Free Spitting Devil by Brian Freeman

Spitting Devil
    As Alison Malville dreamed, black ants marched over her body.
    Like an army of intimate invaders, they sought out the puckered folds on the buttons of her nightshirt and trooped relentlessly across the silk onto her damp skin. From her pillow, they climbed through the thick forest of her red hair, clung to her eyelashes, and explored the orifices on her face. She tasted them on her tongue. She inhaled and exhaled them through her nose. She drowned them in her tears as she cried. Unable to move, she screamed soundlessly as thousands of ants mounted her feet, her thighs, her torso, and her neck, violating the crevices between her limbs.
    Wake up, her brain told her.
    Wake up!
    Alison flew upward in bed. Awake, she could still feel the ants crawling on her body, and she tore at her clothes, popping buttons as she stripped naked. She scrambled out of the tangled sheets and threw herself against the wall, rubbing and slapping her skin as if she could kill them. Finally, exhausted and sobbing, her chest hammering, she sank to the floor and hugged her knees.
    Again. It had happened again.
    She dreamed of the ants almost every night now. When she closed her eyes, there they were, waiting to slip out through the walls. They had even begun to march from her sleep into her waking life. She couldn’t escape them. Wherever she went in the house, she heard them massing in the ceiling, watching her like spies.
    Alison understood what was happening to her. It wasn’t about the ants at all. It was about her husband. He was driving her into madness.
    As she sat on the floor, she stared at the glowing clock on her nightstand. The time said six o’clock. There was no light through the curtains, but it would be morning soon, and she was already late. She’d failed. She’d meant to stay awake – to listen, to see what Michael did – but sometime after midnight, her eyes had blinked shut despite three cups of caffeinated tea. She’d slept heavily.
    The ants had come back.
    Alison got to her feet in a rush. Gooseflesh pebbled her bare skin. She lifted a robe off the hook on the back of the closet door and slipped her arms inside the sleeves and tied it at her waist. She removed the chair wedged against the doorknob, unlocked the bedroom door, and peered down the upstairs hallway, which was dark and quiet.
    She smelled something odd in the stale air, blowing through the vents with the furnace heat. It was an essence of perfume. Hers.
    She checked on Evan first. Her ten-year-old son slept in a bedroom that was crowded with monster posters thumb tacked to the walls. He was obsessed with old Frankenstein movies. Vampires. Werewolves. Unlike his mother, Evan was fearless, immune to bad dreams. She found him on top of the covers, his skinny limbs sprawled, his mouth open, and his messy mop of brown hair covering his eyes. She navigated the minefield of toys littering the carpet and stroked his cheek with the back of one hand. Evan murmured but didn’t wake up.
    Alison heard something behind her. She spun, but there was nothing.
    Just ants.
    She clutched her forearms as she hurried downstairs. The house was so cold and dry that the metal railing gave her a shock of static when she brushed against it. The ceramic tiles on the floor of the foyer were like blocks of ice, making her dance on her tiptoes. She passed quickly into the dining room, where the carpet was lush, but she grimaced as she cut her foot on something sharp buried in the weave. She bent down and kneaded the pile with her fingers until she located a triangular shard of glass, which she cupped in her hand. When she peered into the dusty shelves of their hutch, she saw that a Russian crystal tumbler – a wedding gift from her parents – was missing.
    “Oh, Evan,” she breathed.
    She didn’t have time to worry about the broken treasure. She continued to the rear of the house where Michael kept his private office. The door was closed, as it usually was now. The room