They Come When You Sleep: 16 Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (Stories for Late at Night), page 7
Kelp and seaweed swayed from the hand as it turned Jeremy’s head to the side. The rotted face of David, his eyes white and milky, his gray skin pockmarked from the bites of sea creatures, stared back at him. A final rush of water surged into Jeremy’s mouth as he tried to scream. David’s rotted fingers closed about Jeremy and pulled him down into the depths of the bay.
Bee is for Boy
James Harris felt the satisfying crunch against the soft skin of his palms as he slapped his hands together. He blew the crumpled body of the bee out his son’s bedroom windows and slid it shut with the urgency of a man trying to seal the space off from a deadly contagion. Holding his hand up to the daylight, he searched his palms for the pinprick mark of a bee sting.
No holes. No redness. No swelling.
James had not realized he was holding his breath until he exhaled deeply and let his hands fall to his sides. He hated spring and the swarms of bees that danced among the flowers. It made him feel emasculated to carry an EpiPen with him everywhere. He swore he could always spot the bemused look on people’s faces as their eyes trailed to the back pocket of his jeans, the slim auto-injector filled with epinephrine, and the dawning knowledge that the burley, six-foot-five former high school football star could be felled by his body’s allergic reaction to a sting from a bee, a thumbnail-sized insect. Time and again, his wife told him it was all in his imagination, but he knew the people in town snickered behind his back about his allergy.
After their son, Jaime, was born, James brought the child to an allergist who confirmed that the child had inherited his father’s allergy to bee stings. James was devastated by the news until the doctor assured him that Jaime’s bee allergy scored much lower on the allergen scale. While James had a life-threatening Class Six bee allergy, Jaime only scored on the high end of Class Three and was unlikely to manifest anything more than moderate swelling around a sting.
“I assure you, these things are very common,” the doctor explained to James. “Parents do not just pass along their physical characteristics to their children. While it is true that parents can pass along an allergy, physical infirmity, or even mental health issues through their DNA, they also pass along such wonderful things as musical talent, academic aptitude, and artistic abilities. Believe me, James, as Jaime grows, you will see that you have passed along to him far more than just your allergy.”
Jaime was now thirteen, and aside from a few swollen bites over the years, the boy’s allergy left him relatively unscathed. James looked around his son’s bedroom, the walls covered with posters of Marvel Universe characters, and frowned at the unmade bed.
Where had the boy gotten off to? James knew being a long-haul trucker for Stan R’s Rolling Rigs did not leave him much father-son time, but the kid was always up for a ride to Home Depot with his old man.
James looked down at his hand as he left the room and noticed a small, black filament sticking to his thumb’s side. One of the unfortunate bee’s legs had dislodged when he crushed it. He wiped his hand clean on his blue jeans with a look of disgust and closed the door behind him.
Thursday
Jaime sat in the back seat of his father’s Ford pickup truck and tapped on the side of the small cardboard box in his lap. He could hear the creature’s exoskeleton rubbing against the cardboard walls as a slender green leg tentatively touched one of the box’s air holes.
“That’s the first time I have ever seen a praying mantis for sale at Home Depot.” Jamie’s father’s dark eyes glanced up to look at him in the truck’s rearview mirror. “I’ve seen them selling ladybugs to eat the aphids but never a praying mantis.”
“Yeah, it’s so cool.” Jaime peered through the air hole into the darkened box. He could see the long, slender silhouette of the mantis with its small, triangular head.
“Hey, if your mom asks, just tell her it eats lettuce and stuff like that.” His father smiled and winked at him in the rearview. “Let’s just keep it between us that it eats bugs. Your mother doesn’t need to know that there’s a dangerous predator in the house. Okay, kiddo?”
“Okay, Dad,” Jaime replied without taking his eyes off the box.
Jaime reached out and lightly touched the slender, spiked raptorial foreleg that protruded from the air hole, a wicked smile crossing his face.
The praying mantis crawled up the stick, the only ornament in its new home in the old Folgers instant coffee jar. Its triangular head rotated upward to study the patch of window screening covering the jar’s opening and affixed in place by a rubber band, its antennas twitching.
Jaime sat at his desk watching the mantis as he quickly thumbed through his dog-eared copy of The Bees in Your Backyard: A Guide to North America’s Bees. It had been a birthday gift from his mother three years ago. He remembered how his father rolled his eyes and shook his head as Jaime held up the gleaming white book with the picture of a giant yellow-and-black honey bee emblazed across the cover.
“Bees are amazing and fascinating creatures,” his mother had cajoled her husband. “It will be good for him to see they are more than flying stingers.”
“Bees are just mosquitos on steroids. They are vermin. Monsanto would do us a favor to eradicate both from the Earth.” James Harris folded his arms across his chest.
“Well, if there were no bees, there would BEE no fruits, vegetables, chocolate, coffee, or nuts.” Jaime’s mother playfully poked at his father, trying to turn his sour mood around.
“I love it.” Jaime’s eyes lit up excitedly as he leafed through the book’s colorful pages.
Jaime did love the book. It was his favorite birthday gift that year. He loved it more than the video games, the comic books, Marvel action figures, and certainly more than the Thor pajamas from his grandparents.
Most ten-year-old boys would have groaned at such an educational gift, but not Jaime. He loved it because it told him everything he needed to know about bees—his arch-nemesis.
Earlier that summer, Jaime had made two important discoveries, both because of his father. When the elder Harris switched the family’s cell phone plan from Verizon to T-Mobile, a free subscription to Disney+ and its treasure trove of movie properties was an added perk.
Jaime sat up in his room, watching hours of Marvel superhero movies. He loved the superpowers, the battles, and the eye-popping special effects. But most of all, Jaime loved the villains. Thor, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America, and all the rest of the Avengers seemed boring and lame to the ten-year-old. However, Jaime reveled in the cackling Green Goblin, the scheming plans of Loki, and the raw power of Thanos. He spent his weekly allowance buying comic books at the local Walgreens and hanging their posters on his walls.
Villians had a plan, cool weapons, and almost always had a score to settle with someone. To Jaime’s immense disappointment, every movie ended the same way, with the heroes ganging up on the villain to win the day. Lame. Boring. Why shouldn’t Loki rule Asgard? Why couldn’t Thanos be all-powerful?
Jaime’s second discovery that summer was that his bee allergy was not a myth. He was sitting cross-legged in the grass, waiting for his turn to rotate into the soccer game at the Bight Summer Day Camp his parents had sent him to, when he felt a sharp pain on his upper lip. He frantically swatted at his face, crushing a black-and-yellow bee across his mouth and cheek.
His sudden cry of pain was loud enough to stop the soccer game and bring the camp counselors and children alike running over to where he lay sprawled on the grass. As if sobbing uncontrollably in front of the other campers was not embarrassing enough, his top lip reddened and swelled to the size of a golf ball at the site of the bee sting.
As one of the camp counselors led him off to the nurse’s office, Jaime could hear the laughing and joking starting to ripple through the assembled children.
“I hope you’re okay, Jaim-Bee,” called a large red-haired boy, followed by a chorus of laughter from the other children.
Jaime could hear one of the counselors scolding the boy, but he also heard several children giggling as they referred to him as “Bee Boy.”
As Jaime lay on a cot in the nurse’s office, waiting for his mother to pick him up, a Ziploc bag filled with ice pressed against his lip, the two discoveries gelled in his mind. He envisioned himself as cunning as Loki, as ruthless as the Green Goblin, and as powerful as Thanos as he waged war on his arch nemesis, the bees.
After begging his parents not to send him back to summer camp after the embarrassing episode, Jaime began his war of extermination on the bee kingdom. Armed with a rolled-up newspaper, he stalked his mother’s flowerbed and garden, swatting hapless bees from the air and stomping them underneath his sneakers.
Jaime’s mother stormed out of the house and took the newspaper from him. She scolded him that none of her tomato plants would fruit if he kept up this behavior. However, when his father came home that night and witnessed the bee carnage on the walkway, he nodded to his son and told him it was a good start, just be careful not to get himself stung again. Jaime smiled with delight at his father’s praise, even though it made his swollen lip ache terribly.
“I was just like you as a kid.” Jaime’s father stared at his son for a long moment, eyeing the child curiously.
Later that summer, his mother’s birthday gift of The Bees in Your Backyard became the battle plan for his war on bees. The book said dandelions were an essential first food of spring for bees, so Jaime stomped every dandelion he could find. He stalked the woods behind his house with his Super Soaker filled with white vinegar from the kitchen and gleefully sprayed a beehive nestled in the branches of a pine tree after reading that vinegar was lethal to bees.
Jaime slipped a six-pack of Pepsi from his father’s stash in his sleek, black Peterbilt Model 389 semi-truck. He discovered the sodas a week earlier when he spied the corner of the blue soda box peeking out from behind the red-and-white Make America Great Again flag hanging over the bed in the back of the truck’s sleeper cab. When he lifted the flag, Jaime found three cases of Pepsi stacked on the over-the-bed shelf alongside a box of Hershey bars, a gallon of Clorox bleach, a bottle of Nailite acetone, and some Walmart dish towels.
Jaime poured all six sodas into an old white bucket behind the house after discovering in the book that unattended sodas posed a hazard to bees. They would mistake the sugary scent for a blossoming flower, swoop in, and drown.
The morning after he set the Pepsi trap, Jaime rushed outside and was delighted to find five bees floating in the dark liquid. The trap worked so well that he began to keep track in a black-and-white notebook of his daily tally, reaching a kill count as high as nine in a single day before his father discovered the bucket and poured it out, mistaking it for dirty water. After that, Jaime moved his trap into the woods with a fresh six-pack of Pepsi and enjoyed even higher rates of daily bee mortality. He especially liked when a bee would still be wriggling its legs, trying to free itself from a sugary demise, and he would continuously dunk it under the dark waters with a stick until it floated motionless.
By the time he was thirteen, Jaime had honed himself into a supervillain that he had imagined bee mothers had warned their children about at bedtime. When he swatted a bee near the house, he liked to think these were bee superheroes sent to defeat him but failed and died.
Jaime still made his Pepsi traps, which he named Sweet Death. He also added new variants to his arsenal, including one that lured in specifically yellow jackets with meat and drowned them in soapy water that he called Meat Death.
When he spotted the boxes of praying mantises by the checkout counter at Home Depot, a plan that would make Loki proud caressed the corners of his mind. Now, he could feel the mantis’ bulbous eyes staring at him from within the jar as he turned the book’s pages. Jaime found what he sought with a triumphant laugh and tapped the picture on the page. The image took up a full half-page of the book, showing a large, green praying mantis clutching a bee in its raptorial forelegs.
Jaime looked from the picture to the mantis in the jar, a malicious smile crossing his face. The arch villain now had a monster to unleash upon the bees.
Friday
For most of the day at school, Jaime sat thinking about how to employ the mantis that weekend. Last weekend, he spotted a bee nest forming on an oak tree in the woods. The worker bees were still building the honeycomb structure, and he fantasized about the mantis tearing its way through the thin walls of the nest to get at the plump queen.
The nascent hive nestled in the crook where a low-hanging branch met the old oak’s trunk, ideally located for the morning sun to heat the nest and the shade to keep it from overheating in the afternoon. Jaime had contemplated taking it out with the vinegar in the Super Soaker on the spot but decided to let the worker bees toil away for another week. He had read that it took up to fourteen days for a new nest to become fully populated, so he felt another week would make it ripe for conquest.
He envisioned the mantis descending upon the hive like an insectoid Godzilla emerging from the waters of Tokyo Bay to lay waste to the city. Jaime mulled over the problem of the mantis in his mind. The bees provided an easy and ample food source, but the mantis had wings and could fly off once released. He thought about clipping the mantis’ wings with a nail clipper, but in the end, he decided to tie a kite string around the insect and affix the other end to the ground. Just enough line to reach the hive, so the mantis would have to go for the bees to feed. Jaime supposed the string would inhibit the mantis from successfully evading a crow that saw the long insect as a quick and satisfying meal; however, if Loki or the Green Goblin never scrapped a plan because of the risks, then neither would he.
So all day at school, Jaime occupied his thoughts with his self-ascribed cunning plan. He had a few friends at school, more acquaintances than friends, just some other boys he sat with at lunch and chatted with about movies, video games, and school gossip. However, he never shared his plans with them.
School rarely held Jaime’s attention for long, though his grades were consistently above average, and this day was the same. The only exception was Mr. Kriaris’ sociology class, which focused the afternoon discussion on the phenomenon of serial killers in society. On most days, Mr. Kriaris seemed as bored by discussions of social change and the impact of human behavior on society as the rest of the class. However, the ordinarily sedate teacher seemed electrified by the recent storm of media coverage of the hunt for the “Sixty-Six Strangler,” a serial killer responsible for the murder of at least thirty-two homeless people along the stretch of highway between Chicago, Illinois, and Santa Monica, California.
“Serial killers often start their careers by torturing or killing small animals.” The rail-thin teacher tapped a cigarette-stained finger on the laptop’s keyboard, and the PowerPoint projected onto the screen at the front of the darkened classroom toggled through a series of grim-faced mugshots.
“They choose animals because they are weak and vulnerable,” Mr. Kriaris continued as a picture of a handsome, smiling, dark-haired man appeared on the screen. “Ted Bundy was known to derive pleasure from torturing cats and dogs. I suspect that once the Sixty-Six Strangler is apprehended, similar details will emerge about him.”
“Or her,” Seol-Hyun raised her hand and added from the back of the room.
“Or her.” Mr. Kriaris nodded and smiled at the correction, apparently thrilled with the rare class participation in a lesson.
Jaime was disappointed his teacher arrived at such a simplistic solution. He had spent hours dissecting live bees, watching them slowly suffocate in enclosed jars, starve on glue traps, or react when sprayed with various chemicals. While Jaime admittedly enjoyed it, he did not think it was fair to say he did it for pleasure. He did this to hone his knowledge of his foe. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” That was straight out of the mouth of the Chinese tactician Sun Tzu from the sixth century BC.
Jaime imagined it was the same for serial killers; they did these things to increase their understanding, not for pleasure. Whatever his motivation, the Sixty-Six Strangler was abducting and killing homeless people, so Jaime thought it would be logical for the killer to start with animals to perfect his craft and lessen the chance of making a mistake that could get them caught.
Jaime attributed this to a need for more critical thinking to reverse a dumbing down of people that started with fairy tales and continued in every movie, book, and television show: the bad guys were cruel and evil, and the good guys were pure and innocent.
Many people were troubled by the growth of homelessness in America; he had heard his father go on endlessly about the topic. Jaime felt he was one of the few people cerebral enough to consider that, whether misguided or not, the Sixty-Six Strangler was one of the few people doing something about the growing homelessness epidemic. However, society ascribed serial killers as the bad guys, just like in movies, so their only conceivable motivation was to do evil.
Jaime imagined raising his hand and pointing out this flaw in society, and since this was a sociology class, was that not what they should be discussing? He would rest his case with the profound statement, “What if Loki wanted to rule Asgard because he thought Odin was doing a pretty crappy job of it, and Thor only stopped him so he could look like the hero and bang a harem of valkyries? History is written by the victors, after all.” Jaime envisioned the class staring at him with awestruck faces and Mr. Kriaris nodding thoughtfully at his revelation and keen observation.
It occurred to Jaime that serial killers were no different than supervillains, and he imagined a classroom full of bees looking at his grinning picture on a screen and shrinking back in terror. The thought made him smile.
