Bundy looked back at Carson and Michael as they reluctantly sat down at their table. He stared at them a moment, as if fixing them in their chairs, and then departed.
chapter 60
The Ahern property in the Lowers proved to be a cottage on a wide lot, but not one in disrepair. The paint wasn’t peeling, and the front-porch steps didn’t sag. The lawn and shrubs appeared to be well kept, and no pales were missing from the picket fence. Scalloped barge-boards and simple fretwork along the porch eaves gave the little house some charm.
Controlled by a timer, the porch light had come on at dusk. Otherwise, the place remained dark.
Directly across the street from the cottage, snarls of crisp dead weeds surrounded the burned-out concrete- block foundation of a house destroyed by fire years earlier. On the same property stood a wood-frame, corrugated-metal storage shed from which the door had broken away.
Concerned that someone from the hospital might come here in search of Travis when it was discovered that he had gone missing, he and Bryce Walker stood sentinel from within the empty storage shed. When Grace Ahern appeared in her Honda, they would break from cover and stop her in the street before she parked in the carport. She could drive them to the friend of Bryce’s from whom he believed he could get the help they needed.
The canted shed smelled of rust and wood rot and urine, with the faint underlying odor of something that had died in here and had nearly finished decomposing. A cleansing draft would have been welcome, but no breeze stirred the night.
Wrapped in the hospital blanket, which seemed thinner than it had been when he’d stripped it off the bed and rolled it, Bryce was neither warm nor freezing. The cold air nipped at his bare ankles, however, and gradually a chill crept up his calves.
As they waited, Travis’s stories about his mother revealed a woman of exceptional character, determined and indomitable, self-effacing and self-sacrificing, a woman with an inexhaustible capacity to love. Although the boy, in the manner of boys everywhere, would not say that he loved her with every fiber of his heart, the truth that he adored her was evident in everything he said about her.
But the longer they waited, the less Travis talked. Eventually, the question became not when Grace Ahern would come home but if she would show up at all.
“She wouldn’t go straight to the hospital,” the boy insisted. “She feels stale after working all day at school. That’s what she says-stale. She takes a quick shower. She gets to the hospital about six.”
She was already far behind the schedule that the boy attributed to her, but when Travis wanted to wait another ten minutes, Bryce said, “We can wait as long as you like. All night if you want.”
After that, they maintained their watch in silence, as if Travis feared that speaking of his mother would jinx her and him, that only by a stoic silence could he earn the sight of her again.
The boy’s anxiety became as manifest as the chill that coiled ever tighter as the night wore on.
Minute by minute, Bryce was overcome by a growing sympathy of such tenderness that it risked becoming pity, and he didn’t want to pity Travis Ahern because pity supposed that the mother must be already lost, like the screaming victims in the hospital basement.
chapter 61
In the silence, Nummy waited for the ceiling to creak but he also listened hard for any sound of Mr. Lyss searching downstairs for something he could use to burn the cocoons. Mr. Lyss wasn’t usually a quiet person, but now he was as quiet as a sneaky cat. No footsteps, no doors opening and closing, no bad words being said because he was having trouble finding what he wanted…
Maybe the problem wasn’t that Mr. Lyss couldn’t find what he wanted. Maybe instead the problem could be that something that wanted Mr. Lyss had found him. Maybe downstairs hung a cocoon that smelled a little bit like Mr. Lyss’s bad teeth.
Maybe three outer-space things spun these giant cocoons around themselves, the way caterpillars spun themselves up inside their own silk to become butterflies. But maybe instead the thing that spun the cocoons wasn’t in any of them, and it was creeping around the house and spinning more cocoons with its babies inside, and none of them pretty like a butterfly.
This was for sure what Grandmama meant when she said too much thinking led to too much worrying.
Although he seemed to have been gone a long time, Mr. Lyss still wasn’t making any noise downstairs, but suddenly some noise came from one of the cocoons or maybe from all of them. At first Nummy thought the things in the cocoons were whispering to one another, but then he realized this was a slithery sound, like a lot of snakes might be sliding around inside the sacks.
You would think that so much slithering would make the sacks bulge and ripple, but they didn’t. They just hung there, looking wet though Mr. Lyss said they weren’t.
Nummy stood very near the bedroom door, and he wanted to back across the threshold into the hallway, putting a little more space between himself and the cocoons. But he knew that once he went as far as the hallway, he would run for the stairs. If he ran for the stairs, that was when Mr. Lyss would finally return with his long gun, and Nummy didn’t want his head blown off and used like a basketball.
Finally, he couldn’t bear listening to the slithery sounds any longer, and he said to the cocoons, “Stop scaring me. I don’t want to be here, I have to be here, so just stop.”
To his surprise, they stopped.
For a moment, Nummy felt good that they stopped slithering when he told them to, because maybe they didn’t really mean to scare him in the first place and were sorry. But then he realized that if they stopped slithering when he told them to, they were listening to him, which meant they knew he was here in the room with them. Most of the time he was watching them, he told himself they were just cocoons, they weren’t aware of him. But they were.
Footsteps on the stairs turned out to be Mr. Lyss, which by now was the last thing Nummy was expecting.
“Are your pants still dry?” Mr. Lyss asked.
“Yes, sir. But they was slithering.”
“Your pants were slithering?”
“The things in the cocoons. Lots of slithery sounds, but the sacks they didn’t bulge or nothing.”
Mr. Lyss carried a two-gallon red can like people used to keep gasoline for their lawn mowers. He also carried a little basket with some smaller cans in it.
“Where’s your long gun?” Nummy asked.
“By the front door. I don’t think it’s smart to use a shotgun for this. Split the sack, and who knows how many things might come squirming out of it, maybe too many to shoot them all.” He put the basket on the floor beside Nummy. “Don’t drink any of that.”
“What is it?” Nummy asked.
“A couple different kinds of paint thinners, some lamp oil, and charcoal starter.” He handed Nummy a box of matches. “Hold these.”
“Why would I drink that junk?”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Lyss said, screwing the cap off the spout on the gasoline can. “Could be you’re a secret degenerate boozer, you’ll drink anything that’s got a kick to it, and I just haven’t known you long enough to see it.”
“I’m no boozer. That there’s an insult.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Mr. Lyss said as he moved among the cocoons, holding the can high, pouring the gasoline all over them so they dripped on the floor. “I was just looking out for you.”
