He took a step toward her.
Hilary stood her ground. Her heart was exploding.
Frye moved closer.
Shaking, she backed down the first step that lay beyond the doors.
Just as Tony reached the head of the stairs, supporting himself with one hand against the wall, he heard a noise behind him. He looked back.
Joshua had crawled out of the bedroom. He was splashed with blood, and his face was nearly as white as his hair. His eyes seemed out of focus.
'How bad?' Tony asked.
Joshua licked his pale lips. 'I'll live,' he said in a strange, hissing, croaking voice. 'Hilary. For God's sake ... Hilary!'
Tony pushed away from the wall and careened down the stairs. He weaved back down the hall toward the kitchen, for he could hear Frye shouting out on the rear lawn.
In the kitchen, Tony pulled open one drawer, then another, looking for a weapon.
'Come on, dammit! Shit!'
The third drawer held knives. He chose the largest one. It was spotted with rust but still wickedly sharp.
His left arm was killing him. He wanted to cradle it in his right arm, but he needed that hand to fight Frye.
Gritting his teeth, steeling himself against the pain of his wounds, lurching like a drunkard, he went out to the porch. He saw Frye at once. The man was standing in front of two open doors. Two doors in the ground.
Hilary was nowhere in sight.
Hilary backed off the sixth step. That was the last one. Bruno Frye stood at the head of the stairs, looking down, afraid to come any farther. He was alternately calling her a bitch and whimpering as if he were a child. He was clearly torn between two needs: the need to kill her, and the need to get away from that hated place.
Whispers.
Suddenly she heard the whispers, and her flesh seemed to turn to ice in that instant. It was a wordless hissing, a soft sound, but growing louder by the second.
And then she felt something crawling up her leg.
She cried out and moved up one step, closer to Frye. She reached down, brushed at her leg, and knocked something away.
Shuddering, she switched on the flashlight, turned, and shone the beam into the subterranean room behind her.
Roaches. Hundreds upon hundreds of huge roaches were swarming in the room--on the floor, on the walls, on the low ceiling. They were not just ordinary roaches, but enormous things, over two inches long, an inch wide, with busy legs and especially long feelers that quivered anxiously. Their shiny green-brown carapaces appeared to be sticky and wet, like blobs of dark mucus.
The whispering was the sound of their ceaseless movement, long legs and trembling antennae brushing other long legs and antennae, constantly crawling and creeping and scurrying this way and that.
Hilary screamed. She wanted to climb the steps and get out of there, but Frye was above, waiting.
The roaches shied away from her flashlight. They were evidently subterranean insects that survived only in the dark, and she prayed that her flashlight batteries would not go dead.
The whispering grew louder.
More roaches were pouring into the room. They were coming out of a crack in the floor. Coming out by tens. By scores. By hundreds. There were a couple of thousand of the disgusting things in the room already, and the chamber was no more than twenty feet on a side. They piled up two and three deep in the other half of the room, avoiding the light, but getting bolder by the moment.
She knew that an entomologist would probably not call them roaches. They were beetles, subterranean beetles that lived in the bowels of the earth. A scientist would have a crisp, clean, Latin name for them. But to her they were roaches.
Hilary looked up at Bruno.
'Bitch,' he said.
Leo Frye had built a cold storage cellar, a common enough convenience in 1918. But he had mistakenly built it on a flaw in the earth. She could see that he had tried many times to patch the floor, but it kept opening each time that the earth trembled. In quake country, the earth trembled often.
And the roaches came up from hell.
They were still gushing from the hole, a wriggling, kicking, squirming mass.
They mounted up on one another, five- and six- and seven-deep, covering the walls and the ceiling, moving, endlessly moving, swarming restlessly. The cold whisper of their movement was now a soft roar.
For punishment, Katherine had put Bruno in this place. In the dark. For hours at a time.
Suddenly, the roaches moved toward Hilary. The pressure of them building up in layers finally caused them to spill at her like a breaking wave, in a roiling green-brown mass. In spite of the flashlight, they surged forward, hissing.
She screamed and started up the steps, preferring Bruno's knife to the hideous insect horde behind her.
