The Nest (4 page)

“Why would he just leave it like that?” I asked.

“Maybe he left it as a sample,” Dad said. “To show us how good his workmanship is. I don't know. He's from a different time. . . .”

“Do you think we should call the police?” Mom asked.

We were in the kitchen. Nicole was watching TV. The baby had fallen asleep on the ride home from the specialist and was in his car seat in the living room.

Dad grimaced and let out a breath. “He's just a strange old guy—”

“He wouldn't stop knocking!” I said.

“He was probably just hoping we had some more business for him. He can't be making much money. I was chatting with the Howlands—you know, at number twenty-seven—and I mentioned him, and they looked at me like I was crazy. Said they'd never even seen the guy. I feel like he's been on the street practically every week this summer.”

“Well, he really freaked me out,” I said.

Mom put her warm hand on the back of my neck. “That must have been scary.”

“It was just the way he kept knocking and knocking.”

“I'm going to put this somewhere safe,” Dad said. “It's really sharp. Just leave it alone, all right, Steve? Next time I see him, I'll give it back and ask him not to knock on our door again.” He looked at
me with a sympathetic smile. “I'm sure he's harmless, but you were right not to open the door.”

I didn't know how to explain it to my parents, but the knife guy felt familiar. He felt like a nightmare. Unexpectedly I thought of what my dream angel had said, about how some people might try to stop them from making the baby well.

And I thought,
What if he comes back for the knife?

The bright walls. The thrum of music. The shimmer of wings, and the angel coming to greet me right away.

“Hello, hello,” she said cheerfully. “I'm awfully glad to see you again.”

She made it sound like I had a choice. “I just come straight here,” I told her.

I liked how she touched my face when she talked to me, and I could see her a bit more clearly now. The big eyes really were enormous, without pupils
or irises. They were just pure darkness. And there seemed to be, in the middle of her forehead, a smaller dark dot—maybe it was a third eye, I wasn't sure. On the top of her head were two particularly thick whiskers, bendy filaments of light, and it was one of these she touched to my face when she spoke. Like a kind of bridge that allowed us to communicate.

“Well, there's always a choice,” she said. “Always a choice. How are things?”

“Okay.”

“‘Okay' is a terribly vague word. You can do better than that, a smart boy like you. How is your family, your sister? How is the baby?”

“Still sick, but they think an operation might help. They saw a specialist. He needs an operation on his heart.”

“I see.”

Some part of me was very aware I was dreaming,
so I was bolder than normal. “When are you going to make the baby better?”

“My dear boy, we're working on it right now. Around the clock. No lazybones here!”

“Really? How?”

“As we speak, we're tending to him and nourishing him and letting him grow. He's going to be so healthy. He's still very little, but oh, I can already tell he's going to be a real beauty!”

I smiled and thought of his little dinosaur sounds. “He's kind of cute sometimes already.”

“Well, just wait until you see him properly. Wait till he's in the crib.”

I didn't understand. “He's already in the crib.”

“Not your new baby.”

I frowned. “What do you mean, ‘new baby'?”

For a moment it seemed all the musical thrumming in the cave stopped, the silvery wings stilled.

“We've already gone through this,” she said. “That's how we're fixing him. We're replacing him altogether.”

Replacing. Inside the lighted cave it was still silent, as if every angelic presence were waiting for my reply.

“But I didn't . . . that's not what I thought you . . .” I couldn't finish my sentence.

“Oh, Steven. Steven, don't worry. I'm sorry if I didn't explain it properly. It's completely my fault. Forgive me. It will all be seamless. One day—and it really won't be so very long; I know it seems to take forever when you're anxious about something—you'll wake up, and the proper baby will be there, that's all.”

“But . . . where will ours go?”

“The new one will be yours.”

I was shaking my head. “But the . . . the old one?”

Her head tilted. “I'm afraid I don't understand your question.”

“This one, here, right now. He won't be here anymore?”

“What would be the point of that? You'll call him the same name, of course. He'll look identical. No one will know except us.”

“But this new baby, where does he come from?”

“Well, we're growing him right now, aren't we? Right here in our nest, outside your house.”

I
WOKE WITH MY HEART RACING
. T
HE INSIDE
of my mouth tasted bad. For a second I thought I might throw up. Sweat beaded my face and neck. I sucked air through my breathing hole, tried to inhale like Dr. Brown had taught me last year, my stomach a big balloon that I filled, counting to four as I slowly exhaled.

I was still sickeningly hot, so I threw off my blankets, and was relieved to see it was morning—just past dawn. I knew I wouldn't get back to sleep—didn't even want
to—so I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and went outside to the backyard. It was early enough to be cool still, though you could feel the heat already clenched up in the earth and air, just waiting to unfurl.

I walked along the side of the house and peered up at the nest. In the low light of dawn, it looked like a giant piece of dead gray fruit. It was definitely bigger than before.

It could easily hold a baby.

If the baby were all curled up tight, like in those sonogram pictures of a mother's womb.

And then my heart started to race again, because I was worried I was going crazy.

A baby growing in a wasps' nest.

That whole rest of the morning, I felt like I was sleepwalking. Vanessa made us sandwiches for lunch, and Nicole wanted to eat outside, so we took
our plates to the table. I ate as quickly as possible, before the wasps could come and start bothering us, but Nicole's ketchup brought them fast enough. Nicole still wanted ketchup with everything. A grilled cheese sandwich, fish sticks, carrot sticks. And the wasps went crazy for that big red blob on her plate. The yellow jackets kept diving in, and then some of the pale ones showed up and chased the yellow jackets off. Two landed right on Nicole's plate. She didn't seem bothered.

But suddenly they made me furious. I shooed them off. They swirled around. One veered away, but the other landed back on the table. I grabbed my empty tumbler and lifted it high so I could smash the wasp into goo.

“Wait!” said Vanessa, and she took the tumbler from my hand, inverted it, and trapped the wasp underneath.

“What's that supposed to do?” I demanded angrily. “It'll just come back when you let it go.”

Inside the tumbler the wasp angrily bashed itself against the sides.

“I'm not letting it go,” she said. “I want to show it to my prof. Maybe she knows what kind it is.”

Vanessa found an old margarine tub from our recycling bin, stabbed some holes into the lid with a steak knife, and skillfully transferred the wasp into it. She sealed the lid tight.

“There we go,” she said.

I didn't want to dream about them again. I worried it meant I was going crazy. But that very night I ended up in the cave anyway.

Not as much light was coming through the walls now—they looked thicker, more fibrous. When I peered down from my ledge, I saw that the cave
tapered inward, and the circle of light at the center was smaller than last time.

I didn't want to be here. I willed myself to wake up. I told myself it was a dream and I was bored of it and wanted out. But I went nowhere. I turned. Behind me in the tough papery wall was a tunnel, big enough to crawl through, but before I could even bend to peer into it properly, I felt a soft filament caress the back of my head. Despite myself, my body relaxed. A big breath seeped into my lungs. My shoulders dropped. I turned to face the queen.

“You were upset after our last conversation,” she said. “You were upset all day.”

“You're not an angel,” I said. “You're just a wasp.”

“Well, I prefer ‘angel,' but ‘wasp' is acceptable too. If that's what makes most sense to you. Names
are just names. They don't really mean anything in the end.”

I didn't really understand what she meant by that. It was like something from a textbook I wasn't smart enough to understand. I looked at her closely. Even in the dimmer light, I could see her face more clearly, and it was unmistakably a wasp's. What I'd thought was a silvery nose was a diamond of pigment. As for the sideways mouth, I'd been very wrong. It was the vertical gap between a set of mandibles. As I looked, they parted sideways a little, like pincers. They were sharp-edged.

Amazingly, I didn't feel scared of her. I was allergic and was in front of a wasp bigger than me. But I sensed instinctively she didn't mean me any harm. And anyway, wasn't this just a dream?

I looked to the top of her fine-whiskered head, at
the snaky antenna that bridged the gap between us.

“That's how we talk, isn't it?” I asked. “You touch one to me, and we understand each other.”

“In part, yes. But also because I stung you.”

My body had a quick nauseating memory. “That was you?”

“Indeed it was. I needed a bit of you in me, and a bit of me in you. It was you I wanted to talk to.”

“Why?”

“Young people are much more open-minded. Your brains are still so beautifully honest and accepting and supple.”

“I'm allergic, you know!”

“I do apologize.”

“So . . . that's you up in the nest on our house.”

“That's my nest.”

“You're the queen!”

Just a hint of pride in her voice: “That would be me.”

“And where I am now,” I said, looking around, “this is the nest, isn't it?”

“Right again.”

“It's a real place. But I thought . . .”

“What did you think?”

“That I just dreamt you.”

“You are dreaming. But it's also real.”

I wasn't sure this made any sense. “But how can I fit inside?”

“Your dream self can fit into any space,” she said as if it were the simplest notion in the world. “Outside the nest you're big. Inside you're small.”

Relief mingled with my astonishment. I wasn't crazy. These dreams weren't just imaginary. They were somehow welded to the real world, just like the nest was welded to our roof.

“We're as real as you are,” the queen said. “Including the worker you killed today.”

I blinked. “What? Oh, no. Our babysitter just caught one in a glass.”

“And she took my worker somewhere and killed her so she could study her.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don't consider it very kind. Do you?”

“Vanessa said her professor might want to study it.”

“We have feelings! We have aspirations! We're not just little bugs.”

“What exactly are you, then?”

She ignored me. “My workers live only four weeks. They're giving their lives for this baby. Your baby! You could be a little more grateful!”

“I didn't ask for this!”

“There's such a thing as manners. Imagine you're just going about your business and someone gasses you to death.”

“Gasses! What do you mean?”

“That's what your babysitter did to my worker. Put her in a little chamber and poisoned her with gas.”

It sounded terrible. “I'm sorry.”

“I hope you are.”

“I didn't know about any of this.”

“It's like murder.”

“Really, I'm sorry—but it wasn't me!”

“It's all right. She wasn't very important anyway.” The queen chuckled. “Practically interchangeable, they are. Thousands upon thousands of them to do the work. Anyway,” she added cheerily, “let's not let it happen again, shall we?”

She made me feel we were still friends, like I was automatically part of her team.

“It's bad for morale,” she said. “How's your morale, by the way?”

“Okay,” I said warily. I wasn't sure how much I should be talking to her anymore.

“Just okay?”

“I think so.”

“Well, we'll change that, won't we? We'll get that taken care of.”

“Look,” I said, “I don't really understand what you're planning.”

“Of course you do. You're a clever boy.”

“This whole idea of the baby you're growing . . .”

“Exactly! It's our gift to you. Everyone likes a gift.”

“Yes, but—”

“And everyone likes to be thanked for a gift.”

I said nothing.

“Ah, well, you'll thank us later.”

I blurted it out: “I don't understand any of this, but I don't want you doing anything to the baby!”

“You haven't even seen the baby yet,” she replied. “We just finished the nest properly today.”

I looked around. This place was nothing like
the bits Vanessa had showed us a few days before. “I thought nests were supposed to have rows and rows of cells.”

“Well, this one is different. It has just one cell for just one egg. This entire nest is devoted to your new baby. That's all we'll grow in here. And look, the egg's just hatched. See up there?”

I looked and could see, at the very top of the dim cave, a pale blob.

I squinted. “I can't really . . .”

“I'll fly you up. Just hold on.”

Before I could object, her antennae wrapped themselves around me and lifted me atop her head. Wings whirring, she darted off the ledge. Instinctively I shut my sleeping eyes tight, expecting that horrible amusement-park plunge, but I wasn't falling, just rising. My fear dissolved, and I opened my eyes and wanted to shout with exhilaration. After a
few seconds we reached the top of the nest. Glued to the ceiling was a pasty slug-like creature.

“There's our little darling,” said the queen proudly.

It was slimy, with two black dots sunk into the front end of its soggy body. Underneath the eyes it had a kind of hole, and it was eating. All around it, stuck to the nest ceiling, were insects—a dead spider, headless bees, and other things that I couldn't quite recognize, but there was a bit of something red that looked like it had hair on it.

“It's disgusting,” I said.

“No, it's just a larva. It's just starting.”

“I don't want to look at it.”

For the first time the queen's voice was harsh; it came with a kind of clicking sound, like fingernails scratching at one another, which I realized was her mandibles opening and closing. “Shame on you! You shouldn't
judge things by their appearances. I imagine you didn't look very appetizing when you were just conceived and starting to grow in your mother's womb.”

I was still being held by her antennae, floating through the air, circling the larva.

“I want you to stop,” I said.

“What on earth are you suggesting?” she said, clicking angrily. “That we harm the baby?”

“I want all of this to stop!” I repeated.

“Oh, that's quite impossible. Now that it's started.”

“I'm waking up now.”

“Only if I say so,” said the queen, and her antennae released me, and she tipped me off her head.

With a surge of terror I fell, away from the larva baby, down through the nest. I woke with a jerk in my bed. My blanket was on the floor, as if someone had yanked it off me.

“The wasp you caught yesterday,” I said to Vanessa when she arrived in the morning.

Her eyes lit up with excitement. “I was going to tell you guys about that.”

“Did you kill it?”

“Oh.” She looked a bit surprised at the question. Her clothes smelled mustier than usual. “Well, yes, in a killing jar. That's how we get all our specimens, Steven. We just put them in a jar with a little ethyl acetate—it's like nail polish remover, and it konks them out.”

“Kills them.”

She nodded, looking at me uncertainly. “Does that upset you? I thought you—”

“Hated wasps. Yeah, I do.” It wasn't the fact that she'd killed it. It was the fact that I already knew, because my dream wasp, the queen, had told me.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Uh-huh. So . . . what kind of wasp was it?”

Her face got all eager again. “I still don't know. My prof wasn't there, but I showed it around to some of the other people in the lab, and no one could identify it. I said maybe it's just some kind of albino, but no one had ever really heard of an albino wasp, so . . .”