Hitchcock Meets Stephen King

Hitchcock Meets Stephen King

There was no rhyme or reason to their flight. They bumped into each other as they tried to whizz by, only to change direction as soon as they reached where they thought they wanted to be. They lived in a realm of glorious chaos until they were reined in by the clang of two metal rods. The Rod Keeper stood by the Keeping House and looked on as one by one they danced inside, entranced by the still ringing rods.

Is this the beginning to a fantasy novel? Let's try again:

They had taken over, the bees. No one knows exactly how it came about, but from time immemorial they had conquered the trees. People had learned to avoid the woods, but sometimes a weary traveler rested under the inviting shade, unleashing the bees' wrath. "How dare you stop underneath our home! Should we give up this, too, you greedy human? How much more do we have to endure?" they shouted. Then, they would swarm around the person, scaring him away or even stinging him to death.

This is why we never venture into a forest, and when we have ceremonies outside there is always the Rod Hitter advancing before us. The rods confuse the bees. This is our only known weapon to keep them at bay...

Still sounds pretty unbelievable! The truth is, the other day I observed a fascinating scene outside my window. A bee keeper all in white was "calling" an angry group of bees into a beehive he had set up on a gate under a majestic ash tree. I later read that there was probably a cavity in the tree because bees like to hide in low-key, shady areas. However, the cloud of bees was pretty high up, committed to their contemporary dance until the bee keeper played his song. "Clang, clang, clang..." scurrying down from the mass above. "Clang, clang, clang..." circling the beehive.

Later, walking along another street we found a doll with pins stinging her waist. The doll had bright, red hair and a painted clown's face. She looked kind of like the doll from the "Chucky" movies, only her make-up was grotesque and was definitely not her original "face". I had heard about voodoo dolls, but had never seen one before. Could we have stumbled upon a genuine voodoo doll? Who was it for? What curses did it hold? If it wasn't a voodoo doll, was it some sort of strange joke?

The bizarre seemed to meet bizarre, like a cross between a Hitchcock movie (Attack of the Bees? The Bee's Revenge?) and a Stephen King novel (The Doll's Revenge? The Voodoo Doll?).

Maybe I was in the middle of a thriller in which the bees had taken over and a shaman tried to control them by throwing Voodoo dolls about. Or, could it be that a crazy criminal wanted the extinction of the human race, and so left voodoo dolls strategically to attract the bees? Maybe we were the only ones who could save the Earth from the killer bees. Maybe we were the one who found the voodoo doll, so we had to solve the mystery....

Have you ever felt like you were in the middle of a thriller?

Text: Kristen Mastromarchi

Photo By: Şahzadə - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26854860

Guy Donges, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons