The Bug in the Lamp

I had been journeying for several days when I occasioned to stay at the Château Hotel, with only my cat Artemis for companionship. Artemis, a mewling, foul-tempered feline, sat in her leather carrier under my seat as we crossed the countryside by train, crying from beneath me at regular intervals. We disembarked the train in Wilson\'s Corners although we were still nearly a full day\'s train ride from our destination; I was growing very tired and could not find a comfortable way to arrange myself around the cat carrier. Vowing to conclude our journey on the first train the next morning, I arranged for my main luggage to continue to Brownsville, and we got off into the chill night air.

We were directed to a place called the Château Hotel, and set off for the hotel on a crisp, cold evening in late October. Indian Summer had been and gone, and the temperature dropped considerably once we had boarded the train. Dry, autumnal leaves blew around my feet as I walked, carrying my suitcase in one hand and Artemis in her carrier in the other. I was grateful that, despite the warm weather as I packed for our move to Brownsville, I had worn my coat and scarf on the trip, which I wrapped tightly around me, buttoned right to the collar against the chilly evening.

We found the hotel in the last strains of daylight, its sign on a post by the street- Château Hotel, est. 1803, it read. A charming building with a weathervane on its tallest peak, with a huge, gnarled oak spreading through its dooryard. Multicolored leaves swept against its wraparound porch like high tide. Electric lights glowed in all the ground-floor windows, a cozy, homey shimmer that beckoned us in from the chill evening.

We entered the foyer of the hotel and approached the front desk, where the proprietor stood. A tall, thin man with gauzy sheets of white hair and dark, chocolate-brown eyes, he smiled as Artemis and I crossed the exquisite foyer.

\"Welcome to the Château Hotel,\" he said with a sweeping gesture of his arm. \"I am Garrison Finestra, proprietor. You would like a room for the night?\"

\"Indeed,\" I said to him. \"One night, please, a room for myself and my cat.”

\"Not a problem at all, sir,\" Finestra said. He pulled out the hotel register, and I signed for the room. \"Your room will be the third door on the third, uppermost floor. You\'ll have a fine sunrise, should you be up so early.\"

\"That would be lovely,\" I replied, finishing my signature with a flourish. \"It seems like a very fine hotel, very nice and clean. I don\'t doubt the view will be quite charming come morning.\" I set the quill pen in the spine of the book and slid it back toward him; in turn, he slid a key on a fine metal ring across to me. “I might ask, would I be able to order a bottle of brandy to be brought up in an hour?”

\"Absolutely, sir, one hour,” he said, making a note. “I trust you\'ll find your room quite comfortable. And thank you for complimenting our cleanliness here, sir. We pride ourselves on it. Not a mote of dust, not a pest to be found.\" He puffed out his chest as he spoke.

\"Thank you, Mr. Finestra.\" The hotel was indeed lovely. Everything was a buttery, burnished wood inside, with ornate carvings around the doorways and the stairs. I found my door, where the key turned easily, and we went inside. The room itself was very nicely furnished and decorated. The window did indeed face east, although there was little to see in the dark, barely lit spectral fingers of the huge front lawn oak just beyond the thick glass panes.

Shutting the door behind me, I opened the cat carrier and Artemis strolled out, looking- as cats do- indignant at being shut up for so long. She flicked her tail at me, licked her lips, and jumped down off the bed, sniffing around at her new environment.

Artemis has been my companion for near onto three years now, a roly-poly gray-orange tabby with a cranky demeanor and a near-constant voice. She was a well-kept and well-fed house cat, but periodically would go outside and was an excellent hunter. She had been a gift for my beloved, who was deceased over a year now. I couldn\'t simply open the door and let the cat go feral, so although I initially had no affinity for cats, I kept her myself. She helped keep the silence of my suddenly empty house from driving me insane. After a year of living alone, I desperately needed a change. Of course, I brought Artemis with me when I relocated. I cannot say that she enjoyed traveling, but we made the best of it. Her carrier had a small food bowl and water, as well as a litter compartment at the back. She had all she would need. I withdrew from my case papers I wished to review and laid them out on the writing desk.

The room had electric light, but there was an oil lamp at the writing desk. Ornate to match the rest of the hotel decor, it had a large, bulbous glass covering that was a frosted white. I found my matches in my breast pocket and lit the lamp. The flame it emitted cast a soft light that was excellent for reading.

Time escaped me then, for it seemed only moments later a knock came at the door. I could see the cat, still exploring around, her ears pricked up at the sound of the knock. Her wide, attentive eyes were scanning for the source of the sound, her stubby body rigid at attention. I opened the door, Mr. Finestra stood outside with a bottle of brandy and a glass on a tray.

\"Your brandy, sir,\" he said. He entered the room and set the tray on a bare corner of the writing desk. \"I see your small friend is making herself at home.\" He nodded slightly toward Artemis, still at fervent attention.

\"Oh yes,\" I said with a small laugh. \"She\'s been patrolling the room since I let her out of her carrier. Quite the hunter, this one. If you have any rats in the cellar, I\'m sure you\'d be able to borrow her services.\"

\"Oh, we have no rats here, sir,\" Finestra replied. I thought, just for the most fleeting moment, I saw a cloud cross his face, resentful at me implying there might be rats.

\"I have no doubt. The Château seems an exemplary place, Mr. Finestra.\"

\"Yes, indeed it is,\" he said, his shoulders relaxing slightly. \"We\'ve never had a pest problem here at all.\" He paused for just the barest second. \"Will you be requiring anything else this evening?\"

\"No, thank you, sir,\" I said. \"I’ve taken a teaching position, and I have some paperwork to read over. That will keep me occupied, but I anticipate an early night.\"

\"Good night then, sir, and congratulations on your new post.\" He showed himself out, pulling the door closed behind him with a soft click. I turned and Artemis relaxed, beginning to methodically wash her face with her forepaw. She looked drowsy and content, and I must confess I was starting to feel the same way. The room was warm but pleasant, and I was starting to feel the pull of the bed. I pulled the stopper out of the brandy and poured a knock of it, hoping to feel as warm on the inside as out, and able to concentrate enough to read.

Minutes later, as I was absorbed in my reading, Artemis leapt up onto the writing desk, startling me. So silent the hunter! She was tensed up again, and I could see a fine line of her gray hairs standing up the length of her back. I followed her stare—there was a tiny shadow moving inside the oversized glass of the lamp on the desk.

\"Get down, Artemis,\" I said firmly, setting the syllabus on the desktop between her and the lamp. \"It\'s just a bug in the lamp.\" The tiny shadow moved, up away from the flame of the lamp. It appeared to be a housefly. The cat stared hard at it, her tail out rigid behind her, the tip flicking back and forth spastically, the hair on her back still on end. She growled, a low sound from deep in her throat, and I felt a slight tingle in my own spine. It was unlike her to focus so intently.

With a speed only a cat can know, her haunches twitched slightly, and she sprang at the shadow. Her powerful back legs propelled her chubby frame across the desk and knocked the bottle of brandy over, glass too, spilling the amber liquor. And as she reached the lamp, focusing only on the shadow of the bug, she crashed headlong into it, knocking it over.

I watched in what seemed to be slow motion as the oil lamp skidded across the desk under Artemis’s weight, tipping, keeling, and finally falling over the edge of the writing desk. The lamp, with wick burning, crashed to the floor, followed a split-second later by the bulbous glass, which shattered into large shards.

I reached down and snatched the body of the lamp up off the carpet where it landed. I turned to see the bug- a fly of some kind, and strangely larger than it seemed inside the lamp glass—flittering up, with the cat leaping and swatting after. I glanced back, and the carpet did indeed have a black crescent-shaped burn on it where the flame had landed and rolled, but no serious damage. I thanked the heavens that the ceramic body of the lamp, full of oil, had not shattered like the glass cover. I quickly shut off the lamp valve, and the wick died down to a faintly glowing tip.

Artemis leapt after the escaping fly, and as I watched, she batted the fly clean out of the air with a swipe of her paw! The fly was actually quite large, I noted. I had thought it a housefly, but perhaps the curved surface of the inside of the lamp glass distorted its shadow? I could hear the faint buzzing drone of its wings stutter as Artemis hit it, and it spiraled down to the ground out of sight behind the desk

\"Oh, my papers,\" I moaned. I fetched towels from the bureau and worked frantically trying to dry the papers. I blotted the best I could, but the pages were soaked and beginning to smudge and curl before my eyes. I could hear her paws stomping around, still out of sight behind the desk. Curiously, I noted that I could also still hear the fly\'s wings buzzing. It seemed they had grown louder. I could still hear those horrible growls coming from her, normally such a mild-mannered, although cranky, cat; there was something wild and primal in the sounds that frightened me. Also, I thought I could hear the body of the insect bumping against the wall, but it was only a fly; how could I hear such a small thing? I could see the very tip of the cat\'s tail, flicking back and forth. The rest of her was obscured by the desk. Curious as to what was happening, I reached down and moved the desk aside.

There was Artemis, and she had cornered the fly between the desk and the wall. I looked down and saw the fly she was chasing, and its body was the size of a golf ball! Surely, this couldn\'t be the same fly, the tiny shadow, less than a fingernail? But she had her prey, and it was enormous. I\'d never seen such a huge insect! The hairs sticking up off its body seemed as thick as the hairs on the backs of my own hands, and either of its compound eyes was larger than the entire shadow we\'d seen earlier.

\"Good lord!\" I exclaimed, shocked by the sight of the now-gigantic bug. \"Artemis, get away from that!\" I had no idea where this thing had come from, and I didn\'t want it to injure my companion. Who knows what sort of disease this monstrous creature carried?

I reached down and grabbed her before her haunches. The low, feral growls she\'d been making rose into a shriek, and she twisted her pudgy body in my hands, swatting at my arm with her foreclaws. Her paw found its mark and dug in painfully. Instinctively, I drew my hands back and dropped the cat. I looked quickly down at my arm where she\'d clawed me and saw that I was bleeding where the claws had sunk into my wrist! In her excitement, she had given me not just common cat-scratches, but a wound.

\"Confound it,\" I swore to myself. Artemis had disappeared again behind the desk after the giant fly, and I left her momentarily. I stepped quickly back to the wash basin on the bureau, grabbing one of the other towels, which I pressed firmly against my bloodied wrist, tying it tight, and came back to Artemis and her prey. I pulled the desk fully away from the wall, rumpling up the carpet beneath it as I moved it.

The fly had grown even more. Its body was now a goodly six inches long, almost half the size as the cat herself! I couldn\'t see it very well, as it was buzzing and flitting awkwardly and Artemis was swatting angrily at it, but its size was readily apparent. Also, it appeared to have grown some sort of pincers from its face, and its proboscis, formerly soft and flexible, looked to be needle-straight as well as needle-sharp.

Fear seized my heart like a hand of cold fingers—what was this blasphemous creature? This surely couldn\'t be the fly I had seen only a moment before, let alone the tiny thing in the lamp. Finestra\'s reassured voice came back to my mind, we\'ve never had a pest problem at all.

The fly-thing lifted off the ground and stabbed out at her with its new pincers. She ducked, turned and ran behind me, skidding through the minefield of broken glass and out of sight behind the bed. It made to follow me, the buzz of its wings louder than ever, its demonic pincers working and clicking together audibly. I slammed the desk against the wall, hoping to kill or at least wound the fly-thing; it was hovering but struggling under its own weight. After a moment, mercifully, the buzzing of its wings fell silent.

I scrambled after Artemis, who had gone to ground under the bed. I climbed over the bed and leaned under to reach her, and to my horror, I could see the writing desk, which the fly-thing was behind, moving. I withdrew my hand and stood up behind the bed. I clearly saw the desk tipping- I prayed the fly-thing was dying, but I knew it was certainly not dead yet.

The Spartan room didn\'t readily offer a weapon, but desperately I pulled out a heavy leather-bound book from the shelf. As I approached the freakish creature, I put my hand on the corner of the heavy desk and pulled it over. The lamp and brandy bottle bumped down and rolled out of sight. I looked at the fly-thing. It had grown, again, and was nearly a foot long! It now looked more like some horrific beetle, with a black carapace and some sort of whitish-gray, undulating flesh beneath it. The wings and compound eyes were gone, and its clawed feet, at the end of long, spiked legs, clicked and skittered against the floor. With some unknown sense, it leapt at me, reaching almost waist high!

Stupidly, I swung the heavy book at it. I felt the vibration of my strike shiver up my arm, and the smack of the book against its shell made a dull, empty sound. It fell upon the upturned writing desk and skittered around again to face me, the pincers snicking together and proboscis jabbing forward.

I dropped the book and back-pedaled away from the thing. I could hear some sort of high-pitched chittering sound coming from it, as it stalked me. It seemed to be staring, eyeless, deep as if into my immortal soul. The giant creature seemed to grow and shift its form even as I watched—the black pieces of its carapace seemed to stretch and spread apart as it grew, with that awful pale and sickly flesh expanding. More limbs, like tentacles, long like a giant squid, burst forth in the gaps of its horrifying carapace! It coiled itself and made to leap again.

As the creature began to spring, so fast my eyes could hardly follow, suddenly a blur of a gray shape burst in and knocked it aside. Artemis, the hunter, flashing out from her hiding spot under the bed. She leapt onto its back and the two of them clattered into the corner of the room, her claws scrabbling for purchase on the thing\'s hard shell. In the struggle, I saw her claws catch in the pulsating underflesh of the creature. Its keening increased in pitch and volume—she had clearly hurt the thing. It flailed several of its limbs at her, and I sprang into action, as she would surely be torn to shreds!

Reaching out with my towel-wrapped hand, I felt for and picked up one of the large shards of the lamp glass on the floor. I gripped it tightly and raised the shard high over my head. I plunged it down into one of the gaps in the thing’s shell, into the whitish flesh. The creature shrieked, even louder than before, the sound filling the entire room. Artemis bolted from its grasp as a geyser of horrid, fetid black fluid gushed out, spraying my torso and my face, wherever it touched my skin, it tingled and burned. I wiped it away the best I could.

I kicked at the thing, now the size of a small dog, and managed to knock it away. It lay in the corner, half overturned, clawed limbs and tentacles all akimbo and whipping wildly. Finally, it managed to reach up and grasp the glass, shard I’d stabbed into it, pulling it out as more of the horrifying ichor spewed out of its wound.

I looked behind me and Artemis was near the door, splattered in the black ichor and screaming her high-pitched whine. The door! my brain screamed at me, Get out!

I stood and turned to run, and I felt that blazing tingle again—the creature had shot out one of its tentacles, and it looped tight around my ankle. I could feel panic clutching at my throat as the thing began to drag me toward it with horrific strength. Tumbling to the floor, the monstrous creature seemed to have grown larger still, and now between its fiendish pincers, a ghastly mouth, filled with jagged teeth and strung with ropes of noxious slime, gnashed and snarled. Desperately, I looked around for anything I could use to hurt it; my eyes landed on the heavy base of the oil lamp, rolling back and forth on the floor in the commotion just a few feet away.

I lunged, pulling against the creature, and grabbed the lamp. Blindly, I threw the lamp, and it hit the thing right in its face and shattered. The oil in the base of the lamp splashed over the creature, and I could see a thin smoke rising from its carapace as the fuel sunk in. The creature shook and thrashed, and I felt the limb-tentacle around my ankle loosen just slightly.

The matches! I had all but forgotten about the matches in my pocket! With shaking hands, I searched for the matchbook. The thing was screeching and squealing, that horrible sound of white noise, its pincers and new teeth thrashing and ripping the air as it pulled me toward it. I focused and pulled out a match, willing myself with everything I had not to drop it.

I struck the match and threw it at the creature. It went up in a fireball, bright and burning, and I felt the searing heat engulf the room! The fire burst upward and outwards in the briefest of seconds and consumed the monstrosity as the oil burned. The thing began to shake and jitter, and I felt its limb-tentacle release my ankle, screeching out the sound of white noise and thrashing about. Flames licked up the wall behind it, soaked in oil and the vile ichor of the creature\'s innards. I could barely see through the flames, but cracks appeared in the shell of the thing and the whitish underflesh bubbled.

That was all I could stand to see- I saw my chance and ran as best I could with my injuries! Pain be damned, I ran, scooping Artemis up as I went. I threw the door open and burst into the hall, running back to the stairs.

\"Fire, fire!\" I screamed at the top of my lungs, as I ran, I bolted out of the hotel as fast as I could possibly manage. I didn\'t see anyone else as I fled, but I was solely focused on getting out of the building before the fire spread, or even worse, before the creature followed me.

I burst through the outer lobby door in my shirtsleeves, no coat or scarf, into the frigid night air. I stopped running under the oak on the lawn, turned to face the building and set Artemis down on the ground. I looked up at the third floor (third door) and flames licked out of the shattered window, roiling up into the night. I stared at what had been my window, and I thought once I saw one of the limb-tentacles of the horrible creature flick into- and out of- sight.

I looked down at Artemis. It seemed so long ago now she\'d lunged at the lamp to get the bug inside, but in all likelihood the whole thing had transpired in only a few minutes. She sat, indignant and cool, her tail wrapping around her neatly folded paws in the chill night. She brought her forepaw up and nonchalantly began to clean her face. There were patches of that horrid ichor on her cheeks and in her whiskers.

I looked back at the burning hotel. Finestra had said I would have a fine view of the sunrise from my window, and I indeed had a grand view of the burning room from the lawn. The yellow-orange flicker that consumed the third door on the third floor began to spread to the next window, and I wondered to myself, did that actually happen? The tiny fly that morphed into the hideous monstrosity of poisonous tentacles and jagged teeth. Could such a thing so horrifying have begun inside an oil lamp?

After a moment, I began to catch my breath and let my guard down slightly. The cold night felt good on my burned skin. Gingerly, favoring my injured leg and careful not to abuse my bloodied hand, I lowered myself to a seated position on the ground next to Artemis. I stroked her idly as she washed her face. I dabbed the towel wrapped around my hand against my own face, trying to clear off the vile ichor the creature had sprayed on me when I stabbed it. Together, we sat, cleaning ourselves of the filth, and waited to see if anyone or anything came out of the burning Château Hotel.

About the Author

Nathan Poole Shannon is an emerging writer of strange and the macabre. Creepy and weird stories, whether they be modern or historically set, are his specialty. From oozing monsters to cryptic curses, he is only beginning to share with the world. He lives in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife and a small menagerie of pets who are decidedly not creepy- but from time to time, inspire something that is.