The Call of Distant Shores by David Niall Wilson, Bob Eggleton

and fled to the front – to his chair, and his beer, and the line of folks already stretching halfway around the parking lot, all of them wanting a glimpse of that damned giant cockroach.
    Jasper wondered if they felt it.   He wondered if they smelled the stench, and heard the scuttling feet – the soft, chitinous voices that never stopped speaking or chirping or chanting or whatever-the-hell they were doing.   Maybe he was just losing it.   Bobby Lee had sure done him a good turn, letting him in on this deal, and one thing was certain.   There was no shortage of cockroach suckers in the world.   No sir.
    Jasper grabbed the roll of tickets and began doling them out, five dollars a pop, to bright, eager-faced kids and tolerant parents, young couples on long vacations and truckloads of rednecks in for a quick laugh.   He only paid them half a mind, but one family caught his eye.
    They pulled up in a brand new SUV, the kind with a million features, DVD player in back and On Star up front.   Mother, father, a boy of maybe thirteen in a black t-shirt with the center of his lower lip pierced and his hair spiked like a damned purple and green porcupine, and the girls.   They were twin girls, probably eighteen or nineteen, tall and long-legged with matched honey colored hair and short skirts.   Jasper couldn't have missed them if he tried, and despite his need to vend tickets to the next twenty people in line and price t-shirts for another fifteen visitors on their way out, he managed to keep an eye on them until they wound around the corner and out of site toward the shed.
    For the next half hour or so, Jasper was too busy to think about them, and that was a tribute to how hard he was working, because there was absolutely NOTHING Jasper loved better than a cute set of twins.   He liked to watch TV LAND on cable so he could catch the old Doublemint Girls commercials.   It wasn't until that family was winding their way back out, the boy selecting a truly disgusting plastic roach souvenir, and the mother laughingly holding one of the "I Survived the Great Dismal Swamp" t-shirts across her breasts and winking at her husband, that Jasper remembered them at all.
    It was later in the afternoon, and Jasper scanned the diminishing crowd quickly for the twins.   They were nowhere to be seen, and he grew almost frantic, staring out over the thinning traffic in the small parking lot to see if he'd somehow missed their trek back to the SUV.   There was no one visible inside the vehicle, and the rest of the family seemed oblivious.   They laughed and joked a little - or the parents did.   The boy jammed a pair of headphones onto his head, cranked the volume on some sort of expensive portable MP3 player, and zoned out.   They walked away as a group, straight to the SUV, opened the doors, and got in.
    Jasper stepped away from his counter, holding up a hand to those waiting on him to give him a moment.   He stepped to the corner of the stand, and glanced around at the shed.   Bobby Lee was there, grinning and waving at him, but there was no sign of the girls.   Jasper frowned.   He turned to scan the SUV again, but its taillights were already disappearing out the feeder road toward 17.
    "What the hell?" he muttered.   He turned back to the counter and went through the motions for the next twenty minutes or so, ushering the last of the crowds out and away.   Jasper carefully counted out the days proceeds, which were phenomenal, and packed the bills away into the bank bag he'd taken to carrying in a lock box beneath the seat of his truck.   When the shirt racks had been wheeled inside, and the tiny remnant of the day's fresh produce had been stored for the night, he locked up carefully.
    He stepped to the corner of the building, as he did every night, and called out to Bobby Lee.
    "You done for the night, Bobby?"
    "Just about," Bobby called back.   His voice floated out from the interior of the shed, and for a moment, Jasper