could turn one out every Halloween, have the kids waiting in line—'

'I said I'd think about it—'

'I know you're worried about Ginny, bud, but this one could set you up with a guarantee every year for the next five years at least. Can I at least negotiate a three-book deal?'

He said nothing, and Revell went on: 'The characters are great, Pete! A real Halloween character! Named Sam no less! And I love Holly Ween! I've got feelers out already to television, and I think we can expect a big bite on that—half hour like 'It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.' We're talking ancillary—lunchboxes, tees, the whole nine—'

'Do whatever the hell you want!' Kerlan shouted, and slammed down the phone.

He gripped the receiver tightly as he suddenly began to cry.

If she wasn't with Revell, she was with someone else.

And he'd driven her away.

She's gone and I know it.

Gone for good.

He let the second can of bug spray slip to the floor as he covered his face with his hands and wept, and kept weeping.

After trying to watch television, and trying to eat, he went to bed early and as a consequence rose early the next morning.

With a tepid cup of instant coffee in his hand, he made his way down to the basement office.

Even before reaching it, the faint, acrid smell of bug spray tickled his nostrils.

'Christ,' he said, wincing as he walked into the room; it was even worse than the faint, musty odor the basement room sometimes held in the summer months, when the foundation walls behind the sheetrock covered studs picked up humidity from the ground. The smell had been particularly noticeable this year.

He stood up on his swivel chair, cursing sharply as it tried to turn sideways with his weight, then leaned out over his desk to open the room's single casement window.

'Shit,' he said, recoiling; in the casement box were the bodies of five small hornets, all but one seemingly dead; the live one moved feebly, its small wings opening once, then again. Behind the casement, somewhere behind the room's wall, he heard a faint buzzing sound.

He climbed down from the chair, nearly ran to the workbench area, and returned with the basement's wet- vac.

He plugged the vacuum into the wall socket between his desk and the printer stand, turned it on, and angled the hose nozzle up into the casement, sucking up all of the hornets.

His eye caught movement by the printer, and he saw another small insect body crawling up the wall over the machine.

I thought I wiped you bastards out yesterday!

He covered the hornet with the sucking nozzle, then looked wildly around the walls, then at the floor.

'Shit!'

There was a cluster of dead bodies fanned out in the corner just to the left of the printer stand, where a heat register ran across the wall at floor level; two live hornets were just crawling out of the bottom of the register itself.

'Shit! Shit!' he said, fighting an uncontrollable chill, thrusting the vacuum head around the area and plugging it into the corner under the register as far as it would go.

He heard the tap of insect bodies rushing up the vacuum's soft plastic accordion hose and into the wet-vac's drum.

Another crawled out onto the rug from behind the printer stand, and he speared it, then put the nozzle back into the corner. He kept it there, feeling another tiny body sucked up into the machine, and then another.

He gave up all thoughts of work, and fled the office; at the doorway he saw a feebly moving hornet on the rug by the sill, and mashed it with his foot, closing the door behind him.

'Sounds weird enough, Mr. Kerlan, but they all sound weird to me. One time—'

'Can you come today?' Peter said into the phone, cutting the beekeeper off before he went into yet another anecdote. 'This infestation is in the place I work, and I need it taken care of.'

'Sure,' the other said, slowly. 'I suppose I can be there this afternoon. We'll take care of you.'

'I hope so,' Kerlan said, slamming down the phone.

He stole a glance into his office, opening the door a crack. By now all sorts of nightmares preyed on his mind: the room filled with flying insects; a swarm waiting for him, covering him as he opened the door—

All inside seemed quiet; the casement window threw a rectangular shaft of light against the far wall's built-in bookcase.

He opened the door wider, listening for buzzing.

Maybe I wiped them out after all.

His relief was short-lived; as he stepped toward his desk his foot covered three squirming hornet bodies, and he saw a few more scattered here and there, some unmoving, others moving as if drunk; there were three or four on the walls, also, and more, perhaps a dozen, covering the casement's window itself, silhouetted dots against the light.

He reached for the wet/dry vac, recoiled as a hornet brushed his hand as it fell from the hose; others were crawling over the instrument's drum, one hiding coyly by one of the rolling wheels.

Once again he fled, and closed the door.

'What you've got there is a classic case of wall infestation,' the bee-keeper, whose name was Floyd Willims, said. He looked like a beekeeper, was tall and thin-haired and preoccupied when he stepped from his dirty white van; and now even more so, dressed almost comically in a pith helmet whose brim was ringed with mosquito netting; from the back of his van he pulled a thick pair of rubber gloves from a soiled box. He held up the gloves for inspection. 'Triple thickness,' he said, almost proudly; 'stingers can't get through.' After retrieving a powder filled canister and what appeared to be a pump hose from the van, he turned back to Kerlan and said, 'Proceed!'

Kerlan had already showed him the corner of the house where the hornets had gained access; they returned to that spot now and the beekeeper knelt, put the thin end of the hose which led into the canister in the opening, and began to puff powder into it.

'This'll kill 'em dead,' he said. 'Whichever ones return will carry the powder into the nest and spread it to the others.'

As if on cue, as the bee-keeper removed the hose from the opening a hornet alighted and crawled into it.

'Now let's have a look at the nest,' the bee-keeper said, heading for the house with Kerlan.

They had already studied the office on the bee-keeper's arrival, and the bee-keeper had helped Kerlan move furniture so that the upper corner of the wall, behind which the bee-keeper said they would find the nest, was exposed; luckily, there would be access through a nearby panel, behind which the house's electrical box was located. To either side of the box was packed insulation, which the bee-keeper began to remove.

The smell of insect spray became stronger in the room.

The bee-keeper lay the strips of insulation on the floor; Kerlan was repulsed to see hornets crawling feebly over the pink spun glass fibers of its back.

The bee-keeper held up a strip, examined the five hornets on it carefully.

'You zapped them pretty good with that off-the-shelf stuff you sprayed into the nest yesterday,' he said. 'If you'd gotten them at dusk, when they were all in the nest, you might have killed them all. What we're looking at are the dregs, I think.'

'How did they get in here to begin with? How many openings does the nest have?'

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