Amanda was standing in the darkness, beating her fists against the refrigerator door.
The commotion had wrenched me out of a deep and dreamless sleep. When I'd crept down the hall to investigate, I'd had panicked thoughts of intruders, stealing into the house to gut my family. But when I made it to the kitchen, I found only my wife, standing in her nightie, looking somewhat like an apparition, banging in a steady rhythm upon the hapless appliance.
I nudged the dimmer switch up, in the hopes of shedding even just a little light on the situation. It didn’t work; I still didn’t understand what was happening.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You don’t hear that? That fucking buzzzzzzz?”
I listened. It was more of a hum than a buzz, I thought, and a very gentle one at that. One you wouldn’t notice unless you were paying attention. “That’s how it always sounds.”
“No. It’s broken. You don’t hear that? It’s fucking loud. I can’t sleep. It’s keeping me up.”
I nudged the switch a little higher and now I could see that Amanda wasn’t kidding around. She looked positively haggard, and, in the light, even more like a ghost than she had in the dark.
“It sounds normal,” I said again.
“That’s what I was really afraid of.” Amanda closed her eyes and spread a hand out across her face, gripping her temples with her thumb and middle finger. “It’s in my head.”
“You hear a buzzing sound in your head?” I bit my lip. “Do you think…?”
“Yes. Yes. I picked something up on my trip. God knows what it could be. I took all of my vaccines.”
“Those don’t work sometimes.”
“So it would seem.”
I was groggy and wanting to get back to bed. “Well, we’ll figure it out in the morning. We’ll get you right to the doc, first thing. For now, try to get some sleep.”
“I can’t.”
“Take an Ambien.”
“I’ve already had three. It sounds like a fucking bee hive in there, Walt. It won’t shut up.”
I looked at the clock. Work in four hours. “You’ve tried Tylenol?”
“I’ve been awake all night. I’ve tried Tylenol, yes. I’ve tried reading the fucking Bible too, before you ask. I’ve tried everything. It won’t stop.”
“Should we go to the ER? Wake up the kids and go to the ER? Or call an ambulance?”
Amanda shook her head. “Just go back to bed, Walt. I’ll be okay. Just go back to bed, and on your way out, kill that fucking light.”
I did just that.
*
A few hours later, with the sun creeping into the sky, I shut up the alarm clock and looked over to see that Amanda hadn’t made it back to bed. I found her soon enough, sitting on the kitchen floor. She had pulled the refrigerator away from the wall and unplugged it. She looked wild and unhealthy; less the ghost now, and more the decomposing corpse.
“Honey?”
“It won’t stop. It will never stop. I made you coffee.”
“The buzzing still?” I asked, pulling a mug out of the cabinet and pouring myself a cup.
“Like a swarm of bees,” she said. “No. Like a swarm of angry wasps.”
“Never went to sleep, huh?”
“Never did.”
“Alright. I’m calling off work today and I’m taking you to Dr. Henderson.” I looked down at her. She had a blank look on her face, and for a moment, I could vividly hear a buzzing in my own head. “We’ll get you all fixed up.”
Jacob Henderson was a friend of mine. We played poked together every Friday night. I called his personal line to find him just on his way to the hospital, and filled him in on my wife's condition.
"Amanda's got it bad. This buzzing in her head that kept her up all night. We think she got it from stomping around in Thailand last week, though she was up-to-date on her vaccines."
"Hmm. Well, I'll go ahead and clear a spot for her. Can you bring her in right away?"
"Yes. Thank you, Jake." I hung up and turned to Amanda. She was shivering now, her teeth audibly chattering. The sound made me shiver.
"He said he can fit you in first thing. I'll drop you off, bring the kids to school, then come right back to check in on you."
My wife gave no indication that she'd heard me. "Amanda?"
Suddenly she leapt to her feet and took off running, out of the kitchen and down the hall. After a moment, I heard a door slam shut.
I followed behind, to the bathroom door, and knocked. "Amanda?"
I was answered by a terrible, throaty retch, followed by a splash, as of a large volume of liquid being poured out over the tile floor.
Aaron came out of his room, dressed in his pajamas, his hair sticking up in a cowlick, and asked, "Was that Mom? Is she okay?"
"Your mother is feeling a bit under the weather today, but she'll be fine." From the bathroom: another retch, another splash. "I'm going to drop her off with Dr. Henderson, and he'll fix her right up. But I need your help this morning, okay buddy? Need you to go get your sister moving, and then the both of you get ready for school. Okay?"
Aaron nodded and walked off to his sister's room. I tried the knob. Locked.
"You okay in there honey?"
Silence. Or was it? I put my ear against the door. Not silence. Buzzing. Very faint buzzing, but definitely present.
"Amanda? Please answer."
What if she'd passed out? Maybe she fell and hit her head on the way down.
I decided to pick the lock. It was a privacy lock, and would be easy to do with a straightened-out paperclip.
I pulled my head away from the door and an instant later there was a click and Amanda slipped out of an opening that was barely big enough for her body to fit through. She closed the door behind her, and kept her hand on the knob.
"I'm fine, honey," she said. "Totally, 100% better. The buzzing's gone and I feel fine. Just got a little sick. I'm thinking it was something I ate."
She really did look better. Tired still, but no longer on the verge of death. "Well, let's have Dr. Henderson look you over anyway. It's all arranged."
"No," she snapped. An ugly rage flashed across her face and then was gone, leaving a gentle smile in its wake. "I told you. I'm feeling quite well now."
I didn't want to press the matter too insistently. Taking her to the hospital would mean missing work, and when I missed work, the work didn't magically disappear, but rather piled up on my desk. I was just getting over one ulcer, and wanted to avoid another if possible.
"You're sure?"
Amanda nodded.
"If you're sure."
"I am. But… could you still take the kids in today? I'm going to clean up in the bathroom, then hit the hay. I'm beat."
"Of course.” I nodded at the door. “Let me just do my business in there, and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“No. No, you can’t go in there. It’s embarrassing.”
“Nothing I haven’t seen before. Come on now. I’ll be late.”
“Use the kids’ bathroom. This one is a war zone. I can’t let you in there.”
I shrugged and was getting ready to turn around when I heard that buzzing sound again, a little louder now, coming from the other side of the door. “What’s that sound? That buzz?”
Amanda was silent for a beat, then let out a mechanical laugh. It didn’t sound like her at all. “Now you’re the one hearing a buzz? Maybe you should consult with Dr. Henderson yourself, after you drop off the kids. You probably have a case of what I had. It’s not fun at all, I promise you that.”
Something’s off about her, I thought. Then: Sure there is. She’s been up all night and just puked her guts out. Relax. “Ah, it didn’t look fun, no.
I headed off to the kids’ bathroom. As soon as I was a few steps down the hall, I heard Amanda open the door again. I stopped and turned to see her disappear back inside. With the door open, the buzzing grew temporarily louder. There’s something in there. It’s not in my head. But then, I realized, Amanda had spent all night in front of the refrigerator, convinced that the noise was coming from there, even after I had borne witness to the contrary. Maybe I do have a bit of food poisoning.
I put the matter out of my mind and went about my day.
*
That afternoon, at the crest of a wave of progress against my towering workload, I got a call from my kids’ school. Amanda hadn’t picked them up. Normally, she picked them. The school secretary said that she’d tried the other numbers listed before mine, but none of them had reached a human being. I was a little put out, but figured: Fair enough. Amanda had a rough night, and needs the rest. She’s probably off in dreamland right now.
I picked up Aaron and Margaret and, to their delight, took them out for ice cream. I wanted to give my wife a little extra time to sleep before I dropped the kids off with her and went back to work. But I did need to get back to it, so as soon as we got home, and the kids went barreling off for their toys, I went to my bedroom, bracing myself for the unpleasant but necessary task of awakening my wife.
But my wife wasn’t in our bedroom.
“Amanda?” I knew that she was home because her car was in the driveway. But if not in bed, then where? And why wasn’t she answering her phone?
I walked through the house, calling her name, sticking my head into each room. When I got to the hall bathroom, I was greeted by a closed door and an undeniable buzzzzz.
Something was very wrong. A part of me wanted to pretend that it wasn’t, and to just keep walking down the hall, out the door, and into my car. Back to the office to make some more progress. Make some more money. But no. That was my wife in there. I Ioved her. We’d made vows, and had children together, who were now playing in the living room, oblivious to any kind of danger. I couldn’t abandon them either, though some dark and primal urge, stirred by the buzzing sound, was telling me to run for my life no matter the cost.
Amanda had been right: it really did sound like a swarm of angry wasps. It was menacing in a way that was both organic and mechanical, which, I suppose, was true enough of wasps. Single-minded drones, like programmed robots, but alive too, and looking, finally, for nothing more than an excuse to plunge their poisonous stingers into your flesh.
I knocked on the door. “Amanda?” I knew that she wouldn’t answer, but I hoped that she would. I hoped that she was in there, perfectly fine, having just woken up from her nap, and that the buzz was from her use of some kind of electrical device. Let it be a vibrator if need be. Hell, let her be in there with the defensive line of the Dallas Cowboys, her only requirement that they trim their public hair with an electric razor before she sucks each of their cocks utterly dry. Let it be anything other than the unspeakably awful thing that I knew it absolutely would be, even as I didn’t know the specifics of what that nightmare would manifest itself as.
I took a breath and tried the knob that I knew wouldn’t turn. It didn’t. The buzzing seemed to intensify, becoming agitated by my attempts at intrusion.
There was no more procrastinating. I made my way through the living room, where Aaron and Margaret were engaging in a mock battle between super heroes:
“Super freeze!” cried my daughter.
“It didn’t work,” said my son. “I drank some antifreeze before I got here.”
In the study, I rummaged through my desk drawers until I found a paperclip. I straightened it out with unsteady hands and wielded it, past my playing children, back to the bathroom door. Just get it over with, I thought, sticking the wire into the small hole in the knob. I wiggled it around a bit until I heard the click of the lock coming undone.
I was almost grateful for the sound of my pulse thudding in my head as I pushed the door open; it temporarily drowned out the droning buzz coming from within.
There, inside the bathroom, was my wife, Amanda. She was stark naked, and crouched above what looked like a writhing ball of insect larvae and human shit.
Some of the larger larvae were emerging from this central mass and crawling all over Amanda, finding a suitable piece of flesh and attaching themselves there to suck out the final bit of sustenance needed to become adults. Above her head, hanging from the ceiling, was a nascent nest, swarmed by what did indeed look like wasps: striped black and yellow, buzzing, and nasty.
Amanda was twitching all over, but otherwise unmoving. Her eyes were blank and her face was slack. She was, I realized, gone... overtaken body and mind by these parasitic wasps. One of them had found her, probably while she was in Thailand, and had laid its eggs inside of her. Did it do this through a sting, or by crawling into her mouth while she slept? No matter the method, the insect had succeeded, and the eggs thrived in my wife’s body, protected from the outside world. She gave them a free ride to America, back to our house, and then, when they were ready to hatch, she had vomited them up on the bathroom floor. There, in various stages of development, they had fed all day, either on her shit or her blood. They grew fast into adults, who now swarmed around her head and plucked the hair off of her head in order to build their nest.
I understood this on instinct, like how a mouse understands a cat. Come to think of it, there was a parasite for that, too. Toxoplasma gondii, which thrives in cats but will settle initially for a mouse. The parasite's special talent was to make the rodent unafraid of felines and so easy prey. The cat, without sport, would eat the oblivious mouse, its flight function disengaged, and the parasite would get what it wanted all along: to live on and reproduce in the cat. Life can be a nasty business all around.
My own fear response, however, remained fully intact, and even as I took in the scene before me, -- as the thoughts swirled in my head, contributing to the discordant symphony in there, alongside the organic/mechanical buzz and my pounding pulse -- I retreated. I slammed the door behind me and braced myself against the wall in front of me, dizzy. Good God, what do I do?
Amanda was beyond help, it seemed. There was no coming back from that. Her mind (and so her body) had been taken over by them, in the same way that certain other species of parasitic wasps will take over the body of a spider, and have it spin a protective cocoon around them; or how certain fungi will take over the minds of ants, turning them into half-dead slaves under their control. Nobody quite knew how it worked, only that it did work, and was terrifying.
Those things were in there, all too rapidly growing into adults, building their nest. Amanda’s body would serve them for awhile. But once that resource was depleted, they’d want to be seeking other hosts, seeping through every crack, looking for fresh meat. Maybe that would happen sooner rather than later. Maybe they were already searching for the exit. I turned slowly and looked at the crack under the door.
In horror, I tore off my shit and spread it out on the floor, attempting to blockade the gaping gateway between the horrible world of the bathroom and this world. In even more horror, I looked down at my naked arm to see one of them on there, crawling.
I slapped at it madly, until it was mush. Had it stung me? Or was that just the sting from my own slaps?
Get the kids. Get out of there. Then call the police or call an exterminator or burn the house down. Just get out of there.
I ran into the living room and grabbed my kids roughly by their arms, dragging them along behind me.
Did it sting me? Did it inject me with its nightmare eggs? Are there more on me? Did it sting me? Is it too late? Are they right behind us, giving chase? Did it sting me?
As my mind screamed, my children screamed.
“That hurts dad! What are you doing?! Why are you doing this?!”
I didn’t stop to explain. I kept running, praying that the buzz that filled my head was only the sound of my nerves sizzling out.
*
I am told that when the police arrived at the scene, my wife was already dead. After some pressing on my part, an officer disclosed that there was no writhing ball of larvae on the tile floor, nor any larvae attached to Amanda’s body, but that there was a massive nest hanging from the ceiling, with a thick swarm of adult wasps encircling it.
“It happens,” the officer said. “They’ll build a nest wherever they can.” He shuddered. “Nasty fuckers.”
“Do you really think we wouldn’t notice a colony of wasps building a giant nest in our bathroom? How long does that normally take? Weeks? And we didn’t notice?” I was frustrated because nobody believed my story about some sort of super-charged species of parasitic wasps. Wasps might take over the body of a ladybug, I was told, but no species exists that can take over the body of a person… and yet no other really plausible explanation for what had happened was proffered.
“I certainly would have noticed it,” the officer admitted. “But then again, I’m trained to observe my environment at all times. I’m trained to notice the slightest detail out of place.”
I tried a different approach. “The nest was made out of her hair. You tested that, right?”
“Lots of stray hairs in a bathroom, available to anyone or anything looking for such material.”
I sat in disbelief for a moment, across the desk from this officer. I knew that I couldn’t convince him of the truth; he’d already made up his mind. The truth lay in matters beyond his knowledge and understanding of the world, and, rather than expand his understanding of the world, he had chosen to contort the truth to make it fit.
This is how the world will end, I thought. After days and nights of mourning and erratic sleep characterized by terrifying nightmares, I had little emotion to lend the thought. There was only a flicker of rage.
“Let me review. According to what you’re telling me, a massive colony of wasps was picking up my wife’s stray hairs for weeks on end, and building a huge nest in our bathroom, completely without our notice. And then, one day, Amanda undresses to get in the shower and lo, she finally notices the enormous nest. The sudden sight frightens her so much that she defecates, and then drops dead of a heart attack. The marks all over her body? An unexplained but unrelated rash of some sort. Case closed. Is that right?”
“Unfortunately, sir, that’s the long and short of it. I know that it’s hard to hear… it seems such an undignified way to go. If it makes you feel better, I saw that nest with my own eyes, and I’m not ashamed to say that I pissed myself. There’s no shame in being human. Those fuckers are scary. One of them got me in the neck while I was there. I’ll tell you, the only thing worse than getting stung by one of those things is getting shot, which I have been.” The officer patted his shoulder. “Right here.”
“You got stung?”
“All in the line of duty.”
I stood up. “Well, I have to thank you for your time. I needed some closure, I suppose, and now I have it.”
The officer smiled. “I’m very sorry about your wife, sir. The only advice that I can give is to hang in there. Life goes on. You’ll see. Even now, somebody needs your attention. It’s okay. You can go ahead and answer your phone now. It must be important. The damn thing’s been buzzing for five minutes straight.”
My phone was in the car with the kids. “It can wait. Thank you again, and good luck.”
I left his office and walked outside. The sky was overcast. The investigation was complete, as was the fumigation, and the kids and I were due to move back into our house. We were in fact on our way to do just that. But suddenly, it seemed like a good idea to go somewhere very far away instead.
---
Credits
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