My business partner Aaron and I arrived at the dark cottage late at night, soaked to the bone from the torrential rain. The sign outside read Rooms Available! We were weary, and this should have been a good omen, yet the silhouette cut around the house by the full moon’s light left me unsettled.
“I don’t know about this,” I said.
“We’ve been traveling for hours, and I’m beat,” Aaron said. “I don’t think we have a choice.”
“The lights are out,” I said. “We shouldn’t bother –”
Then the attic window lit up. The shadow of a woman moved briskly across it before the light was again extinguished.
A moment passed, then the house lit up like a Christmas tree. We shielded our eyes from the blinding floodlights that bathed us.
“Y’all boys better come out of the rain now before you catch a cold!” A friendly voice shouted through the flood of rain and light.
We hitched our horses to the post and hustled onto the porch. A short older woman with a beaming smile met us.
“Now, what are a couple of fancy boys like you gawking at our home in the rain like that?” She said. “Don’t know you you’ll give people the creeps?”
I felt embarrassed. I realized I had been reading the news too much and was getting paranoid.
“We’re sorry, ma’am,” I said. “We’re looking for a couple of rooms.”
“That won’t be a problem. You gentlemen are our first customers in quite some time,” She said, smiling. “We are just so glad to have you here.”
We walked into the musty foray and set our bags down. It felt like we were standing in an antique store. Plastic covered the furniture, and everything seemed ancient. The grandfather clock chimed that it was midnight.
“Let me fix y’all something to eat,” the woman said. She turned and walked towards the kitchen in the back of the house.
“I’m beat,” I said. “I would rather you show us to our room –”
“Let. Me. Fix. You. Something… TO EAT,” the woman said edgily. In the intervening silence, the unsettling feeling returned to me. Every fiber of my body wanted to flee.
Then she spun around and smiled at us once again.
“Can’t let y’all go to bed hungry!” She said cheerily. “What kind of host would I be?”
We glanced at one another nervously but eventually relented and followed her into the kitchen.
The woman babbled while she reheated dinner from earlier that night. She regaled us with overly complicated anecdotes about people we would never know in the nearby town. Her odd mannerisms and sputtering set us further on edge.
Finally, she set down two big plates of sauce over rice and mysterious chunks of meat. It smelled delightful.
“May I ask what this is?” I said.
“Y’all ain’t never had gumbo?!” She screamed. “Well, it’s rice, gravy, sausage, and… well, we call em’ ‘mudbugs.’ Dig in.”
With that, she left the room.
I had eaten crawfish before, but the meat looked nothing like that. Nevertheless, it was delicious even though we gulped it down so quickly that we could hardly taste it. As we finished our plates, the woman returned.
“Y’all’s rooms are ready now,” she said. “Let me show you!”
We walked up the creaky old steps with my bag. At the doorway, the woman said, “Don’t let the bed bugs bite!”
I smiled and thanked her, but she grabbed my sleeve and stared at me intensely.
“Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
I shook her off and stumbled backward into my room. She shut the door in my face.
I had horrible nightmares and couldn’t stay asleep that night.
Luckily, being in business with your friend means sharing drugs as needed. So I’d give him some uppers when he was dragging, and he would give me downers when I needed to relax. Tonight was one of those nights.
I stepped onto the cold hardwoods and slunk down the creaky hallway to Aaron’s room. At first, I thought the strange noises emanating from his room were from a sound machine, but they were far too loud. I put my ear against the door, and the chirping, clicking, and squishing was so loud that it vibrated.
I opened the door and the moonlight illuminated Aaron’s bed. His comforter writhed like a rocky ocean, and the chirping was deafening. It smelled like burned hair and sewage.
I yanked the blanket off the bed and underneath were thousands of cockroach-like creatures with vicious pincers tearing into my friend’s desiccated flesh. They had removed his skin so only a bloody husk with a gaping, toothless mouth remained in a sea of squirming bugs.
After picking the bones clean, they began ravenously tearing each other apart.
A sharp whistle cut through the air.
“That’s enough, boys!”
The bugs obediently stopped fighting.
The old woman flashed a crooked grin at me from the doorway.
“The mudbugs gotta eat something,” The woman croaked. “I told you not to let em’ bite.”
Millerwiller 