Bedbugs

by Ben H. Winters

  “She tried to kill you.”

  “Yes. Jesus, how did you know that?”

  Oh, God—oh, God—they were already here. The bugs were here before Jessie and Jack even moved in. Shivers chased up and down Susan’s spine like electric pulses. Her whole body itched: searing, dry, tingling, horrible itches. They were already here.

  “Anyway, so, I freaked out, and I mean, I just ran.” Jack sobbed again, a single guttural wail. “I left her here.”

  Dana was watching Susan now, looking up at her with her head tilted and one eyebrow raised.

  “And then they kept torturing her,” Susan said. “And she flipped out, and, and when she couldn’t take it anymore, she bolted. She left so fast she left the cat behind. And—”

  “The cat?”

  “What?”

  A cheery knock sounded at the front door. “Yoo-hoo?” called the genial, throaty voice. “Suze?”

  “No,” Jack said. “We never had a cat.”

  Dana was on her feet and out of the kitchen, halfway down the hall, while Susan stared into dead air, thoughts tumbling into her brain:

  Never had a cat.

  The knock came again, a happy little “shave-and-a-haircut” knock.

  “Wait, Dana! Don’t—”

  It was too late. The exterminator pulled the door open and Andrea Scharfstein smashed the side of her head with a hammer. Kaufmann stepped back, swayed on her feet and pivoted toward Susan, an expression of dumb surprise frozen on her face. Then she pivoted again, back toward Andrea, and Susan saw the inside of her head where her forehead had been cracked like a pumpkin, clumps of red and gray under the cap of her skull. Andrea twirled the hammer in her hand and struck again, this time with the claw side, tearing a huge, messy divot into Kaufman’s face. While her hand, still clutching the hammer, hovered in the space between them, a badbug flitted from the open cut on Andrea’s arm into the shattered wreck of Dana’s face, like a child cannonballing into a swimming pool.

  Dana’s broken frame sunk to the floor, and Andrea Scharfstein looked up at Susan with a daffy grin. “Oh, dear,” she said, clucking. “What a shame, what a shame.”

  The bugs appeared from everywhere at once: they poured from the loose electrical outlet; they swarmed up out of the floorboards; vomited up from the sink. Susan raced for the knife block and slipped on the fallen ceiling tile, still lying at an odd angle in the center of the kitchen floor. Her foot danced out from under her and she landed with a painful, spine-rattling thud, sunny-side up on the kitchen floor. Spots flickered before her eyes while badbugs advanced from all directions.

  Andrea was coming, too, padding toward Susan in her god-awful lime green house shoes, step by step. The bugs crawled up and down Susan’s arms in exultant figure eights. Susan felt them in her hair.

  *

  Though Susan’s body was weak and frail, it nevertheless took Andrea a full half hour to drag her down the long hallway into the living room, and then across the room to the air shaft. At last she made it and then, with a slippered heel, managed to kick open one of the windows lining the shaft. Cold air whistled into the room, and a moment later Susan heard the distant crash of glass hitting the basement floor.

  “Now, listen, dear,” Andrea said, bending over Susan. “This is going to hurt. And there will definitely be some blood. Actually, if I’m being totally honest, there will be a lot of blood.” Andrea grimaced apologetically, her thin tight face a map of lines and spots. “But the thing is, dear, that’s how they want you.”

  Andrea lifted her just far enough to get her up and over the sill and shoved her into the air shaft. As she tumbled down two floors to the basement, Susan imagined herself as a baby carriage, spinning end over end, filled with blood, about to burst on the floor below.

  29.

  The pain was terrible. It radiated upward from the lower part of her body, from her legs and her pelvis.

  Susan could not actually see the lower part of her body. Or anything, really. She was propped upright, somehow, and could move her head around a little, but not enough to look down. And anyway, it was dark. Terribly dark. But she could feel it, that was for certain. She could feel the pain, searing and intense, wave upon wave of agonizing pain radiating up from her legs. They were broken, she was sure of that. She tried, tentatively, to move them, and the waves of pain doubled, crested. Her right kneecap was facing the wrong way, is what it felt like. Her left leg she could not feel at all.

  Next Susan became aware of the stench. Wherever she was—the trunk of a car? stuffed upright in a hole somewhere?—it smelled awful. The smell filled her nose and mouth, stung her eyes with tears. It was like the hot rancid odor that trails after trash trucks, that lifts from the muggy city streets on scorching August mornings: a reek of garbage and shit and death and decay. The smell was all around her. She was inside it.

  She could move her shoulder and her arms. The joints were stiff and resistant, but they moved. She wiggled her fingers and they moved through something, something loose and slippery, crumbling.

  Garbage—she was buried in garbage. She pushed her fingers around her, expanding the radius of discovery: soil and dirt. Hunks of slimy, roughly textured vegetable matter, slippery shreds and waxy peels, crumbling wet hunks of what felt like cardboard.

  Oh, Susan thought simply. I’m in the compost bin.

  She extended her fingertips as far as they would go, swimming them through the clustered muck, and they brushed against walls of hard plastic. She reached up, wincing as the joints in her shoulders cracked, and touched the lid of the bin above her head. She was able to raise the lid the tiniest bit before it fell closed again.

  Slowly, she lowered her hands again, and they brushed against flesh. Susan screamed. As she screamed, Susan stared forward, and her eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to see that Jessica Spender was staring back at her, her eyes wide open, bugs crawling across the milky flesh of the eyeballs.

  Susan screamed and screamed and screamed, the stench of rotting trash filling her mouth and rolling like fog down into her lungs.

  In time, Susan stopped screaming, lapsed into a low animal moan, and then into terrified silence.

  The minutes rolled past.

  There was nothing to do, nothing to think. She couldn’t move. She kept her eyes closed, rather than stare into the dead eyes of Jessica Spender. But with her eyes closed, she imagined the body of Dana Kaufmann, slowly being covered over with gleeful triumphant bugs, her blood leaching onto the kitchen floor, a bloodsucker’s feast.

  Susan flickered in and out of consciousness, her head lolling forward on occasion, then jerking back up when her mouth sank below the line of the garbage. The pain, which had been so sharp when she woke, dampened to a low constant ache. In time, Susan began to feel a strange fondness for this pain, radiating up from the wreckage of her legs: it distracted her from the itching, rashy sensation that had been her constant preoccupation for so long. It was a different kind of pain, and for that she felt a perverse gratitude.

  She waited, not knowing what she was waiting for. Andrea had stuffed her in here and gone somewhere—but would she be coming back? One thing she knew was that Dana Kaufmann, poor, dead Dana, had been very wrong. So had Alex, and so had stupid Dr. Lucas Gerstein. Pullman Thibodaux was right, lunatic or not. The badbugs were real, though they had come to 56 Cranberry Street long ago … before Susan and Alex, before Jessica and Jack.

  Susan eyes slipped closed. She didn’t care. She wanted to die.

  Except for Emma. Oh, my dear little darling girl, Susan thought, and slipped away again.

  Susan did not die.

  Sometime later—there was no time in here, no sense of time, only dull pain and stretches of sort-of sleep, and the smell—Susan heard the door. Heavy wood dragging against unfinished concrete with a dismal, echoing scrape. The strange small door that led from beneath the stoop into the basement. Susan’s heart began to pound. Let it be anyone, she thought. Anyone but her.

  “Ple
ase …” Susan croaked, her voice thin and broken, the metal scritch of a broken spring. “Please, help.”

  The lid of the compost bin yawned open, and Andrea’s wrinkled old face, with the cat’s-eye glasses balanced on the end of her nose, hovered into view above Susan’s eye line, like a horrid bizarro-world sun rising on the horizon. Andrea made kind of a tsk-tsk noise, a parent disappointed at her daughter’s dirty dorm room.

  “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” Andrea began abruptly, “So don’t go around blaming me.”

  “Andrea,” Susan managed. “Andrea, please.”

  Still holding up the lid with one hand, Andrea removed her glasses with the other, and Susan saw in her eyes that steely faraway look, the one she’d seen last night … or was it last week? Whenever Andrea had come for help with her phone. Except that’s not why she came. She came to make sure you didn’t leave. To remind you of the hotel. To make sure you drove Alex away, to get you alone—

  “Andrea, please.”

  “If you must blame someone, blame Howard. Forty-six years we were married!”

  “Please. My daughter, Andrea.”

  “Forty-six years!”

  Andrea propped the lid open with a hunk of two-by-four and walked away, her face disappearing from Susan’s view. But she kept talking, the sound of her voice now drifting to Susan from the far side of the room.

  “Can you imagine how it felt to be told, after all those years, that he is not in love with you anymore? That he is now in love with your neighbor? With stupid Norma Frohm? That he has been making love with her, every Saturday afternoon he has been making love with her, while you are at the grocery store, for seventeen years?”

  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.

  Epilogue

  It was the gunshot, Alex later explained, that brought him rushing down the stairs and into the basement. At first he thought the shot came from somewhere inside the apartment, so loud and nearby had it sounded. But then he realized it had come booming up from the basement, amplified and distorted by the airshaft. When the shot sounded, he had been standing in the doorway of the apartment, contemplating the corpse of Dana Kaufmann, which in a span of five hours had been entirely consumed; a handful of bugs was crawling in and out of the empty eye sockets, picking at what flesh remained.