Apocalypse by Nancy Springer Page A

every word.
    â€œDon’t have to be that,” Shirley soothed. “Could be something else.”
    â€œLike what?” Just as sharply Elspeth turned on her.
    â€œLike, I dunno! Like them crazy people out in California with their coven.”
    â€œA witch.” Elspeth began suddenly, too shrilly, to laugh. “That’s all we need. A witch hunt.”
    â€œPlenty of people in this town who might qualify as witches,” said Gigi with her own peculiar dry, blunt zest. “Anybody know Sojourner Hieronymus?”
    Cally thought of Sojourner Hieronymus sitting on her pristine porch and hating butterflies. Sojourner had once told her that there was a woman who had got a butterfly up her skirt and stuck in her underpants in a public place and it fluttered her to death. Gave her such a strong orgasm that she got a heart attack from sheer exertion and embarrassment. Died on the spot. Wherever Sojourner went, she carried a cane for striking away butterflies and mice and whatever small creatures might assault the sanctuaries of her skirt. Sojourner never wore slacks. She didn’t approve of them.
    But instead of saying she knew Sojourner Hieronymus, Cally said, “Listen.” She stopped her horse, and the others, who were following her lead, necessarily stopped theirs.
    â€œHuh?” Shirley complained. “Listen to what?”
    Then they all heard it. The primal sound, empty, angry and yearning, hollow as Cally’s belly, lonesome as her childhood heart.
    â€œLocusts,” Shirley answered herself.
    â€œCicadas,” said Cally, “all around.”
    Elspeth said with unnecessary force. “So what?” And Cally shrugged her thin shoulders and sent Dove forward again.
    The road narrowed to a grassy trail. Woods closed around like felons in an alley, and the women began to hear within the hollow mob-roar the individual voices, the shrillings and snickerings and tiny screams. They began to see the sere husks clinging by the thousands to the twigs.
    â€œIt’s locusts, all right,” said Gigi.
    â€œCicadas,” said Cally.
    â€œWhatever,” Gigi retorted. In each woman’s voice was a stretched harp string of tension. Shirley, also, looked uneasy. “They don’t hurt nothing,” she offered with far less than her usual volume. “Not even the trees. I heard someplace where they don’t chew, all they do is suck. They come up—out of the ground.…” Her voice dwindled away. She had tightened rein on her horse, stopping where she was, and the others stopped with her. They did not let their horses browse, but sat with the reins in their clenched hands, listening. From the woods on either side and all around them sounded the voices of thousands upon thousands unto millions of—what?
    Something was crying. Or, many somethings. Amid the clickings and chucklings and hum and clamor they heard the wailing cries.
    â€œIt sounds like babies!” Elspeth exclaimed.
    â€œThat’s what I said, the first time I heard them.” Cally controlled her voice, but her body shook, a fine vibration, at one with the mobbed and trembling trees, the cicada resonance.
    Shirley, more prone than any of the others to say whatever came to mind, blurted, “Did you ever hear about the woman died a few years back, over in Mine 27? They went through her things, they found babies in her attic. Five babies, all brown and dried up, wrapped in newspapers and stuffed in a box. Can you imagine? They said one of them was almost a year old before she—”
    â€œI don’t want to hear it,” Cally interrupted, shaking harder.
    With more anxiety and less sense than was usual for her, Gigi put in, “I’ve heard that deer make a noise like that sometimes. Like humans.”
    â€œThat’s not deer,” said Elspeth flatly.
    And with a twiggy sound, a dry, rattling buzz of wings, the chorus made itself visible.
    In spectral colors,