Crawling

‘The ants are back again,’ said John through his large beard. Those bastards! I’d love to get them out in the open – then they’d let us alone!

            ‘Relax, John,’ said Angela. ‘They’re only ants!’

            Only ants, thought John. Red ants, thought John – the worst kind. He felt a burning in his soul, a fire in his conscience, the gnawing of a thousand tiny jaws – the pang he quickly dismissed.

            ‘Get some Bugzapper out the cupboard, and then fill in the hole,’ Angie called out.

            I know that, thought John. ‘Okay, honey.’ But they always come back, he thought. He looked at himself in the mirror – he was old, greying, his hair was only now streaked with a small sliver of black. He was wearing a black sweater, slacks, and open-toed sandals. John stood a fatigued and shaggy mock-joke of his youth.

            ‘He got the Bugzapper (a nasty-smelling concoction that meant whatever offending room had to be closed off) and some high-strength bleach out from the cupboard under the stairs. He went back into the kitchen, knelt down by the back door, and sprayed the ants. They were manic in the stinging foam, their antennae twitching and burning under the action of the abusive chemicals. He sprayed down the hole, too: that would keep the buggers from coming back, he thought.

            John left the kitchen and went into the living room. He would come back later to sweep up their small, dried bodies. He sat and watched television with Angie. They shared a bag of corn snacks. Then they went up to bed, and before they made love, Angie read a chapter of the novel she had on the go.

            John slept more uneasily than usual. He occasionally swatted his neck in his sleep, heard a steady, seamless, eternal crawling sound; then he heard a low buzz – a plane engine – and heard the sound of rushing flames, crackling wood, screaming women. He could see a dead elephant in a tortured clearing, and he could smell the burnt flesh of something else. And then he woke up with a violent turn. He went to the kitchen for a glass of orange, heard a familiar sound, but he dismissed it. John went back up to bed.

Angie was restless as he lay down to face the other way. He turned over, snuggling up behind her and pushing himself into the backs of her knees. He held onto her tightly. John closed his eyes to usher in sleep. Please come, he thought.

            The next day, he and Angie went to work. John worked in a bookshop; she worked in a grocery. They didn’t earn much, but they earned enough to pay the bills and put food in their mouths. The shop John worked in was big and full of old books – there were three floors; a strange shop, he’d always thought – but a lovely one because of this. He worked for a friend – he’d work there four days a week, usually, sitting behind the desk out front, sipping his black coffee, one sugar, and perusing the books at his leisure. Business was good – the local university had a prestigious English department – actually, it was reasonable more than anything else; the students appreciated a flow of good, affordable books – the more worn the better. Then he got the regulars in – Mr McCaffery, Stephen Blanche, Michael Dubois, Martin Oliver (otherwise known as Big Martin), Elizabeth Prigg, Mary Parker (who he swore was a bull dyke), and others.

            John closed up at six that afternoon and it was getting dark outside. He got the bus home and got in shortly after half past. When he got in, he found a note in the kitchen: Gone ‘round Susan’s. Be back late. Love you, hun. P.S. Dinner’s in the fridge. He scrunched up the note and threw it in the bin, then went to the fridge and found steak, potatoes, and string beans with gravy – he’d always tried to give up meat, but he liked the taste and the texture – especially of beef. Besides, it was not a big deal – he’d seen his fair share of blood.

            John ate it whilst watching the box. He couldn’t really concentrate, though, so he turned it off. He decided to run himself a bath and try to read something short and manageable – perhaps some short stories, beat, sci-fi – or maybe the Russians, those great visionaries. The warm water felt good – the steam went to his head. The window was closed and he felt relaxed but exhausted. He shut out all thought from his mind, submerging himself in the water; he did not open the book that lay beside the bath in the bundle of towels.

            After the bath, he went downstairs for some pudding and some orange. He flicked on the light and held the carton up to his mouth. And then he noticed something in the corner of the kitchen: the hole he’d sprayed the day before seemed bigger. He went over to it, put his finger in it, and felt the hard wood floorboard crumble at the touch of his fingers. He suddenly became scared: he put his ear to the floor. The sound was back: a steady crawling. As he listened, it seemed to grow louder and louder, closer and closer, until he imagined the whole house should be shaking. The floor under his feet started to crack and buckle, and with a terrible sound half the kitchen descended into a great hole in the earth. He rummaged around in the damp hole and then looked up – he could see the kitchen lights above his head, metres up.

            John could feel something crawling over his skin – he lifted his arm up to the light above him: thousands of ants, biting at his flesh! He desperately brushed them off, and then something from the other end of the hollow made his flesh crawl with chill fear: a scuttling sound was building and coming towards him. In the faint light, he saw two massive hairy red legs emerge, followed by a pair of barbed jaws. The ants were all over him. ‘Sorry!’ he cried. ‘I’m sorry!’ But it was too late for that. Buried beneath a mound of twitching red fury, the last thing he heard was the snapping of jaws and the stripping away of his flesh.

            When Angie returned home later that night, she found the house in darkness except for their bedroom and the kitchen. She searched upstairs and found the bed ruffled, the television playing to no-one – just footage from the Persian Gulf. She called out to John, but his familiar friendly, gravelly voice did not respond. She went downstairs and walked towards the kitchen, the lights flickering ominously. As she entered, she saw cracks up the wall, shattered crockery – then she saw a puddle of orange embedded with fragments of glass. As she approached, she saw that the kitchen surfaces were slanted and buckled like cardboard: a hole the size of a Jeep had engulfed half the kitchen. She screamed, shouting down into the abyss for John. She rushed into the lounge and phoned the police. She just said, ‘Come! Come quickly! For God’s sake just come! 27 Parson’s Road! It’s my husband – my husband!’ The police searched, and a health and safety crew came from the council. John was not found in the hollow, but they did report a strange network of tunnels, the likes and size of which they had never before seen.

            The following week, an old friend of John had rung Angie with condolences. She thought he had an odd reticence about him, a fear that was almost palpable across the line. He said he'd called after reading a disturbing article in the local paper about John's disappearance:

Wednesday, May 17th, 1992

John Patmore, Vietnam veteran and respected member of the local community, mysteriously disappeared Monday evening. He was last seen at his place of work - Bohemian Books - that afternoon. A strange hollow, which has been put down to subsidence by the city council, was found beneath his house on Monday evening. However, no body was found. His grieving wife, Angela, has expressed that if anyone knows of his whereabouts, or has any vital information, please.... The man could not read on and threw the paper down, terrified. He had a creeping fear that that something was now coming for him, hungry, marching in unison; the champing of their jaws the military drums; the underground caverns their chambers of blood: lifting one’s foot to quash them only made them bolder. The days of the bully were coming to an end, and all those with even the tiniest flecks of blood on their hands would be irrevocably consumed.