It has taken me eight years to begin writing this down. Eight years since I took that thing into my house. Eight years since my family lost their lives, and I lost everything.
Of those eight years, I’ve only spent two as a free man - the rest were spent in a cell awaiting trial, or in a hospital where I was sent as a forensic patient, someone who needed to be locked away for the protection of themselves and for others.
It all started with a weekend trip to the coast. We didn’t live far from the ocean - you could drive there and back in a day if you didn’t mind a long day in the car - but we rarely visited it back then. Suzanne loved the coast, and so did I, but when Jessica was a baby any outing seemed like a fuss, and when Jessica got older we found ourselves out of the habit. The seaside just became something we didn’t do that often anymore.
But Suzanne had suggested that we take Friday off to drive out there and stay for the weekend. I jumped at the idea of getting away from my desk and out of the city for a few days.
There was a small town by the coast that we had visited a few times when we were younger. We rented an apartment by the sea and stayed for two nights. The weather was hot and we swam in the ocean, ate fish and chips and walked around the scenic coastline.
On Sunday morning there was a market in the town centre. That’s where I first saw it. Sitting on a table amongst shells and driftwood creations and other flotsam from the sea. It looked different to the things around it, foreign but not out of place. Like wherever it was was where it belonged, even if it looked like it didn’t belong anywhere. It was pitch black all over, about the shape and size of my fist, with spaghetti thick-strands coming from the base and curling around its bulb and sprouting from its top, like the remains of a burnt and blackened onion.
When I picked it up it was heavier than I expected, and it had a quality that made it attractive to me, so I bought it. My wife thought it was ugly, repulsive even. She seemed offended by it, and didn’t know why I wanted to buy it but I did. Jessica, our daughter, was too young to have any interest.
That night, the thing went into my suitcase and was taken home. For a while it sat in a drawer, and then I put it in the bathroom because it looked vaguely nautical, like a dried sea urchin, but my wife truly hated it and it was banished from the shared space. I put it on a shelf in the bedroom where I kept my watch at night, next to a little clay figure I picked up somewhere years before, and I forgot about it.
Two weeks later, I found the thing on the floor, a few feet from the shelf. I picked it up and put it back where it had been. I don’t know how it got there but it didn’t seem particularly odd, someone could have bumped it or the cat could have knocked it off. She occasionally came in here to prowl around.
Two days later, it was on the floor again, this time further from the shelf. Joining the location of the thing to each end of the shelf made a perfect equilateral triangle. I hadn’t seen the cat upstairs recently - she spent most of her time lying in the sun downstairs, or eating, and only occasionally bothered to walk up the stairs if she was bored or if the weather was cool, which it was not.
When I saw the thing on the floor this time, I stopped what I was doing to look at it. It was sitting on its flat side, its black tendrils tightly wound around it, pointing at the ceiling. I looked at it for a good two minutes. Not considering it, or thinking about anything in particular, just looking at it, breathing deeply and slowly, absorbing the blackness coming out of it into my eyes like tar pouring in. After a while I picked up the thing and put it back where it belonged, in its place on the shelf next to the little clay man.
To be honest, I didn’t think much about the thing for a while after that. I didn’t have any reason to. It was just a thing on a shelf in the room I slept in, next to another thing, both inert and inanimate. But I was always conscious of its presence, as though I could feel it.
Two weeks later something awful happened. Jessica found the cat dead on the kitchen floor. She screamed so loudly we thought she was injured, and rushed into the room. The cat was lying on its side, blood sprayed outwards from it across the floor and even some up the walls. There was a small silver-white mess of intestines spilled out of its belly, and red slimy organs. When I moved closer, I saw that its throat had been cut, almost all the way down to its spine so it was nearly decapitated, and its belly sliced open in a T-form from the centre of its throat downwards. It looked like its guts had been scooped out of its belly, like the seeds out of a melon.
I don’t know why I did what I did next. Looking back on that moment - when I ran out of the kitchen straight for my own bedroom - makes me shudder. I didn’t even think about what I was doing. I just had to see it. I knew, without even thinking about it, that the thing was somehow responsible for this. Somehow, even without realising, I had come to associate it with death, with something ugly and violent. This was ridiculous because it was nothing more than a little object on the shelf, but for some reason every time I had looked at it lately, I had felt a cold wave of disgust come over me. Not just disgust, total revulsion. Not at the thing itself, that wasn’t the object of my revulsion, it was just a feeling I had every time I looked at the thing, and the dead cat, with its guts all over the floor, seemed completely and obviously tied to that feeling.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but all I found was the thing sitting on the same shelf it had been sitting on since I last put it back, nothing unusual or out of the ordinary. Just a little fist sized thing sitting on a shelf, giving off a quietly menacing aura from its ugly blackness.
After the incident with the cat, I started to feel the same dark feelings that I had previously only experienced when I looked at the thing, all the time. And I wasn’t the only one who felt a change. Suzanne and Jessica both had a perpetual look of disgust on their faces. No one seemed to have any interest in eating, and although we cooked meals and sat around the dining table, no one ever really ate very much anymore, or spoke to each other very much. Although I was generally flat and lifeless, I still felt a wave of intense disgust, approaching hatred, whenever I looked at the thing, still sitting inert on the shelf.
The dark mood in the house persisted for weeks. It was like dampness in the walls. We all started to look thin with dark rings around our eyes. No one went out very much. Jessica had barely been to school in weeks, and we had stopped answering emails and calls from the principal. It was like we were all being eaten alive from the inside outwards.
It felt like we would go on like this forever, the joy gone from what had been a normal, happy family filled with love only a few weeks earlier. But at least nothing really mattered anymore.
During this time, the thing sat right where its place had been since I brought it home. It hadn’t moved since the cat had died. And I hadn’t tried to move it, or even touch it. It just sat there menacingly, unapproachable.
It would have been about six weeks after the cat’s death when I woke up to the sound of my wife gurgling in the middle of the night. Her arms were flapping around the bed, slapping me in the body and the face. As soon as I woke up, I could feel the hot spray in my face, and smell the metallic smell of blood and viscera in the air. The smell made me want to vomit. I was in complete shock and for a moment I lay there gasping for air. It felt like the first time in weeks that I had been properly awake instead of trapped in the terrible brain fog we had all been living under since the cat’s death.
I sat up and saw my wife gasping for air and clawing at the great wound in her throat with both hands. I could already see the light going out of her eyes and the fight going out of her struggle. I screamed and grabbed her, pulling her towards me. A gory mess poured out across the bed and I was immediately sick, her body limp and lifeless in my arms.
I scrambled out of the bed, hands and face sticky with blood, and ran to Jessica’s bedroom. I don’t think I’ll ever bring myself to write down what I saw in there. For all the horror and misery of what happened, that part is too much to recount. When I try to turn my mind to it, it’s like a blank page comes up, and I feel like vomiting.
The police arrived quickly. According to the witness statements, a neighbour called them after she heard me screaming for fifteen minutes straight, hardly drawing a breath. When they arrived, they found two dead bodies, killed in their beds, and a man, a father and husband, soaked in blood, screaming like a madman.
They took me into custody. Later, they searched the house, unsuccessfully, for a murder weapon, signs of a break in, or any other physical evidence that could have explained how my wife and daughter suffered those horrific injuries. But they never found anything. Just a normal house, with everything in its place.
They charged me with the murder of Suzanne and Jessica. There was no other logical explanation for what the police found that night. Two bodies, mutilated with surgical precision, a man, the immediate family member, covered in blood and hysterical at the scene. But there was never any direct evidence that I had killed either of them - no weapon or obvious mechanism of death, no clear cut forensic or medical evidence that I had caused their deaths. In fact, the physical evidence seemed to show that Jessica was dead before I even got out of my own bed, and so I couldn’t have killed her. That was probably the most compelling evidence that led the jury to acquit me. But by then, I had already been labeled insane. When the police arrested me, I was shouting about the black thing with the thin, creeping tendrils wrapping around it, that gave you a feeling of disgust bordering on hatred when you walked past it or looked at it, or even thought about it.
When they sat me down for an interview I told the police all about the thing, about the cat, which I knew the thing was responsible for, and the dark cloud that had enveloped us and suffocated us for weeks. I told them all about it, and I told my lawyers all about it, and when I went to court, I told the judge and the jury all about it, even when I was told not to. Because I wanted them all to know that this dark and evil thing was out there, that it had taken my family, and that no one was safe as long as it remained intact.
But of course, all of this sounded completely insane. And so, even when the jury found me not guilty of murder, I was declared unfit and unsound of mind, and I was sent to a hospital were I was detained as an involuntary patient for as long as I presented a danger to myself and the community. Which ended up being four years, because I would never, ever admit that Suzanne and Jessica’s deaths were caused by anything other than that evil black ball. But they couldn’t keep me detained forever, and I never did back down.
Incidentally, the police never did find it. As soon as they arrived the house was sealed off and searched by forensic officers for evidence. They photographed every inch of the bedroom I had shared with Suzanne, including the little shelf on my side of the bed. The only things on that shelf were my watch and the little clay man. And, despite my hysterical insistence that they search for the thing that caused all of this, they never found it anywhere.