Bedbugs

her eyelid and under her chin, points of pain throbbing red all over her skin. She hurled herself at the door of the bonus room, again and again, pounding the wooden door with her frail body, ignoring the shockwaves of pain that rocked her frame with each strike. Badbugs were pouring in under the door now, hundreds of them, a low tide welling in around her feet, snapping at her ankles like fleas. Susan backed away from the door, retreated into the far corner of the room, sank to the ground, and threw her hands up over her face.

She had to keep fighting, had to somehow escape … where had her phone gone, where had she dropped it … but there were so many of them … and she was so terribly tired …

So tired …

In her dream Susan simply stood up and shook the badbugs free, like a rain-soaked dog shaking itself dry. She turned to the windowsill and saw him, as clear as crystal in the moonlight—Louis! Good old Louis, right outside, striding across the concrete slabs of the garden like a modern Colossus, squinting up at the window, mouthing her name.

“Susan?”

“Louis!”

She cried his name, pounding on the windowpanes, and he raised both hands in greeting. He had come to check on her. He was worried about her, and he’d come to check in. Good old Louis!

She screamed his name. “Louis!”

The moonlight glinted off the cheap plastic frames of his glasses. He held up a finger, to say “just one second,” and took another step toward the house. And then Andrea appeared behind him, holding a long claw- hammer. Susan screamed, “No!!” and Louis furrowed his brow, just before Andrea swung the hammer high above her head and brought it down squarely on the back of Louis’s skull. He buckled and collapsed, blood erupting from the top of his head, and all around him hammers rained from the sky, bloody hammers spiraling down, burying themselves in the earth … and then babies, bloody babies buckled in their strollers, tumbling out of the night.

Andrea walked through them like a ghost slipping between raindrops, back toward the house.

Susan woke up, screaming, and immediately heard the sound of wood scraping on wood.

The sofa. Someone was moving the sofa.

Susan blinked. The room was full of sunlight. There was a row of bugs on her forearm, and there was one on her face, she could feel it on her cheek, biting, right now, she could feel it …

But—oh, God, oh, God, thank God—someone was moving the sofa.

“Alex!” she called, or tried to call, but her voice came out as a gritty dry rattle. “Alex?”

“No, ma’am.”

As soon as Dana Kaufmann opened the door her mouth dropped open. The exterminator’s voice emerged as a cold dead whisper: “Holy crap.”

28

“You see them?” whispered Susan desperately from where she lay in a heap in the far corner of the room. The bug currently sucking blood from her face unlatched, descended onto her stomach, and skittered away. Bugs meandered across her arms and legs; bugs threaded in and out of her eyebrows; bugs swarmed in clumps and swirls across the floorboards, in patches all over the room. “You really see them?

Dana Kaufmann stepped slowly into the bonus room, her big brown work boots crunching on patches of bugs. The badbugs, made wild by her presence, dashed in frenzied patterns around and past her footsteps as she made her way to Susan, bent over, and extended her hand.

“I see them,” said Dana Kaufmann. Now that her initial shock had worn off, Kaufmann sounded like Susan remembered: gruff, stoic, and reassuring. “I do, Ms. Wendt. I see them all.”

“What I need you to understand, first and foremost, Ms. Wendt, is that there are no pests I cannot kill. None. Do you understand?”

Susan was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen table in her bra and underwear while Dana Kaufmann picked tiny insects off her body. She was like a mother gorilla grooming her offspring, hands moving swiftly and expertly over every patch of Susan’s skin. Cast skins covered Susan’s body, crusted on like patches of eczema. Her torso was smeared with brown feces. Dana found three bugs still biting, latched in a neat row on Susan’s lower stomach, just above her waistline. The exterminator pulled them free one by one — muttering, “Sorry,” each time Susan winced at the tug of the bug’s unlatching.

“Hold still.”

Kaufmann reached between Susan’s legs and plucked an insect from just below the crotch, where it was about to bite. “Excuse my reach,” she grunted.

Susan nodded blankly. “What time is it?”

She felt completely disoriented: her back ached terribly, and her head was pounding like she’d been hit with a shovel. And, Jesus Christ, the itching — her whole body itched, one massive undifferentiated fiery itch.

“Quarter to ten. Here.” Kaufmann produced a tube of calamine lotion from a pocket of her coveralls and handed it to Susan as she continued. “I was supposed to be here yesterday, and I apologize. I had an emergency call at a house in Ditmas, and frankly you were not a priority, since I had already cleared the premises.”

Kaufmann paused, shaking her head in disgust and self-recrimination. “I cannot imagine how I failed to detect a problem of this magnitude. I honestly do not know how it happened. I just didn’t see them.”

Susan closed her eyes against the sun, which was shining in brutally through the kitchen windows. “They didn’t want you to see them.”

Kaufmann cocked her head. “Who didn’t want me to see them?”

“They were hiding from you. Only I was supposed to see them. Only me.” Tears were rolling from her eyes, down her red and abraded cheeks.

“Stop. Susan, hold on.”

“They’re not …” Susan’s voice dropped to a whisper, and she looked around fearfully. The bugs, emboldened by their assault on her the night before, roamed at will across the floor of the kitchen, in fat roving packs. This is their house now. “They’re not normal. They’re … they’re supernatural. I read this book, see … ”

“Don’t tell me.” Kaufmann scowled with irritation. “The Shadow Species.”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“I wish I could say I hadn’t. All right. You’re clean.” Kaufmann cracked her knuckles, jerked a thumb at the pile of clothes in the corner of the room. “But I would not advise putting those back on.”

So Susan wrapped herself in Kaufmann’s Greater Brooklyn Pest Control jacket while the exterminator heaped scorn upon Pullman Thibodaux’s masterpiece. “Badbugs, right? Please. Just for starters, the author of that book was insane. Literally. A mental patient. Supposedly, he and his wife had a severe bedbug infestation, and he was too cheap to have it treated professionally. So he’s trying to handle it, doing all this research, taping up the mattresses, all the bullshit things people do when they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Susan listened, holding her breath.

“Long story short, the wife can’t take it anymore, she walks. The guy goes cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, decides that bedbugs aren’t bedbugs, they’re demons. OK?” Kaufmann, without smiling, rotated one finger beside her temple, playground sign language for crazy. “So he wrote that book”—she placed exaggerated air quotes around the word—“in his spare time, while in the nuthouse.”

“Well … all right, but … ”

“Susan, I had a client a couple years ago who got his hands on that damn book and insisted to me that his house had been cursed. Except he didn’t say curse, he said … oh, what the hell did he say?”

“Blight,” mumbled Susan. A draft crept in beneath the frame of the kitchen window, and she shivered. She was starting to feel a little ridiculous, half-naked and wrapped in Kaufmann’s gigantic jacket.

“Yes. Blight. Well, I performed an aggressive three-pronged protocol, right out of the playbook, and guess what? Five years later, he’s contented and bedbug free.”

The words shone like a dawning ray of hope in Susan’s mind: contented and bedbug