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I walked in front of the vehicle and directed Bobby until he stopped with the right front tire squarely atop the ine and, with the shotgun, got out of the Jeep

The weak onshore breeze grew a little stronger, and the clouds in the west, which had sed thethe stars

"Inside what?" Bobby repeated

I pointed to the bungalohere I’d squeezed into the broom closet to hide fro in the kitchen"

"Want to?"

"Need to," I said, heading toward the bungalow

"Perverse," he said, falling in beside me

"The troop was fascinated"

"We want to lower ourselves to monkey level?"

"Maybe this is important"

He said, "My belly’s full of kibby and beer"

"So?"

"Just a friendly warning, bro Right now I’ve got a low puke threshold"

11

The front door of the bungaloas open, as I had left it The living room still smelled of dust, ering odor of ht, which I’d not dared to use here before, revealed a series of three-inch-long, yellohite cocoons fixed in the angle where the back wallcases spun by an exceptionally fertile spider Lighter rectangles on the discolored wallsThe plaster wasn’t as fissured as you would expect in a house that was more than six decades old and that had been abandoned for nearly two years, but a web of fine cracks gave the walls the appearance of eggshells beginning to give way to hatching entities

On the floor, in a corner, was a child’s red sock It couldn’t have anything to do with Jimmy, because it was caked with dust and had been here for a long ti-room door, Bobby said, "Got a new board yesterday"

"The world’s ending, you go shopping"

"Friends at Hobieroo, was a cluster of cocoons si, each three to four inches long and, at the widest point, approximately the diaalow, I had never seen anything quite like these silken constructs I ht

"Not uncreepy," Bobby said

Within a couple of the cocoons were dark shapes, curled like question marks, but they were so heavily swaddled in flossy filaments that I could ?" I asked

"No"

"Me neither"

"Might be dead"

"Yeah," I said, though I wasn’t convinced "Just so, dead, half-e"

"Maybe new ?"

"If people, dogs, birds, ht about that "Probably wouldn’t be smart to buy any h me as I realized that I’d been in these rooms in absolute darkness, unaware of the fat cocoons overhead I’ht so deeply disturbing After all, it wasn’t likely that I’d been in danger of being pinned to the wall by so cocoon of my own On the other hand, this was Wyvern, so perhaps I’d been in precisely such danger

Partly, the nausea was caused by the stench wafting frootten how fiercely ripe it was

Holding the shotgun in his right hand, covering his nose and et worse than this"

"It doesn’t get worse than this"

"But it does"

"Oh, yeah"

"Let’s be quick"

Just as I ht I saw one of the dark, curled forms writhe inside its silken sac

I focused the beas moved

Bobby said, "Jumpy?"

"Aren’t you?"

"As a toad"

We ventured into the kitchen, where the linoleum cracked and popped underfoot and where the reek of decomposition was as thick in the air as a cloud of vaporized, rancid cooking oil in the kitchen of a greasy-spoon restaurant

Before searching for the source of the stench, I directed the light overhead The upper cabinets hung under a soffit, and in the angle where the soffit , there were more cocoons than in the previous two rooms combined Thirty or forty Most were in the three-to-four-inch range, though a feere half again as large Another twenty were nestled around the boxy fluorescent fixture in the center of the ceiling

"Not good," Bobby said

I lowered the flashlight and at once discovered the source of the putrescent smell A dead man was sprawled on the floor in front of the sink

At first I thought he must have been killed by whatever made the cocoons I expected to see a wad of spun silk in his openfro fro to do with it This was a suicide

The revolver lay on his abdomen, where recoil and death spasht hand was still hooked through the trigger guard Judging by the wound in his throat, he’d put the ht up into his brain

Entering the lightless kitchen earlier in the night, I had gone directly to the back door, where I’d halted with lass Approaching the door and backing away fro on this corpse

"This what you expected?" Bobby asked, voiceto filter the sickening odor

"No"

I didn’t knohat I’d expected, but I was sure this wasn’t the worst thing that had been lurking in the deepest cellars of ination When I’d first seen the cadaver, I’d been relieved--as though subconsciously I had envisioned a specific and far worse discovery than this, an ultimate horror that noould not have to confront