Hornets and Others

Willims had shown him a picture of a typical paper hornet's nest; a nearly round structure with a single opening, usually at the bottom.

'They either made another exit, or left an opening near the top,' he said. 'This isn't quite a typical nest. They were drawn to the light in your office.' He pointed to the baseboard, the corner of the floor where the heat register butted the wall. 'There's an opening down there, I'm sure. Doesn't take much, just a quarter inch.' He squinted through his mosquito netting at the molding along the rug where the printer stand had been before they moved it. 'There may be others. Like I said, a quarter inch is all they need.'

An involuntary chill washed over Kerlan as a hornet crawled onto the bee-keeper's glove and onto his shirt sleeve. The bee-keeper regarded it for a moment and then flicked it to the floor. 'Like I said, you must have hit them good. if they were healthy they'd be all over us, because of the light.' He turned to Kerlan as if having a sudden thought. 'Sure you don't want to leave?'

'I'll stay, if you think it's safe.'

The bee-keeper laughed. 'Safe enough. If they pour out of the walls when I remove the rest of this insulation, I'll yell and you can run.'

Kerlan's eyes enlarged in alarm but the bee-keeper added, 'Not likely to happen.'

At that moment the bee-keeper pulled the last strip of insulation out with a grunt.

Nothing happened; the bee-keeper angled his head, aiming a flashlight up into the exposed cavity, and called back, 'Yeah, you hit 'em pretty good.'

Kerlan leaned over, trying to see; pulled back and a fist-shaped clutch of dead hornets fell from the space between the open cavity and the bee-keeper's body.

The bee-keeper angled his arm up into the cavity.

'I'll. . .get it out if I can—'

He pulled a huge chunk of dark papery gray material out of the cavity, let it drop to the floor.

'Nest,' he said in explanation. It was followed by a bigger chunk, mottled and round on the inside; within it's crushed interior were dead hornets and a few feebly live ones.

'Ugh,' Kerlan said.

'Pretty big nest,' the bee-keeper said, continuing to pull sections of the structure out. Mixed with the leavings now were the familiar honeycombed sections that Kerlan knew contained the pupae. Most but not all were empty. 'About the size of a soccer ball. They built it right up in the corner beneath the floor above. As they built the nest it forced the insulation back. Amazing critters.'

He continued his work, and Kerlan shivered.

An hour later the office was more or less back to normal, and Kerlan was writing the bee-keeper a check.

'You'll want to caulk that hole they used in a couple of weeks,' Willims said. 'That powder I sprayed around it will take care of any stragglers.'

'Why not plug it now?'

'Well, you could, but there could still be a few females outside the nest; they'd just start another one.'

Kerlan had forgotten that each nest held a queen.

'Didn't we kill off this nest's queen?'

'You can be pretty much certain of that. But even so, any female can become a queen. They'll just start another nest.' He grinned. 'Summer's not quite over, you know. I'll be getting calls like yours 'till mid-November, if the heat holds out.'

'Christ.'

The bee-keeper folded the check and turned toward his dirty white van. Kerlan had a sudden thought.

'You're sure my nest is dead?'

The bee-keeper shrugged. 'Pretty sure. You may see a few strays wander out of your baseboard gaps looking for light, but believe me, that nest is dead. Only other problem you could have is if two females got in there originally and the second one started another nest somewhere else inside the wall, farther down.' Seeing Kerlan's eyes widen he laughed. 'Not likely that happened, though. Plug the gaps in the baseboard if you can; you can use a wad of scrunched up cellophane tape. Call me if you have any more problems.'

Kerlan nodded as the van drove off.

A single yellow-jacket brushed by his face as he entered the house.

The next morning he entered his office to work. The evening before, he had moved along the edge of the baseboard where he could get at it, pushing cellophane tape into anything that looked like an opening. By the baseboard he had found a huge hole surrounding the heat pipe which let into the register; around it were tens of dead yellow jackets and a very alive spider as big as a thumb nail, feeding on them.

There was a sour smell emanating from the vent; a mixture of fading bug spray and the strong damp smell from the cavity behind. After recoiling he cleaned the area out with the wet/dry vac and then plugged it with insulating material. The smell receded.

He vacuumed the rug thoroughly, sucking up dead hornet bodies, and then replaced his furniture and turned on his computer.

There came a tapping at the casement window above him and he started, looking up. It was just a fat bumblebee, probably the same from the other day, which ambled sluggishly off.

He let out a deep breath and turned to the screen.

He typed out the words Sam Hain and the Halloween that Almost Wasn't and suddenly, for the next hours, he was lost in the characters as words poured out of him in a torrent. Nothing like this had happened to him in the last twenty years. Page after page scrolled down the screen, and he knew they were all good. He finished one story and the ideas for two others came into his head unbidden. He typed so fast his fingers began to ache—something he hadn't felt since the days of electric typewriters, when the constant kickback of the keys would rattle his knuckles and literally make his fingers sore. It was a marvelous feeling. And still he wrote on, completing outlines for two more stories before finally letting himself fall back into his swivel chair, breathing hard. It was as if he had run a marathon, and he couldn't believe the mass of material now stored on his hard disk.

Without thinking, he sent it all as an attached file to Bill Revel!, with a curt note: 'Like I said, do whatever the hell you want.'

He knew that would keep the bastard busy for a while, and off his back.

Even now, he felt another itch at the back of his brain, which would turn into more work tomorrow. He knew it. It had been so long since this had happened to him, this creative torrent, that he'd forgotten what it was like.

Oh, Ginny, if only you were here now! The problem's gone! I can write again!

It was the only sour note in what had been a marvelous day. He looked up at his casement window and saw that night had fallen, and that a waxing moon was rising. It looked huge and orange-tinged, and even that gave him a new idea for a story: Sam and Holly and the Halloween Moon.

Quickly he wrote it down in outline, and when he looked up again the moon was high and the clock said it was midnight.

He stumbled upstairs, past Ginny's things, and walked down the hall to bed, where he dreamed of black and orange things, and a cute character named Sam Ham, a squat fellow that looked like a comical skeleton with a wide happy grin and a spring in his step, who danced through a children's Halloween world with his blonde-curled friend Holly. It was a world of orange and yellow and red, of perpetually falling leaves that danced and dervished, and trick or treat bags that were always open and bottomless, and Jack o'lanterns that never sputtered or grew burned black inside or soft rotten, and winds that were blustery and just cold, and the clouds that made the fat full moon wink, and a night that was always All Hallows Eve, with hoots in the air, and scary costumes that weren't really scary at all

and in the dream Sam Hain changed, even as the night changed, as he grew from a fat happy children's character into a monstrous terrifying thing, black and tall and cold as space, his bone hands bone white and hard as smooth stones, his eyes deeper than black empty wells, his grin not happy but ravenous, his breath ancient and colder than space, and sour with death as he bent to whisper into Kerlan's ear something soft and horrible, and which made him scream even as it filled him with joy—