armrests.
She didn’t need this now.
Not when she was about to commence the decisive phase of her work.
She reached for her pills, put two in her palm, swallowed them and set her head into her headrest, thankful no one was beside her. She always paid for the seat next to her, to keep anyone from getting too close.
As the plane leveled her discomfort ebbed.
Agoraphobia. Demophobia. Enochlophobia. Ochlophobia.
She knew the terms but refused to label her condition a phobia. Her fear and loathing of crowds was not irrational. It was grounded in reality, in the old horror that was reaching for her…pulling her back….
“Gretchen! Help me! Gretchen!”
She shut her eyes, gained control of her breathing and directed her thoughts back to the time of joy in her life.
She was a happy little girl again flying above old London at night.
Flying like Peter Pan and Wendy, and dreaming of living in London with her mother, her father and little brother, Will.
But her family had to leave England. It broke her heart. Of all the cities in the world that they’d lived in, Gretchen had loved London best. On the day they packed, she cried. Her father crouched beside her and dried her tears.
“In a few years when my work is finished, we’ll come back to London and we’ll live here,” he said.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
He’d told her that they would live in Kensington, her favorite part of the city, and later that night Gretchen had dreamed she was flying over it with her little brother.
“We’re going to live here forever, Willy.”
But her dream died.
Gretchen Rosamunde Sutsoff was born in Virginia where her father, Cornelius, was a scientist who’d become an American diplomat. He was a science attaché who worked with U.S. military and intelligence officials at U.S. embassies. His job meant they’d moved around the world. Every two years it seemed. They’d lived in Moscow, Tokyo, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Nairobi, London, Panama and Vridekistan.
Gretchen’s mother, Katherine, was a pianist who gave lessons to students who would come to their home. “Music is the universal language. It makes words unnecessary,” her mother liked to say.
Gretchen’s parents loved her and Will, but they were self-absorbed precise people whose displays of affection toward them were as rare as falling stars. The family’s constant moving meant they were continually severing ties in one country while establishing new ones in another.
Gretchen and Will had no connection to any place or anybody.
Except each other.
Forever the new, strange child with the accent, Gretchen was often confused about where she belonged. She seldom made friends. Will was her best friend and she was protective of him as she sought refuge in her books, particularly books about science and the nature of life and death.
Wherever they lived, Gretchen always had the highest grades in her class. She astounded her teachers. “Your daughter is a prodigy,” her instructor in Moscow said. Another teacher in London said, “We feel the term genius is appropriate. She actually pointed out two errors in the mathematics textbook.”
Gretchen was ten years old when she started conducting her own research with Will as her assistant. Her parents allowed her to have a dozen white mice. While botched piano concertos sounded through their home, Gretchen tracked the life cycle of her mice, making exhaustive notes on their development, on which pairs mated, then tracing and noting characteristics of their offspring.
“Pretty cool, huh, Will?”
“Cool.”
Will was in charge of naming them and would have funerals when one of them died. He cried when they buried them. Gretchen would roll her eyes. She was more concerned with her new scientific discoveries.
They were living in Africa when she experienced a prophetic incident.
At the edge of the diplomatic quarter in Nairobi, there was a dense forest. Venomous snakes were sighted there by locals. One man was bitten and died. People were warned to keep out of the woods. But Gretchen needed butterflies for one of her many studies, so one day she left school early and slipped into the forest.
She had entered a darkened section. As birds screeched, she began searching. It was not long before she came upon a rare Taita blue-banded swallowtail on a broad leaf. Withdrawing a wide-mouth jar from her satchel, she inched it into position when she heard a moan.
She turned and saw a muddied stream flowing over a boulder.
That’s what it looked like.
She gasped. Gooseflesh rose on her arms.
The stream was a moving river of ants: millions, maybe billions of them. The ant-covered lump—judging from the single fear-filled eye staring from it