Feature Writer: dr_mabeuse

Feature Title: THE MOTH’S SONG

Published: 11.10.2004

Story Codes: Erotic Horror

Synopsis: What’s inside Faith?

The Moth’s Song

It was a big old gothic farmhouse, and it stood there well back from the road looking uncomfortable in its suit of new wood siding– new windows, new gutters and shingles on the roof, the porch rebuilt and still unpainted. Most of the renovation was done, but there was a dumpster out in back, and some stacks of building material still stood in the overgrown yard. The house gave the impression of a grandmother tricked out in girl’s clothes for a night on the town. It didn’t look right.

I pulled up in front of it under a sweltering late summer sky the color of a dirty mirror, and before I even cut the engine the front door banged open and Faith came running out. She was wearing jeans and a cotton work shirt and she looked great, tanned and tightened up, and with that elusive gloss that engagement to a guy with money can give a girl, and I saw that all the jokes I’d prepared about her becoming an Earth Mother wouldn’t work at all. She wasn’t the neurotic and edgy wreck of a girl I’d known from our days in the city anymore, and I felt something strange in my chest when I saw her, something like what you must feel when you see an animal you’ve nursed back to health running free again. She reminded me of the pain we’d shared during that time, but there was something else too. She was over it now. I really hadn’t realized till then that I wasn’t.

“Davey! You made it! Oh God! Look at you! You look great!”

She ran across the yard and threw her arms around me and held me tight, and above the smoky scent of the fallen leaves and the sweetness of the crushed autumn grass I smelled the soft musk of her soap and shampoo. It immediately took me back to those terrible days we spend in the city nursing each other over our broken hearts and shattered lives; desperate days, days I thought would never end.

“So you found it okay? Did you have much trouble? Was my map okay?”

“Your map was great, Faith. I just had some trouble finding County H, the sign was down.”

“That’s from the harvesters,” she laughed. “They knock everything down this time of year. God, Davey! Look at you! I can’t believe it. I am so glad to see you! Come inside, come on.”

I let her drag me across the yard towards the house. Clouds of grasshoppers and little moths exploded from the weeds with every step we took. The sound of the cicadas was loud in the trees out behind the house, so loud you couldn’t hear the sounds of the diesel engines in the big harvester that crawled around in the fields half a mile away, looking like a kid’s toys in that expanse of emerald green.

“Todd’s still at work but he promised he’d be back for dinner: he’s really dying to meet you. Meanwhile I’ve got so much to tell you, and I want to hear everything you’ve been up to.”

“Listen, Faith,” I began. “I’ve been thinking about this. I passed a motel back on I-90 and I think maybe it would be better if I stayed there. Less awkward and all.”

She stopped on the stairs and looked back at me. Her gray eyes, which I remembered so well red-rimmed and filled with tears, were clear now and even mischievous. She was alarmingly beautiful.

“Todd knows all about us, Davey. I’ve told him everything. He understands. In fact, that’s why he wants to meet you. He wants to thank you for saving my life.”

“I didn’t save your life,” I said. “You would have been fine.”

She gave me a look that said we both knew better.

“Have you heard anything from her lately?”

“Not since the time I told you about on the phone. It’s just as well. You were right: there’s really nothing between us anymore. I still had her grandmother’s table cloth and some crap she wanted, so I sent it to her, and that was it.”

She examined me, peering into my face with sisterly concern and said, “It’s not laughing time yet, is it? Not for you, I mean.”

“No. Not quite yet it isn’t.”

She was referring to something we used to tell each other back then, when we clung to each other like survivors of some horrible disaster amidst the stormy wreckage of our lives: that someday we’d look back on it all and laugh. It became a private joke, asking each other whether we were there yet, whether it was time to laugh.

“Poor Davey,” she said.

“And you? Gainfully employed and happily engaged. I guess it’s time for you?”

The smile stayed on her lips but her eyes lost their shine. “I think so. I seem to be disgustingly happy. I mean, I should be. That’s what I need you to tell me, Davey. But I know this: seeing you makes me happy. You’ll be able to tell me. No one knows me like you do.”

She was right. I could always tell how she was feeling even if she couldn’t tell herself, and that’s why I was here, only this time it was fairly obvious that something wasn’t quite right. She’d admitted as much to me during our phone calls, calls that had become more frequent since her engagement to Todd. She should have been supremely happy—a good job, an engagement, the newly renovated house–and instead there was a cloying feeling of something being not quite right, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

She showed me the house: the huge plasma TV and sound system in the living room, the expensive furniture and Peshawar carpets on the polished hardwood floors. The new kitchen with the industrial range and fridge, the huge bathrooms and multi-head showers, the Seth Thomas clocks and expensive antiques. She showed me the master bedroom, rather austere, with an antique shaker bed and armoire, and she showed me the room they had made up for me down the hall, a former child’s room, overlooking the vast fields behind the house. I was going to mention the motel again, but I knew Faith wouldn’t hear of it.

Todd did very well for himself. He was in biotech, and had worked for a big agri-business for some years doing genetic research and gene-splicing before he’d quit and gone off to found his own private research and consulting company in the same area. He worked ferocious hours, but it had paid off for him, and he’d hit it big in cut-worm protection, finding a way to sterilize male cutworm moths so the females would lay infertile eggs. Sterilized cutworm moths had paid for the farmhouse, had paid for his BMW, and had paid for the rock on Faith’s finger.

Noctuidae moths had been very good to Todd Burrows. He was an expert on their genetics and they seemed to repay his interest, for as the sun went down and the clouds parted, they began to rise in nebulous clouds from the misty fields, getting ready for their night of activity. They began to flit across the porch and even land on us, forcing Faith to cover her wine glass with her hand. She shuddered

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go inside. I can’t stand these things. They’re everywhere and they’ll only get worse as the sun goes down. They wake up to feed.”

“Why are there so many?” I asked, because already there were twenty or more crawling around the porch light.

“Todd thinks he somehow got some pheromone on his clothes at the lab and brought it home. It’s on the house now somewhere, and we don’t know where. It brings them from miles around and totally freaks me out. I can’t stand them. Every night it’s like this. I can’t wait for winter.”

I worked in chemistry, and part of the reason that Todd and I were supposed to get along so well was because we could talk science to each other, even though the areas of overlap between his field and mine were tenuous at best. I worked with drugs for humans; he worked with insect and plant genetics. Faith knew the difference, but she was hoping we’d connect. She wanted us to get along.

We went inside and Faith closed the door and put on the air conditioner. We’d been talking about nothing personal, just mutual friends and changes to our old neighborhood. Faith had been living with a musician named Eric when Jean and I moved in on the first floor on their building. Jean went to visit her mother in Greece a few weeks after we’d moved in, and then had decided that maybe it would be best if she stayed on for a while, maybe the whole winter, maybe more. There was so much to see and do in Greece and after all, what was she going to do in Chicago with me except watch me flop from one crappy job to another, coming home pissed off and surly on those nights when I didn’t come home flat-out stoned? We both knew it had been a mistake for her to move out from California to be with me, though neither of us would admit it. When she first told me of her plans to stay in Greece I was actually glad to be free of the responsibility for her happiness. It wasn’t until three days later that it hit me and I fell apart.

It was Faith who got me through the heartbreak and total wreck of my life in the months that followed, who actually took me back down to the U to register for the classes I needed to finish my degree, laterally dragging me along by the hand. But whatever had come between Jean and me, it seemed to be contagious because a month after Jean left me, Eric moved out on Faith. They hadn’t been together that long, but still for me, who’d lost everything, they seemed like a rock of commitment, and I used to envy their relationship when Faith would invite me up for dinner. Eric would sit in the living room and watch the game or listen to music, and Faith and I would sit in the kitchen and talk. Neither of us had any idea that he was seeing someone else.

No matter how many times Faith denied it, I felt as though Jean’s leaving me had given Eric the idea, and I felt responsible. Faith took it hard and her life fell apart, just as mine had: the same deep depression, the same thoughts of suicide. It was remarkable how little we had other than our shaky relationships: no jobs, no social life, no other friends. We clung to each other like drowning people, and there’d been times when we were honestly afraid to let the other one out of our sight, not knowing what they might do. Not knowing what we ourselves might do if left alone. We became inseparable. Our doors were always open.

We tried sex, but it was really no good. It wasn’t what we needed at the time, and so I was limp and she was dry and besides, you can’t make love and cry at the same time, so it was just no good, but it was a sign of how close we were that we could actually laugh about it. We lay naked in bed together holding each other and laughing and crying, and that’s pretty much how we spent that horrible winter.

And now it was all coming back, but without the tears. She’d graduated from Columbia with a degree in broadcast journalism and taken a job in the tiny market of Bartlett Wisconsin producing a local cable news show, met Todd Burrows and gotten engaged, and now as we sat in her kitchen and talked, the kitchen Todd had bought her, I realized that I was really in love with her. I’d never opened myself up to another human being the way I’d opened myself up to Faith, and she’d seen the very worst of me and hadn’t pulled away. She’d accepted me and loved me in spite of it–or maybe loved me because of it, I don’t know–and I knew now that I’d loved her all along. My grief over losing Jean had blinded me to it. I’d been standing too close to Faith to see.

She loved me too. I could tell in the way she handled her wine glass, the way she held her head and the look of complete understanding in her eyes, the sweet reluctant sadness that always broke through when she started to talk about Todd and the way she quickly steered the conversation back to us, to things we’d done and things we’d said. She wasn’t ready to marry this guy. She just couldn’t yet tell herself that.

It had been a big mistake for me to come see her like this. I knew that now. It could only cause trouble.

“I don’t know,” she said when I finally cornered her about her lack of happiness and the things she’d hinted about on the phone. “I think I might have picked up something. Some bug or something, like Lyme disease or West Nile virus. I’ve got these funny marks.”

I didn’t think her problem was physical.

“Marks?”

“Yeah. And I have spells, just like an old form wife. Not dizzy spells really, but the kind of thing where you feel like you can’t quite wake up, or tell if something was a dream or not.”

“What kind of marks?”

Faith looked at me for a moment, making up her mind, then she stood up and leaned over the table, pulling down her collar to show me the swell of her breast. There was a reddish ring on her skin about an inch in diameter, an oval really, almost like a bite mark but not as big. I thought at first it might be a love bite but it was too evenly round, with no tooth marks. Besides, Faith would have known what a bite mark was and wouldn’t have shown me something like that. As it was, I felt a disconcerting twinge in my stomach when I saw the swell of flesh above her fetching, lacey bra and thought of another man biting her like that. That breast had been mine for the taking once, and I still remember what it felt like in my hand, the way she cradled my head and sniffed back her tears as I kissed her nipples, trying to make her pain go away. I think it was the best I was ever able to make her feel, and when nothing else would work, I would just kiss and play with her breasts, and it gave us both some peace.

“There are more,” she said. Then her mouth curled in a naughty grin and she said, “Maybe I can show you later?”

The lift to her eyebrows told me she was teasing, but only just. I was shocked by the surge of excitement I felt.

Headlights suddenly swept over the front of the house and there was the crunch of tires on gravel. Through the living room windows I could see clouds of moths and grasshoppers in the headlights of Todd’s Beemer as it rolled up the driveway like an alligator climbing up on a sunny bank. I also saw a sudden tightness take over Faith’s features, and anxiety in her eyes. She knew I saw it, and she gave me a quick, pleading look, not to say anything.

She met him at the back door with a wifely kiss that for all its cool domesticity still made my heart sink, and Todd came over with a big smile and shook my hand, but it was already too late. I tried to like him for Faith’s sake, but the damage had been done. Maybe it was simple jealousy, or maybe it was the expensive suit or the fashionable glasses so out of place in this old farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere, or maybe it was just the smugness of a man who had something I suddenly wanted, but I just couldn’t. Faith’s old life and her future collided there in that kitchen, and I took the brunt of it. I felt strangely shabby and out of place, some hobo from the past that Faith was feeding for old time’s sake. I decided I’d really better stay in that motel.

Todd wouldn’t hear of it though. He’d stopped and bought aged New York strips from a specialty purveyor in town, and Faith had apparently told him the name of some rare single-malt scotch that I’d mentioned once when I was trying to impress her, because Todd had bought two bottles. One he opened right away, and the other was for me to take home with me: a kind of souvenir of my visit.

We sat in the living room sipping the scotch and trying to find something to talk about that didn’t involve Faith

He wasn’t a bad guy, he just wasn’t for Faith. I’d known her wild side, her desperate, dope-smoking, excesses, and I knew that there was no way she could ever put her arms around him and lean her head against his and cry like she did with me when she needed to. I just couldn’t see her arranging his arms around her so that he held her just the way she wanted to be held, and find shelter and comfort in his embrace, and there was no way she would ever turn those gray eyes to him and ask him if she really truly was beautiful and if he wasn’t just saying that. It was just all wrong.

At one point I was looking out the living room window at the scene outside illuminated by the overhead yard light. There really were way too many bugs out there: clouds of them, and the sealed and air-conditioned house had the feel of a place under siege. I turned back from the window to say something about it, and caught Todd as he was taking a sip of his drink. It was just an instant, and his head was down and to the side so I couldn’t quite see, but I had the impression that he had both his lips over the surface of the drink, as if he were sucking it up directly from the surface like a bug.

~ ~ ~

They both went upstairs–he to change, and Faith for some other reason–though I know they were up there talking about me. I began to get kind of sick, sitting in his house, drinking his whiskey, knowing now what I’d lost. I got up and turned off the stereo, and in the silence I heard a soft puttering sound, coming from the windows in the side of the house. I pulled back the curtain and looked out and saw hundreds of fluttering shapes bouncing and knocking against the windows: the moths, attracted to the lights of the house, attracted to whatever kind of contaminant Todd had brought back from work, throwing their soft furry bodies against the screens, walking up and down and fluttering their wings in agitation. There was something nauseating about it.

“Come on,” Todd said, as he trotted down the stairs in his jeans, “I’ll show you my green house. Faith calls it the bug house. This should interest you.”

We went out the back door and across the yard. The moths were attracted to the lights from the yard and the house and left us pretty much alone, although every so often one would catch in my hair or stumble across the back of my neck. The soft, furry, fairy kiss of their wings made my skin crawl, but Todd didn’t seem to mind, even when they landed in his hair.

The tables of plants in the greenhouse were all covered in nets of cheesecloth, and as soon as he switched the lights on things began to flutter beneath them like little ghostly shadows. For the first time I became aware of a sound, a very soft, sputtery sound, like the soft cooing sound of doves, only drier and darker somehow: a very nocturnal sound. It was the sound of the moths.

“Yes, they sing,” Todd said. “Some of the Noctuidae have tympanum membranes on their thorax, and they make that little putter sound when they’re looking for mates. They’re fascinating, really. And under-appreciated. There’s over ten thousand species of moths, way more than there are butterflies, but because almost all of them are nocturnal we never even see them.”

On one table stood a supply of bottles and chemicals, and I walked over. Mostly nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers, but I also noticed some smaller bottle from a pharmaceutical supplier. Ibogaine and yohimbine. Both of them are naturally occurring hallucinogenic compounds, but they’re also involved in plant metabolism, so I didn’t think twice about them. There was also gamma-amino butyric acid: GABA, tightly controlled now because it was the premiere date-rape drug, used for rendering its victims senseless. It registered briefly, but then Todd called me over and I forgot about it. My mind was on other things.

“Moths are nocturnal,” Todd said. “They’re really just waking up about now. That’s why most people don’t pay them much attention: they do all their business at night. Moths pollinate more flowers than bees do. Any flower that’s open at night is probably pollinated more by moths than by bees: evening primrose, lycanthus, hollyhocks. Look. Here’s who I’m working with now.”

He pulled back the cloth over a frame and stuck in his hand and came out holding a moth about an inch and a half across: bigger than a moth had a right to be. Todd held it by a leg as the moth vibrated its wings wildly, then settled down and folded them across its back and began to crawl over his hand. Its wings were marked with brown circles and lines on a tan background; its body was fat and covered with rust-colored fur.

“This is Escherigea etops. Those circles on his wings are called eyespots. The moth spreads its wings when it’s threatened and predators think they’re eyes of some bigger animal. Those lines on his wings look like teeth. Scares off the birds. I know this little guy inside and out. Have the entire genome worked out, know what everything does. We’ve been doing some gene swapping, etops and me, haven’t we buddy?”

I looked at the inhuman face: the blind, faceted eyes and the twitching, sucking mouth. Two large feathery antennae twitched from the top of his head.

“The lovely thing about etops is that way they reproduce. They have what we call a very mobile genome, lots of variation, lots of mutation. They mutate so much that almost half the males are functionally sterile. Great genes, lots of variation, but they’re sterile. Old etops has found a way around that though. The female has multiple partners. The males take turns with the female, and one male’s sperm piggybacks on top of another’s. Hitches a ride, so to speak, so the sterile male’s DNA sneaks in on a fertile male’s. Pretty clever, huh?”

The talk of sex made me uneasy, and I didn’t like the looks of that moth, crawling around on his hand like a furry blind thing, antennae waving. I didn’t like the gawky way the feet dug their tiny claws into Todd’s hand

“I never really gave much thought to the sex lives of moths,” I said. “I just thought the female laid eggs and the male fertilized them or something.”

Todd smiled. “No. Fish work like that. Bugs have organs just like people. Well, not like people. The male has an aedaegus that deposits the semen. He also has organs down there that hold on to the female during sex, kind of like having another pair of hands or claws. Fascinating, huh?”

He must have seen the look on my face because he laughed. He was enjoying this.

“So what do you do with these things?” I asked, wanting to break the mood. “All that research and gene mapping? You trying to wipe them out, like with the cut-worms?”

He put his hand back under the cloth and shook the moth off.

“What do I do?” He gave me a knowing, satisfied smile. “Whatever I want. I can do pretty much manipulate their genes to do whatever I want to with them. Make them brown, white, black; short wings, big wings, no wings at all.”

‘So you can make them big or small too? Change their size?”

“No trouble at all,” he said.

From the house, the kitchen light started flashing on and off like a fire alarm. Todd smiled.

“That’s Faith signaling up to come in for dinner. She refuses to come outside anymore at night. She hates the bugs, especially the moths.”

Todd covered the cages and walked over to the light switch. I realized that this was my last chance to say something to him alone before we went back into the house. I didn’t want to talk to him in the yard with the moths fluttering against my face.

“Listen, Todd. I really appreciate the offer to put me up for the night, but I think I’d rather stay in that motel, so I think after dinner I’ll just—”

“Oh come on! Faith is having a ball seeing you. I haven’t seen her looking so happy in months. It’ll break her heart if you don’t stay. Besides, I really have to get back to the lab after dinner. She’ll be all alone and, despite what she might have told you, I really hate leaving her alone.”

I was embarrassed. “No. She hasn’t said anything about that.”

Todd smiled. “Well, whatever. I know I work terrible hours and it’s hard on her. Things will change soon though, once I finish this one project.”

Todd turned back to me and lowered his head conspiratorially.

“And, look: if something were to happen between you two… Well, let’s just say I understand. Faith and I have a very open relationship, know what I’m saying? It’s okay with me. I know how much you mean to her.”

I felt the blood pound in my ears like surf on a beach, but before I could think of anything to say, Todd switched the lights off and hustled me out into the yard. I tried to wait for him as he locked up, but the moths were growing bolder and had been joined by other bugs: some delicate but maddening lace wings that seemed to aim for my nose and mouth, and huge, stumbling beetles that buzzed in flight like old war-time bombers and dragged their scratchy chitonous legs through my hair. I waited for as long as I could stand it, but then I turned and just ran to the house as fast as my dignity would allow.

~ ~ ~

I didn’t know what to do, and if Faith noticed my silence during dinner, she didn’t say anything. I pretended to be tired and excused myself, leaving Faith and Todd alone. Faith showed me the room and got me some towels, and showed me where there was an extra blanket if the AC got to be too much. Several times she seemed about to say something, but I didn’t give her the chance. I needed to sort things out.

From the bed I could hear them talking downstairs as they straightened up, although they didn’t say much, and Todd left shortly after. I heard Faith clearing away after dinner, and then I heard her come upstairs and go into her room. I lay in bed looking at the moonlight and shadows in the walls and trying to ignore the soft thump of the moths against the window screens.

It had been hot and dry all day, and although the AC was on inside, it was still stifling and still outside. Somehow the heat communicated itself to me lying in bed with just a sheet over me and made me sweat. Occasionally I could hear Faith moving around in the house. Despite the extensive overhaul, the old floors still creaked softly and the house itself seemed to groan as it settled. The sound of those soft bodies hitting the windows was maddening.

I heard her come up the stairs and stop outside my door, and then go back down again. I heard her come up and go down the hall to her room. I heard her lie down on her bed and then get up again. I knew exactly what was going through her mind

It wasn’t a happy home. There was a kind of clinical sterility about it that was so unlike Faith that it made me nervous. I tried to sleep but kept on waking up, hearing the sounds of the moths. I fancied I could hear that soft, dry, cooing sound I’d heard in the greenhouse above the soft pattering of their bodies against the screens. I finally took my tee shirt off, rolled it up and threw it on the floor to make the room feel more lived in. I dozed.

I was instantly awake when she tapped on the door and pushed it open. I’d been expecting it. I didn’t say anything when she came in. Through the mottled shadows of the moths on the window screen I could see she was wearing old sweat pants and a tee shirt, what she always slept in when we were together. She closed the door behind her and walked over and sat on the side of the bed without saying a word.

I knew I shouldn’t. I knew it would only lead to trouble and do neither of us any good, but I knew that she wanted it too, and I might have been able to deny myself, but I couldn’t deny her. I never could.

I took her wrist in my hand and I pulled her down, and she resisted only briefly before she fell down on top of me, her hair was hanging around her face and curtaining us off from the world. Her lips were warm and so soft and yielding and the way she needed me so much, the way we fit together so perfectly, the smoothness of her skin under my fingers was all too much. Nothing had changed and everything had, and suddenly it was just the way it had been last January and yet this time the hunger was for each other, not to save ourselves, but to give ourselves away, and as she kissed me I knew that despite her engagement I wasn’t the only one who had felt so lonely.

I sat up, kicking the sheets off me and Faith lifted her arms up so I could pull her tee shirt off and then leaned back on her hands, giving her tits to me, knowing how they drove me crazy. We didn’t say a word. I filled my mouth with her flesh and thrust my fingers between her legs and she fell back with a groan, her hips working against me, desperate for my touch.

I’d known how much she could hurt and now I learned how much she could want too, and she pushed me over on my back and pulled my shorts down, panting with excitement. She got up on her knees and dragged her tongue over me.

“Faith… Wait!”

She opened her mouth and impaled it on my cock and sucked me with a voracity I’ve never felt from a woman before, her cheeks hollowed, brow furrowing as the shadows of the fluttering moths clouded her face. She went down on me, groaning, but when she dragged her lips up me all I could see was Todd, sipping his drink through his pursed lips. There was something insect-like and obscene about it, with Faith splayed over me like a female mantis with her prey, and I reached down and pulled her off. I didn’t want to see her like that.

She rolled over onto her back with a gasp and lifted her hips, and I pulled her sweat pants off. She was naked beneath them and wet, and my fingers found her out as I kissed her and she sobbed into my mouth, wrapping her arms around my neck. This time I had no problem getting hard. I was erect and throbbing as soon as I kissed her. She spread her legs shamelessly and I could see her already glistening with wetness. I plunged into her softness and she sobbed with pleasure. Immediately she started to fuck me, throwing her hips up at me with a wildness that took my breath away.

I’d never dreamed she could be so passionate and so athletic in bed, but now when I held her wrists down and buried myself inside her, she met me stroke for stroke. I fucked her hard, and when I flagged she fucked me back, curling her body up to mine with a biological urgency that went beyond mere lust, as if her very survival depended on it. She squeezed me inside, drew me into her and milked me, threw her legs around my back and held me deep as she worked against me. She took what she needed from me too, holding my hair in her hands and kissing and licking my face as her hips worked whorishly beneath her.

“Come in me,” she hissed. “Shoot it in me, Davey. I need to feel you come. You don’t know how long I’ve wanted this!”

She was slick and tight and as sweet as the earth, as strong as the night and I couldn’t have held back if I’d wanted to. I looked down into her face clouded with her rapture, and I gave her everything, pouring myself into her as she went wild beneath me, clawing my back and biting my shoulder, and when at last I fell back exhausted she peeled her body away from mine and kissed me all over, down my chest, trailing her warm lips along my belly.

I pulled her back down in bed and got up on my elbow, leaning over her. For the first time since that day last winter I got a chance to look at her body, and what I saw made me gasp in alarm. She was marked all over with those little circles like she’d shown me in the kitchen, scraped as if she’d been worked over with a metal rasp.

“My God! What happened to you?”

There were those circles all over her breasts and shoulders, going down her belly and laid along the tops of her thighs, some old and fading into bruises, some new and still red, and her body was streaked with lines a scabs and strange red scratches. There were two bruised areas on the outsides of her hips that looked as if she’d been flayed with a whip, as if she’d been held.

“Faith? What the hell’s going on here?”

“I told you! I told you but I guess you didn’t believe me! I don’t know what it is, Davey. You tell me.”

“Does he do something to you? I mean, when you make love. Is he kinky or something?”

“No. I mean, I don’t really know. Half the time I can’t remember. I just seem to wake up all bruised like this, with these marks all over me.”

I sat up. “We’ve got to get you out of here, Faith. We’ve got to get you to a doctor or something. Maybe even the police.”

“Shhh, shhh.” She put her fingers over my lips. “Whatever they are, they don’t bother me. I feel fine, except that they’re kind of sore. These cuts on my hips are the worst. They hurt when I bend or stretch.”

“Faith, Faith…” I didn’t know where to begin. In the moonlight her eyes were clear and calm and I couldn’t look away. “Look, We’ve got to talk. I love you, Faith, and I made a horrible mistake. I know that now. And you’re making one too, marrying him. We belong together. We’ve got to get you out of here.”

It all tumbled out of me then, all the feelings I had for her and the ones I didn’t even know I had, all my need and loneliness of the last seven months after she’d moved away. I tried to be fair. I tried not to say bad things about Todd, but I had to tell her how I felt, and I had to tell her how wrong he was for her. Still, I didn’t mention what he’d said to me as we were leaving the greenhouse. There seemed no need for that.

“I know, I know,” she said at last. “Everything you say is true. I love you too, Davey. I’ve known it for months now. You’re the one I want, but I can’t just walk out on him now. I’ll have to break it to him slowly, talk to him. I care for him, Davey, I really do. I just didn’t know.”

I burned with anguish, with fear and desire. I held her, and it was like old times, us crying together in each other’s arms, but now they were a different kind of tears, and it made all the difference in the world. Just the feel of her in my arms set off my lust, and I wanted her again.

“I have to go,” she said. “He’ll be back soon. I have to get back to bed.”

“But what’s going to happen now?” I asked. “How am I going to be in the same room with him with you around?”

Faith sat up naked on the edge of the bed. In the moonlight, even with the shadows of the moths crawling over her, even with the marks and scars, she looked beautiful.

“Oh, it’s not like that,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about that. Todd’s all for this, for us being together like this. He told me.”

“He told me too, Faith. He’s crazy. But he can’t have thought this would happen, that we’d feel this way about each other.”

“No,” she said. “No. He couldn’t have.”

She reached down and picked up her tee shirt and put it on.

“I have to go. You’ll just have to let me handle this in my own way, Davey. Please. I’ll tell you all about it later. For now just let me handle it. You sleep. Leave it to me.”

I tried to pull her back to the bed and she leaned over and gave me just one kiss, one long hungry kiss. I wanted her to stay with me, but she pulled away. She bent and picked up her sweats and carried them out of the room, closing the door behind her with a finger to her lips, and I lay back staring at the shadows on the ceiling.

~ ~ ~

I might have heard Todd’s car come back. I might have heard their voices on the stairs. Whatever it was, I awoke from a troubled dream to find absolute silence in the house and silence outside, and the room seemed unnaturally dark and enclosed. Then I saw why: all the moths outside had stopped their wild flitting against the windows and were clinging to the glass blocking out almost all the light. They were slowly moving their wings, trembling as if breathing, a slow, almost hypnotic sight.

Through the gaps in their patterns I could see the moon high in the sky, thin clouds razoring across it. Outside the cicadas had stopped and the crickets were shrill in the dying grass and in the fields that stretched away from the house like a sea of green. Beneath the forlorn stridulations of the crickets I could hear that soft, furry sound again, loud this time, and not so much loud as present, as if the air were full of it and I could feel it as a soft pressure somewhere against my body, a small, curling thing, as if cotton balls were raining down on my skin. I heard it with a part of myself I don’t usually use for hearing things, and it made me think of dark things, of life under rotting logs and in the secret spaces beneath the bark of trees, the dry coolness below the surface of the soil where the blind bugs live.

There was a creaking, a rhythmic metallic sound, and I realized with alarm that Faith and Todd were having sex. The sound and the steady tempo were unmistakable, the old rhythm of copulation. Whatever Faith’s plans for handling Todd were, they involved fucking him first. My heart sank. There was no way I could go back to sleep or even try.

I should have stayed in bed. Everything told me to stay in bed, but the same time something made me get up. I swept the sheets off me and got to my feet. The shadows of the moths on the windows showed a sudden trembling agitation. I put on my pants and went to the door and opened it.

Moonlight in the empty hallway, the moving shadows of the moths made giant on the walls; the moving shadows of leaves on the trees. Now the creaking of the bed stopped, to be replaced by another sound, a kind of scrabbling sound of something hard scurrying or clawing against the polished wood floor. Then that soft, spluttering explosion of moth song again, like puffs of air against my skin, like dry bubbles somewhere in my chest.

I already knew what was happening. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew without looking, yet still I had to look. I tiptoed out into the hallway, keeping near the wall so the floorboards wouldn’t creak. Their bedroom was just down the way; the door stood ajar, moonlit darkness beyond it. Somehow I already knew what I’d see.

The room was filled with moving shadows and when I pushed the door open there was a violent furry as its wings began to beat. Faith was naked, on her back, and the thing was between her legs, it’s furry thorax pumping at her with a slow, obscene regularity. The wings beat harder and I felt the wind on my face, smelled the odor of wet leaves on the forest floor and damp things beneath rocks, life half-formed emerging from its glistening chrysalis, the musty smell of insect pheromones coupled with the scent of human female arousal. Between the beating of its wings and the scrabbling of its horny legs I saw the organ enter between the columns of her thighs, dark and shiny. I saw the dull, moon-knowing faceted eyes, the long, sucking mouth, the feathery antennae stroking her breasts, and I watched as the clawed feet scratched at her flesh with urgent, instinctive need. Two hooked appendages emerged from its thorax and held her hips up off the bed so that her legs hung limp on either side, and her thighs flexed as she took the steady mechanical thrust of the thing’s appendage.

It saw me, or it knew I was there, but that didn’t stop it, and there was nothing I could do myself but stand there in horror, breathing the reek of the thing and watching that furry abdomen pumping against her again and again. Faith seemed unconscious, but her lips were slack and her eyes closed as if in beatific pleasure. The wings went still and the thorax suddenly trembled and I knew the thing was ejaculating.

I dove at it then, and my hands closed on its soft, waxy fur. The body was cool and hard and massively heavy. I pushed at it and pulled, but it was not till it was done that it climbed off her with awful twitching legs and got down from the bed and turned to face me. It stood on its hind legs like a man, the body enormous, the eyes blank and each facet reflecting the light of the moon through the window.

There was no intelligence in its face, nothing but blind instinct, but what it new it knew perfectly: the sounds of the night and what happens in the shadows where blind white root meets sucking mouth in the darkness of the soil. Where sex is a force like life and hunger and eating and being eaten. The wisdom of the insects, the knowledge of the moth.

It rushed at me then and I covered my face and fell as the wings struck me, dislodging a storm of pearly scales that filled my nose and mouth as I fought to breath. There was the sharp hook of insect legs on my flesh as it scrambled past, easily throwing me down and scrambling over me. Then the next thing I remember was fighting back my blind horror as I grabbed Faith and wrapped a sheet around her and carried and dragged her down the stairs, through the immaculate kitchen and out the back where the moths still hadn’t stirred. I carried her across the lawn, my bare feet crushing the writhing furry bodies, and threw her into the car just as the moths began to stir and flutter up from the weeds around us.

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.

THE END