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.
Grinning, Frye said, “See how you like it, bitch.” And he slammed the door.
The rear lawn was no more than twenty yards long, but to Tony it appeared to be at least a mile from the porch to the place where Frye was standing. He slipped and fell in the wet grass, taking some of the fall on his wounded shoulder. A brilliant light played behind his eyes for a moment, and then an iridescent darkness, but he resisted the urge to just lay there. He got up.
He saw Frye close the doors and lock them. Hilary had to be on the other side, shut in.
Tony covered the last ten feet of the lawn with the awful certainty that Frye would turn and see him. But the big man continued to face the doors. He was listening to Hilary, and she was screaming. Tony slipped up on him and put the knife between his shoulder blades.
Frye cried out in pain and turned.
Tony stumbled backwards, praying that he had inflicted a mortal wound. He knew he could not win in hand-to-hand combat with Frye–especially not when he had the use of only one arm.
Frye reached frantically behind, trying to grab the knife that Tony had rammed into him. He wanted to pull it out of himself, but he could not reach it.
A thread of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
Tony backed up another step. Then another.
Frye staggered toward him.
Hilary stood on the top step, pounding on the locked doors. She screamed for help.
Behind her, the whispering in the dark cellar grew louder with each shattering thump of her heart.
She risked a glance backward, shining the light down the steps. Just the sight of the humming mass of insects made her gag with revulsion. The room below appeared to be waist-deep in roaches. A huge pool of them shifted and swayed and hissed in such a way that it seemed almost as if there was only one organism down there, one monstrous creature with countless legs and antennae and hungry mouths.
She realized that she was still screaming. Over and over again. Her voice was getting hoarse. She couldn’t stop.
Some of the insects were venturing up the steps in spite of her light. Two of them reached her feet, and she stamped on them. Others followed.