Yuletide bonfire stories (from KOL)

You grab a roasting stick and mercilessly skewer your marshmallow. As you roast, you listen to a spine-curdling, blood-tingling tale from Roger Kenny, the Roastmaster:

"Many years ago," Roger begins, holding a flashlight under his chin for maximum spooooky effect, "there was an accountant who worked in the King's treasury. He was a shy, solitary man, who did his job thoroughly and carefully, but nevertheless he was constantly passed over for promotion due to his lack of social skills. Year after year passed, and the job opportunities he felt were rightfully his continued to be given to less-qualified employees who were good at schmoozing and brown-nosing."

"Is this meant to be scary?" asks one of the kids.

"You'll understand when you get older," Roger scowls.

"Anyway, he eventually grew so disillusioned with the situation, that he quit his job and moved out to a small cottage on the edge of The Spooky Woods, and started a new life as a beekeeper. Once in a while he would appear in the marketplace, selling honey and wax, and he would tell anyone who would listen about how wonderful bees are, and how their well-ordered society provides the appropriate work for each member, with no room for slackers or shiftless layabouts.

"His visits to town became rarer and rarer, though, and each time he came he seemed increasingly stranger. He talked less and less, and eventually made no sound at all apart from a low angry buzz. Then he stopped coming altogether.

"It wasn't long after that that the King's accountants began to be viciously murdered in the night, one by one. Members of upper management would not show up for work one morning, and when someone went around to their house to check on them, they would find their bodies, and the bodies of their wives and children, bloated and swollen by the venomed stings of hundreds -- thousands! -- of bees, and expressions on their faces of the utmost horror and pain! A squad of guards went to the beekeeper's cottage and pounded on the door... the man ran out the back and tried to escape, but the guards caught him in the middle of the field where his beehives were kept, and cruelly beat him to death as he struggled to get away. Then they set fire to the beehives.

"Great clouds of bees swarmed out of the burning hives, attacking the guards. Most of them did not survive to tell the tale, but the few that escaped reported seeing, by the light of the fires, a swirling mass of bees that covered the fallen body of the beekeeper, and then rose again, no longer an indistinct cloud of insects, but a defined, humanoid form -- a guy made of bees. And as the guards ran screaming into the night, their heads were filled with a vicious, droning buzz that formed words within their minds: 'We are Bees. We hate you.'"

"They say that, on dark nights, if you stare into a mirror and say his name, "Guy Made of Bees", five times, that he -- they -- will appear. And take their revenge."

Goosebumps shiver up and down your arms, and you feel like you'll never look at a jar of honey the same way again.