by Gina Ranalli
BLACKBLACKBLACKBLACKBLACK.
“What the fuck?” Kathy pushed herself away from the board, all the color gone from her face. “It really works?”
“Oh my God,” Mick rasped. “Jesus!”
“Ask it something else!” Speck yelled. “Make it stop doing that!”
Mick looked terrified, glanced up from the board to give Speck a helpless look. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
BLACKBLACKBLACKBLACKBLACKBLACKBLACKBLACK.
“Fuck!” Speck tried to get to her feet, but Mick grabbed her arm, yanking her back down.
“No!” Mick spoke firmly. “We can’t lose her!”
“Fuck that!” Speck argued, pulling away.
“Black what?” Mick shouted. “Black death? Elizabeth! Calm down! Black what?”
Kathy leapt up, backing away slowly until her legs bumped into one of the pews. She sat down fast, mouth open in a shocked O.
“It’s spelling something different now,” Speck said, shivering in the sudden cold. She was stunned to see her breath plume from her mouth, but not so stunned that she couldn’t remain focused on the planchette, which had never hesitated, but had indeed moved on to a different word.
Speck and Mick leaned forward, trying to read what the new word was. It only took a few seconds of intense staring to make it out. The new word was DROWN.
“Holy shit,” Speck said, her stomach knotted painfully. She felt like she couldn’t breathe.
“What does it say?” Kathy asked in a normal tone of voice. Speck thought she sounded drugged.
“ 'Drown',” she replied. “It says 'drown'.”
Kathy swallowed. Even in the dim glow of candlelight, Speck could see the girl’s throat working. Silent tears spilled down Kathy’s cheeks and she seemed to shrink in her seat, hands moving in slow motion up to her mouth to cover the O.
“You drowned?” Mick said sharply, causing Speck’s attention to snap back to the board.
The planchette reversed direction, shot up to the word NO and abruptly stopped moving.
Speck and Mick exchanged a glance before Mick asked, “Who drowned, Elizabeth?”
The answer came fast, causing Speck to flinch.
HER.
“H-E-R,” Mick said. “Are those initials?”
NO. HER.
“They aren’t initials,” Speck said quickly, as though she knew right away that they hadn’t been.
“Who is her, Elizabeth?” Mick asked.
HER. HER. HER.
“Was she your daughter, Elizabeth? Is that what you’re trying to say? Your daughter?”
The planchette stopped unexpectedly, both girls staring down at it, feeling something between wonder and fear. Speck sighed, noting her breath was no longer visible. “Guess she doesn’t want to play anymore,” she said after a moment. “Neither do I.” She let out a nervous laugh, not even the slightest bit stoned anymore. She drew up her legs and hugged her knees, resting her chin atop them. She looked at Mick. “Fuck this shit.”
Mick opened her mouth to reply but snapped it closed again when the planchette rose into the air several feet before falling back onto the board with a loud clatter but somehow managed to land right side up.
Kathy screamed, jumped up and ran, tripping over debris as she made her way out of the room. Speck knew she was heading for a neighboring room and the window that the guys had pried a wooden plank from to gain entrance to the building. Kathy was getting the fuck out of there while the getting was good. Speck was tempted to follow her but one look at Mick told her that her friend was staying. Mick, although clearly afraid, wanted to get to the bottom of this. Again, she asked, “Your daughter, Elizabeth? She drowned?”
Speck felt her chest tighten as the planchette burst back into life, skating over the board with such obvious intent that she knew she would, after this experience, question everything there was to question about life, death and everything in between. As she realized what was being spelled out this time, she began to tremble, every bone in her body shaking uncontrollably beneath her skin. For the first time, her fear had deepened to terror.
The planchette began on the letter L and stopped on the E.
Mick frowned. “Lynne?”
The dark room, the graffiti on the walls, the trash, the Ouija board…everything blurred.
Looking up, Mick asked, “Isn’t that your real name?”
Mouth suddenly the driest it had ever been, Speck slowly nodded. “What does it mean?”
Mick shook her head, repeated the same question to the board, but the planchette remained still and no matter how many times she asked, it didn’t move again.
CHAPTER 14
The visit from the exterminator turned out to be pointless.
The man, a heavyset balding guy in his fifties, walked around outside examining the house’s foundation before coming into the house and poking around inside cabinets, checking the baseboards, doorjambs and window seals. His conclusion: complete bafflement.
He’d stood in the kitchen, eyeing the fly strips that still hung here and there, displaying the bodies of the dead like some gruesome gift to the gods.
“Have you talked to your neighbors about the problem?” he’d asked.
“No,” Tess replied. “Why would I?”
“Well, if the problem isn’t in your house, it could be that one of your neighbors has an even worse infestation. Could be there that the problem lies. Maybe they don’t take out the garbage or pick up after their dog. Something like that.”
“I guess I could ask them. It would be kind of awkward though.”
“The good news is that what you have here is Musca domestica.”
Tess gave him a blank stare.
“Common house fly,” he said. “A little bigger than average but nothing to be alarmed about. These babies are known to infest in the spring. May usually, so there you go. Trouble is, the female can lay a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty eggs at a time and depending on the temperature, those puppies can hatch into maggots in a matter of hours. That’s a lot of flies.”
The mention of maggots made Tess’s skin crawl.
“Flies will start to appear around four days after that,” the exterminator went on cheerfully.
“So…what do you suggest?”
“Bagging up all your perishables, keeping your trash can clean—or even better, empty, if you can manage it. The maggots will burrow into a food source, so you have to make sure they don’t have one. Other than that, the flypaper is good. Might want to try an insecticide, since you don’t have pets, but without knowing the source, I’m not sure what good that would do.”
“I have a daughter.”
“Right. Well, like I said, talk to your neighbors. Even though it seems unlikely—and it is—someone around here might be a bigger slob than you think and the flies are just cruising the neighborhood. Like I said, unlikely, but I’ve seen it happen.”
Scratching her neck, Tess nodded grimly. “I hope it’s not that.”
The guy laughed. “Could always be a dead body somewhere nearby.” When his joke did not elicit a response from Tess other than a look of distaste, he said, “Maybe an animal. Raccoon, cat, dog. You never know.”
Tess scratched her head, then rubbed her nose before realizing what she was doing. “God, they’re just so gross. Makes me itchy all over.”
“Yeah. Just be thankful you don’t have roaches.” He laughed again and Tess thanked the man for his time and showed him out, still scratching her body.
Once he was gone, Tess phoned Josh at work to give him the report.
“The neighbors?” he asked incredulously. “Sounds like bull. Maybe we should get a second opinion.”
It didn’t escape Tess’s notice that he’d used the word “we” and despite herself, her belly gave a little flop at the notion that he still considered them a family. “I don’t know what good that would do,” she said. “You and I both checked the house from top to bottom and couldn’t find
anything. The exterminator just confirmed what we already knew. The flies aren’t nesting anywhere inside the house. Hell, not anywhere on the property, as far as any of us can tell.”
Josh held the mouthpiece of the phone away and spoke to someone else. When he came back on, he said, “We’ll have to talk about this later. I’m late for a meeting.”
“Okay.” They said their goodbyes and Tess snapped her phone closed, just as another fly was cruising by, through the kitchen and off to the living room. For a moment, Tess had the crazy idea to follow it, as though the insect would lead her somewhere important, namely wherever it was calling home at the moment. Then she rejected the idea as foolish and went up to her office to try and get some work done. She’d cancelled her on-campus office hours in order to be home when the exterminator came but that didn’t mean she didn’t have plenty of work to do. When it came to her job, there was always something to do.
Sitting down at her desk, she wiggled the mouse, expecting the dark monitor to resolve into the brightness of her blue sky, green hills desktop wallpaper.
It didn’t.
Apparently, the computer had shut itself off sometime during the previous evening. Tess thought nothing of it; it was a common occurrence that anyone with a computer experienced more frequently than they would like.
She pressed the power button and heard the familiar whirring of the modem warming up. Swiveling her chair to the right, she leaned forward to open a drawer in the filing cabinet. Fingertips on the silver drawer handle, she hesitated.
Flies. As soon as I open this drawer flies will come out, a dark angry swarm and they’ll go right for my eyes. They like the soft spots.
Tess shivered. “Where the hell did that come from?” she muttered.
But she knew. She knew she wasn’t being silly, not after the flies in the bag of corn chips. It had to be more than just coincidence. Something very strange was happening to her and her daughter and even though she didn’t know what it was or what was causing it, she didn’t think she would ever feel silly about being fearful again. And to Tess, that wasn’t a good thing.
She was a reasonable woman, not given to flights of fancy, not easily intimidated, fiercely independent.
“They’re just flies,” she whispered. “They can’t really hurt you.”
Sucking in her breath, she ripped open the filing cabinet drawer and threw up her hands to shield her face from the onslaught of insects about to assault her.
Peeking out from between fingers, she gazed into the drawer to see only her files, each neatly tabbed and alphabetized.
She released her breath in a long shaky whoosh, her heart beating a frantic jungle rhythm in her chest. “Jesus. I'm really losing it. ”
Once her nerves had settled, she pulled out the file she needed and swung the chair around to face the computer again.
Thin tendrils of smoke drifted lazily from the back of the modem tower to her left. Alarmed, Tess reached once again for the power button just as the disc drive slid open with an unhealthy grinding sound and the flies emerged, a black hissing wave, bloodthirsty soldiers shouting with glee as they poured forth from the guts of a Trojan horse.
Tess gasped, swatting at the insects as they swarmed towards her and then past, buzzing off into other parts of the house as if on a mission. She was still swiping the air when the computer made a loud popping sound and what had previously been tendrils of smoke became billowing gray clouds that filled the small office almost instantaneously.
Above her, the smoke detector sounded and Tess cursed, jumped up and scanned the room for something to wave beneath it. A blue sweatshirt draped over the back of her chair would have to do and she snatched it up, waving it back and forth above her head the way a person stranded on a desert island will try signaling a passing plane with a white flag.
A minute later, the smoke was dissipating and Tess glanced over her shoulder to ensure there were no flames or sparks coming from the back of the computer, something she realized she should have done right away. When the smoke detector finally ceased its bleating, she tossed the sweatshirt onto the chair and dropped to her hands and knees, crawling beneath the desk to yank the plug from the wall socket.
That done, she rose to her full height again, her cheeks flushed with anger. Flies in the fucking computer? Just what the hell is going on here?
For the first time, it occurred to her that this could be more than just nature run amok. That someone could be doing this to her.
That’s ridiculous, she admonished. Even if someone could somehow plant fly larva in various places around the house, it doesn’t explain how they got into the chip bag at work.
The whole thing made no sense and Tess despised when things made no sense. She was practical, probably to a fault, and she just couldn’t explain what was happening to her.
She stood in the middle of her office for what seemed like a long time, proud of herself for not screaming at the first sight of yet more flies, proud for having stood her ground and not fleeing the room like a helpless little woman frightened of her own shadow.
On the hardwood floor, she noted several of the flies moving sluggishly, most of them unable to even crawl, just twitching down there. She thought she remembered learning at some point that smoke had negative effects on insects, though from what she could see, it didn’t seem to out and out kill them.
Maybe there wasn’t enough of it. Maybe I should have just let the whole house fill up with smoke and choke the life out of the damn little bastards.
Unconsciously scratching herself again, Tess moved across the room and opened a window to let some fresh air inside. The last thing she needed was to have her office smelling like barbequed electronics.
Hands on hips, she glared at the computer. She had no doubt it was fried beyond repair, but was relieved that she’d always been vigilant about saving her work on memory sticks. It was getting online that was going to be a problem, as the pc was the only one she had, her old laptop having bought the farm close to a year ago.
“Damn,” she murmured. “What am I supposed to do now?”
She couldn’t just abandon her job until she was able to get a new computer and she didn’t have enough time to go shopping for one today anyway. That in itself would probably take a couple of hours, which she didn’t have unless she wanted to deal with a lot of disgruntled students and then an ass-riding dean.
There was only one solution for now. She would have to go to the library and hope that there was a free terminal she could use for a while. Giving the flies on the floor one last look, she briefly entertained the idea of stomping on their tiny bodies, grinding her heel down until they were completely obliterated, leaving nothing but a vague smear on the hardwood floor.
Tess grimaced. She didn’t usually have such awful thoughts but she supposed she couldn’t really blame herself. These insects were… She stopped herself before she could complete the thought, but the thought remained just the same.
Out to get me. That’s what I was thinking. They’re out to get me.
She ran a hand through her dark hair and plucked the sweatshirt from the chair. “You’re losing it, girl,” she muttered as she left the room in search of her car keys. “Just totally losing it.”
CHAPTER 15
Josh was considering blowing off the rest of the day, going home and maybe—if he was lucky—fucking Gillian.
He knew she was mad at him and for some reason that always made him want her more. She’d gotten pissed when she’d tried calling him earlier and he was unable to take the call because he’d been on the phone with Tess, a fact that he should have left out when Gillian asked a half hour later when she’d called back. He should have just lied, said he’d been speaking with a client. He had no idea why he hadn’t, though he suspected a couple of different things. One, that he really didn’t understand what was up with Gillian these days. She’d never seemed to be the jealous type before; in fact, she’d been flat-out curious about Tess when Josh had first gott
en together with her, had asked tons of questions; sincerely had seemed like she wanted to meet her. Just lately, however, he’d noticed the sour expression on her face whenever he mentioned Tess or even Emily. If he continued to talk about them, Gillian would eventually fall silent, stare off into space, and refuse to meet his gaze or participate in the conversation any longer.
He had no idea what had brought about the change in her demeanor, but had just chalked it up to the fact that their relationship was deepening, getting more serious than either of them had ever expected it would. Hell, even after he’d moved in with her, he still wasn’t thinking that it would be a long-term thing. He was fully aware of himself as a guy on the rebound from his wife. He’d had an affair, effectively ruining his marriage, all unbeknownst to Tess, and it had simply seemed like the thing to do. Moving in with the mistress.
Sensing that Gillian knew the score, he hadn’t given much thought beyond the sex, which was the best he’d ever known in his life. Gillian was not a bashful woman, was willing to do all the things Tess had been disgusted by (though she’d never said she was disgusted, Josh knew that she was). In fact, Gillian often suggested things that made Josh feel slightly embarrassed, but of course, he never refused her. Embarrassed and downright stupid were two different animals and Josh was a lot of things, but stupid was not one of them.
Just the thought of her was enough to get him stirring down there and after a quick skim of his office, he saw that there really was nothing that couldn’t wait until tomorrow. Smirking to himself, he began to shut down his computer, tugging at the crotch of his pants to make more room for his growing erection. He wondered if he’d be able to pass his co-workers without them noticing the bulge and the idea that they might notice it had him grinning all the more. Let them notice.
There was a tap on his door but before he could respond to it, it swung open and Gillian stepped quickly inside. The door made a barely audible click when she closed it behind herself.
“Gillian,” Josh said. He stood up, moved around the desk towards her. “Is everything okay? I was just on my way to--”
