"What is that mysterious buzzing noise?" Sweeney Todd looked up from the fateful red barber's chair, of which his victims rarely go out the way they come in.
A bluebottle droned overhead, unaware that its being noticed by the fickle-tempered barber was never a good thing.
"Ah. I see." Sweeney stood up and ventured toward the slanted window and opened it.
The sky was overcast, as it usually was in London. With a mutinous churning sound, the intruder flew near the exit but veered away in the nick of time.
Something resembling a cross between a groan and a growl escaped the barber's lips, and he slammed the window shut.
"Right, you annoying little pestilence! If you don't bugger off by your lonesome, I will personally escort you out in a pair. Do you understand that?"
As if to confirm the negative, the fly whizzed by the barber's eyes and began a series of circuits around the second-floor room.
Sweeney covered his eyes with a hand, and he lowered himself back into the chair. "What am I saying? It's a bloody fly!"
Downstairs, someone was moving around, likely being the person of Mrs Lovett. Out of the corner of his eye, the barber spied a shard of light spilling through a crack below the door. The man frowned for a moment, and then stood up again.
He threw the door open in a fine rage, and with an exaggerated sweeping gesture aimed at the other side of the doorway, Sweeney half-shouted, "By your leave!"
Amazingly enough, the fly obeyed, and its fitful buzzing could be heard no longer. Sweeney himself was rather surprised, and for a moment he didn't shut the door.
However, when he did eventually make the move, the fly returned, along with its irritating noise making.
Sweeney screamed, stomping his foot down sharply. He felt like pulling his own hair out by the roots, and he was sorely tempted to do so- after he had pulled the fly's wings off, of course.
"There is a world of manure just outside this doorway, specially designed for your filth, yet here you remain." Sweeney snarled at the fly, "It's bloody odd!"
His friend made no point of acknowledging his observation besides buzzing around the room at high speed.
Sweeney sat back down, and he stared up at the ceiling, where he could see several cracks exposing the sky's dark underside.
"Grant it, you do have an important task here." The barber hastily reworded his statement. "Well, not here here, but out there, away from here, here. Does that make any sense at all to you?"
The fly continued to do its namesake in a circle.
"You're a persistent little bugger. But I'm being nice. Uncharacteristically nice. Have you no respect for the uncharacteristic?"
Defiantly, the insect looped around his head for a moment before coming to a rest in his hair.
"I am not nice." Sweeney slowly reached for the cutthroat razor in his belt.
He narrowed his eyes in concentration and then brought the blade down upon his head in a wide and deadly arc.
"I got you," the barber said with smug satisfaction as he observed the blade, which had exactly half a fly on each side. "I did say you would leave as a pair. You didn't listen though, did you? Nobeast does."
Sweeney stepped away from the chair before realising the secret lever. The trapdoor became visible as the chair tipped back. Mr Todd crouched by the hole and reached beneath the floorboards. He felt around until his outstretched hand touched a cool glass object, which he picked up. The barber unscrewed the jar lid. He bit off the dead fly's wings before wiping the remains into the jar of dead flies, all minus their wings.
"That will teach you all," the barber said.
He replaced the lid and put the jar back in its hidey-hole, amongst other jars filled with such things as rats with no tails, small birds with no heads and squirrels with no nuts.
Sweeney got to his feet again. He began to walk away, but one of the floorboards was loose, and when he stepped on one end, the other jerked up and whacked him in the balls.
"Woe to my crotch!" he shouted in pain, and he tripped over the edge and fell down the hole with an "AHHHH!"
The barber landed on top of a pile of bodies in the basement.
Mrs Lovett was just coming down the steps when she saw him drop in.
"Mr Todd!" she cried. "Don't you think it might be better to come down the stairs?"
Before Sweeney passed out, he weakly whispered, "The floorboard met me first."
***
A wall of fire flanked the fly on each side as it scuttled along the rock towards Lucifer, Hell's leader.
"What happened to you?" the Devil asked, a smirk on his evil face.
The fly had a look of unresolved vengeance in its eyes. "I've been 'Sweeney Todded'."
Snickering, the Prince of Earth pointed towards a crowd of creatures in a similar state of mind to the fly. "You're over there with the others."