Louder. Louder.

There was a tiger in the hall, and now the tiger was just around the corner, still crying out in that shrill and petulant and lunatic rage, the roque mallet slamming, because this tiger walked on two legs and it was-

He woke with a sudden indrawn gasp, sitting bolt upright in bed, eyes wide and staring into the darkness, hands crossed in front of his face.

Something on one hand. Crawling.

Wasps. Three of them.

They stung him then, seeming to needle all at once, and that was when all the images broke apart and fell on him in a dark flood and he began to shriek into the dark, the wasps clinging to his left hand, stinging again and again.

The lights went on and Daddy was standing there in his shorts, his eyes glaring. Mommy behind him, sleepy and scared.

“Get them o$ me!” Danny screamed.

“Oh my God,” Jack said. He saw.

“Jack, what's wrong with him? What's wrong?”

He didn't answer her. He ran to the bed, scooped up Danny's pillow, and slapped Danny's thrashing left hand with it. Again. Again. Wendy saw lumbering, insectile forms rise into the air, droning.

“Get a magazine!” he yelled over his shoulder. “Kill them!”

“Wasps?” she said, and for a moment she was inside herself, almost detached in her realization. Then her mind crosspatched, and knowledge was connected to emotion. “Wasps, oh Jesus, Jack, you said-”

“Shut the fuck up and kill them!” he roared. “Will you do what I say!”

One of them had landed on Danny's reading desk. She took a coloring book off his worktable and slammed it down on the wasp. It left a viscous brown smear.

“There's another one on the curtain,” he said, and ran out past her with Danny in his arms.

He took the boy into their bedroom and put him on Wendy's side of the makeshift double. “Lie right there, Danny. Don't come back until I tell you. Understand?”

His face puffed and streaked with tears, Danny nodded.

“That's my brave boy.”

Jack ran back down the hall to the stairs. Behind him he heard the coloring book slap twice, and then his wife screamed in pain. He didn't slow but went down the stairs two by two into the darkened lobby. He went through Ullman's office into the kitchen, slamming the heavy part of his thigh into the corner of Ullman's oak desk, barely feeling it. He slapped on the kitchen overheads and crossed to the sink. The washed dishes from supper were still heaped up in the drainer, where Wendy had left them to drip-dry. He snatched the big Pyrex bowl off the top. A dish fell to the floor and exploded. Ignoring it, he turned and ran back through the office and up the stairs.

Wendy was standing outside Danny's door, breathing hard. Her face was the color of table linen. Her eyes were shiny and flat; her hair hung damply against her neck. “I got all of them,” she said dully, “but one stung me. Jack, you said they were all dead.” She began to cry.

He slipped past her without answering and carried the Pyrex bowl over to the nest by Danny's bed. It was still. Nothing there. On the outside, anyway. He slammed the bowl down over the nest.

“There,” he said. “Come on.”

They went back into their bedroom.

“Where did it get you?” he asked her.

“My… on my wrist.”

“Let's see.”

She showed it to him. Just above the bracelet of lines between wrist and palm, there was a small circular hole. The flesh around it was puffing up.

“Are you allergic to stings?” he asked. “Think hard! If you are, Danny might be. The fucking little bastards got him five or six times.”

“No,” she said, more calmly. “I… I just hate them, that's all. Hate them.”

Danny was sitting on the foot of the bed, holding his left hand and looking at them. His eyes, circled with the white of shock, looked at Jack reproachfully.

“Daddy, you said you killed them all. My hand… it really hurts.”

“Let's see it, doe… no, I'm not going to touch it. That would make it hurt even more. Just hold it out.”

He did and Wendy moaned. “Oh Danny… oh, your poor hand!”

Later the doctor would count eleven separate stings. Now all they saw was a dotting of small holes, as if his palm and fingers had been sprinkled with grains of red pepper. The swelling was bad. His hand had begun to look like one of those cartoon images where Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck had just slammed himself with a hammer.

“Wendy, go get that spray stuff in the bathroom,” he said.

She went after it, and he sat down next to Danny and slipped an arm around his shoulders.

“After we spray your hand, I want to take some Polaroids of it, doc. Then you sleep the rest of the night with us, Tay?”

“Sure,” Danny said. “But why are you going to take pictures?”

“So maybe we can sue the ass out of some people.”

Wendy came back with a spray tube in the shape of a chemical fire extinguisher.

“This won't hurt, honey,” she said, taking off the cap.

Danny held out his hand and she sprayed both sides until it gleamed. He let out a long, shuddery sigh.

“Does it smart?” she asked.

“No. Feels better.”

“Now these. Crunch them up.” She held out five orangeflavored baby aspirin. Danny took them and popped them into his mouth one by one.

“Isn't that a lot of aspirin?” Jack asked.

“It's a lot of stings,” she snapped at him angrily. “You go and get rid of that nest, John Torrance. Right now.”

“Just a minute.”

He went to the dresser and took his Polaroid Square Shooter out of the top drawer. He rummaged deeper and found some flashcubes.

“Jack, what are you doing?” she asked, a little hysterically.

“He's gonna take some pictures of my hand,” Danny said gravely, “and then we're gonna sue the ass out of some people. Right, Dad?”

“Right,” Jack said grimly. He had found the flash attachment, and he jabbed it onto the camera. “Hold it out, son. I figure about five thousand dollars a sting.”

“What are you talking about?” Wendy nearly screamed.

“I'll tell you what,” he said. “I followed the directions on that fucking bug bomb. We're going to sue them. The damn thing was defective. Had to have been. How else can you explain this?”

“Oh,” she said in a small voice.

He took four pictures, pulling out each covered print for Wendy to time on the small locket watch she wore around her neck. Danny, fascinated with the idea that his stung hand might be worth thousands and thousands of dollars, began to lose some of his fright and take an active interest. The hand throbbed dully, and he had a small headache.

When Jack had put the camera away and spread the prints out on top of the dresser to dry, Wendy said: “Should we take him to the doctor tonight?”

“Not unless he's really in pain,” Jack said. “If a person has a strong allergy to wasp venom, it hits within thirty seconds.”

“Hits? What do you-”

“A coma. Or convulsions.”

“Oh. Oh my Jesus.” She cupped her hands over her elbows and hugged herself, looking pale and wan.

“How do you feel, son? Think you could sleep?”

Danny blinked at them. The nightmare had faded to a dull, featureless background in his mind, but he was still frightened.

“If I can sleep with you.”

“Of course,” Wendy said. “Oh honey, I'm so sorry.”

“It's okay, Mommy.”

She began to cry again, and Jack put his hands on her shoulders. “Wendy, I swear to you that I followed the directions.”

“Will you get rid of it in the morning? Please?”

“Of course I will.”

The three of them got in bed together, and Jack was about to snap off the light over the bed when he paused and pushed the covers back instead. “Want a picture of the nest, too.”

“Come right back.”

“I will.”

He went to the dresser, got the camera and the last flashcube, and gave Danny a closed thumb-and-forefinger circle. Danny smiled and gave it back with his good hand.