But Depart Into The Wild Mountains

Another house, another husband opening the door. “Are you the exterminator?” he asks. 

The husband winces at the light like a creature disturbed under a rock. Even though the exterminator is sitting, he manages to take full inventory: starting with her buzz cut, lingering on the tank top showing the outline of her flat tits and following her legs all the way down to sturdy boots. Extra once-over time is spent on her hands in their fingerless gloves where they rest on the wheels of her chair. 

“You’re not what I expected,” the husband says. 

Knock knock. Who is it? Nobody ever expects a dyke in a wheelchair. 

The exterminator has a name, but its softness gets stuck to the roof of her mouth. Exterminator is fine, from Late Latin, an angel who expels. 

The exterminator looks at the row of houses, neat as piano keys. Behind a window, a lace curtain falls back into place. “You said on the phone that you had an infestation.”

The husband’s expression turns bile-sour. “We can discuss that inside.”

Inside is a boxy ground floor apartment smelling of dirty laundry and stale sweat. The way cleared between random junk—a home trainer powdered with dust, Red Bull cans stacked on top of empty pizza boxes—is just big enough for her wheelchair to fit through as the husband leads the way.

“I didn’t think women would be interested in doing this kind of job,” the husband says. “Must be nasty, being around pests all day.”

They are moving towards a door at the end of the hallway. There is always a door at the end of a hallway, or in the back of an attic, tacked onto the architecture like a tumor.

“Really,” the exterminator says, “They are more afraid of you than you are of them.”

A scratching noise can be heard inside of the room. The husband tells the story like this: upon waking up, his wife, Kristen, found herself transformed into a person-sized insect. 

“I turn around in bed and she’s—” he makes a noise like there is something vile stuck in his throat. 

The exterminator has a set of keys in her lap that she absently toys with, cold ghost teeth snapping against her fingertips. The trick is not to hold a key between each finger, Wolverine-style, but to close your fist around one. Use it like a small knife. The trick is to shout fire instead of—

The husband unlocks and opens the door. It is a guest room with one neatly made-up bed with a flower print comforter in the center. The wallpaper is so ugly that if you squint, you’ll think you can see shapes moving around in it. All the tricks, in the end, are useless against a bear in the woods, the sound of footsteps in a dark parking lot. 

“I heard about this shit on the news,” the husband says. Beneath the bed, something dark shifts, listening. He does not venture farther into the room. “Women turning into these huge cockroaches, climbing on the ceiling. What is it, some kind of fucked up epidemic?”

The exterminator moves her chair into the room. What does a body have to endure to make it turn into something untouchable?

“Kristen,” the exterminator says. “I am here to help you. You can stay below the bed if that is what feels safe to you right now. I brought something to eat; I think the foods you used to like probably don’t taste as good anymore.”

From her backpack, the exterminator produces a tightly sealed box and opens it to the putrid miasma of spoiled meat and rotten cheese. The man in the doorway retches and groans. The exterminator sets the food down on the floor. “Can you use human language for me, Kristen?”

From under the bed, there is a sound like small bones breaking beneath the heel of a boot.

“That is perfectly fine,” the exterminator says. 

A pair of long feelers detaches from the shadows and pokes out into the room.

“Are you going to get this thing out of my house now?” the husband snarls. The feelers shudder and retreat under the bed. “They said on the news to call the number and that you would take it to some kind of facility.”

There are framed prints of pittoresque landscapes on the wall. There are vertical scratches on the doorframe around the lock. 

The exterminator moves backwards in her chair, opens a pack of cigarettes and shakes out a silver lighter. “You mind if I smoke in here?”

“Yeah, I actually do,” the husband says, folding his arms. 

The exterminator’s mouth twitches. She lights up a cigarette. 

The husband leans down to talk to her.  “Listen, I don’t want any trouble with the police, I just want this fucking roach removed from my house!” 

“I’m not police,” the exterminator says. She watches, amused, as the husband understands two things in quick succession: that he has not requested any ID and that he has neglected to check if the front door closed behind her. How quaint it must be, the exterminator thinks, to have the privilege of being so careless. 

The husband is deterred from any further action by the movement of the three bodies behind him, masked and silent. His cheap sneakers leave black dragging marks on the floor. 

Another meaning of exterminare: to destroy. 

From beneath the bed, a person-sized brown moon emerges, all iridescent shell and strong mouth tools. The verminwoman Kristen shuffles forward and greedily chugs down her Tupperware rot meal. Her carapace shows dents and scratches from where she has squeezed herself into too-tight spaces. She scuttles around the room, small legs rippling, then turns her antennae towards the exterminator. There is a white pattern around her upper body like a string of pearls, or a noose. 

“You know, they are going to come for you. We just have our ways to get here early.”

The verminwoman makes a rattling noise with her mandibles. 

The exterminator puts her head to one side, considers. “No, he’ll probably never be a problem for anyone ever again,” she says. “I’ll leave the terrace door open; it should be wide enough for you to get out.” The exterminator blows a lazy smoke ring and winks. “Good luck out there, kid.”

†

Verminwoman waits for the frontdoorclick and the personsounds to quiet. Then its skitterlegs move over carpet, staticstrange feeling against its belly, now coolcool tile, then squeeze and raise frontbody and push, yesalltheway through the opening. Warm here too but no personsmells, and then outsidewind tingling its carapace. Stretching little skitterlegs soon shuffling towards woodlandsmell, with leaves and mossy earth and bug bodies and verminthings crawling in the darkness. 

†

A white van moves between rows of family homes in the blue dusk, an urban legend with its teeth knocked out. The exterminator likes her driver. Her hands on the steering wheel are steady and sure, sleeves rolled up over her biceps. 

From the back of the van, a muffled noise: shifting cargo, or a body hitting the floor. The exterminator itches for a cigarette. Soon the sweltering electricity will gather into something productive, and the heat will break like a wishbone. The noise again, louder.

The driver nudges up the volume on the radio. The van keeps moving. 

†

Behind doors at the end of hallways and high up in attics, things scuttle on polished floors.

© 2025 Caro Jansen

About the Author
Caro Jansen (she/her) is a queer writer of horror and speculative fiction. Her work has appeared in Fireside Magazine and elsewhere, she recently contributed a story to the horror anthology The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread (Neon Hemlock Press, 2024). Perpetually unable to decide between passions, she is also a medical doctor. Caro lives in Cologne with her girlfriend and their two cats (one named after a fictional jungle boy, the other after a sad Czech novelist). She posts as @somenotesonghosts on instagram, or find her at catrinko.com.