Feeding time (standard:horror, 1259 words)
Author: Lev821	Added: Jul 10 2008	Views/Reads: 3249/2071	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A cowboy plumber is left in a victim's house alone, but what's that sound?

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

It wasn't long before Mrs Lyson was stood staring down at the bones that
once belonged to the plumber. All the cockroaches had gone, and would 
return when she lured another unsuspecting victim to fix the sink. Mrs 
Lyson was 148 years old, but looked about 60. The ageing process was 
frozen at that age because that was when her husband had died. He had 
been an entertainer, a stage magician who had dealings with real magic, 
but in an amateurish sense. He had been trying to use it for his own 
benefit, but had inadvertently ingested a lethal cocktail which he had 
believed would give him eternal life. Instead, it had killed him, but 
reincarnated him as a thousand cockroaches that had the ability to 
bestow one year of extra existence to a person of his choosing. The 
price would be to simply feed them one human. For one human, one year 
would be added to Mrs Lyson's life, and she kept her husband fed well. 
It was easy to bring unsuspecting victims into her house. Plumbers, 
electricians, gas men, all left alone for her husband to feed on. 
Several years ago, she had managed to acquire several vats of corrosive 
substances which had been sent for waste by a school science 
department. Why they needed so much of it she never knew, but they 
ended up in her basement, which took care of the bones, so not a single 
trace of them remained, except for perhaps the drifting molecules that 
had once been a part of that person, drifting in the air, like their 
departed spirits, or ghosts. 

It was easy to find potential victims. She would find them in the yellow
pages, and understood that the smaller the advert they had, the more 
likely they were to be a charlatan or bad worker. Now though, she had 
the task of dragging the skeleton into the basement, but there was no 
rush. She had all the time in the world. 


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