The first one appeared on a Tuesday.

   Gregory Hume had just microwaved a frozen shepherd’s pie and was halfway through a rerun of “Quantum Leap” when he saw it—skittering across the linoleum like a twitchy shadow. He blinked, paused the show, and leaned forward. It wasn’t a cockroach. Not exactly.

   It was too large. Too symmetrical. Its carapace shimmered faintly, like oil on water, and its antennae moved with deliberate intelligence. It stopped mid-floor, turned toward him, and raised one of its forelimbs in what looked disturbingly like a wave.

   Gregory didn’t scream. He didn’t move. He just stared, slack-jawed, as the thing turned and disappeared behind the fridge.

   He didn’t sleep that night.

   By Thursday, there were three. They were growing.

   They didn’t hide. They didn’t scurry. They walked—upright, almost proud—through his apartment like they owned the place. 

   One of them had a small pouch slung across its thorax, filled with what looked like glowing pebbles. Another dragged a bundle of fibrous material into the hall closet and began weaving it into a nest.

   Gregory tried calling the landlord. No answer. He left voicemails. He emailed. He even walked down to the building manager’s office, but the door was locked and the window was covered in newspaper.

   He considered calling pest control, but something in his gut told him it wouldn’t help. These weren’t pests. They were something else.

   Something worse.

   That night, he watched one of them peel back the wallpaper in the living room and begin etching symbols into the drywall. The symbols pulsed faintly, like veins under skin. Gregory sat on the couch, clutching a half-empty bottle of gin, and whispered, “Please stop.”

   The creature paused, turned its head, and clicked its mandibles softly. Then it resumed carving.

   By Sunday, they had a child.

   It was smaller than the others, barely the size of a golf ball, and it chirped incessantly. 

   The adults—there were now five—tended to it with eerie tenderness, feeding it bits of mold scraped from the bathroom tiles and stroking its translucent wings.

   Gregory tried barricading his bedroom door, but they slipped through the vents. He woke to find one perched on his chest, watching him sleep. Its eyes were multifaceted, like polished marble, and its breath smelled faintly of cinnamon.

   He didn’t scream. He couldn’t. He just cried.

   Weeks passed. The apartment changed.

   The walls grew damp and soft, like living tissue. The air buzzed with a low-frequency hum that made Gregory’s teeth ache. 

   The creatures expanded their territory—building tunnels through the drywall, hollowing out the ceiling, replacing the light fixtures with bioluminescent sacs that pulsed in time with their movements.

   Gregory stopped going to work. He stopped showering. He stopped eating anything that didn’t come from a can. His skin grew pale and waxy. His eyes sank into his skull.

   He tried leaving once. Packed a duffel bag, put on his coat, and stepped into the hallway.

   But the hallway was gone.

   In its place was a corridor of chitin and bone, stretching into a darkness that smelled of rot and ozone. The walls pulsed. The floor squelched. He turned back, trembling, and found his apartment door had vanished.

   He was trapped.

   One night, he heard voices. Not human voices. Not exactly. They came from the vents—whispers in a language that made his ears drip. 

   He stuffed cotton into his canals, but the words seeped into his mind like smoke. They spoke of birth and hunger and the architecture of despair. They spoke of Gregory, too.

   They called him “the vessel.”

   He began to dream of eggs.

   They pulsed beneath his skin, nested in his organs, waiting to hatch. He saw himself split open like a chrysalis, his ribcage blooming into a throne of bone and mucus. The child—the small one—would sit upon it, crowned in his suffering.

   He woke screaming.

   The creatures watched.

   He would writhe on his bed in the filth of himself, trying to reason, but having gone mad, almost chuckling, " No way, man. You ain't real. You can't be real. Cockroaches can't do that. You can't do that. "

   One of them approached, carrying a bundle of wires and teeth. It pressed the bundle to Gregory’s forehead, and he felt his thoughts unravel. 

   Memories spilled out—his mother’s funeral, his failed marriage, the time he tried to hang himself in the garage but the beam cracked and dropped him onto the concrete.

   They drank his pain like nectar. He began to forget his name. The apartment grew.

   It expanded beyond its dimensions, folding space like origami. Rooms appeared where none had been. A nursery filled with twitching sacs. A chapel carved from cartilage. A library of bone, filled with books that screamed when opened.

   Gregory wandered the halls, naked and mumbling, his skin etched with symbols. He no longer knew what day it was. He no longer cared.

   The creatures multiplied.

   They held ceremonies—rituals of molting and mating and sacrifice. Gregory was always invited. Sometimes he was the guest of honor. Sometimes he was the altar.

   He tried killing one once.

   Found a rusted hammer beneath the sink and brought it down on the smallest adult. It shattered like glass, releasing a cloud of spores that filled his lungs and eyes. He coughed for days, vomiting black mucus and fragments of memory.

   The others didn’t retaliate. They simply watched. And waited.

   One morning, Gregory awoke to find the child—now grown—standing at the foot of his bed. It was taller than him, its carapace adorned with symbols of royalty. It reached out a clawed hand and touched his cheek.

   Gregory felt warmth. Felt purpose. Felt love. He wept.

   The creature spoke—not in words, but in pulses of thought and emotion. It showed him a vision of the stars, of worlds devoured and reborn, of species uplifted through suffering. It showed him his place in the design.

   He was the seed. The beginning. The martyr.

   Gregory nodded. He understood.

   The next day, the apartment vanished.

   Neighbors claimed it had never existed. The building manager was found wandering the streets, muttering about “the fold” and “the hunger beneath.” Pest control refused to enter the block. The city declared the lot condemned.

   Gregory was gone, but in the shadows creatures can be seen skittering for cover. They chitter amongst themselves and carry their eggs.