Episode 38: Apiary

Narrator: Welcome to Ghost Wax, a Far and Tall Tales Production. The following story may contain graphic content. Listener discretion is advised. 

[Intro Music]

Episode 38, Apiary

Recorder clicks on

May: My hope is that if I hold this recorder and make a serious face, it will look more like I’m doing something important, and less like I’m a weirdo loitering outside the bathroom. Which is, in fact, exactly what I’m doing. sing-song Do de do de doo. Don’t mind me, I’m just-, oh! Pip? Hi!

Pip: Yeah?

May: I’m Mayberry Jules, from tech? I was-, are you okay?

Pip: I’m fine. What do you want?

May: I was hoping to get your help with something.

Pip: With a case?

May: Uh, no. I’ve been seeing someone lately, and I’ve got this big choice to make and it all feels so overwhelming.

Pip: unamused And you want me to read your cards and tell you what’s going on.

May: oblivious to Pip’s frustration Yeah! I’d really appreciate it!

Pip: I really don’t have time for this right now. 

May: Oh, uh, later then? I know everyone is swamped, but things are getting serious so fast and I want to know if I’m making the right decision. I was talking about it with Luca earlier and he said you could help me.

Pip: For fuck’s sake. He shouldn’t have.

May: What?

Pip: sounding pissed Look, I get it. Knowing the future would make everything easier. But that’s not how this works. Whatever’s going on in your relationship, you’re just going to have to figure it out on your own, the way normal people do.

May: embarrassed and dejected Oh, Ok. Um, I’m really sorry for bothering you.

–

Recorder starts

Luca: What did you say to Mayberry?

Pip: Are you kidding me? This is your first time seeing or speaking to me in weeks and that’s your greeting?

Luca: It hasn’t been that long.

Pip: Tell me one conversation we’ve had since the Dottie Jean incident? Because I know you haven’t responded to my text messages!

Luca: I’ve been busy lately.

Pip: More like you got a boyfriend and suddenly no one else matters.

Luca: Charlie is not-, I thought you wanted me to start seeing someone.

Pip: I do! And I am happy things are going well!  But I feel like I’ve been completely shoved aside. This whole thing is a nightmare, I thought we were going to be there for each other… I kept trying to be there for you after the whole fucking kidnapping, which was terrifying for me too you know…

Luca: scoffs

Pip: But you kept blowing me off. You’ve been a total no-show [to our last three Saturday movie nights] and you hardly even look at me here at work. Are you mad at me for something?

Luca: No, and I’m not blowing you off. Like I said, I’ve just been busy. This job is insane, it’s life or death, I can’t… I have to prioritize and… it’s not my fault you don’t have anyone else. 

Pip: Wow.

Luca: You know I didn’t mean-

Pip: Save it, you’re right, it’s not your problem.  Now what do you want, you’re clearly here to yell at me about something, else.

Luca: Why were you so cruel to Mayberry? She’s a nice person who just wanted your help.

Pip: She wanted me to fix things in her personal life.

Luca: Okay, and why is that so bad?

Pip: Maybe because that’s not my job! I’m not here to give relationship advice. And you should know better than to offer up my time to people without my permission.

Luca: You could try doing something nice for someone simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Pip: Do you know how many Ardent workers have asked me to solve their personal issues since I’ve started here? Nearly half. And I know that sounds like an exaggeration but for once, it’s not. And 99 percent of those people are only looking for easy solutions to stupid problems. Just because I can read people’s futures, doesn’t mean I should! It’s draining and I’m not going to do it anymore.

Luca: But what about that 1 percent, huh? What about the people who actually need your help?

Pip: So I just don’t matter then? I’m only here to serve everyone else?

Luca: Maybe that would be an improvement. Maybe you’d actually make a few more friends. But you’re right, Pip. This was my fault. For forgetting the only person you ever care about helping is yourself. 

Pip: What’s that supposed to mean?!

Luca: Everyone here knows you wouldn’t be doing any of this if you weren’t getting paid. Gods, Voncid saved your life, and you’re still so ungrateful that you won’t even take the time to help a nice person get some clarity. 

Pip: Fuck you, Luca!

Luca: Don’t worry about me sending people to you for help anymore, I know better now.

Door slams

Pip softly crying.

We hear crackling on the recording as the Cypher feeds

Cypher: Delicious…

The audio begins with the faint sound of the phantom apis hive at a bit of a distance.  Voncid is standing watching them in the moonlight.  We hear a gentle breeze.

Emea: Hello Owen.

Voncid: Ah, Emea, I was afraid I had missed you again.  

Emea: I have been inside the hive a lot these last few weeks, a new queen is being birthed.

Voncid: Wonderful news, it’s been… what… nearly a century.

Emea: Franklin was still president.

Voncid: that long ago?

Emea: No I mean Roosevelt.  32 not 14.

Voncid: Ah, yes of course.  

Emea: Has the wax helped?  With the bleeding together?

Voncid: Actual quite substantially, my memories are much easier to separate from those of the dead once they’ve been pressed into the wax.  Keeps the thoughts trapped.

Emea: the wax is quite a preservative.

We hear a louder buzz, one of the apis are agitated

Emea: in russian Stay calm little one, it’s just bad omens on the air, nothing to worry about.

Voncid: one of the soldiers caught a scent it didn’t like.

Emea: they have been more and more often.  I’m assuming one of the Glorious is very close to breaking through.

Voncid: No one has briefed you?

Emea: I’ve hardly been available, as you’ve noticed.

Voncid: Ah, yes, well, the Cypher is nearing the door.

Emea: Never one of your favorites.

Voncid: It feeds on knowledge and human connection… they are all incomprehensibly vile, but yes, the cypher has a very special place in the hateful chambers of my heart. , Thankfully, I’m confident its days are numbered.  

Emea: How so, have you found an anchor?

Voncid: Not yet, but we have a very promising team that have nearly done so.  Rather than finding a focus to draw the Glorious into a confrontation and push it back out of the vessel, as is usual, we are making a composite.

Emea: I don’t follow.

Voncid: Rather than finding one large piece of the thing, we are compiling myriad small pieces of it, data, signals, numbers, waves… the way it's been transmitting itself, and we are collating them all into a database that will serve as that anchor.

Emea: sounds very… technical.

Voncid: The Cypher is data after all.  In this particular case, I think it is going to work.  Also Biers Weather has been chosen to be the one to banish it.

Emea: I hope she’s ready for that, Dalton said he’d rather deal with the Tyrant of Flesh than the Cypher again, the way it gets into your mind…

Voncid: I wish Dalton were here… not that I don’t have confidence in Olivia, but there’s no substitute for experience…

We hear more buzzing

Emea: Just a moment.

She comforts the bees in russian

we hear the wind pick up gently as Emea’s magic calms the hive

Voncid: the impending breach of the Vessel never was half as important as your bees.

Emea: The last of their kind on this side Owen.  You of all people know how important they are to the order’s work.

Voncid: These walls are made of honey…

Emea: That honey would do you a lot more good if you would let go of the Sumerian, Owen.  Its  nourishment can hardly reach you anymore.

Voncid:  I know.  I know I need to let go.

Emea: You’ve said that for generations.

Voncid: Well… I’m thinking… I’m thinking that maybe it isn’t the phantoma’s honey I need.  Perhaps what I could use is their sting.

Emea: Owen.

Voncid: Hear me out… perhaps… perhaps he and I could return to the scattered light together?  Maybe I’m tired, maybe I’ve shared his form long enough that there is no real difference between he and I?  A hamsa has never dwelt within a human being as long as I have, perhaps we’ve become one person, body and soul and wouldn’t that be a fine thing?  

Emea: in russian  How dare you talk about giving up, you made a promise.  They are the last of their kind, we swore to preserve them.

in english You promised to protect them, you swore to preserve them and the Vessel and keep them from the others.  You swore like we all did.

Voncid: I know.

Emea: and you are the last who can reach them beyond death.

Voncid: Yes.

Emea: So there you have it.

Voncid: If they would let me teach my craft to an apprentice who was their own person, someone not bonded… think of what they could do?  A mortal would be even stronger, their relationship with death is much more intimate.  Luca… luca would surpass me, easily, within his lifetime, but I have been forbidden because he cannot be inhabited, his… spirit is incomplete, through no fault of his own, simply through the circumstances of his birth. But we guard our secrets so jealously that if one cannot give themselves to us completely, then they must never be allowed our secrets.

Emea: In the end we will only tell our secrets to ourselves, yes it is vexing.

Voncid: It is impossible.  The new hunter, Kat, Rugen thinks she has something, she witnessed the euthanizing of a shaper just yesterday.  A natural shaper, a girl with a mind full of gray matter and human anxiety, not complicated machinery, who could alter the Vessel without even trying.  A miracle.  One of the blades gold, as is protocol, inserted a Cathartic blade into her brain pan, Frontal Lobe and Temporal, as she was instructed…  The girl is now a very useful and powerful tool, but not at all a person…

Emea: they made room for all  the butterflies…

Voncid: exactly… we are parasites… we use them. 

Emea: unhappy, this is one of the Hamsa’s harshest terms Owen.

Voncid:  You want to deny it, but just tell me, how sweet that honey tastes…

Emea: This is why you wanted to see me?  So that I can have one of the little phantoms in russian sting you and end your suffering in blissful peace?

Voncid: I am simply considering my options.

Emea: That is not what they are for.

Voncid: because you are their servant you are the keeper of their purpose?  Nothing has a purpose but what it is given…

We hear a door to the courtyard open

Kat: oh, hey.  Master Voncid right?  And uh Master Emea?

Emea: please don’t bother with the honorifics.

Voncid: There are plenty of the order leaders who care about titles, but none of them are in this courtyard tonight.

Kat: sure. Well I just wanted to catch some air, I can come back.

Voncid: No please, I was just being an ass to my dear friend here because… well she wasn’t telling me what I wanted to hear.

Emea: Old friends don’t need to dull their tongues quite so much… Kat, yes?  You were taking the night air?  It is very peaceful here at night isn’t it, Luca, and Philipa and Charlie have all taken to late night strolls.

Kat: It’s the moonlight… something about the way the moonlight is always so… bright?  No it’s… thick here.  That doesn’t make sense does it?

Voncid: oh quite the opposite, that’s a fine way to put it.

Emea: I heard you have had a difficult year yourself.

Kat: yeah, I almost threw hands with Angiers… 

Voncid: Yes, ugly business.

Kat: I… I just can’t really believe in lost causes.

Voncid: cheers to that.

Emea: oh!  Should we have tea?  I have some made, let me fetch it.

We hear Emea enter the apiary

Kat: dumbfounded  Does… does she live in the tree?  With… the bees?

Voncid: It’s roomier inside than it appears.

Kat: right, the layout of this place doesn’t make much sense anywhere else, why would it inside the trees… it really is a beautiful tree, I’ve never seen anything like it.

Voncid: that hive, the last home of the phantoma, the ghost bee, and the honey inside are one of the most precious things in this or any world.

Kat: I… really?  

Voncid: That surprises you?

Kat: Not more than anything else recently I guess, but, you just leave it here out in the open?  Not kept in a vault with the other relics and, you know like, holy grails and whatever shit you have locked up here?

Voncid: It needs to be open to the air, so the drones can fly off and collect the… nectar they need.

Kat: ok, sure, but no armed guards?

Voncid: laughs oh, well, the hive has quite a lot of armed guards… In fact you are probably standing in the safest spot on the continent.  The bees… the phantoma, have the deadliest conceivable sting, don’t be frightened though, the sting isn’t deadly to humans, except under certain circumstances.

Kat: well that is jarringly cryptic.

We hear the jangle of Emea’s tea set

Emea: Oh no, she looks like she’s seen a ghost.  Did one come by?

Voncid: No, I told her about the phantoma’s sting.

Emea: Ah, yes, the gentle death.

Kat: I was saying they should be better protected… deadly sting or not, a guy in a beekeepers suit with a flamethrower and the uh, phantoma is extinct right?

Emea: oh, a suit would offer no protection.

Voncid:  they don’t sting the body.

Kat: Well, this USED to be the most relaxing place in the Ardent.

Emea: you have nothing to fear from them.  It’s not your time.

Voncid: that one is returning with nectar.

Emea: oh lovely, then we can illuminate what we are going on about.

Voncid: See the glimmer along the back of its legs, where it almost seems to be clutching something?

Emea: In russian: Come here my little worker.

Kat: was that russian?

Voncid: The bees speak russian.

Kat: I… of course they do.

Emea: Here, this is the seven thousand, four hundred and sixth phantoma born in this generation.  It has returned from… oh it’s been… to Maryland, to a hospice center in cumberland.  

Kat: You’re  getting all of that by petting its fur.

Emea: we are communicating chemically. 

We hear the music of Vincent’s record player.  Something pretty that can swell a bit at the end of the story, it doesn’t have to be antique, Vincent’s grandson put him onto it.

 It is giving me the impression of an elderly man… he was alone, in a bed, late at night, bathed in the moon.  Pretty music is playing from a record player… I can hear it clearly, it’s more modern than you’d expect from the player and the age of the man… he carries a deep loneliness, though he has family… ah, his wife had died several years ago and he’d been hoping to join her soon, but is trapped in his body as cancer is slowly eating away at his bones and he will not die.  He woke to a tapping at his window, his heavy eyes slowly parting and taking in the moonlight as it glinted off the fur of an insect he had never seen before, a bee, but a bee like no other.  The bee clanked into the window a few times, bonking against the glass in the unthinking way that insects do, only on its fourth impact the bee slipped through.  The man, Vincent Collagio, nearly dismissed it as a trick of his many medications, but the plump black and white body of the bee floated towards him and landed at the foot of his bed.  He felt the pressure, and strong as his medicine was it had never transferred the sensation of touch… there was a another sensation as well, something he could not place, could not classify as pressure, nor as anything he’d felt before.

His grandson had been to visit him some weeks earlier and had told him of something he had learned in some science journal, about how humans have more than five senses.  “We can experience acceleration, and deceleration, sense of balance, senses that tell you what is going on inside your body, inside your organs.”

He had obstinately laughed and said that those were all just touch.

His grandson furrowed his brow and disagreed. “Touch happens with your skin, your nerves… it's handled in completely different parts of the body and brain.  Balance happens with your inner ear and almost entirely inside your brain…”

 The boy’s mother had told him not to argue with his grandfather.  Acceleration and balance are just fancy kids of touch.

This made his face turn red.  “No it isn’t.  Touch is touch, it’s… that’s why it’s called touching things and… it’s more interesting than that… I read about a woman who a scientist discovered who could tell what color things were with her fingertips.”

“See, so that’s just touch,” his mother said waving him away.

Vincent watched the boy's exasperation.  The kind of frustration that could only be felt by someone with more information than everyone else being told they were wrong and to be quiet.  That Galileo look.

He’d been teasing his grandson, whom he loved, and was grateful for the record player and new music to listen to.  He’d been mostly teasing, but now, as this strange bee crawled slowly and deliberately up the blanket towards the paper thin skin of his exposed arm, he felt sensations he could never have described as touch rushing through him.  Memories played across his nerves, light shone through parts of him within, taking in information, meaning, importance, that he couldn’t put words to, but knew deep down.

Where the bee walked the hideous tight pain in him drifted away.

The bee’s glossy eyes turned towards his own, either catching the moonlight just so, or glowing from within.  Its antenna twitched.  Another new sensation drifted in through his skin, then into his blood and through his organ, as never before active centers of his brain lit up and communicated, newly firing synapses crackled to life, chemicals catalyzed and bloomed within.  He knew.  Knew.

The bee would sting him, and his life would end.  These vital, animating parts of himself would come loose, slip off his bones and the bee would gather them up in its mouth and clutch them in its legs and carry them off.

Energy was a wheel.  The universe was a waterwheel that caught life, energy, significance as it passed, ever transitory, from one place to another, falling through worlds, reshaping and solidifying into forms unimaginable to his human mind, things he could only glimpse in the farthest reaching metaphors, and as it traveled its weight spun the cycle and orbit of the cosmos.

Vincent was so grateful.  

His doctors had told him they would manage his pain, but he was a frog boiling.  Each day a little worse, each pain deeper and deeper.  The cliff stood before him, but he would not jump.  The edges he clung to were sharper every day, but he could not let go.  For all his bluster and assurances to his family, the truth was that death terrified him and as much as he longed for relief, his heart held onto life with a jealous clutching fear.

Yet.

Here was a bee.

A funny, fuzzy, little bee with strange black and white markings on its body that looked very nearly like a small skull.

Something about it was comforting, natural.  He knew, intrinsically, this agent of end meant no harm.  That it simply completed a cycle.  

He laughed at that, and reached up to let the bee onto the back of his hand, where without hesitation it inserted its impossibly sharp needle.

Vincent Collagio sighed and exhaled his life, his military service, his whirlwind romances, the swells of pride at the sight of his children coming into the world, the constricting snake of grief in his stomach when one of them had died, the long summer, fall and now winters of his life, and all else about him into the ether, into the unknowable spiral of dust and rock and light.

Something else, a quintessence built up by those experiences, the bee took up in its mouth and legs and carried back here to us.

Kat: I…

Voncid: Such lovely remarkable creatures.

Emea: That one there helped a man escape suffocating in a cave in, and that one stung a kitten dying of an infection that could have been easily treated, had anyone stopped to help it, that one… ah… that one stung a woman in the clutches of a sadist, a creature of the otherworlds that feeds on pain and fear.  The bee slipped in and stole her away from a cruel and unfitting fate.

Kat: I… 

Emea: The kind death.

we hear commotion, hurried steps and a door opening.

Charlie: Master Voncid, Master Emea, there um, there’s an emergency, everyone is supposed to head to the Occulatory.

We hear the group moving

Voncid: the moment of peace never lasts.

Charlie: It's bad.

Voncid: out with it.

Charlie: a field office… there’s been an attack… or a breach… I didn’t hear much of what they were saying, but apparently there’s a lot of people dead…

Voncid: A field office… oh gods no.

Emea: What?

Voncid: The composite… the anchor… 

Kat: shiiiit.

Voncid: Mayberry…

we hear a short silence, then footsteps and whistling as someone approaches the hidden location of the recorder, takes it out of hiding.  The whistling gets louder.  Then the tape shuts off.