by John Everson
“For help,” the man answered.
The car followed a winding road out of the city and past the docks and the warehouse district. Then it shivered off onto a gravel road that led to a small shack within spitting distance of the bay. As the woman helped him from the car, Wes complained, “I haven’t slept, it’s so loud.”
She nodded and pointed up at the trees around them. “They never sleep.”
It was then that Wes realized the trees all around them were alive with the sound in his head.
“I tried to take sleeping pills,” he began, but she only laughed and pulled him toward the gray-boarded shack.
“They never sleep,” she repeated.
“Will I ever have my hearing back right?” he asked. “I just want to go back to normal again.”
Metallica Man laughed at that. “You’re chosen,” he said. “You’ll never know normal again. Just the swarm.”
With that, the man grabbed him around the throat and whispered, “Lie down” into his right ear.
“Why?” was all he could say.
“Eardrum Buzz.”
They pushed him onto a cot, and as he lay there, face buried in a dusty pillow, Wes could hear the sound in his head chime and chitter, rise and fall like the whir of an engine. It called to the noise in the trees, and as it received an answer, its buzz grew more excited. The nagging pain in the back of Wes’s head grew from dull to ice sharp and spread to pound like a nail gun into his forehead, hammering just behind his eyes.
I’m going to die, he thought. And the thought was good.
Wes woke from a droning doze to the sound of boots. They clomped hard on the wooden floor and paced back and forth nearby.
“It’s almost time,” he heard a voice growl.
Wes opened his eyes and rolled to see the thin, saturnine features of Arachnid pacing near the cot. The singer wore his usual black leather pants and boots, and a tight, ripped T-shirt. On its black cloth surface, the white fangs of a spider opened hopefully.
“You did this to me,” Wes accused, struggling to sit up.
Arachnid shook his head. “Not me,” he said, grinning and pointing to Jen. “She did it. I just told her what to do.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
“You want the buzz to stop, yes?”
Wes looked into Arachnid’s too-black eyes and nodded.
“Then we must release the swarm.” He lifted a pair of gardening shears from a small table and ran a finger down the sharp side of the blade. A bead of blood collected almost instantly on the tip.
It occurred to Wes that “releasing the swarm” was not a procedure he was likely to live through.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked, stalling.
“You were drawn to our music, right?” the singer said. His voice was almost gentle.
“Yeah.”
“They are our music,” Arachnid said. “They live within each of us; it is their sound that makes Eardrum Buzz.”
“How do you live with it?” Wes whispered.
Arachnid leaned down, until Wes could smell the faintly licorice and hay scent of his breath. As Wes stared at the singer’s discolored-brown and gold-flecked eyes, a small black form crawled from the man’s ear. Its antennae shifted back and forth quickly, like the nervous jitter of a roach. Then, with a spread of brown-and-clear chitinous wings, the bug launched itself from the lobe of Arachnid’s ear and flew up in a lazy circle to land somewhere in the shadow of the pitched roof.
“They’re our children.” Arachnid grinned. “We love them.”
Wes’s stomach churned as he realized that thanks to Jen’s false kisses at the party, those same bugs were inside him right now. Growing inside his ears. Rubbing tiny hairlike legs together to sing in the center of his brain.
“Bugs don’t live inside humans,” he whispered. Hoping perhaps that by saying it the statement would be true. But he’d seen the evidence proving his theorem false just seconds ago.
“These do,” Arachnid smiled. “They feed off of us just a little at a time. They can’t live without us. That’s why we’re helping them find new hosts. Soon the swarm will be strong enough to fend for itself and find its own hosts. But right now…only one in a million survives.”
“What do they eat?” Wes whispered.
“Brains.” The singer laughed and pointed the shears at Wes’s forehead. “Right now they’re in there nibbling. Before long, if you incubated a few nests of them, you’d have a hole in your head as big as a baseball. Like our drummer, Cicada. He found them a couple years ago when he went on a rain-forest trip. But he’s hosted so many that he’s not much there anymore, ya know? That’s why he never does interviews.”
Arachnid drew a cold steel line from Wes’s forehead to his ear.
“But you won’t have to go through that. I know you haven’t enjoyed our children. Jen and Orin have told me their song is driving you a little nuts. So we’ll just set your brood free.”
“Set them free?”
“Outpatient surgery,” Arachnid said, laughing and brandishing the pruning shears. “Won’t take but a moment. And when we’re done…your babies will be free, and the swarm will have a fresh dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“Your brains.” Arachnid shoved downward with the shears like a spear thrust. But Wes had seen the tensing of his arms and rolled just in time. He jumped to his feet as Jen and Orin grabbed him from behind.
Kicking backwards, he heard a grunt of anguish from Orin, and as one set of hands released, he spun hard to his left, catching Jen in the breast with his elbow. Like a dancer he spun in a slow circle away from the three. He lost his balance in the momentum and staggered into the roughhewn wall in the corner of the shack. Something rattled as he hit the wall, and Wes grinned when he darted a glance to see what. There was a rack of old rusted gardening tools screwed to the wall.
“Just what I needed,” he whispered, and reached past a rake to nab a long, pointed spade from its hook.
Arachnid was on him before he had it fully in hand.
“Drop it,” the singer hissed. Wes felt the bite of cold metal at his throat, and he twisted backward a step before letting his body crumple. The shovel thumped to the floor as he released it. Before Arachnid could follow through with a stab, Wes rolled into the singer’s shins, knocking him off-balance. Wes grabbed the shovel again, and from a crouch on the floor he brought it around hard to finish the job his body had started. The edge of the steel connected with Arachnid’s shins, and the singer went down hard as Wes leapt up.
Orin and Jen were waiting.
They circled him, hands outstretched to grab for his shovel, to disarm him. Arachnid moaned on the floor and clutched his leg in a fetal curl.
Orin came for him. Without thinking, Wes brought the spade up and around, catching the grizzled man in the side of his shiny head with the back of the rusted blade. The man went down with a low whoof.
Something scratched at his neck, and Wes gasped. Jen brought her fingernails around to claw at his eyes. Wes couldn’t go forward without driving her nails into his brain, so he shoved hard in reverse, throwing his weight against her. She didn’t expect the motion and fell back as he pile-drove her into the wall. Her body slammed hard enough to rattle the window.
Jen screamed. Not a little “there’s a mouse” squeal of fear. Jen screamed a horrible, long, wrenching cry of anguish.
Wes turned to see why, and the reason fell to the floor as Jen staggered to the center of the room grabbing at her back. The rake rattled to rest, and Jen fell forward, five blooms of blood already seeping through the puncture marks in the back of her shirt. She was gasping for air, her screams cut short by a gurgle of fluid filling her lungs.
Wes backed away to the other side of the room. Orin lay where he’d fallen. A gory gash split the skin along his forehead leading t
o his ear. And around that ear clustered a handful of small, black, antennaed bugs. They buzzed quietly as more emerged from the black, bloody hole of Orin’s ear. They shook the crimson free as they met the air and gathered on the man’s cheek.
“Fuck,” Wes gasped, and held a hand up to his own ear. The noise in his brain escalated when he covered the canal.
Jen was shuddering on the floor, trying to crawl toward Orin. But Arachnid was no longer on the ground with them.
Arachnid was back on his feet and moving slowly toward Wes with the shears. He was not smiling.
“It would have been painless,” the singer growled.
“For you, maybe.”
Arachnid launched forward and cut at Wes, who recoiled and tried to bring the shovel around. Too late. The blade slashed against his chest, cutting through the shirt and drawing a line of blood. He screamed and ducked as Arachnid brought the shears down again, this time aiming for his neck.
Wes threw himself sideways and rolled over the dead weight of Orin, disturbing the small swarm that had gathered on the man’s face. Wes came to his feet in front of the door and with one hand felt behind him for the knob. It turned as Arachnid rushed at him. Wes pushed the door as the lock released, and fell back, stumbling down the step to the ground outside.
“You’re not going anywhere,” the singer yelled, limping after him.
Wes leapt to his feet and ran around the shack, waiting for Arachnid. He didn’t wait long. The singer turned the corner, brandishing the shears.
But Wes’s reach was longer. He held the shovel like a baseball bat, and as Arachnid lunged, he brought the heavy side around, and all those years of Little League paid off—in a spade. The metal tip of the garden implement connected dead on with a clang against Arachnid’s skull. But this time the singer didn’t just go down.
This time the shovel cleaved his skull just above the ear. Maybe it was because the generations of Brood he’d fed had weakened his skull, or maybe it was because Wes swung that shovel damned hard. But the top of Arachnid’s head came off as clean as a Tupperware lid. With a slight pop.
As it did, a cloud of black wings filled the air, and the world was alive with the drone of an angry, surprised hive.
The Brood.
As the droning black bugs swirled into the air, a cloud of larger insects poured like smoke from the trees all around, and Wes was pummeled by legs and wings and chittering, buzzing smacks of bug.
The Swarm.
Wes dropped the shovel and ran.
He’d only gone a few yards when he realized…the swarm wasn’t after him. They hadn’t followed. The yard sounded like the inside of a beehive, but when he looked back he saw the center of activity. Arachnid’s head.
More precisely, Arachnid’s brain. The swarm…was feeding.
There was a pain then in his own head, and Wes felt dozens of tiny teeth biting. Something pushed through his ear canal, and legs pricked across the lobe of as it crawled out. He swatted the side of his head.
His hand came away bloody and black.
“Oh God,” he cried, and slipped down to his knees. His stomach threatened to puke. These things were really alive in his head! Then he felt the creepy plucking feeling again, and this time he didn’t swat. There was a piercing cicada buzz, and a small black bug flew past his face. And then another. And another. They were leaving!
His brood was going to join the swarm. For dinner.
He stifled the gorge in his throat, and his whole body shook with horror as he forced himself to remain still, kneeling, and let them go.
When he got home that night, Wes took his Eardrum Buzz CD and threw it in the garbage. Then he reached for something older. Safer. He popped in a The The disc and sat down on the couch.
“Infected with your love,” Matt Johnson began to sing.
“Uh-uh,” Wes said, and hit the Power button on the remote. The stereo went dead.
“No more infected with your anything,” he said.
As he lay back on the pillow, he realized that the drone in his head was finally gone. Mostly.
It was actually so quiet he could hear the silence.
It buzzed.
Field of Flesh
Everyone knows the saying: Only the good die young. But the corollary is, only the bad live forever. And to crib from another really well known pop song, forever is a really long time.
I’m a neutral party. Or at least, that’s what I always said. Call me a voyeur if you want. I call me a private dick. And I don’t mean in the sense you’re probably thinking. My dick is private, but I meant that in the parlance of 1950’s noir movies.
I watch people.
I find out their dirty secrets, and bring them out of the closet and home to roost. And no, I’m not normally the purveyor of a cavalcade of clichés, but those timeworn phrases are perfect to illustrate my profession. I make money by watching people…usually people involved in nefarious activities.
The people who will live forever.
So I didn’t blink when the woman in front of my desk said she wanted to pay me a retainer to go a sex club, find her husband and bring him home. It was not exactly something I’d done before, but I’d been asked to do stranger things. And been paid well for it.
In this instance, the setup was intriguing. I was to be a “white knight” in the dark cellars of kink. Apparently the client—who introduced herself as Patricia Delacruiz—had been attending a super exclusive bondage club called NightWhere for the past few months. Every month, she and her husband Lucas would receive an invite delivered to their home a couple hours before a session was to occur, with instructions on how to find the secret club. Because NightWhere, apparently, was never held in the same location twice.
Smart setup, I thought. Keep the lookie-loos out and the local constabulary off your back. Before any of the locals knew any wiser the club would have come and gone. So to speak.
“Here’s the thing,” Mrs. D informed me, with fingers entwined nervously on her lap. She was wearing a short black dress, and I could see the top of a garter belt holding up the black pantyhose she wore. I suspected I was meant to see that, so I ignored it. “They have a room where they torture people, and never let them leave. They have my husband, Lucas locked up there, and now I don’t receive any invitations to come back to NightWhere, so I don’t know where they are. I can’t get back to the club to find him and get him out of there.”
“Well, if you can’t get back there, how am I supposed to?” I asked. Yeah, I know I’m a private eye, but…that doesn’t mean I always want to do things the hard way. I wanted her to help me out a little. One thing I’ve noticed—people are usually more resourceful than they give themselves credit for being. I never pass up a little help.
“That part’s easy,” she said. My ears perked up at the word easy. It’s a word I like. Eggs over easy, The Big Easy, women who are…you get the picture.
“I know a couple who go to NightWhere every month,” Mrs. D said. “If you stake out their place at the right time, you could get their invitation, and use it to get in.”
“Well,” I said, thinking this one through. “That seems like a sound plan. But why couldn’t you just ask them to take you? Or stake out their place yourself and snag their invite if they won’t? It would be cheaper than hiring me.”
“Because the doorman at NightWhere would recognize me. He’d know not to let me in. With you? You’d be a newbie, and they always have a few new recruits every month. He won’t recognize you, but you’ll have an invitation, so he’ll think you’re one of the newbies. So you could get in, find your way to the Field of Flesh, and set Lucas free. They’d never suspect what you were there for, until it was too late.”
“Field of Flesh?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. I tapped my Bic pen impatiently on the notepad. So far I hadn’t written anything beyond a sketc
hy list:
sexy dame
easy
bondage club
find NightWhere
Call Tommy to see if bowling is still on for Friday night.
I needed to fill in the blanks on this assignment and then hussle it over to the bank to make sure her check cleared.
“Yes,” Mrs. D said. “The Field is the place where they take people to torture inside NightWhere. You’ll have to look for it, but carefully.” She chewed her lip before continuing.
“The Field of Flesh is kind of the last resting place in NightWhere for voyeurs.”
“So Lucas was a voyeur?”
Mrs. D uncrossed her legs, and then crossed them again, with her opposite foot now on top. She made sure to give me a long look at the shadow above her garters before settling back in the chair. She smiled, two cherry-red lips moist and full of promise.
Whatever she was promising, I didn’t want. Except as it applied to money. Payment in cooch didn’t pay my rent. As enticing as it may have been. From the sounds of it, she wasn’t just second hand goods at this point; more like sixty-second-hand.
“He liked to watch,” she admitted, dipping her head a little. I could almost imagine that she blushed. “He really liked to watch me.”
“Hmmm,” I said. “And now they’ve locked him up in the voyeur’s prison?” I said. “What’s he watching now?”
“He can see everything that goes on in NightWhere,” Mrs. D said.
“From what you’ve described, that sounds pretty good for him. What’s the downside?”
“He can’t ever leave.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to,” I suggested.
“I’ve seen him in my dreams,” Mrs. D said. “I know he wants to come home. They’re milking him dry.”
I chose to ignore the dream comment. I could have found a few choice barbs to puncture that. But somehow the picture of a guy watching scads of people doing all manner of sexual things, and the phrase “milking him dry” struck me as too funny to pass up.
