RACHEL’S CAMPFIRE TALE

AS FEATURED ON EPISODE #37

“THE MANTIS” by Jordan Miller

Her dreams were full of churning relentless machinery. Stainless steel serrated arms, burning hot and razor sharp, moving with cold persistence.  The sound of a scream as the arms swing downward. The effortless sawing through soft human flesh sending spouts of blood across burning metallic skin. Blood hisses and turns to vapor and she could swear the steam had a coppery smell, like old pennies, and it made her feel sick. The towering metal god before her was strangely insectile, mostly because of it’s large glass eyes--intelligent, alien and unreadable. They reminded her of those dome shaped security cameras she’s seen in so many department stores. It loomed over her as hateful steam billowed from vents behind churning robotic mandibles.

Rachel awoke, still terrified and feeling a bit queasy. Her clock read 6:50 am, ten minutes before her alarm was set to go off. She hated when that happened and spent a full minute debating whether to get up or give herself the extra nine minutes when her eyes fixed on something at her window.  Her blinds were pulled almost entirely down, but there was a shape visible in the small gap there. Something small, but out of place nonetheless. Her internal debate forgotten, Rachel pulled open the blinds to find a praying mantis standing on the outside of her window sill, peering inside and perched like a curious green statue. It’s large, questioning eyes brought back visions from her dream; tearing flesh, burning glass dome eyes of a towering skeletal machine and that sickening smell of old pennies. Rachel frowned and pulled the blinds completely closed before climbing back into bed, deciding she deserved those remaining eight minutes of peace before her alarm.

On her drive to work the radio gave today’s version of the same story that has been playing for the past four weeks: When will police catch Hacksaw Jack? The police hated that name and referred to him officially only as the “perpetrator”, but the media loved it and, of course it stuck. Hacksaw Jack held the greater DC area in a grip of fear ever since his first known victim, Alicia Green, was found in a ditch with her head missing. It was the savagery of the cuts that led to the killer’s name, looking as if they had been done with great force with a dull saw blade.  The following week another victim was found, and another the week after that, both decapitated with the same ferocity as Alicia Green. After the third victim, a twenty-two year-old nursing student, a city wide curfew was being seriously considered. The wounds were so distinct and the cimes so close together, there was no denying it was the work of a single disturbed mind. Rachel switched off the radio and frowned. It was no wonder she was having nightmares of murderous, serrated terror. She drove the rest of the way to work in silence. 

Rachel hadn’t been at her desk more than five minutes when any remaining mental residue of Hacksaw Jack was washed away by a much more immediate concern, the blonde bitch herself, Karen Windsor. Karen had been Rachel’s supervisor for five months and made it clear on numerous occasions that she believed it to be her ambition and work ethic that had gotten her where she is.  She spoke of these qualities as if they were pieces of fine jewelry, glinting in the window of a store women like Rachel only hoped to window shop. She had grown to despise Karen’s small conversations, the ones where she would parade her life before you in small condescending anecdotes, casually giving you enough of the full portrait to deliver the message clear as day - we’re not on the same playing field. Hell, we’re not even playing the same sport. It was because of Karen Windsor that Rachel kept a bottle of Aspirin in her desk.  These constant conversations with her supervisor could sometimes bring on a real pounder. Today, after telling Rachel about her date on Saturday at some unpronounceable michelin-starred restaurant in Northwest, Karen asked her to take an important package to the post office and overnight it. It simply had to be done immediately, Karen explained contemptuously, and she couldn’t trust it to an intern. Rachel hated the annoying trips to the post office, and Karen was aware of this fact.

Rachel kept the radio off on her way to the post office and back, surprised to find that the short errand actually calmed her down. The only strange notable thing was upon her return to her car from the post office she discovered another praying mantis perched on her side view mirror. Disgusted, she brushed the creature away gently, though not without some contempt, and headed back towards the office. She found herself regretting the morning’s negative feelings until Karen practically met her at the office door, yanking her inside the building by the arm and pulling her to the break room. It only took a moment of seeing everyone gathered around the television to know what had happened. “They caught him in the act” Karen spewed, “halfway through cutting off some poor girl’s head. Far too late to save her life obviously, but they caught the bastard all the same”. Rachel gathered excitedly with her coworkers as a raving man on television was led out of a house and into a police cruiser. Multiple camera angles caught the man’s insane face contorted into monstrous shapes as he screamed of his innocence. Rachel couldn’t look away from the screen, not because of the obvious drama that electrified those around her but because of something that all of them had overlooked. It was understandable that they had overlooked it really, how could they not? Just like everyone else, they had been fixated on the screaming maniac, the accused murderer. However, once you saw it it was undeniable, especially because the man being led by police seemed to be screaming directly at it. Atop the raving man’s car, not two feet from where the officers led him screaming, stood a familiar bright green skeletal structure - a praying mantis. 

Rachel looked forward to the first really good night's sleep in three weeks, safe with the knowledge that Hacksaw Jack was behind bars. She was disappointed to find herself awake at 4:30am, having tossed and turned through most of the night. When she did sleep her dreams were plagued still by the white hot sawing arms of that dome-eyed mechanical god, so she stayed up and she read on her laptop. Mostly, she read about praying mantises.  Besides the well known fact that mantises eat the heads of their mates, they were also totems of luck, intelligence and patience in most cultures, some believed the mantis to have a connection to the unknown and unseen world of spiritual truth. Rachel wondered what all those spiritual nut jobs thought about the head eating. All she knew was that they gave her the creeps. She was about to give sleep another try when she came across another article about an obscure Japanese folklore regarding the praying mantis.  It stuck out to her because it used a word that none of the other articles so far had used, not even once. That word was death. This largely forgotten belief was that the praying mantis was no symbol of transcendent luck, but rather a harbinger of inhuman cruelty and soothsayer of death. They believed the praying mantis to be a species of willing vessels to dark otherworldly intelligences, to demons, and to see one could be an omen of one’s own damnation. Well that was great, Rachel had certainly seen her share of them lately, hadn’t she? She knew there would be no sleep tonight and so she put on a pot of coffee and played video games until it was time to go to work.

It took three cups of coffee and two aspirin to get Rachel through lunch. Karen had brought on a substantial pounder with a stack of paperwork and her incessant talk of the Hacksaw Jack case as she herself had been the arresting officer. While she finished the paperwork her mind was drawn back to the previous day’s news footage. It had really seemed as if the blood soaked maniac had been screaming at the mantis. She was almost sure of it. Why would he do that? Karen dropped a fresh stack of paperwork in front of Rachel with a shit eating grin, and that’s when both the fourth cup of coffee and the third aspirin became a reality.  It was on top of this new stack of paperwork, with less than a third of the coffee drank, that Rachel finally fell asleep. Her dreams were different this time. She was not sickened or haunted by the towering metal god, instead she had become it. She was the intelligence behind the glass dome eyes and she could understand them because they were her eyes. The massive sawing arms were her arms. But even in the depths of this dream she questioned. Were they her arms? Were they really? Was it her mind who commanded them? The important thing was she wasn’t scared this time. In fact, she felt oddly powerful. There was another pleasant sensation as well, the feeling a delicious meal after a long day. She could feel her metal jaws crunch into something crisp, fresh and wonderful. Her mandibles found their way through the hard shell with ease, releasing a sweet and creamy center like poached eggs, but more exquisite than anything she had ever tasted in her life.

The screams woke Rachel up with a jolt. The first thing she had to do was regain her balance because she was no longer sitting at her desk in front of a mountain of paperwork, but rather standing in the middle of the hallway. A minute ago she was at her desk, now she was here and there were people screaming. She felt a warm wetness on her clothes and looked down to discover herself covered in blood. She spun around to try to figure out what on earth was happening when she looked into the open office that had been directly behind her. The door was open and there, sitting at her desk was the headless body of Karen Windsor. Her neck brutally torn but no sign at all of her head. Rachel’s mouth dropped open in shock and she began to shake.  She tightened her fists and realized there was something in one of her hands - a broken blade from a paper cutter, drenched in blood. She suddenly found herself frantically wondering what had happened to Karen’s head. It was nowhere. Then she remembered poached eggs. She thought of the crunch of some crispy shell and the release of a divine creamy interior. Rachel vomited and heard the distant sounds of police sirens start to swell. She stumbled to the lobby, still gripping the paper cutter blade when she saw it. Perched on the window sill in the corner of the room was the praying mantis and it was this moment she realized there had been only one this whole time. Something inside her knew this to be true and it was then that she went mad.  Cell phone footage of Rachel’s arrest showed her to be yelling at something in the corner of the room. Nobody was able to understand what, if anything, she had been screaming at, as the phone video showed nothing there but empty room. The most troubling thing was even though Mrs. Windsor was killed in her own office, the police have still been unable to locate her head. 

The arresting officer was a rookie named Stuart Hill, who could only explain the mad woman’s behavior by saying she had clearly been off her rocker. Whatever had set her off, Stuart puzzled, it must have really been something.  The terrified look in her eyes is what stuck with him. There was insanity in those eyes and Stuart was certain they would haunt him in his dreams. He was wrong, however, and instead his dreams were haunted by the piercing dome eyes of a towering metal daemon, billowing hot steam and sawing with endless serrated appendages.  Stuart Hill began to cry in his sleep as outside on his window sill a praying mantis was perched, as still as the night air, watching.