The Dead Town

Chapter 29

Suddenly an ardent believer in everything that he previously disbelieved, from extraterrestrials to Satan, Frost sprinted across the room, past the eye-in-the-tongue still lying on the bed, and into the upstairs hallway. His heart galloped and he heard himself gasping for breath. He knew that he was sprinting as fast as he ever had, ever could, but he felt that he moved in slow motion, through air as resistant as water, his legs as leaden as those of a deep-sea diver in a pressure suit and a massive helmet, trudging across the ocean floor.

Even above the desperate bellows of his ragged breathing and the slamming of his feet, Frost heard his pursuer, a buzzing-hissing-sizzling-zippering that was all those things and yet none of them, nothing like the sly slithering noise that had come from the cocoon, a never-before-heard sibilation, now a wet and clearly biological sound but now as dry as windblown sand.

At the midpoint of the hallway, he turned right toward the open staircase, and as he changed directions, he glanced back. The thing wasn’t giving chase in either its womanly form or as the amorphous mass of seething tissue that it had been when it sucked in the last of Dagget. Now it manifested as an airborne silvery-gray mass, as dense as smoke, a teeming and twinkling swarm that might have been insects so tiny that the eye could not discern any details of them, billions upon billions. But he knew in fact they were together the body of the woman who came from the cocoon, nothing as ordinary as insects, but the substance of the woman now a racing cloud of gray that, falling upon him, would render him as rapidly as Dagget had been rendered.

Pistol in hand but under no delusion that it would be effective, Frost plunged down the stairs. The swarm passed overhead, perhaps intending to swoop around and into his face and dissolve the eyes out of his skull as they entered and possessed him. In passing, however, they encountered the chandelier above, a many-armed brass affair with amber-glass cups containing flame-shaped bulbs. They sizzled through it, dissolving the chain from which it was suspended and the cord from which it drew power, leaving the foyer lit only by the staircase lights and a soffit light above the door.

The extinguished chandelier fell but only half as fast as gravity demanded, borne by the boiling cloud of ravenous microscopic mites, descending toward the ground floor like a ship slowly sinking through the fathoms, diminishing as it went because it was being consumed in its fall. What reached the foyer below was in the end only the cloud, the swarm, no twist of metal or shard of glass remaining of the chandelier.

Just past the landing, on the lower of the two curving flights of stairs, Frost halted. Death waited below him. The swarm appeared less bright now, less silvery, darker shades of gray … and clotted. It looked more like dirty water than like smoke, slopping around in the foyer, lapping at the walls, seeming to build a tide toward the lower hallway that led back into the house, but then rolling toward the front door.

In spite of its watery appearance, the swarm didn’t make liquid sounds, still buzzed and hissed and sizzled, but the tone had become lower, less the furious zeeeeee of angry wasps, more the grumbling drone of bumblebees. Through the spiraling currents of this pool, which included numerous whorls that intersected and spun off new coils and curls, there bobbled what appeared to be lumpy forms more coherent than the rest, though they seemed to dissolve as new lumps formed elsewhere.

Frost might have fled back to the second floor, to leave the house by an upper window and a porch roof, if instinct had not said Wait. Weak-kneed and shaking on the stairs, he slipped his pistol in the shoulder rig under his jacket. He gripped the railing with his left hand to steady himself, leaned against it. With his right sleeve, he wiped at the cold sweat that stippled his brow.

In the foyer below him, under a mirror, stood a narrow side table holding three ceramic vases of different sizes. The gray tide washed under it, around its legs. For a moment the table seemed to be of no interest to that voracious multitude, but then the slender legs began to dissolve. The table tipped forward, and the vases slid off. They didn’t shatter as they fell into the pool, but bobbled briefly before apparently dissolving. The table came apart and the pieces were briefly flotsam before deliquescing out of sight into the spiral currents.

Intuition needed a while to be heard through the roar of Frost’s terror, but finally he began to suspect that the swarm had lost track of him. There was something aimless in its motion as it swashed back and forth in the foyer, as though it had forgotten its purpose and quested this way and that, in search of some reminder of what it had been pursuing.

Frost suspected that if he moved or in any way drew attention to himself, he might inspire an attack. He leaned against the railing and quieted his breathing.

Dagget was dead. They had been not just partners but also best friends. Frost wanted revenge. But he knew there would be none. The best he could hope for was to survive. And with his sanity.