"What the hell is this? A wake?" My grandpa came out of the house carrying a tray of buns. He looked from me to the silent farmers. "Anything wrong here?"
"Nah," Old Man Crawford said, smiling and downing the last of his beer. "Everything's fine."
The mood was broken, the tension dissipated, and the conversation returned to a normal, healthy buzz, though it now revolved around other, safer, topics.
I got up and went into the house, rummaging through the refrigerator for a Coke. Jan followed me in. "What was all that about?" she asked.
I found my Coke and closed the door. "You got me."
She shook her head, smiling slightly. "Ever get the feeling this is all a joke? Some trick they're playing on the rubes from the city?"
"You saw them," I said. "That was no joke. They were scared. Every one of those old bastards was scared. Jesus ..." I walked over to the screen door and looked toward the hillside. "Maybe we should go up there and look around." An expression of terror passed over Jan's face, and I laughed. "Then again, maybe we shouldn't."
We rejoined the party and sat in silence, effectively chastened, listening to the farmers talk. After a while the talk turned, as I knew it would, back to the hog mutilations. A lot of hostile glances were thrown in my direction, but this time I said nothing. I just listened.
"Herman looked fine when I went out to see him," Old Man Crawford said, running a hand through his thinning hair. "I just thought he was asleep. Then I heard, like, a buzzing coming from where he lay. I moved in a little closer, and I saw that his stomach had been sliced clean open." He made a slicing motion with his hand and his voice dropped. "He'd been gutted, all his innards taken out, and the inside of his body was nothing but thousands of flies."
A middle-aged farmer I didn't know, wearing grease-stained coveralls and a cowboy hat, nodded his head in understanding. "That's exactly what happened to my Marybeth. Flies all inside her. Even in her mouth. Just a-crawling around..."
"The bathhouse," my grandpa said, chewing the last bite of his hamburger.
Old Man Crawford nodded wisely. "What else could it be?"
That afternoon it rained—a heavy downpour of warm summer water which fell in endless torrents from the black clouds that had risen suddenly over the hills, and which formed miniature rivers and tributaries on the sloping ground outside the farmhouse. We sat in the kitchen, the three of us, talking and watching the rain.
"Good for the crops," my grandpa said, holding his leg as he limped over to the window. "It's been a helluva dry summer."
I nodded my head in agreement, not saying anything. Jan and I had decided that we would ask him about the bathhouse that afternoon—the real story—and I was trying to figure out how to broach the subject. I watched my grandpa staring out the window, looking small and frail and old, and listened silently to the depressing sound of rainwater gushing through the metal gutter along the edge of the roof. I felt sad, all of a sudden, and I wasn't sure why. Then I realized that something had happened to the kitchen; it was different. It was no longer the warm quaint kitchen of my grandparents but the curiously empty kitchen of an unhappy old man—a stranger. The feeling hit me abruptly, inexplicably, and for some reason I felt like crying. I no longer felt like asking about the bathhouse. I didn't care. But I saw Jan staring at me quizzically from across the table, and I forced myself to speak. "Uh, Grandpa?"
He turned around. "Yeah?"
He was silhouetted against the screen, the rain in back of him, and his face was entirely in shadows. He didn't look like my grandpa. I looked across the table at Jan, and she too looked different. Older. I could see the wrinkles starting.
She motioned for me to go on.
I cleared my throat. "I'd like you to tell me a bit more about the bathhouse."
He walked forward, nodding, and as he came closer his face once again became visible. And once again he was my grandpa. "Yeah," he said. "I've been expecting this. I was wondering when you were going to ask." He sat down in his familiar chair, holding his leg. A sudden gust of wind blew the screen door open then closed. Our faces were lightly splattered with water spray. He looked from Jan to me, and his voice was low, serious. "You feel it, don't you? You know it's here."
I felt unexpectedly cold, and I shivered, instinctively massaging the gooseflesh on my bare arms. Jan, I noticed, was doing the same, hugging herself tightly. Outside, the rain abated somewhat.
"It's like a magnet," my grandpa said. "It draws you to it. You hear about it, or you see it from far off, and you start thinking about it. It takes up more and more of your thoughts. You want to go to it." He looked at Jan. "Am I right?"
She nodded.
His gaze turned to me. "You're going to have to go."
There was a finality about the words and a determination in the way he said them which scared me. "I thought you wanted us to stay away," I said. My voice sounded high, cracked, uncertain.
"Yeah," he said. "I did. But once it gets ahold of you, it never lets go." His voice became softer. "You have to go there."
I wanted to argue, to tell him off, to deny his words, but I couldn't. I knew, deep down, that he was right. I guess I'd known from the beginning.
He looked out the door. "Go after the rain stops," he said. "It's safe after the rain."
But his eyes were troubled.
We walked across the wet ground, our shoes sometimes slipping in the mud, sometimes getting caught in it. The midsummer dust had been washed from the grasses, from the plants, from the trees, and everything appeared exceptionally, unnaturally green. Overhead, the sky was a dark, solid gray broken by occasional rifts of clear, pure blue.
We walked forward, not looking back though we knew my grandpa stood on the porch of the house, watching. I don't know how Jan felt, but I was surprised to find that I was not scared. Not scared at all. I was not even apprehensive. I felt only a strange sort of disassociation; it was as if this was happening to someone else, and I was only an observer, a disinterested third party.
We passed through the wall of grasses and emerged in the clearing, just as I had in my dream. And the clearing, the bathhouse, and the other small shacks looked exactly as they had in the dream.
I was conscious of the fact that my reactions were replaying themselves along with the scene. I knew exactly what the bathhouse would look like, yet once again I was surprised by its smallness.
Jan grabbed my hand, as if for support. "Let's go in," she said. Her voice sounded strange, echoing, as though it was coming from far away.
But the spell dissolved as soon as we stepped through the doorway. I was again myself, and, for the first time in my life, I felt fear. Real fear.
Sheer and utter terror.
The room was covered with millions of flies. Literally millions.
Perhaps billions.
They covered every available space—walls, floor, and ceiling—giving the entire inside of the room a moving, shifting, black appearance. They rippled across the floor in waves and dripped from the ceiling in grotesque liquid stalactites, all shapes, sizes, and varieties. The noise was incredible—an absurdly loud sort of buzzing or humming which had definite tones and cadences. It sounded almost like a language.
Almost, but not quite.
Before I could say anything, Jan had stepped forward into the room, her right foot sinking several inches into the sea of squirming flies. But the tiny creatures did not climb up her leg. Indeed, they seemed not to notice her at all. It was as if she had stepped into a pool of black, stagnant water. "Come on," she said.