Bedbugs

27

The first of the badbugs crawled in under the door about an hour later.

It might have been less than an hour, or it might have been more. Susan wore no watch, and the moon gave no clue, hanging mute and unmoving in the window.

It was just the one bug, and it was not a big one. A stage three, Susan thought, maybe even a stage two. An eighth of an inch. Someone who was not waiting for it would never have noticed. But Susan’s eyes were trained, and she was waiting. Now they were coming for her. Susan was sure of that.

She watched the little bug from where she sat in the far corner of the room, under the one big window, where she had first discovered the photograph of Jessica and Jack. It crawled toward her, and Susan watched it come. Her knees were drawn up in front of her, her hands laced across the kneecaps. No more hiding for Susan’s friends, no more darting out when others couldn’t or wouldn’t see.

Now she was awake and alive and in their time, and they were coming.

The little stage three, a dark brown oval, a tiny creeping shadow in the moonlight, took a winding course across the hardwood floor, making its roundabout way to where Susan sat, waiting for it, her stomach churning with dread. A single bug. It skittered forward a foot, paused, skittered forward another half foot. Doubled back, circled around, came closer still.

No reason to hurry, the bug was saying with its easy meandering pace. We’ve got you now.

She looked at the badbug, and the badbug looked back at her.

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.”

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 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.”

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 rang. 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 …”

“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.

“Please …” 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.