Sting of the Honey Bee

Sting of the Honey Bee

A scary story for John Michael Greer's competition on ''The Well of Galabes"

It was a few days before Halloween. Melissa, a bright, pretty, pleasant girl in her final year at school, had a run-in with Susan, a girl from the same year whom she barely knew, when, backing her bicycle out of the rack she snagged Susan’s leggings and cut her leg with a wire sticking out from the gear change.

“Ow!” yelped Susan.

“Sorry, you okay?” asked Melissa in a concerned voice.

“Stupid bitch! Look what you’ve done! Why don’t you watch what you’re doing, you clumsy cow!”

Melissa was quite taken aback by the sudden verbal onslaught and responded in kind. “Look, I said I was sorry, didn’t I? Why were you standing right behind me as I pulled my bike out of the rack anyway? Not exactly bright was it? You’ve only got yourself to blame. “

“Whaaat?! I’m the one with the cut and the ruined leggings and yet it’s all my fault?” Susan screamed at Melissa, “How about I just accidentally kick your scrawny arse and then blame it on you?”

“Just try it, you pathetic emo!” Melissa shouted back. For a moment, it looked like Susan just might kick Melissa and then, all of a sudden, she exploded in a flood of tears, grabbed her own bike and fled.

“What was all that about?” Stephanie, Melissa’s best friend, had just turned up on the scene.

“No idea,” Melissa replied emphatically, still very hyped by the encounter, “If you ask me that kid’s unhinged.”

Cycling home from school Melissa ran the incident from earlier in the day through her mind over and over again, something about it really bothered her. She could not really see that she had done anything wrong apart, perhaps, from losing her temper. Nevertheless, she somehow felt guilty and it was like the whole world knew it; everywhere she looked everybody seemed to be looking back at her accusingly. In fact, now she came to think about it, it really did feel like someone was watching her. She looked over her shoulder to check whether someone might be following her, but saw nothing suspicious. She picked up the pace to try to leave everything behind her faster.

Once at home, her mother asked her if she had had a nice day. Melissa did not know what to say about the incident and so simply told her that it had been an ordinary boring day and then headed up to her room.

Once in her room she was still troubled by a strange, uneasy feeling that she just could not seem to place. She put on some loud music and ate a few sweets whilst chatting online with friends. She refrained from mentioning anything about the strange feeling to them, but did talk about the incident. Her friends reassured her that she had done nothing wrong and that anyway, Susan was just one of those people who seem to attract trouble. At that point, Jackie, who knew Susan quite well, cut in saying that they were not being very fair to poor Susan. Did they not know that Susan’s parents had recently split up and that she was now living weekdays with her mother and weekends with her father? Everyone made excuses and started feeling sorry for Susan. That made Melissa feel really bad!

After a while, the chatting died down and Melissa went for dinner. For a while she was able to forget everything thanks to the normality of the evening dining ritual. Katie, her little sister, told some funny stories about what had happened in her biology lesson and then they all talked about what they would be doing at Halloween.

All of a sudden, Melissa started choking. She put her hands to her throat and turned bright red in the face. Her mother screamed, “John, do something!” In an instant Melissa’s father stood up to get behind her and try to perform the Heinrich-manoeuvre on her. Melissa’s lips started to turn blue; she was not getting any oxygen. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets so that only the whites of her eyes could be seen. Her father had been trying to pull her to standing to perform the manoeuvre, but she was like a rag doll, she could not support herself. He jerked at her and Melissa made an awful sound like a death rattle. Her mother was totally distraught and started shrieking “Melissa! Melissa!” Then, just as suddenly as it had started, Melissa started coughing and wheezing. She retched and then her strength started to return and she doubled over to draw in long draughts of air. A moment later she sat back down in her chair, coughed a bit more and then looked up.

“Melissa! Are you all right? Whatever happened? Did you choke on some food?” asked her mother in rapid succession.

“Dunno,” replied Melissa, “all of a sudden I just couldn’t breathe.”

“Must have been some food went down the wrong way,” said her father matter-of-factly. Things settled down and everyone finished eating, the episode all but forgotten.

Afterwards, Melissa went back upstairs to do some studying but already as she was halfway up, a feeling of foreboding came over her, similar to the feeling of being watched she had experienced earlier, but now much more intense. The door handle to her room felt unusually cold and she was inexplicably almost paralysed by fear as she opened the door. Before she could even look into the shadows, she quickly turned on the light. She tried to settle into her books – she had a test to prepare for the next morning – but she just could not concentrate. The whole time she had the feeling of being stared at. Eventually, after a couple of hours, she decided that she must be overwrought from the thing with Susan and then the coughing fit and that she might relax under a nice hot shower. The feeling of foreboding, of being watched, though, followed her into the bathroom. She ran the water hot in an attempt to flush the feeling away but it did not help at first. She dared not even close her eyes whilst shampooing her hair and ended up with soap in her eyes, painful, but in some ways a welcome distraction.

Eventually, the hot water did seem to calm her a little and she even started to sing, albeit a bit nervously. She paused to change song and thought she heard a scraping noise. The bathroom was really steamed up now, thanks to all the hot water, and she could not even see all the way across it, but, was that a shadow? Maybe her mother had come in – Melissa rarely locked the door – “Mum, is that you?” she asked. When no reply was forthcoming, Melissa turned off the water and grabbed a towel, draping it round her like a makeshift dress. The mists cleared a little and she went over to the sink and was suddenly struck with panic; in the condensation on the bathroom mirror she could read her name: “Melissa.” Moments later she was laughing at herself, “Good God, how stupid am I?! I wrote that myself just two days ago! There’s even the smiley that Katie drew!”

The laughter really helped, she was feeling much better until, that was, she caught sight of the glass of the shower stall and struggled to stifle a scream. There, in the drops of water on the glass, was a pattern which, for all the world, looked like a pointed knife dripping with blood. Melissa stared at it, mesmerised. Had she leant against the glass whilst she washed her feet? Was that what had caused the shape? She could not remember. Gradually, the drops began to coalesce and very soon the glass looked again just like a wet shower stall. Had she imagined it? The product of watching too many horror films and an overactive imagination? The uneasy, ominous feeling of being watched had returned even though the bright lights of the bathroom banished all shadows. Melissa dried herself quickly and, with some trepidation, opened the bathroom door. As she did so, the feeling seemed to intensify and she rushed to her room, quickly closing the door behind her.

Inside everything looked perfectly normal, but still she felt terrified. She quickly put on her pyjamas turned on her bedside light and then turned off the main room light. Once that was off all the shadows seemed to take on enormous proportions and she practically jumped in a single bound from the door into her bed. As she lay there the thought would not leave her that there could be something under the bed. “Oh, come on!” she tried to comfort herself, “I haven’t looked for monsters under the bed since I was eight!” Then, leaning over gingerly, she did look under the bed. The deep shadow seemed to contain abject fear, but nothing jumped out at her. She used her bedside light to clear the shadow and, apart from a couple of pairs of shoes and her old teddy bear, saw nothing under the bed.

Melissa decided to sleep with the light on, at least she tried to sleep. It must have been gone two o’clock before, exhausted, she finally did nod off. She slept very fitfully and had dream after dream of being followed or chased, captured and pinned down.

“Melissa!” her mother called, “Are you dressed yet?”

Melissa woke with a start, “I don’t need to be in till nine this morning,” she called back.

“Do you know it’s already gone eight?” replied her mother.

“What?!!”, Melissa threw back the bedclothes and rushed to get dressed, she must have overslept! Outside she noticed it was pouring with rain so she could take the bus to school instead of cycling, but the bus left at eight thirty, so she would still have to rush. She threw on her clothes, quickly applied a bit of make-up, stuffed her schoolbooks into her bag, snatched her mobile phone from the bedside table and tore down the stairs. In her rush she had forgotten everything of the day and night before and barely even registered that her door handle felt colder than usual.

She went straight into the kitchen to grab a banana to eat on the way and then froze to the spot as she saw the knife her mother had been using to cut up oranges for juice lying on the kitchen counter. It was lying pointed down at exactly the same angle and was of the same proportions as the one she had “seen” in the water drops on the shower stall. It even had drops of orange juice next to the blade in the same places as the “blood.” Carefully, Melissa picked up the knife, gazing at it in amazement. After a moment she heard her mother coming back to the kitchen. Not wanting to get caught staring awkwardly at the knife, she dropped her arm and allowed the knife to slip into her bag. “Ah, there you are,” said her mother, “I made you a Nutella sandwich to eat on the bus.”

“Oh, thanks, mum,” Melissa said giving her mother an uncharacteristic hug, “see you later!”

Once outside in the cold morning air with the rain pouring down, a dark mood began once again to settle on Melissa. She walked quickly but could not get over the feeling of being watched. At the bus stop, a boy stood listening to music and two schoolgirls chatted. None of them seemed the least interested in Melissa yet she kept having to look over her shoulder to check there was no one there. The bus arrived and she climbed on board. The windows were all steamed up and everyone’s head was buried in his mobile phone. Just one old woman looked across at Melissa and smiled revealing, as she did, an almost total lack of teeth.

Melissa sat down next to the window and got her mobile out. Entering the passcode she was immediately confronted with a warning message informing her that the memory was nearly full. “Funny,” she thought, “it was alright yesterday and I didn’t install any new apps in the evening or download any music.” She pulled up the ‘settings’ menu and clicked the option marked ‘storage.’ The memory was certainly nearly full all right, just 100 kilobytes left. The coloured bar at the top of the screen indicated that a large percentage of the storage was being taken up by photos. “That’s odd,” Melissa thought to herself, “I only cleared out a whole bunch of photos just last weekend.” She fired up the photo gallery and immediately let out a shriek, dropping her mobile phone on the floor. The old woman glanced up momentarily, but nobody else even noticed.

Shaking, Melissa picked up the phone to check what she thought she had seen. On the screen was a picture she knew nothing about; it was of her lying on her bed, sleeping, with hands above her head, her head twisted up and her mouth open wide. She flicked the photo aside to reveal another similar shot with her head in a slightly different position. She continued flicking through picture after picture like this. In total there were nearly eighty of them. She checked the time and date info. They were all taken last night between three and five a.m.! Melissa felt sick to her stomach. Who could have done this? Why would they do it? Why so many? Was it her dad having some fun with her? There was nothing funny about it. Katie? She had been known to sleepwalk, but this? Melissa shuddered as the thought occurred to her that she looked dead in the pictures. Sickened, and not a little scared, she just had time to delete them all before the bus pulled up at her stop.

It was a short walk, but she was now feeling very disturbed. She comforted herself with the thought that at least everything would be normal at school with all the hustle and bustle, chatty girlfriends and boring lessons. Unfortunately, it was not to be. She had barely stepped in the building when her friend Stephanie came up to her, “Have you heard? Susan’s gone missing.”

“What?” stammered Melissa.

“Susan, the girl you had a fight with yesterday, didn’t go home last night. Do you know anything about it?”

“What would I know about it?”

“Dunno, just thought…”

“Well don’t! You know as well as I do what happened. I knocked into her with my bike and she went off the deep end. That was it!”

“Yeah, I know, sorry. It’s just that everybody’s…”

“Everybody’s what exactly? Melissa broke in, practically exploding with indignation.

There was a pause. Melissa did not want to alienate her best friend. She decided to change tack. “Sorry,” she said, I just had a bit of a spooky evening yesterday, weird things kept happening and then this morning I found all these creepy photos on my mobile.”

“What sort of creepy photos?” asked Stephanie.

“They’re of me sleeping in my bed,” replied Melissa.

“Whoa, that really is creepy. Who took them?” asked Stephanie.

“That’s just it, I don’t know who did it or why. I just know that it’s got me really freaked me out!” Melissa said.

“Show me!” demanded Stephanie.

“I can’t.” said Melissa.

“It’s all right, you can trust me,” said Stephanie.

“No, you can’t see them because I deleted them all on the bus.”

Stephanie looked at her incredulously for a moment and then a broad smile stretched across her face, “God, you really had me going there for a minute! I fell for that all right, didn’t I? What with it nearly being Halloween. Good one!” and mock punched Melissa on the shoulder.

At that moment, the school buzzer sounded and it was time to go to lessons. They went their separate ways. Stephanie had geography while Melissa had biology. “I’ll see you at break.” Stephanie shouted to her friend, but Melissa could not hear it, already swept away by the masses heading off to class.

Meeting Stephanie at break did not work out. Melissa’s biology teacher wanted to talk to her about the possibility of doing a project. Lunch break was not any better. Right before the end of the lesson before, the principal came in and whispered in the ear of the teacher. Moments later, the buzzer sounded, the teacher reminded the class about homework and then said that Melissa should stay behind to talk to the principal. Immediately, murmurs were heard from the rest of the class as they filed out of the door.

Principal Davis turned to Melissa as she approached. “Melissa? Would you accompany me to my office?”

“Okay,” replied Melissa, “what’s it about?”

“All in due course, my dear, all in due course,” replied the principal condescendingly. They walked in silence to the principal’s office. As they entered, two police officers stood up.

“Ah, you must be Melissa Langdon. My name is Detective Sergeant Judy Stewart and this is Detective Constable Colin Marsden. We’d like a few words with you about Susan Wainwright, would that be all right with you?”

“I barely knew her!” stammered Melissa.

“That’s okay,” sergeant Stewart reassured her, “as you probably know already, Susan has gone missing. We are just trying to re-trace her steps. If my information is correct, it seems you and she had a little contretemps yesterday, is that right?”

“A what?” asked Melissa.

“An argument, disagreement,” DC Marsden filled in helpfully.

“I just accidentally knocked into her with my bike, said I was sorry and then she went completely bananas, that was all that happened,” Melissa replied.

“And then you followed her home?” sergeant Stewart asked.

“What? No, of course not! Why on Earth would I do that?”

“Well, from what I understand, Susan was quite upset. You might have gone after her to comfort her,” explained the sergeant.

Melissa suddenly felt terribly guilty. Yes, she could have done that, but the thought never even occurred to her. “Well, I didn’t,” she said simply.

“So, what did you do?” asked the sergeant.

“I went home! You can ask my mother! I got home at the usual time, around four thirty,” Melissa explained a little petulantly.

“That won’t be necessary, we just rather hoped you might have followed her. It seems that the last anyone saw of Susan was in fact at the bike racks yesterday.”

The sergeant gave Melissa a card with a number on it. “If there’s anything, anything at all you would like to tell us, please call this number.”

The meeting ended and Melissa went looking for Stephanie but did not succeed until right before the afternoon buzzer. They agreed to go into town after school.

Being with Stephanie later was really comforting for Melissa, just like nothing at all had happened. They looked in the shops and then went for a McFlurry. At about five thirty, they parted company to go home. It was already getting dark as Melissa stood at the bus stop. Stephanie was barely out of sight when the feeling of dark foreboding descended once again. Every time she looked at anybody they seemed to look back at her with accusing eyes. Eventually, though, the bus came and she climbed on board.

Twenty minutes later she alighted and started to walk the half kilometre home. It was pretty much dark now although, thankfully, the roads were well lit by the orange of the sodium streetlights. Feeling very nervous, Melissa walked quickly, looking round often. She kept hearing strange noises and the deep shadows looked particularly menacing. Within five minutes of home she became convinced there was someone behind her, but as she had already looked round so many times and seen nothing, she decided to set her shoulders and just walk on.

She was just passing the small wooded area near to her home when a man’s voice behind her said “Hello, Melissa.” She wheeled round in an instant to see a man of average height, dark, dishevelled, greasy hair, three days of stubble on his chin and piercing blue eyes, standing right behind her.

“Who are you?” she asked, trying to sound bold, “How do you know my name?”

“Your friend told me,” he said casually.

“What friend?” Melissa demanded.

“Why, Susan, of course,” he replied. Melissa’s blood ran cold. Not only had this man been following her, he also knew something about the disappearance of Susan. She tried to turn and run, but before she could she felt an arm grab her. Above her head she saw the sharp blade of a knife flash orange in the light from a lamppost as it came down to stop within a centimetre of her left eye.

“One false move,” the man said, his voice now very menacing, “one shriek and this blade goes right into your pretty eye, okay?”

Melissa, paralysed with fear, felt herself being manhandled off the pavement and into the little clump of trees about 20 metres away from the road. Once there, the man spun her round and grabbed her from behind pinning her arms to her side. A moment later, she felt something being stuffed into her mouth. A handkerchief? A sock? She did not know what it was but it was some fluffy cloth and it would now be impossible for her to scream. The next thing she knew, Melissa was being wrestled to the ground, all the while with the point of the knife in her neck.

She lay on her back, the man on top of her. With his own arms, he pinned her arms up above her head. Then, holding both of her arms down with just one forearm he used his other hand to start pulling at her clothes. “My god!” Melissa thought, “He’s going to rape me!” The appalling thought energised her, she managed to get her left arm free from under the man’s elbow and scraped it over the ground looking for anything she might use as a weapon. Briefly, her hand brushed something odd, cold and unpleasant, she looked sideways and caught an unmistakable glimpse of some fingers. There, beneath a pile of leaves must be a dead body. She was chilled to the bone. The man grabbed her arm back and propped it more painfully under his elbow again. “So, now you know what happens when you resist, eh?” He brushed a few leaves aside to reveal the body a bit more. It was Susan, her arms were arranged above her head much like Melissa’s were now. Her mouth was open. She appeared to have been strangled.

“Silly girl, Susan, if she hadn’t have been following you, you and I would have met yesterday, but then I wouldn’t have learnt your name, my little honey bee. You do know that’s what it means, don’t you?”

Melissa was in a total panic, she wanted to squirm and fight but the thought of poor dead Susan lying there just made her freeze.

Having successfully got various items of her clothing off, the man now started on his own trousers. As he fumbled, Melissa felt a release of pressure on her right hand, instinctively, she brought it down in a wide arc over the ground where it found her school bag. The man, too busy, did not seem to notice. She found the opening of the bag and rooted around hoping to find a book heavy enough to knock him out with. Instead, her hand grasped something rather better: the fruit knife from that morning! A rush of hope surged through her body which gave her the strength to raise her shoulder a little and the knife high up above them, only to bring it crashing down into the base of the neck of her assailant.

The man screamed and put his hand up to the large gash in his neck. Melissa had withdrawn the knife ready to strike again, but the man made to stand with blood gushing like a fountain from between his fingers. It occurred to her that she must have slashed open an artery for there to be so much blood. Instead of standing, though, he buckled to his knees, eyes wild and then collapsed face forward into the earth next to her.

Melissa looked up at the knife still raised above her, but pointed down at a now-familiar angle. In a state of total shock, she watched transfixed, as drops of blood dripped from the blade.