The Legacy of Mr. Horrible, Part 2

Previously. On I'm Afraid of Bees...
A rat has terrorized my apartment, but is finally dead somewhere in the walls.

Mr. Horrible had died some time in the winter. It was summer now and the apartment was up to its usual shenanigans.

The floor in the bathroom was leaking. That's right, the floor. Water was coming up through the tile and ruining several bathmats.




We would later learn that a pipe under our floor was cracked and leaking.

What does this have to do with Mr. Horrible, you ask?
To answer that we first need a quick science lesson. Yay, science!

Did you know that certain flies make their babies in animal carcasses?
That's why there are always maggots on corpses in horror movies.

I'm sure you are thinking, "Maggots? Oh no, there's a rat corpse in her walls!"
You are right to be concerned.




Flies also need a running water source to turn grow up big and strong.





Remember the hole in the bathroom wall? The one that Mr. Horrible made?
That was the point of entry for the flies.





I'd never been afraid of flies before. But I'd also never seen flies like this.
They were HUGE and aggressive. They would charge at your head and smack into your face. It felt like being pelted with rocks. There were usually 3 or 4 of them around at a time, often appearing while I was using the bathroom.

As you can imagine, the flies were well on their way to becoming my number one fear.
Then I made the mistake of looking them up on wikipedia.

Looking at anything online is a bad idea. Most people find knowledge empowering. I am not most people. The more I know about something the more it sends me into a spiral of panic. Plus there are pictures.

But I end up online anyway, researching every little thing that comes into my life.
"My throat hurts and oh, it looks weird. The Internet will know what to do!"





"Oh look, pictures! One of these will surely match my throat problem."






"Oh no."






"Oh dear god no!"






"NOOOOOO!"






The internet lived up to its reputation, revealing that these giant flies weren't just any giant flies. They were flesh-eating flies.
Flesh. Eating. Flies.





This explained why the roommate and I had been waking up with mysterious bug bites. The flies had been EATING OUR FLESH.






Further research revealed that flies cannot fly in cold environments.
We turned the apartment into an ice box. I also purchased a fancy bug spray.
It smelled like Febreze and murder.

The apartment being cold definitely cut down on the fly activity. I had my magic fly spray. I was lulled into a false sense of security. I made the mistake of turning the air conditioner off.

I was sitting on my bed, watching important tv shows, when I noticed some casual lumps on my rug.







As the room became warmer the lumps began to slowly move, like zombies dragging themselves out of their shallow graves.
Wait, those were no ordinary lumps! Magnify!





I screamed and sprayed and sprayed and screamed. I made myself light-headed and had to go into the living room.

There was no easy solution for the flies.
The Internet revealed that fly infestations happen outdoors, on farms. They can be lured away from your horses with a giant blue balloon-like apparatus.







This was not a feasible solution for our refrigerator-box sized apartment.
I stuck to the screaming and spraying solution.

The flies disappeared when the weather turned cooler. My fear of them did not.

The Legacy of Mr. Horrible, Part 1

(Note: Those of you who have read my other blogs may have heard parts of this story already. I promise I will have new ones up as well, plus any older stories will have new things in them. Like extras on a DVD. Except with reading.)

The apartment I currently live in has had it's share of problems; if you want to dry your hair you have to turn everything off, the bathtub is perpetually clogged, the whole thing is slanted at a 45 degree angle, etc.

But the very worst thing was Mr. Horrible, and the things that happened because of Mr. Horrible.

It was winter, I know because I had put some trash bags in the back porch area to be taken out once I was fully protected by one hundred layers of winter clothing.
I then got distracted by something (probably tv) and forgot about the trash.

A few days later I was headed out the back door and paused in my doorway to wait for the motion sensing light to click on.
When it did, a monstorous blob ran furiously in a circle, close to my feet and then through the newly made hole in the bottom of the staircase.

I screamed like I scream, which is not really a scream. It's too deep in register and it's more of a "Huuuuglah!".

This alerted the gay neighbor (or gaybor) who came rushing down the stairs to see if I was okay.
I told him that I had seen a rat but it was gone now and I was fine even though it had sounded like I was being stabbed. He not so subtly implied that the rat had come in to feast on the trash bags that had been in the back area for far too long.

I looked at the trash mess the rat had made and noted that he seemed to be eating through all of the Dunkin Donut coffee cups that had spilled about.

I assured the gaybor that I was taking the trash out now and I would call the landlord about the rat.

This presented a new problem, actually making a phone call. For whatever reason, making a call is an anxiety-ridden experience for me. I have been told this is a common problem for people with any variety of anxiety disorder. That does not make it any easier for me. Even thinking about it right now makes my stomach do back flips and feel like something is crawling under my skin.

Answering the phone is no easier. I usually let it ring several times before I work up the nerve to answer.
Even if I know you and love you, picking up the phone to talk to you is terrifying for me.
I mean, what if it's not you?
What if someone else is trying to reach me from your phone for a totally legitimate reason and when I finally pick up the phone it's not your voice, and I become totally disoriented and wonder if something is wrong with my ability to see what the phone screen says? Then I'll spend the first portion of this conversation not listening while I try to figure out what went wrong in my brain, and completely miss the fact that it's an emergency and that's why someone else is calling from your phone.

I did not call the landlord.

I avoided leaving through the back for a few days.
Then one night the roommate and I heard a noise, somewhere in our walls.
The terror of the noise beat the terror of a phone call and I called the landlord and told him the story of the back porch.

He was very sympathetic and sent someone over to deal with it.

The solution?
Boarding up the hole in the staircase.

A while later (maybe a week) I was cleaning the apartment and went under the kitchen sink to grab something, only to discover that under the sink had been converted into a classy rat apartment.

He had a whole set-up; bed, bathroom area, a make-shift staircase (an old dish rack) that led up to a drawer that held miscellaneous cooking utensils (balcony?).

Everything was covered with muck and grime. I could not deal with it at the moment because the thought of touching anything under there made me want to die. I informed the roomate of the rat penthouse, and we assumed, since the rat had been 'dealt with', that the undersink apartment was vacant.

This also explained the several overturned cups of coffee we had found in past weeks. Apparently the rat had been surviving on coffee alone.

It wasn't until late one night, as we were sitting in the kitchen chatting about our days that we heard it.
The distinct sound of something heavy dragging itself over the hole in the wall and the sickening plop of it finding the ground inside the cabinet. Silence. We sat frozen, mouths agape.
Then the sound of the same heavy thing dragging itself back through the wall, it's belly catching and scraping on the bottom part of the wall hole.

We stared at each other, horrified.
The landlord wouldn't be in til morning.

To deal with this trauma, we did what we always do. We made jokes about our rat tenant.
We named him Mr. Horrible and decided he looked like this:

But really, we knew he looked like this:

While we were at work the next day, the rat police came and evicted Mr. Horrible by repairing the hole he had made in the wall. We were assured traps of some kind had been set (Poison? Actual traps? They didn't say).

The noises in the wall soon became worse.
Mr. Horrible was trapped within our home and all exits had been cut off. Whatever means the rat police thought would kill him were powerless against him.

He tried escaping many different ways, the roommate noticed part of her closet wall where she often heard rat thrashings had been pushed out.
The wall on the other side of the rat penthouse had been pushed out as well.
The other side was in the bathroom, between the sink and the bathtub.

None of these holes were big enough for Mr. Horrible to escape through, but the noises he made were absolutely terrifying. I kept having nightmares that he was going to push through the wall and climb on my bed while I was sleeping.

Then one day the noises stopped. There was a strange smell.
We assumed that Mr. Horrible had died and that everything would go back to normal.

We were wrong.

To Be Continued...