Bedbugs

It came again, as it had last night, a scrap of text dancing up in Susan’s feverish mind:

Someone has to commit the act, think the thought that throws open the door to the darkness.

It wasn’t Alex, of course. And it wasn’t poor Jack Barnum, either.

Andrea kept talking, her voice still coming from the other side of the room, now competing with the noise of a drawer opening, the sound of Andrea rummaging, looking for something. Susan’s left leg throbbed, sending desperate distress calls up her spinal cord to the base of her brain.

“Oh, Suze, I was so angry. I was just so terribly angry.” She had returned to the bin now, her wraith’s head back where Susan could see it. “I just … I wanted him to suffer. I did. Oh, how I prayed to God that he would suffer.”

“Andrea,” Susan said again. “Andrea.”

The old lady shook her head rapidly, grinning her lunatic vaudeville grin. “And then, just like that: He did! He suffered! The bugs came, and he suffered so terribly. God, you should have seen how he suffered. And I laughed.” Andrea laughed now, low and throaty and maniacal. Susan shuddered in the darkness.

“Please, Andrea. Please … my daughter … ”

“I laughed because I was so happy,” Andrea said and then dropped into a confidential whisper. “God had answered my prayers.”

She held up a small jar, like the kind used to can preserves. Susan couldn’t see what was inside.

“But you know, Susan, I’m going to be totally honest with you. I don’t think it was God that sent them. I don’t think it was God at all.”

In one swift, efficient motion, Andrea twisted the lid off the jar and overturned it into the compost bin, shaking it up and down over Susan’s head like a saltshaker. The bugs rained down into her hair, onto her shoulders, into her eyes, and when Susan opened her mouth to scream they landed like snowflakes on her tongue.

“So, you see, it’s not my fault.” Andrea’s voice was pleading, pitiful, even as she kept pouring in the bugs, and Susan kept screaming, writhing helplessly in the darkness, while the bugs begin to bite into her face, her neck, her arms, her shoulders. “They run the show now. It’s not my fault.”

“So kill me,” Susan spat with effort, her tongue crawling with bugs. “Let them have me.”

“Oh no, oh no,” Andrea said. “You don’t understand. They need you alive.” She dropped the lid and Susan heard her, walking away. “As long as you last, anyway.”

The badbugs bit unceasingly, scaling Susan’s body, climbing happily in and out of the rises and folds of her flesh, latching themselves on, biting her over and over. Occasionally, Susan would reach up desperately, knowing it was useless, trying to maneuver her hands up far enough to throw open the lid of the bin. But it was impossible, and each effort sent new waves of pain radiating down her spine.

She gave up, and the badbugs continued their eager efforts. After an hour, they began to subside; she felt them dropping off, scuttling away into the infinite hiding places afforded by the compost bin, to sleep and digest their meals. But they would wake and feed again — she knew that. And how many more jars did Andrea have …

She breathed deeply through her mouth, in and out, forcing herself to think. I have to convince her to let me go. There is a person in there still, somewhere, deep down was the person that once was Andrea Scharfstein, before this blight took hold of her.

Somehow, I have to get through to her.

Susan had been trying not to look at Jessica Spender, her head tilted at a terrible unnatural angle, her tongue lolling out of her mouth. In the breast pocket of her shirt, Susan noticed for the first time, was a severed finger. She blinked and looked closer. It was a girl’s finger, slim and manicured, with an engagement ring on it.

Jessica’s own finger, surely.

Ping.

Ping.

Jessica had managed, somehow, to open the bin, to get her hand out far enough to tap on the glass of the air shaft. She had sent a desperate noise, the metallic ping of a gold band rapping on glass: an SOS, echoing up the air shaft.

And I had told Andrea about it, and she had cut off her finger.

There would be no convincing Andrea Scharfstein of anything. For her to be freed of this horror, either she would have to die, or Andrea would.

The badbugs began to bite again, as Susan had known they would. Suddenly, there were dozens of the tiny monsters feasting on her, finding fresh patches, new stretches of flesh that hadn’t yet been pierced. Some stayed latched on; some ate quickly and then dropped away, replaced by a fresh attacker or leaving behind a new itch, an itch that couldn’t be scratched.

Susan shouted with renewed desperation and again reached her arms upward, straining her muscles as far as they could go, managing to push the lid only very slightly farther than she had before, before she had to let go and it fell closed again. “Damn it,” Susan cried, tears flooding her eyes. She tossed her whole body with frustration, moving the tiniest bit — a quarter of an inch, maybe — to one side, and then back. The bin rattled a little, and she felt it move around her.

“Huh,” Susan said.

She shook her body again, on purpose this time, and again felt the bin rattle. She did it again, shaking herself as hard as she could, leaning forward, wriggling back, and feeling the bin move under her weight. With desperate force, she heaved herself forward, and the bin heaved forward, too.

She stopped, took a breath, and then heaved herself backward. The bin heaved backward.

Holy shit, she thought. It’s working.

She heaved forward and back again, and the compost rustled and shifted all around her.

She did it a third time, the bin jerked, and Jessica Spender’s corpse slipped in the garbage and soil, the dead face resettling into a new patch of muck.

Susan kept it up, pushing harder and harder, until at last the whole can pitched forward, spilling her and Jessica out, out into a sliding pile of shit and dirt and eggshells and coffee grounds, out onto the cement floor of the basement. Susan screamed in triumph, her heart pounding, even as her entire body flared with pain. She tried to stand and collapsed, her legs broken and useless beneath her. Breathing deeply, Susan heaved herself up onto her arms and looked around wildly for the door.

She dragged herself forward, inch by painful inch, moaning with the effort, her chafed sandpaper skin rubbing raw against the cold concrete. Behind the overturned compost bin, past a second bin still standing upright beside the first one, past a row of milk crates full of tools and cleansers. Painted on one dingy wall like a gruesome mural was a sloppy circle of blackish red, an ancient grisly stain, the ghostly remains of Howard’s violent escape. Halfway to the door was an old trunk, black and battered. Susan grabbed onto the back of it and used it to heave herself forward — and then stopped abruptly, resting her head on the dented top of the trunk, breathing heavily. She moved her fingers and worked at the latch.

Susan heard the squeak and scrape behind her as the basement door swung open. She jerked her head around, spots like dancing fireworks before her eyes, and glimpsed a rectangle of daylight behind Andrea before the old lady, grinning like a death’s head in her cat’s-eye sunglasses, pulled the door closed behind her.

“Oh, goodness,” crowed Andrea. “Look who’s out of bed.”

From one of her frail old hands dangled the claw hammer, bits of Dana Kaufmann’s blood and brain still clinging to the claw.

“I can’t let you go, Suze.” Andrea advanced across the cold floor of the basement. The one dim lightbulb swung gently between them. “We need you.”

Susan grunted, slammed shut the door of the trunk, and angled her body up toward Andrea.

“What — what is that?” said Andrea. She dropped the hammer, raised her hands to her mouth, trembling. “Where did you find that?”

Susan had found it in the trunk, just where Louis had told her it would be. She raised it, propping her elbows on the top of the trunk, aimed the long nose of the old rifle’s barrel at Andrea’s torso, and pulled the trigger.