The fear of long words.
Yes, whoever coined such a long name for this phobia was cruel. I’ve heard that joke a thousand times. But do you know what isn’t funny? The story of why I fear long words. And it’s a story that I’m going to tell here in the hope that it makes people think twice before being callous. I can’t speak for others with this phobia, of course, but I can tell you how it began for me.
It was 2005, and I was 10 years old. My friends and I were watching Mary Poppins. Amy, Stephanie, Brandon, my little brother, and me.
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” I proudly said, pointing at the piece of paper on which I’d just written the word.
Amy beamed. “You’re so smart, James!”
I caught Brandon eyeing her coldly, but I pretended not to notice. I just thought him to be troubled. Unloved at home by his drunken dad. Envious of my relationship with Amy. Angry at the world. All of the above.
But there was more to Brandon than that. Or less, depending on how you look at it. And however you look at it, what happened next was a horror beyond words. In fact, after all of this time, I’ve finally decided that there isn’t a word for what happened next. And I know plenty of words. That’s what started everything.
“James,” Brandon said as we were walking out of school. “What would you say to a Spelling Bee at my house?”
I shrugged. “Sure. I guess.”
He was quiet for the duration of the walk home. As I said, he was always an unusual, unnerving boy, but I have to admit that he seemed particularly unhinged on this particular evening. I noticed that his driveway was empty as we approached the front door.
“Do your parents know I’m coming over?” I asked.
“Let’s go up to the den,” He said, averting my question and guiding me upstairs.
“Are we allowed, Brandon?” I asked, as he pulled on the string to the attic door. “Where are your parents?”
“They’re away,” Brandon said, beginning to climb the ladder. “Come on. It’s time for the Spelling Bee.”
He turned on the light in the attic, and I followed him into what I can only describe as the first of many traumatic memories. Chained to plastic chairs – yes, chained by a 10-year-old – were my friends and my brother. Stephanie, Amy, and Tom. They were all crying.
“What have you done?” I squealed. “Let them go!”
“Did you not wonder where everyone had gone during our lunch break, James?” Brandon asked. “I thought you were smart.”
“James,” Tom bawled. “I want to go home.”
“I’m gonna untie you,” I said, striding towards his chair. “One second.”
But Brandon lunged at me, pinning me to the rickety floorboards of the attic and wafting a multi-buttoned remote before my eyes.
“That isn’t how the Spelling Bee works, James,” Brandon hissed, dark eyes burrowing into my soul. “If you step out of line again, I press this button and… You don’t want to know what it does to your friends and poor little Tom.”
“I… I’m not little…” Tom whimpered.
Brandon leaned towards my ear and whispered quietly. “By the time we’re finished, he’ll be the littlest thing you’ve ever seen.”
“Just tell me what to do,” I cried.
Brandon smiled wickedly. “Three words. That’s it, James. The world’s easiest Spelling Bee. A word for each of them – Stephanie, Amy, and Tom. Spell each word correctly, and I set them free.”
“And if I fail?” I asked.
“It’s not a pass or fail situation, James. You’ll spell each word, letter by letter. As soon as you get a letter incorrect – sorry, if you get a letter incorrect – I’ll tell you the correct letter and repeat the word so you can continue.”
“But what’s the catch?” I asked quietly.
“Well, there’s a price for my assistance,” He said thoughtfully. “It’s like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. You’d be using a lifeline. I’d have to… creatively… write the correct letter on the whiteboard for you. You lose if… well, we’ll get to that.”
Brandon gestured to a whiteboard stand to the side of my three loved ones. I couldn’t see a marker pen.
“Right, shall we start with Stephanie?” Brandon asked.
“Wait…” I whispered.
“The word is Pulchritudinous.”
I inhaled deeply, preparing to best Brandon at his demented idea of a prank, but I had no idea as to how deep his insanity ran. I was about to find out.
“P… U… L… C… H… R… I… D–”
“– T, not D,” Brandon said.
Then something horrifying happened. Brandon produced a pair of hedge trimmers from a small duffel bag on the floor and took long strides towards Stephanie. He clipped, clipped, clipped, clipped, and clipped.
She wailed as five fingers were severed, one by one, from her left hand. I screamed, as did Amy and Tom. A fountain of blood gushed from the stubs on Stephanie’s hand, and Brandon sinisterly shaped each of the five fingers into various formations.
He was spelling the word with her body parts. Sellotaping P, U, L, C, and H to the whiteboard, much to my horror.
“Need more,” Brandon hissed, a deranged glint in his eyes.
Stephanie was too weakened by blood loss to resist Brandon as he clipped away at her right hand, severing those fingers and moulding them into letters too. Our cries of horror must’ve carried a good mile, but Brandon’s family lived on an isolated plot of land.
“There we go. R, I, and T. T, James, not D. Pulchritudinous. Go on.”
“P… U… L… C… H… R… I… T… U… D… I… N… O… U… S.”
“Wow, James. Just wow. Second try? You really are a genius. And I’m a man of my word!”
Brandon pressed a smaller button beneath the big red one on the remote, and Stephanie’s chains loosened. Bawling, she fell to her knees and began to crawl across the attic floor, holding her stumped, fingerless, bloodied hands before her. But it was already too late – she didn’t even make it to the attic door before crumpling lifelessly and staring at me with unblinking eyes.
“Most unfortunate. Anyway, moving on to Amy. The word is Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,” Brandon said.
Still unwilling to grapple with the terror of Stephanie’s death, I found myself collapsing to my knees and spelling Amy’s word before my brain had even caught up – I was in shock.
“P… N… E… U… M… O… N… O… U… L… T… R… A… M… I… C… R… O… L–”
“– L? What?” Brandon sighed. “The correct letter, after O, is S. This is going to be a long one, James…”
I could only observe from my knelt position on the floor as Brandon spelled out the eighteen letters I’d done correctly, plus the nineteenth that he revealed. Nineteen body parts. You can’t imagine my horror as I watched Brandon inflict the same terror upon Amy that he inflicted upon Stephanie. And when he had ten fingers on his whiteboard, what did he use next?
Not toes, as one might have hoped, to give Amy a fighting chance at surviving. No. He clipped her arms. I screeched at the top of my lungs, eyes swimming with terrified tears as Amy’s head swiftly lolled forwards, blood gushing from the open wounds on her torso. And yet Brandon continued to hack up her dismembered body parts, contorting them into each letter of the word and sellotaping them to the whiteboard.
“P… N… E… U… M… O… N… O… U… L… T… R… A… M… I… C… R… O… S… Well, I would say to continue, James, but… it appears you’ve failed. I don’t think poor Amy is moving, is she? That’s how you lose, James,” Brandon faux-sniffled, walking over to her limp corpse and puppeteering her lips. “You’re oh-so-smart, James. Why couldn’t you spell the word properly?”
I wailed inconsolably, horrified by the unfathomably and graphically gruesome spectacle before me. As I collapsed into a ball on the ground, my tormentor continued.
“Now, according to the Oxford Dictionary, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest word in the English language,” Brandon said, unfazed by my hyperventilation. “But did you know that there exists another word – a far longer word?”
I sobbed, unable to breathe properly – nostrils clogged with snot bubbles, and cheeks strewn with tears.
“The Titin protein is the largest protein in the human body, which is why its full name is such an obscenely long word. 189,819 letters, to be exact. So, that brings us to Tom. And the third word is…”
I would include it here, but it’s far too long for a Reddit post.
You can imagine how many times I failed to spell a 189,819-letter-long word correctly. And though I’d accepted that I couldn’t save my baby brother, I hadn’t expected Brandon to make Tom’s end so horribly drawn-out.
The monster plucked minuscule strips of flesh from my little brother’s body to form the letters of the 189,819-letter word. I kept trying to spell it, watching as Tom bled out hauntingly slowly. He sobbed for the first hour or so, before uttering little more than the occasional hoarse grunt or inaudible whisper. Letter-shaped wounds formed where my brother’s skin had been, and Brandon continued to spell the word along the floor after he’d run out of room on the whiteboard.
It took hours for my brother to finally fall still, but Brandon didn’t stop, even after Tom’s death – after I lost. He made me finish the word.
We used up every last piece of my brother’s body to spell out the full word – limbs, eyes, innards, and bones. I don’t know why I kept spelling. There was nothing that Brandon held over me. My only explanation is that sheer shock drove me onwards. Horror at what I’d witnessed. A disconnect from reality.
When the word was finished, Brandon silently left the attic.
I eventually returned to the real world, in a sense, and called the police. It’s hard to explain what followed. I know that Brandon’s parents were found in their bed, throats slit. Their cars were in the garage.
The demented boy has been missing for eighteen years, and my town has never been the same. I’ve never been the same. As I type this post now, I don’t see letters. Not really.
I see body parts.