SquidgeWorld Archive

'What is that Humming noise'?

He found himself behind his desk with no memory of how he got there. His coffee cup felt odd in his hand. It was vibrating. The liquid inside was rusty brown under his lamp light, almost red-no in fact it looked like blood.

"Are you going to tell your Mother?" 'How long has Sara been standing there?'

"What?" He struggled to hear over the noise.

"Call her, Gil? What are you going to call him?" Sara was irritated.

'Why is she angry at me'? Maybe because he wasn't listening, he couldn't concentrate, maybe because he was looking right at her and he could not understand what the hell she was talking about.

The hum was becoming more and more obtrusive. Sara didn't even seem to notice. He looked down to find the source sitting directly below him. It was a small plain white box. The lid folded inside it self like some Chinese take out. Only it was not Chinese takeout. He felt dread rising.

He studied the box, afraid to touch it. It had no visible markings. It was pure white. In his dark office, it almost glowed. He couldn't stop staring it. Then he saw something move. A tiny speck of blood -no- a single red ant- A single red ant crawled right out from the corner seam.

'Jesus'. Gil froze in fear. 'Did she see that?' He was trying to keep his eyes both on the box and on Sara. She still seemed oblivious. Only now did he see the label on the other side of the box reading: "Re: Nick Stokes"

The humming grew louder.

Another ant crawled out from inside the box and made it's way across the surface. This must be some kind of sick joke. An odd sudden feeling of shame came over him. 'Hide it Gil, Hide it now'. He scanned around his office for somewhere to stash the damned thing, just until he could figure out what to do. 'Sara can't see this...' the drawer, the safe, the window... 'Nobody can see this'.

Then over his shoulder a strange but familiar voice: "...know what, Gil?"

Sara was gone. It was now Nick standing at his office door with a naïve beautiful smile.

'Was that Nick's voice?'

Fire Ants. Gil felt a surge of sheer panic. 'Nick can't see them. Oh God! No, he can't know this!' They were now flooding out over the top the box. Pulsating beads of red were streaming out from every side, making their way quickly across the desk. Gil felt weak, he sat down, his head spinning, his heart was racing too fast. Maybe if he didn't move, Nick wouldn't notice. His fingers twitched, Gil knew his hands were now covered in ants. He knew Nick would panic at the sight. 'No, he'll be lost- he'll be lost again.' Gil wanted to scream at Nick and tell him to get out, to run, but that would only alarm him, 'or hurt him?' Maybe he could give Nick an errand, something, anything to distract him. Nick was just standing there motionless.

'The ants will reach him soon if he doesn't move away'.

Now the faint pricking feeling of a thousand hair sized pins was spreading out over Gil's body. They were crawling up his shirt through the sleeves to his neck. He closed his eyes. He felt the veins in his arms and neck pulse under their collective weight.

There was something strange about it. They weren't biting yet, 'but they must have some kind of toxin'. Gil felt the vague sensation of pleasure. The ants were continued on over his chest, under his clothes, over his belly and down his legs. He felt heat rising in his face, then heat and the rising below his waist. It was all so obvious now. He couldn't hide it. Gil opened his eyes, blushing and embarrassed, only to see Nick...Nick was staring directly at him, his face now contorted in a mask of sheer anger and disgust.

All at once the ants began to bite.

Gil Grissom woke to the sound of his own muffled scream. It was more of a pathetic gasp, a kind of pleading. His heart was racing. He squirmed, catching his breath while feeling his skin, his pulse, and the sweat on his face and sheets. The soaked sheets.

'No ants'.

Only after turning on the light did he notice the throbbing in his groin. He not so amused as annoyed at the easily available pun his dream had provided. 'I dreamt of Ants in my pants.'

The clock glared 3:00 pm. It was a little sooner than his usual `mid-day-night terror', and too soon to get up really, but he did anyway. He knew it would be no use trying to get back to sleep. Regular sleep had been next to impossible for the past month now but he was growing accustomed to the painful ache his body endured as he rose from his weekly `wake and scream'. His only recourse was not to be upset about it. At least he had some routine. Despite his groaning body's demand, he would go ahead and get up, pour some coffee, take a shower, eat something, read something and wait. He hated waiting but he had to. He had to wait for the soonest decent hour that he could go back to work without inciting too many obvious comments "...didn't you just leave?"

The hardest time always came after the nightmares and before the shower. Somewhere between the bed and the breakfast table. It always came over him.

As Grissom poured his coffee he felt it once again, the same strange lethargy that washed over him as he thought of his night's visions, the same vague feeling of depression that rose in him as he settled to his kitchen table, the same shadow wall closing down on him somewhere deep inside.

'It's just a dream Gil'. Sure, despite the underlying erotic implications, and despite the gender and the circumstance of age, social status, working relationship...'blah, blah, blah...' it happens to everybody. It's Human. Of course it is. It's normal -expected- to have nightmares after what we've been through. No doubt Nicky will be having them for some time now -the nightmares.

Grissom paused. He wondered how Nick was sleeping. What would his dreams be like? 'Is he able to sleep alone?'

Gil winced. Pushing away the concern, he palmed his coffee cup as it cooled too quickly in his hands and remembered the red bloodlike liquid in his own dream. The humming from his window unit air conditioner brought back the glowing box -the ants escaping everywhere -the tingling on the surface of his skin. He groaned and sighed to himself, 'Fucking Ants.'

The beauty of science is objectivity. There are no value judgments. No personal motivations. One must always be rational. There is a logical explanation or everything - material. Grissom was very good at categorizing things. Boxes. Science provided wonderful boxes and hierarchies. Science had Categories and subcategories for everything. He liked ants - in boxes. Ants in his nightmares were something else.

It is the messier elements of life that constitutes the consciousness -what we call `Human Nature'- and that never fits well in any goddamned box. He knew that. For that, Dr. Grissom was very good at rationalization. Any kind of reaction he felt that bordered on irrational was quickly dismissed with a little analysis. He was human, of course. Emotions were natural. They were not something he consciously avoided. But logic was always just his more natural state. He was a rational man to a default. In this job it served his purpose. He needed his cool. He simply refused to allow many things to upset him. And those things that did, he refused to allow in the way of work that needed to be done. He would just excuse it and move on.

Only when alone at home, exhausted and barely awake in the middle of his dark day- when he should be sleeping- did Grissom allow himself to think about it. How close it had been - 'It could have been anyone us in that box'.

He could handle most of the images. He could still see the simple black and white font that outlined the taunting moniker: "You can only watch." He could still see Nicky's cartoonish head in the monitor, his distorted mouth gaping for air, his lips wording his own epitaph. He could still see Nick's face stung, swollen, wet with tears under Gil's own face superimposed in the glass. Nick Hand on his. Nick's voice crying out at the first burst of free air- Nick clinging to Grissom's arm. The fast moment of sheer terror he felt as the earth exploded and Nick's unconscious body was thrown convulsing onto the ground. Gil reminded himself, it was over. Nick was alive. Nick was safe. He knew that.

'So why the guilt Griss?' What happened to Nick had been something no one could have predicted. It was a complex, well-planned, cold, calculated act of absolute fucking insanity. And it was over. So keep working, move on.

But something kept pulling Grissom back. It kept him there. The voice in the Door.

It was nothing more than an old man's quivering, insane monologue. That man's voice- so cold, so intentional, so fatalistic- like a razor drawn slowly across smooth skin. That fucking voice cut through the dust and darkness and straight into Gil every sleepless day.

He could hear the words again. "Oh, He is 'your Guy'- hu?" They had etched themselves into Gil's mind like a phonograph. The needle skipped over and over. "He is 'Your Guy', hu?" It was how the bastard said it, how he emphasized the possessive. Grissom had balked and the Son of a bitch knew it. He was taunting him.

At that moment, Gil didn't have time for it and he didn't care. "Yes. He is. Where's Nick buried?" Gil just wanted to make the
drop- Buy this asshole off- and end it.

But so quickly, something else was happening.

So the madman wanted to talk. Grissom was prepared to let the idiot rant. He could take anything that kept the other guy talking, anything to make the man slip and reveal Nick's location. Grissom also knew that all his own rage and the hatred he had for this man was useless and now he had to just let him talk. Grissom had dealt with hostages situations before. He'd interviewed villains in all forms. He was prepared for ranting and rage, for insanity, or for some kind of warped reasoning and for all bullshit selfish reasoning of a terrorist or a madman or whatever this guy was.

Anything -"Are you two...'Close'?"- but not this. This he was not expecting.

'What...what did I say?' Gil shifted uncomfortably in his kitchen chair. One half of his face was now too warm under the evening sunlight that had cast hot spotlight through his kitchen window. He covered his temple with his palm but didn't make the effort to move. He closed his eyes, Gil couldn't remember his own words now. He only remembered feeling "Useless."

"Tell me... what does Nick Stokes mean to you?"

What could he say? It didn't matter. Grissom had been stunned silent. Gil wanted to scream and beat the man into the ground as far as Nick was possibly buried. But he just waited. He just listened. He had too. Yes, he was powerless... Helpless... "Impotent." That bastard had Nick trapped in a box... and that last smug look on his face told Grissom the final thought he enjoyed before the madman hit that trigger. He knew that he'd trapped Gil Grissom too.

'And I couldn't even touch the son of a bitch'.

Or Nick.

He still can't. Not like he wanted.

Gil swallowed the thought with a mouthful of cold coffee. He shook himself back out of that place and tried to detach again. But his well-practiced emotional distance was quickly faltering. The sadness came. The tension came. The anger came. He stared at the cup in front of him and briefly envisioned it shattered into shards against the kitchen wall -like that man's body all over him- like a part of Gil himself.

Now he felt it. Something else had torn in that warehouse. In one spilt second, all the stealthy mechanics Gil had built up over the years -all the reasoning, the denial, the emotional avoidance techniques he had down to a science, each carefully constructed rationale he used to push back any of this kind of emotion -any feeling that could expose him -that selfish bastard had so simply extracted, brought forward, and blown to pieces right in Grissom's face.

It had always been building up in Grissom for sometime now. Something until recently he'd been able to set back and ignore quite successfully. The messy, unprofessional, restlessness he had always so easily put down and shoved back in his mind like so many old case files -it was now ever present. It kept him from sleeping. It taunted him all day long. It made him doubt his own reasoning. It made him doubt his own intentions. It made him ache like a low electrical current just under the surface of his skin. The hum was constant.

Again the wave of sadness came. Again the needle skipped. Again, that voice: "What does Nick Stokes 'mean' to you?"

Grissom knew now. He felt it. And there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it.

'That's right, Gil'... "You can only watch."