Bedbugs (23 page)

No eyes
, she told herself. Cimex lectularius
have no eyes. Six legs, two antennae, nonfunctional wing pads, and a dual tubelike proboscis … but no eyes
.

“But you’re still looking at me, aren’t you?” Susan whispered, and jumped at the sound of her own voice in the tomblike silence of the room.

Her new friend was not startled. It kept moving forward.

It’s so small
, Susan told herself, breathing deeply.
So small. What was this thing, this tiny insect, going to do—what could it really do to her?

But she knew the answer. The answer she had never dared to contemplate, and now she had no choice. It was going to latch on to her and drink her blood. They had latched on to her soul, and now they had come for her body. This little bug would latch on and drink until it was full, and then another would come, and then another, as many as it took to drain her of her blood, every drop of it, until she was an empty shell, a dry rag, the empty husk of a person.

They were going to eat her alive
.

The solitary badbug came within three feet, and then made a long, lazy U-turn to return to the door, and left the room.

*

Susan shook herself into action.

She stood up, flexing her arms and legs, cracking her knuckles
and growling her throat clear. She walked across the room and tried the door again, rattling the handle and pushing as hard as she could, crouching down. Nothing. She backed up the eight or so paces to the far side of the bonus room and threw herself forward, slamming against the door, shoulder first, so that her whole body shook with the impact.

“Shit,” Susan muttered, massaging her bruised arm.

She looked at the crack beneath the door, but no more badbugs were crawling in—not yet. She moved her eyes along the baseboard, and her glance came to rest on the spot where poor Catastrophe the cat had left his desperate scratches. Susan crouched down to trace her fingernails in the ruts, imagining the poor cat scratching madly, slowly going crazy, slowly dying as she was dying now—

Stop it
, Susan told herself.
Alex will come back. He’ll be back, just like he said. He’s taking Emma out to his parents on Long Island, or to Vic’s place on the Upper West Side, and he’ll be back. Another hour. A couple hours at the most. You’ll apologize. Promise to take the the Olanzapine, whatever the hell it was called
.

I can last until Alex gets back from Long Island
.

*

“Help!”

Susan pounded on the door, hard, with the flat of her hand. She had been pounding for forty-five minutes, and the pad of flesh at the base of her palm was red and raw. Her voice ached from screaming.

“Andrea! Please! Help!”

She pounded more. Andrea would hear, the noise would boom through the living room, echo down the air shaft, into her bedroom
and wake her. She would come up and save her.

If
Alex hadn’t locked the deadbolt on the front door.

If
Andrea could move the sofa.

If
she heard the banging.

Which, clearly, she did not.

*

When the next badbug came in under the door, Susan leaped up out of her crouch, scrabbled across the floor on hands and knees, and squashed it with her forefinger. She pressed her fingertip down on the tiny creature and pushed as hard as she could, bringing to bear the full weight of her upper body, until she was sure she felt the minute
scritch
of the creature’s husk cracking from the pressure. But when she lifted her finger and held it up to the moonlight, there was no bloody red smear across the tip.

The bug was alive and at work: it had latched onto the pad of her fingertip. Sucking her blood.

“Oh, God,” Susan said. She shook her hand back and forth violently, flapping it like a bird’s wing to fling the thing free. It did not come loose. As it continued to eat, Susan felt a prick of pain at the spot where the bug was latched, a sharp sting in the center of her fingertip.
No more with the anesthetizing anticoagulant fluid now—the bugs had her where they wanted, and they didn’t care whether she knew they were biting or not
. Susan shaped the forefinger and thumb of her other hand into a pincer and grasped at the bug, tried to pull it free of her flesh, but it dug in and would not come loose. The more she tugged, the more it hurt, an excruciating, radiating pain, like a needle wiggling in a vein.

Susan gave up and held her hand in front of her bleary eyes,
watching the bug as it drank. She counted quietly to herself, ticking off the seconds, and then the minutes. One minute … two …

After a little more than twelve minutes, the thing dropped off, fell to the floor, and skittered a drunken staggering path back to the crack beneath the door. Susan turned her gaze to her finger, watched as the welt blossomed on the tip, round and red and hard.

Susan felt tired … so tired. The awful self-portrait hovered over her, her own terrified features glowering back at her in the grim moonlit darkness of the room.

*

When she stuck her wounded hand into her pocket, a few minutes later, she found her iPhone where she had jammed it, and she nearly laughed out loud with relief.
I’ve been sitting here
, Susan thought.
Sitting here like an idiot, with my phone in my pocket!
The wallpaper picture of Emma, upside down on the monkey bars, tugged at her heart. The digital display told her it was 1:45 in the morning.

She called Alex but disconnected the call after a single ring, suddenly afraid of speaking to him. What if he said he wasn’t coming home? What if he refused to help her? Which, by the way, would be perfectly reasonable, considering …

Susan glanced down at the floor and saw two new badbugs, zipping across the floor toward her: no lazy meandering circles now, no slow and easy progress. These two were making a rapid crisscross motion as they advanced, twin fighter jets closing in on their target.

Susan texted quickly, her thumbs flying across the keyboard:

ALEX I AM SORRY PLS COME HOME I NEED U PLS

Susan hit Send just as the bugs arrived at her feet; she tried to
stomp them and missed, then watched in horror as they disappeared up her pant legs. She danced, shaking her legs, but it was too late—she felt them latch on, one on her calf, the other on the tender flesh of her inner thigh. Tears filled Susan’s eyes. The pain was worse this time, fiery and intense. They were taking what they wanted now, ruthlessly, and it
hurt
.

She texted Alex again, PLS PLS PLS PLS PLS, and then gave up and called him. It rang and rang.

“Hey, it’s Al Wendt. Looks like I’m too busy for the likes of you. Go ahead and—”

She ended the call. More bugs were swarming in under the door, dozens of them, and she watched them advance in an uneven black line. The ones on her legs kept sucking, even as the new bites began: one under her chin and another on the small of her back, just above her ass.

Susan found Andrea Scharfstein in her contacts list, jabbed furiously at the number.

“Andrea, if you’re awake—if by some chance you get this, can you call me? Or, or just come up, because—I—oh,
God …
”

Tiny little legs scurried up Susan’s neck, danced across the delicate skin under the earlobe and into her ear. And then the sting, as the bug latched on to the membrane just inside her ear canal. Susan screamed and jammed her pinky finger into the ear, but the bug was deep inside her head, past where her finger could follow, and it was biting her, the pain was unspeakable, and she could hear it, amplified a hundredfold, the hideous
suck suck suck
as the insect drank from the tender flesh.

Susan screamed and screamed. The phone fell from her hands and she watched the console light flash brightly and go dim. There were active bites all over her body now—her legs, her ass, her crotch, her ear,
above 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.
”

“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.”