(What was that? Matt had screamed, his eyes wide. Was that real? Is that happening? Ransom had been unable to speak, his tongue dead in his mouth.)
Like so many cranes raising and lowering, the cluster of smaller limbs that rose from the center of the crab’s back was opening and closing. Ransom said, “I know: if the guy was such a shit, why pass his name on to my son?” He shrugged. “When I was younger — at that point in my life, the idea of the past. of a family’s past, of continuity between the present and that past, was very important to me. By the time Heather was pregnant, the worst of Gus’s offenses was years gone by. If you wanted,
I suppose you could say that he was paying for his previous excesses. He hadn’t taken notice of his diabetes for decades. If the toes on his right foot hadn’t turned black, then started to smell, I doubt he ever would have returned to the doctor. Although. what that visit brought him was the emergency amputation of his toes, followed by the removal of his foot a couple of weeks later. The surgeon wanted to take his leg, said the only way to beat the gangrene that was eating Gus was to leap ahead of it. Gus refused, declared he could see where he was headed, and he wasn’t going to be jointed like a chicken on the way. There was no arguing with him. His regular doctor prescribed some heavy-duty antibiotics for him, but I’m not sure he had the script filled.
“When he returned home, everyone said it was to die — which it was, of course, but I think we all expected him to be gone in a matter of days. He hung on, though, for one week, and the next, and the one after that. Heather and her mother visited him. I was at work. She said the house smelled like spoiled meat; it was so bad, she couldn’t stay in for more than a couple of minutes, barely long enough to stand beside Gus’s bed and kiss his cheek. His lips moved, but she couldn’t understand him. She spent the rest of the visit outside, in her mother’s truck, listening to the radio.”
Ransom glanced out the window. The huge sheet of light rippled like an aurora, the image of the island and its cargo gone. He said, “Gus died the week after Heather’s visit. To tell the truth, I half-expected him to last until the baby arrived. Heather went to the wake and the funeral; I had to work. As it turned out, we settled on Matthew — Matt — instead.”
His break was over. Ransom exited the kitchen, turned down the hallway to the front door. On the walls to either side of him, photos of himself and his family, his son, smiled at photographers’ prompts years forgotten. He peered out one of the narrow windows that flanked the door. The rocking chair he’d left on the front porch in a quixotic gesture stood motionless. Across the street, the charred mound that sat inside the burned-out remains of his neighbor’s house appeared quiet. Ransom reached for the six-foot pole that leaned against the corner opposite him. Careful to check that the butcher knife duct-taped to the top was secure, he gripped the improvised spear near the tape and unlocked the door. Leveling the weapon, he stepped back as the door swung in.
In two months of maintaining the ritual every time he opened any of the doors into the house, Ransom had yet to be met by anything. The precaution was one on which his son had insisted; the day of his departure north, Matt had pledged Ransom to maintaining it. With no intention of doing so, Ransom had agreed, only to find himself repeating the familiar motions the next time he was about to venture out to the garden. Now here he was, jabbing the end of the spear through the doorway to draw movement, waiting a count of ten, then advancing one slow step at a time, careful not to miss anything dangling from the underside of the porch roof. Once he was satisfied that the porch was clear, that nothing was lurking in the bush to its right, he called over his shoulder, “I’m on my way to check the garden, if you’d like to join me.”
A chorus of ringing announced the crab’s extricating itself from the sink. Legs clicking on the wood floors like so many tap shoes, it hurried along the hall and out beside him. Keeping the spear straight ahead, he reached back for one of the canvas bags piled inside the door, then pulled the door shut. The crab raced down the stairs and to the right, around the strip of lawn in front of the house. Watching its long legs spindle made the coffee churn at the back of his throat. He followed it off the porch.
Although he told himself that he had no desire to stare at the remnants of his neighbor Adam’s house — it was a distraction; it was ghoulish; it was not good for his mental health — Ransom was unable to keep his eyes from it. All that was left of the structure were fire-blackened fragments of the walls that had stood at the house’s northeast and southwest corners. Had Ransom not spent ten years living across the road from the white, two-story colonial whose lawn had been chronically overgrown — to the point he and Heather had spoken of it as their own little piece of the rainforest — he could not have guessed the details of the building the fire had consumed. While he was no expert at such matters, he had been surprised that the flames had taken so much of Adam’s house; even without the fire department to douse it, Ransom had the sense that the blaze should not have consumed this much of it. No doubt, the extent of the destruction owed something to the architects of the shape the house’s destruction had revealed.
(There’s something in Adam’s house, Matt had said. The eyes of the ten men and woman crowded around the kitchen table did not look at him. They’ve been there since before. everything. Before the Fracture. I’ve heard them moving around outside, in the trees. We have to do something about them.)
About a month after they had moved into their house, some ten years ago, Ransom had discovered a wasps’ nest clinging to a light on the far side of the garage. Had it been only himself, even himself and Heather, living there, he would have been tempted to live and let live. However, with an eight- year-old factored into the equation, one whose curiosity was recorded in the constellations of scars up his arms and down his legs, there was no choice. Ransom called the exterminator and the next day, the nest was still. He waited the three days the woman recommended, then removed the nest by unscrewing the frosted glass jar to which it was anchored. He estimated the side stoop the sunniest part of the property; he placed the nest there to dry out. His decision had not pleased Heather, who was concerned at poison-resistant wasps emerging enraged at the attack on their home, but after a week’s watch brought no super wasps, he considered it reasonable to examine it with Matt. It was the first time he had been this near to a nest, and he had been fascinated by it, the grey, papery material that covered it in strips wound up and to the right. Slicing it across the equator had disclosed a matrix of cells, a little less than half of them chambering larvae, and a host of motionless wasps. Every detail of the nest, he was aware, owed itself to some physiological necessity, evolutionary advantage, but he’d found it difficult to shake the impression that he was observing the result of an alien intelligence, an alien aesthetic, at work.
That same sensation, taken to a power of ten, gripped him at the sight of the structure that had hidden inside Adam’s house. Its shape reminded him of that long-ago wasps’ nest, only inverted, an irregular dome composed not of grey pulp but a porous substance whose texture suggested sponge. Where it was not charred black, its surface was dark umber. Unlike the house in which it had grown up, Ransom thought that the fire that had scoured this dwelling should have inflicted more damage on it, collapsed it. In spots, the reddish surface of the mound had cracked to reveal a darker substance beneath, something that trembled in the light like mercury. Perhaps this was the reason the place was still standing. What had been the overgrown yard was dirt baked and burnt brittle by the succession of fires. At half a dozen points around the yard, the large shells of what might have been lobsters — had each of those lobsters stood the size of a small pony — lay broken, split wide, the handles of axes, shovels, picks spouting from them.