Chapter 4: The Ancient Strain

Chapter 4: The Ancient Strain

The journey up the stairs was a slow ascent into madness. Each step Jack took seemed to plunge him deeper into the house’s oppressive atmosphere. The air, already thick and humid downstairs, grew hotter, soupier, tasting of mildew and rot. The polished wood of the banister felt tacky beneath his sweating palm. Faintly, from the living room below, the jaunty 60s rock song continued its endless loop, a cheerful, tinny whisper of a world that no longer existed up here.

Stephanie glided ahead of him, a serene ghost in a velvet shroud, the insects on her body a shifting, living constellation in the gloom. They reached the upstairs landing, a space steeped in a darkness that defied the afternoon sun pouring through a nearby window. The light seemed to bend away from the master bedroom door, as if afraid of what lay behind it.

From the room came a sound, soft but distinct. A rhythmic, wet clicking, punctuated by a low, resonant hum, like a faulty transformer. It was the sound of something massive and organic, content in its lair.

Stephanie paused at the door, turning to Jack with that same beatific, empty smile. She raised a single finger to her lips, an insect crawling over her knuckle as she did. “Shhh,” she whispered, her voice a breathy caress. “He’s sleeping. He gets so tired after a big meal.”

She turned the knob and pushed the door inward.

The smell hit him first, a physical force that made him gag. It was the stench of a slaughterhouse basement left to fester for a month. Not just decay, but something acrid and alien, a chemical reek of unnatural secretions mixed with the cloying sweetness of spoiled meat.

The room was a cave. Heavy blackout curtains were drawn tight, and the air was a visible fog of dust motes and tiny, winged insects dancing in the single shaft of light from the hallway. Jack instinctively raised his heavy-duty flashlight, clicking it on. The beam cut through the murk, a lonely sword of light in a suffocating darkness.

He swept it across the room. The furniture was draped in what looked like cobwebs, but thicker, greasier. The plush carpet was matted and stained with dark patches. Then the beam found the bed.

Jack’s heart stopped. His breath hitched in his lungs, trapped behind a wall of pure, undiluted terror.

Resting in the center of the queen-sized bed, its immense weight making the mattress sag almost to the floor, was the source of the infestation. It was no longer a pet. It was a god.

The cockroach was a meter long, easily. Its carapace was an oily, iridescent black-brown, the color of a fresh oil slick on a puddle of blood. But its surface wasn't smooth; it was alive. A moving carpet of tiny, writhing white mites swarmed over every inch of its armored shell, a horrifying counterpoint to its dark stillness. Long, whip-like antennae, thick as electrical cables at their base, lay coiled near its head. Its body pulsed, a slow, rhythmic expansion and contraction that was horribly reminiscent of a lung. It was breathing.

The source of the clicking sound was its cluster of mandibles, chittering softly in its sleep, stained with something dark and crusted. The fine Egyptian cotton sheets beneath it were shredded and soaked in a viscous, brownish fluid that had dripped onto the carpet below. Scattered around the monstrous creature were the gnawed-on remains of… something. Jack saw what looked like a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, but also smaller, more delicate bones he refused to identify.

His professional training, his years of experience, his uncle’s gruff lessons—all of it evaporated in an instant, replaced by a single, primal command that screamed through every cell of his body: RUN.

The industrial sprayer in his hand felt like a water pistol. The flashlight trembled, the beam dancing manically over the pulsating horror on the bed. This thing wasn’t just a bug. It was a violation. A tear in the fabric of the world he understood. His gut feeling hadn’t just been a warning; it had been a full-blown air-raid siren, and he’d walked right past it.

He took one stumbling step back. Then another.

“Isn’t he magnificent?” Stephanie’s dreamy voice came from beside him, but Jack didn’t hear her. He couldn’t hear anything over the roaring in his ears.

He turned and fled.

He didn’t run, he scrambled, his boots slipping on the grimy floor. He cannonballed down the stairs, ignoring the splintering protest of the wood under his heavy tread.

“Where are you going?” Stephanie’s voice called after him, laced with a gentle, confused disappointment. “Don’t you want to meet him properly?”

The question spurred him on, a fresh spike of adrenaline lancing through his veins. He burst through the front door and into the blinding sanity of the Sunday afternoon. He sucked in a breath of clean, warm air, his lungs burning. The cheerful blue door slammed shut behind him, cutting off the jangly music mid-note.

He fumbled for his keys, his hands shaking so violently it took him three tries to unlock the van. He threw himself into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and jammed the key into the ignition. The engine roared to life as he peeled away from the curb, leaving the aggressively normal house and its unspeakable secret behind him.

He drove for five blocks, then ten, running stop signs, his mind a white-hot panic. Finally, he pulled over to the side of a quiet, tree-lined street, the van shuddering as he stomped on the brake. He killed the engine and sat there, panting, the ghost of that fetid, acrid stench still clinging to his nostrils.

He snatched his phone from its cradle, his thumb smearing the screen as he stabbed at his contacts. It rang twice, each electronic tone an eternity.

“What?” Alistair Carter’s voice was a gravelly bark.

Jack’s own words came out in a choked, fragmented torrent. “Uncle… the Miller house… on Elm. The roach… My God, the roach… it’s… it’s on the bed. It’s huge.”

The usual drunken slur was gone from Alistair’s voice, replaced by a sudden, cold sobriety that was more frightening than any anger. “On the bed? How big, Jack? Tell me exactly.”

“A meter,” Jack gasped. “At least. And it’s… pulsating. Breathing.”

A string of curses from Alistair’s end, low and vicious. “Son of a bitch. I was afraid of this. Get out of there. No, listen to me. Drive at least a mile away from that house, park, and then call me back. Now.”

“But the woman—”

“The woman’s gone, kid!” Alistair snapped, his voice like cracking granite. “She’s not a client anymore. She’s just the dish the food is served on. Now do it!”

The line went dead. Jack did as he was told, his mind numb. He drove until the street signs were unfamiliar, parking in front of a small park where children were playing. He called his uncle back.

Alistair answered on the first ring. “Alright, kid. You listen to me, and you listen good. That thing in there is no bug. Not one of ours, anyway. It’s an ancient strain. Older than the dirt that house is built on.”

“Ancient strain? What the hell does that mean?”

“It means it doesn’t just infest a house, Jack. It infests a mind,” Alistair said, his voice grim. “It’s a psychic parasite. It finds someone weak, lonely, broken… and it worms its way into their head. It reads their memories, their grief, their desires, and it wears them like a mask. Sings them a lullaby while it eats them from the inside out.”

The pieces clicked into place with horrifying clarity. The music. The name Travis. The delusion.

“It felt her grief for her dead husband and built a puppet show just for her,” Alistair continued. “Gave her the grand romance she always wanted so she’d protect it. Feed it. Nurture it while it grew. These things are called Brood-Fathers for a reason.”

Jack’s head was spinning. “What do I do? Who do I call? The cops? Hazmat?”

Alistair let out a short, bitter laugh. “There’s no one to call, kid. This isn’t their world. It’s ours. This is the family business. The real family business, the one I tried to protect you from. You can’t poison it. You can’t trap it. Its influence spreads through the whole damn house, controls every little crawler in the walls. There’s only one way to stop it.”

Alistair paused, and in the silence, Jack could feel the weight of generations settling onto his shoulders.

“You have to cut the head off the snake,” his uncle said, his voice flat and final. “The psychic link, the hive, the whole damn infestation… it all runs through the alpha. You have to go back in there, Jack. You have to kill the big one. It’s the only way.”