Lepidopterophobia

I bought this house not too long ago. It seemed ideal when I found it. A two-bedroom apartment at the edge of town, away from the prying eyes of strangers. I don’t mind driving an extra few minutes to work or to the grocery store. That’s what cars are for, right? There’s also a basement I never bothered checking until now and quiet. Lots of it. At least during daytime.

The price for the place was fairly reasonable. Some might say it was too low. I’d argue that’s bullshit. In our day and age, everything is expensive. I just found something that wasn’t. Maybe I got lucky, or maybe not. I’m not really sure. It’s only quiet during the daytime. It gets quite noisy after sunset, the night specifically, whenever I close my eyes, to be exact.

From my first day here, the moment I attempt to fall asleep, I can hear the chirping of grasshoppers tearing through the silence of the night, preventing me from sinking into the Sandman’s domains. That said, every time I do open my eyes in annoyance the noise seems to fade away back into nonexistence. It’s as if my lack of attention is triggering the ruckus. Eventually, of course, I pass out from sheer exhaustion and the noise stops penetrating my mind.

I haven't gotten any kind of decent sleep since I moved here, absolutely none. I’m constantly tired and weak and, more so, I kept finding all these bug bites all over my skin. The itching doesn’t make my life any easier. The odd thing about it is that there are no mosquitos to speak of in the area, nor any grasshoppers. While I might be away from the urban center, it’s still a concrete jungle all around my place. No grass fields in sight.

I’ve been looking for the strange source of the irritating noise but couldn’t find anything. Even pest control didn’t yield any results. The nightly terror occurs every night, again and again. Slowly digging its way into my brain. Eating away at my sanity.

I’m pretty sure I’ve started seeing shadows move around the house. Hell, at one point, I’m sure I’ve seen a man stroll around the house. Nearly gave me a heart attack. I just remember a figure walking past my field of vision sending chills down my skin as I watched it move - half out of focus. I blinked, and it was gone.

I didn’t even attempt to sleep that night.

Other times, I felt something breathe on the back of my neck, making me shiver before I turned around and found out nothing was actually there. I’ve also had the pleasure of experiencing a few tactile hallucinations. A hand dragging itself against the top of my head, making me shudder or nails tracing themselves against my leg, making me kick so hard I lose all balance and fall off my chair.

Recently, though, the noises seemed to bleed into my waking hours as well. I’m not really sure if it’s just my sleep-deprived daydreaming or actually something rooted in reality. It comes, and it goes worse each time. Behind me, in front of me, all around me. Taking over everything through noise-induced paralyzing anxiety.

During a terrible episode, I was about to lose it completely. My head was spinning, the walls were dancing back and forth, and the sensation of ants walking all over my skin made me itch myself so hard I actually broke the skin in a few places. The noises just kept getting louder and louder. Everything bled into each other, and the sensory input overwhelmed me to the point I couldn’t even notice I had wandered off into the basement.

The basement door stood open ajar before me, as the noise and all other sensations were fading into the background. All but the dizzying nausea. My eyes scanned the previously unexplored room, barely steady enough to register anything. Thoughts were still incoherent and messy. They were fluidly racing at five thousand miles an hour in my head. My eyes landed on the worst possible thing.

A large shape on the floor, one not unlike me. The sickening sensation of angina interlaced with nausea induced through the strong taste of iron in my mouth overrode all other senses as I looked on with sheer terror at the corpse in front of me. A few seconds later, the stench of decay hit my nose. The smell of spoiled eggs and fish confirmed my suspicions. The form in front of me was indeed a corpse, albeit preserved. It was bloated and pale, its lower jaw stained with blood.

Instinct took over as I slowly tip-toed my way towards the dead intruder and poked at it with a shovel. My hand grabbed faster than my mind could alert my eyes to its presence. The moment the steel spade touched the porcelain skin of the cadaver, it exploded.

A terrible noise, that sickening chirping, exploded out of nowhere, deafening me. A legion of bright blue-winged butterflies swarmed the entire space around me. I heard myself scream. My limbs moved on their own as my mind melted under the crushing weight of the noise and the visual display. I felt a couple of painful pricks on my arms before I fled from my basement. The loud thundering noise of the thick metal door slamming shut served as a great motivator to run for my life as I fled my house towards the safety of my car.

I do not know how much time I spent panicking in my car, but it was a while. The sun had sat, and it was getting dark before I could finally calm down enough to think straight. As straight as a madman could think that is. I had an eureka moment; I was going to exorcize the basement with a baptism of fire. Nothing thinking this through. Obviously, I got out of the car and grabbed a gas canister I had in the trunk. Attempting to march back inside the house, I found out my panic had rendered my legs too sore to run or even march. Instead, my body forced me to limp awkwardly back into the house, screaming and shouting at the grotesque horrors inside. I opened the basement door with such force that it slammed into the wall, producing yet another thundering crack.

The basement was empty. No corpse, no flying insects, no nothing. Pure ghastly silence. Piercing, almost punishing. Impenetrable silence. I stood there for a few moments, pondering the entire ordeal. Had I gone mad? I’ve gone mad indeed. There was nothing there. I was all alone. Completely alone, stranded with a canister of gasoline in my hands, sinking into that one memory from my childhood.

I had fallen off my bike and tore open my left knee, laying on the concrete, crying as the shock waves of pain traveled through my entire body. A small butterfly landed on the exact spot where my fall had broken the skin and through which searing fires of the abyss erupted. The sensation of its pointy legs digging themselves into my exposed subdermal tissue stung like swords being logged into my flesh. And I screamed in pure animalistic agony.

Waking up from my nightmare memory, I was standing in the basement, surrounded by the unnatural silence. Feeling drained and sore. I dropped the gas canister on the floor and left the basement. What happened next is a blur, but I remember waking up, fully dressed in my bed. No new bite marks, no noises. Completely calm and almost fully rested.

That was the last time I actually slept over two hours straight. Even though the chirping is gone and it’s completely quiet at night. Eerily so, the noise never stopped. Every night since that night, I end up self-torturing with apocalyptic thoughts about the chirping returning. About the flies, the corpses, about human-faced cockroaches eating the human intestines of their still living victims that howl in a sadomasochistic pleasure with my voice. I keep myself awake with my own loud thoughts screaming inside my head. It’s gotten to a point that I see a striking resemblance between me and the corpse in my mirror whenever I look in the mirror. I am pale, gaunt, and a shadow of myself. Trapped in a purgatory somewhere between alive and dead.

It’s getting dark again, and I think I can hear the buzzing in the back of my head again.