Hornets & Others
By Al Sarrantonio
© 2011 / Al Sarrantonio
OTHER BOOKS BY AL SARRANTONIO:
Novels:
Campbell Wood
Haydn of Mars – Book I of the Masters of Mars Trilogy
House Haunted
Kitt Peak
Moonbane
October
Queen of Mars – Book III of the Masters of Mars Trilogy
Sebastian of Mars – Book II of the Masters of Mars Trilogy
Skeletons
Summer Cool
Tales From the Crossroad, Vol 1
The Boy With Penny Eyes
The Masters of Mars – The Complete Trilogy
The Worms
Totentanz
West Texas
Collections:
Toybox
Halloween & Other Seasons
Unabridged Audiobooks:
Moonbane – Narrated by Kevin Readdean
To My Brother,
Tom
CONTENTS
Preface
The Ropy Thing
The Only
The Beat
In the Corn
Two
The Coat
The Haunting of Y-12
Billy the Fetus
Stars
Bags
The Red Wind
The Green Face
White Lightning
The Glass Man
Violets
The Quiet Ones
Hornets
PREFACE
Some of these stories are old and dear friends of mine; others, after visiting them for the first time in ten or twenty years since their publication, seem like new ones. I was particularly pleased to reread one tale and be totally surprised by the ending: is that craftsmanship allied to a bad memory, which I have ever owned, or merely incipient senility? Two stories are brand new to both of us.
In any event, dear reader, I do hope you find something herein to enjoy, and, more importantly, something that scares you...
Al Sarrantonio – May, 2003
The Ropy Thing
The ropy thing got most of the neighborhood while Suzie and Jerry were watching Saturday morning cartoons on TV. Then the cable went out and Jerry's dad put on the radio but then that went out too. By then Suzie and Jerry were watching the ropy thing from the big picture window in Jerry's living room. The ropy thing was very fast, and sometimes they saw only its tip stretched high and straight, or formed into a loop, or snaking over a house or between trees or moving over cars. It hesitated, then shot into the moving van in front of Suzie's house across the street, pulling a fat uniformed mover out, coiling around him head to toe like a mummy and then yanking him down into the ground. It pulled Suzie's mom into the ground too, catching her as she tried to run back into the house from where she had been directing the movers from the curb.
"We're getting out!" Jerry's dad shouted, giving Jerry a strange look, and the ropy thing got him in the front yard between the garage and the car. Behind him was Jerry's mom, with an armful of pillows, and the ropy thing got her too. It got Jerry's sister, Jane, as she was sneaking away from the house to be with her boyfriend, Brad, down the block. Suzie and Jerry watched the ropy thing jump out of the bushes in front of Brad's house like a coiled black spring, getting Jane right in front of Brad, just as she reached to hold his hand. Brad turned to run but it got him too, shooting up out of the lawn and over the sidewalk, thin and fast. It whipped around Brad and squeezed him into two pieces, top and bottom, then pulled both halves down.
Suzie and Jerry ran up to the attic, and the ropy thing snaked up around the house but didn't climb that high and then went away. From the small octagonal attic window they watched it wrap around the Myers' house and pull the Myers' baby from the second-story window. Then it curled like a cat around the Myers' house's foundation, circling three times around and twitching, and stayed there.
"This is just like—" Jerry said, turning to Suzie, fear in his voice. "I know," Suzie said, hushing him.
When they looked back at the Myers' house all the windows were broken and the porch posts had been ripped away, and the ropy thing was gone. They spied it down the block to the right, waving lazily in the air before whipping down; then they saw it up the block to the left, moving between two houses into the street to catch a running boy who looked like Billy Carson.
The day rose, a summer morning with nothing but heat.
The afternoon was hotter, an oven in the attic.
The ropy thing continued its work.
They discovered that the ropy thing could climb as high as it wanted when they retrieved Jerry's dad's binoculars and found the ropy thing wrapped like a boa constrictor around the steeple of the Methodist church in the middle of town, blocks away. It pulled something small, kicking and too far away to hear, out of the belfry and then slid down and away.
"I'm telling you it's—" Jerry said again.
Peering through the binoculars, Suzie again hushed him, but not before he finished: "—just like my father's trick."
They spent that night in the attic with the window cracked open for air. The ropy thing was outside, moving under the light of the moon. Twice it came close, once breaking the big picture window on the ground floor, then shooting up just in front of the attic window, tickling the opening with its tip, making Jerry, who was watching, gasp, but then flying away.
They found a box of crackers and ate them. The ropy thing's passings in front of the moon made vague, dark-gray shadows on the attic's ceiling and walls.
"Do you think it's happening everywhere?" Jerry asked.
"What do you think?" Suzie replied, and then Jerry remembered Dad's battery shortwave radio that pulled in stations from all over the world. It was in the back of the attic near the box of flashlights.
He got it and turned it on, and up and down the dial there was nothing but hissing.
"Everywhere..." Jerry whispered.
"Looks that way," Suzie answered.
"It can't be..." Jerry said.
Suzie ate another cracker.
Suddenly, Jerry dropped the radio and began to cry. "But it was just a trick my father played on me! It wasn't real!"
"It seemed real at the time, didn't it?" Suzie asked.
Jerry continued to sob. "He was always playing tricks on me! After I swallowed a cherry pit he hid a bunch of leaves in his hand and made believe he pulled them from my ear—he told me the cherry pit had grown inside and that I was now filled with a cherry tree! Another time he swore that a spaceship was about to land in the backyard, then he made me watch out the big picture window while he snuck into the back and threw a toy rocket over the roof so that it came down in front of me!" He looked earnest and confused. "He was always doing things like that!"
"You believed the tricks while they were happening, didn't you?" Suzie asked.
"Yes! But—"
"Maybe if you believe something hard enough, it happens for real."
Jerry was frantic. "But it was just a trick! You were with me, you saw what he did! He buried a piece of rope in the backyard, then brought us out and pulled the rope partway out of the ground and said it was part of a giant monster, the Ropy Thing, which filled up the entire Earth until it was just below the surface—and that anytime it wanted it would throw out its ropy tentacles and grab everybody, and pull them down and suck them into its pulsating jelly body—"