Alan Dark lives in Connecticut where he worked for a national Pest Control Company and both his father and grandfather owned local Pest Control Companies. He’s a horror writer who enjoys making readers uncomfortable and will often present situations that are disturbing. Come find me on Instagram right HERE.
RESEARCH
by
Alan Dark
I fancied myself a scientist, a researcher carrying out cutting-edge experiments on how insects lived, reproduced, and fed. I’m sure that some people will call me a monster, especially those liberal yuppies on the West Coast, but I never really cared about their opinion; people found it as interesting as I did. Sure, I made money from it, but only enough to live and continue my research; I didn’t want to live an extravagant lifestyle on someone else’s dime, I simply refused handouts and donated any extra money to charity.
My study always begins with a queen. I don’t dissect her or anything, just she exists. I observe and note how she begins her hive and reproduces, digging tunnels where none existed before. I had to use a specialized camera to see down there, I didn’t want to disturb her or the hive by cutting a hole for my viewing pleasure. Once the hive had grown sufficiently, I observed how the workers acted; how they burst from the hive in a bloody spray to forage from the flowers I strategically placed near enough to make them gravitate to yet more hidden cameras. All of the cameras fed into my computer and shown live to those willing to pay for admission to my horror show.
The one thing to understand is the nature of the hive. I am not a handsome man, I can admit that, but I am very charismatic and have a knack for attracting various subjects for research purposes. Some come willingly, especially when promised a reward in either the form of money or candy, while others have to be forced to participate against their will. If I wasn’t strong I doubt the latter would even be an option. But once I had secured the subject I asked my audience to elect what subject was to be studied in conjunction with whatever insect was selected. It’s a little heartbreaking that the youngest subjects are often treated the worst by the audience.
I’ve only once managed a live cicada special since they take around 13-15 years just to emerge and the audience wants to see them emerge more than anything. I usually have a vote that lasts about a week and then from a few days to a few months later I upload my research video online complete with post-production audio of myself explaining what is happening. But the audience never seems to care about waiting, they are in it for the thrill of watching the carnage.
Last week I took a child from a shopping center. I wasn’t too proud of it but several people in the audience demanded that I offer a child sooner rather than later; I suppose that says a lot more about them than it does me. I suspect that many are somewhat influential; politicians, lawyers, and doctors judging not only from the costs associated with viewing the research videos but also because I’ve been offered specialized advice like methods of keeping the subjects alive longer and what the law has to say concerning my research. Regardless I took a child and used her to create a hive of parasitic wasp, Acmopolynema hervali, that is infamous for draining the life out of a victim before forcefully emerging for a short period of time before dying; living long enough for the swarm to infect another subject as nature intended. For that reason, and that reason alone, I had also taken the girl’s father (I usually avoid double subjects but it couldn’t be helped).
My research took a dark turn when one of my audience members offered a large sum of money to show an illegal immigrant being consumed by cockroaches, a request that I’d almost refused. I had informally refused to use cockroaches in my research years earlier because the potential for infestation was extremely high. But I managed it; getting an illegal immigrant was easy, offering someone safe passage into America was too good for many to pass up, but getting the cockroaches to enter his body was something else entirely. Cockroaches do enjoy dark, damp places but the human body also possesses toxins that cockroaches don’t enjoy; still, with a little effort on my part, they took hold. A male and female were introduced to copulate and the female laid about fifty eggs. It took the eggs 45 days to hatch into their early nymph stage where they consumed the subject’s internal organs for sustenance as they went through the instar stages before finally becoming adults and emerging. The man screamed a lot before he lost consciousness; the pain must’ve been extreme but I dutifully recorded it all and performed my voice-over during post-production.
There is something that I possessed that my audience was never aware of; my identity. They didn’t know what I looked like and they were completely unaware of what I could do. For example, they were unaware that I’d been contacted by an audience member a few years earlier, claiming to work for Homeland Security, who helped me trace any audience member that I wanted based on their IP address which, on the dark web, wasn’t hard to get. So I traced the person who had requested the disturbing cockroach video to a computer in Chicago and I’ve decided to travel.