Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

Chapter 20: In the Time of the Bees

As the chapter title implies, this chapter involves honeybees, so phobics beware. You can skip this chapter without losing the thread of the story.

Dušamanûðânâz clutches his trousers at his waist and regards Iniðilêz, who is mottled with bruises, his eyes still swirling in the sockets from the aftermath of his concussion, and Iniðilêz wonders why Dušamanûðânâz is covered in chocolate. His anger is never an arrow, directed at a target, but meanders like a cloud of blackflies to whatever warm-blooded target is nearest at hand. For now, although Dušamanûðânâz has neither burned nor bludgeoned him, that is Dušamanûðânâz.

He cuffs Dušamanûðânâz on the back of the head. “Have you been eating candy??”

Dušamanûðânâz doesn’t have a chance to answer. Both of their heads swivel at the sound of running footsteps in the hallway overhead. A little face framed by red hair pokes over the staircase—who can tell which one it is and who really cares?—and boasts, “Hey guys, we’re up here! Aren’t you gonna come up and catch us?”

An identical face pops out over the staircase on the other side. “Yeah, we know where the vault is—do you? Come on up and you can make us tell you!”

And then they are gone, evident only in the hurried pounding of their little feet.

“Let’s get the little sadists,” Iniðilêz growls.

Carnistir is the most unsung but perhaps most inventive of the Fëanárions, in part because his profound misanthropism would have him replace most human interactions with mechanical transactions. One of his contrivances is a system of laundry delivery that transports soiled items from the rooms of their owner to the laundry shoot that drops to the washroom, then zips the laundry items back upward, clean and pressed, to be folded and put away. While his inventions are often greeted with mixed reviews, the laundry system is lauded by his family for its time-saving properties. No one has to traipse into the basement anymore with a basket on his or her hip. The twins, you might recall, used its network of tracks as a rollercoaster in their heady first day of bachelor living.

Now, Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz stand in the upstairs hallway, unsure where their quarry has gone. The hallway extends to each side with door after closed door. The laundry track runs overhead and does not excite their notice at all.

“It smells like a meadery up here,” Dušamanûðânâz observes, not bothering to constrain his excitement at the possibility. One of the advantages of having a primitive brain is its ability to quickly forget, and mead would taste great after chocolate. His ass still smarts from the teeth of the piranhas but the trauma of having his cheeks latched onto mid-poop is frittering away like dandelion fluff in a windstorm at the thought of sweet booze.

“Don’t be stupid,” Iniðilêz spits, a split second before the honey-soaked pillowcase, conducted silently along the track from the washroom, smacks into his back. He whips around, which has the effect of getting him tangled in the fabric and thoroughly coated in honey. He squirms to free himself while Dušamanûðânâz—now sporting scrawny human arms capped by a pair of very tiny hands—also tries to free him by pulling in the opposite direction, which tangles him further. The oaths Iniðilêz swears make what the twins have heard from their father and Carnistir sound as nursery rhymes meant for the ears of babes. At last, Iniðilêz is freed, and the honey-soaked pillowcase resumes its journey to a door, which swings open long enough to admit it before closing quietly again. They both stare after it.

“Huh,” says Dušamanûðânâz, and then he is smacked by a second pillowcase, also honey-soaked, and the inanity of trying to get him disentangled recommences.

The pillowcase, freed, floats soundlessly down the track. A door opens to admit it and silently closes behind it. “Huh!” says Dušamanûðânâz before whipping around to glance behind himself, but no more laundry travels the track, honey-soaked or otherwise. “At least it is delicious!” He licks between his tiny fingers with a forked tongue.

“You fuh—” but before Iniðilêz can finish his oath, there is a giggle from the direction where the pillowcases disappeared. Another door is opened, the twins peering out, identical faces stacked one above the other. That door slams shut as Iniðilêz begins to run after them, bowlegged in the attempt to avoid the unbearably unpleasant sensation of honey squelching between his thighs, his arms bobbing aloft to likewise keep it from sticking in his armpits. Dušamanûðânâz lingers, licking the honey on his hands before realizing that he should be following. He slops off after Iniðilêz down the hall.

The door Iniðilêz slams into sets off some kind of mechanism, and a crossbow bolt erupts and embeds itself harmlessly into the opposite wall. Iniðilêz laughs and begins to rub his hands together before realizing how disgusting that feels when they are coated in honey. “Fooled you this time, you little twerps! When I catch you and I’m done with you, the Doomsayer himself will need to identify your bodies by your shivering, cowering feär!”

The room they have entered is very strange. Plants twist along the walls, giving it the feel of a boxlike clearing in an otherwise impenetrable jungle. There are animals too: A parrot in a cage leers at them, and Dušamanûðânâz starts away from the tank of piranhas before realizing these are safely behind glass though eying him as though they know the fate of their brethren. The twins are nowhere to be found.

“Search the plants,” Iniðilêz orders. “They must be hiding in here somewhere.” He begins to bash at the greenery, feeling for little bodies hiding behind.

There is a low droning sound, and both villains momentarily pause, but in the overall strangeness of the room, it does not impress either of them as being particularly sinister. It is Dušamanûðânâz who feels the first tickle against his cheek; he brushes it away and resumes pushing at the greenery with one hand while licking honey off the other. An irritated whine separates itself out from the droning sound, and a bee fumbles its way onto the bridge of his nose.

His eyes cross to meet the compound gaze of the honeybee slurping honey from his nose. The ensuing shriek makes the windows tremble in their frames. It keens on and on like a siren until all the air is wrung from his lungs, and then it ends in a warble. And suddenly they seem like they’re everywhere: bees, stretching forth their little furry feet to claim the honey for their winter stores. The crossbow bolt, you see, did not land so harmlessly. It embedded itself into the glass front of Tyelkormo’s observation hive, leaving a spiderweb of cracks just wide enough to admit a steady stream of first curious, then hungry, honeybees.

Honeybees, you might know, raise up a special generation of winter bees whose purpose is not the marathon-intensity of their workaholic summertime cousins, who gather pollen and nectar until they literally drop dead from exhaustion. Theirs is more a slow abiding existence designed to patiently weather the long winter—or rather, to ensure the queen weathers the long winter. Most will never emerge from the hive, so they are slow in apprehending the opportunity presented to them: of refilling their winter stores in the midst of the winter. But once one realizes what has happened and returned to the hive to jitter out her joyful dance to the others, they begin to exuberantly pour through the cracks to make their hay while the sun shines.

Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz are liberally covered in bees nibbling at the honey that coats them. They react in the way most people react upon discovering that the tickling legs upon them belong not to an ant or a fly but a bee: They sway and flail and stop just shy of swatting, which would guarantee a sting, and these thwarted slaps come out in a warble of distress.

“Just stop. They won’t hurt you.”

Iniðilêz manages to mostly freeze. The twins are standing at the opposite end of the room from him and Dušamanûðânâz. Their smiles are of mischievous pleasure. Beside him, Dušamanûðânâz stops as well, though the occasional twitch betrays both their seeming composure.

“They’re just hungry. They’ll clean you of honey and then return to their colony. They won’t sting unless you provoke them.”

The twin is the younger one. A honeybee, in fact, is crawling up his cheek. He blinks it away when it reaches his eye but otherwise stands fearless. Several other probe at him and his brother, but realizing that they are not honeyed, quickly lose interest and return to Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz.

"They will, however, take their time," he adds.

Thus frozen, Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz have little choice but to watch the twins scurry from the room, laughing at they go, while they are thoroughly cleaned of honey by Tyelkormo’s bee colony. Dušamanûðânâz mewls a little when one begins to mine out the honey from inside his ear, but the boy was right: Honey collected, the bees begin to fly off, and neither Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz has sustained a single sting. The bees take their time, though. They are interested in thoroughness, not haste. When there are maybe a dozen remaining, Iniðilêz begins to flick them off of himself, but they are dazed and fattened on honey and not up to the fight. In slow, drooping flight, they return to the hive.

Back in the hallway, neither Iniðilêz nor Dušamanûðânâz wants to admit the full extent of their terror under the bees to the other. They both preoccupy themselves for several moments in plucking at their clothes, restoring themselves to the illusion of order. A bee, trapped under Iniðilêz’s sleeve, emerges and he yelps, then covers it with a cough. “I’m done with that pair of witless little bastards,” Iniðilêz announces, oblivious to the irony in his words. “Let’s just head for the vaults.”