“Hello?” He was getting tired of shouting out “HELLO” to no one.
The scratching continued.
“I have a knife!” he cried. “But I’m not here to hurt anyone. Is it okay to come up?”
The scratching grew fevered. It sounded like a bunch of kids were gouging the door with forks.
And then it stopped. Did I cause that? Ben thought. No. No, he didn’t. Whatever was behind that door stopped scratching because it felt like it, and not because of the white guy holding a cocktail knife. At home, Ben could cut an intimidating presence. You can say a lot with silence and a scar. His kids called him Scary Dad whenever he got mad, and he would use that to his advantage when he needed them to listen. You guys don’t want Scary Dad, right? So please put on your shoes. He could turn into Scary Dad all too easily, and hated himself for it. But Scary Dad worked. Scary Dad could get them to fall in line. But that was with small children. It would not be as easy to make whatever was behind that door quake in fright.
The scratching came back, and then it went silent again, and then it came back, and then it returned, off and on. It’s the wolf. It didn’t get me at the tower, and now it’s here. Perfectly logical conclusion. He listened for growling, but there was only the scratching and scraping.
He waited for a random gap in his mounting terror: that lull that sometimes occurs in your brain whenever you psych yourself out for something, like jumping into a cold pool. He found it, took a deep breath, and walked raggedly up the staircase, as if he were dragging along an unwilling participant. Then he seized the knob and turned it before he could change his mind. He pushed the door open.
He wished that he hadn’t.
Inside the attic was a cave cricket. He knew the species well from the basement of his Maryland home, with their sickly, mottled brown shells, and their creepy extended hind legs, and their probing antennae, and their curved, larval backs. They didn’t bite. They weren’t poisonous. They just jumped. Constantly and chaotically, without rhyme or reason. Before you hit them, they would leap in great bounds out of the way: past you, behind you, over you. It was like they could teleport. They would come jumping through the heat ducts and terrify the whole family. He and Teresa would suck them up with a vacuum, but you had to get them on the first try, otherwise they knew you were coming for them, and they would never stop hopping. They made him jump. One time, a cave cricket came at him and he jumped so high he bashed his head on the ceiling. It hurt for a week.
This cave cricket in front of Ben in the attic was over six feet tall.
It was in the back of the attic, facing sideways. Behind it was some kind of control console that Ben couldn’t make out, because there was a very large cricket in front of it. Ben wanted to die. He turned and reached for the door but that was an enormous mistake, because the cricket got spooked and jumped up, landing on him and knocking him to the floor.
“Oh my fucking God.”
He could feel its slimy underbelly rubbing against him. Then it jumped again and smashed him in the head with one of its hind legs. Ben started screaming, yelling out nonsense and cursing as loudly as possible to scare it, and to make himself feel as if his voice were a separate companion in the room, there to aid him.
The cricket jumped again and landed on him. Its round black eyes loomed over him. They were unreadable. Maybe it wanted to kill him. Eat him. Gut him and lay eggs inside him.
He stabbed the pathetic cheese knife upward at the cricket and the blade bounced off its exoskeleton, breaking off at the handle. It was drooling on him now, secreting some kind of noxious syrup that coated him and was gradually immobilizing him. Ben was flailing and screaming and the cricket leapt around some more, battering his midsection and knocking him over one, two, three more times.
Ben reached into his sack and yanked out the loaf of bread, throwing it to the back of the room. The cricket seized on it hungrily and Ben felt little choice but to mount the distracted insect, with the bare cheese blade still wrapped in his right hand. He was clenching it so tightly that it cut through his palm, but he couldn’t feel it digging in. The cricket leapt again and smashed Ben against the ceiling. He grasped at its antennae like they were reins and brought the blade down into its hulking black eyeball, slicing across the lens.
White ooze gushed out of the eyeball. The cricket’s jumping became more furious. It was like a stuck bull now. Ben fell off and dropped the knife in the process. He could discern a pattern to it now. Four jumps: one forward, one sideways, a short one back, and then sideways again. He could time it. He dodged the cricket’s leaps and found himself facing its blinded eye. With one swift motion, he plunged his fist into the eye socket and buried his arm shoulder deep in the cricket’s head, punching through its brain. The cricket finally came to rest in the center of the room and collapsed, the white fluid seeping down Ben’s side and soaking him entirely. Hysterical, he fled down the stairs and ran out to the front deck, so he wouldn’t have to look at the thing again.
He sprinted from the deck, fell to the sand, and screamed until he was wheezing.