The Littlings

Rebecca was a woman, regardless of how she’d look to you. A tomboy grown up, she had long accepted she struck many as, in a word, “butch.” Thick, square, and barrel-chested, Rebecca absent-mindedly chewed her nicotine gum in wide, obnoxious, exposed openings of her mouth, stimming as she glanced down to her van dash-holstered phone displaying directions; she couldn’t hear her music with the text-to-speech on. Thankfully, for pedestrians and other drivers, she wasn’t long pulling into the driveway of that morning’s client; Janet Frost of 108 Glengreen Estates.

…

Janet had perched herself on the sofa in the living room by the window with a book and a latte on the sill. It seemed the most productive way to spend the morning, especially as traders had a habit of being late. You hire a plumber or an electrician, and they practically show up five days after they said they would. Janet once had a glazer show up at nine at night; they were both lucky she hadn’t put her charcoal face mask on for the night.

She was prepared to hunker down for a long stay, about to use the wait as an excuse to finally get some reading done and absolve herself for her insatiable phone use when, no more than a page into “The Seven Sisters”, a hulking van with “Little Problems: Licensed Exterminator” printed across the side pulled into the drive. Eric had taken the car to drop the kids to school and for work, so the massive frame and rumbling engine were able to impose their presence unnecessarily close to the porch door. Janet almost didn’t hear the scurrying in the ceiling over her exasperated swear. Almost. She cast a quick skyward glance up before tucking a marker into the book she’ll never finish, hurrying to the kitchen to reboil the kettle, and answer the door a second after the bell was rung.

Rebecca stood in the open doorway kitted out in a shapeless blue jumpsuit, clasping a fat tool bag in her right hand. Janet’s immediate impression upon opening the door was Rebecca resembled a beer can.

“Good morning, Miss… Misses… Frosting… Frosty?”

Rebecca’s face scrunched and contorted, struggling to recall the phone call from yesterday evening. The blotchy ink-stained napkin with the details hastily written on it was back in the van. Janet graciously helped.

“Janet is fine. And good morning.”

“I’m Rebecca; we spoke on the phone.”

“Yes, I remember. Please, come in.”

“Ta!”

Rebecca stepped over the threshold and was about to step further until, catching the slight gape of Janet’s eyes, quickly stepped back and wiped her boots on the door mat. Rebecca, to avoid any further middle class faux pas, made a point of waiting for Janet to lead the way. Janet seemed appreciative as she smiled sweetly, walking on ahead.

“Can I get you a cup of tea or coffee, Rebecca?”

“A cup of tea, please, thank you.”

“Sugar and milk?”

“Please. Two spoons and just enough milk to make it go light brown.”

Janet made her way down the hall and back into the kitchen, expecting Rebecca to follow her, looking back in time to see her drop the cumbersome bag onto the freshly swept hardwood floor.

“I’m just going to set up here.”

Rebecca knelt down, unzipped the bag, tugging forcefully to get the zipper passed several broken teeth, and rummaged through an assortment within; gloves, hammers, tape, poison pellets, matches, and a slingshot. Janet busied herself with stewing tea in a small teapot, usually reserved for guests in the Frost house, craning back a little to call out to Rebecca, noisily searching her bag.

“Oh, that’s perfect, because I’ve been hearing a lot of scurrying out there, especially at night and in the mornings.”

Rebecca made an odd noise, somewhere between nasally derisive exhale and an ungraceful chuckle, as she stood up, placing the plugs of a stethoscope into her ears, pressing the diaphragm to the wall.

“Yeah, that’ll be them alright. They tend to keep close to the main halls of houses; close to the kitchen and radiators, easy to hear people coming and going. Typically, they go no higher than the ground floor ceiling, but you do get some that hide out in the attic for God knows what reason. A lot of the crazy ones do that; dementia or mania or whatever.”

Rebecca glided the diaphragm across the wall’s surface, listening for seconds at a time, tapping the wall with two fingers. She had forgotten Janet was there when she let out a concerned mumble.

“Oh no.”

Janet shot her head back into view from the kitchen doorway.

“What?”

She didn’t wait for an answer as she hurried to Rebecca’s side, who continued to search the wall, listening and tapping. Another ten seconds passed before Rebecca stepped back, unplugged the stethoscope, and sighed, scanning the house with her hands on her hips.

“Yeah… you’ve got a city.”

“A what!”

“A city. That’s what you call a nest of littlings this big.”

“Oh God! Is it bad?”

Janet was kept in merciless anxiety by Rebecca’s professional silence, reaching into her boilersuit pocket, taking out a pack of nicotine gum, popped a pellet into her mouth, and proceeded to chew like a grass munching cow, considering the walls of the hall as though her expertise had granted her X-ray vision to see through them.

“Have you found any of them dead?”

“… Excuse me?”

Rebecca didn’t clarify. Instead, she marched on through into the kitchen. Hesitating from the sudden assertiveness, Janet skittered after Rebecca, desperate to keep pace with Rebecca. The kitchen, along with the rest of the house, had a polished sheen to its surfaces, in preparation for Rebecca’s arrival, lest Janet be tormented at night with the thoughts of gossip that the Frosts live in squalor. Janet herself expected to beat Rebecca to the teapot, only to find she wasn’t even in the kitchen, instead continuing out to the back garden. Stalled once more from confusion, Janet shook herself back to reality and hurried out into the garden.

She hadn’t time, nor thought, to tidy up the garden but it was in relatively presentable condition, with the grass at a pleasant length still fresh a week after Eric had cut it, and a football and net and swing set adding a charming homeliness that distracted the gaze from noticing the half painted shed at the bottom of the garden, and the still bare walled flowerbeds. For a moment, Janet thought Rebecca had disappeared, searching the width and length of the garden for her. She was nowhere in sight. After a few seconds, Janet earnestly began to question if she had been mistaken thinking she’d seen Rebecca come out here, turning around to re-enter her home, only to double-take as she finally found Rebecca crouched on the ground, looking like a bulging bin bag, staring at the spout of a rain gutter.

Janet stared at Rebecca’s arched back, on her hands and knees, for another minute before stepping forward, shifting from foot to foot to try to get a view of what could possibly be of such enthralling interest. Rebecca was gingerly stroking a wispy tangle of spider web trailing from the side of the spout, only instead of being a shimmer of silver, it was multi-coloured; green, red, brown, yellow. And while it was clumped together, bulging and tapering like a Prince Rupert’s drop, the colour helped distinguish the threads from one another. The only sight more peculiar than this was the small, almost imperceptible, wet set of footprints, about the size of rice grains, imprinted under the spout, trailing and evaporating steps from it. Rebecca notices them as well, following their direction, heading, seemingly, to the flowerbed.

Rebecca turned and shuffled for a few paces, like a hunchbacked turtle, before standing into an upright stride, throwing her balled fists and roast-like arms from side to side as she marched across the garden to the flowerbed. This time, Janet decided to watch, twice now thrown for a loop on what proved to be an unpredictable house call. Janet waited as the Lego brick shaped Rebecca stood with her short, ironically petite hands on her waist, as though considering a problem before her, one unapparent and invisible to Janet. Rebecca turned her short-haired head slowly from side to side, corner to corner, before, abruptly, shooting practically head first into the flowerbed, shovelling dirt into the air like an emaciated mole desperate to catch a fat worm.

Once again, for a third time, Janet was rigid with confusion, but it was the scandalous assault of upending her dormant poppy bulbs, still hiding from the last few damp and murky weeks of winter, that compelled her, through sheer outrage, to march over to Rebecca, grab her firmly by the shoulder, and reprimand her for her carelessness. This was a housing estate, not a council estate; you can’t do that sort of thing here! She was about to tell Rebecca all this until Janet noticed, clasped in their hands, a limp, lifeless, unnaturally greying human body; a littling corpse of about five centimetres in height.

This wasn’t the first time Janet had ever seen a littling before. As a child, her grandmother would take her out to the garden shed, left untouched after her grandfather passed away, to feed the littlings hiding in there, usually with a bowl of cooked rice, raisins, bread croutons fried in rasher grease, and a little capful of fizzy drink, but only a capful. Sickos would leave out whole glasses of the stuff out for them, listening and laughing as their small bodies popped from the carbonation building up inside them, their screams going unheard as the gases would stretch and tear their organs. Janet’s grandmother didn’t care for littlings herself, especially not inside her home, but feeding them outside and forfeiting the old rain buckled shed proved to be an unspoken truce for keeping them from infesting the house. Feeding or starving nearby littlings is still a hotly debated topic today.

No, this wasn’t the first littling Janet had ever seen, but it was the first one she’d seen dead like this. People who feel the need to kill them, if they’re not psychopaths, at least do it quickly. A smack of a hand, a swipe of a newspaper, a stomp of a boot, they all yield the same result; a jumbled, disjointed mess of smushed organs, a cracked, splintered, and stabby nest of bones, a slimy, bloodied, and viscous stain of brains, teeth, wispy nerves, and sinewy muscle. Sometimes, if you looked close enough, you could just make out movement; a deflating lung, a twitching limb, a dilated eye. It was easy to think of them as mere vermin when their deaths were so grotesque and undignified.

But here Janet couldn’t help but marvel at the care and love paid to whoever this female littling was in life. Her hair was braided and wrapping in shimmering threads of web, much like the wad back at the spout, only now untangled and stretched out, it coiled and bound the long brown hair in a net spun from rainbows. Her skin, though ghastly with death, was imbedded with fascinatingly ornate and intricate piercings and modifications; she glistened with metal shavings that rippled across her like chainmail in shades of grassy copper and rouge rust, her nails glittered with strips of sandpaper affixed and styled like salon tips, and though her naked figure still had spots of soil clinging in crevices, there was freshness in her skin that seemed moisturised yet still bore the signs of age with a slight motherly pouch and the roughened callous wrinkles. A sorrowful knowing filled Janet. She knew this small peaceful spirit had a life, a family, and was being mourned even now.

“Yeah! That’s it. The whole house will have to be fumigated.”

Janet snapped back to the present just in time to see Rebecca drop, unceremoniously, the littling onto the grassy lawn, wiping her hands clean of the dirt, only managing not to step on it through disinterest as they ambled back towards the back door, only to be yanked to a halt by Janet’s grasp gripping her beefy forearm, surprisingly firm enough to pinch bone.

“Fumigate? Why?”

Rebecca stared and struggled to make sense of the question, replaying in her mind, as though to make sure she wasn’t dreaming their entire meeting, the signs of infestation that have led up to this moment.

“You have littlings. A city of them.”

With her free arm, more focused on explaining the situation clearly from a professional standpoint than on freeing her locked arm, Rebecca pointed back to the flowerbed.

“That is a littling grave. Best case scenario, it’s the first, but I have enough experience to doubt that. Do you understand what this all means for you?”

Janet’s patient silence was answer enough for Rebecca to calmly lift Janet’s hand off her arm, turning fully to face her.

“Littlings, in the wild, will typically form small units, usually familiars or stragglers they pick up. Those are called tribes. When a tribe infest a house, they generally, you know, mate, eat, nest. They multiply. They don’t mate in the wild. They’re small, but they’re smart like that. Usually, a few more tribes will come, either searching for shelter themselves or else invited. Sometimes, not always, the new tribes invade and kill off the original group; crazy, right?”

Rebecca’s morbid smile and giggle wasn’t as infectious as she had hoped, finding Janet’s face slacking into repulsion.

“Anyway, we call those villages. About a hundred littlings. You, however, have a city! Do you know how many is a city? At least a thousand littlings. No wonder you said you can hear scurrying at night and find food missing in the morning. But that’s not the worst! That, over there, is the worst!”

Janet turned to follow Rebecca’s extended finger, pointing down at the littling corpse, crumpled in an unflattering tangle of limbs, desecrated. Janet mournfully stared down upon the poor thing, growing deaf to Rebecca’s lecture.

“Littlings develop customs and rites when they feel secure enough in a house. It’s a sign they’re there for the long haul. Usually on smaller jobs I’d recommend scaring them out; blast loud music into the wall, get a cat, strip the house of food. But when they do that, give their dead a proper send off, it means they’ve developed into a city with their own laws and jobs. You can’t scare them off. Hell, they start fighting back! And even if you do try to scare them off, they tend to just go next door. You’re legally obligated to exterminate anything bigger than three villages; it’s a hazard to the building’s structure. You neighbours can sue you over it. And let’s be honest, I’m sure they’ve noticed my van out the front.”

A thought occurred to Janet and, sure enough, just as she whipped her head up to her neighbour’s bedroom window, she caught sight of Mrs. Fran Reilly dropping from the window, rippling the lace she was peering out from behind a moment before. Nonetheless, Janet’s concern returned to the littling on the grass. She couldn’t help, even as she spoke to Rebecca, but kneel down and scoop up the corpse, as light and as cold as a snowflake.

“Can we not leave something out for them? Like a trail of food leading out to the shed. We don’t ever use it anymore anyway. I can get Eric to erect a second or even a bigger one for them. A cabin for a thousand or so. My granny did it. I’m sure the kids would like that as well.”

Janet brushed the dirt off the frail Thumbelina, straightening and positioning her limbs in a more dignified and composed form, something becoming for the parted. Rebecca sighed, folding her arms.

“Look, I’m not trying to scare you or anything, but… I got a call about a year ago. A bit like yours. Nice woman. Spoke so softly I had to lean in. Old. Nineties. Coughed a lot but was up and about most days with the shopping and the bingo and the community centre café and such. She called and I find the same thing. A city. A big one. But not in the walls like yours. No. Sure the cheeky buggers were out in the open, building huts out of toothpicks and loo roll tubes in her kitchen! They turned the hot press into a sauna! I was practically stumbling over them. I stepped on some and they came at me with forks and glass shards. Took everything I had to pull the old one out with me. I was about to report it to the department of agriculture and conservation; I’d need permission to use the amount of pesticide it would take to clear the house. And do you know what that old one said to me? She said she didn’t call me to kill them, she wanted to know if they were okay! She called me because she couldn’t get a vet to visit and she wanted a professional opinion on if they were thriving. Thriving! I said there was an orgy in the bread bin! They were worse than squatters in a drug den! I tried talking sense into her, telling her she needed the whole house fumigated, at the very least. I didn’t want to tell her they’d probably have to condemn the whole damn building, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway since she wasn’t budging. Poor thing said they kept her company. She was there on her own. No kids. The husband left decades before for a younger woman. She gave them names. Five thousand of them, but she said she knew them all by name.

“I got a call a few months later, but it wasn’t the same one from before. It was the coroner’s office. They asked me to meet them at the house. They wouldn’t say why until I got there. I had to sign some NDAs and the like. They needed an extermination and I came recommended. It wasn’t until we got upstairs, and I saw her, the old one, that I realised why they needed me. The little bastards were living inside her. She had died, supposedly of natural causes in her sleep, and the little shits starting devouring her. They were divvying up her body for parts; her hair for rope, her ear wax for candles, her muscles for meat, her skin for leather. They had hollowed out her eye sockets and were living inside her skull. They were strip mining her dead body.

“The coroners couldn’t move her without risking carrying the infestation out of the house. I wish I could say it was satisfying to gas them all to Hell, but it wasn’t. I should have pushed a little harder to convince her. She would have died of old age anyway, I know, but at least she would have been left intact. Left undisturbed.”

Janet remained still, cupping the littling in her hands. Rebecca, trying to fill the silence, noisily chewed her nicotine gum, scanning the garden and it’s remnant of family life.

“I wouldn’t want to risk that happening again. Not here. Not with kids in the house.”

“How…”

Janet swallowed, struggling to sooth her burning throat. Rebecca waited.

“… How soon can you start?”

“You pick a date that best suits, but it’ll take a full twenty-four hours. Usually, weekends are good for families. Take the kids out to Bray for the seaside, and the arcade, and the aquarium. There might be a sterile smell afterwards, but that’ll pass after another day with the windows open.”

Rebecca waited, expecting Janet to look away from the angelic littling in her hands. Rebecca spat her gum into her hand, tucking and rolling it into a wrapper from her pocket.

“They’re not people. Just because they look like us doesn’t mean they’re human.”

Rebecca was saved from suffering the prolonged silence further as she noticed, from the kitchen window, the teapot steaming from its spout.

“Listen, I’ll just run out to the van and grab the paperwork. I can explain it over tea.”

Rebecca hurried back inside, sighing a whistle of relief, but stopping by the kitchen window as she witnessed, slowly, Janet shuffling to the flowerbed and, tenderly, reburying the littling into its grave, patting the disturbed topsoil smooth again.

#HI