this happened I didn’t see you in the store again. School started and you didn’t come ‘round no more...” He finished then and just stared at Simon. It was as though he’d just shared the meaning of life with my brother and was waiting for the boy’s overwhelming comprehension of it to become absorbed.

  Simon didn’t meet his gaze. But he finally responded, his head still held down. His tone was serious, slow and deliberate. “Mr. Parson, you know a lot of things. But if you tell anyone, the sheriff or anybody else, ar step-daddy’s gonna keep hurtin’ us.” He looked up then, “He might even kill us.”

  “You never saw me again last summer,” He continued, meeting Mr. Parson’s eye, “cuz Everett beat me and my Mama so bad I could barely walk. I was shut up in our house and Rupie here had to bring me my school work. This summer...Everett went and did the same thing to Rupe.” He motioned to me and I was suddenly self-conscious of my jagged scar. “We need your help Mr. Parson. We need your help so Everett won’t hurt us anymore. So he won’t kill us.”

  4.

  Sitting in the cool cellar in the dark after I put the bottle of Black Label in the liquor cabinet upstairs, I thought about Mr. Parson’s dead uncle. I wondered if old Samuel ever saw those critters before the night they scared him to death. Maybe he had. Maybe that’s why he had his skivvies on when they found him. But maybe he knew how to keep them out. What happened then?

  I mentioned that the last time Mama had gone anywhere at all, Everett hadn’t gone with her. Likewise, tonight for the dinner party at the Walsh’s she had gone alone. It had been hot the last time she’d went away too, and Everett spent the afternoon and the evening in the basement. He carried our little black and white set down there and a case of beer to escape the heat and stuffiness of the upstairs. It was somewhat cooler and certainly shadier, because there was only the one window, the one in Simon’s room. On that day, Simon and I stayed far away from the house. When Everett had more than a cou
ple of beers he could be just as angry and prone to getting upset as if he’d had a double shift at the shop. Tonight, for certain, after his ordeal in the sun with the lawnmower, he’d want nothing more than a couple of beers and to watch the Dodgers and the Yankees down by his work bench. But we were to be anywhere but far away this time.

  I heard Everett bang the screen door behind him, swearing and sputtering. I could tell he’d had his fill of that heat for one day. Simon came in the house behind him. “You goddamn, lazy kids.” Everett said, not really to Simon. I could hear the beak of his cap hit the floor after he peeled it from his sweaty head of black hair. “Where the hell have you been all damn day?” He leaned against the kitchen table and I could hear the floor above me creak with the weight of him. “Next summer, your ass’ll be out there in the sun mowing the lawn. I work all goddamn week and then gotta spend my weekend cutting the goddamned grass.”

  To this Simon responded, which was rather unusual for him, “Well, uhm, maybe you’d like a nice cool drink. Mama bought you a new bottle o’ Johnny Walker.” At this, Everett perked up. “Uh-huh. She put it in the cabinet and she told me to tell you that there’s plenty of ice made in the freezer.”

  “...really...” It wasn’t meant as a question, but his disbelief was apparent to me, even as I listened through the floor boards above the cellar. “—-Black Label?...Finally did somethin’ right for a change...” His anger at the day’s events and at Simon for being just a boy were forgotten. I could hear him creak across the kitchen floor towards the stove and, simultaneously, I heard Simon’s quick footsteps hurry down the stairs. “I’ll be damned,” I heard Everett say, as the cupboard door over the stove squeaked open. He had discovered the fresh, unopened bottle of liquor I’d placed there. I heard the cupboard door squeak shut then, and realized that Everett had likely snatched the bottle and was holding it in his dirty hands, feeling like the day was finally going to go his way. His hands on that bottle set the plan in motion and there was nothing we could do to stop it now. I prayed that things would happen as they should. As they needed to.