My parents were the most ordinary couple you could ever hope to meet.
Mom liked to attend book clubs and often busied herself with her baking. Dad wore a suit to work and had a habit of checking his watch a dozen times throughout breakfast.
They weren’t at all interested in anything one might consider extraordinary. Humanity could have made contact with an alien civilization and they wouldn’t so much as look up from their coffee mugs.
Whenever I needed help with homework, I could count on my dad’s help. If I fell and tore a hole in the knee of my pants, I could count on my mom to sew them right up.
When I suspected that a boy lived under the sink, well… I was on my own.
The first time his muffled voice chimed up through the pipes, it didn’t say much of anything. It was mostly restricted to quiet moans and grunts exacerbated by the acoustics down there.
For a time, I roamed the house in an effort to locate the source. It was an adventure for me back then. Nothing frightening, just a mystery that needed solving.
My investigation ended in the kitchen. I successfully scaled the looming countertop and pushed aside a set of semi-dry plates for a better view into the plug hole at the center of the sink.
It was dark. Too dark, as if a jet black veil covered the entrance that no light could penetrate. Suddenly the mystery didn’t seem all that harmless to me anymore.
Just as I turned to hop back down to the floor, I thought I heard the voice calling my name. I paused and cocked my ear. It came once again.
“Kieran.”
Nope. I slid to the safety of the cool kitchen tiles and fled the room, screaming about the boy under the sink and outright refusing to go anywhere near it.
My reward was a slap on the wrist and a lengthy berrating about telling lies.
One day soon after, my mom refused to fetch me a cup of juice. She told me I was a big boy now and needed to be more independent. I clenched my teeth and held my tongue. If I protested, she’d grow suspicious. They mustn’t find out that I still believed there was a boy beneath the sink.
Holding my breath, I pushed open the kitchen door and rushed to the refrigerator, bare feet slapping against the checkered floor.
“Kieran. Please help me.”
I kept my eyes fixed on the task at hand, shakily pouring the orange carton whilst refusing to acknowledge the disembodied voice.
It began to sob.
“Kieran please, no one else can hear me. I’m going to be stuck down here forever if you don’t help! I don’t want to die down here, I just want to go home.”
I maintained the facade, slotted the now considerably lighter carton back into the refrigerator, and turned to carry out my filled cup.
“You aren’t crazy, you know.”
I paused.
“There’s a reason you’re the only one who can hear me.”
“Why?” I said, unable to stop myself.
“Because you’re special, like me.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, like I said, you can hear me. That makes you special! As for me, how many other boys have you met that live under a sink?”
I giggled despite myself.
“I would very much like to get out though. It’s scary down here.”
“What’s it like?” I asked, inching closer. I was tall enough now that I could see into the sink if I stood on my tiptoes.
“Well, for starters, it’s dark. I can’t see anything aside from a small circle of white above me.”
I pondered for a moment, wondering what the circle could be.
“Can you see this?” I held my hand over the plug hole.
“Yes! Is that what you look like? You look a little strange if you don’t mind me saying.”
“No, silly!” I laughed. “That’s just my hand.”
“Oh! I’m sorry, that’s embarrassing.”
“Haven’t you ever seen a person before?” I asked, withdrawing my hand.
“I see a woman and a man from time to time. I get covered in water and bits of food whenever they show up. It’s thanks to them that I can survive down here, actually.”
“How long have you been stuck in there?”
The voice took a moment to respond.
“You know what? I have no idea.”
Mom called from the living room, demanding to know what was taking so long.
“I’m sorry, I have to go now. What’s your name?”
“I don’t have one.”
My fear of the voice all but evaporated. From that day on, I spent as much time as I could get away with perched next to the sink, legs dangling against the cupboards.
I told the voice all kinds of things. What happened at school each day, people I liked and disliked, the childish dreams I aspired to. Anything and everything that came to mind, I knew I could tell the voice in confidence.
Eventually, I got sick of referring to the voice as ‘the voice’, and decided to name him.
“Crampy,” I said, dropping a buttered cracker down into the hole. “How’s that?”
“Sure! What does it mean though?”
I shrugged.
“Well, you’re always complaining about how cramped you are, so I thought Crampy sounded good.”
The voice stayed quiet and I got worried.
“You don’t like it, do you? I’m sorry, I’ll try to think of something else-“
“No, no! Crampy. Okay, my new name is Crampy. Hey, Kieran and Crampy has a good ring to it, don’t you think?”
I smiled and nodded, then realised that Crampy couldn’t see me.
“Yeah!” I squeaked.
Crampy started asking me for favours not long after that.
“Because that’s what friends do!” He’d say if I ever questioned his requests.
Sometimes, he asked for water. That one was simple enough, I just had to lean over and turn on the tap. Other times he’d want a certain food or drink. Those were a little trickier. I couldn’t let Mom and Dad think I was throwing out perfectly good food.
One day, I was holding my favourite toy out over the plug hole to show Crampy. A small plastic action figure with movable limbs.
“Can I have that?”
I clutched it to my chest and pouted.
“But this is my favourite one!”
“Kieran… We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Friends share. Give me the toy.”
His voice took on a stern quality I’d only heard from grown-ups before. I got the same sense that refusing his request would lead to some kind of consequence. So, not wanting to upset Crampy, I held out my cherished figurine and dropped it, before leaving the room whilst fighting back tears.
The missing toy didn’t go unnoticed. Dad exploded when I confessed to what I’d done after a relentless barrage of questioning, spit flying in all directions as he seethed to my mom about how ‘fucked up’ I was.
Their temporary solution was to ban me from the kitchen and, honestly, I wasn’t all that upset about it. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be friends with Crampy anymore.
Mom taped a hastily scribbled sign to the kitchen door to serve as a constant reminder that I wasn’t to enter. But as days turned to weeks and weeks turned to months, I started feeling lonely again. My parents were poor company at the best of times and now more than ever, I could really use a friend.
I was still sad about losing my toy, but then I reasoned that Crampy had probably never played with one in his whole life. It was mean of me not to share when I had an entire box full of them just sitting in my bedroom.
I decided I wanted to apologise and hatched a plan to sneak downstairs once Mom and Dad retired to their room for the night. I winced at every creak of the old staircase, and held the kitchen door handle so the latch wouldn’t spring back too loudly when it clicked shut.
“Crampy!” I hissed. “Are you awake?”
“Where’ve you been?”
He didn’t sound happy.
“Mom and Dad haven’t been letting me in here. I’m sorry for leaving you-“
“All alone,” he finished. “Why did you tell them about the toy? I thought you could keep a secret.”
“I can! It’s just…”
“You’re scared of your parents, aren’t you Kieran?”
I nodded, forgetting once again that Crampy couldn’t see me.
To my surprise, he responded.
“I thought so. But you know something? I think you need to be more concerned about how I feel. You really upset me, Kieran. We’re supposed to be friends and you abandoned me. But there is something you could do to make it up to me.”
“What is it? I’ll do anything you want, I just wanna go back to how things were.”
There was a shuffle followed by a wet slithering sound. Then, illuminated by the moonlight filtering in from the window above, a hand appeared. It rose from the plug hole a dirty, wet and scrawny little thing, and kept on rising until the rest of the arm was visible.
“Help me, Kieran. That’s how you can make it up to me. By finally helping me out of here.”
I hesitated. The sight of the arm sticking out of the sink unsettled me for reasons I couldn’t understand back then. Perhaps it was the impossible nature of what I was seeing and my partway developed brain failing to make sense of it.
Either way, I couldn’t refuse.
“Okay,” I said, mostly to myself.
I clambered up onto the marble countertop before looking down at the disgusting hand. It was mottled with thick patches of yellow crust and something foul oozed from his cracked skin.
I pitied Crampy all the more.
“What’s taking so long? Grab my hand.”
I counted down from 5 and pressed my hand into his with a squelch, squatting into a position I could better lift him from.
The logistics didn’t make much sense. I couldn’t see how a person, no matter how frail, could possibly squeeze through the comparatively tiny hole. Regardless, I grit my teeth and pulled with all my might, feet slipping in the wet basin.
It was then that Crampy laughed. Not a joyful laugh, but a nasty, mocking one instead.
“You know what? I just had an even better idea. Since it seems I can’t get out, you should join me down here instead!”
I protested and tried to yank my hand free from Crampy’s grip, but he was far too strong.
“Come on,” he said, arm retracting slowly into the sink. “You’ll get to play with your toy again, we can even play with it together! Every day will be so much fun and you’ll never have to deal with those miserable parents of yours ever again.”
“Please!” I pleaded as my hand inched closer to the plug hole. “I won’t fit, I won’t fit!”
“Oh, that’s what you’re worried about? Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you do.”
There was a sound like a switch being flicked, followed by a loud whirring from inside the sink.
I begged and yelled and screamed for Crampy to let me go, but it was no use.
My fingers hit something sharp and hard, and then I couldn’t feel them anymore. Crampy was saying something, but I couldn’t hear him over the storm of bone and flesh rending beneath me.
When there was nothing left for Crampy to hold onto, I was able to slide what remained of my arm free. In a daze, I fell back and cradled the mangled, bloody stump against my body.
Dad was the first to burst into the room, screaming for my mom to call an ambulance as he wrapped a towel around the mess of gore. He was a scary man when he got mad, but the panicked face he wore now was somehow much scarier.
The last thing I saw before consciousness slipped away from me was a fiery red eye staring up at me from the sink, crinkled in an angry expression. A bony finger poked up through the hole and beckoned me to come back, before the world turned black.
I’m 17 years old now. I spend most days working to earn a little extra cash. The original goal was to scrape up enough money to escape this nightmare. From Crampy.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. There aren’t too many places that’d choose to hire a kid with one arm over someone still in possession of all their limbs.
A few years back, my mom gave birth to a baby girl. I didn’t much care for Charlotte at first. It felt as though an invisible barrier separated me from the rest of the family after everything that happened, so I didn’t bond with her like I probably should have. But now, for her sake, I’m thinking I should stay put.
She’s started talking about the voice coming from under the sink.