Fishing in Brains for an Eye with Teeth (Thirteen Tales of Terror)

by William Markly O'Neal

  The punch hurt and it made Howard angry.

  Something deep inside him began to buzz.

  Now Danny spoke up and his tone suggested disgust, not contempt or anger, which surprised Howard. "Look at his eyes, Sean! What’s wrong with his eyes?"

  Wesley sounded worried. "Is he sick or something?"

  Sean’s brow furrowed as he appraised Howard. "What’s up with the yellow contacts, freak? That some kind of queer boy fashion statement?"

  Howard couldn’t see his own eyes but he somehow knew they were now the color of honey.

  The buzzing inside him got louder when Sean punched his shoulder again. "Ever hear of ‘eye for an eye,’ asshole?"

  Jason grinned and Wesley snickered.

  "Well, the way I see it," said Sean to Howard, "since you closed my brother’s eye, it’s only fair I shut yours!"

  Wesley lunged forward even before Jason shouted, "Grab ‘im!"

  Howard didn’t struggle. He was enjoying this. You guys have no clue how righteously fucked you are!

  Wesley slipped behind Howard and wrapped an arm around his chest, just below his neck. Danny captured one arm and Jason captured the other.

  Inside Howard, the buzzing fury continued to build.

  "Hold him still, guys," shouted Sean, sounding excited.

  "Hit ‘im," said Jason.

  Danny agreed, "Do it, dawg!"

  Wesley snickered.

  Sean grinned as he raised his fist.

  Howard Hawthorne exploded.

  He unhinged his jaw, opening his mouth unnaturally wide as a torrent of bumblebees roared out. The living blast hit Sean directly in the face, pelting him with insects that struck stinger-first. In an instant, he suffered dozens of stings and the bees just kept coming, spouting out of Howard’s mouth with the power of a directed dust devil.

  Sean screamed, only to have his shrieks cut off an instant later as bees stung his tongue and choked his throat. Batting at his already swelling face, trying in vain to swat the storm away, he stumbled backward and fell.

  Howard then wanted the swarm to attack Jason and instantly, it did.

  The atmosphere thickened, becoming heavy with mutant bees.

  Around the world, bees had been disappearing and Howard alone knew the real reason why. Reacting to pesticides, global warming, and other human contaminates, a new type of queen bee had recently evolved. These new queens were not only resilient in the face of man’s poisons, they had developed rudimentary sentience—a Hive Mind. Honeybees weren’t actually vanishing. They were being gathered by these queens and gradually transformed into an organized insect army with burgeoning group-awareness.

  The bees knew who was destroying the ecosystem. The bees fighting back.

  Sean Lofton, Jason Mercuriadis, Mike Keller, and Danny Pescucci were all shrieking.

  Once enough humans were transformed, once Howard was joined by other living hives, it wouldn’t be long until all humanity was screaming.

  The swarm continued to flood out of the hive’s mouth.

  The screams of the jocks had a calming effect on Howard. Listening to their agonies was almost as sweet as the nectar on his lips.

  Howard knew a normal hive could house anywhere from fifty thousand up to half a million residents. He was also proud to know he was the Biggest Hive that had Ever Existed, host to nearly three million mutant bees, all with a single purpose: to protect the hive/Howard.

  The workers served him and he served Her. Sensing Her presence inside him for the first time, Howard thought, For the Glory of the Queen!

  Bees began shooting out of Howard’s anus. His pants were baggy anyway and the sudden push of the winged insects caused them to fall to his ankles.

  Bees squirted out of his ears.

  And a raging tempest of bees still emanated from his mouth.

  Sean Lofton went into what looked like a kind of epileptic fit. He thrashed and flopped beneath a blanket of bees. And the swarm poured down his throat.

  Sean would die from suffocation, rather than poison.

  All four of Howard’s tormentors would be killed today.

  When Howard Hawthorne spoke, the bumblebees spoke with him, joining their voluminous buzz to his voice. He raised his arms to the sky and thundered, "I AM A TEENAGE BEEHIVE!"

  The Howie-Hive’s moment of triumph was short-lived.

  ******

  Amy Grubman loved Sean Lofton with all her seventeen-year-old heart. She didn’t want to lend him her car after school that day but when she saw how upset Sean was, she couldn’t refuse him.

  When they found the geek, Sean didn’t need to tell her to remain in the car. Amy always stayed with the air conditioning when it was this muggy outside.

  She watched as Sean and his friends surrounded the geek. She looked down for just a minute and now, when she looked back up, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  Bees seemed to be coming out of the geek’s mouth!

  And Sean was screaming.

  Terrified, Amy grabbed her cell phone and dialed 911.

  The operator who took Amy’s call understood very little that Amy said except for the location and, "MY BOYFRIEND’S BEING ATTACKED BY BEES!"

  Like Sean, Jason was rolling on the ground, covered with big fat bumblebees.

  Amy saw Danny running down the middle of the street, being chased by his own personalized swarm.

  Mike was wailing like a little girl as he did these jerky spasms where he stood, as if his body was being riddled by machine-gun fire.

  Amy looked again at Sean, the boy she lost her virginity to, the love of her life. When he went into his own seizures on the ground—and still the bees keep coming out of the geek—his pants had fallen down and bees seemed to even be coming from the geek’s ass—his legs and buttocks were covered in bees—Amy freaked out. She impulsively slid over behind the steering wheel, shifted her car into drive, and floored the accelerator.

  So many bees splattered the windshield, it quickly went completely dark.

  Amy Grubman wailed as she drove into Howard Hawthorne, running him over.

  The bees went berserk, attacking her car. The sound of their buzzing was like television static at maximum volume in Dolby stereo.

  Crying, unable to see, Amy drove into the side of a house. Her airbag saved her from injury.

  Amy couldn’t be coaxed out of her car until long after the swarm had dispersed.

  When Amy finally got out of her vehicle, in addition to all the dead bees on her car, she saw the grill and hood were splattered with thick puddles of honey.

  The police arrived first, quickly followed by paramedics, but all the victims were beyond help.

  The officers who took Amy’s statement thought she was hysterical until they got a look at what was left of the teenage beehive.

  Later, an autopsy would reveal that, at the time of his death, Howard Hawthorne didn’t have a drop of blood left in his body. All his veins ran thick with honey.

  When Amy saw the devastation her car did to Howard’s body, she passed out.

  Even veteran police officers were shocked.

  The impact of Amy’s speeding car not only ripped Howard’s body apart like a wet paper bag, it cracked open his skull, revealing what was inside. Where there should be wrinkled brain tissue, there was instead a series of hexagon-shaped honeycomb chambers, some still capped with beeswax and filled with honey.

  No one saw the fat stealthy queen bee when she slipped out of Howard’s broken head and flew away.

  The mutant queen flew unerringly to Amy’s purse, where she settled in and hid.

  Later, after Amy had been treated at the Emergency Room and sent home, the queen came out of hiding.

  When the teenage girl slept safe in her bedroom, the queen bee crawled into Amy’s mouth and scuttled down her throat, stinging her repeatedly as she went. The young woman would have nothing but a mild sore throat in the morning to mark the beginning of her transformation into the next living hive.

  Amy
Grubman had a terrible nightmare: she was walking to school with some friends, when suddenly they were chased down by a great swarm of bees.

  zzzz THE END zzzz

  I Was a Teenage Beehive was originally a 120 word script that Weird Tales magazine produced into a One Minute Weird. It can be seen (with a completely different ending than this story) on YouTube and also at the official Weird Tales website.

  ________________

  Crimson House

  Despite the NO TRESPASSING signs posted outside Crimson House, Cyrus Colton knew the young people would come, the way they always did every Halloween. A Rite of Passage in this rural Kentucky county was to find out which teenagers were brave enough to spend a night in the haunted house.

  Mostly, it was boys who sought to explore the ramshackle building, but they occasionally brought their girlfriends.

  Cyrus hoped there would be girls this year. He was feeling the old itch again. He had no intention of making one of his trips up to the Big City— the cravings weren’t that strong— but he didn’t see the harm in spying on girls, as long as he didn’t act on his cruel impulses.

  Cyrus was a paragon of self-discipline. The years with Hope and the boys had mellowed him. He wasn’t the same person he was when he was younger.

  It had been years since he’d slain someone.

  More than eleven years, to be exact.

  Even serial killers believed in retirement. Killing people and getting away with it was not exactly easy work. It was work better suited to the young.

  Hope—Cyrus’s dutiful wife of thirty-three years passed away thirteen months ago, snuffed out by lung cancer. Her death came quickly and Cyrus was glad.

  In all those years he was married to Hope, he only committed three murders. He was very proud of his restraint. It was a testament to his respect for his wife.

  When he was younger, before he met Hope, he once killed three women in a single night.

  Cyrus knew why the cravings were back.

  He was lonely. He told himself that was only natural. Both his sons had long since moved away; his wife passed away; even his favorite dog was six months gone.

  Was it any wonder he was looking forward to a diversion?

  Cyrus once lived in Crimson House, back when he was a kid, back before he even started torturing small animals. He was happy in that house, Way Back When.

  When Cyrus was eleven years old, the county was hit by a terrible blizzard. It continued for four days straight, burying everything. Under the weight of all that snow, the roof of Crimson House partially collapsed.

  His family lived for a while with his grandparents, until later the next spring when construction was completed on the Brick House. The newer residence was closer to the road, had better plumbing, better insulation, and employed an oil furnace, instead of a coal-burning contraption like the old Crimson House had.

  Eventually the entire farm— all eight acres of it— passed to Cyrus, after his father died.

  Crimson House fell to rack and ruin.

  When Cyrus was a young man, just twenty-three years old, he murdered his first victim in Crimson House. The dilapidated building was secluded, so far off the road, all the screaming didn’t matter. He was clumsy about it; later he would become much more proficient at inflicting pain, at prolonging the experience. But that first time, he ejaculated too quickly, killed the girl too fast, and it was over entirely too soon.

  Afterwards, Cyrus took her nude body to the basement of Crimson House and laid her to rest.

  All total, there were fourteen women buried down there. He actually wanted to stop at thirteen but he thought that was an unlucky number so he killed one more.

  Throughout his quiet years, when he was particularly happy being married to Hope, Cyrus would still occasionally have a craving. But generally he could trek back to Crimson House, spend a little quality time there reminiscing about His Girls and the way they died, and then would be able to return to the normal part of his life.

  Hope often urged him to have Crimson House torn down. She said it was an eyesore.

  Cyrus agreed it was ugly. But he also secretly thought of it as a shrine.

  Over the years, he’d done his best work there.

  It was Cyrus himself who started the rumors about Crimson House being haunted. Or rather, it was Cyrus’ sons.

  Both of his boys were the sensitive type. In that regard, they took after their mother. They were squeamish about blood. They were easily frightened. Both were jokesters, hiding behind laughter, but Cyrus knew the truth.

  His sons were wimps.

  When his boys were young, Cyrus made up the ghost story. To give it more impact, he would only tell it once a year, on Halloween night. The first time he told the tale, he fully intended to scare the crap out of his sons and he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. For weeks, both his boys were plagued by nightmares. Hope was furious.

  The story had the desired effect. It kept his sons from poking around Crimson House. They avoided it. They were afraid of it.

  What Cyrus hadn’t anticipated was his sons telling the ghost story to their friends.

  Within a few years, a legend had taken root.

  Now, nearly three decades later, Crimson House was still the stuff of local folklore.

  Over the years, teenagers have added new layers of spray paint, maintaining its crimson appearance.

  And every Halloween, the ghost hunters came.

  Inside Crimson House, Cyrus had a place where he could hide, where he could spy on trespassers. He was always eager to hear new twists on his old yarn. Last year, the ghost story bore only the vaguest resemblance to the tale Cyrus originally told his sons nearly thirty years ago.

  Now, October 31st had finally come again. Cyrus left Brick House just before sunset. It was already very dark. The sky was overcast, the wind was picking up, and he could smell the approaching storm.

  As he trudged through the dying fields, bound for Crimson House, Cyrus said a silent prayer that the bad weather wouldn’t keep the kids away.

  He was looking forward to the girls.

  He hoped very much there would be girls.

  ******

  Isabella Idlewine was a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl. A junior in high school, she was enormously popular. She was currently ‘between boyfriends’ (she broke up with Jacob Lauder two weeks ago because he was caught red-handed looking at other girl’s butts) but that suited her just fine. By Christmas, Isabella would be going steady with someone of her choosing. For now, she was enjoying her independence. (And she insisted on being called Isabella and not just Bella.)

  Isabella was a free spirit.

  She saw her first and only ghost when she was just nine years old. It wasn’t a frightening experience. She loved it.

  And ever since then, she’d been eager to see other ghosts—other glimpses of the unseen reality that is shared with the seen.

  The ghost was her grandmother’s. She had always been close to her Nana and, on the night the old woman died, Isabella (then ‘Belly’) woke up from a sound sleep to find her grandmother sitting on the side of her bed. Her Nana talked at length to Belly, telling her how much she loved her. Her Nana told Belly to always listen to her own heart because Belly’s heart was a good one. Her Nana told her that there were no limits to what she could do with her life. And her Nana told her that she should do what made her happy.

  Her Nana told her that she would one day meet her soul mate, a person that she would connect with and love with all her big heart.

  Then her Nana just faded away, right before Isabella’s eyes.

  Little Belly climbed out of bed, went to her parents’ bedroom, and told them what happened. They didn’t believe her. They told her she’d been dreaming.

  The next morning her grandmother’s body was discovered.

  Even now, eight years later, Isabella could still remember, quite vividly, the conversation she had with her grandmother’s spirit.

  She was named after h
er grandmother. And when her Grandmother Isabella went to Heaven, little Belly stopped being Belly and became an Isabella herself forevermore.

  After that, ghosts became her hobby. She read everything she could find on the subject. She was fascinated by tales of earthbound spirits, victims of tragic demises who didn’t know they’d died.

  That was why she was so angry with her friends when she discovered they were holding out on her. True, Isabella only moved here three years ago but that was still two Halloweens that had passed without her hearing anything about the local haunted house.

  There was disagreement amongst her friends about what happened there, particularly about the date of the events. Some said the murders took place in the 1970s; others said they occurred all the way back in the 50s. The only thing everyone seemed to agree on was it happened in January, during one of the worst blizzards in the state’s history. A man went nuts— cabin fever— and killed not only his nagging wife but also his four kids.

  And while a few storytellers added knives or guns or even the occasional axe, most seem to agree on the method of execution. Unable to actually harm his loved ones, but also unable to go on living, the crazy man had tied up his family and threw open all the doors to his crimson home. Then he got drunk, laid down in the snow, and died. His family eventually froze to death but not before screaming for help. No one heard, of course. The house was too far from the road and the howling wind was entirely too loud.

  Isabella didn’t know if the legend was true or not (she secretly suspected it wasn’t because she could never find any mention of it on the Internet) but she remained hopeful it was true.

  On Halloween night just after dusk, Isabella and six friends snuck onto Cyrus’s land and made their way back to the haunted house. Her three girlfriends seemed nervous. Their boyfriends seemed horny (nothing new there.)

  Isabella was excited.

  She had brought with her tools traditionally effective in summoning ghosts. In addition to a Ouija board and sandalwood incense, she was also carrying tom-toms, having read about how Voodoo priestesses in New Orleans use drums to call up spirits.

  She honestly didn’t think she’d see any apparitions tonight but she remained ever hopeful.