by Nick Cutter
NIGHT
The anthills covering me have worsened. Broadened, heightened, connected together on my flesh. They have a uniform look, vaguely hexagonal. Like honeycombs.
“We are just skin.” My second wife said this in one of her fouler moods, when I had the bad timing to comment on her lovely figure. “Me and you and everyone, we’re all just skin and fat wrapped around bones.”
Yes, I’d told her, but I happen to fancy the way you’re wrapped.
My own wrapper is beginning to peel. HAH!
The pain is exquisite. I am half delirious with it. The instinct arose to show Clayton my condition and seek aid. But I like it too much in my lab, with my bees . . . and my wonderful hole.
The hives stretch ceiling to floor now. The bees have begun to build into the floor grating; satellite combs are appearing at the edges of the lab bench in the manner of toadstools ringing an elm tree.
The bees are changing, too. Larger, is the most obvious difference. Some are the size of hissing cockroaches. They are aggressive toward one another—bees are communal by nature, so this is strange. They seem obsessive but in a different way: instead of building a hive for the purposes of nurturing young and manufacturing honey, the hive itself is their sole ambition: building it, growing it.
They are not aggressive. I have not been stung again. They dance lightly up my arms and legs. It tickles. Sometimes I fall asleep and awake with them covering my face, tiptoeing over my closed eyes.
The air smells of caramelized sugar. A nice smell.
NIGHT
A massacre.
The bees of one hive attacked the other. I can’t imagine what provoked it. The air filled with mad buzz, the sound of a rusted band saw. They fought in the air and on the ground. It was the most vicious thing I’d ever seen.
One hive, the cochlear one, has been fading of late. Its honeycomb took on a grayish hue. Its honey was a clotted, sludgy gray. Its drones, while large, were spiritless in their fight against the drones from the other hive.
I tried to stop them—how in God’s name do you stop a bee-fight? I waved my arms (my swollen, itching, bloody arms) frantically, yelling, “Stop!”
Yes, I yelled at bees. It is to laugh . . .
They didn’t attack me, but they didn’t stop going after one another. They danced gently on my arms as they battled, their stingers jabbing crazily.
It was over quickly. The floor was covered with the dead. The victorious bees descended upon the cochlear hive, ripping at the rotting honeycomb. They attacked the nesting queen. I never got a good look at her—her body was covered in drones, layer upon layer—but she was clearly huge. She toppled from her throne and hit the lab bench with a meaty smack. The drones stung and ripped at her—some have developed rudimentary mandibles. When they cleared off, buzzing sluggishly back to their labors, the bench was empty save a blot of very thick, red royal jelly. The color of blood.
Their industry continues unabated. They have grafted their hive to the bones of the cochlear one. It is incredibly large—I have to crawl on my belly to reach the other side of the lab (where my hole is), my head mere inches from the dripping comb and that unearthly buzz.
The new hive is profoundly disturbing to behold. It beggars mathematics. The eye revolts.
I’m sitting beside my fantastic hole now. It is larger. I could probably squeeze a volleyball through it, into . . .
????????????
The bees are entranced by the hole. They hover nearby, crawling around its circumference in a narcotic daze.
It makes such lovely noises, the hole. Those resonant knocks. And odd muttersome sounds, musically sweet, like voices from another room. If I listen closely enough, perhaps I can hear what they’re saying.
Am I insane?
Does a sane man ask himself that question?
Ha! Ha! Ha! Hey!
. . .
They came out of me. They were born inside of me, fostered in me, and then they exited me.
I am the incubator.
I am the queen.
The first one birthed from my left elbow. My skin had been stirring restlessly for some time. The flesh-hills—fully connected by then, perfect hexagons spanning my body—twitched with hectic life.
The bees seemed to pause in their labors, watching me. They overrun the lab now; they bristle on the floor, huge bees, some the size of malnourished mice. When I walk, their bodies crunch underfoot. They do not protest or sting me. The remaining bees harvest the ones I’ve killed, picking the bodies apart with their mandibles and bearing them back inside the mother hive, which pumps out a thin drip-of tarry, noxious-smelling nectar.
I tasted some of it, a child accepting a schoolyard dare. Revolting. A diseased offering from a diseased host. It killed the skin on my tongue, turned it gray and dead.
It—IT—exited my elbow with torturous languor. Its legs, tiny and black and covered in oh-so-delicate fur, slit the top of the flesh-hill. It pushed itself out slowly, its body coated in dark pus, a tumor releasing itself from the flesh.
It was not as big as its brothers and sisters, and it looked very different indeed. Its head was that of a bee, though its eyes were a bright and fiery red. Its abdomen was flesh toned—it looked like a severed fingertip—banded with angry red slashes. Its stinger was a cruel spike, dripping venom that sizzled on my skin.
They came quickly after that. From my arms and legs and neck and cheeks. From my toes and thighs and buttocks and a few very small specimens from the thin vein-strung flesh of my scrotum. I exhaled, mesmerized, as one pushed itself from my forehead—I am Zeus giving birth to Athena!—and trundled over my quivering brow to perch upon the convex of my eyeball.
When it was finished, my flesh sagged like the wattle on an old biddy’s neck. I was emptied and sundered, but it was perfectly okay. I had given birth to wondrous marvels. They colonized my body, zipping around my head in a protective corona. I was their mother and father.
I was their queen. The NEW queen.
. . .
The other bees avoid me now. Their buzzing has reached a quailing, fear-struck harmonic. Good. That is good.
Not long ago I advanced on the mother hive. Drones teemed over its surface. My hands plunged through their soft buzzing bodies, sinking into the comb. It did not feel firm, as I’d expected—rather it stripped away in my hands like the flesh off a long-dead corpse. The bees did nothing to protect their hive. The new bees—MY children—battened upon them, sunk in their stingers, and tore their heads off. The old bees did nothing to defend themselves, submitting like weary soldiers at the end of a prolonged skirmish.
The comb turned dry and brittle as I ripped toward its center. My arms were coated in that revolting nectar. Here and there within the combs I’d discover some abnormal and awful sight: my hand sunk into a baseball-sized pocket of wriggling yellow larvae, the ball coming apart like cheese curds; next I tore into a vault of festering bee parts, their pulped anatomies tumbling into my upturned face and stuck to the loathsome nectar coating my arms and chest.
I knew I was nearing the queen by the sound echoing through the moldering combs: an anxious squeal. The comb was caving in around me, the entire structure collapsing in sticky, suffocating rags.
I encountered a small army of defending drones—queen protectors. They were incredibly large, rat-sized in some cases, but they were bloated and blind and seemed as resigned to their fates as the others. I knocked them to the floor and stomped them amid the stinking comb; the ones I didn’t kill were dispatched by my progeny, who took great sport in pulling their limbs off and bursting their milky, sightless eyes.
I tore through a final vault of coppery comb—it ripped apart like stinking cheese—and beheld the queen.
A horror. She was immense. The size of a rump roast or a large puppy. She lay in a pool of black, viscid jelly swimming with her birth: gelatinous gray grubs that squirmed in that sticky tar, issuing crazed mewls like children hungering for their mother’s teat.
&n
bsp; She saw me and knew—I could tell, somewhere in her insect brain, that she realized—her time had come. My progeny darted, harassing her until she let out a bleating buzz, her jelly-smeared wings shuddering against her bloated frame.
Consumed with disgust, I wrapped my hands around her. The queen’s body was ribbed, its texture strangely giving; my fingertips sank in without resistance. I felt the rapid thudding of her heart in my palms.
I squeezed. The queen bleated again, more shrilly. Grubs sputtered out of her backside. I squeezed until her convex eyes swam with blood—yes, she was full of blood—and finally, with a shuddering sigh, her body ripped apart in my hands. The separate parts thrashed for a few moments before going still.
Things went very dark and quiet.
When I regained my senses my tongue felt furry, as if I’d eaten something alive.
. . . when-where-why-what-how-HEY-YO! . . .
The lab is quiet: only my progeny are left. They crawl and frolic around the hole (which is enlarging ever more), flicking their delicate wings.
I don’t have nightmares anymore, doctors. Thought you’d like to know that.
I’m cured! HAH!
I’ve no need of nightmares now. They’ve invaded the waking world.
. . .
This is not about the Disease. The ’Gets. Never was. The ’Gets was simply the vehicle, the substance whose purpose was to ferry the valuable commodity—US—to the site of infection. The ’Gets was the tail we foolishly chased down the rabbit hole. There is no cure down here. There is only madness and malignant evil and death. I should say, if we’re lucky, death. We’ve been tricked. Played. Our love and hope and desire to do good for mankind—our need to understand, to CONQUER—brought us here against our every instinct.
I am known. I mean to say, whatever lurks down here (and yes, oh yes oh yes oh yes, something is down here) KNOWS me. Knows my history and loves and fears. It has been studying me for a long time. My whole life, even. It has met me before, and vice versa. And it has arranged, through some slyboots method, to bring me down here.
I am in the basement with the beast. It is the same one, I fear, that lurked in our home back in leafy Belmont—that same beast, or somehow connected to it. The creature that tried to take Hannah (HANNAH!). The same beast whose ageless need and hunger howled up those dusty stone steps. The one I fled from like a coward.
But you can’t run. It will find you. Hunt you down and find you.
It will lay a trap in the basement of the world and bait it with the sweetest fruit and it will wait. It’s been waiting a long time.
It has waited long enough.
. . .
I put my fingers through. Just the tips.
Couldn’t help myself. Swear to God swear to God I couldn’t just could not help it—
Funny. Felt funny. Not bad-funny. Not good-funny. Not joy-buzzer funny.
Just . . . funny.
Two fingers. Pointer and middle. Same two fingers I’d stick into the bathtub to test whether the water was too hot before bathing my infant daughter. Same two fingers I’d used to fingerbang Sue Reynolds behind the utility shed in the ninth grade. Stinky Sue. Rosie Rottencrotch. Slutty Sue, the only one who’d sleep with Craterface Cooper Westlake . . .
They began to change. My fingerprints. Shift and swirl. They are the most unique feature of our bodies. Our DNA is expressed in the whorls. And I was seeing them change . . . and with it, a profound change occurring inside of me.
I cut them off. Just the tips of each finger. Scalpel. Chop, chop. It didn’t hurt at all. The sound of the blade hacking through bone was only minorly unsettling. I’ve heard much worse by now.
The severed fingertips kept moving. Kept . . . squirming, like fat little grubs. The bees tried to spirit them away for their strange games. I shooed them off, picked the tips up with tweezers, and deposited them through the hole.
Have me, if you want. A small piece. A tribute. Won’t that be enough?
The voices seemed appreciative of my gift. But they are growing louder again.
Hungrier.
Hungry hungry hole . . .
. . .
I dreamed I was drowning. Wanted to die very badly. Tried to take a breath, flood my lungs. Couldn’t. I washed up on the shores of an immense black ocean. The water was thick as molasses, sucking at my bare feet. Hannah was there, singing the song I’d once sung to put her to sleep as a baby.
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,
Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird won’t sing,
Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.
Hannah’s eyes were huge ovals, dead black, stretching from her eyebrows to the base of her nose. A bee’s eyes. The flesh above her nose broke open and a pair of antennae pushed through like bean sprouts from a pot of dirt.
I awoke screaming . . . or laughing. So hard to tell now.
My bee-children are cruel. They grow impatient, which leads to mischief. There are a few of the old bees left. My children make terrible sport of one of the old queen-defenders. They’ve torn its legs and wings off. They pinch and slash it. I think they may have tried to copulate with it.
Bee rape? Is it possible? If they conceive, what will that baby look like?
The hole is much bigger now. The voices, louder. It’s as if lips are pressed to the other side of that dark, glittery sheen. If I put my ear to it, I’m sure I’d hear what those lips are saying.
I want to put my head through the hole. Want to kiss those lips.
Whose lips? WHAT’S LIPS?
Is that a bad thing to want?
I won’t put my head through.
I am trying very hard not to.
. . .
put it
through
. . .
Cut myself with the razor. Slashed my wrists vertically, not horizontally, the way you do when you’re dead serious and not just squalling for attention, MOMMY-DADDY PAY ATTENTION TO ME OR I’LL SWALLOW A HANDFUL OF KIDDIE ASPIRIN—no I slit right down the ulnar artery, deep deep slashes, serious as a fucking heart attack, you bet your ass, the best way to let out a whoa-nelly gusher of blood.
I healed. Almost immediately, I healed.
I wept. Cut again. Wept. Wept. Jesus fucking wept.
My children buzzed about my ears, stinging me.
Bad mother! Bad mother! Don’t hurt yourself, mother! Stay with us, love us, be with us forever!
Fucking things. Fucking fucking fuck fuck FUCH HUCH UG UG UUUUU
. . .
Amazing. Simply amazing. It is beauty. The purest beauty imaginable.
. . .
THE FIG MEN
ARE DRAWING NEAR
. . .
THE FIG MEN
ARE HERE
. . .
LUCAS. LUCAS COME HERE. LUCAS COME HOME. COME HOME LUCAS.
COME HOME SON
DADDY COME HOME
19.
LUKE HURLED THE JOURNAL. Pages riffling, it struck the wall. He shook violently, gooseflesh pebbling his scalp. LB’s head popped out from underneath the cot where she’d been resting, her eyes darting restlessly.
DADDY COME HOME
Jesus. Jesus Christ.
He shouldn’t have read it. He knew that belatedly, the same way he’d known he shouldn’t watch a scary movie as a young boy—but Luke always had to watch, peeking through his fingers.
The final ten pages were partially glued with a rank-smelling substance; the honey produced by those bastardized bees, Luke could only guess. And the last few pages were dark with blood.
The journal’s final words seemed less written than etched. Each letter had torn through several sheets of paper, their impressions carving deep into the sheets below. The letters were huge slashes, horizontal or vertical, no curves—the O’s looked like crazed cubes. Westlake must’ve wielded his pen like a knife, slashing each stroke several times, ripping and gouging them onto the page.
DADDY COME H
OME
It made no sense. Dr. Westlake had no idea who the hell Luke was. That he was a father, or Luke’s tortured history with his son. Christ, they’d never met. Had Clayton mentioned him? Even if so, what would compel Westlake to write that?
THE FIG MEN ARE HERE.
This cut even closer to the bone. How would Westlake know about the Fig Men, the monsters in Zachary’s closet? It made no sense. Luke thought about the words written in blood inside the Challenger: THE AG MEY ARE HERE. That’s how he’d read it. But Al thought the second word was Men, hadn’t she? Could the A Luke had seen actually have been the capital letter F and and a lowercase I combined? Could the blood from a letter F have dripped down, joining the top of that I to become what looked to be a sloppy, too-big A?
Jesus, had Westlake actually written: THE FIG MEN ARE HERE?
The Fig Men didn’t exist. There was no such thing. They were something his son’s fevered imagination had cooked up—something Luke himself had fixed, trapping the Fig Men in obsidian cocoons. He remembered how the act had made him feel like a minor superhero. The Human Shield.
Could the journal be a deeper manifestation of Dr. Westlake’s psychosis? Rantings and ravings divorced from truth? Luke wanted to believe so. The “honey” could be something he’d mixed up in his lab, boiled sugar and some manner of toxic chemical. Physically speaking, the gunk on its pages was the only thing that separated Westlake’s journal from your standard loony bin manifesto—it was full of the same delusional thinking, paper-shredding pen strokes, and yes, even blood.
Home. Come home. Luke had been home, safe if despondent in Iowa City. The Trieste, though, wasn’t anybody’s home. Not the home of anything human, anyway.
LB clambered onto the mattress and rested her head on Luke’s lap. As he massaged her ears, Luke felt the energy coursing through her bunched muscles. Did he really believe it? The bees, the hives, the madness lurking behind the hatch to Westlake’s lab? The hole?
Westlake had gone insane. Succumbed to the same pressures that had consumed Dr. Toy—the mental erosion Luke himself had felt from the moment he’d set foot inside the station.
