KILLING TEDDY
by William Pauley III
It came from the third floor.
The sound echoed through the hallways and down each of the staircases before tearing into my ear canal like a fucking razor. I tell you, it was a scream! A scream followed by the ripping thunder of a chainsaw furiously rumbling to life. As much as I would’ve loved to have pulled the blankets over my head and attempt to sleep through it all, as the building superintendent, it was my duty to take care of these kinds of things as soon as possible. Believe me, you do not want to wait around until every last one of these miserable tenants are stark raving mad and screamin’ in your face about who’s doing what and why their rights are more important than his or hers or yours or whoever’s. Goddamn. Works me up just thinkin’ about it.
I snorted a line of red fire ants (a nasty habit I plan to quit, believe you me). The ants crawled around in my brain, awakening my senses. From each of their fangs leaked electric venom.
I grabbed my shotgun then ran up the staircase, tripping up a time or two. Those goddamn fire ants, they always get the best of me. The closer I got, the louder the noise became. Several of the tenants opened their doors as I passed by. Before they spoke, I held a finger to my lips, signaling for them to keep quiet, then continued my trek down the halls.
When I finally reached the third floor, I hoisted my shotgun and leaned one shoulder against the wall, just as I was trained in my younger days in the Army. All the rooms on the third floor were vacant, except for one. Room 333. From that one room came the sound.
I balled up my fist and banged twice on the door, keeping my sights on the peephole. The chainsaw noise stopped. The screaming stopped. Suddenly, there was silence.
A shadow briefly appeared before the peephole, then vanished. I beat my fist against the pale oak door a third and fourth time. Still, no sound.
“Now look here, folks! There are people here trying to sleep!” I said, answered only by silence. “Now, if I have to come up here a second time, I’m gonna knock down this goddamn door and pull ya out by your earlobes!”
Silence still.
“You hear me?!”
Silence.
“Well, alright then.”
I lowered my shotgun and walked downstairs. The other tenants all watched as I trudged down the hallways. I just waved them off, shooing them back into their rooms. I needed some sleep and goddamn it if I was gonna stay up all night answering their questions. I wasn’t sleeping so well then, especially with all that noise carryin’ on.
Before climbing into bed, I went into the kitchen and filled a glass with water. I hugged the sides of the icebox and moved it out about two feet. Three large brown cockroaches roamed about underneath, panicking at the light, anxiously seeking refuge. I managed to pin one of them down against the floor with my index finger. I pinched the squirmy pest, picked it up, and pushed it between my lips. I had to wrap my tongue around its writhing body to hold it in place while I went back for the glass of water. I hate the fucking taste of a filthy cockroach. I can never manage to swallow one without having something to wash it down with. Only reason I eat the damn things are because there’s something in their fat bodies that always makes me feel tired. It’s like that chemical found in turkey meat that’s supposed to make you feel sleepy or something. Whatever it is, it works. It’s the only goddamn thing that works. I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in nearly a month at that point. I needed it.
I bit the little fucker in two, downed the entire glass of water, and spent the rest of the night picking parts of its legs from my teeth until I finally fell asleep.
I was awakened shortly after, or so I thought. Turns out I’d slept for two entire days. A drop of water landed right square between my eyes and pooled around my left socket. It brought me screaming back into consciousness. I wiped the water from my eye and looked up at the ceiling. The span of it was completely soaked and had already started growing black rings of mold. I immediately leapt from my bed, and that’s when I discovered the carpet was submerged within two inches of freezing cold water. The mail slot in my door was crammed full of white envelopes. Some of it was mail. Most of it was complaints about the water leaking into and destroying the tenants’ apartments. All of them claimed the water was coming from the third floor. It was then that I’d first suspected I’d slept a little longer than I’d originally intended.
Again, I grabbed the shotgun and angrily stomped out of my apartment. I lost my slippers in the ocean somewhere between my front door and the staircase.
When I finally made it over to the staircase, a waterfall was pouring down onto the steps from two floors above. I pulled the nightcap off my head, pitched it angrily at the pool of water at my feet, and braved the flood.
Now I ain’t gonna lie, at that moment I felt like killin’ a man. Maybe that’s the easiest way to explain my participation in the unfortunate events that followed.
Once I was up on that third floor, staring down the hall at room 333, I knew right away that something wasn’t right. The oak door that had been on those hinges just two days before was replaced with a large steel door, the kind found on goddamn submarines. You could imagine my anger when I first noticed this, being the building superintendent and all. I tried to remember if any of the letters stuffed in my mail slot had anything to do with asking permission to install a large metal door. I was sure there wasn’t.
I pounded my fist against that steel door and was surprised to hear that there was no sound. I beat my fist against the door again, still no sound. It was as if the whole goddamn room was filled solid with metal.
My anger got the best of me as I kicked in the door of the neighboring apartment. The room was empty, as I mentioned before, all the rooms on the third floor were vacant except for the one causing all this ruckus. I loaded my shotgun and took aim at the wall shared by the two flats and blasted a hole about two feet in diameter.
Much to my surprise, I was knocked flat on my ass by a 500-gallon water-blast that shot out from the mouth I had just blown through the wall. Half of the room filled with ice cold water in an instant. My feet finally found the floor. I rose up out of the abyss, the water was now as high as my chest.
What I saw in that room, you’d never believe. I threw up my shotgun and aimed it straight at the terror standing in room 333.
There’s nothing in life that can prepare a man for what I saw that day. No sir, nothing t’all. I remember my first thought was that I was dreaming. Ain’t no way in hell this thing is real, I thought. I pinched my arms and bruised like a banana, I did. I tell you, this thing was real! Standing before me, nearly taking up half the entirety of room 333, was the biggest goddamn carpenter ant I’d ever seen.
Without even realizing, I lowered my gun.
“What in the hell are you?” I asked it. It didn’t speak. Instead, it gargled and coughed up bucket-loads of water.
“Goddamn it! We were almost there!” I heard a woman shout. She stepped out into view, dressed head-to-toe in scuba gear, then threw her plastic goggles right at my face. I ducked. She was quite stunning. Blonde hair, blue eyes. The works. “What the hell, man?! Have you ever heard of knocking?”
“Uh... excuse me, ma’am... but just what the hell is that?” I couldn’t get my mind off the giant puking insect.
“Who him? That’s my fiancé! Who the hell are you? Elmer-fucking-Fudd?” She was making fun of my shiny bald head and shotgun, I’m sure of it.
“Fiancé?!” I laughed, “Honey, that there is the biggest goddamn demon insect there ever was. Surely, you can see that thing standing next to you?!”
Her eyes lowered. “Well, you know, he wasn’t always this way...” she said, sighing.
“Oh? Well, just what the hell was he then? A rattlesnake? A... a... a goddamn sperm whale?!” I said, poking a little fun.
“Oh, he’s been lots of things...” she said, without any emotion. She looked up at the fifteen-foot creature that stood next to her, eyes wide with love, “but he started out human, just like you. Just like me.”
I dropped my sarcasm. “What do you mean, ‘started out human’?”
The woman stared at me for a few seconds before turning back to her lover, the six-legged demon freak. She looked at him as if she was silently asking permission. The freak cocked his head in approval. She turned back to me.
“He’s... cursed. I know this is going to sound pretty unbelievable, but Teddy... that’s his name, Teddy...” she said, now holding one of the creature’s filthy armored limbs in her tiny perfect little pink hands, “Teddy and I went to Japan on holiday. We made plans to get married. We even talked about heading back to our hotel room afterwards to conceive our first child, but then we made that awful decision... it ruined everything.”
“What awful decision?” I said, taking it all in.
“Super Happy Fun Time.”
“Super Happy Fun Time?”
“It’s a Japanese game show. The day before we were meant to be wed, we were offered free tickets courtesy of the hotel, guess as an early wedding gift or something. We went just as members of the audience, but Teddy’s name was randomly picked to be a contestant.”
“So, what? I don’t get it. Did you lose a bunch of money or something?”
She didn’t speak. Instead, she just pointed at Teddy.
“They turned him into an insect?” I asked.
“No, no, no... first they turned him into a panda. He didn’t reach the insect level until much later.”
“Insect level? I’m sorry, I’m not following you...”
“They cursed Teddy to live life as each and every creature on Earth. Insects are his final stage. We have something like two-hundred species left before Teddy’s human again.”
I kept a straight face for as long as I possibly could, ‘fore eventually bursting out laughing. It was obvious by their change of tone that they took offense.
“You never answered me, old man–who the hell are you anyway?” she said, her anger coming around again.
“I’m your goddamn landlord, that’s who I am.” I answered, “I came up here to get an answer as to why the hell my building is sinking. Water’s everywhere! It’s at least knee deep down on the first floor. Now, I know it wasn’t like this when I went to sleep, so just what in fresh hell is goin’ on up here?”
She stood there quietly like a scolded child.
“Come on now, out with it!” I nudged.
“Well... I was trying to kill Teddy!” She said, serious as could be.
My eyes glowed. “You were trying to kill your fiancé?”
“Well, yeah. I have to. If I don’t kill him, he’ll live the lifespan of all of the creatures he must replicate. I can’t wait that long! I’ve been killing Teddy for about three years now. I’d say in another month, we’re in the clear. Teddy will be back and we’ll have our 500 million dollars. Teddy says we’re going to buy an island with that money. We’ll finally be able to live the good life!” She smiled and kissed Teddy’s twitching leg. “We’ve worked so hard for this.”
“Okay, so let me see if I understand this correctly, you replaced your wooden door with an airtight steel door just so you could fill the room up with water and drown him?”
The woman nodded.
“Wouldn’t it just be easier to blow his goddamn brains out with a shotgun?”
“Well, there are two stipulations... One–Teddy prefers to die in ways in which he doesn’t have to suffer. He prefers painless, instant death, although now that we’re here at the end, more and more pain is becoming wholly unavoidable, but still, we try to keep it at a minimum.”
“Ain’t nothing quicker than a shotgun blast to the face, is there?”
“Well, the second one is really more the issue here,” she said, and continued her explanation. “Two–Super Happy Fun Time requires that we kill Teddy differently each time, so that the viewers don’t get bored and change the channel.”
“Viewers?!”
The woman pointed to a camera mounted in the corner of the room. “Oh yes, we have to keep it on us at all times, or else we don’t get our cash prize.”
I looked up at the camera. The device hummed and whirred as the lens zoomed in close on my face. I stood and stared silently at the floor, trying to digest all of this peculiar information, and perhaps to do a little scheming.
“I want in on this,” I said.
“What? No, you can’t. Why would you even want to?” she asked.
“I want me a piece of that money pie, that’s why!”
“No, no, no, no, no... we’ve come so far already. We don’t need your help! Why should we waste any of our prize money on you?”
“Hmm... well, you two have done quite a bit of damage to this building, wouldn’t you say?” I said, eyeing the blood-spattered walls and the waist-deep gulf covering the floor. She looked around, noticeably nervous.
“I’d hate to have to sue your ass for every last penny of that prize money. Lord knows I’ve got enough proof to sway any judge. You should see the amount of complaints I’ve gotten since the two of you’ve moved in. All written out by the hand of about fifty some-odd tenants,” I said. Being a landlord most of my adult life, I’d gotten pretty good at blackmail.
She gulped and took a quick glance at Teddy, “No... we wouldn’t want that. Surely, we can work something out here.”
“Ah, good! Now that’s exactly what I was wantin’ to hear! So, shall we continue?”
“Continue what?” she asked.
“Continue killin’ Teddy!” Her eyes perked up and she smiled.
“Okay, great! Just let me get my goggles.”
“No, no... you just wait. If we’re gonna do this, then we’re gonna do it the right way. The easy way.”
I grabbed a plastic trash bag and a roll of duct tape from one of the cabinets. I filled the bag with water and taped it around Teddy’s head. Teddy was dead seven minutes later.
“See, he still drowned, the audience still gets their entertainment, and there’s considerably less to clean up afterwards! This killin’ thing ain’t too hard, you just gotta use your noggin’.”
“Wait! Look! He’s changing!” she screamed excitedly.
She was right. Teddy’s body was changing right before our very eyes. Bones popped and shifted. A new layer of insect shell jutted out from each of his joints and covered the previous armor. Soon there was this whole new thing livin’ and breathin’ right before our very eyes.
This time, Teddy was an ear wig.
We continued to play this morbid game for somethin’ like three weeks. Teddy turned into every insect you could possibly imagine. Some giant, but mostly in their natural smallish forms. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to what variant manifested at which size. It was the most bananas thing I’d ever seen.
For the most part it was a cakewalk. The smaller bugs we were able to kill with household items, like cleaning solvents and rolling pins. The larger ones took a little thought to pull off.
Once, Teddy turned into a giant moth and escaped through the kitchen window while we were thinkin’ of a new, excitin’ way to kill him. I grabbed the camera and chased Teddy through the city, scaring the living hell outta all the people out in the streets. Luckily for us, Teddy fell in love with the neon sign that stood just outside of Wild Bill’s Gentleman’s Club. The little lady and I enjoyed a couple beers and a great show, while Teddy sat perched on that sign until his insides were fried from the intense heat. I knew it was time to go home when the joint started to reek of what smelled like burnt popcorn.
We killed Teddy in just about every which way imaginable, putting on quite a show in the process. We stomped him, sprayed him, sawed him in half, stabbed him, burned him, smoked him out, strangled him, shot him, ate him, (don’t even fucking ask), blew him up, force fed him those little silica gel packets that clearly read “do not eat,” tossed him off the roof of the apartment building, crushed his dumb ol’ bug brains with a large rock, stuck his twitchy legs into exposed light sockets, hanged him by the neck until his tiny insect head popped clean off (well, not clean, but you know what I mean), pulled him limb-from-limb, buried him alive, gave him lethal injection, let him bleed out, got him loaded on every sort of drug we could get our hands on, choked him, snake bite, froze him, force fed him the bad part of a blowfish, got him so drunk off his ass he succumbed to alcohol poisoning (ever seen a drunk bug? Can’t get ‘em to shut up), shot him with an arrow, scared him to death, skinned him alive, trampled him, hammered him, nailed him, ground him up into insect sausage, fed him expired food, botulism, crucifixion, got him chain smokin’ (only took him a couple cartons to do him in—weak insect lungs), left him out in the sun under a magnifyin’ glass, mashed him to glue, then used that glue to seal the next variant’s airway shut, stole a car and had him drive around the city without a seat belt (maybe the fastest death on the list), gave him onion and baking soda (a home remedy for infestations), suicide, suicide by police, I even very carefully ripped down the power line outside the building and fixed it to Teddy’s favorite armchair, creatin’ what very well may be the first at-home electric chair. By that time we were pretty much exhausted and we literally sat in silence for days tryin’ to come up with a new way to kill him. Luckily for us, we hadn’t used time just yet, and seeing as how many insects don’t live more than just a few days, Teddy ended up dying of old age.
When the day finally came that Teddy became his last creature, we were all so excited that none of us could think straight. The three of us had dollar signs in our eyes and couldn’t see much else. We’d done killed ol’ Teddy in just about every goddamn way you can kill an insect. There just wasn’t anything left to do. I’m sure there were millions over in Japan laughing at our dumbasses that day as we all sat slack-jawed and silent, contemplating that final kill.
I started to nod off. It had been a few days since I had gotten a good night’s sleep. I looked over at Teddy, now a water bug, resting gently in his loving fiancé’s palm.
“I’ve got it... here, let me have him!” I said, as I took poor ol’ Teddy and pinched him between my finger and thumb to keep him from squirmin’.
I looked down at Teddy and whispered, “I’ll be seeing ya, buddy!” then jammed Teddy’s crispy torso up into my left nostril and snorted. I felt Teddy squirm as he made his way down my nasal cavity, nearly escaping from my mouth, and finally dissolving in the stomach acids that gurgled below.
Much to my surprise, Blondie wasn’t jumping for joy like I initially thought she would be. Instead, she was balled-up on the recliner, crying her goddamn eyes out.
“Hey, hey now... what is all of this? I thought you’d be happy! Come on! Teddy will be here any minute... when do we get our money?”
All of a sudden, her crying sorta evolved into deep, hysterical laughter.
“Ho, ho, ho, ho! You rearry think you’re slick, huh, Mr. Randrord!” she said, her voice was lower in register now, and she seemed to be speaking in some sort of strange accent that she didn’t have before.
She turned to look at me, raised her hands and dug her fingers into her own throat, yanking off the mask she’d apparently been wearing the entire time I’d known her. Underneath, there was the face of a smallish Japanese man, smilin’ dastardly.
“Ho, ho, ho... Mr. Randrord! Smire for camera! You’re on Super Happy Fun Time! I do berieve you know the rules, correct?”
I didn’t answer. I was in shock. He continued. It was clear he didn’t have a firm grasp on the English language, but he managed okay considerin’.
“The organism you just ingested contains the chemical Cramorhorozide which crevery rewrites your DNA. You are new Teddy! Ho, ho! We give you one year to comprete course! If you succeed, then cash is yours! Goodbye, Mr. Randrord... and good ruck!”
And then he was gone.
Okay, so now that you know my situation... what do you say, huh? You wanna get yourself a piece of that cash pie?
Good!
Now, go grab that shovel…
Killing Teddy
© William Pauley III, 2009
All rights reserved.
Storytime: "KILLING TEDDY"