In Constant Fear Read online

  We started off back down that track a damn sight faster than we went up, and with the light fading, where the trees were at their thickest, my old eyes were really starting to struggle and I had to keep hitting the brakes, bringing us almost to a halt so I could work out which way the track was going, then gather up a bit of speed again. Even then there were a couple of occasions when we almost came off, but you know, just when I started to think it might be safest to walk, I felt her hands on either side of my hips.

  “Keep going,” she said.

  “I can’t see,” I told her, feeling that bit embarrassed.

  “Keep going!” she urged, starting to twist my body this way and that, and I realized she was intent on doing the steering for me.

  “Lena!” I protested, again hitting the brakes.

  “Clancy . . . trust me!” she cried impatiently.

  It wasn’t easy—I mean, she was blind, for chrissake, how could she possibly see better than me? I kept slowing and stretching my fingers out for the brakes, but each time I did she got more and more irritated.

  “No!” she shouted angrily, and I knew it’d become something of a test: that I had to trust her, I had to go along with what she was saying—otherwise what sorta relationship did we have? But she was trying to direct me through areas where the forest was so thick I could barely see, and at speeds I wouldn’t’ve been comfortable about in the daylight and out in the open. A couple of times she left it so late, I braced myself for the impact, but at the last moment she swerved me away from the tree looming up before us. The irony was, the deeper, the darker, into the woods we went, the more I became the blind one, the more she became the one who could see.

  It was those special skills of hers again, that she’d acquired down in the tunnels those four years she’d spent alone underground—the ones I’d once mistakenly thought the Doc wanted her for. She could hear sounds bouncing off hard surfaces—in this case, I guessed, the trunks of the trees—and maybe she was cross-referencing that with her sense of smell to map out what was around us.

  Whatever her method, I gotta say, it made for one of the most hair-raising rides of my life as we slid one way, then another, the two wheels at the back scrambling to maintain grip, threatening to skid right off the track. Lena was whooping and laughing away, having the time of her life, maybe ’cuz she knew that if we did hit a tree, I was gonna be her personal airbag.

  At last the forest began to thin and I could feel her insight fading; the fewer trees there were around us, the closer she was to being blind again. Fortunately, with more light, I was able to regain control.

  “Want to go again?” she laughed.

  “Nah. Not really,” I replied, trying to sound like I just couldn’t be bothered; but you know, when we reached the road, I felt so damn pumped up, I started laughing along with her.

  “You’re a miracle and I love you,” I shouted.

  She took me completely by surprise, throwing herself at me, wrapping her arms around mine—no way could I keep control, and we veered off the road and into a nearby tree with such accuracy, you might’ve thought I’d aimed for it.

  We had to walk the last couple of miles, still chuckling away every now and then, knowing we’d be in big trouble with Jimmy for buckling the front wheel of his invention, but in a way, it was the perfect end to a perfect evening, when even what went wrong was right.

  I put my arm around her as we went to enter the house, still unable to resist taking a quick glance back: I gotta say, that valley looked about as quiet and peaceful as an angel’s graveyard.

  I was actually hoping, even expecting, not to see that view again that night, what with clearing the irrigation channels, going for our tandem ride and just the general mood of contentment between Lena and me. Any normal person would’ve followed that up with a good seven or eight hours of honest slumber—but not me.

  Thomas got going a little after two, in full cry, though it was actually Lena nudging me that really brought me around. I stumbled over to the wardrobe, almost tripping over my boots and sprawling headlong. Yeah, I love him, he’s my own little guy, my flesh and blood, but there are times . . .

  I took him outside, the night dull and dim, the moon covered by a dozen different veils—the world itself sleeping.

  I don’t know how long it was before I knew something was wrong. I’d just been doing my usual thing, pacing around the farmyard, jigging and shushing Thomas, when suddenly I felt it: this sense that in the deadness of night, the world was actually coming to life. I stopped, holding the little guy that bit closer to me, staring all around us, trying to work out what the hell it was. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear, just this sense of . . . movement! It wasn’t the wind—there was none to speak of—but there was something: a force, a dissipating electricity leaking out into the night, faintly crackling all around me.

  The first one I saw, I didn’t even put the two things together. I suddenly noticed something was crawling up my leg: small, black, moving quite slowly—maybe some kinda weevil? But no sooner did I realize that was what it was then I saw others making their way up my pants, over my boots, covering the ground around me—there were thousands of them! No wonder I’d had the feeling the world was on the march: an army, a crawling black, wriggling army was encircling me and now venturing up my body.

  I started to back away, trying to work out what direction they were traveling in so I could hopefully step aside. I thought it must be some kinda migration, but the moment I changed direction, they did the same. I turned to run but they were all around me, more and more of them, their gathering mass slowly turning my pants black, crawling up my back and front. I tried to brush them off, to sweep them away, but it wasn’t easy with a baby in my arms. They were everywhere, and the most disturbing part—that at first I couldn’t believe—was that they seemed to be targeting Thomas, finding their way into his blanket, navigating the tucks and folds, doing their best to get to the little guy.

  I brushed one off his soft, little head, another from his arm, at the same moment aware of several wriggling down my neck and starting to crawl around inside my shirt. Thomas began to wail, no doubt panicked by what he couldn’t understand, maybe by my distress, and damned if one of them didn’t try to scuttle into his mouth. I swept it away and stamped on it. Jesus, what kinda nightmare was this?

  I ran toward the house, squashing them underfoot, stripping the little guy as I went, throwing away his blanket, his clothes, even his diaper. I could feel them sneaking around all over me, finding any way in they could: up the legs of my pants, my sleeves, down the front of my shirt—my whole body seemed to be wriggling and squirming. But it was the way they were converging on Thomas that was really spooking me, as if they somehow knew this tiny, unprotected baby was the vulnerable one, the weakness they should exploit.

  I burst through the front door, ran through to the bathroom and turned on the water; Gordie soon following on behind, wondering what the hell was going on.

  “Block the front door!” I cried, sweeping weevils off me and Thomas, stamping on them the moment they hit the ground. “Anywhere they can get in.”

  For a moment he just gaped at me, barely believing what he was seeing, then he ran through the house, calling to Hanna and Gigi to come out and help.

  I juggled Thomas from one arm to the other while taking off my clothes, the little guy still wailing as loudly as he could, even before I was naked, jumping into the shower and washing those things away, crushing them before nudging them toward the drain.

  Suddenly Lena appeared in the doorway. “What’s going on?” she asked, bewildered.

  “I dunno. Some kind of weevil,” I told her. “There are thousands of them out there.”

  “Is he okay?” she said, Thomas’s crying not having lessened a single decibel.

  “Yeah, just a little spooked,” I told her, trying to sound as calm as I could. “I think a few might’ve got in the house.”

  Without another word, she went to see if sh
e could help. I could hear Jimmy and Delilah joining in, the sound of stamping feet mingled with the shrieks of disgust echoing throughout the house. As I got out of the shower, a weevil fell from my hair onto Thomas’s chest and immediately scuttled up his neck, trying to get to his face. I flicked it off and stamped on it. The body had a kind of hard shell that crunched beneath my foot, but there was something soft, almost liquid, inside.

  “Shall I take him?” Lena asked, again appearing in the doorway.

  I handed him to her; the little guy still giving it all he had, flushed and bulging, as if he was constipated or something, and she took him away, shushing him as she walked through to the bedroom, I guessed to try to calm him with a feed. I dried myself and wrapped a towel around me before grabbing my clothes, opening the window and throwing them out. I’d deal with them later. A couple of weevils fell out and down onto the floor and went scampering away to hide, but I managed to stamp on them, then returned to the shower to wash my feet.

  When I finally went out, the others appeared to have the situation under control; still finding the odd insect crawling around, but one by one killing them off, leaving the floor covered in this slippery greenish liquid.

  “What the hell was that about?” I said.

  “Some kind of natural phenomenon, I guess,” Jimmy said, looking as disturbed as anyone. “Like a plague of locusts or something.”

  “You reckon?” I said, taking a quick look out the window, but it was too dark to see if they were still there.

  “Yuk!” Hanna squealed, finding a couple crawling up the back of her leg. She brushed them off and stamped on them, that green liquid squirting out again. “Disgusting!”

  “Did they bite or sting anyone?” I asked, but no one had suffered anything more than a fright. “Weird,” I commented. “Just weird.”

  “What about the wheat?” Hanna suddenly asked, and everyone paused for a moment. I mean, none of us were that knowledgeable about farming, but I guess we kinda knew that was what weevils did: they ate the stuff you tried to grow.

  “I ain’t gonna look,” Delilah quickly chipped in.

  “I’ll go,” Gigi said, as always, out to prove a point.

  “No one’s opening that door again tonight,” I said, going to check that any gaps were completely sealed.

  “I don’t mind,” Gigi persisted.

  “Well, I do. We’re not chancing letting those things in again. We’ll worry about what they’ve done in the morning.”

  One by one we returned to our beds, but for once, I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep. We had this real fear that they might be trying to get in elsewhere, that there were thousands of them climbing all over the house searching for a weakness. Thank God, ’cuz of the cold winter nights, the windows’d all been double-glazed and sealed and the floors were solid. The only possible other entry point—and once I thought about it, it did really concern me—was the chimney. Would they climb up there and find a way down? It worried me so much that, no matter how unlikely it might’ve been, I went and built the fire up so high, flames were leaping halfway up the chimney. No way was a weevil gonna come down there.

  When I finished, I made one last inspection of the house, then rejoined Lena in bed. Not only was she awake, she had Thomas sleeping with her.

  “Okay?” she whispered.

  “As if we ain’t got enough problems,” I grumbled, gently sliding into bed beside her, not wanting to bounce Thomas awake.

  For a while we just lay there with the baby fidgeting and whimpering, the light left on in case we had any more unwanted visitors, then finally Lena said, “Clancy?”

  “Mm?”

  “. . . I’m scared.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her, “come morning, they’ll all be gone.”

  “Not just of them.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, turning to face her.

  She had that slightly wild intensity about her she sometimes got, when I reckoned she’d’ve given anything to have her sight restored, if only for a few seconds. “Don’t you see? The animals, the insects, even the plants . . . there’s something’s wrong with them.”

  No matter how badly you sleep, it’s surprising how you can easily make it worse. Sometimes when people say “I never closed my eyes all night,” what they really mean is, “not so I noticed, but pardon my snoring every now and then.” When I say, “I never closed my eyes all night,” I mean it: not so much as a blink.

  At first I didn’t pay too much attention to what Lena’d said; it was pretty far-fetched—she’d just been upset about all those weevils crawling over Thomas—but her words kept coming back to me, worrying me a little more each time. It was kinda odd, as if Nature was going against its own nature, and that couldn’t be right. Those last few days had really been something: seeing Nora Jagger again, the invasion of the weevils, not to mention those two punks spontaneously combusting. What Doctor Simon had said about them probably being implant guinea pigs, that did kinda ring true, but it also added to this growing sense that in some way our existence was being distorted. I just didn’t get it. Not that I felt I was lacking in any way—’cuz I don’t reckon anyone else got it either.

  I did finally manage half-an-hour or so of “death sleep”: that narrow crevasse you fall into around about four or five, that when you wake, it feels as if you were mighty lucky, that death played with you for a while and then let you go. I forced myself up, leaving Lena still sleeping, and Thomas, too—probably ’cuz he was exhausted by the previous night.

  The first thing I did was to take a good look out the window, but there wasn’t a weevil to be seen, not even a dead one. The stuff we’d used to block up the gaps around the front door—wadded paper, torn-down curtains, whatever—had been removed, so I guessed someone’d already gone out. From the porch I could see the barn door was open, which presumably meant Jimmy was already over there and working. I ambled across, needing to talk to the little guy, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to say.

  As I walked in, he was struggling with the bent front wheel of the tandem, muttering away to himself.

  “Sorry,” I told him.

  “Not cool,” he complained. “Fork’s bent, wheel’s buckled.”

  “I’ll help,” I told him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, both of us knowing he was never happier than when solving a mechanical or technological problem, no matter how mundane.

  For a while I just stood there watching him, how comfortable he looked with a wrench in his hand, like an artist with his brush.

  “Those damn things last night—what the hell was that all about?” I eventually commented.

  “Frightened the life outta Lile,” he said, as if it hadn’t been a problem for him.

  “Didn’t do a lot for me,” I told him. “It was almost like they were attacking us.”

  “Nah,” Jimmy sneered, spinning the front wheel of the tandem, still not satisfied it was straight, “just passing through, eating their way around the country.”

  “Did you check the wheat?” I asked, realizing I should’ve done that first off.

  “Every ripe ear’s gone.”

  “No!” I groaned.

  “Should’ve brought back the lasers,” he complained, as if we could’ve shot them all one by one.

  Without another word, I left him to go and look at the wheat fields, and sure enough, every golden grain had been stripped and eaten. I cursed repeatedly as I returned to Jimmy, finding him still bent over the tandem.

  “Shit,” I commented.

  “Thank God it wasn’t all ripe.”

  “Might come back.”

  “Wouldn’t think so; they just keep going ’til they get to their breeding colony, or seasonal resting place, or whatever bugs do.”

  “Hope so.”

  Again I stood and watched as he dismantled the front of the tandem once more, pulling everything apart with such smoothness and precision it was like watching a motor-racing pit stop.

  �
�Lena’s got this, er . . . ‘concern,’” I eventually ventured.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “She thinks there might be a connection.”

  He turned to me, awaiting an explanation.

  “The way that wheat’s grown so quickly, animals and people bursting into flames, armies of invading insects . . .”

  He made this kinda bewildered face, as if to say “what the hell could possibly connect all that?”

  “Nora Jagger?” I tentatively suggested.

  At that he stopped and stared at me. “You think she’s trained an army of weevils?”

  I shrugged, knowing how crazy it sounded. “I dunno.”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past that bitch, but enlisting wolves and weevils—I’d like to see how she does it,” he commented, starting to chuckle. “And I guess the wheat’s gonna attack us in the middle of the night, too, huh? The revenge of the killer corn.”

  “Yeah, okay, Jimmy,” I said, always ready to defend Lena. “You gotta admit, there is something a little odd about it.”

  “Yeah, well . . . not gonna argue with that,” he agreed, spinning the wheel of the tandem again, this time apparently satisfied. “Okay. A little breakfast, then maybe I’ll go over and have a word with Nick. It might be great at growing, but he promised me that wheat was also parasite-proof.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A huge storm blew up later that morning, first enveloping the mountains and then sweeping down on us like some invading horde, battering the front porch, shaking the house on its foundations, bombarding us with water. The creek immediately swelled up like it was on steroids, getting all boisterous and aggressive, surging at everyone and everything, dashing down the irrigation channels we’d cut out so that soon the wheat fields were partly flooded and I wondered if what hadn’t been touched by weevils might well end up being spoiled anyway.

  It meant a whole day of doing nothing but staying inside. Jimmy canceled his plan to visit Nick, agreeing to do a few jobs around the house, but the kids were so fractious, it wasn’t long before he slipped out to his workshop. Hanna tried to practice her ballet on the front porch, but Gigi wouldn’t have it, complaining—no doubt as a matter of principle—that she’d been about to sit out there. Gordie tried his hand at peacemaker, but that only riled Gigi more, and in the end he retreated to the barn to help Jimmy. Meanwhile, Lena got into this long, low conversation with Delilah, which, though I barely heard a word of it, I had a pretty good idea what it was about.