resist. We’re probably saving tens of thousands of bucks.”
“Could you find out more about them? I need to know as soon as possible. You can reach me on beeper.”
“What do you want to know, exactly?”
“Everything. Whether they’re more than just a diagnostic lab. And what other ties they have to Tranquility.”
“I’ll see what I can find out.”
She hung up. Even with the electric heat turned on, the room felt cold. She built a fire in the woodstove and made breakfast out of Max’s meager food supplies. Coffee and buttered toast and a slightly shriveled apple. By the time she’d finished eating, so much warmth was radiating from the woodstove, she was starting to feel drowsy from the heat. She called the hospital again to check on Noah’s condition, then she sat down by the window to wait.
He couldn’t avoid her forever.
It seemed like only moments later when she startled awake in the chair, her neck hurting from uncomfortable slumber. It was three o’clock, and the morning sunlight had shifted to the slanting rays of afternoon.
She rose and massaged her neck as she wandered restlessly around the cottage.
Into the bedroom, back to the kitchen. Where was he? Surely he’d come back for his dirty laundry.
She stopped in the living room and her gaze rose to the topographical map, tacked on the wall. She moved closer to it, suddenly focusing on Beech Hill, elevation 980 feet. What was it Lois Cuthbert had said at the town meeting? It had to do with the lights people had seen flickering up on the hill, and the rumors that satanic cults were gathering in the woods at night.
Lois had explained the lights. It’s just that biologist fella, Dr. Tutwiler, collecting salamanders at night. I almost ran over him in the dark a few weeks ago, when he came hiking back down.
Claire had only an hour of daylight left; she would need it to find what she was looking for. She already knew where to start.
She left the cottage and got back in her car.
The snow would make her search easy. She turned onto the road leading up Beech Hill. As she neared Emerson’s property, she slowed down and observed that the driveway to his house was unplowed. It had snowed since her last visit to feed the cat, and there were no new tire tracks. She drove on, past his property.
There were no other homes beyond his on the hill, and the road became a dirt track. Decades before, this had been a logging road; it was now used only by hunters or hikers on their way to the panoramic lookout at the top. The town plows had not cleared the recent snowfall, and the road was barely navigable in her Subaru. Another vehicle had been up this road before her; she saw the tire tracks.
A few hundred yards past the Emerson property, the tracks veered off the road and ended abruptly at a stand of pine trees. There was no vehicle parked there now; whoever had been here had since departed. But he had left behind ankle-deep footprints in the snow.
She climbed out of her car to study the prints. They’d been made by large boots-a man’s size. They led into the woods and back out again in several round trips.
She’d often heard that snow on the ground is a hunter’s best friend. She was a hunter now, following a clear trail of broken snow through the forest. She wasn’t afraid of getting lost. She had a penlight in case darkness fell, her cell phone was in her pocket, and she had the footprints to lead her back to the car. Off to the right, she heard water, and realized the streambed was nearby.
The footprints ran parallel to the stream, climbing slightly toward a massive tumble of boulders.
She halted and looked up in wonder. Melting snow had dripped down and flash-frozen again into a rippling blue sculpture of waterfalls. Standing at the base of that ancient landslide, she puzzled over the abrupt disappearance of the footprints. Had Max scaled those boulders? Wind had polished the ice to a hard glaze. It would be a treacherously difficult climb.
The sound of the stream again drew her attention. She looked down, where the running water had dissolved the snow, and saw the faint mark of a heel in the mud. If he had waded into the stream, why did his footprints not reappear on the opposite bank?
She took a step into the stream and felt icy water seep through the lacing holes into her boots. She took another step, and the water was at her boot tops and already soaking into her trouser cuffs. Only then did she see the opening in the rocks.
The cleft was partly shielded by a bush that would be lush with foliage in summer. To reach the opening, she had to wade calf-deep into the stream. She pulled herself up onto a lip of rock, then squeezed under the low entrance into the wider chamber beyond.
It was just large enough for her to raise her head. Though scarcely any light shone through the small opening behind her, she found she could make out vague details of her surroundings. She heard the steady drip of moisture and saw trickles of water glistening on the walls. Sunlight must be filtering in some other way. Was there another opening up ahead? Beyond the shadowy outline of an archway, faint light seemed to glimmer. Another chamber.
She squeezed under the arch, and almost immediately tumbled off the ledge and began to roll, down and down, until she landed hard on wet stone. Pain rang like a bell in her skull. She lay stunned for a moment, waiting for her head to clear, for the lights to stop flashing in her eyes. Something fluttered overhead and whooshed away with a beat of frantic wings. Bats.
Slowly the throbbing in her head faded to a dull ache, but the lights were still flashing in streaks of psychedelic green. Symptoms of a retinal detachment, she thought in alarm. Impending blindness.
Slowly she rose to her feet, reaching out to the cave wall to steady herself.
Instead of touching stone, her hand met something slimy and yielding. She screamed and jerked away, and more beating wings fluttered out of the cave.
It moved. The wall moved.
What she’d felt on the wall was cold, not the fur of a wriggling bat. She could still feel the wetness on her fingers. Shuddering, she started to wipe her hand on her trousers when she noticed the glow. It clung to her skin, outlining the shape of her hand in the darkness. In amazement, she looked up at the cave ceiling, and she saw a multitude of lights, like soft green stars in the night sky. Except these stars moved, swaying back and forth in gentle waves.
She stepped forward, splashing through puddles, to stand in the center of the chamber, and had to close her eyes for a moment; the swaying of those stars above her head made the ground seem to rock beneath her feet.
The source, she thought in wonderment. Max has found the source of the parasite, the cave that has probably harbored this species for millennia. Heat generated by organic decay, by the warm-blooded bodies of hundreds of bats, would keep this world constant, even as the seasons cycled on the surface above.
She took out her penlight and aimed the beam at a cluster of green stars on the wall. In that circle of light, the stars were extinguished, and what she saw in their place was a clump of worms, like a many-tentacled medusa, waving gently from the dripping stone. She turned off the light. In the restored blackness, the stars reappeared, rejoining that vast galaxy of green.
Bioluminescence. The worms used Vibrio fischeri bacteria as their source of light. Whenever this cave flooded, worm larvae and Vibrio together would be washed into the stream. Into Locust Lake. We are just the accidental hosts, she thought. A summer’s swim, an unlucky inhalation of water, and a larva would find its way through the nasal passages into a human host. There, lodged in one of the sinuses, the larva would grow, releasing a hormone as it matured and died.
That would account for the chromatographic peak in Taylor Darnell’s and Scotty Braxton’s blood: a hormone secreted by this parasite.
Tutwiler, and perhaps Anson, knew about that hormone, and about these worms, yet they didn’t tell her. They had put her and her son through hell.
In fury. she reached down, grasped a rock, and hurled it at the green stars. It bounced off the cave ceiling, clattered across the ground, and landed with a strangely metallic Clang. A fresh flurry of bats whooshed out of the chamber.
She stood immobilized for a moment, trying to process what she’d just heard.
Moving cautiously through the gloom, she stepped toward the far end of the chamber, where she’d heard the
