Each day, she returned to sit and watch the insect activity. In just a few days, the orange and white fur began to move and ripple, like wind over grass. Glistening maggots tumbled from the mouth and eyes, feeding on necrotic tissue.
Eventually, ants and gnats and beetles crawled over the putrefying mass as the fur sloughed off, displaying the animal's liquefying organs. Libby held vigil through all of it, noting when flies grew bored with the carcass and when ants and spiders moved in to remove morsels. The kitten's body was a motel of activity. Only when the feeding slowed, with mostly bones and fur left, did Libby bury the corpse.
It was a couple of years later that she took a puppy into the same woods. This time she did not wait for death's slow claim but strangled the pup immediately, her hands choking off its whimpers as its black paws scrabbled in the air. When it stopped moving, she laid it on the ground, spreading out its silky ears.
Then she pulled a sharp kitchen knife from her pack. It glinted in the afternoon sun as she studied the black body of the pup. She placed the point against the soft, nearly furless area by the genitals and pushed in, sawing up through the skin to the ribcage. Only a small amount of blackish blood pooled out. Then she cut under the ribs in smaller strokes and across, forming a T. Pulling back the skin and opening the organs to the elements had already brought the flies. Her knife pricked the pink intestines that seeped a fetid black fluid.
Libby sat back as the flies settled upon her offering, humming their contentment. She twirled her wheaten hair, forgetting her hunger and almost missing the distant call of her mother. Scrambling up, Libby tucked away the knife and ran off.
Her diligence brought her each day to note earwigs and the black bowl of hister beetle backs moving in and out of the architecture of decomposing organs while maggots were born and grew fat on the meat. Within a few days the dog's black skin sloughed off the bloated body. Pupae from the flies eventually cracked their husks, emerging as a new generation.
Libby's interest only grew. Not far from her home was a two-story apartment building slated for demolition. The vacant shadows of the windows held only shards of glass. Plywood had been nailed up but vagrants and teenagers had pried them away. Libby had already explored the place, seeing what insects lived in dark and dank rooms.
***
When she was twelve she found a little boy of about five wandering down the street. He seemed to not realize he'd strayed far from the familiar. Libby gave him a cellophane-wrapped candy and as he popped it in his already sticky mouth, she said, "I've lost my puppy. Would you like to help me find him?" The boy nodded, pushing his stringy brown hair out of his eyes but not saying anything around the candy in his mouth. Gummy sweetness streaked his chin with brown and pink.
She took his hand and he followed complacently. It was easy enough to get him into the building and have him sit while she grabbed an old rag and some rope. She deftly tied him and before he could whimper, stuffed the gag in his mouth. He began to cry, soaking the rag with saliva and snot. Libby ignored him while she readied her tools; tweezers and scalpel. A few alert flies already circled the boy's face. From her pack, she withdrew several small jars, each holding a flickering, insectoid mass. In one she had scooped up beetles and earwigs and other ground insects. Another held the agitated buzzing of wasps, while a third showed the constant flutter of color from butterflies and moths. Two more jars contained flies and caterpillars respectively.
She ignored the boy's muffled shrieks, refusing to hurry.
After her experiments, Libby retied the gag on the unconscious boy, most of the insects having abandoned him, and threw a blanket over his body. He would be a better stew in the morning. She left and came back a day later, looking at his welted belly and peering at his crusting arms. Flies buzzed about the trickling snot on his face, landing and walking over his sweat-matted hair.
Libby continued for a couple of days, watching how the fly larva grew on living tissue. The boy stared vacantly, drooling, barely making a sound. When nothing more could be gained from her observations, she untied him and watched. He didn't move, just lay on his side. Maggots dropped off of his arms. There was no need to kill him. She packed up everything she had brought, removing jars, tweezers, scalpel and rope, leaving nothing behind. Libby walked away from the building, never to return.
Between the first Apocryphon and the second, there is a shift of personality. What could be considered normal behavior for a child diverges wildly by the second writing, indicating sociopathic tendencies. Although Libby exhibits the escalation of brutality from animal to human subjects, she doesn't seem to repeat these offenses, which is atypical for sociopaths. However, her behavior in detachment and lack of empathy is typical. 4
Debate remains as to whether the Apocrypha only mark the first of each phase of Libby's experiments, or if indeed she only conducted one event at each stage. The first two Apocrypha remain nearly emotionless, whereas the third takes on a slightly different tone and it is believed that Apocrypha III and IV may have been written by Libby. Contention exists as to whether she wrote the first two, or if an unknown source fictionalized all of it. 5
APOCRYPHON III—RESEARCH
She graduated from high school at sixteen and gained her doctorate in entomology by twenty-two. She became a forensic expert in decomposition and the insects that populated the fleshy worlds of the dead. The microscopic realm of insect biology was as interesting as discovering that first maggot-ridden body.
Libby laid her groundwork well, knowing cell structures, the chemical interactions that drove ants, dragonflies, leafhoppers, moths, and the basis of different groups of social insects. Colonies and hives were fascinating in the caste structure of workers and drones. Not all ant colonies had only one queen and most workers were females, sometimes able to breed when necessary. Often drones lived only long enough to fertilize the queen before dying. In some species of wasps and bees the queens mated with multiple drones and stored the sperm, releasing it over time to fertilize the continuous cycle of egg laying at their discretion.
Libby stored the information, then began to study communication of hymenoptera; the bees, wasps, ants and their hives, colonies and social structure. She ordered yellow crazy ants from the Christmas Islands, Western honey bees and Buff-Tailed bumble bees, Asian giant hornets and German wasps. Besides hymenoptera, she brought in Kirby's Dropwing dragonflies from Namibia, Meadow Argus butterflies from Australia, ladybugs from Canada and a host of other species. She concentrated on the pheromone trails of ants and tried to see if she could colonize species that were not hymenoptera. She tried to form messages from light, from chemicals, from Braille-like forms. Diligently, for five years Libby tested many types of command or communication and searched for any effect on hive activity, caste structures or mating.
Her tests did not lead to any discernible change. Her research could have gone on forever. There were always many new paths to take in studying class Insecta. An estimated thirty million species were still unclassified, but Libby grew unsatisfied, feeling that she was not attaining her goal fast enough.
It dawned on her that though she had concentrated on hymenoptera for their social behavior that she herself was not social. How could she possibly understand such behavior unless she undertook the final phase?
First tidying her lab, Libby took two weeks off, leaving as many insects with the department as she took. After all, she worked alone and was known to keep to herself.
She went downtown and entered a department store. For the first time ever, Libby felt a bit displaced, as if she were an ant that had lost all pheromone signals to the colony. Bewildered, she stared at the array of cosmetics, jars and pomades, lotions, scents, eye and lip colors that surrounded her. Turning a slow circle, she could not pinpoint a place to begin until a clerk approached her.
"I want. . ." She made a motion around her face, struggling for what to say.
The clerk smiled and beckoned her to follow. "I know. You've not worn makeup before. Don
't worry, I'll show you what you need. With your features, you don't need much but we can enhance and highlight what you have."
Libby sat through the experience, finding it alien, then proceeded to buy clothes that were more than utilitarian.
Always a good study, she had no problem in applying the makeup. She slipped on a slinky, red spaghetti strap dress that showed her long legs. Red stilettos added to her color and then she made her way to where males swarmed. The lights and music throbbed around her, pulsating off her skin. She danced awkwardly but it seemed to matter little to the men that grabbed her about the waist and pulled her close.
The first man offered to take her somewhere else. Libby freely gave up her virginity in a car. But she did not stay, exiting for the next nightclub. The second man took her in the restroom, and a third in the back alley where they went to "share a joint". At the end of the night, Libby went with five men, finally finding herself in a threadbare hotel room with a naked flickering bulb. She pulled the closest one to her and kissed him, undoing his pants. When he tried to push her head down, she pulled back and sat on the table, pulling up her dress to take him in. It wasn't long before the others followed.
Libby repeated the swarming for a week, collecting as many men's semen as she could. When she felt she had accomplished that task, now holding enough sperm to release thousands of eggs, she shucked off the mating colors and set to work in her home, which bordered a large, state protected park.
She brought out the terrariums with the various insects and arrayed them about her. From bees, flies, dragonflies, beetles, grasshoppers, moths, weevils, wasps and ants, Libby extracted eggs. She required special tools, often a microscope and careful incubation so that the eggs would not wither. Some she took from the hives about her place and others from the insects directly. When she had a good yield, Libby stripped off her clothing. Under a bright light, she made small incisions on her thighs, arms and abdomen, and inserted a different species' eggs into each opening. Although she felt the pain, it was an abstraction from the task at hand and it only aided her concentration. Overshadowing the pain was a flush of excitement, warmth that spread through her in ways sex hadn't.
As she laid each egg beneath her epidermis, she took out a glass case crawling with army ants. Pressing each bleeding wound shut, she applied the ants along the fleshy rim. The ants in turn seized the edges of the cut in their lightning fast jaws and locked on. Libby felt sharp pricks and then cut off the glossy black bodies, leaving the head and mandibles as sutures. She stood with her stitching of ant heads, and opened all containers holding insects.
A few variants of Apocryphon III indicate that Libby prayed or cried at this point. These have largely been dismissed as additions by unknown sources that wished to humanize her actions. There is no indication in any Apocrypha that she ever showed intense emotion.
It is argued that Libby was trying to become an insect and found the only way to communicate was to pass on her knowledge through her cells. Still others believe that she had in fact been imbued with the essence of Insecta from birth. 6
APROCRYPHON IV-A—METAMORPHOSIS
Naked, Libby walked out her door and into the park. In the white heat of the day she stood beneath the trees, her bare feet burrowing into leaf mold. Feeling the slight ripples in the air about her, she spread her arms. It may be that she knew the secret language of insects and called her disciples unto her with the release of a pheromone borne on her words. In a high voice, she trilled.
They came, great black clouds of pixilating Insecta. The air rippled and thrummed with movement. The green bottle flies with their metallic sheen, the beetles with their chitinous clatter, the buzzing drone of bees, wasps and hornets, the flutter of moths and butterflies, the gnats, mosquitoes, the walking sticks and praying mantises. They came from miles around. Still they were only representatives of the greater horde, but one came of every type, thirty million strong.
Onto each pore and hair the smallest insects landed, followed by others, coating her arms, her legs, her naked torso, her face and eyes and ears. When nothing could be seen but the pulsating cluster, it rose into the air, higher and higher, like an enormous runaway swarm. Lifting to the heavens like a gyrating, buzzing black host, it grew smaller and then. . .dispersed, scattering insects like seed pods.
APOCRYPHON IV-B—METAMORPHOSIS
Libby walked naked amongst the trees under the moon's silvering light. Like Lilith in the Garden of Eden, she moved with confidence. The air seemed to blanket her as she raised her slim, bare arms to the heavens and she cried out in a voice like the chirrup of locusts. Into the skies, boiling from the ground, the myriad host arrived on the pheromone trail, the Insecta in their glory of gold and red, gunmetal black and blue, jarring green and earthy brown, a scintillating mass of color, of forms soft and furred, hard and chitinous. Sound rose like a roar, a thunder, an unearthly humming.
Those who heard the cacophony of wings and legs, and clatter of millions of mandibles thought the end was near. The insects came from all around, swarming up her legs, onto her head. Then they burrowed, chewed and crawled within her. Some crept in her nostrils, others into her eyes, while flies and gnats filled her ears. Other vermin and plump larvae wriggled up her legs. All made their own way and she said, "I am of the hive. Eat of me and understand."
She did not scream nor run, but stood, her form limned in an odd moving pointillism. When an hour had come and gone the insects pulled back as if one and departed. Where they had been, nothing remained; not bone, nor hair, nor flesh, nor sinew. It was as if she had never been.
***
Her name could have easily been Deborah or Melissa or Mariposa, as would befit a benefactor of insects. Swarmings happen from time to time near urban centers yet no specific incident can be pinpointed in North America where a woman was consumed by insects. There is no extant evidence that she existed under any of these names; that she wasn't a myth generated for a troubled world of the new millennium.
Is this a metaphor in which Libby imparts her knowledge to the insect race, raising them up to the next level of evolution? Indeed, praying mantises have been known to lose wings and then regain them in a single generation—a startling discovery even before the Apocrypha were created.
More disturbing is a concept in which few scientists give credence (indeed, they refuse to even look at it), that Libby did indeed pass the mantle of a superior thinking race onto insects, and that homo sapiens' days are numbered. The aforementioned child with compound eyes supports this belief. She not only exhibits the ocular anatomy of Insecta, but displays disturbing digestive traits as well as the ability to communicate and direct insects in hive activities. However, this mutation also supports the argument that due to climatic and environmental changes the human race is evolving into something. . .else.
There are only four Apocrypha (Discovery, Experimentation, Research, and Metamorphosis), which coincidentally compare to the four stages of insect growth: egg, larva, pupa and imago. Since the appearance of the first Apocrypha, global warming and pollution have seen the extinction of many amphibious species that kept insect populations in check. As well, entomologists have recorded a change in hymenoptera hive and colony organizations and structure, as well as the evolution of some other orders into new, highly organized social structures.
The question most debated about the Insecta Apocrypha is who wrote them? If Libby did exist and if she did not write them, then the only living beings that saw her deeds were the insects. 7
* * *
1 Alice Rothwell, ed. Sacred Writings of the Modern Cult Movements in North America (New York: Random, 2014)
All subsequent Apocrypha quotes are from the same publication.
2 Rachel Urghart and Roy Hammerschmidt, eds. Exegesis of the Insecta Apocrypha, Rabbi Joel Shapiro, Chapt. 1 "Interpretations of the Soul" (Numinous Press, Toronto, 2032) 14
3Exegesis Shandra Radakrishnan, Chapter 3 "Psychoanalysis of the Messiah and Anti-Messiah in Relation to Major
Religions" 39-46
4Exegesis Radakrishnan, 53-56
5Exegesis Carl Purdy, Chapter 5 "Interpretations of Voice" 76-78
6Exegesis Purdy, 112-115
7Exegesis Shapiro, "Conclusion" 198-220
Colleen Anderson was once dubbed the Splatterqueen at Clarion West but believes that she has refined the horror since then. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in over 100 publications with newer works in Alison's Wonderland, Shroud magazine and Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead. She is assistant poetry editor at Chizine. Other pieces will be coming out in New Vampire Tales and I Do, I Do, an erotic wedding anthology (and that's scary). Pieces of her mind can be found at: www.colleenanderson.wordpress.com
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