Dark Tales: 13 New Authors, One Twisted Anthology

by Vincent V. Cava (Editor)

  Damn it. Tony didn't bring this to me for a consultation. He brought it to me because there's nothing he can do about it. I don't think there's anything I can do either, but someone has to try. I've already contacted Dylan and Father McBride. Tomorrow morning we're going down to the basement of St. John's and attempting to exorcise something that hasn't inhabited the world of man since the days of Christ and Legion.

  Happy fucking birthday to me.

  - From the journal of Kat Ashcroft

  Little Black Bugs

  Vincent V. Cava

  It’s important you understand that I’m not insane. I say this because the tale I’m about to recount may seem preposterous – outlandish even! So bizarre that if you didn’t know better, you’d think you were reading the words of a madman. Nevertheless, I assure you this narrative only contains the unequivocal truth about what happened to me – about how my life brought me to this.

  I’m afraid that I must write quickly though. I wish to tell you the whole story, but unfortunately I’ll have to omit some details due to the time constraints that are being placed upon me this evening. The guests at my door are growing restless and if I don’t write this confession in a swift, prompt manner then I fear I won’t get the chance to finish it. It is for that reason that I am apologizing in advance for giving you the abbreviated version of my account. You see? A loon would never feel remorse for such a thing!

  My story began six weeks ago. I had just moved into my brother’s apartment – the very one I’m composing my tale from this evening. I use the term “brother” loosely because that’s the type of designation one might typically employ to describe another human being. Donald was more of a pig than a person – a slovenly, fat oaf who did nothing but sit around in his shit-stained underwear, smoke weed, fart, and eat junk food all day. Everything about him made me sick – from the greasy, curly hair that sat on top of his blubbery head, all the way down to the crusty unkempt toenails I would often catch him nonchalantly picking at on the sofa. You should have seen the way he mined the dirt and grime that settled under those claws of his, only stopping to flick his nasty toe-filth to the carpet below or to wipe it on the couch’s cushion with his crud covered fingers. Things like that often made me wonder how it was even physically possible that the same two people sired us. I would have assumed either he or I to be adopted, but unfortunately, if you looked past his pimples, greasy skin, and stretch marks, it was obvious that we bore far too much of a resemblance to each other not to be related.

  It was my first year at college. Donald was a junior, though I’d barely call him a student since he rarely went to class and was hanging on to a C average by the skin of his teeth. My parents had decided that it would be best for us to room together while we were both in school. The living arrangement saved them money since they wouldn’t need to pay for two apartments and I think they hoped that my studious, tidy habits would rub off on my older brother.

  The apartment was located in student housing off campus. The building held about 40 units, all of which were inhabited by students at the university. I of course, being the social butterfly that I am, decided to introduce myself and make friends with many of the buildings tenants. This is a completely rational, non-crazy thing for a person who just moved into a new building to do, don’t you think?

  As I went door to door, shaking hands with each of my new neighbors, it became increasingly more evident that the building had a strong community atmosphere. Many of the students knew each other and I found out there were regular soirees and get-togethers in order to help the newbies like myself mingle and make friends. I was having a great time meeting new people and everyone seemed to be genuinely inviting. Of all the students in my building that I met that day, it was Elizabeth in apartment 303 whom I liked the best. She was a beautiful girl with a sweet and charming demeanor. I like to think of myself as somewhat smooth, but I must admit, I was at a loss for words when she answered the door. It was her gorgeous green eyes that caught me off guard. They were absolutely stunning, like she was looking out at me through a pair of brilliant, gleaming emeralds. Her hair was equally as breathtaking – a dazzling auburn red she wore knotted into a French braid that dangled carelessly over her shoulder, lightly caressing her bosom. Oh how I longed to be that braid! If that wasn’t enough, she was intelligent too. Elizabeth was in her second year of school, studying biochemistry – by no means an easy subject. She even had aspirations of going to graduate school and becoming a PhD – not just one of those pretty girls who gets by on her looks! No sir!

  Some of the other neighbors I talked with were surprised to find out that I was not only rooming with, but also related to my disgusting older brother. A few of them even shared horror stories about the foul stench they would sometimes encounter when they accidently passed too close to his apartment door on the way to the laundry room. Others joked about the stomach turning sights they had caught glimpses of on those rare occasions Donald opened the blinds of his windows to let sunlight into his unit. I felt a great deal of shame and embarrassment listening to their anecdotes – not just for my brother, but for myself as well. It was a curse to be related to such a revolting troll!

  As bad as the other tenants assumed Donald’s apartment to be, I’m certain no one really had any idea just how terrible it actually was. I don’t think I could have ever shown my face around that building again if they knew the truth. When I moved in, the apartment was one of the most repulsive places I had ever had the displeasure of laying my eyes upon. Donald lived alone before I became his roommate so for two years there was no one cleaning up after his over-weight, unrefined ass.

  Trash bags full of fast food wrappers and stale, half-eaten pizza crust laid strewn about the living room, producing a smell akin to that of a hobo defecating in a McDonald’s dumpster on a hot day. The fridge in the kitchen was filled with rotten meat, moldy fruit (that I’m sure he never touched), and multiple containers of Tupperware, each occupied by a different putrid, soupy substance that resembled the habitat of an alien world more than something you could eat for lunch.

  The bathroom was even more repulsive and sickening than any port-a-john you might come across at a summer music festival. The inside of the once white toilet bowl had been stained a deep orange from the years of abuse at the hands, or rather, ass of my brother. Not once had he considered cleaning away the sludge that had collected along the walls of the pot. Tiny brown bits of fecal matter even sprinkled the seat itself! How do you get shit on the seat!? Given Donald’s repugnant nature, I might have understood if it was just the toilet, but the shower and sink were equally as mucky. The drains of both were clogged with coarse black curly hair and some sort of thick yellow goop that looked as though it might have been radioactive.

  Then there was his bedroom. Oh God, his bedroom! Just thinking about the way it looked that first day makes me shudder. Where shall I start? Well, for one there were the plastic solo cups sitting on his nightstand and windowsill filled to the brim with urine.

  “I’m just too tired to get up and walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night.” He would later explain to me. “That’s why I always keep a ‘piss cup’ near by. You know? In case nature calls.” Why he never thought to empty them out, I have no idea.

  I found used wads of tissue paper, soaked in what I can only assume to be the special ingredient one might use to create horrible miniature pig-babies, scattered around his room like some sort of terrible Easter Egg hunt from Hell. His clothes were everywhere. I’m not sure if the human bag of waste had ever heard of a closet, but I’m fairly positive the concept of a washing machine was completely foreign to him because every t-shirt or pair of socks I picked up off the floor stunk worse than George “The Animal” Steele’s jock strap after wrestling a 45 minute “slobbernocker” in Madison Square Garden.

  My living conditions were unfit for a barnyard animal and desperately needed to be addressed. Some of the people I met from the building (Elizabeth included) had invited me
to a start-of-the-school-year BBQ. As much fun as it sounded, I was forced to decline due to enormous amount of cleaning I had ahead of me. The last thing I wanted to do was return to that nauseating place with a belly full of red meat and beer. If I did, I can promise you one thing, my belly wouldn’t stay full for long!

  I first noticed the insects that night when I was tidying up the kitchen. It was around a quarter past eight and I had just set about cleansing and disinfecting the fridge. I was dumping the last container of primordial soup down the garbage disposal when I felt a little prick on the nape of my neck. This triggered a knee jerk reaction, causing me to reach back and grasp wildly at the source of my irritation. To my surprise, when I brought my hand back from behind my neck, I realized I had caught something between my fingers – a little black bug, no bigger than a millimeter in diameter. Its body was round, similar to that of a ladybug. Two long antennas protruded from its head. It wasn’t dead yet; I had crushed it’s body, but its legs were still moving in a fruitless attempt to escape. I didn’t get more than a quick glance at the pesky thing before another one scurried by me on the kitchen counter. One swat of my hand later and both the little buggers were dead. I believed them to be pantry pests, like a rice weevil or something of that sort, though in time I would come to discover that this theory was wrong. Lord knows how wrong I was!

  Naturally, Donald was of little use when it came to cleaning. I worked tirelessly just to keep the apartment livable while he would completely undo everything by the time I got back form school. As the weeks wore on, I started to realize I was fighting a losing battle. The good days were the ones where I could maintain equilibrium and go to sleep with the apartment looking no more dingy then when I woke up that morning, but I never cleaned fast enough to gain any ground on the chaos and clutter my brother created. While I scrubbed and scoured away at the stains on the carpet or threw load after load of his dirty unmentionables in the washer he would already be busy constructing another mountain of garbage for me to clean up. It was around this time that I began to develop genuine feelings of hatred for Donald.

  Those bothersome bugs had become a constant reminder of the filth I was living in. I’d usually see them one or two at a time, sometimes congregating in the bathroom, trying to get into my tube of toothpaste or crawling along the top of cereal boxes in the cupboard. On occasion, I would feel that familiar prick on my arms or legs and look down to find the nasty little vermin feeding on me. I had never lived in a home with pests before, but I was no fool. There were more of them, hiding behind the walls. I was sure of it. Where there’s one there’s a million. That’s what they say about infestations. The thought of a thin layer of stucco being the only thing separating me from that army of insects made me tremble on more than one occasion. It frustrated me to know that it was my brother’s bad habits that had most likely attracted them there in the first place.

  I would often daydream about inviting Elizabeth over to hang out, watch TV, and well, do other things, but I knew that as long as my pest-ridden apartment continued to be treated like a garbage dump, our relationship could only remain a fantasy. How humiliating it would be if she saw how I was living! I was far too embarrassed to get close to her and I had my brother to thank for that.

  ***

  Blast! Those idiots knocking at my door are nothing if not persistent. I keep telling them that I need more time, but it’s clear that they’ve become impatient with my stalling. I might as well skip to the important part of the story then.

  Things went from bad to worse the day I ran into Chuck Volderschmidt while he was smoking a cigarette down by the dumpster behind my building. Chuck was a simple fellow, a second year senior only slightly brighter than my brother. He was one of the few residents of my apartment complex other than Donald whom I had developed a strong distaste for in my short time living there. Maybe it was because he was the type of guy who majored in woman’s studies and took poetry as an elective because it was “a good place to meet dumb broads”. The guy had all the honor and integrity of a used car salesman and it wasn’t hard to picture him twenty years from now working as a clerk behind the desk of a porn shop, balding and sporting the kind of pencil thin mustache you only see on child molesters. I had just finished tossing away a garbage bag full of Donald’s “love tissues” (which I had found all over his bedroom following one of his infamous all-day marathon sessions) when Chuck finally decided to acknowledge my presence.

  “Sup man?” he said in the most comically detached, ‘too cool to care’ voice I’ve ever heard. “What’ve you been up to? You missed a great party in 412 last week.”

  “I’ve been busy with school, Chuck.” That wasn’t a lie. Acting as Donald’s live in maid afforded me little time to study. I was spending my down time catching up with my classes. I continued on. “I know I haven’t been around all that much, it’s just that –“

  “Hey check this out, man.” He cut me off. Of course he was only interested in sparking up a conversation because he wanted to brag about something. “You know Elizabeth in 303, right?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah. What about her?”

  “I totally finger banged her in Jessica Brakowtzki’s bathroom at the party!”

  “I don’t believe you.” I didn’t.

  “Seriously, man! Here, smell,” he lifted his finger to my face. I swatted it away. He giggled like an idiot while I silently talked myself down from cracking his skull open on the pavement.

  “Yeah man. I’ve been hittn’ it for a week now. She’s totally in to me too. Best part is, I don’t even need to buy her dinner or nothn’. She just comes over and I smash that ass ‘till the sun comes up.”

  It took every ounce of my energy not run my fist into the shit-eating grin on his face. I knew he wasn’t trying to annoy me; he was just a moron. Chuck didn’t know about my feelings for Elizabeth and I’m sure if he did, the little coward wouldn’t have dreamed about saying those things to me.

  “Cool, man. Good for you,” I said.

  I brushed past the smarmy boob on my way back into the building and proceeded up the stairs towards Elizabeth’s apartment. If Chuck was telling people lies about her then she deserved to know. My heart started to beat emphatically in my chest as I neared closer to her door. When I arrived, I knocked, then cupped my palm over my mouth once I heard her footsteps approaching, exhaling into my hand in order to make sure my breath was pleasant. It smelled exquisitely minty and fresh – as per usual. Elizabeth answered the door wearing the cutest pair of pink shorts and a workout top.

  “Oh hi,” I said, slightly taken back by the sight of her silky smooth legs. “I, uh…” and suddenly I didn’t care about Chuck Voldershmidt anymore. All I wanted was to place my arms around her lovely waist and run my fingers along her elegant curves. It was now or never. I had decided to finally man up and ask her out. I didn’t care about her seeing my apartment anymore. Surely an angel like that would understand my plight. Maybe if things went well between us, I could even move out of my brother’s place and in with Elizabeth.

  She stood leaning against the doorframe, watching me with a perplexed look on her face, probably wondering why I had shown up at her apartment. “What’s up?” she asked me.

  “Elizabeth…” I said. “I…um…I was wondering if…if you’d like to grab a bite to eat sometime?”

  She smiled (The most enchanting smile I’ve ever seen!) and looked out at me with those sexy green eyes of hers before uttering a dispiriting string of words that ground my heart into powder and scattered its remains into the wind.

  “I’d love to, but I’m actually already kind of seeing Chuck Volderschmidt. You know him right?”

  Chuck Volderschmidt. Chuck “No Means Yes, Captain Fingerbang, Fucking” Volderschmidt! It isn’t even fathomable how a woman like Elizabeth could find herself interested in a guy like him. Yet somehow, as ridiculous and unlikely as it sounded, that was precisely what she had told me. I don’t remember what I said to her after that or how p
athetic I looked as I slinked away from her door. All I do remember is that I ended up shuffling back to my apartment in a depressed haze with my tail tucked between my legs.

  Of course Donald was asleep on the couch by the time I came back. When I had left he had been laying in the same position watching TV, one hand in his pants cupping his balls, the other pinching the roach end of a joint. The place looked like hell. In the time I was gone, he had managed to knock over the glass of Hawaiian Punch that was sitting on the coffee table, creating a large red stain on the carpet and leaving the living room looking like a crime scene. During his siesta, he dropped the still burning roach on the rug and was lucky he hadn’t started a fire. I shook my head in disgust as I picked it up off the floor.

  I decided a bit of busywork would help to take my mind off of Elizabeth and Chuck so I began cleaning. Donald’s bedroom was a good place to start. There was always something in there that reeked so bad it could make a man forget his own name so I grabbed a trash bag and made my way into the pigpen.

  My bag was about halfway filled with soda cans when I came across a pizza box from a local restaurant called “Fat Sal’s” sitting next to Donald’s industrial size tube of “hand” lotion on the floor. I recognized the box. Donald ordered pizza from that place at least a couple times a week. He and the delivery guy even seemed to be on a first name basis. On the box’s lid, an over-weight Italian American stereotype in a chef’s hat was pictured. One hand rested on his pudgy hip while the other extended a thumb into the air to go along with the portly chef’s approving smile. There was no slogan written on the box, but I came up with an appropriate one in my head.