A Few Bloody Samples for the Horror Gourmet

Artem was a man of forceps and hard facts. He compartmentalized nature into neat little drawers to assert dominion over it. The moth on his desk, large as a pigeon and dusty as a tomb relic, defied all his categories. He’d never had a specimen quite like this beneath his magnifying glass.

The thing was dead, desiccated, a rigid husk of chitin and faded pigments. The death’s-head mark on its thorax stared up at him with hollow, phantom eyes.

While adjusting the mount, his index finger snagged on the edge of a wing. A sudden flare of pain, like ground glass driven into the meat of his skin. Through the lens, he spotted them: needle-fine barbs, jaundiced and hollow. He extracted them meticulously with his surgical tool.

He rinsed his hand until the skin blanched, wrapped the finger, and wrote a terse note in the margin of his log—irritant setae; unusual morphology—as if a label could fence the sensation in.

An hour later, the room began to breathe.

Artem watched the insect’s wings tremble. He heard the dry rasp of ancient parchment. The creature unfurled, lifting itself with a heavy, deliberate grace, and thrummed through the air of the lab toward the bathroom. Artem followed.

He looked into the mirror, but the glass no longer returned the world he knew. His perception splintered into facets. The sterile white of the tiles bled into an explosive riot of color; invisible ultraviolet spilled across the space, and the walls flared in fluorescent bands, as if the room had been wired with living neon. His vision warped and widened until it became a dome, an impossible, compound panorama that held every angle at once.

Sickly yellow-and-black patterns gnawed their way up through the pores of his skin. A creeping topography of chitin.

The floor felt precarious, a flat and meaningless expanse. He clawed at the doorframe; his fingers tightened into hardened hooks. Driven by a brisk, mechanical purpose that stepped around pain, he hauled himself upward, his nails scrabbling deep into the plaster until he hung there, defying gravity. He lingered, motionless: an exhibit pinned above the sink, suspended in the bathroom’s dim breath.

He opened his mouth to scream, but his tongue was already an alien thing. It had split, blackened, a chitinous proboscis clacking against his teeth.

The moth landed on his shoulder. In the mirror, Artem watched as the creature uncoiled its proboscis and fed him: a viscous, bioluminescent sludge that pumped down his throat. With every swallow, his human consciousness shriveled. His neck thickened. Memories of forceps, laboratories, and names dissolved like tissue in lye. Inside him, organs softened and ran; bone gave way and reassembled with a muffled, visceral cracking.

In the glass, Artem witnessed the last spark of humanity drain from his eyes. The mottled yellow-and-black patches fused into a hardened carapace. Immense wings tore free from his shoulder blades, crowding the cramped space with their weight and powder. He was no longer a man. He was a colossal, perfected Acherontia, clinging from the cracked ceiling. An instinctual surge of pheromones and blinding light swallowed the last frayed thread of his sanity.

Three days later, the neighbors broke down the door. The stench was gagging.

They found Artem in the bathroom. He was hanging from a thick nylon rope looped over the ventilation grate. His face mottled purple, a dark, swollen tongue protruding from his mouth. A routine suicide for the precinct files.

In the lab next door, the moth lay on the desk. Motionless, dusty, and rigid as the day he’d found it. In the jaundiced wash of the fluorescent tubes, the skull on its back seemed to glimmer.