SIX

Sheriff Amos Tarbell heard the cries before he saw the cars. What he witnessed as he swerved into the Tinton driveway hit him like a hammer, so that the police car skidded out of control and banged into a tree opposite the Laidlaw jeep. His head hit the wheel and he felt blood starting. He was too stunned even to reach for his handkerchief. He sat there with blood streaming onto his tan uniform, watching with bulging eyes the impossible spectacle of Deirdre and Tom Laidlaw being devoured by cockroaches.

Sitting upright in the jeep, the two looked like unnatural wax figures out of a horror museum. Their eyes were gone. They stared back at the sheriff from blank sockets from which gore was trickling. Right before his eyes, their skulls were being cleaned of muscle and flesh by a thousand scurrying bugs. Still-­living shreds of their skin quivered with raw nerves, looked like white worms squirming over the bone-­white of their scalped skulls.

The Laidlaws, before Sheriff Amos Tarbell’s eyes, looked like two cadavers in an anatomy class held in hell. The bloodied bones made a gruesome tableau of skeletons driving a jeep.

The word “piranha” ribboned through Tarbell’s brain like a red-­hot wire. Clearly, these people had been taken by surprise, had been absolutely helpless, unable to defend themselves in any way . . .

So this was the vicious, the inconceivable, explanation of the island’s mysterious disappearances! This was the meaning of Stephen’s reluctance, his questioning about roaches eating leather belts, clothing, and the rest!

The sheriff was seeing it for himself now, understanding the fate of the missing Tintons, of Hildie, of her girls—and, by God, of those men off the ferry! This is what would have happened to himself, Dorset, and Homer if they had not escaped the insect army chasing them when they had the rabbit trap.

Bile was in the man’s mouth, but this was no time to be sick. The sheriff clearly heard the clicking of the roaches’ hard mandibles and teeth, the hissing of their tumbling battle to get at the human flesh. Above all, he heard the grinding of what he had been unable to believe when the scientists had described it—how insects like these roaches could eat into bone, chew through it, saw it and cleave it and splinter it. Could grind it into powder that they lapped up.

He was watching it happen! He wiped the blood that was dribbling into his own eyes. He batted a roach away from his face. He ground into reverse and shot the police car around, spraying gravel on two wheels.

The Laidlaws were beyond help, that was tragically plain. Before the demons got at him, he had to get to the lighthouse with his terrible discovery. The unspeakable theories of the Harvard scientists were proving correct! Yarkie Island might have to call in the Coast Guard, the National Guard, the whole damn United States Army to stamp out—to try to stamp out—the invasion of the murdering roaches.