Suspenseful Tales Part 3

But it wasn't as bad as her scream when the wasps attacked her.

At a medical center in town, Karen lay on a bed, pumped up with drugs to counteract the wasps' venom. Her face was puffy, as if her skin were made of self-rising flour. She hardly resembled the pretty woman that he had married.

Karen was asleep, and had been for over an hour. Anthony paced across the room. Numerous relatives, including his Aunt Janice, were huddled around the bed, speaking in hushed tones.

In his rational mind, Anthony had dismissed the wasp attack as coincidence. The things just happened to be in the potatoes, and they were drawn to his wife, maybe because of her perfume. It was a terrible occurrence, but there was nothing particularly unusual about it.

You're lying to yourself, a pesky voice in his mind whispered. Those wasps were the work of the root woman. She sent them to torment you. Admit it. You don't know what the h.e.l.l you're dealing with.

He put a lid on that voice. It was nonsense. He was an educated man and ought to know better.

At least his wife's prognosis was encouraging. According to the doctor, she should be recovered and ready to leave for Atlanta by tomorrow.

Still, he hated the thought of spending one more night in this wretched place, one more night of bad dreams about that womana"

Anthony caught a snippet of his family's conversation. He stopped in his tracks.

"Did you say something about Sis Maggie?" he asked.

Aunt Janice bobbed her head. "You've got to apologize to that woman, Tony. She did this to you and your wife."

Hot blood surged to Anthony's face.

He pointed to the door. "Everyone, get out. Now."

"Buta"" Aunt Janice started.

"Out!" Anthony was trembling.

His family quietly shuffled out of the room. He shut the door.

"Apologize to Sis Maggie," he mumbled. "I don't apologize to anyone. Sis Maggie can kiss my a.s.s."

Karen's eyelids fluttered. He rushed to her side.

She said something in a whisper. He leaned down closer, to hear her.

"What did you say, honey?" he asked.

"This is . . . your fault, Tony," Karen said in a weak voice that nevertheless carried an undercurrent of anger. "Do . . . what your aunt says."

He raised up, his back rigid.

Karen blinked slowly, but resentment shone in her red-rimmed eyes.

"Fine," he said at last. "I'll find out where the old heifer lives and get this over with."

Anthony was deep in the country, driving on a narrow, b.u.mpy road. Aunt Janice had given him directions to the old hag's house. No one offered to come with him. They were scared.

"Ignorant fools," he muttered. He drew to a halt at a Stop sign, and consulted the directions that lay on his lap.

He was about to turn left, when he looked in the rearview mirror and saw a black cloud rolling toward him.

A swarm of bees.

His fingers clutched the steering wheel in a death grip.

I can't take anymore of this. Why won't they leave me alone? I'm on my way to apologize to the old hag!

The buzzing sound reached him. It was thunderous. The Mercedes seemed to vibrate in sync with the insects' buzzing.

He jammed the accelerator. The tires shrieked, and the car swerved crazily to the left. He barely avoided plunging into a ditch.

The bees chased after him.

You b.a.s.t.a.r.ds aren't going to catch me. I didn't spend seventy grand on this car for nothing.

Teeth gritted, he kept the gas pedal mashed to the floor. The engine roared.

The swarm receded, and soon became a black dot in the mirror.

But the bees were still out there, pursuing him. He had to take advantage of his lead.

Thankfully, Sis Maggie's place was around the next bend. He veered around the curve, and found himself in a long, dusty driveway. An old black Cadillac was parked in front of the tiny house.

"Let's get this over with," he said. He rocked to a halt beside the Cadillac, and hurried out of the car.

He glanced down the driveway.

The dark swarm rumbled around the corner. Hundreds of bees.

He was certain that they would sting him to death.

He raced to the front door. He twisted the k.n.o.b.

He didn't bother to knock. To h.e.l.l with good manners. He didn't have time.

The door opened. He plunged inside, slammed the door behind him.

He found himself in a cramped, dark living room. A shadowy shape sat in an overstuffed chair in the corner.

The air smelled strongly of exotic spices and herbs. Stuff he couldn't even name.

The shape across the room shifted.

"Sis Maggie?" Anthony said, hesitantly.

"What do you want, boy?" the elderly woman asked. Her voice was brittle. "Did you bring me a plate of ribs from yesterday?"

"Uh, no." He struggled to find wordsa"a new experience for him. Usually he always knew exactly what to say to get what he wanted from someone. "I've been having, uh, this problem . . . with bees."

Sis Maggie leaned forward on her cane. "You think I worked some roots to make them bees and such give you h.e.l.l?"

He shrugged. "My aunt and my wife seem to think that's the case."

"I wanna know what you think."

I think it's a bunch of backwoods, superst.i.tious bulls.h.i.t, he wanted to say, but didn't. And I think they believe you're some kind of witch, but in reality you're just an old, ugly woman who badly needs dentures. But he didn't say that, either.

What he said was this: "Honestly, I don't really know what to think. But I know why I came. I'm here to apologize, Sis Maggie. I treated you badly yesterday, and I'm sorry. I hope that you can forgive me."

Sis Maggie cackled, as if he had said the most humorous thing in the world.

Her anorexic-looking guide girl appeared in the hallway, glanced at Anthony, and looked at Sis Maggie with concern.

Wiping her eyes, still laughing, the old lady waved her away; the girl withdrew.

"I'll take away the bees," Sis Maggie said. She chuckled. "I know they were scaring you somethin' terrible. Everybody's scared of somethin'. Some of us are scared of a whole bunch of things."

"Thank you," he said. He blew out a deep breath.

Sis Maggie giggled, like a child. He didn't see what was so funny.

Maybe she was just plain crazy.

"Well . . . good-bye," he said. He bowed slightly, and turned to the door.

She was still giggling when he stepped outside. Old, demented woman. He doubted whether she really possessed any magical powers at all. She was just strange. Here in the deep South, ignorant people probably equated strangeness with someone having supernatural giftsa"being able to give the evil eye, work roots, or some such nonsense.

However, the swarm of bees had vanished.

He climbed in his Mercedes. He peeled out of the driveway and rolled back onto the road.

No bees followed him.

"It's over," he said. He laughed, but it was a stress-relief laugh. "I can't wait to get the h.e.l.l out of this place."

He reached to crank up the air conditioner. Refreshingly cool air hissed from the vents.

Then he frowned.

Something behind him was hissing, too.

He looked over his shoulder.

He immediately felt as though someone had poured ice water down his pants.

An emerald-green snake was coiled on the backseat.

Cursing, he wrestled the steering wheel, forcing the car to the shoulder of the road.

Before he could reach for the door handle, a creature, long, black, and serpentine, slipped out of the dashboard air vent. Hissing.

Snakes, snakes, oh, s.h.i.t, there's nothing worse than snakes, not even bees and wasps and hornets can compare to snakes.

And he knew then, in a horrible instant, why Sis Maggie had been laughing when he'd left. She had not lifted the spell. She'd only changed it. To torment him with his number-one fear in the world.

Something warm and oily slithered up his leg.

Another one wriggled under his shirt collar, slid down his back.

Anthony lost all conscious thought, forgot all his years of fine education and legal training.

He opened his mouth, and screamed . . . and screamed . . . and screamed . . .

GRANDAD'S GARAGE.

"Look at all of this junk," Craig said. Frowning, he stood amidst a jungle of old car tires and warped hubcaps. He kicked a hubcap; it rolled like a giant coin across the dusty floor, struck a paint can, and crashed to the concrete. "Granddad was a d.a.m.n packrat. It'll take us forever to go through this c.r.a.p."

"You know how Granddad was, always collecting things," Steven said. He ran his fingers through his short hair, brushed out a cobweb that had attached itself to his scalp when he'd walked through the door. No one had been in the garage since Granddad had pa.s.sed three weeks ago, and spiders and who knows what else had begun to reclaim the dank s.p.a.ce. If Mama had not asked him and Craig to sort through the garage, months might have pa.s.sed before anyone had crossed the threshold. Steven would have avoided entering because the garage triggered bittersweet memories; Craig would've stayed out, Steven guessed, because he didn't feel that anything in there was worth his time. Craig had precious little time for anything that didn't make him money.

Steven swept his gaze across the garage. A mounted deer's head hung from the wall, above a dirt-filmed window flanked by flimsy, ragged curtains. Grey afternoon light struggled through the gla.s.s. A pair of naked light bulbs that dangled from the rafters provided additional light. Still, shadows ruled the musty, junk-filled corners of the chamber.

"What a mess," Craig said, his brown face puckered in a scowl. Walking beside an old, manual push mower, he spat on the floor. "I can taste the dust in here. Can we raise the door or open the window to let in some air?"

"They won't open," Steven said. "They haven't worked in years."

"Are you serious? What the h.e.l.l kind of sense does that make? Why have a garage if you can't raise the door to park a car inside?"

"Granddad never parked in here. I thought you knew that."

"I never had time to figure out that old man's crazy habits," Craig said. "Some of us have real careers and lives to lead."

Steven opened his mouth to come back with something to salvage his pride--but a chirping sound cut off his response: a cell phone. Like a quick-draw gunslinger, Craig unsnapped the phone from its holster on his hip and placed it against his ear. "h.e.l.lo? Hey, girl, how ya doing? I ain't doing nothing now, just chilling with my baby brother at my Granddad's place. What's up with you? " Winking at Steven, Craig walked outside, his voice drifting away as he chatted with one of his countless women.

Steven wondered, not for the first time that day, why their mother had bothered to ask Craig to accompany him to Granddad's house. Although he and Craig were adults--Craig was thirty and he was twenty-eight--in family matters she insisted upon them doing things together, as if they were still children and were unable to function independently. Granddad had served as a father to both of them (their biological father had fled the responsibilities of fatherhood after Steven's fifth birthday), but Craig had seemed to resent the role that Granddad had played in their lives. "You can't tell me what to do, you ain't my Daddy!" had frequently been Craig's answer to Granddad's request that Craig help mow the lawn, rake the leaves, or shovel the snow. If Craig had railed against a.s.sisting Granddad when he had been alive, why did their mother a.s.sume Craig would want to help now that Granddad was dead? Steven had been prepared to clean Granddad's garage on his own.

And there was a lot of cleaning to do. Craig was right: Granddad really was a packrat. The garage was large, able to accommodate three cars, and even if the roll-down sectional door had worked, there would not have been enough free s.p.a.ce to allow a single car to park inside. The area was filled with two long, wooden tool benches laden with screwdrivers, wrenches, hammers, paint brushes, and other a.s.sorted items; a chest-style freezer that lay like a coffin against the far wall, the top covered with empty cans of oil and pour spouts; an old-fashioned Speedqueen washing machine with wringers to roll clothes through; a couple of lawn mowers; an old Schwinn bicycle; and a bewildering jumble of auto parts, tool boxes, gardening implements, rusty appliances, pipes, buckets filled with junk, milk crates teeming with more junk, and more. More items than Steven could catalogue.

He looked toward the ceiling. He saw pipes, fishing poles, and boxes poking out between the rafters, resting on plywood sheets.

"Well, Granddad," Steven said to himself, "you sure took advantage of every nook and cranny in here."

Grief twisted through him. Weak-kneed, he sat on a short stepladder.

He'd known that coming back to Granddad's place would be difficult for him. Louis Miles had always seemed, to Steven, like a redwood tree, a fantastically solid and eternal creation of nature. Granddad was supposedly eighty-six when he died. For years, there had been a rumor in the family that Granddad was much older than his reported age, but no one could verify it because Granddad said he'd lost his birth records decades ago, and he had no brothers or sisters to provide a point of reference. Steven, for his part, would've estimated that Granddad was actually younger than he claimed to be. Granddad had the bounce, smooth dark skin, and sharp mind of a man thirty years younger; facts that made it hard for Steven to accept that Granddad was gone. He seemed too d.a.m.n healthy to die.