Maggots, Maggots Everywhere!
It was a Tuesday. I woke up, had breakfast and a shower, and when I came back into my room to get dressed, I saw an army of larvae wiggling across my floor... hundreds of them seemed to be wriggling their way to ward my door from the far wall. They were small and white (picture a grain of white rice). Needless to say, I FLIPPED OUT and started moving everything out of my room. When I was picking up a few pieces of laundry from the floor, I would shake them out and dozens of larvae would fall out. Gross. I then realized that the shorts I had just put on were also from the floor, at which time I EXTRA flipped out and started taking the shorts off and jumping around like an idiot. Luckily there were none on me, but it was a close one. I vacuumed the carpet, and then rolled it back and vacuumed the floor underneath. I also had to pull up the spike strips along the edge of the wall in order to get at all of the ones that were hiding in there. I was pretty concerned about where they were coming from, and how many were left, but I figured that there must have been some sort of egg sac by the wall or under the carpet that had just happened to hatch that morning. Thank God they weren't coming from the window, since my bed is directly underneath the window. Also thank God they don't have legs, so they were confined to the floor meaning none were on me while I was sleeping. So with all visible larvae gone, I took the vacuum canister outside and filled it with boiling water. I left for work and didn't want to think about what I'd come home to afterwards.
When I got home from work, there were only a few stragglers left, so I cleaned those up and washed my entire floor with bleach. I don't know why I did that, it just seemed like the right thing to do. Later in the evening, we started talking about where they could have come from. When our good friend Adam insisted that maggots only come from dead animals, we got scared. We went back in to my room and found more of them under a shelf unit by the wall. We also found a few of the little fellas in Chips' room which is right next to mine. Adam concluded that there was something dead in our wall. Hoping this was untrue, I told him the story about the creature living in the chimney.
OK I think we need some background info here so let's rewind about three years. When we moved into our house, I chose the most disgusting room in the house. It was in the basement, and had no carpet or closet. It had school-grade fluorescent lights along the ceiling AND along one of the walls. It was painted industrial off-white, and the forced-air electric furnace was IN THE ROOM behind a cheesy pressboard wall. I saw potential in this room though. I had the landlord put a carpet down and I painted the walls green. I took all of the fluorescent lighting out and put some floodlights in. I built a desk into the corner and barricaded one corner off with a velour curtain (as sewn by my grandma) as a makeshift closet. It turned out to look quite nice after all was said and done. As luck would have it (and due to me suggesting that the bylaw officer would not take kindly to me sleeping next to the furnace) the landlord bought a gas furnace later that year, and put it in the laundry room next door. The old furnace was ripped out of my room and I suddenly was the proud owner of the biggest bedroom in the house. Booya! You are probably wondering where this is going, so let's fast forward to spring of this year...
Since there used to be a furnace in my room, there is a defunct chimney in the concrete-block wall beside my desk. The chimney was sealed off in two places: a round metal plate covered the opening where the furnace was attached, and below the round one, a smaller rectangular plate which covered the access port for cleaning the chimney. This past spring, I started hearing a scratchy noise behind the round plate. At first I thought an animal was trapped in there, and I did not know what to do. As is my style, I decided to just let it work itself out. (Would you want an angry raccoon or other critter jumping at your face when you open that plate? Me neither.) After a few weeks, when the scratching was still going on, I decided that whatever was in there was actually nesting in there, and had the means to get in and out. I stopped worrying about it, since clearly the creature was living happily in there, and I still did not want an angry critter jumping at my face and running around my room when I open the plate. I actually came to assume it was a bird who had built a nest and was living in there. Well, the bad news is, I completely forgot about that critter, and I did not notice that the scratching had stopped for a week or two leading up to "Maggot Day". Hold tight while I bring you back to our continuing story.
Armed with this new information, Adam decided that whatever was living in the chimney had died and sent a maggot army into our house. I told him that he could feel free to open the wall and dig out whatever he found in there. I cowered by my door like a child while he opened the cleaning duct. After pulling out a bunch of nesting junk, he came across a hard piece of blackened plastic, which he figured was foam insulation. Upon further investigation, it turned out that it was a petrified (or mummified) squirrel. THE PLOT THICKENS! Since this was long since dead, we knew we were just getting started. A few feathers and a bird's skull also came out of the nesting mess. There were also a couple of maggots in there. A very brave soul, Adam started opening the upper plate, which had been sealed in there quite well. Once it had been pried off, we peered in and what did we find? Clumps of fur, covered in maggots and fleas. The jackpot so to speak. Next was Chips' turn at the plate. He proceeded to dig at least four maggoty dead squirrels out of the chimney-nest with a crowbar. Most of the mess was just fur and bone. I guess the flesh had all been eaten. We dumped the whole bucket of nest remains in the hydro field, and haven't gone back since. Though I think I am going to go back and get the cover plate and the petrified squirrel as they will make great souveniers (and party gags). I guess the exciting conclusion is that I slept in Doug's empty bedroom for the next few days (good thing he went to Thailand!). By the time I moved back in to my room, the maggots were gone, and I hope the squirrels' angry angry souls had vacated the premesis.
So what happened? I figure the maggots ran out of squirrel carcasses and started wriggling out in all directions, eventually falling down through all the bricks and finding a way into the house by going under the wall. The squirrels seemed to have been nesting in the chimney when some of the internal bricks fell in, trapping them. We could not smell them since the chimney was sealed off very well. I am a bit surprised that they did not scream for help (since squirrels can get quite shreiky at times), but if they had, then I would most likely have called pest control at the time, so it's their own fault. Could you imagine opening that chimney to find four angry live squirrels, waiting to shred the eyes out of whomever set them free? For anyone who is interested, I figured out the genetic programming for maggots. I am assuming here that maggots were written in C:
while(!pupa){
if (food){
eat(food);
else{
wiggle();
}
}
Feel free to use this code wherever you like, I'm pretty sure maggots are in the public domain. For anyone worried about visiting us, the chimneys have since been topped with squirrel guards, and the maggots are all gone. Unfortunately we are now infested with flies... no joke! But we are getting rid of them as I type this.
I hope this wasn't too graphic for you. And if it wasn't graphic enough, just wait for the video (yes we videotaped the entire excavation procedure).
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