22

‘‘Damned’’ wasn’t far off the mark.

The place Singe showed me was one spring storm shy of collapse. Its upper-story windows were empty eyes. The wooden parts of its stoop were gone, taken for firewood. Bricks had begun falling off. There was no door in the doorway.

But the structure remained upright, for now, fifteen feet wide and three stories tall. A squatter’s delight. But there was none of the trash or stench found where outsiders put down roots. There were no filthy toddlers underfoot.

‘‘Sorcery,’’ Saucerhead opined. Having tagged along uninvited, accompanied by Tinnie and Playmate.

‘‘You could be right. I already think sorcery is the root of the bug problem.’’

‘‘You smell it?’’ Singe asked.

‘‘No. I’m human, sweetheart.’’ I climbed the stone steps to the doorway. They wobbled underfoot. Why hadn’t they been carried off? And the brickwork, too. Bricks are valuable.

There was an obvious line beyond which scavengers had not dared venture. Chips of decomposing brick lay on one side, close in. Nothing lay farther out.

Even small chips of brick are salable at the brickworks. The brick makers crush them and add them as tempering when they make new bricks.

I walked inside the line.

‘‘Place looks empty,’’ I said. I reached in with the tip of my left foot, testing the flooring. It creaked. But it was still there. Not yet plundered. Mostly. Without squatters to explain its preservation.

‘‘Sorcery,’’ I whispered to myself. In case myself had missed that point before.

Of my companions, only the natural-born coward, the ratgirl, joined me on the stoop.

‘‘I smell something now,’’ I told her. ‘‘Not fermenting beer, though.’’

‘‘There are several odors. Combined. The wort smell is the loudest. The others are unfamiliar.’’

Something clattered down below. It sounded like a thin board falling onto a hard floor. Someone cursed, in a ‘‘He done a dumb thing’’ mode instead of ‘‘Damn it, I just hurt myself!’’ I waved Singe back, retreated myself, watched from a respectful distance.

Singe asked, ‘‘Why did we run away?’’

‘‘I don’t know. Maybe me thinking about that dead line. Why didn’t scavengers pick up chips on the other side?’’

‘‘Somebody took the wood from the stoop. And the door. And the door frame and the windows are all gone, too.’’

Maybe I was thinking at it the wrong way.

Singe said, ‘‘I saw three boys go in. The Prose boy would be the most dangerous. Right?’’

I took her meaning. ‘‘I’m scaring myself, here.’’

Tinnie suggested, ‘‘There must be more to it than that. A few minutes ago you were all babbling about sorcery.’’

‘‘That’s the answer,’’ I announced. ‘‘There’s some kind of enchantment designed to scare people away.’’ You could buy those over the counter. Install the fetish where you needed protection, then pull the pin. It would work on anybody who didn’t carry a counterfetish.

Crooked hedge wizards would put some of those aside to sell to the people you bought the fetish to keep out. So you, knowing that and being clever, would subscribe to a countercharm antidote.

‘‘That’s the answer,’’ I said again. ‘‘Nothing to fear but fear itself. Here I go. Once more into the breach.’’

Playmate asked, ‘‘Your feet stuck to the ground?’’

‘‘You want to take a look over there? In the doorway?’’

A praying mantis had appeared. A dull lime green, it stood three feet tall. It looked around vaguely, as though blinded by the light.

Saucerhead rumbled, ‘‘Damn! That’s uglier than Winger’s mother.’’

Tinnie said, ‘‘It’s got a rat in its hands.’’

They weren’t hands but she was right. It bit off a chunk as it looked around.

I asked, ‘‘What do you think?’’

Saucerhead said, ‘‘I think I should’ve worn my big boy stomping boots.’’

A more thoughtful Playmate said, ‘‘You wasted your money on that sulfur. If the bugs can just pop out another hole.’’

Singe resigned her membership in the stand-around committee. She headed for the bug. She had, I noticed, produced a weighted oaken head thumper like the one I carry myself. She wore more clothing than her brother, less color-fully. She favored browns. She had places to hide stuff.

She was much more forceful and determined than I’d ever seen. Monster bugs didn’t intimidate her.

‘‘You might want to back her up,’’ Tinnie said. ‘‘Just in case.’’

‘‘Yeah.’’ I hustled after Singe.

The wort stench had grown stronger. I caught it thirty feet from the derelict house.

Earlier there’d been just a handful of people keeping an eye on us. Adding that giant bug had a magical effect. The gallery cooked up into a crowd in two shakes.

Singe climbed the wobbly steps. The mantis ignored her till she took a swipe at its big ugly head.

It leaped straight forward. Singe missed. It tried to fly but didn’t have wings enough for the job. They carried it only a few extra feet. It landed badly, smacked its ugly face into the cobblestones.

Singe jumped after it. Now she had a knife in her other hand. She severed the bug’s neck. Stuff came out. I danced to keep from getting squirted.

A kid ran up to Singe. ‘‘Wow! Cool! Can I have that?’’ He wanted the head. The mantis’s jaw things kept clicking and clacking.

‘‘Oh no! What did you do?’’

‘‘I think I killed a tall bug.’’

Singe spoke to me but the question had come from behind me. From a kid in the doorway of the derelict house. I gawked at his mustache, the saddest display of thin, prickly lip hair I’d seen in ages.

He was a pear-shaped boy Kip Prose’s age, or younger, as pale as a vampire. He wore posh but badly matched clothing. He didn’t look like he could survive a quarter mile sprint. He wasn’t one of the boys who’d been with Kip earlier.

He looked like he’d just watched his favorite puppy get murdered.

Playmate murmured, ‘‘Be careful, Garrett. If that’s the guy who made the big bugs . . .’’

Pear-shaped boy was young to be messing with sorceries nasty enough to give us giant killer bugs. But I haven’t stayed aboveground by taking people at face value. They fool you all the time. Sometimes deliberately.

Saucerhead and Playmate sort of organically drifted away from me and Tinnie and Singe. Pear-shaped boy would be surrounded if he did anything dumb.

The crowd began to buzz.

A giant bug had appeared in an empty second-floor window. It had exotic beetles in its lineage. Scarlet and yellow made a bold statement.

It made noises like tin sheets rubbing, spread its wings. It flew. In a sixty-degree glide. It hit the cobblestones with enthusiasm enough to break limbs and antennae and cause leaking cracks in its body.

Saucerhead waxed philosophical. ‘‘Big ain’t everything, seems like.’’ That from a man for whom big is a way of life.

Pear-shaped boy burst into tears. He started down the steps. Then he noticed the crowd for the first time. Seventy witnesses. He froze.

Another boy appeared. This one had been with Kip. He saw the mob. His eyes got big. He started to shake. He was a stunted beanpole with a fashion sense worse than pear-shaped boy. Sputtering, he grabbed the first kid and started dragging him back.

Seconds later a dozen bugs came out, none nearly as big as the first two. Several were Luna moths with wingspans like peregrine falcons. The world outside overwhelmed them quickly. The onlookers climbed over each other, trying to grab a giant bug for personal use.

Tinnie beckoned me closer.