table. It was a red number ‘1’ blinking on the telephone answering machine. She remembered the earlier call, and the voice that had sounded so familiar.
It had been the detective’s voice.
She turned her head away too quickly. The boy frowned. He looked over his shoulder.
‘More water,’ said Marielle. ‘Please.’
‘Do as she asks,’ said Darina. ‘Give her more water.’
But the boy ignored them both. He put the glass on the dining room table and approached the answering machine. He put his head to one side, like an animal faced with an unfamiliar object. One pale finger reached out and hovered uncertainly above the ‘play’ button.
‘Please!’ said Marielle again.
Darina glanced up from her screen.
‘What are you doing?’ she said to the boy. ‘This work is important. If she wants more water, then give her more water. Just shut her up!’
The boy stepped away from the machine. He lowered his hand.
Marielle sank back against the arm of the sofa. She drew in an inadequate, shuddering breath, and closed her eyes.
There was a single beep from the other end of the room, and a voice began to speak, deep and male.
‘Hi, Marielle, this is Charlie Parker. I just wanted to let you know—’
The rest of the message was lost in a scream of rage and pain unlike any that Marielle had heard before, made more awful by the fact that it came from a child. The boy screamed a second time. His back arched, his neck straining so far back that it seemed as though his spine must break or the swelling on his throat erupt in a shower of blood and pus. Darina rose to her feet, the laptop falling to the floor, and even over the screaming Marielle could hear the voice of the detective telling her that he was coming up to talk with her, that he just had one or two more questions to ask her and Ernie.
There was a buzzing in the room. Even Grady, immersed in his own misery, heard it. His head moved, trying to find the source of the sound. The house grew colder, as though someone had opened a door, but the air that came through was not filled with the smell of trees and grass but with smoke.
An insect flew across Marielle’s line of sight. She shrank away from it instinctively, but it came back, buzzing a foot from her face. Even in the dim light, she could see the wasp’s yellow and black striped body, and the curve of its venomous abdomen. She hated wasps, especially those that lived this late into the year. She drew up her knees to her chest and tried to use her feet to flip the blanket at it, but now there was a second insect, and a third. The room began to fill with them, and even in her fear she could not understand how. There were no nests nearby, and how could so many have survived?
Still the boy screamed, and suddenly Grady was screaming too, his voice joining with that of the boy, and her brother’s bisected lips burst with the effort, and the sound of pain was added to his fright, for Grady’s had been a cry of fear at first.
The mirror: the wasps were pouring out of the mirror. It had ceased to be a reflective surface, or so it appeared to Marielle, and had instead been transformed into a framed hole in the wall. The dying wasps, once trapped behind it, were now free.
But that was a supporting wall. It was solid concrete, not hollow, and the mirror was just a mirror. Nothing could pass through it. It was simply glass.
She felt a wasp land on her cheek and begin crawling toward her eye. She shook her head and blew at it. It buzzed away angrily, then returned. Its stinger brushed her skin, and she prepared for the pain, but it did not come. The wasp departed, and the others went with it, the little swarm returning to the mirror where they buzzed and roiled in a circular motion, forming a cloud that took on the dimensions of a head with two dark waspless holes for eyes, and another larger slit for a mouth, a face of wasps that stared out at them from the mirror, and its rage was the wasps’ rage, and it vented its fury through them.
The wasp mouth moved, forming words that Marielle could not hear, and the boy’s screams ceased. Darina clasped him to her, the back of