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.”
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 frenz
ied 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 free. But still … she cleared her throat, shook her head. “But …” Susan gestured around the apartment. “There are so many of them.”
“I’ve seen worse.” Kaufmann looked around. “Well, not worse. But close.”
“But I couldn’t kill them. They can’t be killed.”
“Oh, yeah?”
In a swift, athletic motion, Dana Kaufmann squatted and snatched a bedbug between two thick fingers. A split second later, she held up the squashed corpse for Susan’s inspection: a crumbled brown shell, a tiny gush of bright red blood at its center.
“Dead.”
Susan reached forward with a trembling hand and wiped the bug’s bloody broken body off Kaufmann’s fingertip onto her own. “Jesus,” she whispered. She began to shake, overcome by a confusing wash of shame and fear. “Dana. Dana, I tried to murder my husband last night. With a butcher’s knife.”
The exterminator raised her eyebrows slightly, let out a long low whistle, and shrugged. “Well, you know, infestations place extraordinary strain upon a relationship.”
Despite everything, Susan laughed.
“Now, come on,” said Kaufmann. “Let’s kill some fucking bedbugs.”
“The first thing we do is, we clean. Here, and your landlady’s apartment. Basement, too. This entire building needs to be scoured, disinfected, and decluttered, down to the canvas. No hiding places: no bugs.”
“But the book …”
“Right, right. The book. Your friend the mental patient wrote that the curse of the evil bedbugs will stay with you forever and always, no matter what you do or where you go. Well, guess what? The ancient Greeks said if you baked the bedbugs in a pie with meat and beans, they’d cure malaria. That, too, was total nonsense.”
Susan smiled weakly.
“Here’s what is not nonsense. We’re going to vacuum every room, we’re going to steam clean your mattresses and linens, we’re going to dry clean every piece of fabric in this apartment. We’re going to scour every exposed surface. Then we pack up your infestibles to be sealed and pumped with Vikane.”
“Vikane?”
“A fumigant. Industrial strength. Forty-eight hours in Vikane, no bug lives. No egg lives. Nothing. Then we proceed to the application of silica gel and pyrethroids.” Dana Kaufmann’s confidence, her sense of power and purpose, was palpable. She was like a general, rallying for battle. “Do you have a vacuum cleaner with a hose attachment?”
“In the closet.”
“Good. You relax. Drink your coffee.”
Susan did as she was told, slowly sipping from her mug and taking deep, cleansing breaths, watching the sunbeams play across the handsome brown hardwood of the kitchen floor. Already it seemed like there were fewer bedbugs than there had been an hour ago, when Kaufmann first pulled her from the bonus room. She heard the vacuum cleaner roar to life and allowed herself to hope that maybe Kaufmann was right: she would clean, they would pack her infestibles in Vikane, apply the pyrethroids and the silica dust and whatever else … and, in time, everything would be OK. Everything would go back to—
“Oh, shit,” Susan said suddenly. “Alex. I have really got to call Alex.”
She had recovered her iPhone in the morning, found it in a corner of the bonus room, shut off with a dozen bedbugs nesting in the UBS slot at the base. Now she turned it on, but before she could dial her husband, it ra
ng. The incoming number was one she didn’t recognize, a 718 area code.
“Hello?”
“Hi, this is … ”
The mechanical roar of the vacuum was moving down the hallway now, coming closer.
“What?”
“I’m—”
“Hold on.”
Susan lowered the phone and shouted to the living room. “Dana, can you cut the vacuum for one second?” Susan turned back to the phone. She had to call her husband. He must be worried sick.
Except—he was supposed to come back, come back to get her. Where was Alex?
“I’m sorry … who is this?”
“My name is Jack Barnum. I think I used to live in your apartment.”
A nervous, prickly energy erupted into Susan’s chest. Beneath thick smears of calamine lotion, her itches sang to life. Kaufmann poked her head into the kitchen, holding up the vacuum hose with an inquiring expression. “Can I …?” Susan shook her head “no,” and the exterminator set it down with a sour expression.
“Yes, Jack? Yes, you did.” She held the phone with her chin, reached around to scratch beneath her shoulder blades.
“I read the note you sent to Jessie, on Facebook. I finally figured out her password. It was my middle name. That was her password, my middle name … my …” Susan could hear raw, throaty grief in his voice, grief and bafflement.
Alarm bells were clanging in Susan’s mind. She scratched the sole of her right foot with the craggy big toenail of her left. “Jack? Are you there?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I am. Do you know where she is? Did you—Jesus, did you find her?”
“No, I’m sorry. I don’t know where she is. Jack, can you tell me what happened in this apartment?”
Jack Barnum said nothing, but she heard his agonized, fearful breathing, tearful and labored. Dana Kaufmann, not one to waste a spare moment, was now crouched on all fours beneath the kitchen sink, right at Susan’s feet, scouring the baseboards with a thick-bristled brush.
“What happened, Jack?”
“She … Jessie … poor Jessie, she got this idea, somehow. That we had bedbugs. And I didn’t believe her. Because I never saw them. Never. And she …” His voice trembled again, and petered out. “She …”
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