Before my wife and I could put our home on the market, we had to schedule a pest inspection. When the inspector arrived, she was very thorough, looking for signs of termites and mold and other sorts of things that might destroy the value of our house. By the side of the laundry room, she called our attention to the fist sized hole dug through the mulch, just below the cement foundation. “This one looks like it might still be active,” she said. “Let me get the scope from my truck.”

She returned carrying three pairs of red tinted protective goggles and the scope. “What are the goggles for?” I asked.

“It’s probably nothing, or it could just be a rat’s nest, but you’ll want to be sure,” the pest inspector said, putting on her goggles before sliding the flexible scope down the hole. “You should put those on, just in case.”

We watched curiously on the monitor as the scope snaked its way down the hole. It stopped for a moment, like it struck something, and then the screen flared in a way that made me feel glad my eyes were protected. The image refused to resolve, its edges wobbling and cracking, but this horrible keening sound kept coming out of the hole, like it was one pipe of the most horrible organ imaginable.

The pest inspector’s hands shook a little, but she was able to adjust the resolution, whereupon I saw what I could only describe as pure evil. We saw its eye, and even though we knew it was impossible, we also knew that it was looking at us, right through the monitor. That it was awake, finally awake, and that it knew what we wanted.

What everyone ultimately wanted.

“Yep,” the pest exterminator said, trying to turn off the monitor. “That’s pure evil living under your laundry room. Have you noticed anything unusual while at home? Like an uncontrollable urge to kill and eat your neighbors, or an odd smell?”

“I just thought that was because I forgot to drain the water from the washing machine,” my wife said.

“Is there anything we should do about it?” I asked.

“Well,” the pest inspector said, removing her goggles. “I see you’re wired for fiber, yes? For the internet?”

“Yes?” I asked.

“Well,” the pest inspector said, her voice lowering so only the three of us could hear. “Before selling your home, you should unplug the router from your provider, run a cord around your house and plug one end of the cord into you know what.” And then she pointed at the hole.

“Free internet,” she said, with an unsettling gleam in her eye. “Better internet.”

What did it feel like? Like when someone hands you a bag of potato chips, and you eat one or two before realizing they’re the best chips you’ve ever tasted. You want more, and your mind leaps through all the different ways more might mean. I kept thinking about what it would feel like to kill the pest inspector.

“Sweetie,” my wife said, interrupting me from my reverie, her goggles dangling from her thumb. “We live in a palace, right above an emperor, who only wishes us to have better access to the internet, and the true whisperings of things.”

She looked so happy and relaxed as she gently, gently lifted the goggles that kept me from understanding the ultimate and most beautiful of truths, the overwhelming architecture of its song roaring from underneath our feet. “Let’s not sell,” she said, like it was the most elemental thing in the world, an affirmation of our love, and how we might reward the pest inspector.

“We could invite all the neighbors over,” I said. “One by one by one. Movie night?”

“The best kinds of movies,” she said. “Movies they’ll never forget.”

Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s fiction can be found in X-Ray, ergot, Hex, Heavy Feather Review, Vlad Mag and The Coffin Bell. His short story "Taylor Swift" won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. He lives in Barcelona.