The first of the shiny beetles appeared on Jacqueline's bedspread when she was late to wake for work. It was June bug large, its front legs serrated like an overused breadknife. How had it had landed there without her notice? That it had been crawling around while she slept gave her the willies.
It was not a cockroach. She was no entomologist, but she had lived in a few run-down apartments where the vermin were her most courteous roommates. She knew a roach when she saw one.
She scooped it into her hand, moving it side to side before her eyes. It did not appear bothered by this or even seem to notice it was occurring, so the bug did not earn an execution by her hands.
She opened her window, gave the beetle one more hard look, and flung it out full force. Ants could not reach terminal velocity -- too little weight for their surface area -- so falling never hurt them. Jacqueline could not say for sure that the same could be claimed for the beetle. All she knew was that it did not seem to have wings because it did not fly away.
There were more the next day, waiting in her kitchen. Three on the counters, largely still, identical to her eyes, watching her. She had the irrational feeling that the beetle on the left was the one she had evicted from her window.
She picked this one up, her suspected repeat visitor. She poked at its back. Indeed, there were segmented wings under the carapace.
"Why didn't you feel like flying?" she asked it and, alone but for her insect company, she did not feel silly doing it.
"Okay, boys, you don't have to go home, but you're not staying here."
She picked each up, calm and docile, and tossed them into the yard, watching a few minutes to assure herself that they did not at once return to her home.
Jacqueline had never been much for killing bugs that were doing her no harm. She had taken a magnifying glass to a few anthills as a child, was not shy about slathering herself with bug spray come summer, and could not deny that she swatted any mosquito that threatened her bodily integrity but, by and large, she was on good terms with arthropods. Oh, she allowed a few spiders to roost in high corners of her home, assuming that they took care of more obnoxious pests whose company she didn't care to keep, but that was nature. Those deaths couldn't be held against her karma. Spiders needed to eat.
A single one of these beetles could have fed all the tiny spiders in her house for a season, not that they would have had any capacity to catch or detain one. If she somehow saw one of these beetles in a web, she would have torn it free from its miraculous lousy luck in strict defiance of her unspoken agreement with the corner spider. It would have been unnatural, like finding a whale shark in a lobster trap.
These beetles couldn't be anything indigenous. In Florida, maybe, home of swamp creatures, den of water bugs that could leave a bruise when flying into the unwary. Not here in Cairo, New York. Not so early in spring that the grass was only the green of queasiness. Where could they have crawled out of?
Once she went to work, she left behind all thought of the beetles until she returned nine hours later.
There are five beetles on her living room carpet, black lumps against the red and blue triangle design.
"Guys, you are testing my goodwill."
She leaned down to give them a more careful look. They were all identical that her eyes could tell, but there was a mutual familiarity. The one closest to her face waved a leg as though offering it to shake or telling her to give it space; its face was too small and rigid to infer an expression, but its mandibles wiggled. It exuded an earthy, sharp odor, reminding her of a hermit crab whose cage she had accidentally left in the sun as a child but also of something foul. She would remind herself to wash her hands after tossing them out again.
She examined her living room baseboards with her cell phone flashlight as though she might find a hole that allowed them entrance. They were large for beetles but, compared against the rats she had shooed out of her bedroom while living off-campus while a student at Annandale University, they were downright puny. She couldn't figure out the provenance of the rats then and soon gave up, assuming she would fare better now. However they were getting in, they would not make it easy to keep them out.
Putting these out in the yard wouldn't be enough, she knew. They or their kind would get in again, and she would feel like a fool to lose another battle against beetles.
Jacqueline went to her storage shed, full of stuff left over from her mom's house. Her mother always owned fish and gerbils. It was not a struggle to find an aquarium with a grate lid. When she returned to her living room, the brownish-black beetles had not moved from where she had left them on the carpet. She was still uneasy with the notion that they watched her in return.
This was irrational, but she was uncertain if she could sleep comfortably not knowing where these beetles were tonight. Yes, the idea of squishing them had not wholly left her, but imagining the crunch of their exoskeletons made bile rise in her throat. If they had so overstayed their welcome, they would not meet their end at the bottom of her pump.
She asked her phone that sort of an environment beetles liked but guessed before it could answer that dirt, grass, and water with a stick or two would be enough for now. If they died overnight -- and she suspected that they were of hardier stock than this if they kept being nuisances -- that was nothing to do with her. An insufficient cage must be better than a spider web.
She scooped them one at a time into her prison terrarium, snapping the lid on and, for good measure, placing a heavy book on top. The beetles reoriented themselves in their new enclosure, settled, and then all turned to look at her in unison.
She added another book.
It remained like this for a few hours until she finished dinner. She tried to doubt her mental faculties and was sure what anyone observing this effort would as well, but the beetles studied her.
She walked over, counted each beetle, and then counted them again. She remembered a classmate putting nail polish on his turtles' shells to tell them apart. Jacqueline knew this was poison to terrapins and was sure it would be death to an insect, but she considered it.
She tossed a blanket over the cage and went upstairs to bed, whispering an idle prayer that, come the morning, there would be the same amount of beetles in her home. No more, no less.
She lifted the blanket shortly after breakfast, though she thought about doing it immediately upon waking. She allowed in only enough light for the count.
One was missing. She regretted not taking the gamble with painting them in some way. Why did it matter which beetle was gone? Weren't they all the same? But she knew it mattered, even though she was not clear why.
She tilled their dirt, but it was not deep enough for hiding. Her search of the glass and grating was perfunctory. She knew they had been intact when she set it up. Nothing -- surely nothing a beetle could do -- would have altered that overnight.
Jacqueline was not opposed to a mystery on the screen or page, something meaty whose clues were somewhere to be found with the right eyes. Living one was less entertaining, particularly once she decided the title would have been in the vein of "The Case of the Appearing and Disappearing Bug." How could she begin to explain this in a way that was other than ridiculous? Though, of course, she would not tell anyone this, perplexing through these beetles were.
Wherever the missing beetle was, it was up to no good. It was rallying others, likely. She tittered at the thought, a beetle army trying to ram her front door.
She could not dawdle here, babysitting insects out of paranoia. She did not wish to leave them here to conspire or also escape. She could think of few ways to justify bringing them to work with her, especially in a ten-gallon tank.
She would have to leave them, knowing what she would return to a cage with no beetles or more than there ought to be, but not the correct number. That was out of the question.
She thought of the beetles at work. Not constantly, but any was too much. She tried to find a pattern in their appearance. One, three, five. Would the following number be odd or prime? Next was a humble seven -- more odd than prime. She preferred the odd, not only because nine was less than eleven but also because primes could quickly spiral out of control. Eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three. At what point was it an infestation, if it was not already? When did it become a plague? Twenty-nine, thirty-one, thirty-seven, forty-one, forty-three, forty-seven. Out of control.
She didn't know it would increase this way, but she had to assume the worst of her opponents if this was indeed what they were. Aside from being in her house (definite) and watching her (possible), she could not properly ascribe motive.
When would her conscience ease enough to invest in a quality insecticide? Not yet, she knew. Though she suspected that they vacated shortly after she left, Beetles in a cage were more like pets than pests. It would not be a matter of time but quantity. She would tolerate seven, maybe even eleven if they remained well-behaved. People kept Madagascar hissing cockroaches or crickets and mealworms to feed to reptiles. Was a box of beetles that much stranger? After eleven, they lost the pretense of charm -- though even seven was pushing it on further reflection -- and would be taking their lives in their hands (legs?) if they made themselves known. A woman had to set clear limits.
Also, it felt unethical to keep too many of them in a single cage. She wasn't about to set out a bigger enclosure for all the new guests or even another smaller one for the stragglers. That death was the other option did seem rude to her, but that did not make it incorrect. It was euthanasia of a sort, her apartment having reached carrying capacity for weird bugs.
When Jacqueline returned home, she announced herself as though they would take the warning. She went to the cage, hoping for the same number within, less Houdini. Or had it escaped? Could it not have been that, in the absence of food they preferred, the others turned cannibalistic, and the presumptive Houdini drew the short straw? Why wouldn't beetles be savages? Looking at the rest, there was not even a bent leg. The missing bug would not have gone gentle into its goodnight. Jacqueline was pleased to arrive at this conclusion. If she were going to be squeamish about killing them, it felt impolite at best that they lacked such compunction toward one another. If they were murderers, her decision not to smoosh or spray them might vacillate.
Five. She counted them again, but it wasn't too difficult when they all froze in place to watch her.
"Where did you go?" she demanded of the one second from left. "What plans have you set in motion?"
It wiggled its stumpy antenna at her. That was Houdini; she did not have a solitary doubt.
There wasn't sense in epoxying the cage shut. However it had escaped, she could not stop it so easily. It wasn't worth her effort. If Houdini -- or any of the others -- wanted to get out, she could not stop them.
This meant, she supposed, that the rest did not want to leave. She studied the others, but she saw no real difference between them. They could all be new, assuming she wouldn't know enough to distinguish the switch. This seemed so, though she had begun to form an attachment to Houdini, albeit not a fond one on her part.
She went out to the shed again, rooted around until she found a tiny travel cage, and filled it with some dirt and grass. Returning to the house, she snatched Houdini away from its compatriots and dropped into the small enclosure, the plastic edges scratched from some diminutive lizard years dead.
Jacqueline placed it on her white, tile kitchen table, resting her head against her downturned hands so that she was on its level.
Houdini turned to look at her, waving this antenna slightly.
"Listen, buddy. If this is meant to be some message, you are not making it clearer. I understand that you are not exactly given to explaining yourself, being an insect, but I don't like you annoying me like this. I am not your haven. Since I don't want here, you have no right to try to throw a party under my roof."
Houdini added its front-most legs to his wiggling as though it were Gregor Samsa turned wizard. This was the most she had seen it move since it first entered her home, aside from when she was flinging it out of a window.
Jacqueline didn't wonder now if she were cracking up, though she considered that she should have. Now that Houdini was moving around, she felt more that they were communicating rather than her just monologuing questions as something with ganglia instead of a brain.
"Can we do a 'one wave for yes, two waves for no'?"
Houdini continued with quick incantation, wiggling far too much for a yes or no.
That complicated matters, but she still felt better off than she had ten minutes ago. Communication was unlikely beyond Houdini's twitchy reaction to being separated from the others. She intended to keep him that way, though she did not see how it would do much good after having rightly named him for a famous escape artist.
She returned to the others. Though they moved no more nor less now that they were again four, she imagined that they were less lively and more perplexed to be an even number. Having done it enough with Houdini, she would have to be more careful in anthropomorphizing the rest. At least they had not joined their companion in wiggling their legs, possibly in unison, which might have been spooky enough that she dumped them directly in the toilet.
This thought struck her. She had made threats enough in her head, but did the beetles believe that she would do them harm? Perhaps not.
She still hadn't decided that she would, but she returned to Houdini. She picked it up gently between her thumb and forefinger, holding the beetle away from her body. In the thirteen steps to the bathroom, it occurred to her that this was the most contact that she had ever had with it. She would wash her hands twice as hard when done with this.
The toilet needed a good scrub. She felt almost chagrinned that Houdini's compound eyes would see something so indecent -- it had been a little while since she had a gentleman caller for him she would have been as diligent about cleaning -- but it almost served its purpose better this way. Let this be grimy.
"We are going to have a conversation somehow," she told Houdini. "You know things that you are not telling me. You have intruded upon my home for days. You had brought back friends to stare at me. You can see how that would make me uncomfortable. Now, I am not a violent person -- you can see that -- but I am not above dropping you in this toilet and flushing. Will this mean that you won't come back? That you won't bring others? Not necessarily, but I think it is a surer bet than throwing you in the backyard."
Jacqueline paused. Houdini did not move any longer, its legs hanging down. It felt as though it might be calling her bluff, the insect version of going limp, which she resented. What would it take to put the fear of God in this bug?
She was above warning the beetle that she was serious. She held it over a toilet that needed cleaning. What could be more serious than that?
Her doorbell rang. Jacqueline jerked back as though the sound were coming from inside her head. In her surprise, her hand released Houdini, who unceremoniously plopped into the bowl below.
Jacqueline panicked between rescuing Houdini and answering the door. Her sense of decorum insisted upon the latter.
At the door was a man, his mustache dangling from either side of his chin, reminding her in no small way of the bug she had left in her toilet (her brain sparked a memory of spiracles; bugs drown quickly because they did not have lung for a reservoir of air but breathed with their whole bodies). The man's stomach pressed against his starched, gray shirt front, a softness shared by his face, its expression graver than suited this features. His skin was the color of chestnuts, his hair that of coal. He held an ebony cane in the middle rather than at its head; he did not need it for balance.
"I'm Wick," he said somberly. "I'm here about your father."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.