A Nest of Nightmares

At first she took it for a drop of blood. Dark and shining, it appeared on May’s lower lip and slipped slowly out of the corner of her mouth. Ellen stared, stupefied, as the droplet detached itself from May’s lip and moved, without leaving a trace behind, down her chin.

Then Ellen saw what it was.

It was a small, shiny black bug, no larger than the nail on her little finger. And, as Ellen watched, a second tiny insect crawled slowly out onto the shelf of May’s dead lip.

Ellen scrambled away from the bed, backward, on her hands and knees. Her skin was crawling, her stomach churning, and there seemed to be a horrible smell in her nostrils. Somehow, she managed to get to her feet and out of the room without either vomiting or fainting.

In the hallway she leaned against the wall and tried to gather her thoughts.

May was dead.

Into her mind came the vision of a stream of black insects bubbling out of the dead woman’s mouth.

Ellen moaned and clamped her teeth together, and tried to think of something else. It hadn’t happened. She wouldn’t think about it.

But May was dead, and that had to be dealt with. Ellen’s eyes filled with tears – then, suddenly impatient, she blinked them away. No time for that. Tears wouldn’t do any good. She had to think. Should she call a funeral home? No, a doctor first, surely, even if she was truly past saving. A doctor would tell her what had to be done, who had to be notified.

She went into the kitchen and turned on the light, noticing as she did so how the darkness outside seemed to drop like a curtain against the window. In the cabinet near the phone she found the thin local phone book and looked up the listing for physicians. There were only a few of them. Ellen chose the first number and – hoping that a town this size had an answering service for its doctors – lifted the receiver.

There was no dialling tone. Puzzled, she pressed the button and released it. Still nothing. Yet she didn’t think the line was dead, because it wasn’t completely silent. She could hear what might have been a gentle breathing on the other end of the line, as if someone somewhere else in the house had picked up the phone and was listening to her.

Jarred by the thought, Ellen slammed the receiver back into the cradle. There could be no one else in the house. But one of the other phones might be off the hook. She tried to remember if there was another phone upstairs, because she shrank at the thought of returning to her aunt’s room without a doctor, someone in authority, to go with her.

But even if there were another phone upstairs, Ellen realised, she had not seen it or used it, and it was not likely to be causing the trouble. But the phone in her aunt’s room could have been left off the hook by either her aunt or herself. She would have to go and check.

He was waiting for her in the hall.

The breath backed up in her throat to choke her, and she couldn’t make a sound. She stepped back.

He stepped forward, closing the space between them.

Ellen managed to find her voice and, conquering for the moment her nearly instinctive fear of this man, said, ‘Peter, you must go get a doctor for my aunt.’

‘Your aunt has said she doesn’t want a doctor,’ he said. His voice came almost as a relief after the ominous silence.

‘It’s not a matter of what my aunt wants anymore,’ Ellen said. ‘She’s dead.’

The silence buzzed around them. In the darkness of the hall Ellen could not be sure, but she thought that he smiled.

‘Will you go and get a doctor?’

‘No,’ he said.

Ellen backed away, and again he followed her.

‘Go and see her for yourself,’ Ellen said.

‘If she’s dead,’ he said, ‘she doesn’t need a doctor. And the morning will be soon enough to have her body disposed of.’

Ellen kept backing away, afraid to turn her back on him. Once in the kitchen, she could try the phone again.

But he didn’t let her. Before she could reach for the receiver, his hand shot out, and he wrenched the cord out of the wall. He had a peculiar smile on his face. Then he lifted the telephone, long cord dangling, into the air above his head, and as Ellen pulled nervously away, he threw the whole thing, with great force, at the floor. It crashed jarringly against the linoleum, inches from Ellen’s feet.

Ellen stared at him in horror, unable to move or speak, trying frantically to think how to escape him. She thought of the darkness outside, and of the long, unpaved road with no one near, and the deserted beach. Then she thought of her aunt’s room, which had a heavy wooden door and a telephone which might still work.

He watched her all this time, making no move. Ellen had the odd idea that he was trying to hypnotize her, to keep her from running, or perhaps he was simply waiting for her to make the first move, watching for the tell-tale tension in her muscles that would signal her intentions.