I’ve come to notice that when people talk about their frightening experiences, they always talk about that creeping sensation of being watched, or at the very least, of not being alone. That pressing fear of something lurking in the darkness just out of view, just behind you, the terror so thick you don’t even want to turn your head to look. I bet even now, the little hairs at the back of you neck are prickling, and you’re just that little bit more nervous. It’s just a thing that seems to be built into people, I guess. I bet it’s saved a lot of people’s lives.
I’ve lived alone for a while now. My apartment is the top floor of an old tenement building. It’s a pretty charming building, big-ass windows and a hallway with stained glass and stairs that look like they were ripped out of a Victorian school. I live behind a pair of brass-handled storm doors, and another door with a peephole and a knocker. The space I call my home is… not what most other people would consider homely. Most of my things are still in boxes, and what isn’t is strewn about the floor. I have to take baths instead of showers, because the shower drain spits up everything you put down the kitchen sink and emits an evil smell at regular intervals. There’s a hole in the wall next to the toilet in the bathroom, and when I go pee I imagine a long-fingered white hand will shoot out and grab my ankle. The floorboards are uneven, the high ceilings make everything echoey, and the person who lived here before painted the walls “fun” colours. I spent most of my time on the sofa under a blanket, reading shoujo manga or crying at musicals. I cry a lot. I figure it’s good for you. I don’t cry much at real life, so I have to cry at something, and if that something is a dramatic moment in Sailor Moon, then so be it. Not everybody cries at funerals.
I don’t get many visitors, and I like it that way. I’m anorexic, so the more I’m left to my own self-destructive devices, the happier I am. I’m not one of those “sees rolls of fat in the mirror but is actually a skeleton” anorexic you read about in stories designed to make you feel better about your love handles and stable mental health. I know what I am, it’s just that my standards for thin are different to everybody else’s. What you call “skinny” just isn’t good enough. Without interference, I can tank water and last on teaspoonfuls of frozen hot sauce to my heart’s content. By the way, I eat the hot sauce like a popsicle. It’s not good, but it’s not bad. Food swims circles in my stomach like butter-coloured goldfish. I weigh myself every time I eat anything, or think about eating anything, every time I go to the bathroom, and of course once in the morning and once right before I go to bed. Sometimes I eat too much and I get upset, which means I usually toss things around and scream for a bit. After a while, the baby from downstairs adds his wails to my own, and the dog from next door joins the hellish chorus. I’ll hear the guy from downstairs tentatively knocking the storm doors and asking me from outside if I’m okay, which is probably the whitest way possible to say “shut the fuck up”. I always tell him I’m fine, and he goes away. This repeats itself every few weeks.
As you can tell, nothing much exciting happens. I sit in my weird green living room alone. Friends don’t come over anymore because I don’t like people to see the mess I live in, but I don’t particularly want to clean it up either so this works best for everybody. I barely need to leave the house. My parents send me money as payment for staying comfortably out of their life, Amazon keeps my bookshelves well-stocked, and Tumblr fills the sticky moments inbetween where my brain is too empty to read and too busy echoing to sleep. I never imagined purgatory would have pistachio walls.
A lot of things happened in quick succession. Firstly, a mouse showed up. I came into the living room one day to resume my usual role as sofa scarecrow, and it was sitting on the fireplace. We looked at each other for a few seconds before it scurried away. I left out some food for it. It came back to get it, or at least I figured it did, because the food was gone. They say mice prefer chocolate to cheese. I didn’t have either, but it didn’t mind peanut butter. Mice weren’t a big deal to me like they would be to other people; what was it gonna do? Eat all the food I didn’t bother to buy? When I lay in bed, I could hear it scurrying about. Not long after the mouse and I first met, I got up one morning after an unusually quiet night to find it dead in the middle of the floor. Its little belly had split open, and what looked like a red slimy ball of flesh hung out, veined and trembling. I guessed the mass was a tumour and cleaned the mess away, though I was pretty grossed out. The tumour was pretty big, I was amazed it had fit inside the mouse in the first place. I was pretty sad; I’d come to like its company.
It wasn’t long after that I started having trouble sleeping. Floorboards in the house creaked. Somebody knocked my door late at night when I’d locked the storm doors, meaning there was no way in to the interior front door. For somebody to knock that door, they’d have to be locked in the small space between the two doors with no way in or out. I went and sat on the floor in the hallway and listened. It was definitely somebody knocking the door. I was too frightened to look through the peephole, or look up at the pane of glass above the door, so I went to bed. Nothing came of it, but I felt a little uneasy for a couple of days. One night I was sitting on the sofa, my attention dithering between a production of Guys and Dolls I’d seen so many times I knew the choreography by heart, and my battered copy of The Fifth Elephant. I glanced up from my book to check out the show, and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window. I paused to look at it, and noticed something else; a white face hovering in the doorway, gazing in, inhuman. The door was slightly closed so I couldn’t see the hallway from the sofa, but I could see the reflection. I stared for a long while, and eventually the face melted into the darkness. That night, I just slept on the sofa. It’s easy to write things off when you don’t eat; people always say lack of food causes hallucinations, at some point you just figure it’s true. Another night, I woke up in the middle of the night to a white, stilt-legged figure spider-crouched in the corner of the ceiling in my bedroom. I gazed at me, and I gazed back. Eventually, the darkness seemed to swallow it up, and I figured it was sleep paralysis. The white shape became almost a shadow to me; I glimpsed it here and there as I moved between rooms, when I rolled over in bed, in the reflection of my windows or mirror.
As a testament to just how fucked my priorities are, I only really got worried after the bloating started. It wasn’t much at first, enough for me to write it off as water weight, but after only a couple of weeks, it was noticeable even through my baggiest sweaters. I tried to ignore it, ashamed of the strange new roundness, torn between fear of what this was and fear of going to the doctor. My weight didn’t change much, not at first. It wasn’t until one day after maybe a couple of months of ignoring my swollen stomach that I woke up and felt heavy. I looked at myself in the mirror, appalled. I knew this was not fat; my limbs were as they always were. Fat didn’t distend one’s belly in this way. If I wasn’t 100% certain of the fact I hadn’t seen a real person in months and fairly sure my reproductive system was not in working order, I would have thought I was pregnant. My body looked stupid; I have arms you’d expect to find cradling religious artefacts in an ancient grave somewhere. They looked bizarrely skeletal against the turgid swell of a mother’s form that was now my body. I wept.
Frightened, I stayed in bed and tried to sleep, cradled in the droning sound of the refrigerator leaking out of the kitchen and the occasional clattering of the boiler. Sometimes there was scratching at my bedroom door or my ceiling, but I just didn’t bother to look. The ceilings were high enough that I’d have to look up to see the source of the noise, and I just didn’t have the energy. I didn’t eat or drink anything for a few days until maddening thirst drove me to drag myself out of bed and drink a glass of water. I’m a pro at ignoring my problems. I don’t answer Facebook messages. I ignore phonecalls. I just wait for things to leave me alone, and eventually they do. I figured this was no different. I weighed in heavier than I had been in years, and the misery and shame of that alone was enough to confine me to my bed.
It took a few days, but eventually the pain started. I woke up feverish, the sheets sticking to my thighs with blood. The base of my spine shuddered with a strange pain that seemed to radiate outward and spread through my pelvis. I felt as though I might be sick. It felt as though there was something inside me rapidly contracting and then spreading out, pushing my flesh out and drawing it in tight again. I must have fainted; I have no idea how long I lay there, fading in and out of consciousness, but eventually the pain stopped and I felt a slithering sensation as something slipped out of me. I didn’t want to look, but I did anyway. A foetus, developed enough to have features, lay in a knotted mass on my bed. It wasn’t human though. Too many legs. It wasn’t alive either. My bed looked like somebody had gutted a pig in it. In a state of nauseous shock, I went to the bathroom, drew a bath and sat in the tub, feeling as though all my insides had fallen out. Once the water was cold enough to force me to get out, I went to deal with the mess in my bedroom, numbly scooping up the mound of offal-like flesh and placenta on an old newspaper. Unsure of what to do, I took it to the bathroom with the intent to flush it down the toilet. I stared down into the white toilet bowl and started to cry; whatever it was, I couldn’t flush it. I left it by the hole in the wall and hoped for the best. When I closed the door behind me, I heard a great sobbing roar and hurried away, putting my sheets in the washing machine and pretending nothing had happened. I’m good at pretending everything is fine; I could move around enough to tidy up a little and make myself a cup of tea, and that was good enough for me. When I peeked into the bathroom later, the bloody heap was gone.
I never saw the white face again. I guess it figured I didn’t eat enough to sustain life after I miscarried whatever it was it planted inside me. Either way, I asked my parents if I could move back in. They sounded happy to have me. I don’t look forward to living with other people again, but people are preferable to whatever I was living with before. You know, the whole time I never felt as though I was being watched. I never felt like there was anything else there. I never felt as though I was anything other than completely alone. Not once. For all the glimpses of the creature I had, they were initially so inconsequential I wrote them off as imaginary. I guess our instincts, or at least my instincts, aren’t as good as we think they are. People tell you to trust your gut, but if your gut hasn’t a clue, then you’re not much better off. I’m just glad I went back to my old weight after it was gone.
The other day, I was heading out to catch the train to my parents’ place and talk to them about moving back in when I met the guy from downstairs in the hallway. He asked how I was doing in that way people do where they only ask because they wanna tell you how they’re doing. He told me his wife was pregnant again, and it had to be twins because there was no other explanation for how she was so big so early. His kid has started having bad dreams, though. I didn’t say anything. I had nothing to say.
Submitted May 02, 2016 at 07:44AM by box-5 http://ift.tt/1TEHdFJ nosleep
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