Box Set: Scary Stories- Vols. 3 & 4 (Chamber Of Horror Book 8)

by Billy Wells

  The very next night, Peabody waited for Fiasco to return home from a board meeting. He was on the sidewalk leading to his front porch when Osgood darted from behind an azalea bush and stuck him in the neck with the syringe.

  The old reprobate gasped as Peabody held him fast until he succumbed to the anesthetic. Then, he let him fall face first. When Fiasco’s nose flattened on the sidewalk with a sickening thud, Osgood chuckled with sadistic glee. He quickly dragged him across the lawn, loaded him into his van parked in the shadows, and transported him to his cabin. Drool slobbered down Peabody’s chin as he thought of the delightful possibilities of having Maximilian all to himself in the lab.

  When Fiasco came out of the stupor, he found himself strapped to a table inside a large glass enclosure. He tried desperately to escape but to no avail. Lifting his head and peering into the shadows outside the bright enclosure, he recognized Peabody seated in a chair with a bag of popcorn in his lap and a pint bottle of Pepsi.

  Squinting from the blinding floodlights, he called out, "Is that you, Osgood?"

  “Yes, Maximilian. I'm here, and I have a little surprise for you. I decided to use you in my latest experiment.”

  “Experiment? Have you lost your mind? Let me out of here at once.”

  Peabody ignored this and said, "I'm sorry. As you know, I don't take orders from you any longer. Are there any eloquent last words you want to say?”

  “Can you speak louder? You know my hearing is not what it once was.”

  “Don't worry, old friend, you won't have that problem after tonight.”

  “What?”

  “Let me write you a final message.” Peabody quickly jotted a note on a white board with a black magic marker and rolled the easel next to the glass. It read, “Fuck you, Max. I hope you rot in hell.”

  Peabody pushed the button on his remote and a small door opened into the enclosure. The colony of army ants swept in covering Fiasco immediately. His agonized screams were pitifully intoxicating as the flesh melted away under the precision one-quarter inch mandibles of the ravenous ant army. It only took about an hour for every trace of flesh to be eaten away, leaving only a skeleton inside the cage.

  Peabody had never enjoyed anything as much as witnessing the ants devour a human being rather than just an animal. The show was truly spectacular. He had recorded it so he could watch it whenever he chose. He couldn't wait for his next victim.

  Archibald Bromfield unlocked his front door and entered the foyer. He immediately detected an odd smell in the house. Then he felt the sting in his neck.

  When Archibald awoke from the propofol, he found himself strapped to a round platform inside a glass enclosure. Lifting his head, he saw Peabody moving about in a small kitchenette and heard the sound of popcorn popping.

  “Osgood, what are you doing?” Bromfield shrieked.

  “What does it look like, Archibald? I’m making popcorn. Don’t have a conniption. Your time will come soon enough. Why hasten your last seconds on earth, particularly when they will be unmercifully painful.”

  Bromfield struggled to free himself as Peabody removed his popcorn from the microwave, picked up a can of Pepsi, and took a seat next to the glass enclosure.

  “What are you going to do with me?”

  “Look around, Archibald. Maybe you can guess.”

  On the glass, Bromfield saw several bees buzzing about. Then, he saw a hive on a rope hanging from the top of the enclosure, level with his head.

  Peabody explained, beaming, “The bees in the enclosure are Africanized honeybee's a genetic scientist named Warwick Kerr developed in Brazil in the fifties. Regular bees allow about nine seconds before they attack, and they leave you alone after you run about three hundred feet away from their hive. These bees are insanely territorial and aggressive. They attack in only one half second, and they will chase you for over half a mile while drawing thousands of other bees to sting you until you are dead.”

  “Osgood! Have mercy! Don't do this!”

  “Save your breath, you despicable turncoat, you made your bed, now die in it.”

  Peabody picked up the remote, pushed play, and the makeshift Lazy Susan Bromfield was strapped to started to turn. His body rotated toward the dangling hive directly in his path. He struggled to avoid it, but his head crashed into it with each rotation and kept pitching it forward. Angry bees, incensed from the collisions, covered the old man like a blanket of stinging fury. Peabody couldn't believe Bromfield wouldn't die for what seemed like an eternity of gut-wrenching screams of agony. Osgood felt a momentary twinge of remorse, recalling the many luncheons they’d attended together, but quickly shrugged it off.

  Once Bromfield was dead, the bees returned to their hive, now hanging motionless from the ceiling. He was almost unrecognizable as a human being since the bloating from the concentrated bee stings had made him twice his normal size. Two down and three to go.

  * * *

  The following evening he easily kidnapped Dudley Grandeur and transported him to the cabin. When he awoke from the anesthesia, Grandeur also found himself strapped inside the glass enclosure. Looking around, he saw about ten Japanese hornets buzzing about his head Peabody had slathered with honey. Each hornet was about three inches long and seemed to be drawn to the honey dripping from Grandeur’s head and face.

  “Dudley, I'm so glad I have this final moment with you before you die. Archibald and Maximilian have already gone to hell and you will join them shortly.”

  “Please, Osgood. Have mercy! The future of the university was at stake.”

  “You did it to save your own ass, you miserable hypocrite.”

  Peabody had already eaten far too much popcorn and drank too much Pepsi the previous evening. Tonight he would eat peanuts and wash them down with a beer. He sat on the sofa and flipped a switch that turned on a blower inside the enclosure that tossed the ten hornets around until they were raging mad.

  When Peabody turned off the blower, the hornets spotted Dudley, and assuming he was responsible for the disturbance, they sprayed flesh-melting poison directly into his eyes. If he had not been in the enclosure, every other Japanese hornet in a fifty-mile radius would have come to sting him until he was dead. However, the ten hornets in the enclosure did a really nice job on Grandeur without the additional reinforcements.

  When it was over, Grandeur’s eyes were black empty sockets. All the flesh on his face had melted away, leaving a skull with a head full of hair and two floppy red ears. The horrific sight curtailed Osgood's desire for more peanuts. Three down and two to go.

  Later, that night, Peabody had so much trouble dragging Cornelius Hardmeat to the van in the parking lot; he had to drive across the lawn to where the unconscious professor lay in the grass. Straining as hard as he could, Peabody finally pushed the obese tub of guts inside the van enough to close the door. Dragging him into the cabin took every ounce of energy Peabody had left, but finally, the task was completed.

  While Hardmeat snored blissfully away, Peabody placed two female earwigs in each ear. He rued the thought of listening to the rotund asshole begging for his life, but it would take the earwigs several hours to lay eggs and devour the inside of Cornelius' head. Since the result was only an empty skull, this experiment compared to the others would be very boring and hardly worth watching.

  While he waited, Osgood stuffed a tennis ball into Hardmeat's mouth and held it in place with duct tape. After making sure he was securely bound, Peabody took off for Dean Uptite’s house at the edge of the campus.

  Peabody had no trouble negotiating the dean’s lean frame into the van. When he reached the cabin, he was surprised to hear Hardmeat's muffled shrieks a considerable distance away. Apparently, the earwigs and their brood had already found the professor's pain center. When Peabody dragged the dean inside, he found Cornelius writhing pitifully in unmitigated, excruciating agony. His eyeballs were rolling around in his head like marbles.

  Peabody dragged Uptite’s body on to the back porch, strip
ped off his clothing, and placed him in a cast iron tub with several decomposing derelict dogs from the dump. He hogtied his arms behind him and connected his feet so he couldn't get any leverage to get out of the tub that was outside on the back porch. Then, he made several slices through the dean’s arms and legs with a butcher knife and rubbed some of the gangrenous tissue into the wounds so the infection would spread quickly throughout his extremities. By tomorrow, the maggots feeding on the dead dogs would transfer into the dean's body. Then, the parasitic infestation of maggots would grow inside him and start devouring his tissue while he was still alive.

  * * *

  Three days later, the tub was teeming with flies and maggots. Some animals from the woods had also happened by for a snack. Uptite and Hardmeat were dead. Five down and one to go, Trixie Montpelier.

  The bitch that started the problem to begin with was the hardest of all to capture. She was always with her obnoxious friends. But finally, late one night, Peabody caught her leaving a fraternity party alone and heading for her car. He had conveniently parked right behind her. As she weaved along the sidewalk toward her Porsche, reeling from a generous helping of booze and drugs, Peabody stepped out from a shrub and stabbed her with the syringe. She recognized him immediately, grabbed him by the balls, and squeezed. For a few seconds while he screamed, she kept licking his face with her long tongue until she finally lapsed into unconsciousness.

  What a pig. The pathetic harlot’s redeeming social value was barely above road kill.

  When Trixie awoke, she found herself in an enclosure teaming with black widow spiders that had already begun to cocoon her with webs. Peabody had injected her legs and arms with bullet ant venom, which had made them stiff and useless.

  The spiders and their brood would be feasting on her for weeks. It would be a horrible way to die, but she had messed with the wrong person, Osgood Aloysius Peabody.

  * * *

  In the meantime, several detectives had come to question Peabody at his home about the disappearances of the board members and Miss Montpelier, but he was long gone by then. Trixie’s father had posted a million dollar reward for information leading to her safe return.

  The bodies were ever recovered, and Peabody remained the only suspect. A nationwide police dragnet fueled by Montpelier’s money continued for months afterward. Peabody had disappeared from the face of the earth.

  Osgood spent a considerable amount of his life savings securing a new identity and having under-the-radar plastic surgery. After a year of going under the knife, he was confident even his own mother wouldn't recognize him. He was surprised he quickly found a new teaching job at an academy three thousand miles away from Stodgy U.

  Peabody knew there was always a chance someone would come along who would know he had never attended, Catholic U. in Washington DC, the university he listed in his resume. He could only cross that bridge when he came to it.

  He bought a new home in a secluded wood in the country. Like his previous residence, he converted the basement, also with an outside entrance, into a lab and had already resumed his clandestine experiments.

  * * *

  One year later after starting his new position in the Biology department of Highbrow Academy, Peabody became extremely bored. Experimenting on stray cats and dogs from the town dump no longer presented the thrill it once had. Nothing could deliver the pulse pounding orgasmic climax he'd experienced when he tortured and killed those academic assholes at Stodgy U. The old adage, “How can you keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Paree?” kept haunting him. He was like a man-eating tiger that had tasted human blood. He longed to feel that excitement again. The problem was the people who’d wronged him were dead. He thought about becoming another Dexter and experiment only on perverts and murderers who deserved to die, but he had no way to find such degenerates to satisfy his bloodlust.

  Finally, temptation prevailed. He answered an ad in the morning paper: Private Lessons By Exotic Dancer In Your Home.

  He met the young woman at an out-of-the-way restaurant. He wore a fake beard and the blond wig. She laughed when she saw his ridiculous disguise.

  They went directly to a seedy motel directly across from the restaurant where Osgood paid cash. The voluptuous call girl was very young, big bosomed, and naive. As she performed every intoxicating carnal act in her bag of tricks, Peabody thought his poor heart would explode from the ecstasy. He ran up a bill he never planned to pay of over two thousand dollars worth of sexual fantasies at bargain basement prices in a single night.

  As the prostitute started putting on her panties and bra, Peabody stole up behind her and stuck her with his syringe. Her eyes rolled up in her head, and she collapsed on the bed.

  He dragged her to his van, transported her to his home, and dragged her into his laboratory. He felt like a child again on Christmas morning as he strapped her to the revolving platform inside the glass enclosure.

  After so many hours of rip-roaring sex, he was ravenous with hunger. He went into his kitchen, placed the popcorn in the microwave, and pushed the button. While the popcorn popped, he poured some Pepsi into a large glass of ice. When the microwave beeped, he removed the popcorn and carried it and his glass of soda to a seat on the sofa overlooking the glass enclosure.

  He picked up his remote knowing a new serial killer had just been born at the ripe old age of sixty-two.

  What would it be tonight? Japanese hornets, army ants, black widow spiders, earwigs, botflies…. So many choices, and he would find others. And all of them delightfully entertaining and deliciously painful.

  STRANGER IN THE RAIN

  As Sam sat on a deck chair in the magnificent pool area facing the windows of the three thousand-room hotel, the lights went on and off like stars in the night. The sky above the enormous Majestic hotel looked foreboding. Every so often, he heard the rumble of thunder and saw flashes of lightning in the distance. The clouds covering the moon looked dark and ominous.

  Looking about the pool area, he noticed only one other man sitting at a table about one hundred feet to the right. A lone beer bottle stood on the table with what appeared to be a few towels. A half an hour before, the pool area had been crowded with guests both in and out of the pool. Now, the lightning had caused them all to go inside except him. That is until the stranger across the way suddenly appeared.

  Sam liked sitting in the dark. He found it invigorating to be alone with his thoughts rather than making small talk with some human vegetable. If he could glean something from a conversation that interested him, he was all right with that. On the other hand, he would rather watch paint dry than listen to someone babble about the weather, politics, or some mindless TV show. Tonight was another matter entirely. He was in no mood for company.

  Suddenly the man at the table across the way rose and started walking toward him. Uh Oh, he thought. He didn't know the stranger and would probably never see him again. That in itself was a reason not to talk to him, but he didn’t feel comfortable just getting up and rushing away. That would be rude.

  The stranger came right to his table, sat down, and said, "Looks like we're the only ones who haven't chosen to come in from the rain.”

  “It's not raining yet,” Sam said, making dreaded small talk.

  Like on cue, drops of rain started to fall. More lights in the panoramic bank of windows above went on and off sporadically.

  "See. I told you so," the stranger said smiling.

  “Are you a weatherman?”

  “No. I'm a traveling salesman.”

  “What do you want to sell me?” Sam said feigning a groan.

  “I don't have my briefcase full of Fuller brushes with me right now.”

  “Do they still make Fuller brushes?” Sam mused.

  “I doubt it. Don’t worry, I was only joking.”

  “So what do you sell?”

  “If I told you what I sell, I'd have to kill you.”

  They laughed at the age-old conversation piece.

 
“I was about to go to dinner,” the stranger said, “and I hate to eat alone. I wondered if you'd like to join me.”

  “Are you gay?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not really. Some of my best friends are gay,” Sam lied.

  “I'm just alone, and I wondered if you wanted to join me. No strings attached.”

  “I must say it's the first time a man has propositioned me like this. I guess I really don't know how to react.”

  “You must be from North Jersey or New York?”

  “I’ve got it. You’re a mind reader.” Sam thought the man was nice enough, and he did have charisma. He continued, “Frankly, I'm not very hungry. I don't think I can eat just yet.”

  “Well, it stopped raining. If you'd rather be by yourself. I'll go.”

  Sam wasn’t in the mood for chitchat, but he replied, “It's okay. I'll have dinner with you if you like, but let’s wait a little while longer.”

  “I’m Jerry, and you are…?”

  “Sam.”

  “So what do you do for a living, may I ask?”

  “Nothing. I gave my boss notice I was leaving ten days ago. He was flabbergasted. I worked for him for thirty years.”

  Jerry seemed to consider this remark for an extra beat, and started drumming his fingers on the table. Then, he said, “Most people over fifty are axed as soon as there’s a downturn, but you left on your terms. Good for you, but actually, you don’t look old enough to retire.”

  “Hey. You know what they say. It doesn’t take age to retire, it takes money. I’m not rich, but I saved enough to get by for the time I have left. I was tired of the debits and credits.”

  “You were an accountant?”

  “Yep. I was the proverbial bean counter for thirty years.”

  “Accounting. That’s something I could never do. I need to be outside. Are you married?”