3. Chapter III

The contractor’s name was Malik.

I knew this because it was stitched across his jacket, which saved me from having to ask while standing barefoot in a hallway full of ants.

He looked down at the trail crossing his boot. “That the infestation?”

“Part of it.”

“Part?”

“The cabinet is in the kitchen.”

He followed me inside, carrying a tool case and a moisture meter. The ants divided around his shoes without slowing. Malik watched them for a moment, then looked at the broken cabinet, the exposed channels, and the panel hanging loose beneath the sink.

He did not say old house.

I appreciated that immediately.

“What opened the wall?” he asked.

“The cabinet.”

“And under the sink?”

“Me.”

“Why?”

“There was something behind it.”

He gave me the expression tradespeople reserve for customers who have already made the job worse. Fair. I had removed half the plaster with a screwdriver and bent a butter knife attempting to open the floor. I was not presenting as a responsible occupant.

Malik set down his case and examined the arcs. He touched none of them at first. He used the moisture meter on the surrounding plaster, checked the torn fittings, then photographed everything from several angles.

“What are these packed with?”

“Pieces of the house.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“It is the best answer I have. I really am sorry if I am being kinda rude, but I hardly slept. So, please, get to work.”

He leaned closer. The red threads inside the exposed cable contracted again.

Malik saw them.

His shoulders changed. Only slightly, but enough. That small tightening people do when the explanation they expected has just left the room.

“Turn off the power,” he said.

“Man, the breaker is in the cellar.”

“Turn it off.”

I did.

When I returned, he had opened the panel beneath the sink farther. The central column was visible from floor to counter, pale material passing gradually into wood and plaster. Malik stood several steps back from it.

“That wasn’t like that when I arrived.”

“What changed?”

He pointed.

The structure had thickened around the electrical cable. The red fibers were no longer fine threads. They had swollen into narrow vessels enclosing the copper, and something dark moved through them in slow pulses.

The breaker was off.

The kitchen light remained on.

I looked at the ceiling fixture, then at Malik.

“Battery bulb?” he asked.

“No.”

He reached for the switch.

The light went out.

He pressed it again.

It came back.

“No power,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Then what is supplying it?”

“I suspect the wall.”

He looked at me.

“I know how that sounds.”

“No, you don’t.”

Fair.

He took a flat pry bar from his case and approached the central column. I told him not to touch it.

That was irritating. I had spent the entire morning touching it myself, yet the moment someone competent arrived I became protective of the impossible wall.

Malik ignored me and pressed the end of the bar against the pale surface. It gave slightly.

Not bone, then.

Or not only bone.

A dent formed around the metal and remained after he pulled away. Clear fluid gathered inside it, followed by one dark bead.

Blood.

There was no point calling it anything else.

Malik dropped the bar.

The column contracted.

The movement passed upward through the channels, across the wall and into the ceiling. A row of cupboards on the opposite side rattled. Something answered beneath the floor with a heavy internal knock.

Malik picked up his case.

“We’re leaving, son. ”

“Yes.”

I meant it.

Truly.

For perhaps five seconds, leaving seemed easy. Front door, pavement, somebody else’s problem. The landlord could argue with the building directly.

Then the red line beneath my forearm tightened.

My hand closed by itself.

Not into a fist. The fingers spread, bent backward slightly, and pressed against the wall.

I pulled away.

The palm remained against the plaster.

The skin stretched between my wrist and hand like warm rubber. There was no pain at first, which made it worse. Pain would have identified the boundary.

“Now what the hell are you doing?” Malik asked.

“Nothing... shit man, nothing - just... just n-nothing.”

A ridiculous answer. I was standing with my hand attached to the kitchen wall.

I pulled harder.

The plaster moved with me.

A shallow hand-shaped section lifted from the surface, connected to my palm by thin red strands. Beneath it, the wall was not brick. Layers of musle-colored tissue ran through the plaster, each crossed by wood grain and grains of sand.

Then the pain arrived.

I screamed and tore my hand free.

Most of it came back.

A patch of skin from the center of my palm did not.

It remained spread across the wall, perfectly flat, fingerprints visible beneath a film of white paint.

Malik grabbed my wrist. “Outside. Now.”

Blood ran down my arm.

The ants changed direction.

Every trail in the kitchen turned toward me.

“No.”

They came across the floor, over the counter, down the exposed channels. Hundreds first, then thousands, carrying nothing now.

“No, you fucking don’t.”

I kicked at them. Stamped. Slapped them from my legs as they climbed. Malik pulled me toward the hallway, but the ants were already beneath my clothes.

One entered the wound in my palm.

I felt it pass under the skin.

That sensation removed whatever restraint I had left.

I screamed at them. Not elegantly. Not in complete sentences. I tore off my shirt, hit myself hard enough to bruise, scraped both arms with my nails trying to remove movements I could feel but not see.

“GET THEM OUT.”

Malik tried.

He brushed them from my back and collar, crushed them beneath his gloves, dragged me toward the door. More appeared from the seams around the skirting boards. From the sockets. From beneath the floor.

The entire house had been full of them.

Of course it had.

I had merely been watching the ones polite enough to travel in daylight.

Malik reached the front door and pulled it open.

The hallway moved.

The floorboards rose in a curve beneath us, not breaking, bending. The wood became pale along the lifted edge, grain smoothing into bone. Red tissue stretched between the boards like webbing.

Malik let go of me.

A narrow piece of floor had entered the sole of his boot.

He stepped back, but the leather stretched with it. The boot was not caught on a nail. It had joined the floor.

He pulled his foot free and left the sole behind.

“Outside,” he said again.

Then the wall beside him opened.

Not collapsed. Opened.

The wallpaper separated along a vertical seam, folding back from a cavity far deeper than the thickness of the house. Pale arcs curved through the darkness. Timber, pipe, bone, wiring—everything joined into ribs large enough to pass through several rooms.

Malik stared.

“That isn’t—”

“I know.”

“No. That physically isn’t—”

“I know. Shut. Up. Old bag.”

It was strangely satisfying to hear somebody else fail.

The cavity contracted.

Air rushed from it, warm and wet. The smell was blood, damp wood, old dust and something from the back of the throat. The ants flowed inside, crossing the ribs in lines exactly six centimeters apart.

One carried the piece of skin from my palm.

I saw the fingerprints.

“Give that back.”

I actually said that.

As though the ant had borrowed it.

It climbed the nearest rib and pressed the skin into a shallow recess. The tissue folded around it. My palm burned.

The wall now had sensation.

I felt Malik’s hand against it when he steadied himself. Felt the rough fabric of his glove. Felt ants walking across sections several meters away. Felt the cold outer brick and, beyond that, rain touching the side of the house.

I pulled my hand to my chest.

The sensation remained.

“No.”

The line beneath my forearm opened.

It did not cut through the skin. The skin divided around it, neat as lips. A red cord rose from wrist to elbow, threaded with plaster dust and tiny wood fibers.

Ants climbed onto it.

I grabbed the cord.

Pain struck behind my eyes.

The kitchen light burst.

Malik swore and pulled me toward the open door. We made it three steps.

My left foot sank into the floor up to the ankle.

Not through a hole. Into the wood.

The boards closed around it. The toes spread beneath the varnish, lengthening into pale branches along the grain. I felt each nail flatten and harden inside the floor.

I fell.

My knee struck hard enough to crack something. Tile, perhaps. Me, perhaps. There was suddenly too much pain to catalogue properly.

Malik wrapped both arms around my chest and pulled.

For a moment, I moved.

My leg stretched behind me.

The skin did not tear. It thinned. The calf lengthened into red cords, and those cords disappeared between the boards toward the kitchen.

“Stop,” I gasped.

He kept pulling.

“STOP.”

He released me.

The relief was immediate and humiliating.

I lay on the hallway floor with one leg inside the house and began laughing.

Not because it was funny.

Because I had spent the morning worrying about the landlord charging me for a damaged cabinet, and now my foot had become structural flooring. That seemed worth something. A deposit deduction, presumably.

Malik took out his phone.

There was no signal.

He moved toward the front step.

The doorway narrowed.

The frame curved inward on both sides, white paint splitting to expose rows of small teeth beneath it.

He stopped.

“Are those—”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t ask anything.”

“Still yes.”

The teeth were not arranged like a mouth. Some were human, some animal, some ceramic approximations formed from broken plates. One was my molar fragment, silver crescent glinting near the hinge.

My intact tooth began to hurt.

I touched it with my tongue.

Still there.

For the moment.

The house contracted again.

My ribs answered.

A pressure spread beneath the sternum, dull at first, then sharp enough to fold me forward. The ants on my chest divided into parallel curves.

“No. No, absolutely fucking not.”

I shoved both hands against my ribs as though that might keep them inside.

The first one moved beneath the skin.

It slid sideways.

There was a wet cracking sound—not breaking, rearranging—and the left rib pressed outward under my arm. The skin stretched over it until I could see the pale curve beneath.

Malik knelt beside me.

“What do I do?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do I do?”

“I DON’T KNOW.”

The rib emerged.

Blood spread across my side. The bone did not fall or splinter. It continued into the wall, narrowing at the end until it became a length of white-painted timber.

The skirting board.

The same board I had marked with masking tape.

I looked toward the kitchen.

The ant trails were no longer entering the house.

They were entering me.

The fingernail clipping. The hair. The skin. The tooth. They had not been samples. They had been parts waiting along the route.

Not predictions.

Inventory.

I began crying then.

Not beautifully. Nose running, breath catching, words coming out wrong. I told Malik to leave even though the doorway had teeth and the floor had his boot sole. I told him to break the window. I told him not to touch the walls. Then I grabbed his sleeve because I did not want him to go.

Human dignity lasted remarkably well until it did not.

He stayed.

That was kind.

Stupid, but kind.

The second rib moved.

Then the third.

Each unfolded into a different part of the house. One joined a ceiling joist. Another curved down through the floor. My chest opened wider with every movement, but I remained conscious and able to breathe.

One lung no longer sat inside me.

I felt it inflating behind the kitchen wall.

Dust entered it with every breath.

I coughed plaster.

Malik backed away, one hand over his mouth.

“Call someone,” I said.

“No signal.”

“Break the window. I'll pay you double, I really will.”

He grabbed the tool case and threw it through the glass beside the door.

The case struck the window and stopped.

Not bounced. Stopped.

The glass softened around it, clear material stretching like skin before drawing the case inward. Metal tools remained visible for a moment inside the pane, then sank deeper and became dark shapes between layers.

“Wonderful,” I said.

My voice was wet now.

The house had reached my jaw.

The left molar cracked.

The silver filling rose from the tooth and slid beneath my tongue. An ant waited at the corner of my mouth.

I spat the fragment at it.

“Here. Since you’ve been so fucking patient.”

The ant collected it.

Annoyingly useful beast.

It carried the filling toward the kitchen, where the channel had first opened. The piece was already darkening as it went, dust gathering along the enamel.

I knew exactly where it would be found.

Had been found.

Whatever.

My spine pressed downward through the hallway floor. Vertebrae separated, not from one another but from sequence. One moved beneath the kitchen. Another joined the stairs. Another lay somewhere inside the office wall beside faded wallpaper that had not faded yet.

The house filled my awareness.

Every crack.

Every nail.

The broken cabinet door.

The blue cup, intact and shattered in different places.

The old paint fragment waiting inside the wall for the corner to break.

I felt Malik running now. Not outside—through the rooms, searching for another exit. Each footstep landed somewhere inside me.

“Malik.”

He stopped in the kitchen.

I could not see him from the floor, but the wall could.

“Don’t open anything else.”

“What?”

“It’s all connected.”

“What do I do?”

I almost said I don’t know again.

Instead: “Stand still.”

He did.

The house moved around him.

The channels tightened, ribs settling into their final curves. Ants packed plaster into gaps, carried blood into wood, pressed ceramic into bone. Small corrections. Maintenance.

Keeping up.

My remaining hand had begun sinking into the floor.

I watched the fingers spread into five narrow cracks.

There was no point pulling.

I was tired.

That feels shameful to admit, but pain becomes exhausting before it becomes profound. I wanted water. I wanted to lie down properly. I wanted the kitchen cleaned and the landlord to admit the cabinet had not been overloaded.

Very grand final concerns.

The front door opened.

Not for Malik.

Beyond it, morning light fell across the step. The street looked normal. A car passed. Somewhere nearby, someone rolled a bin over paving stones.

I tried to shout.

My jaw had become part of the frame.

Only a low sound came through the walls.

Malik heard it.

He looked toward me.

Then toward the open door.

“Go,” I managed.

He ran.

The doorway allowed him through.

Just him.

He stumbled onto the pavement barefoot on one side, turned, and reached back.

The door closed between us.

I felt the latch enter my jaw.

A small click.

Painfully ordinary.

The ants continued.

One crossed what remained of my chest carrying a splinter of white paint. Clearly old. Same yellowed edge. Same brown mark.

It moved toward the broken cabinet door.

No.

Toward where the cabinet door would break.

I understood then why the house had seemed unfinished to me. I had been looking at it in time, one damaged room after another, while the ants moved through the whole thing at once.

The channels were not waiting to become a body.

They already were one.

I had never been living inside the house.

Only arriving in pieces.

The ant pressed the paint into place.

They had never been waiting for me to die.

They had only been waiting for the rest of me to arrive.