Hey everyone. So, I’m at an odd point in my… life? Not sure if that’s the right word. Whatever. Point is, things are weird, and I’ve decided I need some external help. My new boss just went to bed and I’ve got some time to kill, so I thought it would be a good idea to type this up now.
It seems a bit strange to give my whole life story in this post, but it’s what I plan on doing. Trust me, there’s not a lot to get through, and I think as much information I can give on the matter may help you all get the full picture. So, from the top:
I couldn’t move. Not my body, not my mind, not anything. All I could do was try to analyze what I could see from the stagnant position my eyes were fixed to. I don’t remember opening them.
Most of the space was black, but I could make out a thin stream of light shining down above me, and what looked like rocks illuminated by it. I couldn’t tell if I was laying on rocks as well. Was I even laying? Maybe I was sitting. Or standing. I couldn’t tell. Maybe I was just eyes.
I stayed like that for a long, long time. Or maybe it wasn’t that long. In that moment I don’t think I could understand something like time. I only remember one minute I was staring at the light, and then I was staring at pure blackness.
It took a while for me to figure out what happened, but slowly, I opened my eyes. I had shut them. I had moved them.
I tried out the motion a few more times. Closed, then open, then closed, then open.
Then I felt something. Something all along my back and the underside of my arms and parts of my legs, and I realized I was cold.
I attempted to conjure a plan to figure out the source of the chill. Every thought felt like it was stuck in tar: turn your head, move your eyes, look, recognize what is and isn’t you, figure out what what isn’t you is, if it was anything.
I twisted my head toward the darkness, neck moving slow and gelatinous on its joint, until I could feel that cold all over my cheek. Then I rolled my eyes down until I felt the muscles tense in a way I think was painful. The light was slim, but I could see something pale and purple on top of something dark and gray. I knew they were rocks, but not what the purple thing was. There was a white, rubbery netting branching all over the shape like roots, some curling around the shape of the object and some continuing to grow down the side and onto the stone.
I began to panic when I saw it move.
It was only a single twitch, but it was enough to snap the fine netting of white tendrils anchored to the ground and the sight of them ripping sent me into a frenzy.
I flailed around wildly, flinging my arms into the air only to see white strands snap off them too. My back arched, my feet kicked, and bits of white and dust flung into the air. I moved in such a flurry my shoulders raised off the cold, stone ground and I was thrust into a sitting position, free to stare at whatever the thing was.
I looked down to see the shape of a short, purple leg. Thin, white hyphae branched out from clusters of cylindrical fruiting bodies no more than a few centimeters tall. I followed the mycelial structure as it crawled up the leg, along a pelvis and up a torso. Suddenly I felt thousands of nerve endings screaming about a threaded swirling complex covering every inch of my body.
My hand tensed as I felt the overwhelming urge to scratch off every parasitic structure that imprisoned my skin, but an itch in the back of my mind froze me in my tracks. My hand came to my head, and I gently placed it on my cheek. I could feel the threads there too. As I moved my hand up, the density of the strands multiplied so much that if I had any hair on my head, I didn’t notice it. Reaching the top of my head, my fingers curled around something rubbery and cylindrical, about the diameter of a baseball bat. I knew what it was instantly and in a burst of disgust, I pulled on it.
This was a mistake.
My limbs kicked out with a harsh crack as my joints popped, not that I could hear it. I was too focused on the wave of nausea and floatiness and pain and confusion that overwhelmed my brain and forced me to lay back down until the sensations went away.
Whatever this thing was, it was in my head.
I pictured squirming white veins looping around my gray matter and feeding on the very last bit of consciousness I had remaining. I didn’t want to die. Not after I had just woken up. I wanted to rip and tear the thing to pieces and free myself of it.
But my mind whispered no, what if it was spiteful? What if it took you down with it? It covered every inch of you. The moment you took it out, the rest of its structure would tighten around you and squeeze every last bit of breath out of you until you were cold and blue and limp–
I looked down at the purple-blue hue of my hands, and it came to my attention that I wasn’t breathing.
It’s a strange feeling, realizing the worst has already come. That you’re nothing but a shambling amalgamation, accidentally brought back from the inevitable by something trying to eat what remains of you.
I sat on the stone for a long time. Who was I? What kind of life had I lived? It couldn’t have been a very good one, seeing as I was left naked and swarmed by decay in the middle of a cave. No matter how hard I thought of who I might be, I drew a blank. There was nothing to me. I wondered if I should just lay back down.
Thunk, thunk, thunk.
My head jolted up in the direction of the sound. I couldn’t see anything deeper into the cave, the passageways too consumed by darkness.
I didn’t know what to do. Maybe I could run, but that felt like a stupid idea, since I’d be running blindly. I didn’t even know if I could stand.
Thunk, thunk, thunk.
I could hear it clearer now. They were regular in beat, like footsteps.
Maybe I should hide. But while the rocks were irregular in shape, I doubted there was any I could hide behind. The cave didn’t branch off either; I seemed to be in an agonizingly straight stretch of the cavern.
The steps continued towards me, so close now I heard the tak-tak of a pebble being kicked out of the way. When I saw the faint orange glow of the lantern I decided to go as limp as I could. I was dead. I was dead.
The steps approached, then stopped. I heard a voice mutter: “God damn it, is one of them seriously this close to the…” before trailing off. Two steps closer, a pause, and the sound of fabric rustling as whoever lowered their squeaking lantern near my face. After an agonizing moment, I heard the sound of the lantern’s metal base touching the ground, and a horrible shing as whoever was above me pulled out something thin and metal and sharp.
My eyes shot open and I kicked my leg out, knocking whatever was in their hand away from them.
“SHIT!” a voice yelled, tumbling back onto the rocks. I made no move to look at what I was dealing with, solely focused on getting away on my hands and knees, but as a rapid thunkthunkthunkthunkthunk chased after me, I switched over to just my feet.
I was right about running.
Wham. I landed face first onto the stone ground, and a moment later I felt a heavy boot stomp onto my back. I flailed around, but my limbs were tight and stiff and struggled to bend out straight, let alone reach around and claw at whoever was on top of me. The boot remained firm.
When I stopped moving, the figure above me spoke: “The hell are you doing here?”
I made an effort to spin my head around and look at my assailant, but no such luck. As the silence between us extended, I made the horrible realization that I didn’t know how to speak.
The figure stepped harder, “I said, what are you doing here?”
My fingers clawed at the ground in front of me like a pinned insect. I thought as hard as I could on what you do to speak. You breathe. Air goes in. Your throat moves. Sound comes out.
Just as I felt their impatience begin to rise again, I sucked in a rapid breath of air and tried to make a sound.
“Aa-aaaehhh-hhhh-hhhh…” My voice sounded dry. Rusty. Unsure. It wasn’t a pleasant noise.
“Shit, uh.” I felt the boot hesitate, before making its way off my back just as a gloved hand snatched my forearm. I was turned to face my attacker, back against a wall of rocks.
The woman who stood in front of me looked far too gaunt to be the one who so effortlessly overpowered me, even considering my current state. She was well into her 50’s, with a tall, thin frame and long swampy hair, clad in a faded green bomber jacket, tan workboots and thick construction gloves. In one hand was a gleaming hunting knife, but it didn’t gleam as bright as her red eyes, fixated on my face.
“Woah.” she blurted, “Your eyes are fucked. Look at those. The whites are all red. How’ve they not popped?” She squatted down to get a better look, taking my face in her hand and tilting it around. “And the hell are these?”
She attempted to reach for one of the fruiting bodies growing out of my head, but I smacked her hand away.
“Jesus! O-kay. Shrooms off limits.”
She took me in one last time, surely noticing how anxious and confused I was, before sheathing her hunting knife in her waistband.
“Come on, then.”
She walked over to retrieve her lantern and head back the way she came, but turned back when she realized I wasn’t moving.
”You can’t stay down here.” It didn’t feel like she was saying it out of concern, but annoyance, “I deal with enough of that already.”
She didn’t bother waiting for a response, grabbing me by the forearm again and hauling me to my feet, dragging me off into the blackness. It took a little while before I was comfortable with my footing, especially considering the jagged terrain, but with her yanking me along I had no choice but to learn. The woman never slowed her pace for me, only pulling me up a particularly large rock when we came to one. As we ascended, the woman’s eyes never stopped flitting from shadow to shadow.
It took us about ten minutes of wandering through identical-looking tunnels before the woman stopped dead in her tracks, dropping my arm. My body swayed as I tried to find the right stance to maintain balance, and as I looked from left to right I couldn’t see anything of particular note. Just a single, linear passage.
Then I heard the bang of wood being hit. I looked over at the woman, and was surprised to see her pulling herself through an unassuming wooden hatch in the ceiling of the cave. Once fully through, she turned back to me and stuck her hand out.
“Well, come on. Jump.”
I looked at her stupidly.
She narrowed her eyes before turning away from the hatch. For a moment, I thought she was going to leave me down there, until she returned, sliding down a ladder that looked like it would fall apart at any moment. The rungs were entirely made of semi-thick, twisting branches, attached to the supports by knotted pieces of old rope.
The woman rapped her knuckles on a wooden rung, making the thing wobble like sheet metal. “What’s the problem now? Get up here.”
After another moment of hesitation, I approached the ladder. It took me a moment to figure out how to take the first step onto it– both unsure of my own footing and if the thing will hold me, but as the front of my foot made contact with the branch, I felt the surrounding area suddenly get warmer. I stopped my ascent and turned to look deeper into the cave.
The woman piped up, annoyed, “What is it–” She shuts up as the warmth hits her. “Get up. NOW.”
The heat intensified around my ankles, and I looked down to see the stone floor warp and my foot resting on it sink in ever so slightly. It wasn’t like quicksand, but like I was standing on someone’s stomach.
I wasted no time scampering up the rungs as the thing in the cave turned a fleshy pink and began folding in on itself, like rolls and rolls of raw, peeled skin. I heard the crunch as rows of disjointed, curled fangs emerged from the mass and begin biting into the ladder, splintering the wood with each bite. I climbed faster, but the thing grew fast as well, turning the wall just behind the ladder a skinned pink, bulging and wriggling as fat pooled and disjointed muscles flexed. It split, revealing a large, green eye the size of a basketball. Smaller ones opened around it, cracking all along the walls of what was once the cave, staring at me with a hungry glee as the ladder grew shorter and shorter and the woman above screamed for me to hurry up. Just as my head reached the rim of the hatch, my legs got tangled on one another, and I lost my balance.
I wondered what it would feel like to die again. I had no right to be as scared as I was, since I had died once before, but despite it all I was petrified to do it again.
The flesh tensed in anticipation, teeth and rib and bone sticking out of what once was the cave floor, and I shut my eyes.
I felt a gloved hand snatch my wrist and yank as hard as it could. I was tossed behind her, onto the floor, while the woman slammed the hatch shut behind us. Shaking the dizziness away from my head, I watched as she began twisting, latching and locking what had to be at least twenty different locks all along the edges of the hatch. When she was done, she reached into her pocket, and pulled out a thick gold padlock with some kind of geometric drawing on it, latching it over the connection on the front of the hatch. She turned to me with a fury in her eyes, hotter than anything the thing in the cave could ever hope to be.
“You.” She took a step towards me, and I pushed myself back.
“You cost me my ladder.” Another step. Another crawl back.
“It was a damn good ladder, too.” Yet again she got closer to me, but this time I found I hit a wall and could only look up at her in terror. She stopped in front of me, squatting down to get as close to my face as she could.
I looked at her for a moment. This was what she was worried about? The stupid ladder that was well past the point of being usable? Not the flesh-creature that’s under this place?
She stomped her foot down with a loud thunk.
“Pay me back.”
I stared at her open palm. Obviously I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have a bag, or clothes, or even a suspicious looking set of stitches. She could see literally everything I had, which, evidently, was nothing.
I mimed patting my nonexistent pockets and pretended to turn them inside out with a nervous grin.
She breathed out of her nose like a bull. “Fine.” raising back to her full height, she inspected me for a moment.
“You’ll just have to work here to pay me back, then.”
I made a noise. A pathetic ‘Eecchhh?’ type of sound.
“What’s here, you ask? Well,” she yanked me up by the arm again, dragging me through an open doorway. With a flourished swing of her arm, she presented a large, messy looking room lined with aisles and aisles of junk.
“This is Al’s Thrift Shop! You want it, you wait long enough and we got it!” the woman looked down at me with a yellowed grin, “I’m Al, of course, and you’re the new hire.”
The shop was lame.
After Al tossed a towel on me and summarized the things I’d be doing (register work, cleaning, shelving products– typical retail work), she left me to “get familiar” with my new environment, kicking back behind the front desk with a book of sudoku puzzles. I spent the last hour wandering through the tall, cluttered shelves and found that most of the things there were too broken or too old to be desirable. The only use any of those items will ever have is whatever printed words were on them that I’d practice my speech with. Once I started sounding out words, years of practiced memory came flooding back into my system. The only thing hindering conversation with me now was how tight my jaw was. Every syllable I mumbled out necessitated a harsh crack of my jaw as it popped into the position it needed to be, nowhere near as graceful as fluent speech. I hoped this would get better with time.
I started off my search behind the front counter, where jewelry and tech stuff was kept. The technology was rather pathetic, with the most recent-looking object being an offwhite box computer that said ‘MANUFACTURED 1995’ on the back. The jewelry was as gaudy as you’d expect, with rhinestone centers and ambitious swirling designs. Most of the jewelry was hanging openly right next to the till, but there was a particularly opulent piece kept in a glass display box that was padlocked shut. Al told me she’d handle the sale of it, which disappointed me.
Going past the counter, I explored the common area of the shop. A third of the store was large objects all precariously stacked on one another to form makeshift aisles. Most items were scuffed furniture with peeling lacquer or oddly stained sofas, but in the bottom right corner of the very first aisle was a pristine silver safe, nearly a cubic meter big. I asked Al about it, and she said she didn’t have the combination, hoping that some sucker will come along and buy it.
The next third is whatever stuff you could reasonably put on a shelf. It looks like at one point they were organized, but from years of people picking things up and not putting them back properly, the system was barely recognizable. There was a cluster of books with dog-eared pages and curling covers stuffed any which way on the first couple shelves, followed by colourful plastic bins filled with various toys, some home decor items, some frames and posters, various old athletic gear, instruments, construction tools, and so much more. However, the oddest thing in this section was the empty shelf. All the shelves were spaced evenly, with a support plank placed about every five feet, and every other shelf was covered with as much stuff as could fit. But not this one. Nothing was on it. No graffiti, no stains, not even dust. Seems like a waste of space to me.
Clothing took up the final third of the store, and it was all typical tacky thrift-wear, though there was the occasional garment with too many arm holes or pants with no hip opening. Another odd thing was that it was hard to tell which shoe was the left and which was the right. As if the slight curve each shoe is given was somehow un-curved. I tried a pair on, and sure enough, it felt wrong on both feet.
In the front corner just behind the anterior window, a large beige sunhat hung on the hat rack and obscured most of the other hats. I took it off without a second thought, and stopped in my tracks.
It was night now, the dim lights in the outside overhang doing little to prevent light reflection, and for the first time I saw what I looked like.
Have you ever been to a funeral with an un-fresh body? One that’s over a week old, having been frozen all that time in a vain attempt to preserve a sense of life? Everything looks stiff, like it was never meant to move in the first place. Your eyes look slightly sunken in, your lips pale, and try as the morticians might, they can never fully get rid of the unsettling paleness and blue undertones that riddle a body.
My eyes were bloodshot. The deep crimson in them making the pale blue of my irises appear a dull gray. I only had a few tufts of hair remaining in my head, interwoven with grime and the white hyphae that slithered and coiled around every part of my body. The dull red towel tied around me was old and weathered, but it looked like a red carpet on me.
I looked awful. Worse than awful. How did Al not scream when she saw me? I wanted to scream when I saw me. My eyes darted back to the hat rack, and I put the first thing I saw on my head: a gaudy pink wig that looked like it had never been brushed.
Al glanced up from her puzzle, attempting to look past me and into the black of night, “There a problem?”
I turned to her, speechless. I almost wished I was better at speaking, but even if I was, I would have no idea what to say.
Al stared at me for a long, hard moment, before snapping her sudoku book shut and swinging her feet off the counter.
“Let’s get you in uniform.”
I followed Al back behind the counter, through a doorway leading into a short hallway with two doors on each wall. The end of the hall was capped off with a window revealing the blackness of the back of the building.
“First door’s a supply closet, across from that is a room for merchandise storage and repair, then past that’s the bathroom, and that last door’s my office.”
That last room I had already been in. It was where the hatch in the floor was. I didn’t get a good look around in there, but there was no time to explore now as Al opened the bathroom door and gestured for me to go inside.
The bathroom was small and cramped, with smelly incandescent bulbs and ugly yellow tiling. Al reached over into the bath, twisting a rusted knob and giving the faucet a whack when water didn’t start pouring out. The water looked clean enough, and even if it wasn’t, I was in no shape to be picky.
“Uniform can be whatever you want, so long as it’s from the shop.” She tossed a lazy grin over her shoulder, “Gotta rep the merchandise, right?”
I gave a slow nod. It seemed to be enough for her, and with a ‘get to it’, she kicked the door shut behind her.
I spent a long time in the bath.
There was a lot to think about, and the sticky humid air on my skin loosened both my own joints as well as the tight knots of hyphae in my skin. Absentmindedly, I picked off a few loose strands from my legs.
I didn’t know who I was. I struggled to envision any semblance of personhood I could, but nothing came. I stared down at my reflection in the rapidly-dirtying water. The only thing I had to go off of was my appearance. And if that was anything to judge by, I don’t think there was any personhood to begin with.
I frowned.
Despite the circumstances of my employment, I think I’d like to stay working here. Al seemed unphased by my situation– something I suspect would not be the case anywhere outside of this thrift store. Though, I wondered if her being so lax was a good thing. That flesh monster only a few feet under our feet was only being held back by a flimsy wooden hatch and a few locks. I could see it writhing, its wide, green eye flicking open and its spider-like eyelashes brushing against my knuckles holding the ladder. I gripped the skin on my arms a little tighter.
It was then I noticed just how smooth my skin was. After peeling away so many loose threads and clusters of fruiting bodies, my skin was rather visible, and aside from the colour, it was pristine.
How could that be? I was well-infested with evidence of decay, but there was no other evidence of decay. No bloating, no maggots, not even the unmistakable smell of death. Perhaps I had only died recently. Hope bloomed in my chest. Maybe people were still looking for me. Maybe I had friends, or a family. Maybe there was a chance I could still have a life.
As I dried myself off, I couldn’t help the smile spreading across my face.
I walked out of the bathroom, towel tied around me once again, thumbing through the articles of clothing for anything that looked even remotely appealing. On one of the racks was a bright red satin bathrobe, covered in blotches of yellow and blue and speckled in white dots. It had long since lost its sheen and the edges were beginning to fray, but it looked arid and loose enough to be comfortable for the time being. I decided to keep the pink wig as well. Something needed to cover up the fungus coming out of my head, and I figured it did as good a job as any.
“Hey.” I finished tying the robe around me and glanced up at Al, who was seated once again behind the counter, “What’s your name?”
It was here I decided to finally attempt to speak to someone, in a real, actual conversation. The words I used now would set the tone for all future talking I did. I had to make it count.
“No.”
“Seriously?” Al breathed, “I’ve been listening to you mumble words for the past hour and the first thing you say to me is some disagreeable bullshit.” She held up a small plastic card for me to see, “I need your name to write on this nametag. So cough it up.”
I frowned. “No, know.”
Al thought for a long, hard moment. “… Is your name No?”
“No!”
“Then what is it?!”
This conversation was rapidly deteriorating. I tried to figure out how to say what I wanted to say.
“I…” I enunciated the sound as best I could as I brought my hand up to my chin in an attempt to click my jaw into the right position, “No know.”
“Ohhh,” Al pointed the back of her pen at me in realization, “You don’t know.”
“Yeah!”
“Huh. Well thennn…” she turned her attention to the desk, pushing around various stray objects, “Here’s a good one.” Al held up her sudoku book, tapping the title, “Su-do-ku. Easy to say, easy to write, hard to solve.”
I stared at the book cover for a moment. I was not going to be called Sudoku, because that was stupid.
“No.”
Al scoffed, “Well, if Sudoku isn’t a winner, I’m out of ideas.” She tossed the nametag at me, which after a bit of fumbling I successfully caught, “Just pick something. Preferably by the end of the week. I’m going to bed.”
I watched as she got up from the desk and turned to enter the hallway.
“Wait.”
She turned to look back at me with an arched brow. My next question was odd, and hard to say.
“What… About… the rot?” I splintered out, gesturing to myself.
“Ah, don’t worry about that.” she waved a flippant hand, “Things can’t rot here.”
The door to her office clicked shut behind her.
That about brings you up to speed. I spent the next half hour pulling out the clunky computer and fiddling around with it until it worked, then another half hour typing all this up. So, if any of you know any missing persons cases, or anything else you think I should know, please send it my way!
Also, I’m taking name suggestions.