The Wasp Factory Page 0,20

of the one the Bunker lay half-buried in, and had a look round with my binoculars. The coast was clear, even if the weather wasn’t. I went down to the Bunker.

I repaired the steel door years ago, loosening the rusted hinges and straightening the guides for the bolt. I took out the key to the padlock and opened the door. Inside there was the familiar waxy, burned smell. I closed the door and propped a piece of wood against it, then stood for a while, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom and my mind to the feel of the place.

After a while I could see dimly by the light filtering through the sacking hung over the two narrow slits which are the Bunker’s only windows. I took off my shoulder bag and binoculars and hung them on nails hammered into the slightly crumbling concrete. I took up the tin with the matches in it and lit the candles; they burned yellowly and I knelt, clenching my fists and thinking. I’d found the candle-making kit in the cupboard under the stairs five or six years ago, and experimented with the colours and consistencies for months before hitting on the idea of using the wax as a wasp-prison. I looked up then and saw the head of a wasp poking up from the top of a candle on the altar. The newly lit candle, blood red and as thick as my wrist, contained the still flame and the tiny head within its caldera of wax like pieces of an alien game. As I watched, the flame, a centimetre behind the wasp’s wax-gummed head, freed the antennae from the grease and they came upright for a while before they frazzled. The head started to smoke as the wax dribbled off it, then the fumes caught light, and the wasp body, a second flame within the crater, flickered and crackled as the fire incinerated the insect from its head down.

I lit the candle inside the skull of Old Saul. That orb of bone, holed and yellowing, was what killed all those little creatures who met their death in the mud on the far side of the creek. I watched the smoky flame waver inside the place where the dog’s brains used to be and I closed my eyes. I saw the Rabbit Grounds again, and the flaming bodies as they jumped and sped. I saw again the one that escaped the Grounds and died just before it made it to the stream. I saw the Black Destroyer, and remembered its demise. I thought of Eric, and wondered what the Factory’s warning was about.

I saw myself, Frank L. Cauldhame, and I saw myself as I might have been: a tall slim man, strong and determined and making his way in the world, assured and purposeful. I opened my eyes and gulped, breathing deeply. A fetid light blazed from Old Saul’s sockets. The candles on either side of the altar flickered with the skull-flame in a draught.

I looked round the Bunker. The severed heads of gulls, rabbits, crows, mice, owls, moles and small lizards looked down on me. They hung drying on short loops of black thread suspended from lengths of string stretched across the walls from corner to corner, and dim shadows turned slowly on the walls behind them. Around the foot of the walls, on plinths of wood or stone, or on bottles and cans the sea had surrendered, my collection of skulls watched me. The yellow brain-bones of horses, dogs, birds, fish and horned sheep faced in towards Old Saul, some with beaks and jaws open, some shut, the teeth exposed like drawn claws. To the right of the brick, wood and concrete altar where the candles and the skull sat were my small phials of precious fluids; to the left rose a tall set of clear plastic drawers designed to hold screws, washers, nails and hooks. Each drawer, not much larger than a small matchbox, held the body of a wasp which had been through the Factory.

I reached over for a large tin on my right, prised the tight lid off with my knife and used a small teaspoon inside to place some of the white mixture from the tin on to a round metal plate in front of the old dog’s skull. Then I took the oldest of the wasp cadavers from its little tray and tipped it on to the white pile of granules. I replaced the sealed tin