Hornets and Others

The ropy thing got most of the neighborhood while Suzie and Jerry were watching Saturday morning cartoons on TV. Then the cable went out and Jerry's dad put on the radio but then that went out too. By then Suzie and Jerry were watching the ropy thing from the big picture window in Jerry's living room. The ropy thing was very fast, and sometimes they saw only its tip stretched high and straight, or formed into a loop, or snaking over a house or between trees or moving over cars. It hesitated, then shot into the moving van in front of Suzie's house across the street, pulling a fat uniformed mover out, coiling around him head to toe like a mummy and then yanking him down into the ground. It pulled Suzie's mom into the ground too, catching her as she tried to run back into the house from where she had been directing the movers from the curb.

'We're getting out!' Jerry's dad shouted, giving Jerry a strange look, and the ropy thing got him in the front yard between the garage and the car. Behind him was Jerry's mom, with an armful of pillows, and the ropy thing got her too. It got Jerry's sister, Jane, as she was sneaking away from the house to be with her boyfriend, Brad, down the block. Suzie and Jerry watched the ropy thing jump out of the bushes in front of Brad's house like a coiled black spring, getting Jane right in front of Brad, just as she reached to hold his hand. Brad turned to run but it got him too, shooting up out of the lawn and over the sidewalk, thin and fast. It whipped around Brad and squeezed him into two pieces, top and bottom, then pulled both halves down.

Suzie and Jerry ran up to the attic, and the ropy thing snaked up around the house but didn't climb that high and then went away. From the small octagonal attic window they watched it wrap around the Myers' house and pull the Myers' baby from the second-story window. Then it curled like a cat around the Myers' house's foundation, circling three times around and twitching, and stayed there.

'This is just like—' Jerry said, turning to Suzie, fear in his voice. 'I know,' Suzie said, hushing him.

When they looked back at the Myers' house all the windows were broken and the porch posts had been ripped away, and the ropy thing was gone. They spied it down the block to the right, waving lazily in the air before whipping down; then they saw it up the block to the left, moving between two houses into the street to catch a running boy who looked like Billy Carson.

The day rose, a summer morning with nothing but heat.

The afternoon was hotter, an oven in the attic.

The ropy thing continued its work.

They discovered that the ropy thing could climb as high as it wanted when they retrieved Jerry's dad's binoculars and found the ropy thing wrapped like a boa constrictor around the steeple of the Methodist church in the middle of town, blocks away. It pulled something small, kicking and too far away to hear, out of the belfry and then slid down and away.

'I'm telling you it's—' Jerry said again.

Peering through the binoculars, Suzie again hushed him, but not before he finished: '—just like my father's trick.'

They spent that night in the attic with the window cracked open for air. The ropy thing was outside, moving under the light of the moon. Twice it came close, once breaking the big picture window on the ground floor, then shooting up just in front of the attic window, tickling the opening with its tip, making Jerry, who was watching, gasp, but then flying away.

They found a box of crackers and ate them. The ropy thing's passings in front of the moon made vague, dark-gray shadows on the attic's ceiling and walls.

'Do you think it's happening everywhere?' Jerry asked.

'What do you think?' Suzie replied, and then Jerry remembered Dad's battery shortwave radio that pulled in stations from all over the world. It was in the back of the attic near the box of flashlights.

He got it and turned it on, and up and down the dial there was nothing but hissing.

'Everywhere...' Jerry whispered.

'Looks that way,' Suzie answered.

'It can't be...' Jerry said.

Suzie ate another cracker.

Suddenly, Jerry dropped the radio and began to cry. 'But it was just a trick my father played on me! It wasn't real!'

'It seemed real at the time, didn't it?' Suzie asked.

Jerry continued to sob. 'He was always playing tricks on me! After I swallowed a cherry pit he hid a bunch of leaves in his hand and made believe he pulled them from my ear—he told me the cherry pit had grown inside and that I was now filled with a cherry tree! Another time he swore that a spaceship was about to land in the backyard, then he made me watch out the big picture window while he snuck into the back and threw a toy rocket over the roof so that it came down in front of me!' He looked earnest and confused. 'He was always doing things like that!'

'You believed the tricks while they were happening, didn't you?' Suzie asked.

'Yes! But—'

'Maybe if you believe something hard enough, it happens for real.'

Jerry was frantic. 'But it was just a trick! You were with me, you saw what he did! He buried a piece of rope in the backyard, then brought us out and pulled the rope partway out of the ground and said it was part of a giant monster, the Ropy Thing, which filled up the entire Earth until it was just below the surface—and that anytime it wanted it would throw out its ropy tentacles and grab everybody, and pull them down and suck them into its pulsating jelly body—'

He looked at Suzie with a kind of pleading on his face. 'It wasn't real!'

'You believed.'

'It was just a trick!'

'But you believed it was real,' Suzie said quietly. She was staring at the floor. 'Maybe because my mother was moving, taking me away from you, you believed so hard that you made it real.' She looked up at him. 'Maybe that's why it hasn't gotten us—because you did it.'

She went to him and held him, stroking his hair with her long, thin fingers.

'Maybe you did it because you love me,' she said.

Jerry looked up at her, his eyes still wet with tears. 'I do love you,' he said.

They ate all the food in the house after a week, and then moved to the Myers' house and ate all their food, and then to the Janzens' next door to the Myers'. They ate their way, uninvited guests, down one block and up the next. They ran from house to house at twilight or dawn. The ropy thing never came near them, busy now with catching all the neighborhood's dogs and cats.

Even when they did see the ropy thing, it stayed away, poking into a house on the next block, straining up straight, nearly touching the clouds, black and almost oily in the sun, like an antenna. It disappeared for days at a time, and once they saw a second ropy thing, through the telescope in the house they were living in, so far away from their own now that they didn't even know their hosts' names. They were near the edge of town, and the next town over had its own ropy thing curling up into the afternoon, rising up like a shoot here and there, pausing for a moment before bending midriff to point at the ropy thing in their own neighborhood. Their own ropy thing bent and pointed back at it.

Suzie looked at Jerry, who wanted to cry.

'Everywhere,' she said.

As the summer wore on the squirrels disappeared, and then the birds and crickets and gnats and mosquitoes. Jerry and Suzie moved from house to house, town to town, and sometimes when they were out they saw the ropy thing pulling dragonflies into the ground, swatting flies dead and yanking them away. Everywhere it was the same: the ropy thing had rid every town, every house, every place of people and animals and insects. Even the bees in the late summer were gone, as if the ropy thing had saved them for last, and now pulled them into its jelly body along with everything else alive. In one town they found a small zoo, and paused to look with wonder at the empty cages, the clean gorilla pit, the lapping water empty of seals.

There was plenty to eat, and water to drink, and soda in cans, and finally when they were done with the