The ants started in the summer. Nothing unusual, just a few that crawled their way into the kitchen to snack on bits of food. Penny had been working extra hard in the garden that year, trying to transform flower beds into something that might produce food. I didn’t think she was going to have a lot of luck with it, the weather being as unpredictable as it was, but it was worth a try, given how unpredictable everything else was. In between that and the compost pile, we got a lot of attention from the wildlife, scroungers and feeders and everything else that was being pushed out by the new development. I suppose in all that digging and planting we might have stirred something up.
The days started to get shorter, but still the ants came, the once tiny bands of scouts turning into small riots of black wriggling that surrounded any food dropped on the floor. It wasn’t long before there were trains of ants marching their way up the counters to rob the kitchen of whatever they might find there.
I admired their industriousness, but them getting onto the counters was the last straw for me. Penny just said to wait until the weather got colder, so I did, but that only made things worse. The colder it got, and that autumn it got cold fast, the more ants we found. Soon it wasn’t just in the kitchen, but any place that they might forage.
So I bought the poison, something not dangerous to humans, but a spreading toxin to ants and insects, something new called Terra Meta Borax. You put a few drops of the liquid somewhere you knew the ants would be and its sweet scent would lure them to it. It wouldn’t kill them straight away, but rather let them lift little toxic globules back to the colony so it would kill the nest instead of a single ant. I wasn’t exactly sure how it worked, but it somehow involved a molecularly enhanced boric acid, so I can’t imagine it was a pleasant way to go.
It worked, though. The ants stopped. We’d still see a few in the bathroom, which didn’t make sense to me – I don’t think ants eat waste. It was the warmest room in the house, though, sitting above the water-heater and HVAC units in the crawlspace.
Eventually, the ones in the bathroom really started to bug (ha ha) Penny. The rare long bath she took was one of the few luxuries in a busy life, and the ants were upsetting that small comfort. So I cleared some space and put down poison, spattering more droplets than I had ever used before. Finished, I backed up quick, startled at the number of ants that came streaming out, tiny black bodies, antenna wiggling, searching and fevered for the toxic archipelago I had created.
Their excitement unsettled me, seeing so many swarming to embrace a slow, chemical death. I put that aside as childish, though, telling myself that the poison was designed to attract them, and that’s what it was doing.
Their numbers in the bathroom dwindled until one day Penny finished filling the tub and moments later I heard her scream. I rushed in, an unexpected level of adrenaline quickening my feet, but it was only Penny having quickly retracted a toe from the ice cold water of the bath she had just drawn.
I told her I’d check the water-heater in the morning. She wasn’t happy about it, but she was a kind enough that she didn’t press it that night. The crawlspace might be big enough that you didn’t have to go hand and knee into it, but it was a low, earthen cellar. We’d put in a sump pump and gutters to route the waters that came down in the torrential winter rains, but it was still wet and muddy.
There was only a single light down there, and it wasn’t reliable, and the water-heater was far beyond the reach of whatever shard of light might sneak in past the entrance. So in the morning I took a light when I stepped outside and circled the house, coming to the cellar entrance, a half-door set into the house’s brick foundation. I had to lean hard into it, pushing the wooden boards through a shelf of mud that had built up on the inside, black muck seeping from underneath it.
Inside was as dark as the soil. I shined the light around, but it only lit a few yards. Our house wasn’t a big one, but under it, the cellar was like its own cavern system.
I stepped in, my feet sinking into the sludge, causing me to curse the handyman who had installed the gutters, certain they and the sump pump must have failed. Grateful I had rubber boots on, I moved forward, pointing my light in the direction I knew the water-heater should be, but not seeing anything. There was nothing but an inky darkness, with occasional ripples, like fragments of light reflecting from the bottom of a deep well.
I struggled to find my way to the nearest structural pillar, hoping to use it as a guidepost. Each was solid gray cinderblock, steady as the rock it was made of, but they all had vanished in the dark. I found one by slipping in the mud and blindly catching myself on it, barely balancing on the uneven ground.
My heart rate and hair rose as I tried to pull my hand away. The ooze around the pillar held me firmly, and my eyes widened in the lightless cellar as I felt my hand sink further into the ooze around it, exuding a familiar sweet smell. I yanked my arm, trying to free myself, but the dark held me fast. I lifted one foot, then the other, trying to wriggle loose, but I couldn’t move.
I breathed through my rising panic, cutting through the growing pressure of my own pulse to raise the flashlight to get a better look at my trapped hand. As I did, though, the beam swept over something deeper in the cellar.
I was far enough in that I should have been able to see the brick that marked the other end of the foundation. Instead, what I had taken for darkness rippled and moved, giving a sense of immense size, like a bull from one of the local rodeos.
It didn’t move like a bull, though. It rolled like mudslide, a wave of sediment, a lightless composition of rot. I felt the call for help forming in my throat turn into a scream as it got closer. I saw its surface wriggle with tiny black stalks, ants’ black bodies. But there were other things as well.
There were bits of fur and a raccoon skull, skin like a toad, a pair of antlers, all of them tumbling over each other as the dark suspension rolled forward. My panicked arm struggled to get free even as the necrotic melange swept across my feet. I dropped the light to use both hands to pull against the pillar. It hit the ground with a wet pop, releasing more of that sweet smell, its light shining onto an unblinking, inhuman eye before sinking into darkness. Behind me, something shut the cellar door.
I’m not sure who’s writing this now. But I can hear my Penny in her bath, and she isn’t complaining anymore.
See the author’s published work here.
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