Vermilion Sands by J. G. Ballard

song.
    ‘Paul!’ Tony Sapphire pointed across the terrace. ‘What’s going on? There’s something —’
    Fifty yards from us, Charles Van Stratten had stepped over the balustrade, and now stood out on one of the black marble squares, hands loosely at his sides, like a single chess piece opposing the massed array of the screens. Everyone else had gone, and the three of us were now alone with Charles and the hidden occupant of the screens.
     
    The harsh song of the rogue sculpture still pierced the air. Two miles away, through the haze which partly obscured the distant shore, the beach-houses jutted among the dunes, and the fused surface of the lake, in which so many objects were embedded, seams of jade and obsidian, was like a segment of embalmed time, from which the music of the sculpture was a slowly expiring leak. The heat over the vermilion surface was like molten quartz, stirring sluggishly to reveal the distant mesas and reefs.
    The haze cleared and the spires of the sand reefs seemed to loom forward, their red barbs clawing towards us through the air. The light drove through the opaque surface of the lake, illuminating its fossilized veins, and the threnody of the dying sculpture lifted to a climax.
    ‘Emerelda!’
    As we stood up, roused by his shout, Charles Van Stratten was running across the terrace. ‘Emerelda!’
    Before we could move he began to pull back the screens, toppling them backwards on to the ground. Within a few moments the terrace was a mêlée of tearing canvas and collapsing trestles, the huge emblems flung left and right out of his path like disintegrating floats at the end of a carnival.
    Only when the original nucleus of half a dozen screens was left did he pause, hands on hips.
    ‘Emerelda!’ he shouted thickly.
    Raymond turned to me. ‘Paul, stop him, for heaven’s sake!’
    Striding forward, Charles pulled back the last of the screens. We had a sudden glimpse of Emerelda Garland retreating from the inrush of sunlight, her white gown flared around her like the broken wings of some enormous bird. Then, with an explosive flash, a brilliant vortex of light erupted from the floor at Emerelda’s feet, a cloud of jewelled spiders and scorpions rose through the air and engulfed Charles Van Stratten.
    Hands raised helplessly to shield his head, he raced across the terrace, the armada of jewelled insects pursuing him, spinning and diving on to his head. Just before he disappeared among the dunes by the beach, we saw him for a last terrifying moment, clawing helplessly at the jewelled helmet stitched into his face and shoulders. His voice rang out, a sustained cry on the note of the dying sculptures, lost on the stinging flight of the insects.
     
    We found him among the sculptures, face downwards in the hot sand, the fabric of his white suit lacerated by a hundred punctures. Around him were scattered the jewels and crushed bodies of the insects he had killed, their knotted legs and mandibles like abstract ideograms, the sapphires and zircons dissolving in the light.
    His swollen hands were filled with the jewels. The cloud of insects returned to the summer-house, where Dr Gruber’s black-suited figure was silhouetted against the sky, poised on the white ledge like some minatory bird of nightmare. The only sounds came from the sculptures, which had picked up Charles Van Stratten’s last cry and incorporated it into their own self-requiem.
    ‘…“She…killed”…
’ Raymond stopped, shaking his head in amazement. ‘Paul, can you hear them, the words are unmistakable.’
    Stepping through the metal barbs of the sculpture, I knelt beside Charles, watching as one of the jewelled scorpions crawled from below his chin and scuttled away across the sand.
    ‘Not him,’ I said. ‘What he was shouting was
“She killed – Mrs Van Stratten.”
The old dowager, his mother. That’s the real clue to this fantastic menage. Last night, when we saw Gruber by the rail outside her room – I