In the House of the Wasp

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. There wasn’t a room, of course. At least she didn’t think so. Her vision was just temporarily framed like that – she imagined it was akin to horse blinders.

“Talk about tunnel vision.” Patricia mumbled.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” Scott asked. He walked along the edge of the creek with one fist stuffed in his pocket.

Patricia nodded as she followed. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” She waved her palms back and forth in front of her face.

“The hallucinations don’t last as long as the fatigue,” he said. “It should wear off soon.”

They meandered along the trails just north of the township. Today was a school day, but Scott had persuaded Patricia off campus. He wanted to show off his latest discovery and insisted it couldn’t wait.

“Where did you find it?” Patricia asked. Her face flushed with euphoria.

“A toad along the Eastern Banks. They secrete a serum that can be harvested and processed into...” Scott ran his thumb along his lips. “Whatever this is.”

Patricia stopped in her tracks. “How’d you possibly figure that out?”

Scott shrugged and threw a hand in the air. “I heard a rumor!”

They continued walking.

“Well, I hope you thank the spinster. This kind of breakthrough will turn the entire university on its head.”

Scott snatched Patricia’s hand from her side and pulled her off the trail. The abruptness stole her away from the whimsical window in her head. She became aware of the gamey scent of the woods, and let the swirling colors collapse back into textures of reality.

“There’s someone coming,” he informed her, scanning the forest ahead.

“I can’t get caught out-”

He cut Patricia off with a stiff finger against her lips. They watched each other’s eyes and listened to the unmistakable cough of an automobile. It brambled up the road at a snail’s pace.

“We’ll duck down here.” Scott instructed as he led them toward the creek. They hunkered down in a thicket of high grass and waited for the machine to roll by.

Patricia bubbled out her cheeks and held her breath – she thought holding extra air in her mouth might help her last longer. Everything became an experiment with Patricia and Scott since the day they crossed paths at the university. It was a contest of who could out-baffle the other.

She squinted through the reeds and made out the driver. He had tall, wispy gray hair that stood above the headrest.

“I don’t believe it.” Patricia said.

“What?” Scott whispered.

“It’s Mr. Schaeffer.”

Scott’s eyebrows collided. He stood, surveyed the road, and ducked back into the foliage.

“Holy ghost! It is Schaeffy!” Scott looked like he was about to burst out in hysterical laughter. “What’s he doing out here?”

Patricia shook her head. “Who knows?”

“We know!” Scott nearly shouted, and punched her playfully in the shoulder. “Once again, another mystery presents itself.”

Excitement flared inside Patricia’s tummy. “You want to pursue our statistics professor?”

“A scholar always finds an answer,” he snickered. “Let’s see what the old man is up to!”

Patricia took his hand and they crept back up the waterway.

The car didn’t pick up any speed, so it was easy to track between the trees. Patricia took short, careful steps as she navigated the underbrush. The effects from the toad serum still pulsated along the edges of her vision. Even the trickle of the creek kept a certain audible distortion about it, as if it were only a scratched recording.

“It smothers all the senses. I can almost hear the colors in front of me.” Patricia mused. There was a coppery taste rising from the back of her throat.

“That’s the nature of any drug,” Scott ventured under his breath. “Anything less is food or poison.”

His eyes stayed fixed on the rocking frame of Mr. Schaeffer’s automobile. They traced along just a few hundred feet behind him. The terrain soon became overgrown and unfamiliar.

“This is strange.” Scott offered. He looked like an explorer in his vest and trousers. Dirt and grass stains spotted his calves.

“It’s a violation of privacy,” Patricia corrected. “I’ve always thought Schaeffer to be a troubled man.”

The density of the growth slowed them to a crawl. Scott lost sight of the car, and soon the engine faded into the distance. They pushed on in a silent race through unmarked forest, as not even a road disturbed the woodland.

“What in God’s name could be back here?” Scott wondered as they crested a hill. Patricia offered him a hand to assist with the last few steps up the peak.

“What about that?” she asked breathlessly. There was a structure looming in the distance.

“You’d have made a helluva cavalry scout.” Scott remarked. He smoothed the creases in his dress shirt while he looked over the valley.

The building was like an obelisk amongst the trees, and the duo approached it silently. It looked like a downtown factory; plain, hulking walls, with narrow windows only near the roof. It stood rustic, but still kept the touches of modern maintenance. There weren’t holes in the trim, nor rot in the siding.

Mr. Schaeffer’s dusty automobile sat solitary before the old building.

Patricia leaned over and cupped her hands against the driver’s window. Newspapers and empty bags of pipe tobacco lay scattered on every seat.

“Maybe this is an old sawmill.” Scott fingered his mustache while he spoke.

“Doesn’t look like they ever got to logging.” Patricia said with an even tone. A single sweep of the forest proved it unmarred.

“There’s bound to be a clue around here.” Scott advised.

They fanned out and searched high and low for a tipoff of any kind – it proved fruitless. The area between the building and the lush forestry was barren of tire marks, footprints, trash, or any evidence of human traffic.

Patricia rounded the far corner and came upon Scott, who stood transfixed. Sweat trickled along the nape of his neck.

“What is it?”

“Loose board,” he answered. “I think this is the only entrance.”

Patricia’s skin ran cold – had she seen a door? The windows, of course, but was there an entrance of any kind?

Scott pushed the plank aside and inched his way into the dark interior.

“What are you doing?!” Patricia hissed, and yanked on the arm that was still visible.

“God, woman, let me go!” he resounded.

She complied, and Scott’s slender frame vanished into the darkness. Patricia stood frozen, every muscle flared in protest, and waited. Only the musty smells of the building stirred.

Scott’s hand emerged from between the boards and motioned to her.

“Aren’t you coming?”

“Are there spiders? Scott, please, if-”

“No spiders,” he assured her. “There's nothing in here.”

Patricia took his hand and slipped through the exterior siding.

The structure proved to be a warehouse of sorts. There weren’t walls or fixtures inside, but filled instead with more trees. The building was a shell – even the floor within the walls was just more dirt and weeds.

“Bizarre,” Scott whispered. “All this labor, and nothing inside to show for it.”

“Perhaps the funding fell through!” Patricia shouted into the confines of the building. Her voice echoed like an incantation through the darkness.

“Quiet!” Scott quipped, and gave her shoulder a push. “We don’t know who else is in here.”

“That’s a marvelous point.” Patricia hiked her dress up around her ankles and shuffled deeper into the warehouse.

The panel windows allowed just enough light to navigate the enclosure. Most of the trees and foliage caught within the perimeter were dead and pale, stuck in the lightless recess. A squirrel ran across her path from one trunk to another.

So it isn’t void of life…

“Have you gone mad?” Scott asked her from behind.

“Have you become a cricket?” Patricia made a chirping motion with her fingers. “I thought we were getting to the bottom of this.”

“You must still be digesting the drug.” Scott ran a hand across his brow.

“Even so, how does that stop us from figuring out what the professor is up to?” Particia squinted down at the dirt while she spoke.

Scott knelt to examine the ground.

“Are those tires tracks?” she asked.

He nodded.

They stood in the middle of a very old road – a stagecoach trail, by the looks of it. Symmetrical ruts chewed deep into the earth, blanketed by what looked like automobile tracks over the top.

“Lots of driving takes place in here.” Scott muttered in disbelief.

“Or before the place went up.” Patricia added.

They followed the road into the heart of the structure. Window light couldn’t penetrate the black bubble at the center, so they navigated with shaking blindness.

Patricia bumped into something cold and let out a yelp. She stumbled back and collapsed into a bush. She thought she could feel something skitter between her feet, so frantically kicked out with both heels.

Scott approached, and after finding Particia’s hands in the blackness, helped her back to her feet.

“What was it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It felt like an ice block.”

They stood and listened for a moment. The darkness returned to its familiar placidity.

Scott took cautious steps toward the offending object. His hands trembled as they led him through the unknown. Patricia shuffled at his side.

“Ah!” he cried. Patricia jumped and nearly landed in the bush again.

“Christ!” she sneered. “What is it?”

“I think it’s a car.” Scott said. She could hear his hands tapping up and down the metal body.

They flanked the object and touched its features; it was definitely an old automobile. There were a series of them, all parked in a neat row.

“Look at that.” Scott whispered.

Particia turned and squinted into the darkness. There was nothing at first, but then she caught sight of it; a tendril of light. It ebbed within the squared frame of a window.

The cars were parked before a modest mansion. The features were easier to make out as their eyes adjusted, but the silhouette was true. It had the decadence of a plantation farm house.

“A building within a building?” Patricia asked.

“Which one do you think came first?”

Patricia started up the front house steps.

“Wait! Wait!” he pleaded. She turned to face him, but Scott couldn’t discern any of her features.

He tried to gather himself in the darkness. “This feels unnatural to me. Not the trespassing, but the fact that any of this is here.”

“But it is here.”

“But it shouldn’t be!” Scott brought a fist down on his thigh. “There isn’t any sawdust, or leftover lumber, tools – nothing! It’s like these buildings fell right out of the sky.”

Patricia pursed her lips. He was right; it did have a certain instability to it.

“We’ve come this far,” she reasoned.

Scott sighed and followed her up the steps. The boards groaned like resurrected corpses beneath their feet, and the flickering candle brought their shadows dancing back to life.

The paint curled away from the home in long ribbons. There was a foreign language engraved into the wall around the door.

“De Domus Vespae.” Patricia read as she traced the markings with a finger.

“Forgive my latin,” Scott arched an eyebrow. “The House of the Wasp?”

They shared a glance before turning back to the house. It loomed even greater in the darkness, further amplified by its shapelessness.

The interior did not improve. The latin legends continued into the dwelling, etched into every blank board and surface. Even the table and chair played host to runes and strange images.

“I think Occam's Razor delivered us the answer.” Scott declared. He looked over a bowl of what appeared to be hash residue.

“Oh?” Patricia started.

“This must be the remnants of an opium den,” he said with confidence. “It has the cadence of addiction.”

“I have no answer for the house,” Patricia shrugged. “What I know is that Mr. Schaeffer is still nowhere to be found.”

The candle wavered with the sigh of a passing draft. The pair slowly turned around to face the fireplace, where the air pushed out from. A great cloud of dust poured from the opening, but not from the chimney chute as they expected. Buried in the back, behind the grate and the ash and coal, lay a small gap between the brick and the floor.

Scott collected the nub of candle from the window so they could make a better inspection. The crack in the mortar was long and narrow, powdered with dust from passage in and out. Patricia traced her fingers through grooves in the dirt – they looked like the imprint of toes.

“He couldn’t have gone in there,” he concluded. “No one could have.”

“No. I think he could, actually.” Patricia said. She laid flat and eyeballed the opening.

“A child, maybe.”

“Or a cripple.” she offered.

It was true; Mr. Schaeffer was crippled, and had very unique proportions. He served in the Great World War, and fell to mortar fire during an exchange. The shelling took most of his pelvis and hips, which resulted in total loss of support in his lower body. The professor’s walk and posture was one of a kind; like a man partly fused with a worm.

“You think he crawled through there?” Scott clarified. The hole exhausted a plume of dust in response.

She nodded.

Scott smiled and tried to fit into the cavity – not even his shoulders gained admittance. He slid in at various angles but no maneuver permitted him.

“Let me try.” Patricia said. She unclasped her dress from the top and began to remove the outer shell – the frills and accessories came next. When Scott turned back from the chimney he found her stripped down to her knickers.

“Have some shame, woman.” Scott said with a half smile. He looked off into the darkness to provide a little decency.

The air pushing out from the fissure was cold and metallic. Patricia compressed herself against the earth and let the breath out from her lungs – she shimmied forward and her head disappeared beneath the stone.

She inhaled and found her ribcage didn’t have the room to expand beneath the rock. Inching forward was only possible on a full exhale, and proved incredibly painful. The angled pressure forced her to take shallow sips of air as she passed through the chasm.

The shaft dipped away from the house and barreled into the earth. It grew so narrow at times that Patricia almost backed out, half buried in dirt and locked between stones. After the panic washed over her, she gathered her resolve and pushed through the tapered hollows.

There was no light this deep into the shaft. New tunnels seemed to shoot off in other directions, and Patricia heard scuttling echoes trickle out of them. There wasn’t any security in such an isolating darkness. It’s only the drug you took. It’s just in your head.

She heard a raspy breath just ahead.

__________**__________

Scott paced the common room in front of the chimney. The candle dwindled down to merely a marble of wax, which burned his fingers as he passed it between hands. He teetered on the threshold of total darkness.

Patricia is in the dark. This is nothing.

He turned his attention to the walls. Latin scriptures in all manners of handwriting overlapped in frantic scratchings. Some of the clearer words were actually legible:

Apocalypse…

Immortal…

Eternal injustice…

The Insects of the Ancients…

He spied a picture frame hanging in the hallway. It was the only piece of decor in the entire household, and blended seamlessly into the scored wall. Scott approached it with open apprehension.

It was a drawing of the mansion, signed 1744. A small family stood solemnly before the property; mother, father, two sons and daughter. Scott expected them to be dressed as farmers, but were instead swathed in black robes and masks. More strange yet, the drawing showed no sign of the warehouse – the mansion stood alone.

Scott shook his head.

Footsteps erupted to life above him on the second floor. They clamored from one room to the next before coming to an abrupt halt exactly where they started.

Scott licked his lips and waited.

He noticed another picture hanging in the room adjacent. It was a haunting sketch of a face. Scott took silent steps down the hall so as not to give away his position to the phantom upstairs. The sketch features grew more grotesque as he got nearer: rotten teeth, blistered lips, spongy eyelids.

The drawing blinked.

Scott stopped in his tracks and felt frost settle along his spine.

I’m hallucinating. The situation is conjuring its own fears.

He took another step toward the drawing.

Its lips drew back into a horrific grin. Scott noticed there were hands cupped on each side of the face, and the glass fogged with wavering breaths. It pulled back from the pane and wandered off into the darkness.

It wasn’t a picture, but a window.

__________**__________

“Hello?” Particia whispered.

Haggard breath was the only answer.

She reached out with trembling fingers and recoiled when they met a moist fabric.

“Mr. Schaeffer?”

More desperate gasps.

Patricia extended her hand again and felt the hard leather sole of a boot. It quaked in place, locked up between stones. Whoever this person was, they had been stuck a long time.

She sucked in as much air as the tunnel would allow and began to crawl down the stranger’s body into the shaft. They made no attempt to struggle or shoo her away. They don’t even know I’m here - they must be insane.

She grabbed bunches of fabric and pulled herself by. One purchase landed her hand in the stranger’s open pocket; Patricia felt the smooth handle of a derringer pistol. It was small, delicate, and its absence went unnoticed.

Almost better than a lantern! she thought as she tucked it within her undergarments.

The breath was right in front of her now, stiff with decay. Patricia reached out, hesitantly, and felt for a face in the dark. She saw gnashing teeth in her mind’s eye.

She found a nose instead, and then a chin with a fuzzy beard. It was a man, but not the professor. His cheeks were so tightly jammed that the stone cut into his flesh. He began to react to Particia’s prodding.

“This is where the world ends.” he mumbled through broken teeth.

“Maybe for you, my friend.” Patricia replied. She turned away and continued into the abyss.

“Even ghosts will taste the terror of Aktuburis!” he shouted down the chasm.

His holler turned to sobbing as his voice faded away. Patricia could feel a subtle humidity as she plunged deeper into the earth. The metallic musk surrendered to that of ammonia; not enough to be noxious, but distinct enough to place it. It reminded her of the anthills she dug up in her youth.

The tunnel opened up until Patricia could get to her hands and knees and crawl. The floor was neatly chiseled, and never too steep at any incline. She shuffled along like a seasoned traveler through rising halls and dipping grooves. This was made for crawling.

Light teased her through an opening ahead. It looked to be a room.

Patricia scurried out of the shaft and into the overarches of a monolithic chamber. The main sanctuary extended into the dark for what seemed like half a mile. Shadows encompassed the ceiling that vaulted up into oblivion. All of it funneled down to the flickering candles of a crypt. The walls were etched with staircases that led to the main floor, which was decorated with pews and great stone tablets. They were covered in the same latin scribbles as the mansion above.

__________**__________

Scott made the final step to reach the second floor landing. The unexpected company forced him to scavenge for better supplies. The candle rocked on its last length of wick, so he cradled the flame with a delicate palm.

He explored the first room and came upon a stroke of luck: a second candle waited in the window. He exchanged them and continued on through the dark.

Who is keeping these lit when they haunt the house themselves?

The next room had a small desk and chair. The surface was littered with disheveled books and loose papers – most in latin, but Scott recognized a few as German. One of them was a text from the local library.

Mysteries of the Worm.

He cracked the cover open and examined the contents.

Distributed 1699.

The borrowers list was long, stretching out almost two centuries. The last time it had been loaned out was fifteen years earlier to a name Scott thought he recognized.

Deacon Dillabaud - Sept. 17 1904.

He remembered a man that vanished from Gravsmith during his youth. A printer.

“I’m afraid I never returned those.” a shrill voice explained. It leaked out of the darkness from somewhere behind him.

Scott turned and was blinded by a flash of light. It pulsed through his skin and penetrated the hollow channels within his bones. A sickening vibration came to life throughout his body.

“What is this?” Scott croaked. His limbs danced to life of their own volition, and his head pitched wildly from side to side.

“The visions of Nyarlathotep.” the voice declared. The flash exploded again, and Scott continued to dance like a puppet.

Sounds like Egyptian business…

Scott could see a ghastly man in the corner of the room. He stood behind an old camera, complete with a tripod and cover cloth. The flash sparked from the bulb again and rinsed his vision.

“And your idea of suffering is dance?” Scott egged. His only option was distraction.

The phantom giggled and hit the discharge trigger again. This time, Scott did a jig and brought the candle up to his face. The flame gnawed away at the soft flesh around his eye.

He screamed bloody horror.

Footsteps thundered down the hall again, but they didn’t belong to any feet – it was the sporadic thumping of tentacles. A writhing silhouette filled the doorway.

This isn’t possible! Scott tried to reason.

“It is possible, you clever little rat.” Deacon said in a deranged monotone. The goofy pitch in his voice bled out into a deep, distorted thrum. The mass of tentacles slithered under his arms and hoisted him into the air.

“How did you-” Scott began, but the flashbulb cut him off.

Scott reached down and set his own vest on fire.

“No!” he shrieked at the cameraman. “Bastard!”

Scott waltzed back and forth in a wailing inferno. The camera shuttered over and over again while he burned.

__________**__________

Patricia clung to a stone terrace that overlooked the chamber. The fissure in the chimney led her into the gothic belly of an underground palace. Giant trunks of wax stood like sentries around the outer wall, glowering high and low to illuminate the room.

A drum pulsed to life and brought on the same scratching echoes from the tunnels. Hooded figures appeared down below and placed themselves in a ritualistic circle. They were frighteningly tall, and antennas appeared to reach out from beneath their cowls.

The circle formed around a man, who looked like an infant before the underworld clerics. He gripped an obsidian podium and waited for his audience to gather.

It was Mr. Schaeffer.

He was coated in dirt from the climb down. Patricia wondered how he managed to traverse the shaft and descend into the temple so quickly. She remembered the shuffling passages and how easy it was for her to crawl. She imagined the professor wiggling down from the surface with inhuman speed.

The clattering came to a roar that had no room for echoes; Patricia looked up and found the ceiling a pool of rippling darkness. The blackness ebbed with the babble of a boneless body.

A hundred thousand legs reached out to dissolve the shadow. It wasn’t a shade but a black cloud of insects pouring into the temple. Beetles and roaches the size of horses crashed over each other in massive waves. Colossal spiders draped themselves from silky perches, and cleaned their bristled legs with dripping mandibles.

Patricia lay rigid on her perch while the bugs roamed past. A stream of centipedes charged by, and their corded bodies were thicker than a wagon wheel. The most unsettling feature was the face; the tubed physique ended with a mostly human head. Their bald, flaking scalps paraded by in silence.

Bugs have bad eyes. They can’t see you in the dark.

“De audi vocem custodis!” Schaeffer bellowed over the insects. They writhed under the old man’s spell.

“You will wear your old skins forever, here, beneath the House of the Wasp!” he yelled like an old parish pastor.

Behemoth scorpions danced along the temple floor in a menacing display. Their tails arched back and forth with hypnotizing rhythm.

The hooded creatures clicked and hissed, and above them, the stone ceiling rumbled. They took long, ghoulish strides toward the professor. His legs buckled together and he collapsed against the podium.

Another phantom crept out of the shadows. It donned yellow robes instead of black, and a greasy abdomen trailed behind it in the dark. The other clerics bowed before it as if it were a king.

Slabs of stone continued to rearrange themselves in the ceiling before the wings emerged. Patricia lifted her gaze and found the primordial carapace of wasps. They weren’t shuffling stones, but archaic vespids of mythological proportion. The creatures dwarfed even the warehouse on the surface above.

They shambled out of their hole and shook the dust from their shells.

Patricia jumped to her feet and screamed across the cathedral.

“RUN, Mr. Schaeffer!”

The insects turned to Patricia in unison. She retreated toward the shaft before the sounds of infinite clattering legs.

“You’ve killed us all, heretic!” the professor called into the chaos. “You’ve killed us all!”

Patricia turned to find one of the hooded priests climbing over the lip of the terrace. It was gangly, but still towered at least twelve feet tall. The hood slipped back from its face.

“Our world will collapse into Aktuburis!” Schaeffer cried.

The priest had the black bubble eyes of a wasp, and wicked mandibles jutted through its lips. Its remaining features were that of a mutated human.

“Sealed away for one hundred generations, all for not!” his voice echoed. The words were followed by a twisted scream.

The priest lunged forward and backed Patricia against the wall. She felt the opening of the tunnel behind her. I can’t outcrawl a bug.

It lashed out with a razored appendage – ten of them dangled from its emaciated body.

Patricia yanked the pistol from her knickers and shot the monster dead through the heart. Its human features crinkled as the bullet rattled within its exoskeleton.

The hybrid crumbled to the floor in a fit of twitching limbs. She dropped the spent firearm and disappeared into the shaft.

Pandemonium broke out across the chamber; insects climbed over each other in scorn, and Schaeffer shrieked obscenities between nauseating pleas for death. Patricia left it behind in such a hurry that she sanded the skin from her knees. Her knuckles swelled from the constant impact of stray stones.

There was an explosion, and the tunnel behind her filled with dust and rubble.

The shaft fed her back into the impassable chasm. The dirt and sweat on her skin lathered and helped her ease through the tight spaces. The lubrication proved suffocating.

Patricia came upon the man wedged in the rockbed. He was laughing maniacally at her approach.

“We serve the insect once again.” he hooted in the dark.

“What is Aktuburis?”

“The Colony of Carcosa! The Cult of Pests!”

Patricia couldn’t make sense of it.

“What is this place? Why are you down here?”

The stranger began to hyperventilate.

“Brother didn’t say it would be like this.”

She waited for him to say more.

“He told me we had to protect the surface!”

“Protect it how?”

“You have to read to – from the tablets, or the Book of Graechycll. Eternal slumber beneath the House of the Wasp.” he sang in a wheezing voice.

“It didn’t work. The whole chamber collapsed.”

Laughter dribbled out from the stone again. “They opened the doooor.”

Patricia heard the scraping sounds of insects behind her. She pushed past the man in the dark, who made desperate grabs at her. Even his snarling teeth snapped right in front of her face. She made the ascent and left him in the abyss once again.

The shaft made unfamiliar angles that seemed to keep going up. The climb should flatten out soon.

It only continued up. Patricia squeezed around a corner and saw sunlight flickering through whispers in the stone. She whimpered as she thrashed back and forth toward the surface. It reminded her of the hallucinatory visions, and inspired a futile hope this was all a dream.

The light didn’t emanate from the chimney like she expected, but from a window. She approached the dusty glass and realized that the entire house had been turned on its side. The crumbling of the temple collapsed the local geology.

Patricia pushed herself out through the window frame and found The House of the Wasp resting at the bottom of a sinkhole. Blankets of forest had been pulled underground like strips of sagging carpet. Gangs of giant insects circled the hole on their ascent to the surface.

In the air above, archaic wasps blackened the sun.