Jeff Rovin - Vespers

Was it a scent? Someone who smelled like Joyce? The bat could have detected that from the subway, but she didn’t come here to kill. She was looking for something.

“Maybe some of the kids were watching TV,” Gentry suggested.

“Possibly.” Joyce walked toward the overturned set.

“Maybe the bat heard her mate’s voice on the news.”

“A lot of people would have been watching TV along her route,” Joyce said. “Why would she stop here? Anyway, even if a tape of the male bat was on the news, she’d hear the sounds differently from the way we do. They would register as a series of strobing pulses, not as a continuous sound. It would be like you mistaking a black-and-white newspaper photograph for reality.” She stopped at the TV and looked down. “On the other hand-”

“What?” Gentry asked.

“She could have heard something that we recognize as one thing but that she heard as something else.”

“Such as?”

Joyce righted the stand and the TV. She reconnected a loose cable in back. The static vanished and a solid blue screen appeared. Joyce looked at the VCR that was on a bookcase behind the TV. The unit was off. “They weren’t watching a videotape,” she said.

Gentry moved one of the sleeping bags. There was a small plastic console beneath it. The red “on” light was glowing. “No,” he said. “They were playing video games.”

Joyce stepped over and crouched beside it. The game cartridge had popped partway out. She pushed it back in and then looked at the TV. The title screen of the game came on. “Feather Jackson,” she read. She pushed “start.” The legend scrolled down the screen, recounting the history of the girl who could fly. As it did, the theme music came on.

Gentry said, “Maybe we ought to ask one of the kids what part they were up to.”

Joyce nodded absently. She was listening to the game.

Gentry turned to go.

“Wait!” Joyce said suddenly.

Gentry came over and squatted beside her. “What’ve you got?”

She punched up the volume on the TV. “Do you hear that?”

“The music?”

“No.” She raised the volume. “The drum underneath it.”

Gentry listened again then nodded with the beat. “Drums of doom,” he said, then read from the screen. “ ‘The approaching armies of the Pillow People want to conquer Featherland and turn its inhabitants into-’ ”

“Robert, don’t you get it?”

He shook his head. She turned the volume higher. The music itself became a broken, crackling noise, but she could still hear the drum.

“This is just a hint of how the bat heard it. Loud and thumping.”

“Okay. But there had to be thousands of radios on along the way, a lot of beats. Why would she respond to this particular drum?”

“The drumbeats in music change, don’t they?”

“Most do, I suppose.”

“This doesn’t. It’s constant.”

He listened.

“Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Hear it?” Joyce asked.

“Yeah.”

The legend finished, and the game began. The drums continued.

“The beat keeps going when the introduction ends,” she said with growing excitement. “The sound probably continues through the entire game. Don’t yousee?”

“No.”

“Robert, that sound is in the audible range. When would the bat have been exposed to a regular drumbeat like it?”

“I have no idea.”

Joyce rose. She shut off the video game and started toward the door. “In the womb, Robert. The bat came here looking for her mother.”

Gentry and Joyce went back to the car and continued downtown. Joyce was revved up again. Gentry was not. He had some major problems with what Joyce had come up with.

“You really believe that a bat flying through a subway tunnel heard a video game that sounded like her mother-”

“Her mother’s heart.”

“Like her mother’s heart,” he said. “She heard that and she flew over to check it out?”

“Yes. It’s very possible.”

“One sound in a city of millions upon millions of sounds.”

“That’s right. Again, think like a bat. Its hearing is extraordinarily sensitive and multidirectional. A bat can pick up and follow a distinctive sound the same way a shark sniffs blood in the water.”

“But even if that’s true, her mother died eight years ago,” Gentry said. “How could the bat remember that?”

“It’s not in the conscious mind, but it’sthere, ” Joyce said. “The sound triggered some kind of memory. Think about it. She left at peace, without hurting anyone, without stirring up the small bats again. She was obviously calmed by whatever happened here.”

“All right. Assuming that’s true, why didn’t she get angry when she saw that her mother wasn’t here? She was in a rage when she left the museum.”

“You just said why.”

“I did?”

“All the giant bat knows is that her mother wasn’t in the playroom,” Joyce said. “As far as the bat knows, she might still be alive somewhere. But when the bat came to the museum laboratory, shesaw that her mate was dead. She didn’t see or smell anything to suggest death here in the shelter. Maybe one of the kids accidentally pulled out the cable when the bat came in. Maybe the bat did. So the video sound stopped suddenly, and the bat-”

“-thinks that mommy may still be alive?” Gentry said.

“We’ve got a name for that at the zoo,” she said. “It’s called the Dumbo effect. We use smells and sounds to wean animals from their parents.”

“ Nancy, I just don’t know.”

“Robert, it’spossible. As far as our bat knows, this is the same thing that happened once before, a month or so after she was born.”

“Abandonment.” Gentry rose. “How did our lady bat find the dead male bat?”

“She probably traced it by smell.”

“By smell. So wouldn’t the big bat also have smelled that her motherwasn’t here?”

“Olfactory memory doesn’t work that way. Bats, people, most animals recognize a smell if they encounter it again. But they can’t summon it up like they can sounds or images. If she heard something that sounded like her mother, she would believe it was her mother, smell or no smell.”

“And you’re saying this is theonly sound that ever reminded her of her mother’s heartbeat?”

“Why not? Until yesterday this bat lived her entire life in the wild. And she was with her sibling. They were brother and sister, mother and father to each other, mates.”

“Death, incest, and Oedipus,” Gentry said. “This is a goddamn Greek tragedy.”

“That’s the way some mammals are. And now, for the first time, the bat’s alone. When better to listen for her mother?”

Gentry still had problems with it, problems with all of it. Big mutant bats. Little bats driven mad by echolocation. But it didn’t change the fact that New York was under siege, and that the bats had to be dealt with.

“So how does this help us?” Gentry asked.

“I’m not sure,” Joyce said.

Once they crossed West Houston Street, the city was deserted except for police officers patrolling in cars and riot gear-and bats. They were hanging from streetlamps and awnings, from walk signs and traffic lights.

A tired-looking Marius Pace met Joyce and Gentry in the lobby of the new Office of Emergency Management headquarters. Pace took the pair directly to the elevator; on the way to the eighteenth floor, he reported where things stood as of one hour before. That was when Gordy Weeks had come out from his meeting and briefed his deputies during a short recess.

“The impact assessment is obviously pretty grim.” Pace consulted a legal notepad that was spotted with round coffee mug stains. “The subway patrols obviously weren’t able to deal with the bat, so all of New York ’s roadways, rails, and bridges have been shut down. Nothing leaves or enters the borough. All businesses here and in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx are closed except for food-service and health-care providers, but the roads are still open. The area airports have also been closed from Westchester down to New Jersey, and all incoming traffic is being diverted to Hartford, Philadelphia, and Buffalo. Only emergency aircraft can come or go locally.”