If I don’t trust my urges in this place then I will get nowhere, I thought.
The row of plants shielded very little as it turned out. Just a back room with nothing in it but a row of tables and a full-length mirror on the far wall. At first I paid the mirror no attention. Maybe it was the sight of myself with 10 days of stubble and wearing nothing but a pair of board shorts and a tool belt. There seemed little in this room that would be of any use to me, but as I turned to head back to the main restaurant again I caught something in the corner of my eye. It came from the bottom left corner of the mirror… again a kind of blue neon flickering. At first I thought it may be the reflection of the arrow sign from the restaurant, but as I chanced a second glance I saw what it really was.
They were flashing numbers, like the countdown on a bomb. I stepped nearer to get a better look, squinting my eyes as I did so to bring the numbers into focus. It was a small rhythmic pulse that flashed every second or so: 74… 73… 72… 71…
I stood transfixed, not knowing what they meant or what was going to happen. As the numbers got lower, 62… 61… 60… they started to speed up. By the time I reached the mirror they were flashing down at the rate of three or four a second.
As they continued their inexorable drop into the 30s I became aware of an accompanying sound. A low humming, increasing in volume, like the sound of a generator in the distance. It got louder and louder, and in that moment I knew I had about five seconds before something terrible was going to happen.
Glued to the spot, I slowly stood and faced myself in the mirror. The droning sound reached a crescendo, and the very air around me seemed to shake. It was pointless running, but the very second before the sound peaked and the numbers simultaneously hit zero I jerked my body to the left as if to avoid an oncoming missile charging towards me.
It probably saved my life.
Like the sound of a head on collision, the mirror burst open and showered the room with a billion shards of glass. They tore through the restaurant, slicing open curtains and plants and whatever else got in their way. As I dived for cover one glanced my eyebrow and happily took a small chunk of skin away, and as I landed heavily on my hip the blood began to stream down my face as the nightmare sound within the mirror manifested itself.
As if escaping the bowels of Hades, a swarm of black bees burst through the shattered mirror on the wall. The hole created by the broken glass seemed to yawn in protest at the volume of them. My eyes widened in horror as the room around me filled with thousands upon thousands of these hellish drones, clogging the air and stifling the oxygen from around me. I staggered to my feet as they swarmed over every inch of my body. I could feel their tiny hairy legs scrabbling for purchase on my bare skin, creeping up my shorts and sticking in my hair. All the while the epic hum of a million insects arrested my ears, throwing me into an inescapable echo chamber of confusion. I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as possible trying to remain calm but I knew I was screaming; screaming at the top of my lungs and yet I couldn’t even hear my own outburst above the pandemonium.
Frantically waving my arms I stumbled through the mass of tiny black creatures, some no bigger than a fingernail, but by God the number of them! Pursing my lips to stop them flying into my mouth (which would really have sent me insane) I tried to breathe through my nose but the little critters were omnipresent, there wasn’t a spare inch of air in the room that wasn’t consumed by black insects, and my first cogent thought was that I was going to choke to death on them, clutching my throat as they raged down my neck and stung my windpipe and lungs into seizure. I reached out wildly, desperately clutching for some kind of weapon, anything that would help carve a path to the door. I grabbed a plastic dining chair, and began to beat the air around me with a blind panic, but each swipe of clarity I created was instantly refilled by black as the bees continued to pour out of the mirror.
I don’t know how I made it to the door, blind luck must have been smiling on me, but I tumbled through it and out onto the boardwalk just as the last of my air was deserting me.
I landed heavily on the cobblestones on my shoulder and heard a crunch which was too loud to be anything but bad, and for the briefest of seconds I felt nothing. I just lay there in horror waiting for the pain to strike, and when it did it arrested my whole torso and took back the breath I had just regained. I howled in pain, but here was a strange thing – the bees that were now cascading out of the restaurant seemed to stop dead and hover, as if searching for the cry of anguish. Then they changed course as if seeking it out, and a line of them about a metre thick headed straight for me. As they reached my shoulder they seemed to pause, suspended in mid-air, as if testing the air around me. Then they descended and my whole upper body was suddenly swamped by hundreds and hundreds of tiny bodies. I could feel them coursing over my skin, working in unison so it felt as though I was being stroked by a huge loofah, thousands of insect legs rubbing at once. Their stingers were cocked, as if waiting for some sort of signal, suspended millimetres off my skin. Then again without warning they all froze, not a single one moved for the briefest of moments.
I stared in amazement at my body which had been rendered totally black, coated in a thick dark moss by insects that had come from nowhere out of a fucking mirror, and in that split second of silence I knew what was about to happen. Before I could draw breath to scream, each and every bee on me plunged its stinger down into my skin, littering my arm and upper torso with a million poisonous injections. My scream erupted from me as I processed the sheer horror of it, but instead of the burning, searing heat I knew was coming, the pain in my broken shoulder actually began to deaden. I could feel it sliding away as if I had been given a dose of morphine, and what I felt then could only be described as a kind of wonderful euphoria and sense of wellness. Life started passing in slow motion. The bees simultaneously withdrew their stingers and began to rise soupily into the air, creating an effect like floating treacle all around me.
Then I swear they all smiled.
I could see their little proboscises wiggling at me as they hovered inches from my eyes, and my head began to swim with a pleasure I never knew possible. Every nerve in my body seemed to be alive with it and a feeling of wellness passed through my whole frame as I lay there.
To a bystander it must have been an astonishing sight; a semi-naked man propped up on one shoulder staring with a moronic grin into a swarm of black bees hovering in front of his face.
I felt invincible, like I had drunk from the holy grail, the exotic elixir of life was flowing through my veins as I lay with the bees. They rose again, in perfect harmony, like swallows dancing against the yellow twilight sky, softly buzzing in the haze before they were gone.
My eyes watered with the beauty of it, and as the bees collectively flew away into the distance my whole frame weakened. I felt as though I was sliding into a cool, fresh linen bed after a week of sleep deprivation, and yet again consciousness deserted me as the nectar coursed around my system.
The last thing I saw as I gave in to the ecstasy of sleep was the bees drifting away in three groups, etching onto the sky the figure: 70%.