Creeptych

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