Short Fiction: Lowlife
Author's Note: This is the latest entry in what appears to be a series about the horrors of apartment life I've taken to referring to as "Sick House." (Please don't read into why I'm writing horror stories about apartment life.)
Content Warning: Pests, alcohol consumption, emetophobia, body horror
The worst part of the infestation isnât the sound the thing scurrying along the wall behind your bed makes. It isnât the blur of motion in your peripheral vision. Itâs not even the sense that a nameless and invisible intruder has decided to lay claim to your home with you still in it.
No, the worst part is the uncertainty, the complete inability to predict how the outsiders will act or to know with any certainty where they are.
Itâs most evident in the middle of the night, when youâre trying to sleep and one of them â Just one? you wonder, Is it really just one? â dashes up and down along the wall, up and down, its little claws propelling it through the darkness like a missile shaped from matted hair and teeth.
The sound is alarming in how close it seems. Sometimes, as you stare at the ceiling, you swear that what you are really hearing is the thing scraping along your ear drum, a microscopic terror unwilling to leave you be.
You know itâs not the case, but a part of you refuses to see reason. The exterminatorâs words didnât help, delivered as they were on that humid afternoon you spent standing in your kitchen and waiting for him to finish his inspection of the premises. You allowed him to peer into every dusty corner and under every cluttered cabinet to find the miniature gateways that beckoned outsiders into your home.
You even allowed him into your bedroom after a perfunctory attempt on your part to handle the worst of the clutter. Itâs senseless, but you donât want the person searching your apartment for vermin to think that the place where you live is dirty. A part of you wouldâve been more comfortable with him seeing you naked.
He came to you after what felt like too long a time to be alone in your room and shook his head.
âDidnât see anything,â he said. âOnly one living here is you.â
He didnât say it, of course, people are always too polite to say it, but the maybe itâs all in your head hung heavy over the conversation. You nodded, polite, and escorted him to the door.
The back and forth, back and forth in your room was the worst it had ever been that night, like the intruder was a pendulum compelled to march from one end of the room to the other without end. But heâs not in your room, is he? a part of you thought, a part of you that you hated and resented because you always worried it was right. Heâs in your head. Itâs all in your head.
You handle the stress well. Thatâs what others always say. Youâre handling it so well, like itâs a problem that is to be handled and not solved, dealt with, put away for good. You ignore them at first, but like the back and forth, back and forth, it weighs on you.
You stop talking about it unprompted. Why would you? Itâs going as well as it can, you would say, if anyone thought to ask. They donât. They seem relieved not to have to, and that same part of you that you hate is relieved too.
You go out more in the hopes of forgetting your discomfort. If youâre very lucky, youâll get the chance to spend the night somewhere else, somewhere clean of the stain imprinted on your home.
It is good to see other people, you tell yourself. Refreshing. And itâs easier to sleep when you donât remember climbing into bed.
One night, there is something unique in how your drink tingles on its way down, and you donât think anything of having another, or another after that.
You tell yourself that youâre not going anywhere, that you can hold on to yourself even as you down one drink after the next. The certainty of your control only grows stronger as the night progresses, more compelling, and when you are at your most certain, your control shatters. It falls away, and with it, the nightâs sense of continuity. Their replacement is a parade of vignettes interspersed with indeterminate and intermittent stretches of darkness.
Familiar faces broken open into smiles.
Laughter, then darkness.
A dirty restroom mirror. Your face, blurry and amused.
Laughter, then darkness.
You speak emphatically, your hand coming down onto the table in a fist. Your words are indistinct even to you. The looks of concern and surprise your friends flash are not.
Laughter, forced this time, then the relief of darkness.
The sidewalk, the contents of your stomach spilling out onto it, the laughter replaced by your own sickened gurgle.
Darkness.
Murmuring an address to a cab driver alongside promises to control yourself. A response, indistinct, skeptical.
Thankfully, darkness.
You stumble into your house, the vignette clearer now. You are alone and the saliva in your mouth is running. You feel like you are positioned on the far side of a screen somewhere, watching as someone else careens through your doorway and drags yourself into your bathroom.
Somewhere along the way, you remember that youâre the one doing the dragging. You step back into yourself, and your senses are assaulted by the cloying stink of vomit on your breath and the nauseating spinning of the world around you.
You cough and then you retch. A glob of blood and bile splashes into the toilet bowl. You lick your lips, confused and uneasy. You donât have long to worry before your stomach convulses.
You fold inward as the sickening pulse ripples through you. It is as if your intestines have contorted into a fist to tighten around something slick and heavy in your core. The motion launches something into your gullet, and you start to choke on the intruder your body has chosen to reject.
Stinging tears well up in the corner of your eyes as your throat stretches and distends. Something hard and textured lurches up out of the darkness inside of you. Its progress is strained and arduous, and it is not long before the thing is stranded in your esophagus.
You canât breathe. You suck in air through your nose and it fails to go anywhere. Muscles tug and pull at the mass lodged in your throat, and you heave with all your strength as you plead for it to leave. The appeal is wordless, a half-formed thought bobbing on the troubled surface of your mind.
Black spots blossom in your vision as your thoughts dribble into a muddy slurry. Please is the only word capable of coalescing in the primordial sludge of your gray matter. Please.
Your jaw moves out of place with a painful pop. You donât see the thing as it slides out of your mouth, your eyes shut as they are against the acidic fluorescence of the lightbulb. But you can feel its coarse fibers interspersed with eggshell smoothness as it scrapes against the softness of your tongue on its way out.
Something long and ribbed trails the rest, tickling the back of your throat as it comes free.
You spend long moments draped over the toilet, blinking and gulping down shallow breaths. You are desperate for air but trying too hard to take it in hurts, so you settle for ragged and uneven inhalations that donât satiate the burning in your lungs.
Swallowing is just as painful, and when you do manage it, the bile and saliva are tinged with the coppery hint of blood. Your vision is squirming, quicksilver worms of light warping as your eyes refuse to focus on anything specific. The pounding in your skull matches the sickly hammering in your chest. The nausea seated deep in your gut implores you to void the poison still churning there, but you donât have the strength to expel anything else. Exhausted, you shut your eyes tighter and grasp at sleep.
You donât find it, your fatigue overpowered by the discomfort of a cheek pressed against cold porcelain and limbs folded beneath you like those of a discarded doll. After a long time spent in purgatory, you unfurl yourself and struggle to rise. As you stand with halting, jerking moments, your eyes settle on the thing in the bowl and you sink back to your knees, your mind misfiring as it attempts to stitch together the confused visual patchwork of the lifeless thing staring up at you.
It looks like a length of rope at first, its edges frayed, its fibers matted. Your eyes, still swirling with mercurial artifacts, take a long moment to process the rest. Next to fall into place are the four sets of scabrous claws, as pink and topographic as a tongue. Their color matches the limp tail bobbing in the murky water.
Not everything comes together. You spend long minutes attempting to decipher the riddle of smooth, brown material and gauzy tissue poking out of the thingâs back.
You blink once, then twice, trying to banish the vertigo haunting you. You focus your vision and nod to yourself, overtaken with a grim satisfaction in being right.
Yes, it is a pair of wings.
Other details drift into place as you strip out of your clothes and run the shower. Two sets of eyes, one nearer the bloodied snout, the other inset along the skull, each one a mosaic of black glass staring into the distance. Ribbed hairs studding what in any other animal would count as a ribcage. Whiskers white and thin as fishing wire bristling out along the thingâs entire length, concentrated around the mouth and the mandibles jutting out behind the rodent teeth.
You throw up more in the shower, relinquishing pieces of the thing shed during its ascent. These castoffs mingle with your blood and stomach acid, carried along toward the drain by the ceaseless march of running water.
You shut off the water and lower yourself to the floor, tucking your knees against your chest and pressing your forehead to the showerâs cool tile. In the morning you will need to deal with the mess you made and the thing festering in your toilet, but for now, you are carried off to the easiest sleep youâve found in months.