Antman Read online

  Antman

  by

  Robert V. Adams

  'Antman' is the copyright of the author, Robert V. Adams, 2005 - 2012.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  ISBN 1477656170

  EAN 978-1477656174

  'Antman' is published by Taylor Street Publishing LLC, who can be contacted at:

  http://www.taylorstreetbooks.com

  http://ninwriters.ning.com

  The book cover illustration is by Millie Hine. The book cover design is by Peril of http://www.perilstudio.co.uk. All rights are reserved.

  All characters are fictional, and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is accidental.

  'A "supercolony" of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido was reported to be composed of 306 million workers and 1,080,000 queens living in 45,000 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.'

  Holldobler, Bert and Wilson, Edward O. (1990)

  The Ants Springer-Verlage, Berlin p. 1

  'Ants are waiting to become the next weapon of the serial killer, the terrorist. We can probably say that in the early history of peoples, in the beginning was the fear of attack by plagues, swarms or armies, whether of other people, locusts, cockroaches or ants. Plagues of insects have biblical associations. Armies have a militaristic, almost humanised, image, whereas hordes evoke something huge and out of control. Ants regularly become swarms, armies and hordes and it is hordes which contribute to myths of transformation, throughout the life course. In myth and reality, ant hordes are prominent among the gatekeepers to rituals of life or death. In the face of almost every natural disaster or human agency, including nuclear war, along with termites and cockroaches, their powers of organisation and adaptability make them virtually indestructible. They are apparently immune to nuclear radiation sickness. In contrast with termites and cockroaches, their open-air habits and hardiness mean that in the hands of a criminal with even a modicum of scientific knowledge, they are capable of wielding with equal vigour and deadliness the twin-edged sword of extreme terror and destruction.'

  Fortius, Tom (1999) 'Ants: Allies, Terrorists or Instruments of Terror?' Conference Paper. Northern Colloquium of Entomological Research, Hull, Hull Wilberforce University p. 15

  Part One

  Genesis

  Chapter 1

  From the night they'd taken his whimpering brother, wearing the little red romper suit, to that place from which he'd never returned, Graver always saw red against the black of darkness as the colour of fear. You could hide the signs of fear behind a curtain of anger, but you could never do away with the feeling itself. It was one more task beyond all the practical problems of every day: how to avoid being swamped by that fear.

  He got dressed but not washed, dressed up so he wouldn't be recognised, and prepared to drive to town and go walkabout.

  Two words flew from the ether and lodged themselves in his head, becoming a mantra: kill-ing-pi-gs-kill-ing-pi-gs-kill-ing …

  He let the sounds float, now as ever finding their repetition reassuring. They created a song-line independent of the meaning of the words. He hummed them, fitting them to the rhythm of that introduction to the third movement of the Bruckner seventh.

  Di-di-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-duuuuuum. Strong rhythm. Over and over. Most of the time the music obliterated the reverberating tinnitus caused by the movements of the slimy maggots which, like those parasitic flesh-boring insects he'd read about, had crawled in through his ears while he slept and slithered towards the tunnels of his brain. They were microscopic in size and few in number as yet though, and he'd seen and read enough to know they could be lost for twenty years if they explored every route in that maze of the outer brain, before they came upon his queen.

  On the other hand, they could find her in a single year, or less. He couldn't take the chance. He had to act now.

  * * *

  Graver experienced one of those moods of great lucidity. He found himself outside the central branch of the library in town. He walked casually in. Between five and six there were plenty of empty chairs at the tables in the reading area. He went straight to the shelves he invariably visited and took down the reference work on the social insects. He flicked the well-thumbed pages to a passage he knew almost off by heart and read: 'The collective power of the ant should not be underestimated. The African colonies of the driver ants of the genus Dorylus can contain more than twenty million ants. These are different from South American army ants in that they tend to have a much more permanent base nest, excavated to a depth of up to four metres, from which they carry out raids on an almost daily basis. Raiding swarms of these ants can devour with frightening rapidity any prey which for one reason or another is unable to move out of their path. There are accounts of tethered horses being reduced to skeletons within hours.'

  * * *

  Graver was not entirely sure when he became the executioner.

  ‘It was probably when the urge to conduct the performances became realisable. You rehearse some things in your head so many times that when they happen you hardly notice the slide from thought to action. I daydreamed a good deal about the past. I had wanted for some time to reach into my past and tell people – especially Marg from down the road, a couple of hundred miles away, who, when I was a child, leaned over me and patted my head with “what a nice boy” – that they were utterly mistaken. After a while, because the appearance of niceness couldn't exist indefinitely on top of the nastiness, it wouldn't matter one way or the other. Yet (this is the bit that messes you up) I wanted both of them. When I had one I wanted the other. And vice versa. You can only do this by splitting your mind in two or three or four, or any number you care to imagine.

  ‘I put the trouble down to being in the Homes. At primary school the Homes children were picked out by everyone. At register on Monday mornings, Miss Clock – we called her this; I can't remember her real name but recall the sentence which carried her through most days: “I'll clock you if you don't stop that.” – used to call out “Homes children to the front”. We all filed out and stood in a line facing the rest of the class, while she collected the dinner money from everyone else. It went on from there, all day, every school day, every week of term, the picking out of the Homes children.

  ‘I could cope with the attempts to bully me at school, since in any case the Homes children stuck together at school and this made other pupils sufficiently hesitant about attacking us to ward off the worst intimidation or violence. But the real threats came from within the Homes. School was a minor dread, compared to the fear which yawned in the pit of my stomach as I walked back from school every afternoon. And it wasn't all the children by any means.

  ‘As a consequence of what happened to me in the Homes, the main target of my anger was that dried up, crackleskin, leather-faced prune of a reverend mother whom I hated as anything but reverend and as the antithesis of the mother I couldn't have, as neither could most of the other children in the orphanage. But after it happened, I was stricken with guilt about those thoughts, as though I'd actually done it.'

  * * *

  Graver scraped his gnawed forefinger over the pages till he reached a later chapter of the book. The page was well-thumbed. He almost knew it by heart. “Ants are the inheritors of the earth. They survive in conditions which would defeat most other living organisms. They can survive in heavily polluted environments. Species such as the common red ants and black ants on many British lawns, Myrmica Ruginodis and Acanthomyops Niger, actually seem able to activate micro-organisms which redu
ce the level of nitrate concentrations in the atmosphere. Ants seem virtually unaffected by radiation. Along with a small number of other insects they would probably survive a nuclear war.” He experienced a tremor in the lower abdomen as he read the words, his lips mouthing key phrases. He wouldn't have known it as such, but he was near orgasm, as near as when the ants were carrying out his gruesome wishes.

  Graver turned back to the beginning of the book. He read passages from the introductory chapter, skipping to pages he'd marked with Stick-its, revisiting particularly familiar paragraphs:

  “There are somewhere over 8,700 species of ants in the world and once the entire planet has been explored this total may rise to 10,000. Ants are found almost everywhere, from Alaska to the Equator, with the exception of a few remote Pacific islands and the ice-covered continents around the North and South Poles.

  “Ants, along with spiders, cockroaches and centipedes, are the stuff of nightmares. They are the crawling beings which while we sleep inhabit our dreaming brains, clogging them with fears and fantasies, reducing our daytime confidence to palpitating night time fears under the bedclothes.

  “When you sit on the lawn with your bare feet in sandals, six legs which make your flesh creep make their way from slivers of grass bent over the lip of your sandal onto the naked bulb of your ankle, up through the fine hairs of your calf, behind your knee, before injecting venom through the softer skin in response to your hand reaching down to scratch the itch.”

  * * *

  Graver rose suddenly from the table, looking up as though someone had called him. Leaving the open book on the table, he walked rapidly from the building. He was talking to himself, using two quite distinct voices.

  'It's rubbish to assert the past is a foreign country. It's always with us.'

  'Of course it is. The sound of voices is the echo left by our ancestors. They leaned over us when we were children, fixing themselves in our memory before their frail bodies crumbled into coffin shapes.'

  * * *

  As if he could forget those rows, the beatings, his cries of terror as his father's hand raised the strap once, twice, again and again. As if he could forget the defiling of his body, the violation of his privacy under the sheets. Or the loneliness, the intense self-loathing, the guilt, the anger.

  * * *

  Here was a memory with a tolerable lead-in. He remembered Mother Bernadette. She attended to the children. Oh she attended all right. She had the power. She ruled the Home with the awesome power of the dictator, backed by her punishing God.

  * * *

  Graver, down in the park, staring at the ducks, walking along by the waterside, appealing to the spirit of Mother Bernadette.

  'I never meant to trip you. I was sad to see you bleeding when you fell. I heard you call out as you lay there, blood hissing from your ear and nose, reaching towards me: "Bring me a glass of somet'ing, little one, a little glass of somet'ing. Oh, my poor head. Fetch a doctor for my poor head.”

  ‘I nodded and nearly let you reach me with your hand which still held the cane. It was a lifetime before you stopped calling out. I felt easier when you called me Thomas because then I knew you couldn't see me, or if you could, you couldn't recognise me and take my name with you to that place beyond death, from which to return and haunt me. When you died I watched your body for ages, hypnotised by the sounds still coming from it as the organs within it slowly came to rest. No one had ever told me how noisy a newly dead person's body is. It's like a steam engine when the heat's removed from the firebox. But even then, no earthly power would move my feet or let me lean towards you. I got up, walked towards the door, closed it and ran away. If I had known a single line of a hymn you hadn't corrupted, I'd have sung it for joy.

  ‘I would have got away with it because no one in that place would have suspected a small boy of doing in Reverend Mother. Any more than outsiders would have believed the injuries she inflicted on the children in her care. The sisters knew of course, and the other children. Which was why nobody breathed a word till about thirty years later, when it became quite all right to sprag on staff who on the whole were too old and decrepit to beat you. Three of the girls grassed Mother Bernadette then, but it was too late because she had been under the sod for almost a quarter of a century.'

  * * *

  Years later, the turning point, the first time he became aware of the possibility of evening up the score. Remember, he kept saying to himself: in order to be a successful experimenter you have to be very, very clever.

  * * *

  The experiment. He would remember this first experiment.

  People stared curiously, walking away, or if it was too late, trying to avoid his glance. Graver wandered through the park, debating endlessly with the voices, the crowd multiplying in his head, jostling for space to express themselves.

  'What does she want?'

  'She wants to come out, sir.'

  'Out of what?'

  'She wants to come out of the killing machine, sir.'

  Graver shook his head.

  'No, can't do that.'

  He turned, faced his invisible audience, challenging them to debate the matter.

  'What? No reason to do it.'

  'What did you say your name was?'

  'Shbiggesdrywauk, sir.'

  'Whassat? Never heard of it.'

  'Remember what I said: in order to succeed you have to be very, very clever.'

  Chapter 2

  Less than twenty-five miles from Coldharbour as the crow flies, Laura Fortius shepherded her two children, Matthew aged nine and Sarah aged eight, through the early spring crowds of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, England, down King Edward Street, past the Town Docks Museum and the Ferens Art Gallery, and into the Old Town at Whitefriargate. She turned to the shop window and caught sight of her reflection – tall, slender to the point of thinness, her aquiline nose accentuated by her short hair. Auburn was an exaggeration, she thought. Mousey, more like. The overall effect was of neatness rather than beauty. Her irritation at the hairdresser boiled up again. The problem with some hairdressers was their pre-formed view of what she needed. It didn't matter what she said, they followed their own plan regardless. Fancy styling it to make me look so pinched and mean, she said to herself as she led the children through the Victorian arcade, crossed the road and walked the short distance to the car park.

  Laura let out a long, involuntary sigh as she unlocked the battered old Volvo estate. The car had seen them through more than a decade since before her husband Tom obtained his tenured post at the University. The reliability of the car annoyed her. Its appearance reminded her of stuffy, intellectual husbands, sinking into safe middle age. Bloody reliable Volvos. She had a premonition that at this rate the car would outlast their marriage. This was slightly contradictory. Why shouldn't I be contradictory, she thought. All these intellectual men, so damned logical all the time. She installed the two children in their seat belts in the back. She went round to the driver's side and inserted the ignition key. As she turned it slightly, the radio was in mid-flow: “… absconded forty-eight hours ago from Cortham Hall secure mental health unit near Goole. Police are warning members of the public not to approach him. He could be dangerous.” She turned the key back and the radio clicked into silence.

  'I'm thirsty,' said Sarah.

  'I want an ice cream,' said Matthew.

  'When we've dropped the shopping off at the car, we're going to meet Helen at the coffee shop,' said Laura. 'Stay here, cherubs, while Mummy pops back to the corner of the road. Don't worry, you'll be able to see me waving. I only want to look up and down the road for one sec. Keep your hands on the boot of the car, like this. Look Matthew, copy Sarah.'

  Matthew, like his father in appearance as well as personality would always be less reliable than his sister, she thought. Sarah was the image of her mother, tall for her age and built like a coat hanger. “For Heaven's sake, feed the child,” Laura's mother had said when they visited her recently. It was her s
elf-appointed mission to stuff both the children with sweets and cakes at all opportunities, which was why Laura's visits had tailed off since her father's death. Sarah already looks as though she'll be running an office, Laura thought. She desperately wanted not to pass her mistake on to her daughter. If we split up, I'll keep Sarah, he can have Matthew. Only this morning she'd let the thought fall like a stone into the puddle of her over-busy brain. The ripples spread, merging into all the other thoughts, losing definition, flattening out till they almost disappeared.

  A noise near at hand brought her back to reality with a jolt. She couldn't place it, then she saw Matthew had a handful of small pebbles and was tossing them into the air, one at a time, trying to catch them. She immediately was able to place the metallic sound she now realised she had heard. One of the stones must have hit the bodywork of a car. Laura hoped fervently that it was her car.

  'For goodness sake, Matthew, put those stones down. What do you think you're doing?'

  Matthew did not reply, pulled a face and slowly opened his hand, letting the stones drop to the ground, one by one.

  * * *

  Laura wondered how different life would be if she acted on her intuitions immediately. Was it only minutes earlier – it might as well have been a lifetime – when she was listening to Matthew and Sarah giggling about the funny man as she walked with them back to the car park? It had dawned on her it would be ironic, if in the middle of an unseasonably warm and sunny morning in Hull, it took a couple of kids only two minutes to spot a seriously disturbed man the police hadn't found in as many days. These were stray thoughts. Like the wisps of cloud in the blue sky above, they came and blew away in moments in the strong, warm breeze.