Don't Eat West Virginia Honey (Part 2)

Part 1

I know I’ve posted before about why you shouldn’t be eating the honey that comes out of Gramercy, West Virginia. I said I’d start from the beginning and go more into detail about what’s wrong with the town. What happened to me in the woods, and what happened to my dog, Peaches, was terrible, but people are attacked by animals all the time. If that was as far as my experience with Gramercy went, I wouldn’t be so desperate to keep people away. You see, what happened to Peaches hurt me deeply, but it was what happened to Clay, the only friend I ever made in that godforsaken hellhole, that terrified me into leaving as soon as I was old enough.

I mentioned before that Gramercy is something of a desolate little redneck town. There were maybe six hundred people total, and no one gave a good god damn about anything other than hunting, drinking, and beekeeping. Except Clay. By the time I was thirteen or so, I’d gotten into the habit of ignoring literally everyone in school except my teachers. I kept my nose in the books I begged my parents to buy for me any time we made the hour trip to the closest almost-city that even resembled civilization, and everyone just left me alone. But one day when I’d just started eighth grade, one of the yokels actually asked me what I was reading.

It took me a good ten seconds to get over the shock of having another human being actually speak to me before I told him I was reading The Two Towers. Clay didn’t read all that well, but as I soon found out, that was mostly out of lack of interest. When you grow up in a world where no one reads anything but Field and Stream Magazine or cheap romance novels, the urge to read just withers and dies. That changed when I started lending him books from my own collection. He was slow at first, plodding his way through The Hobbit at a turtle’s pace, but he came back and begged for more, and the more he read, the faster he got and the closer we became.

We were a couple nerds cut off from the rest of world by miles of mountains and isolated from our own community by a complete lack of understanding. We’d play at swordfighting in the woods, beating each other within an inch of our lives with branches before settling down to nurse our bruises while we read dog-eared copies of Tolkien and Zelazny. Clay became such a staple in my life that half the time he never really went home; he’d stay for dinner most nights and even sleep over during the weekends.

I’d never really gotten to stay over his place; I think he was embarrassed about his parents, which I guess I could understand. His parents had the same weird habits and odd look to them as everyone else in town. I know it’s been a long time, but almost all of the adults aside from my parents just kinda blended together into one composite figure. The kids stood out, but I guess around high school age, almost all the people in that town started looking the same.

Their eyes bugged out a little and they didn’t blink much. Large hips and a slender waist for both the men and women made it look almost like the human equivalent the insect separation of thorax and abdomen. If we’d been anywhere even remotely middle class, I’d probably have made wasp jokes until I was blue in the face. And everyone was pale, way paler than they really should have been considering all the time everyone spent outdoors. Spending too much time around anyone over the age of like 15 or so really creeped me out, so yeah. I could totally understand why Clay was a little embarrassed of his folks.

But then the day came when I finally did end up sleeping over. We’d both managed to get our hands on a ton of fireworks thanks to a little bit of unsupervised shopping. We’d booked it out to a roadside stand when my parents dropped us off to go shopping in a rare trip to the mall that was a good hour away from us and hid our purchases in a large Waldenbooks bag we’d stuffed in a backpack for just such an occasion. We agreed to meet over his house because god knows my parents would have thrown a fit if they’d known we intended to light a bunch of roman candles and pretend to be Gandalf the Grey.

I spent most of the day over Clay’s place. Hunting equipment, fishing equipment, and beekeeping equipment were everywhere. The place literally smelled like honey, which was a huge improvement over what I expected, and Clay’s parents pretty well ignored us, so we had free run of the place. After it got dark, we made our way into his back yard. The first thing that hit me was the stink. While Clay’s house smelled faintly of honey and wax, the back yard smelled like rot; it was a sickly sweet odor that made me gag. I remember asking “Jesus, Clay. Your dad been dressing deer out here and forget to clean up or something?” Clay just gave me a half-hearted smile in the dark and said that was probably it.

I did my best to ignore the smell and we went on with our plans, balls of brightly colored light flashing in the dark as Clay shouted, “You shall not pass!” If you’ve never heard that particular phrase with a heavy rural accent, it’s pretty goddamn funny. But then we fucked up. One of the flaming bursts from Clay’s roman candle landed in a pile of brush his dad had cleared and stacked next to the new bee hive he’d just put up to replace the crumbling old one. It caught, and suddenly both of us were trying to put it out before it spread.

I tried to get closer, so I could try to stomp it out before the beehive caught fire, but the stink that pervaded the whole yard was so bad near the hive that it made my eyes water and I stumbled away trying not to retch. Clay finally put it out when he ran back to the house and came back with the garden hose, putting the small blaze out with a stream of water, soaking everything in the area, including me as I focused on keeping my dinner down.

After he was done and we’d both breathed a sigh of relief that we weren’t about to be destroyed for burning anything more important than brush, I asked Clay again where the smell was coming from. “Dude, I really don’t see any leftover deer guts. So, seriously. What the fuck is that smell? Is the septic system broken?” Clay took a deep breath, looking around for his parents.

“I guess you lived here long enough. You’re not local, but just so long as you don’t tell nobody I told you…” He pointed towards the new hive and I slowly crept towards the hive with him. “Everyone in town’s been keeping these new kinda bees.” I carefully opened one of the drawers in the hive, and stumbled back with my hands over my mouth. The drawer was full of raw meat… I was suddenly two years younger in a patch of unnatural looking flowers staring at a rotting doe carcass full of honeycomb and glistening bees working in and out of her decaying body. Each slide of the beehive was slathered with gore. There were tufts of fur and intestines marbled with honey. Bees slept in the honeycomb and on the rotting meat itself. Most of it was butchered deer rendered down into almost a slurry. The bees were dormant, barely moving, but when they did, their bodies shivered and twitched in terrible unison, almost as though they shared one dream.

I can barely remember the rest of the night. I know Clay’s parents sent me home after they found out what happened. After that night, Clay’s parents forbid me from ever going to his house. He said it was because we almost burned down the hives and that was their livelihood. I didn’t see Clay much after that. I was hoping to run into him at school, but he never showed up or came over. I tried spying on his house to catch a glimpse of him but his parents kept all the windows shut with curtains drawn so I couldn’t see anything. I was starting to get worried that maybe he was dead and his parents just buried him in their backyard.

But then one night I saw him. It must have been like two in the morning. I was struggling to go to sleep because I was really starting to worry about Clay. I actually considered sneaking out and tapping on his window, and was in the middle of trying to work up the nerve to open my own window when I saw him. He was standing out in the moonlight in the middle of the road just staring at nothing. Except for his white briefs, he wasn’t wearing anything, and his body was slick looking almost like he’d been slathered all over with vaseline or something.

I immediately opened up my window and tried to get his attention with a loud stage whisper, trying to tread a delicate middle ground between getting him to notice me and waking up my parents. “Hey Clay! Clay!” He just kept on looking straight ahead with this vacant expression. He finished crossing the road, without checking for any late night joy riders and began walking through my yard towards the woods. Making a quick decision, I slipped out the window and followed after him to see where the hell he was going.

Once he was in the woods, I caught up with him, shouting his name to get his attention, but he kept going. I grabbed his wrist, but immediately pulled my hand back; it was sticky. I looked at my hand, trying to figure out what was all over my fingers when I realized that Clay had been slathered with honey. I tried shaking him, but he just kept plodding forward. If I couldn’t wake him up, I decided to keep following him. I didn’t want to get my parents, figuring it would only get him in more trouble, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to get Clay’s parents. Besides, if I lost him, I wasn’t sure I’d ever find him again.

I knew something was wrong when we broke into a clearing. The full moon illuminated the field, and I saw flowers everywhere — the same flowers I found two years ago. I looked back and forth, suddenly paranoid that those ugly brown and purple bees would be swarming all over the field. I saw nothing, but on the other side of the clearing I could hear a deep, vibrating drone. I felt it in my skull almost as much as I heard it, and I put my hands to my head, trying to shake the sensation when Clay begin to hum. It was one long monotonous note that answered the thrumming buzz as he crossed the field. By the time I’d recovered enough to follow, Clay had disappeared. I stood, indecisive for a few minutes, calling his name, but there was no response, just that pervasive buzzing.

Finally, I went to see how the hell he could have vanished so quickly, but nearly broke my ankle as I lost my footing. Covered by low bushes at the edge of the field, there was a fissure leading to some kind of cave underground. I was lucky I’d just stumbled rather than broken my ankle. The slit of the fissure was tight, but I found I could squirm my way in if I was careful.

It was pretty chilly out since once the sun goes down it gets pretty cold up in the mountains, but I could feel heat radiating from the crack. As I wriggled in, I could smell a sickly sweet odor that made me gag. It was like rotten meat, like the hive in Clay’s back yard. I ventured deeper and deeper into the fissure feeling the sides of the cave to navigate my way through. The further in I got, the darker it got, and the wetter the walls got, but somehow I still hadn’t found Clay. Fishing the tiny keychain flashlight out of my pants, I held it up, using the feeble glow to look around.

There was viscera smeared all over the walls of the cavern, blood and bits of flesh smeared so thick that it dribbled and pooled, and laced through it was wax and honey. Bees were everywhere, nesting all over the walls My hand was shaking as I pointed my tiny light towards the floor of the cavern… pushed up against the walls of the cave were piles of rotting animals. There were deer, foxes, groundhog, snakes, opossum, literally anything and everything you could find in the appalachian woods, all dead, all rotting in charnel heaps with honey dripping from the comb that laced their burst bodies.

I almost dropped the flashlight as I fought back the urge to throw up. My hands clenched reflexively as I felt the keys begin to slip. Just the thought of searching blindly for my only lightsource, my hands clawing through rot and sticky sweet honey, sent me over the edge, and I vomited all over the floor. Gasping and doubled over, I ran one hand over my mouth. I needed to find Clay. I couldn’t leave my friend here. I was reluctant to keep my flashlight on given the horrors that seemed to litter the cave, but it was the only way I could see down there. I kept going.

As I pushed my way deeper into the cave, I began to shake. If the bees swarmed us, there was no way out. We’d die, and then as we rotted in the cave, they would use us to make their honey. As I rounded a bend in the cave, I stumbled into a larger cavern. In the center of the room was… a monstrosity She, because I knew instinctively that it was a she. It was easily three hundred pounds. She lay on the floor of the cavern, back propped up on a mound of rot and honeycomb. Her body looked at once inhuman and insect with bulging eyes, a too slender waist, and unnaturally thin limbs connected to what looked more like the thorax and abdomen of a massive queen bee. She had an air of obscene sexuality oozing from her, with her legs spread. I had finally found the source of the horrible droning noise… and I had found Clay. He was slowly lurching across the stone floor of the cavern towards her.

It was then, under that awful drone, that I heard the scraping sounds. There were other things in the cave. They looked almost like people, like a hideous caricature of the strange traits everyone in Gramercy seemed to share, but so far gone that no one could ever mistake them for human. Their eyes were almost pushed from their sockets, and in the faint glow of my flashlight I could see hints of compound lenses. They no longer had mouths but instead long sucking mouthparts that looked more like a proboscis than anything else. They were naked, streaked with honey and gore.

They barely paid me any mind, only briefly glancing at me before returning to their task. Near the honeycombed walls were fleshy grubs. They reminded me of larvae, but they were far too large. They were about the size of a small dog and had pinkish flesh that was almost translucent. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but I could swear they had almost human faces. The workers carefully bent down feeding the grubs handfuls of rotten meat and honey. As the larvae fed, they made hideous mewling noises.

I crept forward, hoping I could drag Clay out of the cave, but he had already reached the queen. He was actually touching the thing, hands sliding over her, caressing it like a lover. I tried to get closer, but the humming in my head got louder, swelling in pitch. All at once, the human drones turned towards me. I turned off my flashlight and scuttled back towards the entrance of the chamber. I could hear the padding of their feet as they shuffled towards me. I began stumbling back towards the entrance. I could hear the drones stumbling after me, the squelch of rotting meat under their feet. The bees must have stayed asleep, because I reached the entrance of the crevice without a hint of movement from the drowsing swarm, just the steady footsteps of my pursuers.

The things never left the cave though, and I stumbled my way back through the woods by moonlight. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell my parents; they’d think I was sick or on drugs. I couldn’t tell anyone in town, because I realized now that the already knew. All I could do was hide in my room and hope my friend would come back.

The next week at school, Clay was back, but something was wrong with him. He had no memory, at least none he would share with me, of what happened that night. He no longer cared about anything we once bonded over. He no longer cared about anything, drifting through his classes like he was in a dream. I noticed over the next few months he began to change too, like a twisted form of puberty. He began to look more and more like the other adults in Gramercy, eyes bulging and waist narrowing.

I could only watch in horror as I lost my only friend. The last time I ever spoke to Clay was almost two months later, during the last day of class before summer break. He was walking out, dazed as always. I reached out, grabbing his shoulder and turning him towards me and telling him, “Clay, please. You’re my only friend. I don’t know what’s going on, and I’m scared. Please… just… please.” Just for a moment, I saw raw terror in his eyes. His lips moved, as if he were trying to find words. And then I felt a sudden stabbing pain shoot through my hand, and I jerked it away from Clay’s shoulder. There was an angry welt forming even as I clutched my hand to my chest, staring at it. When I looked back up at my friend, his face had clouded over again, and a single brown and purple bee was crawling slowly up his shoulder towards his neck.