agentblack

I've not been doing much recently, obviously.

I've been feeling a lot better about things in general though. I feel like I've turned a corner recently, and things seem to be falling into place. I'm not sure when it happened, but I think it had something to do with the beetles.

I'd been practicing, trying to count them. The first couple of times, I got to three, maybe four, before the swirling made me lose count or the migraines made me throw up or pass out.

I stuck with it until I got up to twelve. I had a constant head ache, right behind my right eye, and my fingers buzzed whenever I touched something. I could only keep dry toast down.

I gave up after that. I snuck down stairs whilst mum was out at work, had shower. It felt good to wash the dried sick off me, get the smell of bile and sweat out of my hair.

I stood there under the water for a while, let myself think for a bit. under the water, I realised I'd had my shoulders screwed up around my ears for the last few days, tangled up with the stress of trying to count those spinning black shapes. I let the heat melt the tightened meat around my shoulders, felt my spine straighten out.

I stayed there for a while, letting my head swim, until the traffic static humming through the window started to make me panic.

It was still too big and too near, even in the close tiled space of the bathroom. The Outside.

When I got back into the attic, I started thinking again, properly this time, and if felt like I was using my brain for the first time in ages.

I got some paper and a marker pen, and started to plan.

I can't catch the beetles. They're too fast. They seem to shoot out of my hands like they're propelled. It feels like trying to make two magnets touch at the wrong ends.
Some invisible force pushing them apart, and it doesn't matter how close you get, they'll always fly apart.

I think. And I wait. When Mum goes to bed that night, I sneak back down from the attic, and get a glass from the kitchen, and then a couple of old boards of MDF from the garage.

That's hard. I stand by the door, psyching my self up, sweat leaking through my t shirt. I'm terrified, and just thinking about wehter or not she's left the garage door wide open to The Outside makes my bladder weaken.
I touch the door handle like it's red hot at first, scared to open the door accidentally.
I hold my breath to stop me screaming, and then lunge through into the blackness, hunched over and flailing, tripping over paint can's and buckets, sprawlling to the floor, mouth tight shut, breathing hard through my noise, near enough biting through my tongue.

I spot the MDF and grap it , hauling it out and through the door, letting it drop to the floor whilst I slump against the wall whimpering, forehead soaked, spine running sweat. I let my breathing recover before I flinch inside the garage again to shut the door.

Upstairs, I arrange the MDF to form a little corral. I try leaning the pieces together, but it's hopeless. I realise I'm going to need to go back to the garage and fetch a hammer and some tacks.

It takes me three goes, diving inside and hurling myself around in a panic, terrified of staying still for too long, whimpering like a beaten dog as I search for nails and a hammer. I nab a saw as well, because I can't take the idea of some unforeseen circumstance forcing me down there again. I spend a few minutes out in the hall dry heaving once I finish collecting, and then scuttle back up to the attic. I sleep for the rest of the night, collapsed on my bed like a broken toy.

I start properly building the enclosure properly once Mum's left for the day. It takes a couple of hours, and by the end of it I'm left with a little alley a couple of feet deep and just under a foot wide, with good high sides.

Using the saw that I'm so glad I snagged, I cut a couple of pieces down to make dividers for the alleyway that slot in and out nicely. I sweep away the worst of the sawdust, and start waiting for one of the beetles to wander down my enclosure.

I doesn't take long. Theyed been milling around the whole time I was building the thing, checking it out, and a smaller one soon wanders right to the end, waving it's antennae against the wooden walls I've contructed.

I don't want to scare it off, so I move slowly and gently slide one of my cut offs into the alleyway, cutting of the beetles escape route. It doesn't look concerned, keeps waving it's antennae around, checking out the walls.

I move the cut off in, cutting off the space the beetle has to manuveur in, until I reduce it's world to a mall little rectangle. I grab the glass, and then drop an old post card at one end of the small rectangle, away from the beetle. I hold the Glass above the card, waiting, and then reach down with my free hand towards the beetle, fingers outstretched, as if i'm going to grab it. I get close, maybe a quarter inch away, and then the beetle slides away, bounces away like a dodgem car and ends away from my hand, on the card, under the glass.

I drop the glass. It lands with a perfect little thud around the beetle. He doesn't look bothered, just waves his antennae around his newly shrunken soundproofed little world.

I sit back, a shiver of triumph twisting in my chest. I check the glass again. Still there, a hard plack little shape, sitting patiently, waiting for whatever happens next.

I giggle a little. "Gotcha." I whisper. I reach other and pick up the glass, the card clamped firmly underneath it. The skull space behind by right eye starts to gently ache and throb again as I lift the glass and turn it about, getting a good look at the obsidian black little beetle. The throb ramps up to a whistle as I shake the beetle to the bottom of the glass and swap my hand for the card. It turns ultra sonic and makes my eyes tear as I up end the glass again and let the beetle fall onto my hand. I wince and grit my teeth and lift the glass away, shoulders hitched up tight and hard again as I bend in close to get a good look at it.

Except the beetle's gone. I check the back of my hand, to see if it's hanging on there, then the glass, incase it's clinging there. Nothing. The migraine fades, deflating like a punctured balloon, all the pain-pressure whistling into the air.

I loom down, and the other beetles are gathered round me in a thick ring. It feels like they're staring.

I start thinking again. I start being methodical. I get smart.

I can see beetles. But I cannot touch them.

Hypothesis - The Beetles have no physical presence.

Which suggests - They're not real.

That night I go down to the kitchen and pick up some icing sugar. I test my hypothesis.

I scatter icing suger over the bare boards of the attic floor. I dust teh floor with it, and then crouch on the sofa and watch. I sit there for an hour, then two hours, which turns to three; watching beetles cross and wheel around the floor, and not leaving any tracks. I look a hard. No pin prick tiny foot prints from insect feet, no trails from dragging abdomens. I put my own foot on the floor, and lift it up to reveal a giants foot print in the sweet white snowscape.

Results - The beetles leave a no tracks in icing sugar.

Conclusion - The Beetles are not real, Or, they are too light to leave tracks in the icing suger.

I think some more. I sneak downstairs again, it's some time after midnight now and Mum's tucked up in bed. I fetch her hairdryer from her room. I wawtch her sleep for a while. She looks so peaceful, and I suddenly feel really guilty that she got saddled with me, locking myself up in the attic and carrying on. I shut the door behind me gently and go back up to the attic.

Still no beetle tracks, but mine are there, back and forward across the floor.
I plug the hair dryer in and stand at one end of the room. I take aim with the hairdryer at one of the largest, I think I might be Ringo, and I flip the switch on the hairdryer.

If the beetles are so light that they don't leave tracks in the suger, then the force of the air being blown by the hair dryer ought to toss them around like dead leaves.

The icing sugar explodes into billowing clouds that fog and cloud the air with a sweet mist that stick to my lips, and my sugary footprints are lost forever, blowing and blending in the storm of sugar that swept around my room. And the beetles keep on skittering around, completely oblivious to the blast of air that I turn on them. I single out a small one , and get the nozzle close up on him, and heignores it, doesn't stagger, doesn't change direction, not even his antennae flicker.

Even when I get down low and try and get the air stream under him to try and flip him, he keeps on flicking about the room. I feel the hackles on my neck rise up.

Someone bangs on the trapdoor of the attic.
It's Mum, she want's to know if I'm okay, she thought she heard something. I tell her I'm fine. SHe's quiet for a minute, and then asks if i heard anything. I tell her I didn't, but that it might have been next door.

You know what they're like, I tell her. She says good night, and we stop shouting through the trapdoor.

I turn back to the beetles and watch them wheel around the room whilst the icing sugar slowly drifts down like sugary snow. It doesn't even settle on the beetles backs. It makes my spine creep.

The next morning, I've got bacon and eggs on toast for breakfast.There a note from Mum saying that she'll be gone for the rest of the day, and that she's missing a pack of icing sugar, did I move it. I scribble on the back of the note that I didn't even know we HAD icing sugar.

I sweep the floor, and then consider last nights events. I think about how the icing sugar didn't dust the beetles as it fell, and think about testing it further, about going down to my old room and digging out some spray paint, seeing if I can mark them with some bright red or something, but I know it won't work. I don't fancy the attic stinking of paint either.

The beetles have no physical presence.
Which suggests they are not real.

I look at the results. I draw my conclusions. My spine crawls up my back.