S03EP05: Infested

In episode 5 of season 3, I read out loud - and somewhat performed - my short scary story, Infested. Below, you will find the full story for you to read and enjoy!

The house was infested.

To be fair, was his fault he had let it get to that point. The year before, I remember him telling me that he had heard some sounds. Sounds that were all too familiar – sounds he remembered from his family’s old, dilapidated farmhouse. Sounds that were often followed by creeping, crawling, many-legged encounters. He knew it was coming, and he didn’t do anything about it. So, it was his fault.

But I don’t think he ever expected it to become… what it did.

I don’t think anybody could ever expect…

Sorry – this whole story still makes me shudder, still makes my insides twist with revulsion. It’s not just the insects – it’s what they did to him.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Where was I?

Right – the house was infested. Cockroaches were slowly but surely building a colony in his walls, and at night especially, he would hear the sounds of them skittering about in there. It wasn’t long before those walls must have been teeming with them – those winged brown-bodied pests, roiling about in there, expanding their colony, searching for food.

I remember he called me one day, and asked if I could come by over the weekend to help him cover up some holes that had formed in his plaster. He suspected that the cockroaches were using those holes to enter his home. He was sealing it all up, in hopes that they would either go back outside once they realized there was nothing for them in this house, or perish within those walls they’d worked so industriously to penetrate.

I told him that wouldn’t be an issue, that I could drop by and help him out with that. I didn’t know what to expect, but when I arrived at his house… Well, I regretted offering to help, if I’m being perfectly honest. By then, the sounds of them could be heard even during the day. I suppose it makes sense – it must be dark inside those walls, so it’s daytime for us, but always night-time for them. But it was my first time hearing something like that, and it gave me an itching that only insects could give. I needed to get out of there, but I’d promised him I would help him close up the holes in his plaster. I regretted it, of course, but a friend in need…

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself again. I didn’t actually hear them until a bit later on. But I wasn’t particularly worried at the time, either. It was still daytime, so they wouldn’t be trying to get out of their dark little colony in the walls just yet. We got to work, and I helped him patch up the holes – small, black holes that I kept a nervous eye on, just in case a pair of antlers began to poke out. It didn’t take very long to finish – we went around the house and sealed everything we could seal – but towards the end of it, he had to go lie down. Said his head hurt something awful. I got him some painkillers from his medicine cabinet – there, on the ground near the drain in his shower, was a dead cockroach, and stains on the shower floor suggested a fierce battle had taken place before it had finally succumbed to the undoubtedly many stomps. I remember shivering, and taking the bottle of pills back to my friend, who was now lying on the sofa with his hands on his head.

By the time I went to get him some water, he had already dry-swallowed two pills, but drank the water greedily regardless. He told me that he’d been having horrible headaches these days, and that all he could hear sometimes was their scratching and skittering inside the walls, and that it was driving him crazy. I suggested he call the exterminators and stay at a hotel for a couple of nights. It would be nice, I told him, to get pampered for a few nights while the experts took permanent care of the cockroaches, once and for all.

He gave that some thought, or simply went silent – I’m not sure. He didn’t speak again for a while, and as I sat there in his living room, that was when I first began to hear the sounds he had told me about. Scratching, tapping, scraping – the sounds of thousands of serrated legs moving about in the walls. Was it just their legs – did cockroaches make sounds? Did they speak to one another? Though they were relatively quiet, it was still quite noticeable, and a few moments listening to those terrible sounds had all my internal alarms going off. I felt like, at any moment, they would succeed in pushing a terribly large hole through the wall, and they would tumble out in droves.

God – just thinking about it now, I keep scratching my arms – sorry, it’s just… I never was that good with insects. Very few people are, I guess. Even a fly can set me off – I’ll start scratching my arms, my back, my legs. I can’t help it.

Ah – sorry. Yeah… I’ve been scratching a lot lately. It’s just… the memory of what happened… I still can’t…

Anyway, the situation was thoroughly creeping me out. And if it was creeping me out after just a few minutes, what about him? He was there all day, every day. He slept there. He spent his days and nights on the lookout, always alert, always ready to have to kill another unwanted tenant. I felt bad for him, and I could see that he wasn’t doing well at all. The headache wasn’t going away, and I was wondering if maybe it was due to the stress, or the unsafe living conditions – I don’t know. I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure I’d get headaches, too, in his place. So I pushed him again to take a hotel room and call the exterminators.

It took a bit of convincing – it was going to be a lot of money, and he had been hopeful that he could take care of the whole thing on his own – but he soon came to see that it was the only way to be absolutely certain that the damned roaches wouldn’t bother him anymore.

So, in another hour, we had packed a small bag, called the exterminators, and booked him a hotel room. I dropped him off at the hotel myself. He was acting a bit… weird, at that point. I honestly thought that taking him out of that environment would help him calm down. Would help him feel better. Instead, it almost seemed as though it was making him worse. The headache had gotten stronger, and he was clutching his head the whole way to the hotel. I told him we could stop at a hospital, but he refused – almost yelled at me – so I dropped him off at the hotel instead.

He kept muttering something about – about the scratches, about the insects, about the colony. At first, I was confused, but it became clear to me that he was still hearing them – the sounds of the cockroaches in the walls. He could still hear them, loud and clear.

I decided to help him check in and walk him to his hotel room. The whole walk down the hall, he kept looking around, swinging his gaze this way and that, staring at random spots in the walls. Almost like he heard sounds, and kept trying to locate their source…

At this point, he was making me antsy. Something about him was very wrong. I told him again that he should think of going to the hospital. He shook his head, but the movement seemed to hurt him, because he clutched at the sides of his head again. At that point, we reached his hotel room. I moved to open the door for him, but he held me back, his eyes wide with fear. Slowly, he crept towards the door, and put his ear to it. It only took a second, but he reeled back with a cry, and pointed wildly at the hotel room door. “They’re in there!” he yelled. “They’re in there, and they’re all over the place – I can hear them!”

I put my own ear to the door, but I couldn’t hear a single thing. I sighed, and unlocked the hotel room door, ignoring his protests. I swung it open, and inside, the room looked… Normal. There was nothing in there, apart from a nice, clean hotel room with a comfortable bed. There were even chocolates on the pillows. He seemed… He was in disbelief.

He could see now that there was nothing in the room, but he was hesitant to go inside. I reminded him that it was his house that was infested, and that this was a hotel. It was fine, and there was nothing at all wrong with his hotel room. At this point, he was freaking me out. And I was getting a bit impatient. It was selfish of me, but I just wanted to go home.

I left him standing in his hotel room, looking confused and scared. I told him I’d come see him again tomorrow – and asked him to order himself a nice hot meal and forget about the cockroaches in his house, because they wouldn’t be there when he got back home. That’s how I left him.

It was the last time I saw him alive.

The next day, when I went to the hotel room, I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. I knocked again – again, no answer. I thought maybe he had gone out or something, and I was about to head out, when I heard them.

I heard that same sound – that same sickening sound I’d heard coming from his walls that day when I went to help him.

A deep fear gripped me. A part of me understood that this was not normal. Just yesterday, I had shown him that there was nothing at all wrong with the room – but had I been wrong? Maybe this hotel was also infested, and he had heard what I couldn’t?

I reached out and turned the door knob. I don’t know why I thought to try it – but it turned, and the door clicked open.

I cracked the door, and at once I was met with an overpowering stench. A terrible, horrible stench that had me stumbling back and gagging. I watched in horror as a cockroach hurried out from inside the hotel room and down the hall.

The sight of it – I don’t know – it confirmed that something had gone terribly wrong. That maybe… Maybe I had been mistaken, and in my impatience, I had doomed by friend.

It’s so silly, isn’t it? You’d think – Alright, so what if there were cockroaches in the hotel, too? They’re just cockroaches. They’re not going to do anything other than give you the creepy-crawlies.

But in that moment, I knew they had done much worse than that to my friend. I almost didn’t want to confirm – to check on him. Because I knew that if I walked in there, something horrible awaited me. But I also couldn’t just leave.

I took slow, shaky steps towards the door. I placed my palm on it, and gently pushed forward. Gently. Slowly. I didn’t want to… make any sudden movements, for whatever that’s worth.

And when the door was opened wide enough…

I saw.

I didn’t know, at first, that I was looking at him. It took a moment – a second – for that realization to dawn on me. But in that first, initial sighting, it was nothing more than a roiling mass. Roaches – that was the first thing that came to mind. A mound of roaches. But then I saw the frozen hand, the claw stiffered in rigor mortis, and I saw the head – the head – the head which was covered, completely covered by cockroaches, but from which the eyes could be seen in tiny moments, between when one insect moved and another took its place. Only, they weren’t eyes, not anymore – they were just dark holes, and in and out from them those things crawled and moved and skittered, and I –

God, just the thought of it – the memory of it – it makes me want to be sick. I can’t describe it any more – it was awful. Just terrible. Things became clearer the more I looked, but it only added to the nightmare. Legs, arms, the chest – or what should have been, now a gruesome half-eaten ribcage.

I ran off at some point. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds that I stood there, but it felt like an hour. It was overwhelming. And the sounds – that terrible, sickening noise!

I ran like a mad person to get help. I didn’t know what else could be done. Everyone who stood at the door and peered in – the security guard, the concierge, the young woman from the reception – everyone was revolted, horrified by the sight. Everyone ran off, and nobody knew what to do. The security guard called the police, and when the police arrived, they had to call an extermination team to help them clear the scene.

As I sat in the hotel lobby, answering a policeman’s routine questions, I saw the extermination team arrive. It was the same company that we had called for his house. I was overcome by the urge to tell them – to tell them – I don’t know. It wasn’t the same thing, was it? That was one place, and this is another. That was one colony, and this is another.

Wasn’t it?

But I had to tell them anyway. I ran to stop one of them before they entered the elevator. I remember the policeman calling my name – but I had this deep desperation, this need to tell them – as if, something deep inside told me that the two events – the two infestations – were connected.

It was… strange. They remembered that I had called them the day before. They remembered the address and the name of the house owner, and they told me that they’d visited it that very afternoon, just as they’d promised. They hadn’t found anything. The house wasn’t infested. There wasn’t a single sign of cockroaches, other than the lone dead cockroach near the shower drain.

They told me that it must have been just the one, and my friend had been overreacting.

I didn’t quite know what to do with that information. They went into the elevator, and up to his room, and I stayed in the lobby, returning reluctantly to the policeman and his questions. I don’t even remember most of what he asked me, or what I said. I was so distracted – so preoccupied – so shocked at the whole situation. To say that it was unsettling would be a vast understatement.

The police told me that I could go home – that it would take some time to get his body out, and that it was best to leave it to the authorities and professionals. They said that they would call the next of kin, and wouldn’t need my assistance anymore. In fact, they were a bit pushy about having me go home. But – well, they couldn’t kick me out of the hotel lobby, and I wanted to know what had happened to my friend. Something had to make sense.

Maybe whatever they learned about his death – because he was dead, and that much was confirmed when a middle-aged woman wearing a jacket with the word CORONER on the back strode through the hotel lobby just one hour later – maybe whatever they learned could give me some kind of closure – make it mean something – make it make sense.

It was a long while before I got any details, or any answers. Obviously, it was a freak accident – or something along those lines. I don’t know what the official term for something like this is. But they didn’t feel the need to hold any information back from me, so they told me pretty much everything they knew.

They said the hotel wasn’t infested. They said there were no cockroaches anywhere else in the hotel – and was I sure that my friend hadn’t been raising cockroaches, and hadn’t brought them with him in his suitcase? The question almost made me laugh. I’d helped him pack – I knew there was nothing in there but clothes – and he certainly wasn’t raising a swarm of cockroaches – what kind of---

Ugh. Whatever. Anyway, it turns out, he was eaten alive by cockroaches. That’s what they figured that day. Said it was really weird behaviour, and that maybe he had died before they ate him, since roaches don’t usually eat people alive, you know? I don’t know. It was freaky, and it was horrific, and it made me sick. I went home without any answers. None of it made sense. No infestation in his house, no infestation in the hotel, and yet he was eaten by a swarm of those things? Weird. And not in a good way.

I had a hard time sleeping after that. I kept in touch with his family while his body was being prepared for burial, in case they needed any help, except I really didn’t want to have anything more to do with the whole thing. That’s what I do when something, or someone, makes me anxious or scared. I avoid the hell out of them. Not my best trait, but there you are.

There was one thing I couldn’t avoid. The funeral. Not going to my friend’s funeral – well, that’s just downright shameful, isn’t it? So I went, and I told myself that it was okay because they’d cleaned him up, and anyway it was a closed-casket funeral, so I wouldn’t need to see his face, and there’d be a whole lot of people there. What could possibly go wrong?

Nothing. Nothing went wrong. Except when I was standing at the buffet at the reception, grabbing a few bites since it was well past lunch, and I overheard someone talking. It was the hushed kind of tone someone takes on when they’re gossiping, unaware that that’s exactly the kind of tone that alerts people and makes them hone into the conversation. Weird how people are like that, huh? So, there I am, piling a plate with finger-food, and I heard something that made my blood run cold.

It was his brother, talking to his girlfriend. He was telling her – telling her what the autopsy results had shown. He said he’d spoken to the coroner, and they’d told him that… Well, they said that when they were examining the body, it seemed to them almost like… like there had been something that was in his head – in his brain – and had began to eat its way out.

I… I don’t know how that’s possible. I don’t know if an autopsy can even show you that – especially not when it’s a mangled, eaten piece of… Anyway, it just… stuck with me. I remembered his awful headache. I remembered how he kept hearing them, even when they weren’t there.

I just can’t help but think that, as weird as it is, there’s… something to that idea. That maybe the swarm started out in his head. Literally. Physically.

But that… doesn’t make any sense. I guess I’m just a bit worried these days because…

Lately, I’ve been getting headaches. And sometimes. Sometimes I’ll wake up from a dream, and the echo of skittering, scratching, crawling noises will ring in my ears, like an after-image.

...It’s probably nothing more than my own brain playing tricks on me. That’s what it is. That’s what it is.