I Wish... - A Story

I recently got into this funny habit of listening to creepypasta readings while I work. It makes the whole office experience a tiny bit less dull.

Quite a juvenile form of entertainment, I admit. After all, I’m literally a couple of years away from starting my fourth decade. I believe I'm slightly overcompensating for a rather lousy childhood.

True, people have been using this excuse to justify all sorts of fetishes ever since the dawn of psychoanalysis, but in this case the causality is straightforward, with no uncanny sexually-charged complications. Probably because I neither have a penis, nor envy people who have one.

I do, however, own an enviable collection of anxiety disorders whose seeds were carefully sown during my formative years. I was barely allowed to read Goosebumps as a kid, and never dared to watch a single episode of the ‘X Files’. Hell, my parents didn’t let me watch Buffy on account of “it has vampires and it will scare you.” I was sixteen at the time.

Maybe my parents were right to be a tad overprotective, considering the fact that mental stability has never been my forte. But this bears no relevance whatsoever to the events about to unfold. The point is, I have quite a lot of lost time to make up for.

Plus, there’s nothing as therapeutic for a GAD gal as regular ingestion of thinly diluted anxiety in carefully measured doses. There’s something irresistible about knowing that for once Fear is your bitch, instead of the other way around. The little bastard’s muffled screams behind the ball gag are exhilaratingly tantalizing.

At times, I even wish these things were a tad scarier. Surely, the madness-induced self-mutilation stories may be somewhat unsettling. And I do make a point of avoiding the ones that involve animal cruelty. Even in its fictional form, the topic is painful and infuriating to me. There are more than enough humans out there for homicidal psychos, supernatural or otherwise, to harvest. I can offer a dozen or so particularly good harvestee options at any given moment, and that’s from among the ones I’ve personally met alone.

For the record, I’d like to point out I have neither the skills nor the inclination to ever commit murder. I guess I’m just not the type, lousy childhood notwithstanding.

I am, however, very much the type to enjoy a good serial killer story. If only to give vent to my own violent urges.

Therefore, barring aforementioned exceptions, this new infatuation with creepypasta is for the most part a pleasant distraction. I’m particularly amused by the ones where the narrator is a creepypasta fan himself, warning the listeners against the grim consequences of taking this deceptively harmless seeming hobby too far. Some of the skeptic-to-believer transformations are outright hysterical.   

Just the other day I listened to one about a guy who keeps seeing bloody clowns from the corner of his eye after listening to a weird podcast he stumbled upon. Something about a kid who goes on a clown murder spree after her older brother tells her clowns are child-eating monsters in disguise. The guy claims every single person who listens to said podcast starts getting these clown visions. They’re coming nearer and getting sharper, until one day you see them move. And that’s when you’re really screwed.

I roll my eyes, only to meet a chalky white face with bloody red irises and a big painted leer, full of pointy piranha teeth. I smile back. I’ve named him Torso, after a friendly clown from another creepypasta. Hey, as far as I know, there is no law against decorating the walls of your cubicle with cheap Halloween knickknacks. The clown's eyes twinkle in silent agreement. Some days, Torso’s is the only face I don’t want to punch.

I nearly scream when another face appears by his side. A pair of watery blue holes lost in a pink webwork of wrinkles. The wrinkle blob smiles at me, so cheerful I could gauge its eyes out.

“Oh, hi,” it half sighs, half whizzes.

So much for giving the office kitchen a wide berth to avoid the obnoxiously chatty cleaning lady. Turns out it’s not below her to seek me out at my very cubicle.

I paste on a somewhat pained grin, trying to make it as different as possible from Torso’s. It’s quite an effort.

“Dear,” she proceeds with a thick Eastern European accent. Romanian, as far as I can tell. “Dear, what is mean word approve?”

I check my jacket for a label reading “English-Romanian Dictionary.” There is none. There’s nothing on my desk with which I could bash her brains in, either. There’s my mug, of course, but I like this one. I’d never let it get in harm’s way. Mugs this big aren’t easy to come by. This one can effortlessly hold a pitcher-full of coffee. Of course, there isn’t much point in it sparing me an extra visit to the kitchen if the blabbermouth hag can just as well reach me at my citadel. I’m seriously contemplating a crocodile filled ditch around my cubicle. And maybe some crenelated battlements along the partitions. Complete with shooting gaps and cannons.

Word approve is mean fuck off, I want to tell her. But I don’t. I wasn’t raised this way. I've always been taught to treat the elderly with respect. So instead of telling the old cunt to go fuck herself, as I damn well should have done, I embark on the arduous task of teaching the English language to the deaf and dumb. I feel like freaking Anne Sullivan. It’s like explaining the term autoerotic asphyxiation to a three-year-old, albeit less amusing.

“To approve is to accept or allow something, to say it’s OK...”

“Huh? what…?” Holly mother of Fuck.

“To say it’s OK,” I almost shout. The guy from the cubicle across the aisle stops typing and opts for staring at me, instead. Douche. I think his name is Ron, or Rob, or something of the sort. And he’s a major sleazebag. More hair product than hair, patent leather shoes and what seems like a closetful of light-colored sports coats.

I try to avoid the prick’s little Schadenfreude-filled eyes, only to find the round watery ones fixed on me with the muddled expression of an Alzheimer’s-stricken goat.   

“What…? OK?” Alzheimer-goat bleats.

“... to say that something is OK, to agree with it or to say it’s good enough…”

“Approve is mean OK?”

“Yes,” I hiss through painfully clenched teeth. “Approve is mean OK.”

Hair-product-douche is sniggering into a carefully manicured paw.

I’d give up coffee for a whole week to see the two of them die horribly. It doesn’t even have to be slow. Just painful.

Goat-eyes is saying something else, but I already have my headphones back on and my eyes superglued to the screen. I may be a nice person, but even nice people have their limits.  Mine have been long since surpassed.

Headphones still on, I wish her a good day, not bothering to check if my transmission was received on the other end.

From the corner of my eye, I see her backing off. Not because she got the hint, heaven forbid, but because talking at me when I make not so much as a sympathetic nod in reply is just not all that enjoyable. Well, who said I was any fun?

As she walks away, something about her shadow seems slightly off, though. Like it’s got too many legs or something. As if she was not beastly enough without the tricks of my overzealous imagination. I give Torso a playful little wink.

A moment later my attention is entirely preoccupied with bloody clowns and the eternal existential dilemma of what to have for lunch. The semi-responsible adult in me meekly points out the nutritional inferiority of vending machine belly stuffers, assuming the rest of me would give the tiniest fraction of a fuck. The rest of me doesn’t, and my lunch comes in a load of colorful wrappings. Some of them shamelessly display the word “Hostess,” with a little red heart elegantly printed in lieu of the more accurately descriptive skull and bones.

After lunch, I try to look up one creepypasta I’m particularly fond of. It’s about these little gremlin-like creatures that feed on people’s wishes. Once you find out about them, they start stalking you, listening to your every wish and making sure to grant it, usually in some twisted, violent way.

I don’t remember much of the details. After all, I’ve listened to dozens of these stories since. But I do recall enjoying it, and don’t mind a replay. I’m fairly certain the story’s title was “Lurkers.”

However, now that I try to look it up a second time, it’s nowhere to be found. I check my YouTube history, and it’s just not there. There is no deleted video icon to mark its place, either.

I try to find another version of the video, to no avail. It’s as if the thing never existed. I’ve made a note of the author’s name when I first listened to the story, hoping to find more of her work later. I look it up in my little notepad. I like to write my memos in longhand when possible. It feels safer, somehow. Here it is: Lauren C. Dalton.  

I type the name into the search box and hit the little magnifying glass. Nothing. I drop the middle initial. Still nothing.

The irrelevant videos offered instead scream of an entire pantheon of Internet gods to appease. I make a mental note to sacrifice a virgin later in the day. These are rather hard to come by nowadays, though. They rarely leave their parents’ protective wing before they lose their virginity anymore. The hormones and whatnot start them getting horny at ten. Maybe I’ll try an orphanage. Hoping the toddlers there still have some innocence left to them.

With a shrug and a sigh, I go back to my playlist. The rest of the afternoon yields a couple of living dolls, an alien abduction and, the highlight of my day, a haunted slaughterhouse. I think I should note these under Accomplishments in my next mid-year review. I give Lauren Dalton another shot, just for the hell of it, adding an “e” to her surname in case she might be one of them weird name spellers. Nope. Oh well, who spells their surname “Daltone,” anyway?

Finally, after a hard day’s work, I go home to have a random TV dinner and watch ‘American Horror Story’ with twenty pounds of cat on my lap. Now that’s what I call living the good life.

Try as I may, there is one time of the day when I absolutely cannot avoid the office kitchen. Blabbermouth hag or no blabbermouth hag, I need my morning coffee. Without a mugful of liquid energy, even the stale instant stuff they try to pass here as coffee, no amount of creepypasta can persuade me to start typing away at my horror-stacks of eye-straining, mind-numbing, soul-smothering work. If Sisyphus was a dungbeetle, that’s what his days would have looked like. Coffee turns the pile of dung back into a plain old rock. The result is just as onerous, but it doesn’t stink as much.

The territory is clear when I drag my weary self in. I take a position by the counter and hit the heating button on the water dispenser. The only way this fecal brew is even marginally palatable is when it’s boiling hot. You need to burn your tongue senseless to tolerate its moldy undertaste. The things one is forced to put in one’s mouth to make a living nowadays.

I hear footfalls behind me but don’t dare to turn around. I stare at the coffee jar in my hand, deliberately reading and re-reading the short ingredient list. “100% fresh-ground coffee,” it lies. The footsteps are inside the kitchen now. I start humming to myself some whacky little tune I picked up from that Torso story, the one titled “He Does Birthdays”, by some dude who calls himself Slimebeast.

Like in Hitchcock's famous shower scene, I can almost feel her getting nearer and nearer. The humming is my translucent shower curtain.

“Torso, Torso, Torso the clown,” I chant under my breath as the footsteps stop, a mere five feet away from me.

“Oh, hi, dear.”

I nod, without turning my head, to acknowledge the gesture without commending it. I hold on to my chant as one holds on to a frail protective spell in the face of timeless, nameless sorcery of pure evil.

The blabber faucet is turned on with a mental screech and my whispered mantra can barely hold the chatter torrent at bay.

“What you say about this, dear?”

“... Torso the clown. Torso, Torso, Torso the clown…”

“Huh? What you say?...”

“Torso, Torso… hm…? What…?”

I am almost grateful that one does not have to act sane when there are no sentient beings around. At any rate, if it weren’t for dumb chatty fucks like Mrs. Blabberhag I probably wouldn’t be losing it in the first place, now, would I?

Yet, sentient or otherwise, I can feel her watery dementia pits burning holes in my back. She’s just like the old man in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ except she’s got two of them devil-peepers. My Rainman routine seems to make no impression on her whatsoever. I start seriously considering banging my head against the counter a few times, just to fade her verbal diarrhea back into static, when, miracle of miracles, the glowing red dot on the water dispenser stops blinking and turns to a solid warm light. It’s the blissful shine of redemption, and a choir of angels bursts into a mellifluous Hallelujah in my noise-weary ears.

Keeping my gaze low, I pour boiling water over the dark grains and carefully edge towards the fridge for milk. My eyes remain fixed on the murky liquid as I add in some milk, and blindly put the carton back in the fridge.

Mission accomplished, I’m ready to leave hostile territory and return to camp. It’s almost too easy, really. Suspiciously so. I should have known better.

Just as I start turning towards the hall, a sudden movement catches my eye. It flickers for just a second, literally gone in the blink of an eye, but I can swear something moved in the shadows behind the fridge. I try to make out its contours in the gloom, but upon a second glance there’s nothing there.

In my momentary perplexity I raise my gaze, and immediately regret it. Eye contact is established. I’m doomed. No magic spells can help me now. Not even the Avada Kedavra, and I swear I tried. In fact, it was the first one I’ve reached for.

On the upside, I forget all about the thing behind the fridge.

“... right, yes dear?”

“...I...yeah, sure.”

“What?”

“Yes!” I’d rather have the fridge critter.

“And I also put them in my tea. The… what you call? Not orange…”

“Tangerines?”

“Huh? What you say?”

Now could be a nice time for her to drop dead. I’m even willing to make it painless at this point. So long as it’s quick.

“And the... ?“ she makes a peeling motion with her hands.      

“The peel?”

“What…? Yes. Yes, the peel. The peel I do on my skin like this. You do too, yes? Good for what you have on your face,” she points. “Like this not pretty.”

Look who’s talking.

“Yeah… I really need to get back to work now…”

“Huh...? What…?”

“Have a nice day.” And I really hope it’s your last.

I shudder at the thought of what I might have heard had I been conscious for the rest of the conversation.

Back in my citadel, I greet Torso with a heartfelt smile, grit my teeth at Rob-or-Ron with equally heartfelt contempt and plug my brain into the almighty machine.  

“Hey, you’re not still mad at me for yesterday, are you, sweetheart?” Roborron’s buoyant basso booms from behind his computer screen. “I mean, we’re all good, right? No harm in a little workplace humor, now, is there?”

Oh, there’d be plenty of harm if it were up to me. I give out a noncommittal grunt in reply and pull on my headphones.

Before I so much as click Play, there’s a loud squeal and an explosive bang from across the aisle. I look up only to catch a glimpse of greyish motion skittering away at floor level.

Slowly resurfacing on a wave of profanities unfit to be typed by gentle feminine fingers- even ones adorned with flaking black nail polish and a lattice of ugly papercuts- Roborron scrambles to his feet to reappear behind his desk. Huffing and puffing, his red physiognomy bloated with rage, he hisses something about damn cheap office chairs and plastic wheels.

I don’t even bother to hide my delight. Dodging the daggers darting from his eyes, I give out a disarming shrug.

“Hey, No harm in a little workplace humor, right?”

Maybe I can be a fun person after all. I almost start liking this day.

I’m so grateful for the little spectacle, I spend the entire morning doing pretty much what I’m paid for. To increase productivity, I even shut down my creepypasta playlist and headbang happily to motivational Viking metal instead. Between sips of caffeinated mud and fits of sit-down pogoing, I manage to proofread ten whole pages of dull marketing jargon before noon.

Robhisface is scowling at me the entire time, and I keep sending him blissful idiotic grins. It’s like some sort of a marvelous bizarro world where I get to be the alpha douche.  All the other douches can only hope to be me one day, meanwhile humbly grooming my royal posterior with obsequiously extended tongues.

The feeling of self-worth is so deliciously alien, so overwhelmingly elating, I decide to take myself out for lunch. I’m almost worried my jerky highness may decline the invitation. My highness, however, accepts it with a graceful nod.

Feeling lucky, I hit the internet once again in search for Lauren C. Dalton. I know what they say about people who keep typing in the same search query expecting to find different results, but today feels like a day when anything could happen. Unfortunately, reincarnation of mysteriously disappeared authors is not on today’s menu. I must admit, the whole thing is becoming a bit of an obsession. But Tiamat knows I’ve had worse.

Later that afternoon I make my way back to the office, happily stuffed with a Happy Meal. I’m not a big fan of the new My Little Pony design, but I take the toy with me anyway to put on my desk. It’s a fabulous affair of pink and lilac, and though nowhere as cute and chubby as the original ones, I’m quite content with my newest possession. Well, if I had any concerns whatsoever about appearing juvenile, I guess I wouldn’t be gobbling McGreasebombs for lunch in the first place.

And that’s one of the rare good days when I bother to have any lunch at all. More often than not, I simply forget one can hardly live on coffee and skittles. A typical balanced meal for me is one gummy bear of each color. That’s probably why I’m two parts magenta-dyed hair, one part combat boots. I’ve been told there’s some skin and bones in between, but so far I’ve only managed to catch an occasional glimpse of these components in the shower. And by the time I get to the shower in the evening I’m usually so tired I’m tripping balls anyway.

My thoughts are interrupted by a sharp, ear-busting whistle from above. It pierces my bubble gum balloon of infantile joy like a rusty nail. I look up to meet a grin so glittery and self satisfied, it can easily give Roborron a run for his money. It’s smoothly smeared over a healthy tan blot above a thick, sinewy neck. The whole beefsteak leers at me from atop a window cleaner platform hanging off a nearby building, on second floor level.

I give him a glare that would make a wiser man feel uneasy at best. He’s not a wiser man.

“Hey, give us a little smile, pussycat! God knows you don’t have the tits to afford such an ugly sourface.”

“Eat shit and die, you fucking dick!” I yell back with such rage I can barely recognize my own voice. I’m capable of harboring quite a lot of hatred, but I can hardly recall ever having hated a single humanoid cockroach at a single moment with this much heat. Every fiber in my body is screaming for vengeance. Between the red flashes of hyper-concentrated wrath, I catch a movement ascending one of the platform’s cables. I don’t bother to give it a second thought, let alone a second glance. The rest of the journey back to the office is a blurry anger rush. I don’t think my feet even touch the ground.

By the time I get to my desk I’m an emotional trainwreck, a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. I almost want to be provoked, to get as much as half an excuse to hit someone like a ton of bricks. Preferably in the face, but other sensitive areas will do just as well.

It’s probably for the best that Blabberhag is nowhere to be seen and Roborron is still skulking in his cubicle. The last thing I need today is a garnish of regret on top of the big fat anger cake I’m struggling not to choke on. However, at the moment the very prospect of remorse seems too remote and immaterial to give a rabid rat’s ass about.

This silence I’ve been longing for my entire adult life is suddenly almost as oppressive as the insectile chirping of humanity.

It takes a long, loud playlist-full of the most brutal black metal I can gather to wash the window-ape’s asinine laughter out of my ears. And even then, a whole Deicide-, Venom- and Cannibal Corpse-filled hour later, I can still hear its echo when I get up for my fifth coffee refill.

It’s not till I get home in the evening that I even realize I haven’t seen Blabberhag since this morning. Well, I shrug, one can only count one’s blessings. I still feel like crushing something, so supper is a bowl of dry cereal.

Snickerdoodle stares at me from her own bowl, her green eyes reproaching me for stealing her kibbles. I’m pretty sure my Lucky Charmes aren’t half as nutritious as her Friskies, but the crunching sound is just as gratifying. Some of the pieces even seem to have faces, complete with bright, toothy grins.  

“Mommy is losing it,” I whisper confidentially. She rolls her eyes at me, as if to say, well, that’s one tardy epiphany...

For dessert I have a glass of mediocre red wine and some dumb action flick with an orgasmic pyrotechnics display for a script. Some of it seeps through into my dreams that night, and I sleep rather well. Between explosions I get flickering visions of little vaguely anthropomorphic beings crouching in the shadows. There one moment, gone the next, they remind me of the gravelings in ‘Dead Like Me,’ albeit smaller and less thorny.

The final explosion turns out to be my bloody alarm clock, and I almost regret not getting killed in one of the earlier ones. I drop the “almost” when a feline-shaped furry anvil comes crashing on my chest.  

However, it’s what happens next that knocks every last bit of sleepiness right out of me. Granted, the fluffy little demon has been plotting my murder since the very day I brought her into my house as a tiny Unidentified Furry Orb. It’s her sacred duty as a cat. But never in her short lazy life have I heard my whiskered pride and joy hiss at anyone. Until this very moment.

Trying hard not to panic, I wonder whether she still resents me last evening’s stolen kibbles. I’m somewhat relieved to find out it’s not me she’s hissing at. But as is the case with most positive emotions, my relief is short-lived. I follow her gaze towards the window and freeze. There is a face there. My sight is crappy to say the least, and the window is accross the room from my bed, but even from this distance I can tell the face isn’t human. By the time I put my glasses on, the face is gone.

I tell myself not to be an idiot. After all, I live on the seventh floor. And with no glasses on, blinded by the early morning sun, I could have seen anything. It probably was a pigeon. I hate the nasty things. However, I can’t seem to shrug off the unpleasant feeling of being watched.

I decide to use this as an excuse to put a splash of brandy in my coffee. And just so she doesn’t feel left out, I give Snickerdoodle a can of salmon for breakfast. One can’t hiss all that well with a mouth full of salmon. She seems pleased enough with my offering, but displays no signs of excess enthusiasm. Not that I can blame her. The little brat eats much better than I do. If it weren’t for her neat tux-patterned coat, she could be easily mistaken for a slightly overweight mountain lion. And it’s not all fat and fur, either. I’ve never thought female cats could even get so robust. It’s like someone’s shooting her up with steroids behind my back.

The morning excitement almost forgotten, I pull on a checkered skirt and an old leather jacket over a Batman T-shirt, stick my brightly stockinged feet into a pair of battered combat boots and head out for yet another rendez-vous with harsh reality. When you’re armed with a mug of spiked coffee, it may even turn out half manageable, I lie to myself, locking my apartment door behind me.  

I’ve never been the type to care much for current affairs, but for some reason the newsstand draws my attention this morning. “Tragedy in Midtown,” yells out the local morning paper in big red letters. “Window Cleaner Falls Into Manhole, Dies En Route to Hospital.” The face in the picture is all too familiar. I’m not sure whether to laugh or to cry, so I opt for neither. I guess even a dick like Mr. Window Ape didn’t deserve to die like that, knowing that the last thing he’s done was plunging headfirst into a pool of human waste. But I can hardly muster any sympathy.  Hell, I can barely muster enough will power to prevent myself from skipping the rest of the way like a five year old on amphetamine.

I’m slightly disappointed to see that Roborron got his good cheer back on, but I get another Blabberhag-free day as a consolation prize. I accept it with humble gratitude and repay Fate with half a day’s worth of scrupulous work.

I manage to simultaneously paint my fingernails emerald green, learn five new German words, and proofread three contracts twice the length of ‘War and Peace.’  I even order salad for lunch. There’s cilantro in the dressing, so I can’t actually eat it, but good intentions must count for something.

Apparently, they do. When I next land on YouTube’s home page, the first item in the recommended content section is “Lurkers.” The author’s name is Louise C. Dawson. Reprimanding myself for my careless note taking, I strike out the name “Lauren C. Dalton” and add the correct name underneath.

I load up on relatively fresh coffee and comfortably settle back in my chair for story time. The narrator’s voice is so soothing, at first I can hardly see how the story could have anything to do with the horror genre. But as the reading proceeds, the voice is gradually climbing  in pitch and wavering in clarity. There is some weird static in the background that wasn’t there before. Over the static, one can hear a faint rainfall soundtrack, with distant thunder. The sound is getting distorted and new voices start sneaking in: tiny whispers and squeaky scratching sounds that seem to be coming from no direction at all and from all directions at once, at the same time.  

Somehow, it’s as hypnotic as it is disconcerting, and my head is swooning with pleasure even as I nervously look around to make absolutely sure the voices aren’t coming from inside the room as well as from my headphones. I suddenly realize it was not the scare factor that drew me to this story in the first place, but rather the pure ASMR experience. Even the whistling static noises somehow fit in perfectly, if not quite harmoniously. The whole thing just sounds… right. I have no other word for it. I seriously hope my facial expression doesn’t give some curious co-worker any wrong ideas. Like, for example,  that I’m stowing a particularly tongue-agile gigolo under my desk. I’m not even sure my eyes get quite as glazed over when I am involved in actual liaisons with orally gifted gentlemen. You know, poetry readings.  

Poetry readings aside, this kind of story telling is pretty much the best thing a guy can do with his mouth. His voice is not uncommonly deep, nor is it the husky, rumbling, blues singer growl. But it has some vibrating quality to it that makes my scalp tingle. It’s not even about sexual pleasure. The sensation is more primal, more basic. Like when you gently move your fingers up the inside of your arm or when, as a child, you realize dusters and makeup brushes can be put to a much better use if you just slide them over your neck.

The accompanying visuals are a bit of a turn-off, but not all that bad. Nothing gory or disturbing, just foggy images of greyish creatures, barely discernible from the surrounding gloom. There are raindrops sliding down the screen and what looks like dark branches moving in the background. The steady movement makes me even drowsier. At this point, I’m hardly even paying attention to the plot.

Next thing I know, my head is tilted back all the way to my chair’s backrest and slightly to the side. My eyes are shut most of the way and there’s a thin stream of drool running down the corner of my mouth. The reading over now, my headphones are silent.

Startled and mortified by my awkward position, I carefully check my surroundings for potential witnesses.

Roborron is at his desk, but I can only see the top of his greasy head peeping from behind his screen. For all I know, he, too, is enjoying a little impromptu siesta. The corridor is empty, and the only sounds I can hear are the steady buzzing of roughly twoscore computers and the clicking of keyboards. From farther up the hall, the copying machine emits a weary groan as it spews out another section of dead rainforest. Looks like my little indiscretion has gone unnoticed.  

The clock on my monitor is for once in my favor, as well. In an hour the work day will be over and I can go back to my life once again. It may consist mostly of reading, TV binge-watching and talking to Snickerdoodle, but it’s a life nonetheless. And it’s mine to do as I please with.

Lazily toying with a short promotional text ordered by some family spa and resort chain (“...  Take a rest from your cares and let us take care of the rest!” it hollers with cretinous joy), I can almost feel the warmth of the soapy water in my bath. I haven’t had lunch, and my stomach is rumbling at the thought of carb-packed monosodium glutamate neatly packaged in paper delivery boxes.

Finally, when the hazard of falling back asleep seems imminent, I give up on productivity and start gathering my things. Think of it as an early release for good behavior.

Out of habit, I return to the open YouTube tab to shut it down before I go home. The tab’s title gives me a start. “Lurkers - Lauren C. Dalton,” it says. I check my notepad. the name “Lauren C. Dalton” is still there, with a single line drawn through it. Underneath, in the same handwriting- my unmistakable imitation of Gothic calligraphy-  it says “Louise C. Dawson.”

I’m starting to develop a major headache. I guess I could use a good night’s sleep. And starting tomorrow I’m cutting down on caffeine. The coffee here is too bad to justify what it does to my brain.

Taking this nonsense as my cue, I grab my bag and run for dear life. Rushing through the corridor, I almost run into Jerry, our HR manager. He’s showing a young man I’ve never seen before around the office.

“Have a nice evening,” Jerry smiles at me. “By the way, have you met Joe? He’ll be our new office cleaner.”

Joe answers my greeting with a warm smile that reaches all the way to his enormous green eyes. There’s a little dimple on his chin that gives me all sorts of ideas.

A part of me wonders what happened to Blabberhag. The rest is too busy thanking my lucky stars. Life tends to be a tad stingy with pleasant surprises, so one would be wise to take what one can get.

Snickerdoodle has her own special surprise waiting for me at home. In my absence, the puffy-tailed beast has dismembered some sort of lizard. She comes to greet me with a small greenish-grey bloody limb in her teeth. It’s too mangled to properly place anatomically. In fact, it looks quite a lot like a miniature human arm. But that’s probably just wishful thinking.

‘Doodle is deeply offended when her willingness to share goes unappreciated, but I can by no means condone such acts of brutality under my roof. True, I’m not much of a reptile lover, but murder is murder. And murder in your own home never ends well.

The hot bath I’ve been fantasizing about all day long is deferred until after I’m done washing off lizard-gore from the carpet. By then I’m no longer hungry, so dinner is postponed indeterminately.

I try to give ‘Doodle some tuna, hoping she’d talk to me again, but she snubs me all the same. I can see why she’s not very hungry, though. After all, there was only one limb left of the lizard by the time I got home.

“Fine, be like that!” I tell the stupid animal. “I’m not the one who couldn’t resist the urge to turn the apartment into a CSI episode.”

She turns her butt on me, sniffing at the tuna.

“Lizard eater!” I snap. No reply. “Fatass fluff-face!” She makes a disdainful puffing sound and walks away. Five minutes later, she’s fast asleep on my pillow. I decide to follow her example.  

My dreams are filled with little lizard-people prowling in the fog. Their yellow reptilian eyes flicker like ambers in the dark as they turn to gnash their needle-sharp teeth at me and crawl back into the fog.

I think the cat can see them too. She’s meowing angrily in her sleep, lashing at the air with her paws. I wake up with a start when she nearly manages to claw out my eye. Accidentally, for once.   

Between my own weird dreams and Snickerdoodle’s sleep-hunting, I don’t think I’ve managed to get half the rest I needed when the alarm clock tells me my free out of jail card is about to expire. ‘Doodle doesn’t seem all that well rested either. But then again, she’s a cat. They always look one step away from falling back asleep.

Unless they have a sudden urge to attack the door, which Snicker decides to do while I’m splashing some coffee into my brain. I still can’t tell if she’s bipolar, has multiple personalities, or is merely prone to an occasional demonic possession. But one moment she’s lethargically licking her butt, and the next she’s clawing at the apartment door as if the hallway is swarming with heavily armed rats yelling insults about her mother.  

I take a look through the peephole, just in case. Just as I’ve expected, there’s nothing there. ‘Doodle looks up at me, as if awaiting my verdict on the matter. “The committee has established you’re batshit,” I inform her. Her reply sounds quite a lot like “fuck you.”

I give her a catnip snack, just in case she’s not crazy enough, and go off to brush my teeth. Then I throw an apple into my bag, so that the single vitamin I might have hiding somewhere in my bloodstream has a friend or two to play with, and head for the door.

Realizing my near wardrobe malfunction in the nick of time, I go back to the bedroom for a pair of slacks. Once I’m mostly decent, I shoo ‘Doodle away from the door so I can get out. I can still hear her cursing at me while I’m locking the door behind me.

The floor in the hallway has just been washed, and it’s still wet. Moving away towards the stairwell, there’s a trail of small muddy footprints. One of my idiot neighbors has probably let their brat run barefooted in the hallway. And it was one butt-ugly brat, too.The footprints are somewhat deformed, bizarrely elongated, with the big thumb growing sideways like an ape’s.

I spend most of the elevator ride wondering why infanticide is still widely frowned upon. Something to do with foolish sentimentality, I suppose.

I take in a deep breath and step out onto the sunny sidewalk. Only to be nearly killed by a cyclist. These environmentally disturbed green smoothie slurping mega fucks have been conspiring my demise ever since the trend set in. The hippie scumbag smiles semi-apologetically in my general direction and pedals on.

“Look where you’re going, you tree-hugging piece of organic waste!” I yell at his retreating tightly spandexed ass.  “I applaud the first driver who’ll smash into you! That would be the one helping of vegan pancakes I actually might enjoy!”

By the time I’m done simmering and proceed into the wondering-what-the-hell-has-gotten- into-me stage, spandex ass gets to the intersection. Without slowing down, he gets right off the curb and into traffic. Before I manage to so much as gasp, a tanker truck goes by at full speed and proves once and for all the damaging effects of healthy living.

I stifle a scream and try hard not to look at what’s left of the bike and its unfortunate rider. My legs turn into Jell-O and I simply sit down right there on the sidewalk. I’m shaking so hard I can’t even wipe at the mascara running down my face. The street is spinning before my eyes. My glasses are sweating tremendously, and so am I.

When the emergency crews start piling up I force myself up to my feet. I can do without the extra attention of concerned paramedics. Repeatedly telling myself I’ll be alright, I take a couple of staggering steps back towards my building. As an afterthought, I pause to throw up the breakfast I didn’t have.

Back in my apartment, I take a long cold shower and call in sick. I spend the rest of the day crying and sleeping alternately. This time I can see the faces in the gloom with appalling clarity. Little bloody fingers are tearing at the innards of what looks like a human carcass, shoving pieces of torn flesh into smirking mouths, yellow eyes winking with pleasure.

I’m woken up by a combination of my own hunger and Snicker’s. It’s dark outside, and I can hear the beginnings of a light drizzle. My puffy eyes sting and I have a headache fit to split my skull in half. I pop three aspirins with a long drink of cold water and fill Snicker’s food and water bowls.    

Having ordered pizza with three different types of meat, I grab a couple of beers from the fridge and settle down for four blissful hours of ‘Gone With the Wind.’

Four hours later I’m delightfully high on carbs, fat and beer, and almost as delightfully teary eyed, this time for all the right reasons. Not even bothering with the pizza box or the empty bottles, I drag myself back to bad and fall asleep at once. No dreams whatsoever this time around. Not even about Rhett Butler.

I’ve overslept, big time. But I feel so well-rested it was almost worth it. To ‘Doodle’s dismay I even sing a little song in the shower. It takes all the speed and agility I can muster to thwart her attempt at drowning her sorrow in toilet water.

“Like your mewling sounds any better than that, you churlish little beast,” I grumble carrying  the protesting fluffball out of the bathroom. “Also, you’re fat.” It’s like carrying a small ill-tempered hippo. If hippos tried to flay you alive, that is.

I let go of her on the living room carpet, not before she manages to slap me on the nose. She also says something unpleasant about my family, that doesn’t translate well into English.

Otherwise, by the standards set over the past couple of days, the morning goes on rather smoothly. No strange faces in the window, no footprints in the hallway, no suicidal cyclists and almost no homicidal impulses. I’m not even late by all that much, considering I’ve stopped to get a muffin on my way in. Carrying a cat the size of ‘Doodle across the apartment does wonders to one’s appetite.

I find Joe in the kitchen, wiping the counters and whistling lightly to himself. “Seven Nation Army.” Not a bad choice. He does it quite well, too.

Noticing my presence, he stops abruptly and flushes all the way to the tint of Torso’s nose. I feel a bit bad for him. I know how little I like to be startled in this manner. But I can’t help wondering whether I get half as adorable when that happens.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” I hope I haven’t forgotten how to shape my face into a more or less friendly smile. I can’t remember the last time I wanted to look friendly.

“No, I… I didn’t mean to be insensitive…”

“Huh? What’s insensitive about The White Stripes?”

“I mean… with what’s happened…”

Why is it getting awkward? I don’t like awkward. Can someone deactivate awkward mode, please? Plus, the whole thing where every time I seem to like someone they turn out to be a freak, and not the good type either, is getting kinda old.

But you know what they say. When life gives you psychos, you remind yourself that pink lemonade is not actually made from human flesh, so the lemonade proverb does not apply. Instead, you just nod and smile. Slowly retreating towards the nearest exit.

“Um… what has happened?”

“You know, with Bob and Maria…”

“...who and who?”

“Bob, he used to sit right next to you. And Maria, well, I’m here to replace her.”

Who’s the freak now?

“Oh, right. What’s happened to Bob and Maria?”

“You… you mean you don’t know?”

“Don’t know what?”

I didn’t think real people in real life actually did that color changing thing. Apparently they do. He goes from deep red to white and back, with some pinkish hues in between. Actually it’s kind of interesting. I appreciate the aesthetic aspect of the phenomena. When he’s done chameleoning, his face looks like melted candy cane.

“They’re… dead.”

Now it’s my turn to play Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot.

“What… what do you mean ‘dead’?” I try to remember whether I’ve seen Roborron (Bob, I remind myself, his name is Bob) this morning. The problem is I usually make sure I don’t. Unless the bastard is standing in the hallway, I do my best to avoid all interaction, at least until after my second coffee. Blabberhag makes some sense. After all, I have been savoring her absence the last couple of days. But Bob? I didn’t think anything even could happen to him. I’ve honestly abandoned all hope on the matter by my second month at the company.

“How come nobody said anything?” I insist.

“Jerry made an announcement yesterday morning.”

It still does not compute. And not just because I’m a bit of a short bus rider most mornings.

“When did they… when did it happen?”

“I’m not sure about Maria, I think I was recruited a day or so after she died. It was a short notice thing. Jerry is a friend of my dad’s, so he got in touch once the position was open…” he stops in embarrassment. “I… I didn’t mean that to sound… it’s not like…”

“Relax, I know what you mean. No one would actually want for an elderly lady to die for their personal gain.” I almost believe myself. “We’re not monsters.”

Some of us just know how to summon them.

His smile is uneasy enough to make me shut my trap. And I wouldn’t do that for just anyone, mind you.

“She had a heart condition,” he explains, eager to convince me he had nothing to do with the poor thing’s demise. As if I can’t tell he’s way too tall to be a Lurker.

But frankly, I’m more curious to know what’s happened to Bob. Maybe because I’ve wanted him dead for longer. Joe’s account of the matter makes no sense whatsoever.

“Bob died on Wednesday.” That was the day before yesterday. I was right here at the office. I saw him at his desk, for Christ’s sake.

“What time on Wednesday?”

“The paramedics established TOD at around noon…”

“Listen to yourself!” I explode in spite of myself. “He was right there! At his desk! He was sitting there when Jerry was giving you the tour. At around five. I know that, because I was on my way out, goddammit!” It was more like half past four, but that’s not relevant for the sake of the argument.

“Yeah… he was already…”

“While we were just walking around him?! There was a fucking corpse in the office, right here, under our fucking noses, without anyone noticing?! What the fuck? What the fucking goddamned fuck...” Office etiquette does not apply in such circumstances. Proper language just fails to grasp certain concepts. Like a corpse sitting for half a day at an office desk, for an instance. Callous and morbid as I may normally seem, I don’t handle real life corpses all that well. In fact, I’d rather not handle them at all, figuratively or otherwise.

There was no smell, but the office is air conditioned to the point of deep freeze, so that doesn’t count for all that much. He could as well have been kept in the fridge. Besides, with the amounts of aftershave he used, one more stench wouldn’t have made much of a difference anyway.

“The janitor found him when he came in to replace a couple of lightbulbs later that evening.”

“How did he die?” Except for the Lurkers getting to him, that is. I wonder what color Joe would turn if I told him Bob and Maria were in fact killed by little humanoid creatures with yellow eyes, summoned by listening to a certain story whose author’s name keeps changing every time you look it up. I guess he won’t be asking me out on a date any time soon.

“They said it was a stroke.”

Of course it was. I give up on the coffee and stumble back to my desk, mumbling some lame excuse.

The first thing I see is Torso. He’s hanging upside down. I stifle a little scream as I look around me. No one there. I take out my little pink tape dispenser and retape Torso to the wall, right side up. He’s become a crucifix of sorts for me. Seeing him overturned like that is all too ominous.  

Before I’m done sticking the last piece of tape, Bob’s chair creaks. I freeze. I tell myself not to go look, but as usual, self doesn’t listen.

I’m quite relieved to find the chair empty. I do, however, hear little footsteps running away down the hallway. I manage to resist the urge to follow. If I do, I know I will only find an empty hallway, with a glimpse of a fleeting shadow at best. I think I hear a small chuckle from that direction, but somehow pull myself together and return to my cubicle.

I turn on my computer, for the first time in my life longing for the monotonous distraction work would provide.

A horse cackle from the general direction of Bob’s cubicle makes me drop my headphones, and they hang from their cord nearly all the way to the floor. I pull them back up with shaking hands and somehow manage to put them on. The next cackle is thankfully slightly muffled.  

I directly open my downloaded music collection, not daring to go anywhere near YouTube. I need it loud, silly and cheerful. Korpiklaani provide the perfect Lurker-blocker. Headbanging lightly to the sounds of “Vodka,” I go back to proofing the family resort brochure from a couple of days ago.

But before I learn about half the imbecile human-spawn activities it offers, I note some weird, dark undertones creeping into the happy drunken Finns’ song.  I pause the player, only to hear crackling static punctuated by rain sounds, and a familiar voice drifting in the background, barely audible. An occasional high-pitched croaking guffaw tears through the static in irregular intervals.

I minimize every window I’ve opened, to find Internet Explorer running. I would never for the life of me have opened this bottomless glitch pit myself. The browser is open on a YouTube page. I don’t need to see the dark figures and the dead branches moving in the wind to guess the Item’s title. In this version, the figures are almost crystal clear, haze and murk notwithstanding. The author’s name is now Lounees C. Dethbringers.

And that’s when I snap. I tear the headphones off of me and smash them to the floor with such force they get disconnected on their own as they fly. Not bothering to properly shut down the computer, I just pull off the cord, yelling at it to leave me the fuck alone. I ignore the sound of rolling office chairs and the forest of bewildered faces popping from behind computer screens and cubicle partitions.   

I think I’ve mumbled something about migraines on my way out, but my memory of the whole journey back to my apartment is scrambled to the point of near amnesia.

I do remember the sea of faces. Dozens and dozens of faces, human and otherwise, all turned towards me, every one of them somehow distorted, magnified to monstrosity, blurry and hideous. And the laughter. The hoarse unnatural sniggering that hasn’t really stopped ever since I took off the headphones.  

Once the door is locked behind me, still panting heavily, I snatch Snickerdoodle and crawl under the covers clutching to her like a fearful toddler with a closetful of Nightmares. She fails to comprehend my sudden frenzy, but seems willing to cooperate.  

I don’t know how long I fluctuate between troubled sleep and even more troubled half consciousness. It seems like hours, but could well be days. My world narrows down to a tunnel filled with flickering eyes and scuffling sounds. I can no longer tell whether I’m dreaming or awake. The question of sanity is unquestionably out of the question altogether.

“What do you want?” I whisper repeatedly at the scampering shadows. “What the fuck do you fucking monsters want from me…?”

In a moment of relative clarity, I drag myself out of bed to feed ‘Doodle and pour a drink of water down my parched throat. On my way back from the kitchen I nearly step on a prostrate Lurker, ‘Doodle’s second victim. The fur on her muzzle is matted with dark blood. I check her for injuries. Once satisfied that none of the blood is her own, I collapse on the living room couch. My feet just won’t carry me back to the bedroom.

Whenever I open my eyes, the room is crawling with small leathery limbs. The creatures are everywhere I look. They scurry over every surface in view, scramble on the walls, some of them even manage to scuttle all over the ceiling. One of them burrows up in Snicker’s litterbox, thus unwittingly applying as a sole candidate for the Lucky Number Three position. He ascends all the way to gory glory with a single stroke of her paw. His brethren draw wisdom from his bitter experience, and try to keep a safe distance from the beast thereafter.

Having made her point, the beast yawns and comes back to cuddle by my side. I gratefully embrace her, in spite of the Lurker blood smears, and drift back out of consciousness. But the creatures don’t go away. They just grow slightly dimmer, as though my eyelids are mere veils of translucent dark lace.

During my next spell of semi-consciousness I start wondering whether they’re just waiting for me to wish for my own death, lurking around their wounded prey until said prey simply gives up. The thought turns what little willpower I have left into a shadow of my all too familiar rage. It feels good. I’m back on my own turf now. And I’m not giving it up without a fight. Not to a bunch of filthy lizards.

When the smoke of my initial rage is going down, I suddenly realize something. Fuck, it’s so simple I’m almost sure it can’t possibly work. But if these lizardcunts are here to do my bidding in the first place, aren’t I in control?

“You bet your leathery little asses I am, you bunch of slithering shits!” I don’t remember getting to my feet, but suddenly I’m standing upright. My voice is no longer a frightened child’s whisper, either. It’s a feral roar I have never thought my larynx was even capable of producing. “And you know what I wish for the most right now, you cowardly scumbags? I. Wish. Every. Last. Fucking. One. Of. You. Dropped. DEAD!!!”

And all hell breaks loose. The moment the last word is out of my mouth, the apartment turns into a battlefield. The hitherto randomly scurrying humanoids instantaneously morph into a legion of ruthless killing machines engineered with ultimate skill and precision.

They tear at each other’s throats like rabid hyenas, severing tendons, gouging out pieces of meat with their crooked razor-sharp nails. They rip off entire limbs, bloody teeth cutting through skin, flesh and bone like so many jagged daggers.

When one of them is down, half a dozens others pounce on him, to noisily gorge on the remains. By the time they’re done there’s nothing left but a pile of dry bones. As the battle proceeds, these are scattered and finely ground, eventually to be blended into the growing puddles of unidentifiable dark sludge.   

I gather Snickerdoodle in my arms and we stand motionless amidst the raging inferno. I dare not move or breathe, and ‘Doodle is utterly mesmerized with the slaughter. She follows the unfolding innards with unearthly fascination, and though she hisses periodically, my little devil makes no attempt to escape. She’s not one to grow queasy at the sight of blood, but I’m pretty sure this stretches even her limits.

Just when I think that this will never end,  that the last thing I ever see will be this heap of animated Lurker mince, feeding upon itself ad infinitum, everything stops. Just like that, the room goes completely still.

Almost completely, that is. The only motion in sight is the spasmodic twitching of a single disembodied arm. The twitching doesn’t last long, though. With no more carnagetoons on, Snicker get’s bored. She jumps to the couch and from there takes the arm out of its misery with a single punch.

And then the world fades out on me.

I wake up in a pristinely white room to the murmur of gentle voices. The window is open and the white curtains dance languidly on the light breeze. I catch a glimpse of a white uniform through the open door. When I manage to turn my head, I see a vase with hideous yellow flowers on my bedside table. I wonder if maybe I’d rather have the Lurkers’ cannibal buffet back, instead.

I close my eyes and lie still until I’m fairly certain I’m not going to be sick. Then, I slowly turn my head the other way. Seeing that I’m awake, my mom gets off the straight-backed hospital chair and hurriedly approaches me. My sister, Deidre, is leaning on the wall next to the chair. She, too, comes a step nearer when I open my eyes.

Their voices are muffled and their bodies seem to weaver as they come near, as if the room is flooded with some transparent viscous fluid. Their motions make me dizzy. I try to concentrate on their moving lips, but can’t understand a single word. The harder I focus, the fainter I get. Whatever they’ve pumped me with, It’s doing the job quite well. Finally I just give up and go back to where reality isn’t.         

The next time consciousness pays a visit, the flowers are gone. So is my sister. My mom is still there, though. She’s gently running her hands over my face and it feels nice. I’m not entirely lucid, but I manage to catch some fragments of what she’s saying. Her voice sounds like we’re both underwater. She mentions something about a “nervous breakdown,” as well as a “lizard infestation” and “sleep deprivation.” That’s about as much as I can process in one time.

I swallow to moisten my dry throat and force a single word from between lips so numb I can’t even tell if they’re moving. “Doodle?” I ask.

“She’s OK. Deidre is taking care of her for now.”

I sigh in relief. Me and my sister are not very close, but she loves Snickerdoodle. The cat, on her part, is perfectly willing to tolerate Deidre, which says quite a lot.

“... should maybe consider leaving her there for a while.” My mom’s voice is floating in and out of focus. “I’m not sure if you’re strong enough…”

I’m not capable of a coherent reply, but if there is one thing I can say for sure at the moment is I’m not giving up on my little fur devil. I’d sooner give up on breathing. The pillow is too soft for me to hold my end of the conversation, and I gradually sink back into darkness. This time, with ‘Doodle on my mind, I think I go out smiling.

A week later they let me out of the clinic, with weekly shrink meetings scheduled and enough prescription drugs to cure Nietzsche, Kafka, and Kurt Cobain altogether. Provided one can revive them first, that is. Otherwise I don’t think any amount of chemicals could make their brains produce serotonin.

The drugs take the edge off pretty much everything. The result is a slightly drowsier, friendlier me. I am strictly ordered to refrain from any stressful activities. I start working from home, with some financial help from my mom and my sister. For once it pays off to be the family fuckup.

I don’t mind any of this. The only thing that matter is I finally have my life back. And it does, indeed, consist mostly of reading, TV binge-watching and talking to Snickerdoodle, but it’s the only life I want. And it’s mine.