That night, I could barely sleep. The pain and itch in my wrist got worse and worse. Every time I dozed off, I dreamed of wasps—flightless wasps darting over the ground like a living blanket, a blanket of insects crawling out of their burrows, swarming toward me.
It was three o’clock in the morning when I gave up. I went to the bathroom to put more Neosporin on the bug bites, and found they’d changed. The crescent-shaped marks were slits in five red welts, and there were five short purple streaks coming from them.
I did not wait for sunrise.
I ran to the house at the end of Michaelmas Avenue.
All the lights were on, glowing greenish yellow through the dusty windows. Both the doors were open—the old door at the front of the house, and the new door at the top of the new staircase. Rectangles of light poured out into the yard. I walked right into the first story, into the kitchen. In the harsh glow of a fluorescent bulb, I could see the dust and decay much better than on the first occasion. The smell was worse—much worse. I would have run out of the house to escape the smell, if I weren’t so angry and afraid.
The woman who said her name was Vichnaya Pamyat was standing by the counter.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What’s wrong with this place?”
She gave me that smile I’d hated so much the day before. “Aren’t you forgetting something, Kade?”
“Don’t you dare look at me like that. I’ve got spider bites on my arm from your basement. Look. I’m going to have to go to the emergency room for a tetanus shot, or worse. You can’t keep tenants in a building like this. You’ll get someone killed!”
“Those ain’t spider bites,” said the woman without looking at them. “Just bruises. A little infection from her fingernails; weren’t too clean when she grabbed you. Don’t you remember, Cade?”
“Why would they be bruises? It happened in your building, right here, three days ago. There was a bug. There are thousands of bugs. You have the biggest wasps’ nest I’ve ever seen in the yard. This whole place is a death trap.”
“It happened the night before that, Kade, at your place. You came here after. Don’t you remember?”
“Shut up!”
I punched; the next thing I knew, I was throttling her. I had to reach up to do it, she was so freakishly tall. Her expression was placid, calm, a little sad; the dust on her face, her neck and her hands was exactly as it was the first and second times I’d seen her.
And then the lights went off.
I let her go.
“I’ll flip the breakers myself,” the woman said calmly in the dark. “I know where the box is now. Wait here.”
“I’m not staying here.”
“Yes, you are.”
Footsteps creaked upstairs.
“Who is the tenant?” I asked.
“You’re the one who brought her here. Say her name.”
“How could I? I’ve never seen her in my life before.”
The footsteps made their way to where the new door was; I heard it bang, just as it had a yesterday morning.
“Who is she?” I whispered.
“See if you can’t remember.”
Five red-hot needles jabbed into the welts on my arm as she said this. I bit the side of my cheek to keep from screaming.
I remembered.
I remembered that I lost my temper with May. I remembered the fight that ended with her broken arm. I’d wiped the naïve smile right off her face that time. She would think twice before she called me crazy again. But then she started yelling. She was going to wake the neighborhood with that yelling. She kept it up even though I begged her to stop before somebody heard. She said I was crazy, she’d leave me, she’d go to the police. She was going to rat me out to the police, when it had been all her fault.
That was when I started throttling her. She only had one hand to fight back; she gripped my wrist with her nails, but it was over before I noticed.
I needed a place to hide the body, so I waited until night, and took it to the basement of the house at the end of Michaelmas Avenue.
The footsteps came creaking and rattling down the stairs.
“I don’t want to see her,” I begged to the dusty woman in the reeking dark of that kitchen.
“Can’t control that,” she said. “I didn’t bring her here.”
The footsteps reached the bottom step; there was one final creak as the tenant left the staircase.
“I want to go home,” I said.
“Don’t think you can.” The dusty woman sounded sad. “You weren’t too smart about keeping quiet—the neighbors heard you, even with all the wind. Saw you breaking into an abandoned house.”
“Three nights ago?”
I saw the face of the woman whose name meant “eternal memory” one last time, illuminated in flashing red and blue lights from outside the house at the end of Michaelmas Avenue. She looked sad.
“Hasn’t been that long,” she said. “You came out of that basement less than an hour ago. Been standing here talking to yourself for a bit.”
The knob on the kitchen door turned.
The door blew open in a sudden, cold gust of wind.
I saw May—just for a moment, smiling that maddening smile.
Then it wasn’t her, of course. It was a police officer, answer the call from the neighbors.
As I left in the back of the police car, I took one last look at the roof of the house on Michaelmas Avenue.
There was no second story.
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