All morning he twined the coarse rope through his hands. But now he was just trying to ignore the agonising thudding beneath the angry anthill that had formed on his left forearm. It was tipped a violent red and sensitive to any sort of glancing touch. The skin there was gummy with sweat, pus building and building below like some sort of pressure chamber, primed to explode at any moment.
He figured it was some sort of allergic reaction to his grief. After weeks and weeks of fruitless searching, the stony-eyed bastard of a police officer had looked him square in the eyes and said, ‘We’ve found some torn up girl’s clothes. We’re now looking for a body. She’s dead.’
That hit him like a shotgun blast to the chest. A sickening acknowledgement that his nine-year-old daughter was gone and would never be coming home.
That’s all this was, the angry hive on his arm, a reaction to his deep-seated grief. It had to come out in some way. For some it came out in violent bursts, like raining hellfire on a spouse. Sometimes it came out in a suffocating silence that slowly robbed them of their will to live.
That’s where he thought he fit. Sitting in his kitchen, twining the dry bundle of rope through his hands that would soon be wrapped tightly around his neck, so that everything would return to its peaceful rounded medium.
But he had also been plagued by impossible sounds that intensified over the last few days. All of which came from his daughter’s bedroom, left in the same state before she vanished at the edge of the woods. And he heard her now.
‘Daddy,’ the voice crawled up the hall and into the kitchen. ‘Come play! Come play!’
He resisted the urge to jump up and race to her door like he had done before, only to be fooled by the same bedroom, now drained of colour and life and love. A filthy trick. And he suspected what was doing it, too.
‘I’m having a tea party, Daddy!’
Her voice had a hollow ring to it. Although everything did these days. And then he—
The angry anthill throbbed violently; his swollen skin warped as something suddenly writhed beneath. He dropped the noose to the floor. Pus squirted from the angry tip. Then something thin and black broke the skin, blood welling up around the insectile body as its sharp pincers probed. He caught a whiff of some foul odour, like curdled milk.
It was a black beetle, coated in yellowish goo, streaked with his blood. It writhed up and out of his arm and dropped to the tiles, then scurried off into the hallway.
His arm burned delightfully. The awful, terrible grief had finally been released. But it only conjured another question: How did that awful fucking thing get inside him?
The anthill on his arm had deflated, leaving an abandoned crater of stretched skin and oozing pus that dribbled in thick, clumpy wads to his wrist. He wondered feebly what was happening to him and if there were more writhing somewhere within him.
He chased after the beetle, just in time to see it scurry under his daughter’s bedroom door. Not for the first time either. He’d spotted the damn things all over the place recently. Sneaking into the house in alarming numbers. He’d sprayed enough Mortein around the place to kill a dog, yet it didn’t stop them. But he was going to chase this one down and stomp the fucker dead, to feel its pulpy mush beneath the sole of his boot. It’s one thing to invade his house, but his body? Well, that’s a bridge too far.
He threw open the door to find what appeared to be a horde of black beetles — no — worse than that. It was one black beetle, the size of a small dog or an absurdly large rat. It had mussed up his daughter’s bedsheets, once a pale pink, now coated in shiny masses of black gunk. It swivelled to face him then, revealing something truly horrific. It was undoubtedly his daughter’s face, but long hard pincers protruded from her once rosy cheeks, now coated in a foul insect slime.
‘Melody?’ he said, voice far off and distant.
Her voice returned in a disturbing insectile hum; not human at all: ‘Daddy, look at me go! We are all beetles now!’
Seeing his daughter like this forced hot bile to rise into the back of his throat. The hard pincers jutting out of her cheeks flayed her once supple skin apart. He was sure she was in there, stuck in the shiny black shell of the beetle. But before he could reach her, he felt an awful, hurried prickling up his calves, then up the notches of his spine, but he knew it was all wrong. Wrong in the sense that the awful things weren’t so much as crawling up him, as under him.
The fevered scrabbling beneath his skin reached breaking point. The taut skin all up his inner arms tore apart like tissue paper as dozens and dozens of black pincers broke the surface. They tore rags of skin away. The pain was too bright, too fierce, and far too quick for him to do much about it. The beetles freed themselves from all parts of his body; his calves, stomach, arms and worst of all, his neck. One had worked its way into his oesophagus and came scrabbling up his tongue.
Hundreds of blood-splattered beetles dropped to the carpet, scurrying here and there, and soon he was carried out through the kitchen, the flesh of his cheeks itched feverishly, as if small needles probed beneath them. The walls were lined with little black insects, intruding on every space, an infestation of the highest order.
Eventually, in a dozing state, he was carried out into the bush where the soil would help him repair and grow. Soon enough though, he was able to turn over and scurry among the rest of them. But in the remnants of his quickly fading human-mind, he knew he would return some day to pay that bastard of a police officer a visit for not doing his job.