Creeptych

“I tried to take sleeping pills,” he began, but she only laughed and pulled him towards the gray-boarded shack.

“They never sleep,” she repeated.

“Will I ever have my hearing back right?” he asked. “I just want to go back to normal again.”

Metallica man laughed at that. “You’re chosen,” he said. “You’ll never know normal again. Just the swarm.”

With that, the man grabbed him around the throat and whispered, “Lie down” into his right ear.

“Why?” was all he could say.

“Eardrum Buzz.”

They pushed him onto a cot, and as he lay there, face buried in a dusty pillow, Wes could hear the sound in his head chime and chitter, rise and fall like the whir of an engine. It called to the noise in the trees and as it received an answer, its buzz grew more excited. The nagging pain in the back of Wes’s head grew from dull to ice- sharp, and spread to pound like a nail gun into his forehead, hammering just behind his eyes.

I’m going to die, he thought. And the thought was good.

*   *   *

Wes woke from a droning doze to the sound of boots. They clomped hard on the wooden floor and paced back and forth nearby.

“It’s almost time,” he heard a voice growl.

Wes opened his eyes and rolled to see the thin, saturnine features of Arachnid pacing near the cot. The singer wore his usual black leather pants and boots, and a tight, ripped T-shirt. On its black cloth surface, the white fangs of a spider opened hopefully.

“You did this to me,” Wes accused, struggling to sit up.

Arachnid shook his head. “Not me,” he grinned and pointed to Jen. “She did it. I just told her what to do.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“You want the buzz to stop, yes?”

Wes looked into Arachnid’s too-black eyes and nodded.

“Then we must release the swarm.” He lifted a pair of gardening shears from a small table and ran a finger down the sharp side of the blade. A bead of blood collected almost instantly on the tip.

It occurred to Wes that “releasing the swarm” was not a procedure that he was likely to live through.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked, stalling.

“You were drawn to our music, right?” the singer said. His voice was almost, gentle.

“Yeah.”

“They are our music,” Arachnid said. “They live within each of us; it is their sound that makes Eardrum Buzz.”

“How do you live with it?” Wes whispered.

Arachnid leaned down, until Wes could smell the faint licorice and hay scent of his breath. As Wes stared at the singer’s discolored brown and gold-flecked eyes, a small black form crawled from the man’s ear. Its antennae shifted back and forth quickly, like the nervous jitter of a roach. Then, with a spread of brown and clear chitinous wings, the bug launched itself from the lobe of Arachnid’s ear and flew up in a lazy circle to land somewhere in the shadow of the pitched roof.

“They’re our children,” Arachnid grinned. “We love them.”

Wes’s stomach churned as he realized that it hadn’t been her tongue that he’d felt in his ear that night after all. Thanks to Jen’s false kisses at the party, those same bugs were inside him right now. Growing inside his ears. Rubbing tiny hairlike legs together to sing in the center of his brain.

“Bugs don’t live inside humans,” he whispered. Hoping perhaps, that by saying it, the statement would be true. But he’d seen the evidence proving his theorem false, just seconds ago.

“These do,” Arachnid smiled. “They feed off of us, just a little at a time. They can’t live without us. That’s why we’re helping them find new hosts. Soon the swarm will be strong enough to fend for itself, and find its own hosts. But right now…only one in a million survive.”

“What do they eat?” Wes whispered.

“Brains.” The singer laughed and pointed the shears at Wes’s forehead. “Right now they’re in there nibbling. Before long, if you incubated a few nests of them, you’d have a hole in your head as big as a baseball. Like our drummer, Cicada. He found them a couple years ago, when he went on a rainforest trip. But he’s hosted so many, that he’s not much there anymore, ya know? That’s why he never does interviews.”

Arachnid drew a cold steel line from Wes’s forehead to his ear.

“But you won’t have to go through that. I know you haven’t enjoyed our children. Jen and Orin have told me their song is driving you a little nuts. So we’ll just set your brood free.”

“Set them free?”

“Outpatient surgery,” Arachnid laughed brandishing the pruning shears. “Won’t take but a moment. And when we’re done…your babies will be free and the swarm will have a fresh dinner.”

“Dinner?”

“Your brains.” Arachnid shoved downward with the shears like a spear thrust. But Wes had seen the tensing of his arms, and rolled just in time. He jumped to his feet as Jen and Orin grabbed him from behind.

Kicking backwards, he heard a grunt of anguish from Orin, and as one set of hands released, he spun hard to his left, catching Jen in the breast with his elbow. Like a dancer he spun in a slow circle away from the three. He lost his balance in the momentum, and staggered into the rough-hewn wall in the corner of the shack. Something rattled, as he hit the wall, and Wes grinned when he darted a glance to see what. There was a rack of old rusted gardening tools screwed to the wall.

“Just what I needed,” he whispered, and reached past a rake to nab a long, pointed spade from its hook.

Arachnid was on him before he had it fully in hand.

“Drop it,” the singer hissed. Wes felt the bite of cold metal at his throat, and he twisted backwards a step before letting his body crumple. The shovel thumped to the floor as he released it. Before Arachnid could follow through with a stab, Wes rolled into the singer’s shins, knocking him off balance. Wes grabbed the shovel again and from a crouch on the floor, he brought it around hard to finish the job his body had started. The edge of the steel connected with Arachnid’s shins and the singer went down hard as Wes leapt up.

Orin and Jen were waiting.

They circled him, hands outstretched to grab for his shovel, to disarm him. Arachnid moaned on the floor and clutched his leg in a fetal curl.

Orin came for him. Without thinking, Wes brought the spade up and around, catching the grizzled man in the side of his shiny head with the back of the rusted blade. The man went down with a low “whoof.”

Something scratched at his neck, and Wes gasped. Jen brought her fingernails around to claw at his eyes. Wes couldn’t go forward without driving her nails into his brain, so he shoved hard in reverse, throwing his weight against her. She didn’t expect the motion and fell back, as he piledrove her into the wall. Her body slammed hard enough to rattle the window.

Jen screamed. Not a little “there’s a mouse” squeal of fear. Jen screamed a horrible, long, wrenching cry of anguish.

Wes turned to see why, and the reason fell to the floor as Jen staggered to the center of the room grabbing at her back. The rake rattled to rest, and Jen fell forward, five blooms of blood already seeping through the puncture marks in the back of her shirt. She was gasping for air, her screams cut short by a gurgle of fluid filling her lungs.

Wes backed away to the other side of the room. Orin lay where he’d fallen. A gory gash split the skin along his forehead leading to his ear. And around that ear clustered a handful of small, black, antenna-ed bugs. They buzzed, quietly, as more emerged from the black, bloody hole of Orin’s ear. They shook the crimson free as they met the air and gathered on the man’s cheek.

“Fuck,” Wes gasped, and held a hand up to his own ear. The noise in his brain escalated as he covered the canal.

Jen was shuddering on the floor, trying to crawl toward Orin. But Arachnid was no longer on the ground with