He rose and grabbed a paper towel from the roll suspended from the underside of a cabinet. He rolled the needle within and used it to blot the drop of blood oozing from his fingertip.
He turned to his father and Carl, still standing in the doorway.
“What the hell happened here?”
Dad could give him only a stunned look, but Carl held up his plastic shopping bag.
“It’s all here!”
“What’s all there?”
“What happened. The camera caught it all. Or at least most of it.”
2
“When I picked up the camera this morning,” Carl said, “I was in a hurry so it just sat in the bag till after I got home. Long after I got home.”
They’d all hurried back to Dad’s place to set up the camera for playback.
“You didn’t check it right away?”
“Nuh-uh. I figured, what for? I mean, I ain’t never seen nothin before and figured this wouldn’t be no different. So I just left it be until I was watchin the Dolphins game. That’s when I checked it and found the battery didn’t have no charge left. That ain’t happened before. So I recharged it and took a look to see if somethin’d set it off.”
“What’s this camera about?” Dad said.
Jack ran through a quick explanation of Dr. Dengrove’s attempts to catch Anya watering her yard.
“Dengrove,” Dad said. “Cheats at golf but God forbid anyone sneaks a little water onto their lawn. What an ass.”
Jack had the two-inch LCD screen flipped open. He hitPLAY and started to watch. Dad hung over his shoulder, Carl crouched farther back. The screen lit with green and black blobs that quickly stretched and coalesced into recognizable shapes—the side of Anya’s house, her plantings, the doo-dads, the lawn furniture in her front yard. And then a set of legs went by. Then more.
“Doesn’t this thing have any sound?” Dad said.
“If you hook it up to your TV you can get sound. Want me—?”
“We can do that later if we need to,” Jack said. He had a sick cold feeling in his gut that they’d be listening to the high-pitched barking he’d ignored last night. “First let’s see what’s to see.”
Carl jabbed a finger toward the little screen. “There they are! See?”
Jack saw. A crowd was gathering in an irregular semicircle around the edge of Anya’s lawn. Light from the front windows lit their faces. His intestines began to writhe as he recognized Luke and Corley and a couple of the others. Looked like the whole gang had shown up.
“The clan,” he said.
“All cept Semelee. I didn’t see her nowheres when I watched.”
Jack stared at the tiny screen. He now wished they’d hooked it to the TV. Probably would have lost some resolution, but maybe he’d have a better view of their faces. Beyond a few grins, he couldn’t make out much in the way of expressions. He could read their postures, though, and they radiated something between revulsion and avid fascination, as if they wanted to press forward for a better look, but fear held them in check.
He kept watching, waiting for the clan to do something. He searched for Semelee but couldn’t find her. That white hair of hers would be hard to miss. Why were all the men there? What did they have against—?
Oh, right. The big ugly alligator…her dog had chewed a hole in its side. And the bees yesterday…Anya had chased them off. Yeah, he could see where Semelee could have a bone or two to pick with Anya. But how was she going to get her if Anya’s promise—Nothing on earth can harm you here—was true?
Obviously it wasn’t. Someone had got to her—and to poor little Oyv. What had Semelee—?
“There!” Carl cried. “Didja see that?”
“No.” Jack’s attention had been wandering. “What?”
“I saw something too,” Dad said, “but I don’t know what.”
Jack found the reverse button and backed up the recording. Again he watched Luke and the rest of the men standing in their semicircle, eyes fixed on the front of the house. The camera angle didn’t include the front door, but they were staring like there was a stripper doing her thing there. And then something—maybe three somethings, two feet long at most—suddenly streaked out of the house and over their heads. The way the men ducked and covered made it pretty obvious that they were afraid of the things, whatever they were. More flew out. Once they were gone, the clan came to life. Luke swung an arm and they all charged toward the house.
For a good five to seven minutes, nothing happened, and then the clan reemerged. A group of them seemed to be carrying something but the way they were bunched together prevented him from seeing exactly what. He didn’t have to see. He knew.
“They’ve got Anya.”
“The sons of bitches,” Dad said, straightening and reaching for the phone. “I’m calling the cops.”
Jack grabbed his arm. “Hold on a sec. I want to see this again—on the TV.”
“Fine. And while you’re setting that up, I’ll be calling—”
“Just wait, okay? Just let me see it again before we get officialdom involved.”
Dad reluctantly agreed, grumbling about wasting time as Jack wired the camera to the audio-visual inputs on the backside of the TV.
“This happened at least twelve hours ago, Dad. Maybe more. Another ten minutes isn’t going to matter.”
He finished plugging in the wires, then reran the movie. The TV screen offered over one hundred times the viewing area of the camera’s LCD. It offered sound as well. The movie began with the rattle of the lawn-ornament cans and Oyv’s barking, but that broke off with a high-pitched squeal just as the last of the clan reached the front of the house. A couple of minutes later the things streaked away. Jack was ready with his finger on thePAUSE button.
“Got ’em!” he said. He leaned closer to the screen. “But what the hell are they?”
The camera’s image intensification coupled with the speed of the things left little more than amorphous, blurry streaks on the screen, but there was enough resolution to reveal five shapes instead of three in the first batch. He’d missed the other two because they were farther from the camera and hadn’t caught as much light. He could see that the three in front had slightly curved bodies that reflected light like a shell might; their wings were fuzzy blurs.
“Y’ask me,” Carl said. “They look like flyin lobsters.”
Not a bad characterization, Jack thought. But lobsters didn’t fly, so what on earth were these?
Jack felt his neck muscles tighten. On earth…
Nothing on earth can harm you here.
But what if those flying lobsters weren’t from anywhere on earth? What if they were somehow from the Otherness? Semelee had gone down into that sinkhole. Maybe she’d found something down there that she could control like she did the creatures in the Glades.
Jack pulled the rolled-up paper towel out of his jeans pocket and unwrapped the little crystal shard.
“What have you got there?” Dad said.
“Not sure.” He handed it to him on the towel. “Careful. It’s sharp. Ever seen anything like it?”
“I did,” Carl said. “Saw one just like it stickin outta the tore-up wood on Miss Mundy’s door. I just figgered it was glass.”
Dad was holding it up, rotating it back and forth in the light. “You know, it almost looks like some weird sort of fang.”
Carl laughed. “Glass teeth! That’s funny!”
Dad lifted the beer bottle he’d been sipping at during the endless weather reports and scratched the fang’s point along the glass. It gave out a faint, high-pitched squeak as it scored the surface.
Dad frowned. “Not glass. Much harder. The only thing I know that can scratch glass like that is a diamond.”
“If it is a tooth,” Jack said, “that means that Anya was attacked by things with diamond teeth.”
They all sat silent for a moment, then Jack restarted the movie. They watched more of the things fly out, then the clan crowd into the house. When they emerged this time he kept freezing the frames but got no better view of what they were carrying than before. What else could it be but Anya?