Sometimes a monster is your only friend.
I found it endlessly annoying how they kept trying to personify addiction as a monster. The rehabs, the halfway houses, AA, NA. Everyone in recovery desperately trying to frame pain as anything more than it was.
Addiction rips up your soul, feasts on your flesh, drains your life force, and infects the world around you.
I found that wildly unfair to monsters. Sometimes monsters protect you.
It was 2006, and I loathed Florida.
I was stuck in a grimy, run-down halfway house in a shitty neighborhood in the Sunshine State. The shits-stain state, my roommate Devon, who rarely spoke, called it.
I was far from home and had been in three consecutive rehabs. Now I was stuck in this hellhole run by drugged out conmen because it was cheap, and I had nowhere to else to turn. So far from home, a year clean.
Four of us lived in a rundown shack in a cul-de-sac abutting a train track. The litter and graffiti were only offset by the majesty of the track not ten feet from us, surrounded by a small, decrepit forest.
I didn’t think much of at the time.
Why were the trees dying? It was nothing but rain and sunshine, rain and sunshine, rain and sunshine. I wasn’t concerned with minutia, or really anything outside my own predicament. Every thought was consumed with figuring out a way to get home.
Maybe I should have been concerned.
Devon and I got along well enough, but Chuckie and Bobby hated me. They were two Boston meatheads recently paroled after a ten-year bid for cocaine trafficking. Aggressive psychopaths who worked as bellhops by day and shot steroids into each other’s asses by night. They were pure id.
It’s not like anyone drug-tested us or bothered to check in on us. They just took what little money we had.
It was my mouth they hated from the get-go. I ran it recklessly. Chuckie and Bobby could hardly stand the sight of me. The days progressively turned sour, the air feeling a little more electric with the tension of implied threats and cold glares, which invariably warped into castigations and outright violence.
I remember the first time I saw it. I was absolutely convinced my housemates had slipped me some hallucinogen, that I had to be tripping balls.
I didn’t want to be near Chuckie or Bobby so I was walking the train track, trying to avoid the used needles and loose nails, when I saw Slither for the first time.
“Slither.”
The name came to me instantly, like it had been buried within the recesses of morbid place in my mind I wasn’t supposed to find. It wasn’t creative. Terror doesn’t inspire creativity. Fear hands the reigns over to your animal brain, and the animal brain calls it like it sees it.
Slither looked like Salvador Dali had done an absurd amount of LSD and tried to paint a ghostly worm.
About seven feet long, its entire form was bulbous, pulsating, and hairless. A sheer, luminous white, like a fresh paint of coat on the wall of a mental ward, covered its body. Two tiny, beady black eyes protruded from the front, at least a foot separating them.
Slither didn’t have a mouth, at least not one I could see. Four legs darted up and down from random points on its torso, angled, like a grasshopper’s. I honestly don’t know what they were for. It didn’t walk.
It slithered on its belly like a snake, only at far wider and more dramatic angles. I was remined of how a sidewinder moves, somehow simultaneously rhythmic yet with extreme left and right jerky motions.
Slither was impossibly fast. It had to weigh hundreds of pounds yet wiggled like a weightless grubworm flying across the driveway for the safety of the grass.
I stood, frozen.
My brain could not seem to process the speed and silence of its approach.
How was gravel not flying anywhere? How was it making no noise? And why did its tiny eyes look so desperate? It felt like God had pushed the mute button on the world while He went to grab some popcorn to really enjoy this creature feature.
God.
I grew up in the church.
I never cared much for religion, and I had trouble swallowing most of the concepts. But I prayed, privately. Despite my doubt, I couldn’t shake the feeling there was more to this story than what was in front of the curtain. I figured I was wrong, but it helped me get through the darkness.
Getting clean, I found myself praying and more. No atheists in a foxhole. I just…needed to feel like someone was there, in my corner, having my back. Friends and family had disappeared. Intellectual honesty be damned.
And I don’t mind admitting my brain flashed some jumbled prayer before I bolted.
I cut through the woods, shredding my arms on random thorny protrusions. I could feel Slither just behind my footfalls, a strange warmth pulsating out of it.
I couldn’t help it. I had to look back.
When I emerged from the woods onto our street, I turned around. Peering through the tree line, I could see Slither had never entered the woods. It had stopped where the tracks met the patch of dying forest.
I could just make out its little dark eyes. I expected to see hunger in them, anger, animalism. I couldn’t tell you how, but they almost looked desperate, pleading to me.
I saw one of our neighbors on his stoop. Chicken Joe. Never introduced himself as Joe. Always “Chicken Joe.” If you asked about it, he’d ball up a fist, take one step forward, and menacingly tell you “No to worry about it.”
A strange lot for strange times.
The gear on his dirty patio table told me he was riding the dragon and feeling comfortably numb. A dirty needle, some cotton, a rubber tube.
I didn’t care. I dragged him up, muttering some incoherent complaint in his stupor.
“Chicken. CHICKEN.” I slapped him hard. A small shimmer of lucidity spread across his patchy face. “Do you see it?”
I pointed through the trees at Slither, resting on the train tracks, its swollen body heaving up and down.
“See what, Pappy?”
“THE GIANT FUCKING WHITE DEVIL WORM, CHICKEN.”
He looked at me with pity and said “man, you need to cut back on them drugs.”
I rolled my eyes and slunk back to my house, looking over my shoulder the entire time.
I worked late the next day and Bobby was in a ‘roid rage when I returned home. Screaming about me leaving a plate out too long, Devon freaking him out with his silence, someone stealing his protein bars; anything his addled mind could hold on to.
That was my cue. Exit stage left, pursued by a hulking junkie.
I crept through the woods silently, taking care to not add to the myriad of scratches running up and down my bare arms. The Florida sun drenched my face, the air so thick with humidity you could slice it up and spread it on bread.
I had to know.
I did my best to tip toe to the train tracks. With each crunch of gravel under my feet, I winced, expecting some pale hell worm to come ripping towards me at breakneck speed.
Nothing. I stood there silently, noticing the trees seemed to die a little overnight, each branch sagging and browning. It had rained last night but this patchwork forest looked starved.
The explosion of motion in my periphery set off alarm bells in a primal place, like a prehistoric hunter sensing predatory eyes in the deep dark.
I was entranced for a moment by just how pronounced its slither was. Its tail end whipped so far left and right you’d expect its bones, if it had any, to just snap. That dance would continue up its body, a mesmerizing, flailing motion.
The horrible wriggle of an demon earthworm.
This time, I was off the block a lot quicker, plunging through the forest, feeling thorns mutilate my skin.
I stopped at the edge of cul-de-sac, hands on my knees, panting, and staring through the trees. Slither sat, its body heaving, at the edge of the woods, just on the tracks.
Its eyes bore holes into me. This time, I felt like they were begging me.
At first, I thought it was hungry, and I was a meal that just kept tempting it. But there was something else there. Like a toddler who needed to relay an emergency, all the franticness of emotion but none of the necessary language.
“What the fuck are you doing, fucktard?”
Take stupidity, add redundancy, which meant Chuckie was behind me.
“Looking at this fucked up monster on the track.”
I pointed to where Slither rested.
“You’re one stupid little crackhead. There ain’t shit there. Give me twenty bucks.”
I looked at Chuckie, twice my size, eyes and arms bulging like a bad Batman villain.
“Fuck you.”
Chuckie slammed me in the stomach. I doubled over, vomiting what little food I’d been able to afford to eat that day.
“Your days are numbered, you and that fucking mouth.”
Chuckie walked off.
The days ran away, and I settled into a disturbing routine.
I found work and food when I could, but most days I crept to the tracks, trying to silent, hoping to watch Slither, only to find myself the victim in hot pursuit until I cleared the tracks.
Each day, the abuse got worse.
I’d catch a beating for leaving my laundry in the dryer, they’d punch holes in the drywall because I left some hairs on the bathroom sink. Every retort I couldn’t help resulted in a bloody lip or nose.
Day by day, the small forest took on a darker hue, its collective life decaying, heading to rot.
The neighborhood took to calling me “schizoid.” Every person I showed couldn’t see Slither, who would rest at the edge of the forest, watching me, trying to tell me something with its eyes in a language I just didn’t understand.
I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in who wasn’t listening to get me out of here. Away from the monsters.
A bottle of soda was my undoing.
I had grabbed one out of the fridge late one night, not realizing it was pressurized. When I opened it, a torrential storm of dark brown liquid exploded, covering our ramshackle living room. Nicotine-stained walls, hanging cupboards, broken tile – all soaked.
I was contemplating my fate when Bobby and Chuckie walked in.
My heart iced over as I realized their work shirts were sitting on a few chairs nearby. They were covered in brown stains.
I could barely decipher their gorilla screams. No sense appealing to compassion or offering to remedy the situation. When the body says run, I’d learned, you run.
So, I ran.
Through the dead trees, too resigned and devoid of life to even tear at my arms. I was much smaller and faster, and I thought that gave me an edge.
I was wrong. You can’t outright the hatred of a bull. You can’t outrun the madness of steroids.
Just as I hit the track, they caught up with me.
They took turns viciously beating me. The first few strikes hurt like Hell.
After that, shock set in, my body going limp. I realized we’d long past the usual abuse, that this was likely my final curtain call. As my swollen eyes lost their field of vision, I could see blood spraying from my nose, taste the copper of it in my mouth, hear bones crunching.
I don’t know how long it went on. I don’t know how I wasn’t already dead when my body crumpled onto the tracks.
I saw them, just barely, staring over me, the embers of unaltered raged burning in their eyes. Gleeful smiles etched on their face. Two monsters, delighting in their wicked work.
From some distant corner of my mind, I called out to God one last time. All I wanted to do was get clean and go home. Even if I deserved this, mercy, please, mercy. Send me an angel.
It felt stupid and out of character, but at the edge of death, you lose all sense of self and go for broke.
The last thing I saw before the infinite warmth of unconsciousness took me was Slither, the pale worm, effortlessly gliding toward me, its meal, the feast finally ready.
I came to in the hospital three days later.
I had more injuries than I could count. Concussions. Broken this, shattered that. They’d caught the internal bleeding just in time.
The police took my statement. Apparently Chicken Joe saw Bobbie and Chuckie chasing me, emerging from the woods without me, covered in blood.
He found me and got help. Even us junkies do the right thing.
A detective asked me if I knew what happened to Bobbie and Chuckie after they beat me. I could only speak in painful rasps, but I told her they must have made a run for it. Didn’t want to go back to prison and all that.
The detective’s eyes shifted uncomfortably, and she showed me a picture. Next to the pool of blood where my body had lain was a sight I’ll never forget.
Two pairs of boots, perfectly upright, not a drop of blood on them.
Which was strange, given that a leg jutted from each boot, cleanly severed just below the knee.
I was at a loss for words.
I was ruled out, given that I was an inch from death when they found me. Our neighbors confirmed to the police that Chicken Joe never entered the woods.
They never figured out what I happened to Chuckie and Bobby.
I did.
It took a few months of healing to get back there, but the moment I could, I returned to the cul-de-sac. The decrepit forest was bursting with green life, as if the magic of Spring had found it again in one fell swoop.
I carefully cut through the trees and found the track. Stood and waited.
Slither came tearing down the track with its haunting wriggle, hurtling towards me. I never moved. No more running.
A foot away, our eyes met. I can’t really explain how, but I saw love there.
I was startled when I heard the whispers. They were faint and sprang from every tree, a thousand voices, all the same, melodic but discordant, far away.
“Hello, Pappy.”
My hands trembled but I steeled my nerves.
“Hello. Did…did you eat them? Bobbie and Chuckie?”
Slither cocked its head slightly. “I did not know monsters had names. But yes, I ate them. I ate them for what they did to you, my child.”
The compassion in the thousands of voices was palpable.
“Thank you,” I muttered quietly, gratefully looking in its eyes, crying a little. “You…you’re here to protect me, aren’t you? I’m sorry I ran away.”
“Yes. He does not always send pretty angels. Sometimes He sends me.”
I walked over and gently touched its head, holding my hand steady, feeling the warmth of my guardian.
“I can never thank you enough. What’s your name?”
“Hmm. You call me ‘Slither.’ I like that. ‘Slither.’ They’re still slithering inside me right now, you know? For what they did to my child.”
My eyes grew to saucers as Slither raised its face level with mine.
Where nothing once was, a small mouth appeared and grew. Its maw opened, showing what had to be at least ten thousand rows of teeth, swelling and expanding until I could see deep into Slither’s body.
That’s when I saw them.
Chuckie and Bobbie, fumbling, twitching, scrambling, reaching, from inside Slither’s bulbous belly.
They screamed and begged and pleaded for help, cried out to me and God and their mothers.
None of us were listening.
Slither closed its mouth until nothing was left on its face but its obsidian eyes and silence.
We stood there among the lush trees, and I felt life in my body again.
“I’m going back to Texas, Slither. Will you come with me?”
Slither cocked its head, and I could sense a smile that wasn’t there.
“Of course, Pappy. Just make sure to live by a train track.”