“Dad!” he yelled with a slur, his mouth swollen. “Kayla! Lisa! Mom!”
And then he passed out.
“What were they?” the doctor asked. “Where did they come from?”
Edgar didn’t feel like talking. Even if he did, he had no answer for the man.
They stood in a curtained-off section of the emergency room, surrounded by the sounds of medical machines beeping, the murmur of voices, the squeak of gurneys rolling along the hallway; a child cried in the distance. Everything smelled of ammonia and disinfectant. It was all extremely depressing.
Edgar stared down at his son lying on the bed, eyes closed. Every inch of the boy’s body looked red and puffy, pockmarked with hundreds of black dots. Lorena and Lisa cried in the corner, clutching little Kayla in a three-way hug. Edgar felt certain his heart had broken into two pieces and was slowly sinking to his stomach.
Tick had always been a lucky kid. Edgar liked to joke that Tick had been born clutching a rabbit’s foot. When Tick had been only five years old, the family had taken a shopping trip to Spokane and Tick had darted for the middle of a busy road, already two steps past the curb before Edgar even noticed. Even as Edgar had sprinted to save his boy, he watched in utter horror as a huge truck, blaring its horn and screeching its brakes, seemingly ran right over Tick. Edgar would never forget the scream that erupted from his own throat at that moment, an alien sound that still haunted his dreams sometimes.
But when the truck passed, Tick stood there in the street, untouched, his hair not so much as ruffled. It had been nothing short of a miracle.
Then, a few years later, the family had gone to the coast for a summer trip, enjoying a rare hot and sunny day on the Washington beach. Tick, showing off his newly discovered body-surfing talent, had been swept away by a sudden and enormous wave, sucking him out to sea. The current pulled the poor boy from the soft sands directly into an area of jagged, vicious rocks nearby. Edgar and Lorena barely had time to register the shock and terror of what was happening before they saw Tick standing on a jutting shoulder of stone, waving with a huge smile on his face.
Or the time he fell off the big waterslide tower at Water World Park, only to land on a pile of slip ’n slide tubes left there by a family eating lunch.
The stories went on and on. They never talked about it; Edgar was afraid to jinx the whole thing, and he had no idea if Tick even realized anything out of the ordinary was happening. Kids rarely do-life is life, and they know nothing different until much later.
But despite all that he’d seen of Tick’s narrow escapes, Edgar couldn’t help but feel the panic rising in his chest. Had the boy’s streak of luck finally run out? Would he survive this-
“What happened? ” the doctor repeated.
“I don’t know,” Edgar mumbled. “A bunch of bugs, or bees, or gnats, or something attacked him. I threw him in the bathtub, shooed the things away with a towel. They stayed in a tight pack, and when I opened a window, they flew right out.”
The doctor looked at Edgar, his expression full of doubt and concern, eyebrows raised. “ You shooed them away?”
“Yes, I did.” Edgar knew the man’s concern before he said it.
“But you-”
“I know, Doctor, I know.” He paused. “I didn’t get stung. Not once.”
Chapter 10
Tick could think of a million things he’d rather do than get stung all over his body by mechanical gnats that popped out of a demon lunch box with legs. It was a long list and included being dropped in a boiling vat of vinegar and having his toenails removed with hot pincers. Two days after the attack, he’d returned home from the hospital feeling and looking much better, but the experience remained vivid in his mind, playing itself out over and over again. Without any doubt, he knew the Gnat Rat and its stinging bugs had been the single worst thing that had ever happened to him. And that included the time Billy “The Goat” Cooper had almost broken Tick’s arm in front of the girls’ locker room.
Despite the lingering horror he felt, Tick was madly curious to know where the Gnat Rat had come from. And where it had gone. The boxy contraption must have disappeared right after releasing the bugs because his dad said he never saw it and saw no signs of a nest or a hole anywhere in the walls or floorboard. The Rat would’ve been impossible to miss since Tick had collapsed right next to it in his room. The thing had simply vanished-or run away to whatever magical hole it lived in. Either way, Tick knew he could never look at the world in the same way again, and the knowledge made him feel sick, fascinated, and scared, all at the same time.
The doctors had probed him over and over, not bothering to hide their suspicion that some serious child abuse had occurred. But they found dozens of stingers, just like the ones that came from a normal yellow jacket common to the area. That finding, coupled with the obvious fact that Edgar and Lorena Higginbottom were perhaps the two nicest people to ever live in Deer Park, and quite possibly the world, quickly dissolved the distrust of the doctors toward the parents.
Though they said no fewer than a hundred times how impossible it seemed that the bees targeted Tick and no one else, let alone the fact that bees rarely attacked during the middle of winter, the doctors eventually let the matter drop and sent Tick home.
I must have some seriously sweet blood, Tick thought, picking at the bandages covering his arms.
The only thing more baffling than the lone victim and the Gnat Rat disappearing was how quickly Tick healed. He almost felt disappointed he wouldn’t miss more than a couple of days of school. Almost.
Now, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling late the next Tuesday night, he couldn’t sleep. More than ever before in his life, Tick felt terribly afraid. His life was at risk, and for what?
He’d put on a show for his family, acting brave and cracking jokes, but he knew he did it more for himself than anyone else. He didn’t want to accept the horror of what he’d experienced, didn’t want to accept the potential for worse things to come. But the fear crashed down on him after dinner and he’d never felt so hopeless.
Sighing, he sat up in bed and retrieved the letter and clues from his desk drawer, staring at them for a long moment. As he did, he felt the last ounce of bravery drain from his spirit. Quietly, he crept from his room and took the letters downstairs to the living room.
It was the only room in the house with a fireplace.
Twenty minutes later, the gas-log fire had heated the entire room, its blower wafting warm and comforting air across Tick’s face as he sat directly in front of it, staring at the licking flames. The rest of his family had long since fallen asleep, and he had been extra, extra careful not to wake his freakishly light-sleeping dad. This was Tick’s moment of truth and he needed to be alone.
He gripped the first letter tightly in his right hand, clenching a fist around the wrinkled cardstock. He didn’t know how it worked, but he trusted the instruction told to him by the mystery-person, M.G. If ever he wanted it to stop, just burn the letter and everything would “cease and desist.” Tick had no doubt it was true, just as he had no doubt that Gnat Rats, Tingle Wraiths, and an eight-foot-tall woman named Mothball really and truly existed.
Burn the letter, stop the madness.
The thought had run through his mind a thousand times since he’d first come to consciousness after the brutal gnat attack. Only two clues in-ten to go-and he wanted to quit. Desperately wanted to quit. How could he keep going, when things worse than the Gnat Rat might attack him? How could he, Atticus Higginbottom, a kid with a pretty decent brain but the body of a thirteen year old, fight the forces that some unknown enemy threw at him? How could he do it?