The house seemed innocent enough. A fixer-upper for sure, but that was all Mary and Flynt were looking for in their starter home. They weren’t rich, so finding somewhere they could put some elbow grease into over nights and weekends just made sense. It was nice for a while.

            Then Mary found the maggots in the basement. Seems the washer had been leaking for years, which made a sizeable little pool perfect for a thriving, writhing mass of maggots to make their own. Not 100% sure how to kill maggots, Flynt threw some bleach on them and scooped the white worms into a trash bag with a trowel. That was the start of things, it seems.

            Because the next day, Flynt was stung by a bee and found out he was allergic when his ear swelled shut. The doctor was kind enough not only to give him some allergy shots, but dial a local exterminator, who tore the beehive from their backyard tree. But it turned out that the bees had been keeping at bay an aggressive kind of hornet. Flynt and Mary weren’t allergic to hornets, but when you’ve been stung a few dozen times in a day, you start to feel funny.

            It was probably the grogginess induced by stings and medications that made Flynt step in the anthill the same day that Mary found out you can’t celebrate finally trapping that rat by jumping, barefoot, in a house with at least one scorpion. That night, the pair mused that at least they didn’t have snakes. Which is about the time that hissing could be heard from down the hall.

            They say that over one’s lifetime, it’s not unusual to swallow several pounds of insects while asleep. What is unusual is to pack all that consumption in to a single night. It left the medical examiners quite consternated, seeing the sheer quantity of creatures that had worked their way inside the young couple, seemingly from every possible entry. The scientific community was fascinated by the fact that almost everything removed from the bodies was still alive. And what kept the neighbors awake at night was that they never heard the screams.