The C.J. Henderson MEGAPACK ®. C.J. Henderson
forgotten Galvez, however, his full attention falling to each successive page of Claro’s diary. Legrasse had become engrossed with the man’s description of the fourth night of his home’s invasion and reread it simply to hear its words again within his head. That night, whatever had been searching about in the other rooms of his home, even under his own bed, found its way to what was on top of his bed.
Claro wrote of a weight passing over the blanket he kept tight across his face. Anything with eyes would have seen his form beneath the covers, he reckoned, but whatever this was, this probing, single length, it merely poked and prodded and rolled, intent in its search, but making no discovery. At first.
Claro’s words dropped icicles down the back of Legrasse’s shirt collar, making each vertebrae ache in turn as they uncomfortably made their way down his spine.
It were a horrible feeling, not being able to see, not being able to breathe, just scared and waiting for the damn thing to go away. Just holding my breath and waiting and praying and none of it doing no good. No good at all.
It just kept digging and scratching and tugging, like a big finger, but a stupid one. Like something that had never seen a bed or a blanket. I think how dumb it were was more frightening than anything else. Even a bear, or fox, or anything, anything that ever crawled up out of the swamp should have known what it had found. But this thing couldn’t tell it had found a man under a blanket. So it just kept poking and digging at me.
And then, it found me. The crawling bastard thing finally found its way under the blanket and it slid under my leg and up over the other in a motion so fast I couldn’t react. But, as it started to circle under my leg, like to grab it, or squeeze it, my fear left me, or it filled me, whatever, I don’t know. I only know that was all I could stand.
It was a madness that took me then. I rolled out of my bed screaming. In the darkness, I grabbed at the thing coiling around my legs, and I pulled it from me and smashed at it, beating it with my fists, beating it against the floor.
With a lightning speed, it jerked free of my hold and retreated out of the room. I followed it, my hands grabbing for something to use as a weapon. I found a chair. I wasn’t thinking, didn’t care. I grabbed up the chair and ran to follow the thing, whatever it was, to break it, to kill it. Then, I got to the next room…and I had to stop.
Legrasse read on, fascinated.
Claro had stopped, for he had found his home filled with vast lengths of roping flesh, something like the tentacles of a squid, but longer, thinner, and possessed of individual skills no cephalopod imaginable had ever displayed. He stood frozen, terror gripping his every muscle, as he watched the roaming tendrils poke and pull and slither in the moonlight. Then the one he had just eluded found him again, and Claro beat at it with his chair until the seat had become splinters.
Racing about madly, the man had smashed the tentacles, beat them with his fists, even bitten into one of them. Although the tendrils retreated in seconds in the face of his attack, still Claro was left drenched in sweat from his encounter.
He spent the next day closing down the side of his home facing the swamp. It did no good. The next night the lengths returned, and again he was forced to do battle with the sucking, grasping coils. They came over the next two nights as well, and Claro began to take note of certain things. Each night the tentacles came earlier and stayed longer. They were beginning to be able to predict where he would be, what he would do. They were beginning to not fear him. Which is when he had decided to start setting the traps.
* * * *
Legrasse gave the book over to Galvez, telling him to read some of it while he thought about things for a moment. The Spaniard nodded, handing the inspector the cane he had been toying with so that he could hold the book in two hands. While Galvez started, Legrasse thought on what he had read.
The book told of tentacles coming through the windows, slots, cracks, even his sink drain. Why the man stayed in his home, he did not explain. Nor did he explain why he did not at least leave at night, did not call the police, did not ask his neighbors for shelter or assistance.
What could it have been, wondered Legrasse. Why was it? What did it want? Why did it come? Why?
Maybe Claro was just too stubborn to admit defeat. Maybe he simply went insane, bought the traps and spread them out, relying on the only thing that had truly worked for him. The last entry he had made, sitting in his corner, disturbed Legrasse the most. Free, free at last.
The inspector studied the cane in his hand as he tried to piece the sad occurrence into a whole. Certainly the storm had unleashed whatever had found Claro. Perhaps it was some long lost horror, sealed away within the fresh spring so recently uncovered.
Legrasse stared at the corpse in the corner and wondered. Did the dead man know something that some outré thing wanted to know, something it did not want anyone else to know? Or was Claro just the poor unfortunate bastard who happened to be the only thing nearby when the storm somehow opened a random portal that some bug just happened to accidentally poke its way through?
The inspector quietly checked Galvez’s progress. The man was barely halfway through the notebook. Looking about, Legrasse then took note of a section of the dead man’s leg, where the pants were up far enough to reveal flesh above the sock line. Round red welts like sucker wounds appeared to circle the victim’s leg.
Legrasse wondered at it all, at what the searchers could have been after. What was the point, he mused, of coming night after night, but never taking anything, never actually doing anything—anything. Why?
Absently smacking his hand with the butt-end of the cane, the inspector took a closer note of the carvings etched into its length. There was nothing remarkable about them, although he did notice they seemed somewhat fresh. Still, they seemed of no great importance. Indeed, his mind left them instantly as he noticed Galvez coming to the end of the notebook. Tossing the cane back to the Spaniard, Legrasse turned in his small clear space in the traps, studying. Wondering.
“Hey, John,” called Galvez, “anything you want me to do while you stare off into space at the tax-payers’ expense?”
“It’s your investigation,” replied Legrasse absently. “Be creative.”
The lieutenant nodded, looking for a direction in which to head. Legrasse looked down at the traps, wondering about them again.
He had been puzzled about them since he had arrived. So far all he had learned had only added to his puzzlement. He still could not believe Claro had set out all the traps. Their placement was so finely meshed, so intricate. And the patterns he had noticed, swirls and star-shapes, intersecting each other over and over throughout the main room—
Why, wondered Legrasse. Why would he do it?
The traps had not been working, the inspector remembered. Yet Claro had gotten more and more of them, ultimately painting himself into the corner, so to speak, with them.
Across the room, Galvez picked the next spot where he would knock a new hole in the traps so that he could move toward the back rooms. Sealed off as they were, none of them had been investigated yet. To the lieutenant’s way of thinking, it was high time they were opened.
Ignoring Galvez’s actions, Legrasse concentrated on the traps. There was something he was not seeing, something that was passing him by. He stared down at the floor again, trying to look at everything once more from the beginning, struggling to gain a new perspective.
The traps were everywhere. In tight, sophisticated patterns. Why? How could Claro have managed it, with only two hands? It did not seem possible. And, even if it were, why had he done so?
Galvez spotted the point where he could place his next footfall without disturbing too many of the traps.
Of course, he thought, the traps aren’t so tight everywhere. Fairly sparse back by the door when you first came in. And where the patterns ran up against one another. Indeed, that was where Galvez had been making his strikes, in the freer areas between the patterns.
Convenient, whispered a voice from the back of Legrasse’s