THE STORE

"Look!"

Burke was jolted awake by the sound of his wife's voice above the soothing purr of the car's engine. She began to point excitedly through the windshield. Damn! He'd actually drifted off for a quarter second. He knew he had to get some coffee in him before he killed them both.

Up ahead the macadam grew brighter from a wash of light that didn't belong this far up the mountain that had swallowed Burke, his wife and their car almost two hours ago. The Volvo's headbeams began to pick out the beginnings of a roughcut parking lot filled with a row of cars and campers.

"What the hell!" Burke spewed as he slowed and swung into the lot to park. "A Speedy Shop? Way up here?" Thank God, coffee. And a phone call to Hal and Linda for directions off this extremely annoying mountain.

"Why not?" Cathy asked. "The highways are full of places like this in the summertime. They pop up like weeds. Come the winter, though, it's like they were never here."

She stretched with a groan and opened her door. A cool night chill, potent with the scent of pine and damp earth and animal musk, immediately penetrated the Volvo's interior.

"Whew! Cold!" Burke gasped.

Cathy zipped up her sweatshift, struggling for a moment with the swell at her belly. Despite its thick cotton warmth, she shuddered heavily, her hands instinctively clutching her stomach.

Burke jogged to her side to help her walk; Cathy was nearly full term. He had time to look around, and the same feeling came back. What he'd felt as the gentle Connecticut hills rose up around Interstate 91 to meet the lonely, shadow-filled mountains at twilight. He never wanted to leave so late, and found himself gulping when they'd turned onto Route 9, with just enough light to see what lay in front of them. He'd never told Cathy how much he dreaded the heights--at night especially.

As they crunched gravel together approaching the entrance, he felt like a trespasser here. His usual taste of the wild amounted to letting the grass in the back yard grow too high. Burke cast a furtive glance at the star-flecked sky, black as India ink. A shooting star streaked across it. He followed it down, down, behind something huge and black--the massive, brooding humps of the high Berkshires, about to crush him. . .

Burke tore his eyes away. The ceaseless chatter of the crickets seemed to mock him. This was a vacation, he told himself. So why did he feel so awful? Hal and Linda's offer of a two week stay at their cabin sounded inviting. They'd sold their condo last February after Hal retired, purchasing a farm in the spring. Burke feared he'd overshot the place, and it lay halfway down the mountain behind them--Lithia just seemed too far and Hal never mentioned a town past Goshen. Escaping New Haven's sticky August steambath sounded attractive at first; now Burke hadn't enough fingers and toes to count his misgivings.

He flinched, startling Cathy as a swooping shape nearly grazed his face. A bat? That's all they needed was getting attacked by bats after all this.

The shape soared off, headed for a blazing mercury vapor lamp set on a wooden pole across the parking lot. It was a moth, but larger than any he'd ever seen. He watched, repulsed, as it flittered in an idiotic arc and returned to the source of its frenzy.

The lamp's bluish-white glare was nearly obliterated by a thick, teeming cloud of flying insects of all types and sizes, snapping mindlessly against the square plastic lens. The sight sickened Burke. He turned away and felt Cathy grow rigid.

"What, Cath? Cramp?"

"No--the place is deserted, Burke. Where is everybody?"

Burke looked inside the store for the first time. Cathy was right. There weren't any customers, although he couldn't see the register area.

"Maybe in the back, paying for their stuff? Or in their cars. Strange . . .wait here, babe."

Burke felt a little foolish peering through windshields and camper windows. When he got to the Winnebago he pressed his face against its dark glass and made out a color portable flickering and blaring atop a formica counter. A snowy Jay Leno delivered the evening monologue; was it that late? With his hands held as blinders against the glare, he started to look beyond the television's glow.

Abruptly the set died, winking out with a flash. Burke jumped back, popping a bone in his neck.

The Winnabago's generator coughed to a stop. Just like that, stopped. Ran out of fuel?

Fuel that should last for longer than--no. Burke didn't like this at all.

He glanced around him, his curiousity blended now with a growing dread. Slowly he stepped up to the back of a Chevy Celebrity and squinted through the rear window.

All the idiot lights were lit, dimly.

Burke was sure it had been left running. Some time ago, it had been left running. How long?

He stepped up to the driver's window and checked the gas gauge. It read empty.

"Cath, let's get OUT of here, Cath!" he shouted. Burke looked up, over the Celebrity's roof, at the store entrance. Cathy was gone.

"NO!"

Burke bolted inside to see Cathy rounding a corner. He nearly collided with her. She shrugged off his hug, frowning.

"Burke, something is very strange here."

"You're shitting me, Cath! Did you know the cars out there are stalling? How long have they been there? This place has been robbed! The crooks probably stashed everybody in the walk-in cooler! We gotta look for them. Where's the phone?"

"Burke, look at this."

"Damn it, Cath! Read my lips. One, cars are running out of gas. Two, the place is deserted. Equals, the store was hit a long time ago! Help me find--"

"Burke, SHUT UP!"

Cathy had never told him that before. Burke stopped, out of shock more than anything else. Gently, Cathy pushed him away. He stared at her.

"There wasn't a robbery," she said. Just like that. There wasn't a robbery.

"How do you know?"

"Check the register. I just know. I can feel it."

Burke found the register, the key sticking out of it. Feeling guilty, he opened it, intending to close it immediately. The drawer was full of cash.

Cathy snatched a yellow box of Cream of Wheat from the shelf and tossed it to Burke as he crossed the floor. Like a weightless party favor, it practically sailed into his hands.

He flipped its gossamer lightness over and over, shook the box several times, stared at the crude textured lettering.

"What the fuck?" he swore, incredulous.

Burke held the box up to the light, which shone through it like it was a Chinese kite. "I don't believe this. It's empty, Cath. It's not cardboard at all. It's--cloth. Very thin cloth."

"Silk." Cathy said.

Burke peered closely at the words CREAM, OF, WHEAT. The blue letters were stitched in, like embroidered monograms. He ran his finger over the black cook's face, the white bowl he held. The images were finely sewn down to the last detail, including the minute zigzag design around the rim of the bowl. He couldn't shake the image of somebody's grandmother hunched over an old Singer in an old house behind the store, laboring for hours to produce even one of these meticulously made objects.

"Maybe it's a restocker card. You know--when somebody buys the last item on the rack, there's a card or a picture to remind the owner to order more. Yeah, that's what this is."

"All the rest of the Cream of Wheats too?"

"Huh?"

"Check for yourself."

"I believe you. Shit--all five?"

"No, I'm lying. Feel the shelf."

"Feel the--?"

"The shelf! Feel the shelf!" Cathy shouted, suddenly agitated.

"OK, I'll feel the shelf! Take it easy, will you?"

"I'm a little scared."

"Yeah well, I'm a lot scared. Let's just get out of here after this, all right? We'll find another phone somewhere and let the sheriff handle it."

Burke's finger touched the shelf. He thought of a moth's cocoon right away. A lttle rough, a little smooth.

Silk.

Silk stretched tight as a drum.

Burke looked up to see his wife plucking item after item from the shelves and tossing them into the air. Jars of orange marmalade, pickles, and Vienna sausage floated gently to the floor like miniature hot air balloons. Sachets, he thought. Airborne sachets.

He snatched up a jar of sausage, held it up to his face, peering through a curve of the sheerest weave, somehow stitched into a circle to look like a jar. The cluster of short, purplish-brown cylinders inside, floating in some thick, transparent liquid Burke could not identify, resembled anything but food. By now an astounding variety of product shapes lay spread out by his feet, flung from the shelves by Cathy.

"Why?" he said, hoarsely. "Why would anyone put up such a charade?"

"I wish you knew, Burke. Have you noticed how quiet it is in here?"

Burke shot her a quizzical look. Cathy stared back at him. He noticed her lip was quivering.

"Whenever you walk into any deli, any food store at all, what do you hear? What do you hear that makes it so hard to talk because it's so loud sometimes?"

Yes. The cooler and freezer compressors. That predictable din. Ice cream stores were the loudest. Burke studied the milk and soda cases lining one wall, full of round and square cartons he knew wouldn't be real. All were silent.

He walked up to the big square chrome ice machine with its slanted front. The big lid lifted up far too easily, exposing an interior filled with clear bags of ice. Or what appeared to be ice.

Burke reached inside. With his arm halfway through the opening, he was unable to quell the uneasy sensation of entering a nest of jumbo-sized cocoons packed inside a hollow tree.

He pulled out a bag, nearly as light as a feather cushion, an held it at arm's length.

Inside the transparent weave of the bag, their shapes not square but roughly spherical, the golfball-sized eggs moved and squirmed.

What was inside them moved and squirmed.

Burke screamed and ran, tossing the bag across the shelves. This time the mass had enough weight to provide momentum. The sac struck the front window, burst open, and dropped out of sight.

"Now. Now! We're outta here! Let's go, let's go!"

Cathy was nowhere in sight.

"CATH!"

He swung his head wildly. He barely caught a glimpse of the mauve pastel of her sweatshirt as she disappeared through a doorway behind the register.

Burke lunged after her, gagging on his heart. No no no no no no . . .

His wife screamed, a long piercing cry strangely muffled. He rushed through the doorway, uttering a choked, tear-filled prayer.

As he entered a stifling, silk-lined darkness, he caught a faint glimpse of Cathy standing limply as if half-supported, smiling a slight, vacant smile from the deeper shadows, her head tilted and dreadfully still. Burke thought of how long it would take for the rest of the cars outside to run out of gas, even after the intricate, complicated web was neatly unwoven and packed inside the huge, bloated belly. Abruptly, Cathy's body jerked like a marionette, and she was drawn up out of sight.

Burke stepped forward, stopped, bent his head and waited, tears brimming from eyes that would never see a family. He found himself no longer afraid of the mountain so close upon him.

His chest went suddenly bright with overwhelming pain as hidden forelimbs grasped his shoulders from above, the large fangs dripping liquid fire as they receded from his flesh. Burning poison coursed hotly through him, and he went numb all at once, but was nimbly caught before he fell. Then as he was lifted in a dangling rush far, far up, he fumbled for some last words.

You do beautiful work, Grandma.