CREEPTYCH
John Everson
Cover Artwork © 2010 by John Everson
All Rights Reserved.
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
And the scary thing really is thinking about them
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
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:
My very first published story dealt with our fear of insects and was released 16 years ago—in January 1994 in
“Bad Day” was originally written and accepted for a “zombie” anthology called
“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
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
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
BAD DAY
I can remember the very first time I heard the news report on them. A commentator made a joke of it. “Paul Hughes,” he said, “had a bad day today.”
That was something of an understatement, to say the least. Paul Hughes had just been fired from pushing paper literally the day after his wife filed for divorce. He made the news because in the aftermath of this personal implosion, he was walking, no doubt somewhat disconsolately, in the forest near Brave River. As he moped along a walking trail some kind of insect attacked him. The commentator speculated that the buzzing sound of the creature at the back of Hughes’ earlobe led him to jump, slap at the back of his head and consequently lose his balance to fall to the concrete walking path below. He ended up in the hospital after a cardiac arrest left him thrashing on the