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Click hereI 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!
patientleealmost 10 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.
beasthunterover 11 years agoNoira said it better than I can; just wanted to add my admiration.
Noiraabout 12 years agoI've heard it said that if you can take the sex out of the story and still have a horror story it's not erotic horror anymore. I always wondered a little if that was possible, because certainly it's easy enough to write something good and creepy, certainly it's easy enough to write something good and sexy.
Somehow you managed to actually write a story that fits the definition of erotic horror perfectly. You can't lose the sex because that's where the squick lies, and you can't lose the horror because that's where the sex lies and without both you just have a story about a not necessarily compatible couple on a farm and and old lover.
Whenever I consider the genre, I will think of this story and squirm a little uncomfortably and realize that yes... it can be done.
marvellousnineover 12 years agoDoctor, I bow in deep respect. That was a beautifully written little gem. I have read worse in the Year's Best collections of horror.
Sir, I beg you, keep writing.
Anonymousover 14 years agoThis is just good horror period. The sex was good, but the idea of the moths just made my skin crawl. Thanks, and keep writing more like this!
