"Yep, you'd be right about that. Sometimes, after an unseasonable cold snap, folks will see clusters of ladybugs inside. They move toward warmth. Cooler temperatures sure sound nice right now," Dave said, wiping the sweat out of his eyes. "But given the heat, it doesn't make sense for them to have swarmed the house. Now that they can no longer get inside, I can start the removal. With termites and ants, people don't care much about being humane. They just want the things gone, so we fumigate and vacuum up their carcasses."
"You're going to kill them?" said Hazel.
"Well, that was my next question. The way I see it, there are a few ways to go about removing the buggers. I can open the window and use some nets to remove as many as I can and just toss them out. Some are bound to escape, but I'll do my best. Hate to say it, but you'll likely be finding the darn things for some time to come, either alive or dead."
"Stands to reason," said Dad.
"So, if you don't know why they came into the house, there is no guarantee they won't come back? There's nothing you can do, like use a spray or a bomb? Anything?" Mom inquired, still unsure about entire situation.
"Can't rightly say why they showed up. Typically, they would only show up en masse to feed, usually on aphids, which I didn't see signs of in the tree. Pretty sure you haven't got a roomful of aphids now, do you, kid?" Dave directed his inquiry to Hazel. She was almost sure he was joking.
He laughed. "Of course you don't! Anyway, I wouldn't recommend exterminating the ladybugs. Most people like having them around. They are good for gardens and keep the bad guys of the insect world away. No ma'am, I don't think spraying would be right. I'll clear out what I can and take a look around all the other windows. With a house this big, it might take a while," he said, delivering his message in a probing manner, as if preparing Dad for the bill.
"Um, yeah, Dave. Please, if you've got the time, we would appreciate it if you could take a look and seal up anything you find that needs sealing. I certainly don't want another loveliness of ladybugs or something worse invading the house," Dad said.
"Will do, Mr. Weizak," Dave said. Turning his attention to Mom, "Don't you worry, Mrs. Weizak. I'll get things fixed up and I wouldn't expect it to happen again. One of those flukes of nature, I reckon. I have to say, this is going in the record books for the most interesting call of the year!"
The family retreated to the kitchen while Dave completed his inspection and removal. "Well, this is definitely another head-scratcher," Dad said when they had all taken a seat.
"This house, I just …" Mom chimed in, shaking her head in disbelief.
Holden couldn't resist pushing Mom's buttons. "What if it had been roaches instead of ladybugs?"
Mom gave him "the look." Hazel, who hadn't thought of anything worse than ladybugs, was grateful it had been a cute bug. She would be a million times more freaked out if it had been some gross insect. But Holden had a lot of nerve joking about it when his room was bug free.
"I've got to get back to work," said Dad. "I think you should all stay downstairs until Dave is done."
Holden and Hazel hung out in the family room while Mom busied herself in the kitchen.
The summer sun was sinking low in the sky by the time Dave finished the job. They joined him outside.
"Well,” he said, “I have to say I'm impressed with myself. I think I got almost every last one of the things. The little 'ladies' were cooperative."
He could see the relief on their faces, even hidden behind masks.
"Thank you so much, Dave!" Mom gushed.
"I'd recommend giving the bedding a good washing with hot water. You might be finding them inside your shoes and such. But, hey, if you had to have an infestation, I can't think of anything lovelier than ladybugs."
Holden provided a rim shot. "Ba dum tssh!"
Hazel rolled her eyes, and no one else was ready to laugh about the day's events.
That night while eating a late dinner, Dad began his inquiry into the midnight Alexa reminder. The incident was nearly forgotten by the twins, with the appearance of the ladybugs having taken center stage. Holden insisted he had nothing to do with setting the reminder, as did Hazel.
Holden was quick to point out, "Mom's phone is essentially the gatekeeper for the app. If her phone wasn’t used to set the reminder, that means someone had to go to each room and tell every device individually, and turn the volume up on all of them too. Sorry, my time is far too valuable to waste on some lame prank. Besides, there's no way I'm doing something so pointless to mess with my sleep."
Mom scrolled through the Alexa app on her phone, searching the Activity tab. There it was—the device had been told to remind them to check the pool, and the scheduled alert was for 12:00 a.m. There was no way to tell who Alexa had received the directive from.
Holden walked over to the Echo Show that sat on the kitchen counter. He hit the volume button and pointed out, "The volume is set to fifty percent. It sounded like Alexa was yelling through the house last night."
"Maybe we've been hacked," Mom wondered. She had heard stories of people's home security systems and smart devices falling victim to hackers in ways that seemed childish or sometimes perverse. She started searching for information on her phone about people hacking home automation technology.
"Someone had to have a lot of time on their hands to decide to hack into the Weizaks’ Alexa to set reminders telling them to check the pool," noted Dad.
Mom looked up from her research and said, "Well, did you check the pool?" Dad was taken aback by the question.
Mom hadn't meant the question to sound critical, just inquisitive.
Dad chuckled. "Well,” he admitted. “I usually take a look at it every day, but between work and the ladybugs, I didn't even think of checking the pool today. I'll be sure to take a look at it tomorrow." They cleaned up their dinner mess and went into the living room. They searched Amazon Prime and agreed on an action flick to watch in hopes of taking their minds off the turbulent events that were now taking place inside the house as well as all over the world.
Mom double-checked the Alexa app before she went to bed, to make sure no reminder had been set that would awaken them in the middle of the night. This was after the nightly running of the stairs, which at this point barely fazed any of them. None of them had noticed that the runner now stopped short outside Hazel's room, but Dad patted himself on the back for fixing the issue with the garage door camera.
After checking with Holden, Mom popped into Hazel's room and asked her devices if there were any reminders set, to which Alexa replied, "You have no reminders." She got the same response in the home gym. Feeling confident that their sleep would not be interrupted that night, she wished the twins good night and reminded them to not stay up too late.
Staying up too late wasn't a possibility for Hazel. She had fought to stay awake during the day, since her sleep was invaded more and more by the baffling nightmare. She found herself nodding off several times during the day while watching TikTok videos or trying to read, and she had even fallen asleep during the movie.
After putting fresh bedding on her bed, she made a sweep of the area, clearing out surprisingly few lady bugs. She recounted the painted ladybugs on the mural and could have sworn she had counted twelve ladybugs the day she had decided not to paint over it. Today she counted twenty-six. She also noted that the brook seemed to be changing colors, taking on an eerie reddish tint. It must be a trick of the lighting, she told herself.
"Alexa, play forty-five minutes of Sleep Sounds."
Alexa responded, "Sleep Sounds for forty-five minutes, starting now." But Alexa didn't play Sleep Sounds. She played a song by Tears for Fears. Hazel recognized it immediately—it was "Mad World."
"Alexa, stop," she said and waited a few seconds before trying again. "Alexa, play Sleep Sounds." Once again, Alexa agreed to play the requested playlist, but when the audio started it was yet another Tears for Fears song, this time "Memories Fade."
Hazel was getting a
nnoyed. It was as if the AI—artificial yes, intelligence … that was kind of a stretch—was losing her "mind."
"Alexa, stop!" Hazel exclaimed. The music abruptly ceased as requested. Hazel considered asking for Sleep Sounds again but was too tired and irritated to argue with the device. She threw the blankets over here head, and as she nodded off hoped that she would sleep peacefully, free of confusing and frightening nightmares.
Less than two hours later her sleep was disturbed again by Alexa's voice, this time loudly imploring, "I'm reminding you, please check the pool." Hazel bolted up from bed and shouted for Alexa to stop before she could finish repeating the phrase a second time. She could hear the phrase as it resonated on the other devices throughout the house.
Coraline was at the door again, barking incessantly, and she could hear Phineas in her parents’ room doing the same. She got up and was making her way across the room when her foot became entangled in something on the floor. Unable to stop her momentum, she went down. She wasn't hurt by the fall, but when she realized what she had tripped on, she couldn't believe what she was seeing. Her bedroom floor was covered in clothes—specifically her swimsuits and cover-ups. The drawer where she kept her swim gear was standing open, empty.
Coraline was sniffing the suits, fur on end, growling. Hazel got to her feet and made a dash to the door. Outside, she found her mom standing in front of the workout room, yelling for Alexa to stop. Dad was running down the stairs to the silence the Show and the Dot on the lower level. Holden must have been in a deep sleep because he was just then telling his Dot to stop.
As Dad came back upstairs he said, "I unplugged the devices downstairs; you might want to do the same up here." He was obviously angered by being startled awake for a second night.
Holden tried to lighten the mood. "At least she said please this time." No one laughed.
"Everyone go back to bed," said Mom.
Hazel went back to her room and gathered up the suits, stuffing them back into the drawer. All the while, she wondered who had come into her bedroom and made the mess without waking her. She decided to sleep with the door open and her light on, resisting the urge go to her parents’ room and ask to sleep with them. She hadn't wanted to do that since she was a young child and she and Holden got their own bedrooms, but she was becoming very unnerved by the things that were happening in the house.
She was afraid of what she might see when she closed her eyes. She was afraid of the nightmares, and what she might wake up to in the morning. Holden would never let her hear the end of it if she took her pillow and tried to sleep in her parents’ room. It wasn't as if she would crawl in between the two of them like she did when she was a kid; that would just be weird. They had a couch in their room, a comfortable couch. She lay in bed considering the idea and playing out how her parents might react to the request. In the end, she decided to suck it up and deal with it. Having the door open and light on might help. Maybe.
Sleep eluded her for a long while, despite her exhaustion. She wasn't sure how long she had been asleep when the nightmare began. She was running through puddles in a thunderstorm. In the dream she was afraid—terrified, actually. She stopped at the edge of a cliff or ledge of some sort. Lightning lit up the sky and thunder crashed loudly, causing her to jump. She turned and in the burst of light saw what she thought was the figure of a man just at the edge of a tree line. She began falling, and then there was water. The water was red, and she was unable to reach the surface …
She woke, gasping, her face wet with tears. She sat up in bed, trying to shake the terrifying images and emotions the nightmare always brought. There in the doorway of her bedroom stood a figure. She froze. The person had been watching her sleep but disappeared very quickly; not turning to walk away, simply vanishing. She recognized the person, even though it was someone she had never met before. She only caught a glimpse of the girl but for a moment, she knew she had seen Laura Combs.
There was no way she could spend the rest of the night in this room. She grabbed her pillow and comforter and jumped out of bed. Coraline woke and dutifully followed in her footsteps, both of them stepping on her swimsuits that were again strewn about the floor. She hesitated at her doorway, afraid to breach the space where she had just witnessed the … Apparition? Ghost? Closing her eyes tightly and grasping Coraline's collar with her free hand, she bolted across the threshold.
She didn't know what she had expected, maybe a bone-chilling cold spot? She felt nothing out of the ordinary but could smell the faint smell of rain. Relieved to be in the hall, she sprinted to her parents' bedroom. She knocked quietly on their door, as to not wake Holden up. She didn’t wait for a reply before opening the door and whispering, "Mom, I need to sleep in your room tonight."
From his spot at the end of the bed, Phineas looked up disinterestedly.
Mom lifted her head and groggily asked, "Are you okay, Haze? Is everything all right?"
Hazel whispered, "Yeah, I'm fine, just a little freaked out."
"Okay,” she said. “Why don't you take the couch?" Within minutes Hazel could hear Mom's rhythmic breaths, signaling she had quickly fallen back asleep.
Getting herself situated, she felt foolish. Coraline whined from the floor. Scooting back, she made room for the dog and quietly patted the couch. There was barely enough space for her, much less the dog, but she couldn't think of a better alternative. Her own bedroom was a hard pass for the night.
Hazel began to settle in. The sounds of Dad's snoring and Mom’s soft breathing relaxed her and calmed her heart rate. She was comforted by the dog’s weight and warmth. She stared at the darkness, reliving scenes of the nightmare in a failed attempt to quiet the memory of the person standing in her door, the swimsuits thrown about her room. To ease her frightened mind, she forced herself to believe that she hadn't indeed seen the ghost of Laura Combs. Instead, a tiny rational voice told her it was her imagination; that lack of sleep and the stress of the move, the pandemic, the weirdness of it all, had compelled her to conjure the girl. It was the only explanation she could accept that allowed her to not freak out completely. Without that acceptance, she would flip out and beg her parents to call a psychic, a priest, sell the house, something, anything.
She did her best to hush the voices that told her she hadn't dreamed that Laura Combs was watching her. That this time Laura didn't need an app to make herself known. Try as she might to convince herself an over-stressed mind dreamed up the girl, what haunted her the most about the figure of Laura Combs was that she’d seen the girl as she appeared in the original missing poster. It hadn’t been the age-progressed image, the Laura Combs who looked so much like her mother, not the middle-aged Laura Combs. She had seen the thirteen-year-old Laura Combs.
Mom and Dad were going about their morning routine in an exaggerated tiptoeing fashion as to not wake her. Levels of embarrassment overshadowed those of confusion as Hazel fully visualized the scene. She felt foolish for running to her parents' room in the middle of the night like a child scared by a bad dream. But it wasn't just a bad dream, and seeking security on their couch wasn't the worst part of the awkward situation.
She sat up to let them know they didn't need to keep quiet any longer and hoped they wouldn't press for an explanation. She was already trying to formulate her escape plan in hopes that Holden wouldn’t see her exiting their room, pillow and blanket in hand.
"Good morning, sunshine!" Dad cheerfully exclaimed. He was always abundantly peppy on Friday mornings. "Mom said you had a rough night. Well, rougher than the rest of us. Seems Alexa or whatever doesn't want us to get a good night's sleep these days. Anywho, you doing okay now?"
Hazel paused, considering whether she should tell her parents about the mess in her room and what she saw in her doorway. Would they believe her? Would they laugh? She decided to hold off. She still hadn't really processed it herself.
"Um, yeah, Dad, I'm okay. Sorry to crash the party."
"No problem, kid. Hope my snoring didn't keep you u
p. Looks like this rain will let up in time for the Fourth. We ought to do it up right tomorrow. Food, pool, music, fireworks. Can't wait!"
Hazel was making her way toward the door, hoping Holden wasn't up yet. "Sounds great, Dad. Looking forward to it. Thanks for the crash pad." She felt immediate relief when she saw Holden's door closed and the hallway quiet.
She paused at the door to her room, hand hovering above the doorknob, reluctant to open it for fear of what she might see. She closed her eyes, pushed the door open and counted to three before opening her eyes. As expected, all was not in its place. This time, the tapestries she had used to cover the walls were torn down and now lay in puddles on the floor among the swim wear. HELP LAURA COMBS practically screamed from the walls, written in an angry red instead of the pasty color from before.
Hot tears spilled onto her face, and she wished she would have picked a paint color already. Normally she would have blamed Holden. Nothing was normal these days, and she knew her brother wouldn't bother with making messes in her room, and he would never paint over the message in this angry red. Mom and Dad would come up with some lame explanation. She was alone on this one. She quickly rehung the tapestries, blocking out the urgent message for now.
She was now resolute that a paint color be selected, so she opened her MacBook to begin her search. She was face-to-face with Laura again. This time it was a two-dimensional image staring back at her. It was the original missing poster in a browser window she had left open.
She slammed the notebook closed as visions of the girl standing outside her bedroom flooded her mind. Wishing for nothing more than to escape all the madness surrounding Laura Combs, she decided to continue her search downstairs, away from the bed where nightmares plagued her sleep, the wall that pleaded with her for help, the window and its memory of the ladybug kaleidoscope, and the doorway where Laura Combs herself stood the night before.
The family spent the day inside, doing chores. Holden wasn't pleased with the intrusion on his gaming time, but Hazel welcomed the distraction. When the chores were done, Mom helped Hazel decide on a paint color and placed the order. Hazel saw the expected delivery date and stopped herself from begging Mom to pay for expedited shipping. After spending a day going about normal daily tasks, Hazel was convinced that telling her parents about the vision of Laura Combs, and the added urgency to the message on her wall, might end up with her being forced into a virtual session with a psychologist. Then again, she wondered if that might be exactly what she needed.
Red Water, Shadows of Camelot Crossing Page 9