by John Everson
Creeptych
John Everson
CREEPTYCH
John Everson
Creeptych © 2010 by John Everson
Cover Artwork © 2010 by John Everson
All Rights Reserved.
CREEPTYCH: THE HATCHING
Bugs creep people out.
There’s something about all those legs, and those weird eyes, devoid of pupils. There’s something about their multitude that unnerves us, and with good reason—they own this earth. Spray deadly poison on them and hundreds might die…but you know they’ll be back in force eventually. It’s estimated that at any one time, there are 10 quintillion (who knew there was a number like that?) bugs creeping and flying around the earth. There are more than 900,000 documented species and there are estimates that millions of species haven’t been categorized. They outnumber us in the extreme–something like 200 million insects for every human. They are the aliens among us…and below us and above us.
And the scary thing really is thinking about them in us.
Who hasn’t heard the urban legends of someone eating food contaminated with cockroach or spider eggs and subsequently having a horde of the critters hatching in the gums—or even the whole body—and eating the victim from the inside out? The urban legends often feature the victims going to the doctor because they’re in pain and their gums are inexplicably bleeding…and the doc does a quick exploratory and says “oh, you’ve got roach eggs hatching in the warm gum pockets around your teeth. The bleeding is the baby roaches digging their way out.”
Makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up just to think about it, doesn’t it?
We seem especially fearful of spiders. Maybe it’s the eight eyes. Or their vampiric nature of sucking the liquefied insides of their paralyzed victims. Never mind that in fact, for the most part, spiders act as our best friends in insect control, patrolling our houses and gardens to kill other unwanted pests. I’ve been called on many occasions by a frantic female to bash the tiny brains in of an eight-legger who decided at an inopportune time to take a creep across the bedroom or bathroom wall.
Personally, I’m no arachnophobe. But my skin does crawl when I see a cockroach. They’re sneaky bastards. Stowaways. I travel a lot, and I’m always nervous about leaving suitcases open in strange hotel rooms, knowing that in the middle of the night I might gain a passenger that comes home to infest my house. It’s not an unfounded fear.
A few years ago, not long after I’d returned from a business trip to Florida, my wife said to me that she thought she saw a cockroach upstairs in the bathroom. It disappeared before she could be sure. I assured her it was probably just a large beetle…A week or so later, during a 3 a.m. trip to the bathroom, I came face to face with said cockroach. A big ol’ two-inch long hunk of bug, just sitting there on the baseboard in the hallway outside the bath. I knew instantly that it had come home with me from Florida. Had crawled around in my suitcase for hours, touching all my clothes with its legs and antennae. My heart was pounding when I approached him with a wad of tissue…and the crunch made me grimace when I connected with its exoskeleton and pushed. I didn’t tell my wife that I’d found her roach until after we moved. I didn’t want her worrying, although I was looking in all the corners of the house at night for quite some time. Because you know that if there’s been one in your house…
It’s not that the bug itself is so horrible. It’s the knowledge that, if there’s one that gets seen, there are a thousand more moving with quiet purpose behind the walls, just waiting for the opportunity to come out and eat what you’ve left behind.
Which brings us to my little take on insect horror: Creeptych.
My very first published story dealt with our fear of insects and was released 16 years ago—in January 1994 in Gaslight Magazine. It was called “Learning to Build” and was about a colony of roaches that gains communal intelligence. I don’t know that I’ll ever be reprinting that one…but in the hundred-plus stories I’ve published in the intervening years, I’ve not returned to the fear of multi-legged creepy crawlies in print…until now. Though a couple of these new buggy tales have actually been lurking in my house for some time and were supposed to have crept into print awhile ago.
“Bad Day” was originally written and accepted for a “zombie” anthology called Aim for the Head. I wanted to do something a little different than the normal shambling deadly dead story, and so were born the Luna Roaches—which owe something to the idea behind “Learning to Build.” Unfortunately, after several years gestation, the Aim for the Head anthology was never born, and so you are reading the tale’s first appearance here.
“Eardrum Buzz” gestated from a frightening bout I had five years ago with tinnitus. I’d been covering the South By Southwest music conference in Austin for my Chicago-area newspaper column on pop music; for those who’ve never heard of SXSW, the conference involves hundreds of bands playing concurrently on 50 stages for several nights…on the final night I went to see Nashville Pussy, Gore Gore Girls and a couple others at the classic Continental Club. I was in the first jam-packed row holding on to the edge of the stage the whole night, without earplugs…and when I got in the cab to go back to my hotel, I could barely hear the cabbie above the buzzing in my head. Not surprising—I’d experienced that effect before after loud concerts and the club had cranked the sound. But, when it wasn’t gone the next morning... or the next....or even the next week…I got really scared. Ultimately, the condition alleviated, but the fear translated into “Eardrum Buzz,” though the story’s “buzz” is driven by very different circumstance. This story was originally supposed to appear in Red Scream magazine, but that magazine ate itself alive first.
Closing out this trio is “Violet Lagoon,” which I wrote specifically for this book. The tale is actually the back story “prologue” for an outlined novel called Violet Eyes, a sort of Kingdom of the Spiders type book, only with genetically mutated (and lifecycle-connected) swarms of spiders and flies. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to write the full novel, but this self-contained teaser involves a quartet of co-eds who decide to reenact The Blue Lagoon on an abandoned Florida Key, where they find more than just sex and sand is on the agenda. At first the co-ed’s private spring break is marred by a weird purple spider crawling across a girl’s foot. Nothing kills the libido quite like bugs trying to join the party. And then their little XXX vacation gets ever so much worse…
I hope you get a shiver at some point while reading these creepy tales.
Just remember these current world population estimates:
Humans—7,000,000,000
Bugs—10,000,000,000,000,000,000
Wishing you dark dreams of tiny hairlike feet…
—John Everson
Naperville, IL
February 14, 2010
BAD DAY
I can remember the very first time I heard the news report on them. A commentator made a joke of it. “Paul Hughes,” he said, “had a bad day today.”
That was something of an understatement, to say the least. Paul Hughes had just been fired from pushing paper literally the day after his wife filed for divorce. He made the news because in the aftermath of this personal implosion, he was walking, no doubt somewhat disconsolately, in the forest near Brave River. As he moped along a walking trail some kind of insect attacked him. The commentator speculated that the buzzing sound of the creature at the back of Hughes’ earlobe led him to jump, slap at the back of his head and consequently lose his balance to fall to the concrete walking path below. He ended up in the hospital after a cardiac arrest left him thrashing on the river bank with said insect crushed in a chitinous orange paste to the back of his head.
It wasn’t really funny, but I laughed. The poor guy lost his wife, lost his job, and now,
might lose his life because a hornet or something “took advantage” of him at the wrong moment.
That was the last time I laughed.
* * *
In the beginning, everyone thought they were some strange, exotic breed of roaches. They measured about two inches long, and like the roaches of the deep south, were bronze-tinged, dark as well-cured tobacco. They were quickly dubbed Luna Roaches, because they flew in clouds on the wind at twilight and descended on the city in a swarm that blotted out the light of the moon. What bugs flew at night? Nobody really asked that.
The warnings went out quickly. Don’t stay out after dark. Don’t let your children stay out playing after school. Don’t leave your windows open.
Don’t, don’t, don’t.
The media told us to hunker down and hide, cuz the killer roaches had come to town.
Of course, they didn’t say it that way. But while some of us laughed at the story of Paul Hughes flailing about and ending up in a coma because a bug dive-bombed him, we lost our morbid sense of humor really quick when swarms of them began to attack people on the streets at night.
We didn’t know what they could do, at first. Didn’t know what they wanted. Initially, the concern was that they could carry some kind of virus or disease.
Who would have guessed that what they brought us was so much more? And so much worse?
* * *
“Kara, come inside,” my wife shouted. Our little girl was only five, but already she was a handful. Sometimes I was glad that I had to go to work everyday and sit in an office. While I lived for the hours that we played together, and she giggled and kicked and fought against my tickle-bombs, I knew I could never spend the day with my baby and keep up with the girl. She was a handful of laughter and energy, while I felt like a slow-moving anchor of molasses shellacked in tar. I was tired after lofting her in the air a few times like a rocket and rolling about on the floor with her before pronouncing bedtime. I played with her an hour or two a day, while Jenna had her for the other 12.
The city was under alert now; for the past few nights swarms of the Luna Roaches had descended on the streets in a bizarre attack of buzz and wings and biting venom. Those who fell prey to the things were taken to the hospital, but couldn’t be revived. Neither did they die. The doctors quickly learned not to try to pry the roaches from the flesh of the bodies they brought in. While the victims were comatose when they came in to the hospitals with the bugs on their necks or skulls, when the insects were removed, the low level of neural activity dropped to virtually none. If you removed the bugs, you turned the patient into a human vegetable. But if you left them attached to the host, the victim lay in the hospital in a coma. The difference seemed negligible, but as we soon learned, the difference was great.
Jenna slammed the sliding door like a shotgun behind Kara and my little girl ran right into my arms.
“How’s my baby?” I asked, lofting Kara in the air like a juggler’s bag. She giggled and screeched, kinked bronze hair flying in the air like her mother’s had once, when I’d had the energy to lift and twirl Jenna around like so much paper. Now, I’d be lucky to dance around her mother, let alone lift her. A combination of her own gain in “stature” and my own declining energy. We’d had Kara late in life, and frankly, the kid wasn’t making me feel younger, as people had promised. I felt every strain in my back these days as I twirled her in the air and when I looked in the mirror in the morning I saw every age line darkened by another night of worry when she was sick.
I’m getting too old for this, I told myself more and more often. I didn’t dare broach those thoughts to Jenna, whose pallid complexion and dark bags beneath her eyes spoke for themselves. She lived in the trenches of child-rearing. I only dabbled.
Kara giggled as I twirled her in the air and asked again, “How’s my baby?”
“Good, Daddy,” she said, throwing her arms around me, and then pushing off my shoulders to raise moon eyes at me. Knowing she had my attention, she said seriously, “Daddy, there were bugs by the swing set!”
In another time, such a statement from a child would have raised an eyebrow with a smile. But now, today, in an age of Luna Roaches that rendered their victims either comatose or vegetable, I spun my daughter in the air and ran my fingers up under her hair, praying with every pounding beat of my heart that I would find nothing beneath those copper locks.
My hand met only the cool skin of a child and I set her to the ground before slumping myself into a chair, exhausted from the onset of panic. My wife hadn’t moved an inch during our conversation. She held her breath. And when I nodded that everything was ok, she closed her eyes and put a palm to her chest.
“What kind of bugs?” I said, as Kara’s moon-eyes stared up smiling at mine.
“Ladybugs!” she proclaimed and ran into the living room laughing and singing: “Ladybug, ladybug fly away home….”
* * *
If only the Luna Roaches had been ladybugs. If only they had flown away home. But they hadn’t.
Paul Hughes was one of the lucky ones. Apparently, as he’d slapped and fallen, he’d killed the bug before it set its hooks in him. He was shaken. He was physically injured. He was depressed by the disaster of his life.
But he recovered from the bug’s bite. Thinking about his situation, I bet he was later sorry for that. Then again, he never really had the chance. The news reported that he died of a heart attack just a couple days after regaining consciousness from his ordeal. His bad luck streak could have been legendary.
The hospitals were quickly growing overcrowded with those who had not recovered. Instead, bed after bed filled with bodies that were neither dead, nor, in a rational sense, alive. Oh, they laid there breathing. Their hearts beat out a predictable circadian rhythm, but behind their eyes…nothing stirred.
Within a week of the first Luna Roach swarm sighting, the hospitals were out of beds, and emergency wards began forming in the gymnasiums of high schools and colleges.
Nobody liked roaches…but few people were so afraid of the things that they wouldn’t go out after dark.
They should have been.
* * *
The Luna Roaches were legion. The true meaning of that struck me on a Tuesday night as I walked the five blocks from our house to the library. Kara had forgotten to return The Book of Five Cows that day after school, and was distraught that if I didn’t get it back to the library she’d have a fine. Welcoming the opportunity to stroll through the neighborhood on a warm summer night, I took the heavily illustrated volume and started down the sidewalk. I was passing the park just a couple blocks down from my house when I saw them.
A silver-white cloud rose like a mist from thousands of blades of darkened grass, and a sibilant hiss filled the air. In a moment, the sky was a mass of pin-wheeling, shimmering dust motes. They ascended like a flock of startled pigeons, and then after gaining their bearings in the sky, momentarily blocking the light of the moon from which they took their name, they turned their shivering antennae on me.
I saw the shift; one moment, the swarm drifted aloft startled and unsettled. The next, they had a direction. And that direction was my head. As they began to shimmer towards me, a million Luna Roaches on the trail of a new victim, I looked around for a safe place. I’d seen plenty of the creatures over the past few days, but never so many in one place. They turned the sky a slithering arm of silver, and its fingers were reaching for my head. When I saw the shadowed house not too far away, on the corner lot near the park, I nodded to myself. And ran. Where else could I find shelter?
My ears cringed at the chittering sound that grew louder behind me as I shot up the flagstone walkway to the weathered old colonial like a bloodhound, determined to nab my quarry before the things behind me nabbed my back. And my quarry, in this instance, was safety. When I got to the doorway of the house, I found its entryway unlocked. I didn’t hesitate in throwing open the screen door and diving in, as a flurry of shimmering wings beat the air in a hungry hiss behind
me. Many of them crashed into the screen as it slammed shut, unable to turn, and I breathed a sigh of relief on the floor as the soft crashes echoed in the air behind me.
“Wow,” I whispered, tossing the thin hardcover book on the floor in front of me. “That was close.”
I laid on the floor for a couple minutes, breathing heavily and occasionally glancing back at the cloud of angry moths still slamming against the door behind me. Finally, I pulled up my legs and pulled myself into a crouch to see where I’d ended up.
That’s when I saw her.
The owner of the house, or at least that’s what I assumed she was, sat as still as a statue on the couch facing the foyer where I’d landed.
“Did you see that?” I asked. “The damn things came at me like a swarm of killer bees!”
She didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry I let myself into your house like that, but I didn’t know where else to go,” I apologized.
Behind me, the soft flutterings and keening insectoid cries and smacks against the screen of the door were abating. In front of me, the woman stood, still saying nothing.
She stepped forward.
“Just let me wait here a second, until I’m sure they’re gone,” I said, picking the library book up. “Then I’ll get out of your house.”
She stepped forward again. Her eyes didn’t blink.
“Um, Ma’am?” I said. Fear began to grip at my bowels. What had I walked into?
She put another foot forward, and now I began to panic. She moved with the halting stiltedness of a robot still discovering its joints. And she hadn’t blinked since the moment I’d looked up and noticed her staring blindly ahead from her seat on the couch. How long had she sat there, waiting for me to fall into her house? What would she do when she reached me? She was only feet away.
I jumped towards the door and she changed direction to follow. There were still a few Luna Roaches circling in the halo of light like moths outside the screen, but I didn’t hesitate. I launched my way into the twilight and ran back up the street towards my home.
