E is for Exterminator (A-Z of Horror Book 5) Read online

  BOOK SUMMARY

  Antworth Manor is in serious need of renovating, starting with all the bugs. Rats, spiders, and cockroaches have been making the place their home for over a decade now and they need dealing with.

  That’s why the new owner has sent in Christopher Treadwell, pest controller extraordinaire. But after 30 years in the extermination business, Treadwell is about to undertake the job of his nightmares.

  Sometimes the bugs don’t want to go quietly.

  “I don’t care how small or big they are, insects freak me out.”

  – Alexander Wang

  “Come on, let's go find that spider. And let's find your mom to take care of that spider. Honey, we're in the living room. We need you to kill a spider.”

  –Dr Ross Jennings, Arachnophobia (1990), Amblin Entertainment.

  -1 -

  Chris Treadwell pulled his van to a halt outside Antworth Manor. The three-story Edwardian house was old; like, Downton Abbey, old. The windows were mostly broken, but those few that remained were filled with leaded panes of glass five feet high and two feet wide with rotting drapes hanging flaccidly behind them. It looked like the place could come tumbling down at any minute.

  Treadwell switched off the engine and stepped out onto the weed-covered gravel driveway. A cracked statue of an Angel stood in front of him, emerging from a pool of slimy green water. A bedraggled crow perched on one of the Angel’s wings and stared at Treadwell with its head titled curiously.

  He waved an arm. “Get!”

  When the crow refused to flee and continued staring, Treadwell picked up a handful of gravel and tossed it at the bird. It finally flew away, letting out a reproachful caw before disappearing into the nearby trees that surrounded the estate.

  Treadwell felt wetness on his hand and he held it out in front of him, frowned when he saw the woodlice scuttling between his fingers. He wasn’t one to get upset by creepy crawlies, though. That was why he was here. He wiped his hand on his green overalls and went around to the back of his van, opening up the doors and starting to sift through his equipment.

  Antworth Manor was in too bad a state of disrepair to fumigate, and there were apparently things inside that were still within saving. His client had been strict – gentle approach only. Bearing that in mind, Treadwell grabbed his backpack canister, full of his own patented concoction of bug killer, and strapped it on his shoulders. The canister was attached to a pistol that sprayed his chemical wherever he wanted it. He would seek out any insect nests and attack them directly. Afterwards he could assess the condition of the house and apply his longer-term pest solutions such as roach motels and rat traps.

  He closed the doors to his van but didn’t bother to lock them. The house was a mile from the main roads and set in the middle of an overgrown field. No one would be around to make off with his things.

  “Okey dokey,” he said out loud. “Time to get killin’”

  He marched up the stone steps to Antworth Manor and unlocked the heavy oaken door with the keys given to him by his client. The musky stench hit him immediately and caused him to cough. The smell was ordinary for an abandoned property, but the ferocity of it was not. It smelt like the place had been a vermin breeding ground for decades. Truth was that it probably had been. Why his client had decided to renovate the place, he didn’t know. Better to rip the place down and start again.

  He spotted a cockroach racing through a thick sheet of dust on the stone tiles and fired his pistol. A vicious jet of noxious chemical soaked the critter and sent it off in a panic. Thirty seconds and it would turn belly up, a gift to whoever would be sent to clean this place.

  “Hasta la vista.”

  Cockroach dealt with, Treadwell took in his surroundings. The hallway was like an echo of extravagance. The wide, stone staircase led up to a balconied floor and a stripped chandelier hung precariously overhead. Shattered relics littered the floor, cracked vases and broken side tables, and all would be home to either insects or dust. Treadwell wasted no time in spraying them all down with his hose.

  It didn’t take long to coat the whole area and he was pleased to find no more roaches. Perhaps the job would not be as arduous as he’d feared. Considering the amount his client was paying him, it was clearly going to be a big job, but Treadwell was experienced enough to complete any campaign quickly. He’d been wiping out creepy crawlies for thirty years, and he only got better with age.

  Using an extendable sponge he had on his belt, he cleared away cobwebs from ceiling corners and gave any cracks a spray with his hose. One of the chemicals added to his mixture was abhorrent to spiders. There would be none returning to the spots he sprayed for at least a year – hopefully by then the place would have residents, which was the best way of keeping out bugs.

  Next he headed left into a space that turned out to be a dining room. The musky smell was worse here and once again he coughed. The malodour seemed to be coming from the long, ornately carved wooden table in the centre of the room. It was the length of a bus and had chairs for two-dozen people. It was a miracle no one had removed it or stolen it. The table must be worth a few grand easy.

  Bizarrely, the table was still set with plates and cutlery, and several platters formed a row in the centre. Most of the platters still had their domed lids on, but one was uncovered. Something lay on that platter.

  Treadwell approached slowly, feeling his boots sink into the thick layers of dust. The dining room was carpeted, but the fibres were so threadbare that it was like walking on stone. As he neared the open platter, the musky smell got worse and was joined by a sickly, sweet smell.

  “Fuckin’ ‘ell!”

  Treadwell covered his nose as he examined the festering hunk of meat. It looked like a rat had chosen the platter as a place to lie down and die. Now its carcass was bloated and full of flies and maggots. As if to guard their prize, the cloud of flies suddenly buzzed in Treadwell’s direction. He was too fast for them, though, and filled the air with a fine mist of insecticide. The flies dropped out of the air, suddenly too wet and heavy to fly. He crunched a few of them underfoot, but left the rest to die slowly. He took another look at the dead rat and shook his head in disgust. Good luck to whoever had to get rid of that. This place was a mess.

  He dealt with the dining room quickly, spraying every corner and under each piece of furniture. When he finally made it back out into the hallway he took in a deep breath of air, not having realised that he had been holding his nose the entire time. The whole house smelled, but nowhere so much as that dreadful dining room.

  It turned out that the house had a cellar, and cellars were like penthouses to spiders, so Treadwell took the stairs down and searched for a light, but found none. Prepared, he flicked on the torch he had fastened to the shoulder loop of his overalls. The wide beam lamp illuminated the entire room except for the furthest corners. As one would expect, the cold, dank room was full of wine, a hundred bottles at least. Treadwell let out a whistle and once again wondered how this place had never been looted after so long dormant. His client was a modest businessman who owned several properties in the Midlands, but did he have any idea the treasures he had inherited along with Antworth Manor? There must be at least ten grand’s worth of vintage in this cellar and the owner might not even know it. Treadwell wished he understood wine better, for then he might know which bottles were worth taking on his way out.

  As he suspected, there were spiders everywhere. Harmless giant house spiders, mostly, and a few smaller cellar spiders that were unusual to see outside of London – the bottle green mouthparts made him sure of their genus, though. They could give a nasty nip if handled, but were nothing t
o worry about. The giant house spiders could also bite rarely, but their large size and impressive speed mostly betrayed their gentle nature. In fact, they were often devoured by other spiders.

  He got to work spraying them all to death. They scuttled into the dark corners, but he kept his lamp on them until he had soaked them into inactivity. Those he could pin down, he stamped on. He was almost done when he felt something drop down on the back of his neck.

  “What the?”

  Treadwell spun a circle, swatting at the back of his neck, and yelling out when something pinched him. His hand struck something on his shoulder and batted it away. Whatever it was hit the floor with an audible thud – too big and heavy to be an ordinary house spider. But while he should have been looking down at his attacker, for some reason Treadwell looked up. He had sensed something in the peripheries of his vision, so he craned his neck to take a look.

  The ceiling was a network of webs, the biggest he had ever seen, and writhing throughout them was an army of black spiders.

  “Jesus Christ.” Treadwell lifted his hose and let loose a jet just as more spiders started falling down on top of him like paratroopers. The arachnids were small enough to swat away easily and the jet dealt with most of them, but a hissing sound drew Treadwell’s attention back to the floor. His eyes went wide when he saw the huge rampant spider glaring at him. It was the size of a well-fed black rat and covered in thick bristles that shot out from its body in a defensive cloud. He was about to bring the hose around, when it leapt towards him. For the first time in his life Treadwell turned and ran from a spider. He raced up the stairs three at a time and actually let out a terrified scream as he tumbled halfway up and fell something touch his leg. He was up and on his feet in a flash and running up the stairs even faster,

  As soon as he made it back upstairs, he span around and slammed the door closed behind him, sure that the giant spider would leapt out and sink it’s fangs into his face. But the spider did not appear, remained downstairs in the darkness. With his back to the closed door, Treadwell panted. Never before had he witnessed a spider so big in the wild. While his colleagues in more tropical regions might be used to dealing with pests that size, he was not, and he was not ashamed to admit that he had just shit himself. Anything that big in the UK was an anomaly, either an exotic pet escaped from its owners or something completely out of the ordinary. He could name every single native species of British spider – Lace web, Zebra jumping, False Widow, Cardinal, Tube web – but didn’t have a clue about other species. That thing down there could be deadly, not to mention its legion of offspring scuttling around its webs.

  Treadwell felt sick to his tummy, not just because of the fright, but because the spider’s nest down there jeopardised his job. Protocol required him to contact the environmental agencies so that they could come and assess the situation. The spider could be rare or of scientific interest. They would cordon off the house and his client would be very unhappy and, probably, unwilling to pay. Treadwell hadn’t even completed a quarter of the job yet.

  It was too much money to lose. It was enough to cover his child maintenance for a whole year, which would allow him to get his head above water for once. Being a self-employed exterminator in a mild climate was not lucrative. It was only his childhood hatred of bugs that had led him down his path of killing them and provided him any satisfaction at all.

  When he was twelve, Chris Treadwell had gone camping with his uncle Cash and his best friend, Matty-Bob. They had struck tents out in the woods on the outskirts of town and had proceeded to have a fantastic time. They fished in the nearby brook, made a campfire and roasted sausages and burgers, then retired late to bed. Although he didn’t know it at the time, Chris had not installed the floor matting of the old tent correctly, and as a consequence he lay naked against the grass. When he awoke the next morning and headed out into the sunlight without his top on, his Uncle’s expression had turned to horror. Two-dozen blood-engorged ticks covered Chris’s young body, feasting beneath his armpits and in his groin. He had run screaming into the trees, cutting himself up badly and exhausting himself so that when he finally collapsed, his uncle had taken him right to the hospital. He was lucky not to have caught Limes Disease, the doctor had told him, but he hadn’t felt lucky at the time. He had felt sick to his stomach. He’d hated bugs ever since – saw them as stalking monsters trying to take what didn’t belong to them, always eating and scuttling and leaping. He hated them all.

  Fuck the spiders in the cellar. If they were the only ones of their kind in the entire world, he didn’t care. He would finish the rest of the job and then toss a chemical grenade down. Consequences be damned. His client would probably thank him for his discretion. He’d struck Treadwell as a man much more interested in wealth than nature.

  Time to get his head back in the game. Treadwell was a bug killer and he had let a bug scare him, but no more. It was time to do his job and get paid.

  He decided to head upstairs and work downward, so he took the stone staircase in the foyer and headed for the upper floors. As he went, he sprayed the edges of each step where cracks had appeared. There were a few ants scuttling about and he wouldn’t be surprised if the entire staircase was hollow and desiccated. Again he thought that knocking the place down would be smarter than renovating it.

  Treadwell found himself inside a bedroom, still housing a large four-poster bed. The mattress teemed with beetles, attracted to the moisture that clung to the feathers inside. Treadwell swallowed back his revulsion and started spraying. The light coming in through the windows cast a spotlight on the hissing insects as they roiled in their chemically induced deaths, but Treadwell stood by for several minutes and waited for them all to die, but so many were there that even after completely soaking the mattress some critters still moved. It would take some time for them all to expire and the cleaners would find a bed full of inanimate carapaces.

  A buzzing distracted Treadwell away from the mattress and towards the room’s en suite bathroom. There was no window inside the small side room so it was flooded in shadow. He approached slowly, double-checking that the buzzing wasn’t just in his mind. It wasn’t. There was definitely hissing coming from the bathroom. He directed his torch into the darkness and expelled the shadows, found a floor of grimy tiles and a cracked sink with a broken mirror. No cause of the buzzing, though.

  With a grunt of confusion, Treadwell stepped into the bathroom and looked around. Aside from the sink, there was also a freestanding ceramic bath, one of the ones with clawed feet. It was deep and luxurious, but also coated in what looked like algae. The buzzing seemed to be coming from inside, so Treadwell went over to take a look, his hose ready to fire. Antworth Manor had made him uncharacteristically jumpy.

  Inside the bath was a large grey lump. When Treadwell shined his torch directly on it, the grey took on a brownish hue. It was a husk of some sort, like a bundle of old dry, leaves…

  It was buzzing loudly.

  Then it began to move and things started coming out of it.

  The first wasp darted straight at Treadwell’s face. He bellowed in a mixture of shock and pain when his cheek flared up in agony. More wasps flew out of the nest and the buzzing grew angrier.

  Treadwell pulled the trigger and filled the air with toxic mist. He usually avoided taking a breath in when he sprayed chemicals, but his panic made him inhale deeply. He caught a lungful of burning fumes and started choking and spluttering. As he doubled over, the wasps descended on him, stinging him and bombarding him with their plump little thoraxes. He snatched at the air and caught one of them in his palm, then crushed the creature with an inconsolable rage growing inside him.

  Treadwell sprung up defiantly and roared. He clamped down on the trigger and unleashed insect hell. “Say ‘ello to ma lil fren’”

  He must have got stung a dozen times, but he ignored the pain and kept on spraying until every single airborne wasp hit the floor and crunched beneath his boots. Then, when he was done with them,
he saturated the nest, drowning anything still alive inside. So angry was he that he leapt up into the bath like a madman and began stamping on the nest. It crunched at first but then turned to wet mulch. There was no more buzzing.

  He staggered back into the bedroom and went to sit down on the bed, but then saw the mass of beetle carcasses. His only option was to slump down on the tattered carpet, but even that was littered with dead beetles. Antworth Manor was infested beyond any building he’d ever worked. After thirty years, he had found a job to eclipse all others. Spiders, beetles, and now wasps. He opened up his clenched fist and found that he still clutched the dead one he had crushed. It was no ordinary wasp, he saw closer to a hornet in size actually. Like the spider in the cellar, Treadwell was looking at a species not supposed to be there. He thought once again about whether he should call somebody.

  His face and neck were now throbbing. Not only had a spider bitten him, but now he had several stings. He felt sick in his tummy and a little dizzy. He remained on the floor and took some deep breaths. He wasn’t allergic to bee or wasp stings – he knew that from a lifetime of facing them in people’s attics and sheds – but he’d never been bitten by a non-native spider. Did he need to get checked out? Should he just get the hell out of there?

  Antworth Manor was doing a number on him, that was for sure, and he dreaded to think what other beasties were hiding in the shadows.

  Fuck them, though, he thought. He wasn’t going to let a bunch of wasps and spiders stop him from getting paid. Let other people’s flesh crawl at the thought of bugs, but he was not afraid of them. Not since the day he’d woken up covered in ticks.

  He climbed back to his feet and adjusted himself. It was time to check out the rest of the house. The next room he encountered was a library. Like other parts of the Antworth Manor, it was still inhabited by its past. Books lined the many shelves and a grand old oak desk lay parked up against one wall beneath the window.