Chapter 3: The Queen and Her Court

Chapter 3: The Queen and Her Court

Two days felt like a lifetime. Forty-eight hours for the memory of Stephanie Miller and her monstrous pet to marinate in Jack’s mind, souring his weekend and turning his beer bitter. He’d spent Saturday trying to forget, working on his van’s faulty engine, the smell of grease and metal a welcome replacement for the memory of decay and cheap air freshener. But the image of that five-inch cockroach, moving with an aristocrat’s poise while a lovesick pop song played, was burned onto the back of his eyelids.

He’d called his uncle.

“Big roach, you say?” Alistair had grunted over the phone, the sound of clinking ice in a glass audible in the background. “How big?”

“Five, maybe six inches. And the client… she thinks it’s her dead husband.”

A long silence on the other end of the line. Jack had expected a laugh, or at least a cynical joke. Instead, all he got was the slow, deliberate sound of his uncle taking a long drink. “Did you take the job?” Alistair finally asked, his voice suddenly sharp and sober.

“I… I agreed to spray the basement for the ‘other’ ones,” Jack admitted, feeling foolish.

“Good. Go back. Finish the job you started,” Alistair said, and hung up. No advice, no explanation. Just a command.

So here he was, Sunday afternoon, pulling up to the aggressively normal house again. From the outside, nothing had changed. The roses were still pristine, the blue door still cheerful. But Jack knew better. The house had a sickness, and he’d only treated a single symptom.

He parked the van and got out, his canister of industrial-grade pesticide feeling woefully inadequate. An unease thicker than the humid summer air settled over him. He rang the doorbell, its cheerful chime sounding hollow and false. He waited. No answer. He rang it again, holding the button down longer this time. Still nothing.

Against his better judgment, he tried the doorknob. It turned with a soft click. The door was unlocked.

“Stephanie?” he called out, pushing the door open and stepping into the entryway.

The smell hit him like a physical blow. The cloying floral scent was still there, a dying gasp of normalcy, but it was being choked out by something else now. The sickly-sweet rot was stronger, accompanied by a damp, musty odor—the smell of a thousand damp, dark places all rolled into one. The air was heavy, humid, clinging to his skin and the inside of his lungs. It felt less like a house and more like a terrarium.

And the music was playing. The same scratchy, jangly 60s song, on a loop, the house’s new, insane heartbeat.

“Stephanie? It’s Jack Carter, from the exterminators. You here?”

His voice was absorbed by the thick, still air. He moved cautiously through the living room. A thin, greasy film seemed to coat every surface—the dusty piano, the silver picture frames, the polished side table. Everything except the record player, which sat gleaming and clean, the vinyl spinning endlessly.

He found her in the kitchen.

The sight stopped him dead in his tracks, his hand tightening on the handle of his sprayer until his knuckles were white.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, perfectly still, wearing the same stained, wine-colored velvet robe. But where before she had been a storm of frantic energy and fragile hope, now she was a portrait of unnerving calm. A placid, almost beatific smile graced her lips. Her eyes, when they finally lifted to meet his, were serene and unfocused, as if she were looking at something miles beyond him.

And then he saw them.

At first, it was just one. A large roach, crawling slowly across the back of her hand as it rested on the table. Then his eyes adjusted, and the true horror of the scene resolved itself. They were everywhere. Crawling over her shoulders, nestled in the folds of her velvet robe. Two of them were moving sluggishly through her unkempt blonde hair, their antennae twitching near her ear. Dozens of them. A living, shifting mantle of glistening brown bodies.

They moved not with the frantic skittering of common pests, but with a languid, deliberate purpose, as if they belonged there. As if she belonged to them.

The professional in Jack screamed in silent alarm. This was a biohazard. A walking plague vector. His visceral horror was something else entirely, a cold knot of revulsion tightening in his gut.

“Stephanie,” he choked out, his voice a raw whisper. “Don’t move. Just… stay calm. They’re all over you.”

Her serene smile didn’t falter. She looked down at her own arm, at a roach the size of his thumb making its way toward her elbow, with the same fond expression one might give a purring cat.

“Oh, Mr. Carter. Don’t be silly,” she said, her voice a dreamy, disconnected murmur. “You’re frightening them.”

She lifted her hand, allowing the insect to crawl onto her palm. She watched it for a moment, her head tilted. “These are just Travis’s friends,” she explained, her gaze drifting back to him. “His court. They’ve come to keep me company. We’re never lonely anymore.”

“Stephanie, this is dangerous,” Jack insisted, taking a half-step forward before stopping himself, unsure of what to even do. “They carry dozens of diseases. Salmonella, E. coli… You can’t let them touch you.”

She simply laughed, a soft, airy sound that was a thousand times more terrifying than her rage had been two days ago. “Travis protects me. He protects us all. We’re a family now. They wouldn’t hurt their queen, would they?”

Her mind was no longer her own. The delusion hadn’t just taken root; it had consumed the entire garden. The psychic infection he’d only sensed before was now on full, horrific display. The woman who had hired him was gone, replaced by this calm, smiling husk, this willing vessel.

She stood up, the movement causing a ripple through the swarm on her body. They adjusted, a living shroud of chitin and legs, and not a single one fell. The sight made Jack’s stomach heave.

“He’s been so happy since you agreed to help,” she continued, her voice holding a strange, dreamy pride. “All the other, meaner bugs are gone. Now his friends have plenty of room. And he’s been eating so well. Everything I give him.”

A cold spike of dread shot down Jack’s spine. The half-eaten apple from before seemed like a quaint memory now. What else had she been feeding it?

“He’s growing so much,” she whispered, a conspiratorial glint in her vacant eyes. She took a step towards him, and he instinctively recoiled. “Would you like to see him? He’s resting upstairs. In our room.”

The invitation, offered so casually, was the most monstrous thing he had ever heard. Go upstairs? Into the heart of this… hive? Into the nest of the thing that had done this to her? Every instinct screamed at him to run, to call the police, the health department, anyone.

But his uncle’s words echoed in his head. Finish the job you started. This wasn’t just a job anymore. This was a rescue. Or a recovery. He had to know what he was dealing with. He had to see the source.

“Come,” Stephanie said, her back already turned to him as she glided out of the kitchen, a slow-moving river of insects trailing in her wake. She started towards the main staircase, her bare feet silent on the hardwood floor.

Jack stood frozen for a moment, the cheerful music from the living room wrapping around him like a shroud. He looked at his pesticide sprayer, a tool for a world that operated on normal rules, and felt the cold, hard certainty that it wasn't going to be enough.

With a deep, shuddering breath, he took the first step, following the insect queen up the stairs, into the darkness that waited above.