Excitement levels have reached new heights, as The Locust Theorem, one of my latest short stories, is Story of the Week on Fairlight Books. If you haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, you can follow this link, or check out the snippet below…
Doctor Evans slept like the dead. She grumbled when I woke her.
‘Shh. Listen.’ I held up a hand. She rubbed her eyes, trying to make sense of the noise.
‘Where’s it coming from?’
‘The sky.’
She got up, frowning, and padded to the open window. ‘Sh*t, look at the stars.’
‘Right?’
‘Am I dreaming?’
‘No.’ I joined her by the window, both of us staring slack-jawed at the shuddering sky.
‘What is it? I know that noise, I’ve heard it before.’
‘I think it’s teeth,’ I replied slowly. ‘Human teeth. Chattering.’
Both of us kept our eyes fixed on the sky, knowing that if we looked at each other, we wouldn’t be able to keep the next logical assumption at bay.
We stayed awake all night, turning on every light in the house, flitting between twenty-four-hour news channels and our haplessly filed notes. Time zone by time zone, reports of the sound came in from around the world. Parties in New York came to a standstill; Hong Kong and Tokyo office blocks emptied, their workers pouring out to stare at the shaking shadows cast by the sun; back in our own Australia, schoolchildren were sent home for the day. One after another, we could sense our neighbours waking up and tramping out to the street to see what was happening. Someone fired a gun at the moon.
Doctor Evans and I were more pragmatic, scrambling through online recordings of insect calls and papers about the resonance of human teeth but we were in an academic no-man’s-land. After a while, the susurrations started to get to me. It must have been terrifying for the people who didn’t know what was happening, being bombarded with that constant pattern of sound, but knowing it was the chatter of human teeth was just as unsettling. That it was Su’s teeth- I thought of them wearing down grain by grain and I shuddered… [READ MORE]