Crickets
This short horror tale appeared in Volume IV, Number 1 of Late Knocking ("The Poe Issue"). Story copyright
1988, William D. Cissna.


He'd hated the house from the very beginning. Not as much as she had, obviously. Though it may not have been
the only reason, she'd finally walked out rather than live there another minute. Guess he couldn't blame her,
except that she made most of the money. Which, in effect, condemned him to either staying in the house or
living in the gutter.
He'd chosen the house. But just barely.
When they'd come to town, their home rental requirements were two: it must be available right away, and it
must be cheap. He had no job; hers had "great potential" but nothing much up-front, money-wise.
Fast and cheap. A deadly combination. At the end of their allotted time, desperate, they took a little ranch
house on a busy side street. The kindly old lady who showed it to them was the final selling point: she
promised to keep an eye on them, help them along, keep the house clean and functioning.
Three weeks later, when they moved in, she'd taken off for six months in Florida, the bushes and trees were
dying, the grass hadn't been cut all summer and the interior hadn't been touched. The window screens didn't
function, the tub didn't drain, the heat in three of the six rooms wouldn't come on and the tile was peeling off
the floors.
"Paradise lost," he had muttered in a half-hearted attempt at a joke when she'd finally come out of her initial
hysteria.
"Paradise never found, and damn well never will be," she'd growled back. That, he decided later, had marked
the beginning of the end.
The fact that he had steadfastly refused to do much cleaning up -- those things had never mattered much to
him -- and simultaneously couldn't seem to get up the spirit to take care of the kids or pound the streets for a
job, might also have contributed to her annoyance. Then, when he decided she'd bugged him enough about his
inaction, he'd slapped her a couple of times. She turned very quiet. He'd gone off for two days at the beach,
using her money. He came back to the nearly empty house and the note.
The first thing he noticed was the overwhelming sense of silence. No arguing children, no demanding wife, no
squabbling cats. Peace at last.
Which lasted until the first night, when dark fell and the silence was punctured by what must have been
hundreds of crickets, each one calling out to him as if it sat next to his ear. He couldn't believe he'd never
noticed their noise before, but all things were relative. Maybe the family had been even louder.
But without them, the song of the crickets maddened him.
That night, he'd gone without sleep, lying wide-eyed in the dark room, uncomfortable on the lumpy twin bed
she'd left behind. Sweat lay on his brow as the remnant of the day's humid three-digit heat lingered on around
him. And from everywhere, it seemed, the obnoxious chirp drilled into his head.
Finally, and not a moment too soon, the sun rose outside and the noise ceased. Though he knew the heat would
rise to unbearable, and he should be out somewhere looking for work, he drifted instead into a troubled sleep.
The second night was no better than the first -- except, if possible, louder.
On the third night, midnight found him stalking the perimeter of the house with a flashlight, hunting. But
even the few he did find and stomp out of existence were small and didn't seem to dull the outcry of the others
in the slightest.
The next morning, more frustrated than he could ever recall being, he walked to the corner store, shelled out a
quarter and called the County Agricultural Extension Agent, who agreed, he thought reluctantly, to come over
and talk to him.
"Mr. Richardson?" the plump, matronly type asked when he opened the door.
"Miss Anderson, from the county?" he asked.
"Yes, sir. Now about these crickets, what exactly seems to be the problem?" she asked, as if she couldn't
believe she'd had to form the question.
He got her to sit in one of the two straight-back chairs remaining in the living room. "I'm sorry, but they're
making me crazy. I just wondered if maybe there's something going on around town, or if there's some reason
they're attracted to the house."
"Well, Mr. Richardson, everybody in town has a few crickets from time to time. We're not exactly downtown
Manhattan here."
Christ, lady, I'm not an idiot, he wanted to say. "I know that, but there seem to be a lot of them around my
house.  I can't sleep at night for all the noise."
She looked in his face, and could see the wear and tear. "Let me tell you what I know. Maybe that will help."
He gave her his grateful look, and sat back.
Field crickets, she told him, were the most common variety. They could be found nearly anywhere in the
country. Technically, they were vegetarians, but they were known to eat other insects, and even each other.
Though generally harmless, they were also known at times to damage crops. There were cases where they
would invade homes, sometimes devouring clothing in their passage.
"But what about the damn noise?" he demanded, impatient.
She pulled a note from her briefcase. "One of the cricket's lower forewings has sharp-edged veins on its top.
The upper forewing is ridged, something like a file, on its lower side. When one is drawn across the other, the
shrill 'music' is created. Think of a violin. There's this space between the cricket's wings and its back that acts
like the sound box, to amplify the music. Every cricket even comes with a back-up pair, in case of failure with
the primary pair."
"Wonderful. Nature is such a glorious thing," he muttered angrily.
"Actually, it is, Mr. Richardson," she said. "Why don't you just get yourself some earplugs?"
He snorted, trying to ignore the woman's impertinence. "So how do you kill them?"
"Kill them? I'm not an exterminator. No one else here has complained of a cricket problem, so there's
certainly no major infestation. I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill."
"You're getting your sleep, so what do you care?"
She stood quickly. "Sorry," she said curtly. "I thought information might help. But you don't want to know."
"Guess not," he snarled.
She turned on her heel and stomped from the house. "Thanks for nothing," he yelled from the door.
In the night that followed her visit, he lay on the bed as the noise grew around him again. Then the thing
fluttered across his face and he had to take a moment to decide whether his heart had actually stopped or he
had just imagined that sensation. He grabbed at the lamp on the rickety bedside table, illuminating a stretch of
naked floor.
In the dim light, the creature sat, small but noisy, near the wall. Inside! Hell, the house was like a sieve
anyway; he shouldn't be surprised, but he just didn't want the damn things near him.
When the loafer descended from on high, the resulting contact made a satisfactory squelch and left a
discernible stain on the floor. One less damned noisemaker, he thought.
Then he saw another nearby, and another, and another. The shoe fell again and again, making a staccato
drumbeat as the creatures seemed to multiply beyond comprehension. The thrashing went on and on, a
murderous frenzy, seemingly endless until it suddenly halted. The floor, littered with cricket corpses, moved
no longer.
A sickly grin plastered on his face, he gazed upon the carnage, inordinately pleased with himself. He shoved
greasy remains away from the bed with his shoe, then climbed back onto the sweaty sheets.
Outside, the sound level had dropped significantly. For the first time in days, he slid into a dream-filled
slumber, where outsized spray guns spewed deadly chemicals onto the black things that congregated in the
nooks and crannies of his house.
***
The woman on the phone didn't make much sense, exactly, Sheriff Miller knew, but you couldn't ignore
early-morning calls, as much as you might want to. Something wacky, about a whole hell of a lot of bugs at her
neighbor's house. She thought he'd better come over and have a look.
Bugs. Dammit. He hated bugs. Especially at four-thirty in the morning. Couldn't it wait?
She said they were awful loud. She wanted him to do something.
Okay.
When he pulled the patrol car into the driveway at the address she'd given him, he couldn't hear a sound other
than the train whistle two blocks away. Crazies, they'll do it to you every time.
Subtly, being sure to point it away from the windows, he trained his spotlight on the front of the house.
"Jesus God almighty!" he uttered. The house had no visible walls, no windows, no doors. Just a black solid that
swallowed the light, an undulating, throbbing mass of crickets covering every surface. He flicked off the light,
closed the window -- although he could see the bugs were nowhere in the yard or around his car -- and backed
the vehicle down to the end of the driveway. Common sense said he could wait until daylight.
The decision to close the window may have been the smartest he every made. From the total silence came a
sudden burst of sound when, as if giving the coming sunrise a greeting and farewell -- or perhaps, he thought
later, in some kind of victory cry -- the crickets joined in communal song for a few short moments.
The sound, he told his buddies later, was huge. It may have only been an illusion, but he felt that the car
windows bent towards him before resuming their shape as the barrage of sound passed him by. He sat with his
hands over his ears for a long time afterwards. By then, the sun was kissing the horizon and the crickets were
gone.
He found the man's body on the bed inside. He was entirely naked, and no clothing could be found anywhere in
the house, excepting a pair of loafers, one of them shredded with wear. The man's eardrums had burst, but
there were no other external signs of injury.
"Simple case of heart failure," said the coroner.
"Poor son of a bitch died of fear," said Sheriff Miller.
Jeri Anderson of the County Extension Office knew better.
***
Horror shorts -
by Bill Cissna