He would confirm it in a moment. Hubbard held up his fingers in a new, tense warning for silence. His gesture said plainly, “This may be it!” The watchers tensed. It was a bone-­chilling moment. No one moved or breathed. Hubbard nodded to Amos Tarbell.

Under the sheriff’s straining hands the board over the kettle hole moved a little more. Tarbell stopped and waited, listening for any disturbance below. Hubbard signaled him to go on. The board moved again, visibly a full quarter of an inch.

“Now!” Hubbard clipped to the two men. Craig Soaras put his finger on the dry-­ice trigger. Amos Tarbell cocked his gun. Both men were crouching protectively beside the scientist.

Peter Hubbard flashed his light into the stench coming up from the kettle hole. He wanted the first sight of the roach den. But the moment burst his tension like air out of a broken balloon. The circling beam of his flashlight showed no motion below. There was no hissing, no sound. There were no roaches.

Hubbard stamped on the boards with anger and exasperation. The group gawked at him in amazement. They had never seen the scientist agitated before. He shouted at them all as if they were responsible for the failure. “They did use it!” he cried out. He bent over and heaved all the planks off the kettle hole. “Look at that!”

The others came running from the Cannon house. Pair after pair of curious eyes saw the glint of a mound of cockroach shells in Hubbard’s rotating flashlight. The pile seemed feet thick, spread widely.

The people held their breath against the stink.

Wanda Lindstrom was saying;, “They shed their exo-­skeletons as they grow. Usually they eat the remains, but these roaches have had so much other food—”

She did not have to go on. The stench told the story. The sickened eyes were looking into a cavern of death. The people could see chambers cut into the sides of the pit. The niches were loaded with chunks of maggoty meat, broken limbs, internal organs, cracked skulls from which the brains had been sucked.

Rat skulls.

Human skulls!

This pit was not just a nest, it was a cemetery, hellish catacombs of ultimate foulness.

Gagging and choking, the people moved haggardly away. As they left, Peter Hubbard grunted, defeated, “We’ve missed them!”

Soaras asked glumly, “Was it the forest fire that chased them?”

“I don’t know,” the scientist gritted. He sat down heavily, wishing he could yank off the constraining suit, wishing he had never heard of Yarkie. But he had to share whatever little he did know. “There doesn’t seem to be any fresh moulting, so they probably left some time ago. That hole probably became too small for them as the colony kept growing . . .”

Wanda Lindstrom observed, “But they didn’t take their stores along . . .”

Hubbard answered, “They kept finding plenty of fresh food, unfortunately.”