Right around the start of the pandemic me and my husband moved to a new place. It was cheap but a huge step up for us, a two bedroom all to ourselves. We had our new king-sized bed set up in one room and made plans to use the other room as an office for him to work his IT job from home and for me to tailor and upscale thrift store clothes. The night we moved in we were exhausted from carrying boxes and setting up the bed, so we pretty much passed out after a few slices of pizza and about half a beer each. All night I kept tossing and turning, with my hands and feet itching badly. I have an allergy to dust mites and just carrying all those boxes and cleaning up at the old place always triggers my allergies.
The next morning, we started to unpack and were shocked to discover that each of the two bedrooms had a ton of closet space, and in the back, there was an additional smaller room which was not quite a bedroom but would be great for storage or even to set it up as our office/activity room.
It somewhat sucked that we could not really go out due to the pandemic, but we had more than enough space to avoid getting on each other’s nerves. The landlord had told us that so long as we did not open the locked door in the basement, we could help ourselves to anything down there as the previous tenants had left all of it before running off while owing several months of rent.
That basement was the gift that kept on giving… while the gyms were closed, we found some exercise equipment down there. We could not go to the movies, but we found a projector that worked with my husband’s laptop. This house was also full of surprises, as it was much more spacious and comfortable than we even remembered from the tour.
I did continue to have itchy hands and feet on and off, and so did my husband, so I joked that he was starting to get all my allergies. He had already aged into a severe pollen allergy last year despite never having dealt with it before. Either way an order showed up with antihistamines and cream for the itch, so that helped a lot.
We fell into a lethargic slump though, from a lack of going out and seeing the sunlight. The idea was just so unappealing, compared to our comfortable little retreat from the world. I was in a fog, as I kept receiving groceries and amazon deliveries I did not remember placing. We never looked at our accounts; if anything, the pandemic was helping us save money. We kept finding cool things in the basement… he found a bunch of old comics, and I found an awesome old sewing machine. This really was a dream home.
That is until I woke up sweating like crazy one night, with my hands and feet itching and my head super foggy. I could not find my husband anywhere, so I figured he went into the basement to look into our heating system, which was behind the door we had been told not to open.
As I walked down It felt like the stairs had multiplied, it took a long time for me to make it all the way down. At that time, I started hearing a voice in my head, my own voice, saying “aren’t you happy?” and “can’t you leave well enough alone?”. The basement also felt bigger than before, and it took me a while to make it to the door. All the while the voice in my head said “You are not supposed to go in there, you will get evicted if you do”. Also, in my foggy state I kept getting sidetracked… I saw several racks with vintage dresses, even ones that I felt like I recognized from movies. I saw kitchen appliances, a stand mixer, but I got suspicious when I saw some actual dolls from my childhood. There was one my mother had sewn for me, and I recognized it instantly. I snapped out of the fog and pushed further.
Despite the urge to get distracted and turn around I opened the door, which housed a smaller room with all the ductwork and heating. My husband was sitting in the middle of the room with bugs crawling all over him. In the corners I saw more people, perhaps the previous tenants, with papery hives constructed by insects covering their heads like a mask. Small bed bug like insects crawled in and out of the holes in the hives and swarmed in a thick cloud in the air.
The voice in my head announced, “You are ruining a beautiful symbiotic relationship, all we ask for is a little blood and you can have anything you want, anything you can dream about. Our hive mind can re-write reality, with our combined brains, but we lack the human imagination to do it. Without human minds we are just bugs, but when we are drinking their blood and getting inside their dreams, we can accomplish anything, we can create a small slice of heaven on earth”.
“What about my husband?” I asked out loud, to the council of mummified tenants.
“He was not supposed to come down here, but it will be easy enough to have him forget he ever found out about us. You too, you can forget if you let us swarm you, if you are willing to briefly join our hive”.
“No” I answered, “There is no way I’m letting you guys crawl all over me”.
“We will give you anything you want, just anything you can imagine, it is yours”.
I closed my eyes… and I do not know how to say it… I made a wish… a little prayer to the hive and their power to warp reality around me. They complied, because despite their power they need the imagination and desires of a human to actually create things. I reached behind me, to the tank of insecticide on my back, and taking the hose out I started to spray the papery nests.
My head filled with hundreds, thousands of little cries. Something like screams and chirps and chitters, some in my own voice and some completely alien and insect-like. I kept spraying and my eyes watered as the insecticide washed back on me. It burned, or maybe I was feeling what they were feeling, but as soon as it felt safe I took my husband by the hand and walked him upstairs. He followed me without hesitation, without words, just completely in a daze.
I led both of us to the shower and we washed off the poison and the dead bugs. The water was cold, despite the hot water being turned all the way. I guess my husband had been investigating the boiler going out. As the water washed over us he came to, and held me close. I think he knew what had happened, how I had pulled him out of a blood sucking hive of pests.
Things went back to normal after that… the apartment felt smaller again and the storage room we had filled with cool stuff was completely gone. The basement did have some furniture, but it was mostly other people’s junk, nothing anyone would really want. We worked up the nerve to actually check out the locked room, and to our horror we did in fact find 6 bodies with their heads encased in hives. There were dead insects everywhere, and others were crawling in a daze.
We called the police and a few weeks later we had moved out with the money we had saved. The landlord was being questioned as he never reported the missing tenants and he had sold off pretty much any valuables they had. I wonder if he was in league with the bugs, or just a garden variety sleazeball. Either way he knew something was very wrong and he kept renting to hopeful young couples.
As we unpacked in our new place my husband brought me something he had found in one of the boxes with our stuff. It was a doll, one sewn by my mother and heavy with memories from my childhood. I held it close to me and my hands started to itch. Then I remembered I had lost the doll over a decade ago in a house fire, and it turned to ashes in my hands.
“Honey, can you look up the number for some exterminators?” I asked.
“Way ahead of you, baby” he replied as he scrolled through the first dozen results on his phone.