Last night I felt something crawling on me, and discovered there was an earwig in my bed.
I have a longstanding unease about earwigs. It�s not that they scare me, as such; it doesn't bother me to have them crawling around in plain sight where I can keep my eye on them. I don't even find them intrinsically disturbing. However, when I was about 8 years old, one of my favourite tv programmes was Rod Serling's Night Gallery. We didn�t have colour television in Australia back in the early 70's, and the black and white presentation rendered the show all the more gothic.
The first Tasmanian broadcast episode of Night Gallery concerned the torments of a man who had the misfortune of having an earwig crawl into his ear, and subsequently burrow through his brain. There were prolonged scenes of him writhing around in anguish, driven to the point of dementia. He was not expected to survive. Miraculously though, the insect eventually crawled out of his other ear, having travelled right through his brain. The relief of his companions was short-lived. Someone informs him:
"I took a look at the earwig that came out. It was a female, that one - and the female lays eggs."
I still think that is one of the nastiest horror stories I�ve ever come across.
My earwig disappeared as I was trying to get it out of the bed, so I was forced to endure a whole evening not knowing whether it was hiding somewhere under a fold of material, waiting to come out and lay its eggs in my brain. In fact I�m usually so fuzzy-headed, an earwig crawling through my brain might do me wonders.
