Authors: Marlys Millhiser
Nightmare Country (44 page)
“Adrian's going to be a pickle to raise. She would have been even before all this happened.”
“She might not like Alaska. It can be a very cold and shut-in place most of the year. We might consider a warmer climate.”
“Not tropical, not full of sand and frigate birds and heat and stream andâ”
“How about a place that's a little less lonely than those we've known?” He bent to hold her and picked her up off the walkway in the process. “And maybe just a trifle steamy.”
3
It was an almost automatic thing for Edward P. Alexander III to be walking along assuming his mind was concentrating on his journey and to discover instead that it was reworking an awkward sentence he'd written earlier in the day:
“The bane of science, like that of religion, is not that which it explains but all that which it ignores.” No. Too many “thats.” How about: “⦠rather that which it ignores?”
He was still stuck with the excess “that.” Edward was on his way to a point of craggy coral at the very tip of one end of the island.
He arrived at last, camera and film dry, and set to reconstructing the blind he'd built several days before but which had fallen overâmerely a batch of palm fronds stacked in such a way as to provide shade, hide his rather large form, and offer a suitable hole through which to poke a camera lens.
He had come to photograph an iguana.
4
In the sea off the coast of Belize in Central America, in a region known as the Metnál, a depression in the ocean floor began to move and to swell. Sand trembled for a mile around it, and a shock wave sent fish fleeing in an even wider circle, disturbed underwater currents, created new ones. Coral banks that had taken hundreds of years to build crumbled, killing countless small creatures that fed upon it, promising to starve others who had fled but could return to nothing.
The depression became a mound and remained so for several hours. The disturbances under the sea calmed. But wary sea life continued to give the area a wide berth.
The sands moved again, some particles trickled down the surface of the mound, others floated slowly upward. Dark gray patches appeared between sand ruffles nowâshiny, moist-looking. Sound waves, shocking and intense, jagged toward the surface, growing silent when they broke itâbut stronger. They gathered in the cloud clusters from the horizons. The clouds increased in size and darkened, while a metallic dome split the sea beneath it. Water churned around it. Even before the dome had fully emerged, a section of its roof parted and an invisible tracer reached across the heavens to guide and welcome home weary travelers of another time.
An Eastern Airlines L-1011, Flight 781, en route from San Juan to Miami and filled with human creatures who had taken thousands of years to evolve to their imperfect state, vanished in an instant.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Dr. Dale Howard for his assistance in matters of veterinary medicine, to Ron Sneddon for his patience in explaining the vagaries of light aircraft, to Barbara Steiner for her talents at brain-storming, to Dorothy Sands Beers for her night-blooming cereus, and to Kathleen C. Phillips and Delsa Dee Johnson for using their gifts in helping to prepare the manuscript.
And a special thanks to my family for surviving all those frozen dinners.
About the Author
Marlys Millhiser is an American author of fifteen mysteries and horror novels. Born in Charles City, Iowa, Millhiser originally worked as a high school teacher. She has served as a regional vice president of the Mystery Writers of America and is best known for her novel
The Mirror
and for the Charlie Greene Mysteries. Millhiser currently lives in Boulder, Colorado.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1981 by Marlys Millhiser
Cover design by Elizabeth Connor
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1020-7
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
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