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I left everything: my clothes, my bags, everything that had been in the house. I jumped into the car and started it in a blind panic, banging hard into Todd's BMW as I slammed my old Nissan back and forth in a frantic attempt to turn around. The moths were all around us, rising like a cloud from around the house, throwing their bodies against the windshield, their wings fluttering, as if they wouldn't let us go.
I drove like that: barefoot and bare-chested, and it was only after my knuckles began to ache that I realized I'd been holding the wheel in a death grip. Faith slept on beside me and I didn't dare wake her up. What would I tell her? What could I say? She woke up as the sun was going up and by that time we were far away.
"It wasn't so bad, really," she said. "Whatever we were doing. There was a kind of peacefulness about it, like being at one with the night, with all the things we never see. There was life in it. Not like our life, but something blind and hungry, and it wanted me. It just wanted me so much."
I remembered what Todd had said about escherigea etops: how the males take turns with the female, how the semen of the sterile ones uses the potency of the others to find its way to fertilization; how easy it is to mix DNA in the vessel of a living being.
I don't know what's worse now: to keep the lights on at night and risk attracting them, or turn the lights off and face the darkness. I hear the song of the moths all the time now, like puffs of air against my skin, like the feel of their soft wings on the back of my neck.
I think of what's inside Faith right now, and I'm afraid.
- COMMENTS
bikergroschenover 4 years agoReally good read - the idea might had deserved some more tweaks, but I loved it.
Anonymousover 6 years agoOne of the best short stories I have ever read! It truly gave me the creeps!
patientleeover 9 years agoThere's a lot of horror packed into a tight story. Absolutely excellent.
TamLin01about 10 years agoThis really is good. I've seen it at the top of the lists here for a while and I don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading it, but it certainly deserves the credit it gets: It's sharp, cerebral, atmospheric, sincere, and, yes, creepy. It brings together a nice element of 70s-era Stephen King (back when he was submitting baffling short stories to pulp magazines) and 50s-era horror comics, with a somewhat more vulnerable human touch.
Criticisms: First, the proximity of Todd's comment about moth breeding and the allusion to their "pretty open" romance made it quite easy to predict the twist. Honestly, you could do without the latter. Further, I would say this story is a bit overwritten, particularly in the opening. We spill a lot of ink describing Dave and Faith's past relationship at a time when, actually, that's the *last* thing we need to hear about. Much better, I think, to allude to the things in their past up front and then let the reader's curiosity about it brew for a bit before diagramming what happened back in those days.
This would not only unburden the front third of the story, which right now is sagging under the weight of a whole lot of establishing prose, but would also increase the tension in the first half: Readers would be even more edgy about the situation in the old farmhouse if we do not at first know precisely how intimate our two leads have previously been and therefore how much of an incitement their shared past may be to the third party.
Those matters aside, this really is a superior story. So often these promising setups are disappointments, but I couldn't be more pleased with this. Hard to believe it's a decade old already.
Also: great title.
