36) Lord of The Flies

Bzzzzzzzzzz…. Zzzzzzt…. Zzzzzzzttt…

You scanned the room, your toothbrush in your mouth as you turned away from the double sink and mirrors. Where was that coming from?

Zzzzzzzz….. ZZZZZZZZtttt….

There on the floor, over by the pot of flowers and the tall white grow light there was a single fly belly up, struggling in a vain attempt to right itself. You had once read that dead or dying insects will wind up on their backs because of blood flow issues that make their legs fold, causing the top heavy creatures to flip. You found it difficult though to find any sort of compassion for the dying fly… you also couldn’t bring yourself to wad it up into a ball of toilet paper and toss it into the trash can. It wasn’t that you felt bad about doing so, rather the feeling of the live fly buzzing through the paper made you want to wretch. You’d let it die before you tossed it.

This had been going on since day one. There always seemed to be the errant fly in the bathroom or guest bedroom. Sometimes there would be two or three… they’d either be buzzing about the room, or upside down crawling across the ceiling before they dropped down and flew about the room, just out of reach and tormenting your cat. Sometimes the cat would win, catching the fly mid flight with a fury of sheathed claws and sharp teeth. Then there would be the dead flies… you’d find a few on the ground… sometimes one, sometimes two or more. There seemed to be a steady trickle of the disgusting things coming from some unknown source.

At first their occupation made sense… often times the doors would be left open to bring in boxes or sheets of plywood. Many of the few windows that actually did open had screens that didn’t quite fit tightly in the frame, revealing little gaps that bugs could easily slip through. There was never really any abundance or regularity to the found flies downstairs and their presence always coincided with propped doors while a parade of supplies was brought inside. Upstairs however they were a near (albeit small) constant.

At first you hadn’t really minded too much. In Florida you fought a never ending battle against termites and Palmetto bugs. When a switch plate would be replaced or a ceiling light removed, there would always be the accompanying rain of tiny black specks…. tens of thousands of termite droppings. It wasn’t just your home though, it was all homes, new… old… modest… multi-million dollar… the bugs were just barely kept at bay.

And it was the exact same thing with the Palmetto bugs, massive cockroachs. They weren’t anything like a German roach in that unlike a German roach where when you saw one there were thousands, the Palmetto bug was a ‘lone wolf’ that often found it’s way in; seeking shelter from too much rain or looking for water when there was too little. Also unlike German roaches, Palmetto bugs didn’t seek out dirty environments. You could keep your house in absolutely immaculate condition and yet they’d still find their way in. Sometimes you’d be watching TV and one would scamper across the floor sending you into a panic… you’d scream for your husband or your eldest son who didn’t seem at all bothered by them. They’d wad up some toilet paper or paper towels and chase the large roach across the room until they could stomp it out and toss the carcass, legs still twitching… into the trash can. Sometimes though the bug would escape and you’d have to leave the room… not venturing back in for hours. Every so often you’d just find pieces of them… the cat getting to the unlucky roach before your husband or son could.

Now in the church just out of both habit and expectation, you often found yourself bracing for an onslaught of frass every time you pulled out an old board… expecting the disgusting pellets to rain down on you. And every time you’d yank out a plank or remove a switch plate you’d be shocked by their absence. You still jumped months later, when an errant leaf had been tracked into the house… expecting it to scuttle away under a box or cupboard.

“I didn’t realize the bug PTSD I have from living in Florida for twenty years,” you had said to David one day.

“Oh I know! I keep thinking I saw a Palmetto or that I’m going to get covered in termite crap every time I pull up a board.”

The most shocking thing though, wasn’t that there were no Palmetto bugs or termites to be found… the shocking thing was that you saw virtually no evidence of any type of bug when you gutted the basement or pulled planks from any of the ceilings. Sure there was an occasional centipede (you could count the number of times you had seen one in the church on one hand) and a bizarre amount of ladybugs in the guest bedroom, a few little spiders here and there (they didn’t bother you in the least), and even the armored looking stink bug that intermittently snuck in…

But these disgusting flies were finally beginning to get to you. It wasn’t even that they were coming inside in swarms… the issue was the regularity… they couldn’t be written off as a “one off.”

The kids would vacuum the bathroom floor one day, sucking up the upturned insects only to find several more the very next morning. In the guest room, one of the front double paned windows was cracked clean through… the middle of the window was filled with dozens of dead flies. You kept the curtain closed. You couldn’t wait to replace those windows (unfortunately you had to).

When winter came you no longer found the dead, dying, or flying insects anywhere in the house but the primary bathroom and guest room. You could no longer assume, given the sub zero temperatures outside, that they were originating from the church’s exterior.

Even more strange was that their presence was confined to just those two rooms.

“The fly thing is really starting to gross me out,” you had said to David, drying your hands off with a bathroom towel before you pointed to the insect struggling to right itself up off the bathroom floor. “I really assumed that come winter we’d be done with them.”

“Me too.”

“It’s strange that we’re only finding them in here and the guest room too.”

“I had thought about that.”

“You think they’re coming from the attic?”

“I mean it makes sense,” he said looking up at the bathroom ceiling where the access panel to the attic was screwed in… an old hinge had broken and now the ladder no longer stayed in place on its own. One more thing to address on a never ending list. Above the bathroom was another room that the previous owners had wanted to turn into an office. That had made no sense to either of you, imagine wanting to go into your office or to come out of it only to find your partner sitting on the toilet? The space above the bathroom had high ceilings and 12 small windows, three on every side. The windows were each about eight feet off the ground David had guessed. He could just about reach the bottoms of them when he had gone up there.

“Well that’s going to be a whole other project,” he had lamented after climbing out of the attic last summer to inspect the little furnace that provided heat to the bedrooms and bathroom.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s nasty up there… you would be so grossed out. It’s pretty much a bio hazard situation; I’m going to have to go in there with a full suit and respirator.”

“What???”

“Yeah, It’s loaded with pigeon shit… the pigeons were getting in there.”

“Oh my god! That’s freaking gross! So then when the furnace goes on do we have to worry about it pulling air from the pigeon crap attic?”

“No… the air intake is coming from the exterior of the church… you can actually see it from the side yard…”

“Well I guess that’s a small win then…”

“The other win is that I don’t think the pigeons are able to get in there anymore. The droppings look really old. It looks like everything is sealed up… so once we…”

“Once you,” you corrected him, “I’m not going up there…”

“Once I clean it all out… we should be good to go…”

Remembering that conversation now you asked David… “Do you think that the flies are coming in from the pigeon crap or the attic up above us?”

“Well… I don’t think they’re coming from the old bird crap… it’s practically dust it’s so old and the only other thing I can think of is if something was dead up there but… if something was dead we would have smelled it… and seeing as this attic isn’t connected to the other attic, what would be the chance that there just happened to be two dead things in each attic that we couldn’t smell? So maybe but I don’t know Vaness… I’ve fully inspected both of the attics and there is nowhere that pigeons could get in. At some point they were getting into both attics (he had found the mummified remains of a few dead birds in the massive attic over the sanctuary) but not anymore.”

“Huh… well none of this makes any sense then… because flies are not going to be congregating on decade old pigeon crap, there’s nothing actively rotting… we would have smelled it… and there are no holes large enough for any new pigeons to get in…”

“Maybe it’s a plague,” David joked.

“I guess it beats locusts.”

****************************************************************

There was no explanation that either one of you could come up with and yet every day you’d find a few dead flies on the ground or one crawling across the bathroom or guest room ceiling. The ladybugs you could deal with, the occasional spider visiting you in the shower didn’t worry you in the least; you found the occasional stinkbug inhabitance fascinating… watching their little tank like bodies make their way across the slate floor and window sills… the flies though were really starting to get to you.

At this point you had a social media account for the church on vitually every platform. Some you were far more active on than others. Most of your content was video based… nearly all of it… but every now and then there was church content that lent itself better to text. Last week’s bat encounter was one such occasion… though you had written the tale about rescuing a bat on THREADS before it died and you brought its corpse up to Veronica’s rescue, you had gotten so much flack for “not getting your rabies vaccine,” on the platform that you never bothered to go back and update the story. While the post didn’t exactly go viral it had been one of your more popular ‘threads’ with nearly two hundred comments… most of which were telling you what a moron you were for not getting your rabies vaccine (despite reassuring followers and strangers alike that the bat expert had told you that is was wholly unnecessary)… “SHE DOESN’T WORK FOR THE CDC… OBVIOUSLY SHE DOESN’T HAVE A CLUE… SHE SHOULD LOSE HER LICENSING… YADA, YADA, YADA…”. The last thing you were going to do was update it to let everyone know the bat was dead… They’d probably tell you what a jackass you were for not cutting off the bat’s head and driving it another god only knows how many hours to the bat head rabies checking location… wherever that might be.

But something made you check the notifications that day. “How many people were calling you an idiot today?” You had mused when you saw the little heart with the red dot letting you know that there was activity on the post. Always down for some public humiliation you clicked the heart to read the comments and yes, there were even more telling you just how dumb you were… but… one had caught your attention. It read:

“There was a church I read about that had a huge bat issue. The problem was so big that the nuns actually gathered up all the guano and sold it. They made a fortune off of it and used it to fix their church…”

HOLY FUCKING SHIT you thought, IT’S THE FUCKING BAT GUANO. IT’S THE BATS! THE PIGEONS CAN’T GET IN… BUT THE BATS CAN! AND THAT’S WHERE THE FUCKING FLIES ARE COMING FROM! WE DIDN’T SEE THE BAT CRAP IN THE SUMMER BECAUSE THEY WEREN’T UP THERE HIBERNATING AT THE TIME!!!

And with that you jumped up out of your chair and ran down the stairs…

“David! I figured out the fly problem! And it’s actually a bat problem…,” you yelled when you ran into the basement to find David up on a ladder.

******************************************************

Later that night as you laid in bed, you couldn’t help but think of the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” or “Bacon's Law…” a game where one chose an actor whom they then connect to another actor via a film in which both actors appeared: this was repeated to try to find the shortest path to the actor Kevin Bacon. The game rested on the assumption that anyone involved in the Hollywood film industry could be linked through their film roles to Bacon within six steps. And you wondered if maybe there happened to be a “Six Degrees of the Big Brown Bat,” at play in the church…

The flies were easy: just one degree of separation from the bats… from roost to attic floor really… but you were asleep before you had a chance to link the bees, and the trees, and the neighborhood feral cats, to the Big Brown Bats… given a little more time though, you were fairly certain that at some point you could link them all.

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This is one of the two attics. This one is MASSIVE (roughly 3,000 square feet) and located just above the sanctuary. It took us a bit to find the access to this one. We knew this attic existed but we weren’t sure how to get in… our real estate agent wasn’t quite sure either. David eventually ended up finding the access off of the guest room… there is a door in there that leads to a little primitive “staircase” that takes you up to the belfry tower (I use the term “staircase” very loosely as it is far more just boards nailed to the wall in a diagonal direction than it is actual stairs). There’s a bunch of foam board insulation up in that access and David noticed a draft in there; when he moved the foam board, there was the attic on the other side. Took us a few weeks to find it… granted we weren’t really spending too much time looking lol… but still.