The Children(105)

With each step she felt herself softening, like wax awaiting a seal. Whatever happened next, she would carry its imprint forever. Receptive and hungry and terrified, she walked through the factory doors.





Fifty-Seven

2004




Guinevere.

She was asleep. Safe beside Ennis as he took first watch.

Guinevere.

The voice came from everywhere. Her brother’s voice.

Guinevere. Wake—

“—up.”

She did. Ennis had her by the shoulder and he was talking very fast.

“Get up. Get up now, please, right now.”

She gaped at him, trying to place herself. It was dark and he was dressed, sweatshirt hood pulled tight. “Ennis? What’s happening?”

“Come on!”

She looked to the closed door. There was something out there, making a dense, uneasy sound. “What is that?”

He gave a gasping sob, so forlorn it squeezed her heart like a fist. His right hand held her shoulder. His left was drawn to his chest, wrapped in a kitchen towel. The towel was—she jerked upright, shimmying back against the headboard—covered in blood.

“Who did that?” Her voice came out in a whisper. He flinched like she’d shouted.

“No one. I’ll tell you when we’re outside.”

“Outside? I don’t—”

“Guinevere, stand up,” he barked.

Muscle memory took over. She’d been following Ennis her entire life.

At the door he stopped, his sister behind him and his right hand on the knob. The badness on the other side was louder.

“When I say run, you run.”

She shook her head no. No to all of it, the noise and the running and the whole endless night. “Run from what?”

He opened the door. “Run.”



* * *




Guinevere stood right there. Frozen by the sight of the hall behind him, framed like a plague painting by the doorway. He had to reach for her, pulling her from his bedroom and into the storm.

She didn’t scream. There was no time. She mashed her lips together and screwed her eyes shut as the storm whipped around her. It was made entirely of bees.

Thousands of them, black as flies in the underlit hall. Bees hit her mouth, neck, eyelids. They rattled in the cups of her ears. Running wasn’t possible, so she moved step by step, a sailor in a gale.

Guinevere understood madness then. She’d been reading about it half her life. Wives in locked places, Lear on the heath. She hadn’t known how close insanity could keep. It was right here, beating at the folds of her nightgown.

Above the relentless vibration she could hear banging, shouting. It seemed to her the whole house was awake. Later she would know it was Ennis, just Ennis, beating at all the bedroom doors.

Her bare foot stepped forward into nothing, came down hard on the first descending stair. The storm was thinning and she hurried, up on her toes, sucking in breath, bees gusting into her mouth and then out of it. The front door was ahead of her, but the bees got there first, crawling thickly over the knob.

Forget insanity, she was an animal. Pivoting balletically, crossing the house, the worst part of it the hall where someone had left a lamp on. After the gold-bellied dark of the second floor the light here was clinical, a nightmare tunnel of furred legs, alien eyes, quivering mandibles. The door, the door, the back door. The knob was bee-less—small miracle—and she opened it, screaming at last as she ran into the night.

They were all around her, a buzzing, crawling cloud. And then, with startling suddenness, she was free.

She didn’t trust it. On the grass she turned in circles, beating at her nightgown, sweeping hands over her neck, spitting away the feeling of bees on her lips and tongue. When she looked back they were still coming for her, streaming out the open back door. Sweeping infantry lines of bees, reaching for her like fingers, then . . . dropping to the grass.

All of them. Not slowing in the cold, not flagging or struggling. Just falling down dead a yard or so from the open door, as if hitting a sheet of invisible glass. She could actually hear their little bodies raining over the lawn. It was the sound a sun-shower makes, bursting over you from an empty sky. When she looked down all the bees she’d shaken from her clothes lay still.

The moon was new, the dark thick as fur. The grass was wet and she was barefoot. She hugged herself, watching the windows. Why was she alone? Where was her brother, her parents? She tried to scream for them and couldn’t get the shape of it past her throat.

Then, in the kitchen, a snap of light. A glow. She took a step toward it, involuntarily. Though she knew it wasn’t right, she thought, Birthday cake.

Guinevere watched it brighten. Her upper arms would be striped later in bruises from how tightly she gripped them. It wasn’t the steady illumination of old bulbs but a leonine flicker. It prowled and brightened. It began to leap.

Fire.

“Ennis!”

The word tore itself free at last. And there he was, pelting toward her over black grass, bees clattering down behind him. “Guin,” he said, and grabbed her, patting at her arms, her cheeks, all the skin he could see.

He was checking for stings. It seemed impossible that she could’ve made it through the storm unmarked. But it was true, she didn’t have a single one. “You?” she rasped.