Steph Auteri
When she opened her eyes, her throat was dry, her tongue a dead, fuzzy thing in her mouth. Immediately, her heart leapt and raced. Her skin itched and tingled. It crawled. She scratched at nothing.
She reached an arm out, at an angle, to the space where her husband used to be. Her fingers dug into the sheets, pressed into the cold. She was no longer in the house they had shared together. The sun arcing across the left side of her face, making her squint, was new. The duvet pulled to her chin was the old, threadbare one they had placed in storage. Where in her previous home, there had been a deep purple rug beneath their bed, the floors here were bare. This was not their home. It was hers.
For the first time since she left him, she wished he was there. She knew she should get up, but the bed was a womb. The blankets a swaddle. And to leave that—she was so afraid.
She swallowed, hard, a click at the back of her throat. When the press of her bladder became too much to bear, she pulled the blankets to the side and swung her legs over, let the bottoms of her feet press flat against hardwood. Her toes grasped for carpet with old muscle memory, only to be startled by the cold.
She gulped in air. Let it out slow. It meant nothing, she told herself. It was nothing. Old pipes. Old shower. Old house. That’s all.
She slipped her feet into flip-flops and crept out into the hallway, reached into the bathroom, flicked the light switch before stepping in. She saw the mat: bare. The tiles: bare. The shower: empty. She leaned into the shower and touched a hand to the knob that would turn on the hot water. She swallowed again, her throat still dry. She tensed her hand to turn the knob. But she couldn’t do it.
*
The day before had been slow. She’d eased into it, brewing a half pot of coffee, toasting an English muffin, the sproing! of the toaster a hoarse bellow in the quiet empty of the house. Her kitchen chair groaned every time she shifted as she warmed her hand on the mug, tore into her breakfast with her teeth. She wasn’t sure where to rest her gaze, so she stared, unseeing, at the three spice racks lined up next to each other on the wall. She had alphabetized the spices just yesterday, rotating each one so that its label faced directly outward, oregano next to paprika next to pepper. He would have ridiculed her for this, for the way she’d placed the fruit bowl just so next to the napkins, for the way the mugs in the cabinet all faced on the diagonal, their handles jutting out in the same direction so that they nestled into each other like jigsaw puzzle pieces. But now she could load the dishwasher the way she wanted. Store the Tupperware containers in the pantry like nesting dolls. Stack each utensil with those of the same size and shape in perilous piles in the drawer. And he couldn’t say a thing.
After her first cup of coffee, she pushed herself away from the table. There was a lot she wanted to do today. A lot she had to do. It was time she showered.
When she flicked on the bathroom light, however, she immediately recoiled. “Uckh!” she gasped involuntarily, her voice an intruder in her own home. One… two… three carpenter ants she counted in the shower, crawling up the walls, one on the lip of the tub. Several more moved sluggishly along the windowsill. She made a note to herself to get some of that gel, the stuff that attracts ants with its sweetness, and which they then carry back to their nests so as to slowly poison the entire colony. It was a gruesome way to do it, and she knew she’d have near-dead ants doing the breaststroke across her floor for a week or two. But it was effective.
For the moment, though, she just removed her clothes, folded her pajamas, and placed them carefully on the toilet seat lid. Then she reached into the shower, grabbed the handheld shower head, and turned on the hot water, spraying the ants off the walls, off the edge of the tub, and down the drain. Then she showered, moving her hands protectively over her body as she lathered herself up, rinsed herself down. The thought of an ant crawling up her bare skin made her shudder.
She spent the rest of the morning unpacking and putting away more of her belongings. There had been two messages on her answering machine when she’d emerged from her shower. People who wanted to grab coffee, go out for drinks, hear how she was doing.
But the thought of returning those calls made her tired. Instead, she rolled socks and placed them into drawers, tucked handbags and shoes away into closets, let the ringing telephone go several more times unanswered. She couldn’t stand the thought of talking about her loss. Her failure. Having people pity-treat her to cocktails or cappuccinos. And besides, it didn’t feel like such a loss in that moment as she admired the expansive rooms of her new house, the shiny barrenness of the floors, the hamper that was not surrounded by sneakers or crumpled-up jeans or threadbare T-shirts. Instead, it felt like a new beginning. She felt light. Free.
But people wouldn’t want to hear about that. They wouldn’t want to hear about her new master bedroom or the chaise lounge on her back deck, on which she read the latest true crime memoirs while sipping a beer. They wanted anguish, wanted someone to reinforce their faith in the choice they’d made, the person they’d committed themselves to. They wanted to know that the decision to work at the life they had was not a prison sentence.
Once upon a time she would have understood. Would have felt ashamed. After all, she had spent five years trying to make marriage fit her high expectations, trying to make her husband fulfill her voracious sense of need. In the process, however, she’d become someone she hated. A nag. A tiresome bitch. When she’d told her husband she was unhappy, however, he had surprised her by immediately leaning into the fact of her unhappiness and requesting a divorce. All too quickly, the situation became something she couldn’t fix, something out of her control. But this… this was better. If she was alone, she could always be in control.
*
That afternoon, she sequestered herself in her office, working on training documents for a new medication. She edited down lists of risks and contraindications and cross-checked those against first drafts of diagnostic assessment questionnaires. Those guidelines, those rules, those carefully formatted lists were the space in which she thrived.
As she worked, however, there was a buzzing in her ear and, after some time, she suspected it wasn’t just in her head. She’d hear it. Whip around. See nothing. Bend back to her work. Become distracted by it again.
She couldn’t help remembering a story her mother had once told her, about the time her grandparents’ basement wall had exploded inward from the force of the honeybees that had created a hive between the layers of drywall. Her grandfather had run from this surge of bees, had managed to slam the door shut behind him, shove a towel in the crack below the door, all without being stung. Though she knew he had been young once, spry, she still had trouble imagining him in this scenario, whipping himself around, sprinting for the door, whirling to slam it closed. When she remembered him, he was always unsteady, old. His brown slacks strained against the sphere of his stomach. How would she have fared in the same situation? Instead of that quick, athletic sprint, she imagined herself frozen, the swarm blanketing her body, her body crumpling to the floor.
She rose from her desk chair, stretched her legs, and walked over to the wall of her office. She pressed a hand against the wall, then her entire body, her ear. Could she hear them humming? Could she feel it thrumming? The wall beneath her hand was still.
She pressed herself even closer, imagining she could hear them.
But then, out of the corner of her eye, behind the shade in the window across the room, she saw a shadow. She watched as one slim leg curled itself around the shade, as the wasp’s body followed. Her whole body went cold, but she didn’t freeze. She whirled around. She flew through the door. She slammed it shut.
*
She spent the rest of the day upstairs, unpacking more boxes. Later in the early evening, as she was preparing dinner, the plumber arrived to check the valves on the radiators throughout the house. When she opened the front door to him, he hesitated in the entryway before sidling past her and moving through the living room and into the kitchen. In the past, he had replaced pipes in their house. Had installed a new hot water heater, his teenage son fetching tools and parts from their van. The four of them had joked about the incompetence of homeowners who were not them, about the convoluted nature of building permits, and about the differences between gas- and oil-based heat. In this new place, just the two of them, they were lost, the house seeming to yawn impossibly huge around them.
“Something in here smells good,” he said, chin jutting toward the stove top, reaching for that ease they’d had in the past. She smiled weakly. “This is a nice place,” he said, filling the silence. “Gas heat?”
“Yup,” she said, and then cleared her throat, her vocal cords out of practice after being alone in the house for days. “The people who lived here before had the oil tank removed before we finalized the sale. Converted it all to gas.”
He nodded his head approvingly and looked around again, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“No son today?” she finally asked, to break the silence.
His shoulders relaxed. “He’s fishing with some of his buddies,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s impossible to get good help these days.” And finally: “So we’re checking all the radiators?”
“Yup,” she said. “Some of the rooms are hotter than others, and some don’t seem to get any heat at all. I can’t figure it out.” She waved a hand toward her closed office door. “Just to warn you,” she said, “there’s a large wasp hiding behind the window shade in my office, and I haven’t been able to take him down.” She sheepishly retrieved a large can of Raid from beneath the kitchen sink and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “For protection.”
He took the can from her and adjusted the tool belt around his waist. “Might as well start there,” he said, turning down the hallway. He opened the door to her office and then closed it carefully behind him, his tool belt clunking and clinking.
About 10 minutes later, he swung the door wide, leaving it open behind him, and began making his slow way around the house. Finally, he walked over to her, placing the can of Raid on the kitchen table.
“The radiators look good,” he said, pulling a crumpled-up paper from his back pocket and flattening it on the table. “I adjusted the wheel valve on some of the units,” he said, “and the one back there needs a new bleed valve.” He gestured toward the back room, where her television was. “But other than that, everything looks fine. I should be able to pick up a new valve and install it by the end of the week. Will you be around?”
“I’m always around,” she said, flapping a hand toward him to indicate that she was laid-back and flexible and willing to do whatever worked best for him. She struggled to put a smile on her face. Her eyes flicked involuntarily toward the open door of her office.
“I managed to kill that wasp in your window,” he said, noticing. “It was a big one, too. Don’t know how it got in. You might want to check your screens.”
“Thanks for that,” she said, her smile easier. “I appreciate it. I’ll get that taken care of.”
She stood up to shake his hand and walked him to the door. Later, she went to stand in the middle of her office, holding her breath, listening. Could she still hear it? Was she imagining things? She hugged the wall again, placed a hand next to her face. All she could hear was the sound of her heartbeat rushing in her head.
*
Later, even though she knew it was wasteful, she returned to the bathroom, removed her clothes, stepped into the hot spray of the shower, her face stretching toward the heat. She turned around and let her chin hang toward her chest, used her fingers to comb her hair away from her neck so she could feel the hot beat of the water there. She leaned back, let the water run through her hair, down her face, down her breastbone and between her breasts. The muscles in her arms seemed to melt in the heat, a relief after all the boxes she’d strong-armed from one place to another before finally emptying them entirely, breaking them down, and piling them up outside. She folded her torso forward to let the needles of water massage her back. She sighed and her entire body deflated.
The water in the tub rushed across her feet, between her toes, on its way to the drain. After a while, though, the stream of water that had felt like the gentle tap of many fingers on her back seemed to shift, to feel like the wet plop of fat raindrops. The water felt heavier as it ran down the slope of her back and plummeted off the curve of her behind. She opened her eyes, her hair hanging in waterlogged clumps around her face, and at first couldn’t process what she was seeing. Plump, shiny carpenter ants—hundreds of them—floundered in the standing water, intermingled with the water sluicing down the center of her tub, between her feet. Hundreds more seemed to rain down from above. From her shower head. She opened her mouth to scream and then clapped her hands over her mouth. Keeping one hand across her lips, almost blind, she reached for the shower curtain and ripped it aside.
She vaulted out of the shower, but her back shin hit the lip of the tub and she tumbled forward, sprawling across the bathmat. She felt the crunch of tiny ant bodies beneath her and flailed her limbs gracelessly in an attempt to regain her footing. She grabbed a towel, scrubbed her face raw, rubbed ants upon ants from the surface of her skin. Leaving the shower running, she stumbled out into the hallway, still rubbing her body vigorously. When she felt tiny legs tickling her hair line, her forehead, she screamed again and grabbed her hairbrush off the surface of her dresser, began brushing the insects out of her hair. It was only after she had been brushing her hair for what seemed like an eternity that she realized she was sobbing. She crawled over to her bed, pulled herself up, wrapped herself in her blankets so she could barely breathe. The shush of the shower from the other room was like a thunderstorm.
*
After seeing the emptiness of the bathroom the next morning, she didn’t know what to think. The tub, which had just last night been filled with the writhing and plump bodies of hundreds of carpenter ants, was spotless. The white ceramic tiles, where she had landed elbows first, ants popping and crunching beneath her, gleamed, unblemished by the smears of gore that should have been there. The only sign that anything unusual had happened the night before was the twisted carcass of the shower curtain, which had been ripped from its hooks in her fall. It lay crumpled and draped over the lip of the tub, still damp in its creases.
At some point last night, thinking she’d go mad from the sound of ants pouring into the tub, she had pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, knee-high boots, and gloves. She’d crept into the bathroom, tiny bodies scraping across the tiles beneath the soles of her boots. She reached into the shower, even as she leaned her upper torso away, crying out in disgust as ants pattered onto her right sleeve. She quickly wrenched both knobs to the right, stopping the endless flow of insects from overhead.
Now, she stared at the empty nozzles of the shower head, stared into them, thrown off-balance by the improbable way in which the entire apparatus gleamed. Was last night real? Was she losing her mind? Had it been so long since she’d lived alone that—isolated from the world — she’d begun to see things? She twitched, feeling as though there were bugs crawling across her skin, but when she reached a hand to brush them away, there was nothing there. There was only spotlessness and sunshine and the faint lemon scent of the all-purpose cleanser she’d used the other day.
Still, she skipped her morning shower. Then she abandoned the upper level of her house for the rest of the day, tried to throw herself into her work, tried to fill her brain up with so much impenetrable jargon that she barely had the space to think of anything else.
The day was quiet. The creak of springs as she shifted in her chair. The tap-tap-click, tap-tap-click of keyboard and computer mouse. Around 12:30, she pushed back from her desk so she could stretch her legs. She lengthened her spine, drew her shoulders back, felt a satisfying pop in the small of her back. She got to her feet, folded forward to feel that delicious pull in her hamstrings. But as she hung there, the blood rushing to her head, she heard a buzzing again, saw spots in front of her eyes, saw ants teeming around her feet.
She snapped to standing, her breath shallow, dizziness rushing over her. She blinked. Goose-stepped backward. Looked at the floor.
Nothing.
She walked over to the door of her office and sagged against the frame, staring at the spot on the floor where, moments before, innumerable black spots crawled around her feet. She felt a pounding in her head and brought the heel of her hand to her temple. There was nothing there, just as there had been nothing there the night before. She didn’t know how it could all seem so real—she could still feel the scrabbling of tiny feet at the nape of her neck from when she had brushed the ants from her hair—but she was clearly losing her goddamn mind.
And then there it was again. The buzzing. Her gaze shifted to take in the window, but there was nothing there. Slowly, reluctantly, she walked over to the blank wall, the one against which she’d pressed her body the day before. She could swear the sound was coming from it. Could even feel a slight trembling beneath her fingers. But she didn’t know that she could trust herself anymore. Could trust what she saw or heard or felt. Last night, the impossible seemed to have happened. But the morning had proven her wrong. The blank slate of the bathroom said so.
She forced herself to sit back down at her desk, tried to regain the focus that had drawn her forward all morning. But the letters on her screen were bugs dancing across the page. Her vision began to fill with black spots, blinking in and out, just at the edge of her periphery. She brought her hand to her temple again. Pressed gently. There was a migraine coming on.
She rolled back from her desk and, once more, pushed up to standing. The black threatened to slip across her vision entirely, blotting everything out, and she held her breath, waiting until she could see the ground beneath her feet once more. She wove and stumbled her way out the office, through the hallway and the kitchen and the living room, up the stairs to the bathroom. She swallowed a Motrin. Wet a washcloth in the sink and folded it lengthwise, brought it to the bedroom. Then she closed her blinds, slid beneath her sheets, lay back, and placed the washcloth on her forehead. She closed her eyes and waited for her thoughts to go as black and empty as her vision.
*
It was supposed to be a power nap but, when she opened her eyes, the room was a dark so solid she couldn’t see her own hands. She blinked her eyes several times. They were sticky from sleep. Her migraine was gone, but there was still a slight throbbing at her temple, that wooziness that comes from spending too much time conked out. She pulled the blankets down off her body and slowly unfolded herself, extending her limbs, reaching feet to floor. When she pulled up the blinds, the sky was dark, the streetlamps glowing.
“Well, this day was a wash,” she muttered out loud, noticing the lazy blink of fireflies in her front yard. After a time, she felt hunger gnawing at her gut and sighed. She turned away from her bedroom window, the movement of cars on the street and the flicker of lights in other houses seeming a world away.
Once she was downstairs, the night before—even earlier that afternoon—felt gauzy. Insubstantial. She put on some ragtime music, the kind that made her sway her hips and stamp her feet across the floor without even thinking. She poured herself a glass of red. Pulled a zucchini out of the fridge and began slicing.
Before the divorce, this had been one of her favorite things. When the workday was over, when her husband was still out of the house, when the rooms were still quiet and she could feel her shoulders easing down away from her ears, she’d turn on music and pour herself a glass of wine and pretend all of this was hers. Only hers. She’d lose herself in the tangible pleasure of working her hands through ground meat and eggs or of beating breadcrumbs into chicken cutlets, and she’d be happy. Only when she was alone could she shrug off the suffocating sense of want from the people in her life. And though she hadn’t necessarily wanted a divorce, the ability to be alone as much as she wanted was certainly seductive.
Still, the air felt heavy now, especially since yesterday. She felt that low terror still, buzzing at the periphery of her consciousness. After sliding a baking pan into the oven, she ran her fingers through her hair and noticed how greasy it was. How grimy her skin was. She felt a tickle at the hollow curve where her neck and shoulder came together and pinched her fingers there to remove the errant hair. But when she removed her hand from her neck, there was a click beetle between her fingertips, and she released a strangled scream, flung the beetle away from her. “Goddammit!” she hissed, her breath shallow and heavy at the top of her chest. She pulled a paper towel from the roll and hovered over the stove top, leaned forward to see where the beetle had landed so she could crush it and throw it away. But she couldn’t find it. “Goddammit,” she whispered again.
And just like that, that warm, easy feeling she’d had while sipping her wine and shuffling across the hardwood floors was gone. She paced the rooms restlessly as she waited for her dinner to be ready, tapped a foot as she ate, turned the music off, and then on again, and then finally off for good. Her skin crawled remembering the click beetle at her neck, the ants on her body the night before. Her shoulder blades inched toward each other again. Her left eye jittered and twitched.
After dinner, she left her dirty dishes in the sink, not having the wherewithal to clean them. She sank down into the couch in the back room and considered watching a movie. But after about 10 minutes of aimless clicking, she turned off the TV and wandered the first floor, turning off lights as she went, ending with the front porch light before climbing the stairs to the second floor. She paused in the doorway to the bathroom, flicked on the light, and gazed out over all that spotlessness, just as she had that morning. She rubbed her fingertips together, imagining caked-on grit, and decided she needed to clean herself up.
Though 99 percent certain she’d imagined things the night before, she chose to draw herself a bath versus taking a shower. Then she’d lather herself up good, rinse herself off, wrap herself in an oversized blanket. Afterward, she’d finally be able to take pleasure in the feel of sheets against clean skin, perhaps even enjoy a good book while propped up on a hefty pile of pillows. Her skin thrummed in anticipation.
She squatted down next to the tub, placing her left hand on the lip in order to steady herself as she leaned in with the other hand. Her right hand shook, and she stilled it by grasping the hot water handle firmly. She turned it to the left. Hot water poured into the tub.
She grasped the cold water handle next and turned. Just a little. She wanted the water to be as scalding as she could stand, wanted to burn the filth off her body. She flipped the overflow valve and kept one eye on the water as she removed her clothes. Steam rose invitingly from the tub and, once it was relatively full, she turned off the water. Breathed in the steam. Gloried in the silence.
She stepped one foot over the lip of the tub and let it hover over the water. If she blinked, she could see the ants filling the tub. If she blinked, she could feel them on every inch of her skin. But there was nothing there now and she needed this and so, finally, she let her toe dip into the water, and then her foot. And then she was standing in the water up to her calves and she braced herself with her hands and she allowed her entire body to sink into the water, slid her butt down until she was in up to her neck. Her hair floated in seaweed tendrils on the surface of the water. She wiggled her toes.
Slowly, and the longer she remained in the water unmolested, the tension drained out of her. After a while, she dunked herself beneath the water, poured some shampoo into one palm, and worked her fingers through her hair, using the cup she kept by the sink to dump water over herself and wash the soap away. She soaped up her body as well, rubbed the stink out of her armpits and from between her toes. Soap shimmered on the surface of the water like an oil slick.
She used a single, big toe to flip the overflow valve to the downward position and watched the water level slowly drop. And then she saw it. One ant wriggling its way out of the spout, clinging to the edge before dropping into the water, flailing there. She pulled her knees close to her chest, fast. She pressed herself up and out of the tub, stomped slick feet on the bathmat, found herself hypnotized by the ant that swirled closer and closer to the drain. When the last of the water drained out of the tub with a loud sucking sound, it lay there, beached. She leaned in toward the drain, squinted her eyes. Could swear she saw innumerable legs scrabbling up from beneath the holes of the drain cover, grasping to pull themselves up, squeeze through. Could swear she saw endless ants rising from the depths.
*
“This wasn’t a normal pest infestation, Dad.” She paced her kitchen, phone pressed between her shoulder and her ear as she retrieved a yogurt cup from the fridge. Sunlight pressed in from the window over the kitchen sink.
She listened to her father, brows drawing together as her frustration grew. “No,” she tried to interject. “NO. I did my homework. They were carpenter ants, and carpenter ants don’t even get in through the pipes. They usually come in through window frames. Cracks in the foundation.”
The night before, after finding herself mesmerized by the holes in the drain cover, the thrashing, twisting movement she’d imagined in those dark apertures, after drawing nearer to the drain almost against her will, she’d caught herself, drawn herself upright, and left the room, slamming the door behind her. Put herself to bed, careful to not let even a single foot slip out from beneath her blankets.
In the morning, as with the morning before, there’d been nothing amiss in the bathroom. Nothing to show that an army of bugs were rising from some dark netherworld to eat her alive. And yes, her fears seemed silly and outsized in the light of the new day. But the only other possibility was that she was going crazy, and that was unacceptable.
Now, on the phone with her father, she went silent again, her chest constricting as she listened to him tell her she was being hysterical. She huffed out a breath, feeling regret that she had ever called him and, at the limits of her patience, rushed to get him off the phone.
In the aftermath of her marriage’s collapse, she could see clearly how she had married her father, how her father and her husband were one and the same. What she couldn’t understand was how she—someone who relished having control over her life—had ended up aligning herself with yet another man who viewed her actions and her emotions as something to belittle, something to step around gingerly. Well, no more, she decided. It was time to pull on her big girl pants and handle this issue on her own.
After hanging up the phone, she took her yogurt into her office and dropped down into her desk chair. Clicked away from the PestWorld website and the entomology page of the University of Kentucky and the Do It Yourself Pest Control carpenter ant tutorial. Left the database that allowed her to search for past pest inspections on her home. She was left with the page she’d found on delusional parasitosis. She clicked that one shut, too, so she was left only with her work inbox… but then she hesitated.
She clicked into the location box and did a new search for infestations, her fingers slamming over the keyboard. Again, the words threatened to dance away from her on the page, tiny insect legs wriggling and cavorting. Still, she scrolled through page after page, even as her eyes glazed over until, at the bottom of page 12 of her search results, she saw a link to a site on the signs of demonic activity. When she clicked through, “swarming insects” appeared around halfway down the page. “The majority of listed activity falls within the first stage of a demonic haunting – infestation,” she read near the bottom of the page. “Demonic infestation is the stage in which demonic entities take ownership of one’s home or property.”
Something in her right temple pulsed again and she shook her head. Clicked the back button. She immediately noticed a link to an academic article that probed the connection between insects and dreams. She clicked, scrolled down, found a chart on various insect-related dream interpretations. In the entry for “ant,” she saw that dreams could indicate anxiety around conformity, a dissatisfaction with life, and a sense of restlessness. She pressed her lips together, pushed herself abruptly away from her desk. Life has never been better! she told herself. And this was NOT A DREAM.
She stood and walked around her office. Looked out the window. Peered into her bookcase. Walked back to her desk. She tapped her fingers against its surface and then wandered away again, pausing in the middle of the room. Were her walls buzzing again? Were her goddamn walls buzzing again? She clenched both fists, dropped her head back, and roared at the ceiling. Slammed the flat of her palm against the wall.
She wandered back into her kitchen. Stared at the phone. Wandered away. Then she rushed back into her office and pressed herself against the wall. The buzzing was a maelstrom, rushing through her ear canal and squeezing her heart. Her fingers clenched and her nails scraped at the drywall.
She wheeled away from the wall and stumbled from her office. Staggered into her kitchen and pulled open the utensil drawer. Slammed it shut. She reached toward the knife block on the counter and pulled out the chef’s knife. Considered it. Put it back. Pulled the bread knife from the block instead and rushed back to her office.
She placed a hand against the wall, moving it around until she could feel it pulsing into her palm. She took her hand away and leaned in close. She could swear she saw the wall breathing. She rapped it with her knuckles, tried to determine whether the space beneath her fist was hollow. She raised the knife in her other hand, placed the teeth of the blade against the wall, and pressed gently.
The blare of the ringing telephone startled her and, with her heart in her throat, she listened to it ring three more times. There was a click, and the answering machine picked up.
The sound of her voice—calm and capable and even—sobered her. It represented a version of her that seemed to have slipped away in the night. Still, that part of her kept her from pressing the blade any deeper into the wall, kept her quiet and motionless as the answering machine beeped and Walt’s voice echoed throughout the house.
“Hey there. It’s Walt. I got that valve you needed.” There was the crackling of static. The rush of wind. He was likely calling from his van. “I have a coupla projects I need to take care of today,” he continued, “but they should be done by about 3. I’ll swing by your house after that and see if you’re around. It won’t take but a minute to install.” He paused and she heard three quick blats, loud enough so she knew it was him tapping his horn. “See you then,” he said. More crackling, increasing in volume for a moment, and then a click.
She removed the knife from the wall and slid down to the floor. 3 p.m., he’d said. About five hours from now.
She stood and swiped her fingers across the scratch she’d made in the drywall. Left the room and put the knife back where it belonged. She couldn’t let him see her wall cut open. Couldn’t let him see her mind cracked open.
She climbed the stairs to her bedroom. Closed the blinds again. Set the alarm on her phone. Climbed onto the bed and wrapped her blankets around her.
If she were asleep, she wouldn’t be able to see them, she told herself.
If she were asleep, she wouldn’t be able to hear.
*
She crept downstairs at a little before two, unable to stay in her bedroom a single minute more. She had tumbled in and out of a sort of half-sleep for almost four hours, listening to the crescendo and decrescendo of the buzzing in her walls, swiping at phantom insects on her skin. Finally, when she could stand it no longer, she flung the blankets off her body, slipped her feet into a pair of sneakers, and made her way to her front door.
The buzzing was all around her now, echoing throughout the house. It surrounded her, ensnared her in its walls of sound. As she stared at the front door, she flicked through a mental catalog of convenience stores in the area. The CVS on the corner of Bradford and Pompton. The local garden shop on 23. The Home Depot, a little farther away. She imagined herself with a backpack sprayer like a proton pack, filled with the most potent of insecticides so she would never feel vulnerable again. Where might she be able to acquire an industrial-size bottle of pesticide, aside from Amazon? And did she really plan to return to this place once she stepped over the threshold, a place that had clearly driven her to madness?
She reached for the doorknob and then pulled back. There was a large spider near the top of the door, and it skulked its way down, closer to eye level. She imagined it leaping toward her face, scrabbling its legs past her lips, crawling down her throat. She shook her head to clear it of the vision and glanced at the space beneath the door, where she’d noticed air seeping in during the home inspection. Now, in addition to the evening air, she saw a centipede emerge from beneath the door, the length of it seeming to go on forever, hundreds of legs wiggling and squirming in a way that was almost unseemly. She shuddered as it made its sinuous way across the tiles, toward the slightly elevated hardwood floor upon which she was standing. She backed up slowly, noticed two more following.
She whirled around and ran to the kitchen where the can of Raid was still sitting on her kitchen table. She snatched it up, made sure it was unlocked, and held it up in front of her, like a pistol, two fingers straining against the trigger. She felt ridiculous, for just an instant, to be so rattled by a handful of insects, and then she became distracted by movement to the left of her, in her office doorway, where the buzzing had, improbably, increased in volume.
Switching direction, she reluctantly inched her way over to her office, peered through the doorway, around the corner, toward the wall. She watched in horror as the wall unquestionably pulsed in and out, in and out. The crack she had made with her knife earlier that day split outward in a jagged seam. Time slowed as throngs of small, woolly bodies pushed their way out. Her movements seemed sluggish, syrupy as she spun around, slammed the door shut behind her, and ran through the house.
When she passed the front entryway and pivoted to sprint up the stairs, the rubber soles of her sneakers squashed and slid across a number of centipedes. She was crying and screaming all at once now, and she didn’t see the van turn into her driveway, pull up to the front of the house, idle for a moment, and turn off. Instead, she ran away, ran up, ran deeper into the house, flew through the doorway to her bedroom, closed the door, and locked it. She was breathing too hard to hear the eventual knock from downstairs.
She braced a free hand against the door, leaned her forehead against it, felt tears and snot snaking down her cheeks to dangle off her chin. She took a breath. Swallowed. Tried to calm herself. And then she heard the chittering.
When she turned around, there was one stink bug sauntering lazily across the underside of the light fixture on her ceiling. She snarled unintelligibly, swung the can of Raid up, took aim, and pulled the trigger. It writhed in the face of the spray, thrashing its limbs as it fell onto her bed. She had only a moment to wonder if it was dead before she noticed a darkness behind her semi-sheer blinds, a darkness that was moving, throbbing, making the blinds shiver in a way they never had when the windows were open to the breeze.
She heard the knocking at the door this time. “In a minute,” she said weakly as she backed away from the windows. The backs of her thighs hit the lip of her dresser and, when it rocked into the wall, it knocked down a picture, revealing a mass of stink bugs swarming along its back side.
She screamed as the fall jostled the stink bugs, causing them to fly up at her. As she whirled about the room, beating at her body, she saw more of them, crawling out from behind other pictures, from behind the mirror hanging on the back of her door.
The knocking below became more insistent. She looked pleadingly toward her bedroom door. This is when the blinds exploded inward, billowing without a breeze, and thousands of stink bugs filled the air. The deep brown cloud of them blinded her.
“HELP ME!” she tried to scream but was cut off as she choked on the bugs flying about her face. Her arms waved about her ineffectually, the can of Raid forgotten. She hacked and coughed and found herself choking on stink bug bodies. Panicked and disoriented, she slammed into her platform bed frame and sprawled across the mattress. More stink bugs revealed themselves, emerging out of wrinkles in the fitted sheet, out of the sides of pillowcases.
The knocking from downstairs grew louder, interspersed with the ringing of the doorbell, but all she could hear was the beating of wings and the scratching of legs and her own thrashing limbs striking a drum beat against the bed. She could barely breathe against the clot of bugs making their way down her throat, blocking her windpipe. She could just barely see the length of her body being blanketed with bugs before she closed her eyes and let them take her.
*
It was six months before the government seized the property for back taxes. Another few weeks before it was placed on the market and sold to the highest bidder as is. When the new owners visited the house, they weren’t sure what to expect. The grass was overgrown, dandelions peeking out in flashes of buttery yellow. Junk mail spilled off the front steps. Spider webs blanketed the bushes lined up on either side of the front door and spread audaciously between the mailbox and the porch light, the carcasses of countless gnats and flies swaying in the breeze.
But when they opened the front door, the sun shone into a stunning entryway, gleamed along dust-covered hardwood floors, lit up the plush living room couch. As they walked across the threshold, the sun illuminated the kitchen beyond, with its pale blue cabinetry and its rows of spices along the walls, each bottle placed up there in alphabetical order, label facing outward.
They wound their way through the rooms on the first floor, climbed the stairs to the second floor, glanced quickly into the bathroom before turning the knob on what they presumed was the door to the master bedroom. When they pushed it open, the room was spotless, the bed made up as if the owner had vacated it that morning and had just popped out to the market. The sheets were pulled taut and tucked beneath the mattress, the coverlet folded down just so, a hamper placed fastidiously into a corner of the room behind the door. A faint musty scent permeated the air but, other than that, you would never have guessed that this home had been abandoned half a year before.
They sat down beside each other on the edge of the bed, her hand reaching for his. Their heads swiveled to take in the contents of the room before they turned to smile at each other.
And then a chirping sound floated up into the air, seeming to come from the radiator at the far end of the room.
“Crickets?” she asked, her brows knitting together.
He squeezed her hand. “Well, so be it!” he said, beaming. “Crickets are good luck, right?”
***
Steph Auteri is a journalist for such publications as The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and VICE. Her more literary work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Creative Nonfiction, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. This is her first piece of fiction. You can learn more at stephauteri.com.