This all began because of bad tacos. Jeff and I agreed to meet at the movie theater around seven. However, the whole notion of surviving a two-hour film was sounding less appealing by the mile. We’d made plans at 10AM when energy and enthusiasm were boundless resources. 300 emails and a couple of pointless meetings later, all I wanted to do was to drag myself to bed. It was as if some stranger agreed to go to this stupid flick without my consent. Now I was stuck attending. Leaving work at six, between traffic and parking, I had 30 minutes to chow-down on fast food as I drove and call it dinner. Luckily, the drive-thru at the Taco Shack in the strip mall adjacent to my work was completely empty. Perhaps that should’ve been a warning. I didn’t heed it and pulled into the narrow lines of the to-go lane and placed my usual order. A voice murmured back at me through the black box of infinity that was the speaker above the menu’s blinding lights.
The order was ready at the second window, and I shoveled the greasy meal down my gullet like a fly trap, Mountain Dew acted as carbonated acid to dissolve taco meat as I digested. Thirty minutes later, the lights of downtown glimmered in the twilight through my windshield.
The first thing I spotted as I got close to the theater were the light poles decorated with sparkling red confetti sashes. Turning down 17th Street, I spotted a Christmas tree that loomed over apartments pressed together like presents. A sign above the main drag read “Season’s Greetings”. A better message would’ve been “There’s No Parking, Asshole.”
I started for the usually less packed industrial park after three laps around the main strip. Sure enough, a cramped spot was waiting for me. I parked and clicked the lock on my keys. My boxy little car acknowledged the command with a chirp. I didn’t realize how dark it had gotten until I stepped out into the cold night air after my drive. Working in an office has a funny way of blinding you to the rapid descent into the hell of daylight savings. You start your day in the black cold of dawn and end it in the black cold of night.
Worse than the weather was my surroundings.
Back in the 1890s, that industrial quarter was a hub for meat packing and horse trade. A buddy of mine said you could still smell the ancient wafting scent of dung and cow guts. There’d been talk for a long time about revitalizing this side of town, installing cute coffee shops and trendy lofts to mask the distinct stench of economic downturn. None ever took. I guess folks didn’t want to live in the same buildings where calf’s gave whimpers to the cattle bolt a century past. I assumed the renovation was indefinitely delayed, based on a gaggle of polyester tents huddled together in a homeless encampment across from where I parked my car.
I clicked the car lock again.
A tropical storm churned in my stomach half a block away from the CinePlex. It started with an acidic belch, as it always does. Mixtures of day-old ground beef and stale corn shells shoved seismic eruptions of disgusting flavor into my mouth as I closed in on the pink and blue neon lights of the theater’s box office. I waited patiently to purchase tickets as cramps slid knives into my gastrointestinal system. I checked my watch as I waited behind an indecisive teenage couple waffling about where to sit. My lateness to this whole stupid event was confirmed by a frantic text from Jeff seconds later.
“Dude, where are you? They just played the ad with that guy who’s had too much Botox.”
My small intestine leapt in a wave of nausea and pain. Whatever spawn my poor dietary choices conceived was on its way to being delivered. Full grown, and healthy. I needed to reach a porcelain operating room. Thankfully, the two teens finally decided on their seats. Front row, in case you were wondering.
I stepped up to be greeted by a dead-eyed wage slave manning the register. His nametag read, “Carl” and that his favorite movie was Dazed And Confused. The dull marijuana glaze coating his eyes suggested irony in the choice.
“Welcome to CinePlex, where you’re part of the movies. What are you seeing?” The kid asked through a microphone resembling an auditory silly straw.
“One for the seven o’clock.”
“You know that’s already started, right?”
I didn’t respond and slid him my credit card.
Moments later, I stepped inside the air-conditioned movie palace to be greeted by a rainbow ceiling collage of blockbusters from summers past, complete with the frozen grins of the actors who’d starred in those flicks. Hollywood’s Sistine Chapel, if you will. The thing practically gave you a seizure with the self-importance it was painted with. However, the art’s majesty was slightly ruined by the venue’s neon carpet and a dingy Space Invaders pinball machine wedged beside a grease coated butter station.
Any more notions of taking in the scenery was washed away with another errant cramp. I felt like I’d tracked this turd since its inception, the accompanying bloat and gas pains providing a rough roadmap of how close I was to shitting myself as George Clooney and Halle Berry smiled down on me from the mural above. I showed my license to the usher at the security stand and half-jogged to the lobby restroom.
Now, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve taken a dump in public past elementary school. It’s a phobia traced back to the third grade. During a trip to the restroom at lunch, a tactless sixth grader had bellowed to me from the next stall over:
“Yo! You taking a shit or what?”
My face turned red, and embarrassment kept me locked in the stall for the rest of the lunch hour. I wish I could say one small childhood embarrassment hadn’t determined years of decision-making. I can’t. Going number two in a stall at school, work, or at a restaurant was off-limits from then on. On a few occasions, I would brave a public toilet, usually due to unforeseen circumstances like that night at the theater. And, exclusively only for number one. However, when I did, I always expected to open the stall door and be met by a line of patrons Making matters worse, going at CinePlex was only slightly preferable to going in the woods during a blizzard.
I’d noted the state of the bathrooms the last couple of times at the theater. I have a bladder the size of a walnut, and inevitably, if the movie runs longer than two hours, I have to take an intermission. It wasn’t so much the state of the toilet stalls themselves that caused me dread. They were clean enough… most of the time. No, it was the ever-changing mystery of who the fuck you might be sharing them with that drove fear into my heart.
During my last visit to the lobby restroom, I’d walked in to find a question mark of a man with ratty matted black hair yanking every paper towel out from its holders. The pale geezer then took each roll and stretched it out across the bowls of the sinks. The entire effort resembled a papier-mâché nest of toiletry arts-and-crafts. After I clocked the man, I kept my eyes narrowed to the ground, fearful that any eye contact would disturb him. For an eternity I went at the urinal, feeling his eyes burning two beady red holes into my backside. After the customary shake and flush, I decided it was best to forgo washing my hands and left in one piece.
Encounters like this weren’t uncommon at the theater.
CinePlex was a hub for the homeless. People migrated to it from the ruins of the industrial block seeking shelter. It made sense. 20 bucks was enough to buy a ticket which would allow anyone to hop between theaters endlessly - so long as they weren’t obvious. And, the homeless of the megaplex liked no place better to squat in than the restroom. Customers complained about the problem, but there was little management could do unless drugs or weapons were involved. People weren’t watching movies like in the halcyon days of the blockbusters in the lobby mural. A customer was a customer.
So, despite all these circumstances and past traumas screaming at me to “just hold it” as I eyed the lobby bathroom that night, the violent roars of my gut were more convincing. My phone buzzed as another text came through as I lumbered toward the lobby bathroom.
“Trailers are almost done. WTF? This movie’s supposed to be scary. I don’t want to see it on my own!”
My thumbs tapped out that I would be there soon. I pushed past a patron wearing a green military jacket leaving the men’s room, and stepped into the yellow-tiled space.
To my relief, the bathroom was empty. The white trout-mouthed urinals were unmanned, and the sinks were clear, save for some soap and water mixing in their basins.
No nests of brown paper towels.
I must’ve been here between showings, or maybe Thursday nights were slow. I thanked whatever god presides over the comings-and-goings of lavatories and darted for the stalls diagonal from me on the chessboard floor.
There were three toilets in the theater bathroom, each with their doors closed. They were tall gray structures with cheap plywood dividing them. The cubicles were completed with workman-like steel doors which would’ve fit more in a submarine than a John. They were all the same size, rectangular coffins of crap-dom that suffocated the occupant in whatever smells they unleashed into the room. My eyes locked on the area in-between the stall’s chintzy walls. It was a void of airspace above and below. The open chasms unnerved me. Waking nightmares of an arm sliding underneath and grabbing at my ankles while I sat helplessly on the throne came easy. I flushed the thoughts away and bolted for the middle stall. However, I paused as I reached for the handle.
A shadow emanated underneath the glow of the ceiling’s fluorescents.
Two heavy black boots spaced neatly apart came into view below the door. Embarrassment shot through me worse than my dinner. I tried to slink away, but a buzz from my phone revealed my proximity to the door.
A dull coughing rose up from the middle stall. The elephantine boots shifted, soles scraping against the ridges of the floor tiles. There was something hypnotic about the black work boot’s raven shine. They reminded me of watching Frankenstein on my parent’s old VHS player. The grainy black-and-white monster shambling toward that poor blind man in the film. Franky’s oversized boots swallowed any color that dared to penetrate their surfaces.
I stepped back and opted for the last stall, unable to follow the unspoken rule of always choosing the farthest away toilet when going amongst men.
The chosen commode wasn’t in bad shape, although a thoughtless bastard missed his mark trying to avoid the seat with his stream. I unrolled a bundle of toilet paper and wiped off the leftover urine, ensuring to separate contact by at least three plies. Finally, I sat down, and the eternal struggle that’s dogged men and women since the beginning of time began. And, of course, nothing happened.
My pain was still so biting that I’d mistakenly expected the visit to be quick. There was a standstill within me and the pain pulsed endlessly without much movement. I simply sat there, waiting for nature to take its course, watching my neighbor’s shadow clip through the stall divide between us. Another fit of coughing echoed out as my neighbor’s wheezing climbed in peaks and valleys. Sounds of lungs pushing gobs of tar and mucus scored my struggle. I needed a way to evacuate from this linoleum hell.
I’ve always found it funny what people remember. On any given day I probably lose my keys once or twice. Yet, in this dire moment, I was able to remember an article I’d read nearly years ago. It was some ten-minute read about “life hacks”, one of which claimed keeping your spine at a 90-degree angle on the can would clear intestinal blockage. So, I gave it a try and adjusted.
Another wad of saliva hacked up on the sister side of the bathroom barrier and extinguished any optimism with a cacophony of phlegm. My eyes panned to the stall’s steel door, onto the bumpy metallic pattern stretched across it.
Pain skipped through my bowels.
I had to keep my eyes moving and not focus on the spastic rumblings of my belly. I turned to the toilet paper roll. The cardboard corpse of the last reel held court over its still full brother like a vulture. Weakness left my stomach in radical fluctuations as my gaze fell to the pattern of the floor… and a bleached white hand that was outstretched through the gap between the stalls.
I blinked and expected the limb to vanish. It remained.
A long hand hovered in my stall. The hand was so pale that it seemed corpse-like. Its nails were a sickly yellow which inferred advanced stages of rot and fungus dwelling beneath the cuticles. Under the stranger’s flesh, there was the turning of muscular minuscule bones, like pincers fighting under a blanket. The movements caused the flesh to roll like dough in a baker’s hands.
Two hard-edged and cracked words reverberated out of the next door stall.
“Paper, please.” A voice croaked.
The words might as well have been an alien language for how little sense they made in the moment. I curled up on the throne, paralyzed as logic tried to find its footing in reality.
“Paper. Please.” the words repeated to me.
My petrified reflexes tore most of the wad of TP. I dropped the mess of paper into the elongated palm.
The ropey hand grasped the bunch, as if it was weighing it. Luckily, it retreated back under the partition, a turtle’s head slinking into its shell.
I stood up to run from my stall when wetness between my cheeks compelled me to pause. My previous constipation problem had apparently come to an end. Pure fear does more for the belly than proper posture it turns out. Although, it surely won’t be included in any life hack lists.
Every fiber of my being begged me to rush out of the restroom with my jeans wrapped around my ankles like a member of the world’s most unsanitary chain gang. Instead, I fumbled for the remaining paper next to me. I’d gave too much to the weirdo next door. My mental math concluded there’d be enough to cover my mess… barely.
I yanked off a few plies and started when the voice from the next door stall rattled again.
“Paper, please.”
The stretched ashy claw was back, fingers fixed out to accept another toll. I grimly looked down at what little toilet paper I had. I tried to ignore the voice and wiped.
The hook of a hand never moved, and that crooked voice crowed over: “Paper. Please.”
I noted a stiff sense of malice clinging to the word please this time.
“I, I-,” the words clogged my throat. “I don’t have any anymore.” I shouted back, voice reverting to a frightened third grader.
The monkey’s paw between the stalls curled up, wilting. I held my breath and prayed another request wouldn’t come. I slid my pants up, but the pale plastic toilet seat slammed down with a reverberation so loud I’m sure viewers in the neighboring IMAX theater heard it.
The black boots in the other stall shifted. The stranger’s shadow overtook mine on the tile floor. He groaned and something putrid occurred in his vocal chords. A fetid wave of nauseating stink unfurled out the back of the man’s gullet. He let out a shrill shriek that sounded like the stridulating of an overgrown cicada.
The next door stall opened, and the long shadow of the man encroached on my door before there was any chance to flee. His black boots cast a reaper’s outline across the dirty plastic toes of my sneakers.
He was waiting for me.
A typhoon went off behind me. I’d accidentally disturbed the toilet’s red-eyed touch sensor.
A bit of leftover paper spat out of the plumbing maelstrom, and drifted under the door. I reached for the stall’s latch, breath sputtering in measured beats of refined exhausts of fear. The man’s smell snuck its way under the walls worse than before. It should say something that in a room where people emptied their bowels that this guy smelled worse than brewing cauldrons of crap and piss. He had a noxious odor that turned the cramped space into a sepulcher of stink so foul I almost turned back to vomit into the toilet I’d completed my business relationship with. I plugged my nose and shook with the speed of a man in the grips of frostbite. I placed my fingers on the stall’s handle as the door shook. The thing outside chirped and parroted with insectile noises again.
Sense finally broke through my battle lines of dread. I leaned in closer to the canyon between the latch and the stall’s steel skeleton. If I could parlay the weight of the door and my own strength, perhaps I could send the man outside flying. It would give me enough time to rush out of the restroom shouting bloody murder. But, oddly, as I peered in the gap… all I could make out was a pane of red staring back.
And then it blinked.
A violet pupil marked by sharp hexagonal corners gazed back at me. A shimmering conjunctiva octagon of malice.
Even now, I can see that eye. Gazing at me with lust and begging to open the latch so it could greet me with the delights it held within itself. The devilish pupil adjusted, scanning the floor. The gnarled figure let out another word:
“Lie.”
The word floated through the air like a poisonous gas. A quick glance at my feet and I realized what he meant. There was a lone sliver of paper draped across the floor at the tip of the man’s boots
“Lie.” The decrepit voice repeated.
BANG!
Something with the weight of an anvil crashed against my stall door, contorting its metal into shapes never meant to take. Fists dashed against the entry, each successive punch whittling the rusting hinges further.
I scrambled back, cowering atop the toilet.
“LIIIIIIIIIIIE.” The thing shrieked in a voice that rose in pitch with each second.
BANG! A screw flew out of the door hinge and whizzed past into the drywall.
That was all the motivation required for me to scramble to the floor and crawl under the partition between the next stall. The man shattered my old stall’s door, which would’ve crushed me if I hadn’t left when I did.
I pulled myself along into the next-door cubicle. My hands didn’t find cold porcelain tile, though. The floor was caked in a sticky and sinewy clear liquid. Mucus clung to my hands, dripping and oozing down across my forearm.
Christ, it was saliva.
I held back disgust and threw my full weight against the stall’s door to secure it. I tried to dig my heels in for add leverage, but the substance on the floor stuck like gum to my shoe and claimed a sneaker.
The monster’s shadow darted back to my door, clawing again.
I shivered and screwed my eyes tight to try and imagine another universe where I’d never seen Jeff’s stupid fucking texts. Where I was home in bed, safe. Where a nameless gesticulating abomination wasn’t about to turn me into a snack.
I waited for a final blow, but none came.
The silence the chaos left was louder than the booming of the nearby theaters. It only lasted a second.
A ghastly stretching noise rang out. A whining squeezebox of tension gasped and skipped through whatever organs this creature used to breathe. I felt this its true presence peeling from the shape of a man as elastic rubbery molecules reformed the abomination’s shape. The latch was closed, but it was inching closer and closer under the door. I could feel the heat steaming off its false skin. A snake molting his shell.
The thing slunk into the booth, breaking bones and jittering as it adapted form. I waited for decades in darkness, eyes shut. But, I knew… I knew I had to look.
I took a breath, and opened my eyes.
A pale head with an untold tally of bug-like eyes watched me from under the stall’s divider. The ichor of the horror’s skull was constructed from a melting waxwork of flesh and yellow pulsing fat. Its shape wilted and collapsed while its neck curved like a boa constrictor. The thing removed its flesh as if it were a Halloween costume. One thing remained the same about him though. His red mirror-ball peepers still reflected my frightened face back at me a hundred times over.
A grin crept across the monster’s remaining human features. It had a smile constructed of teeth like wooden planks that stretched out from an unhinged jaw.
It spoke again, made worse by its caricature of a mouth.
“Paper. Please.”
The fly-like eyes watched with anticipation. The thing’s eyes bulged, its putty neck extending further in a leathery gyre inches from my face.
“Paper. Please.” It asked again.
Drool slid down its clattering pincers in a long bead. The space grew hot, like the foul fucking thing emitted rays of toxic vapor. The thing simply watched me and cocked its head like a dog waiting for dinner.
“I… I…”
I think it understood my confusion. The man-thing nodded to the empty rolls of toilet paper in the stall we now shared. And then, in a nauseating second, the nameless thing revealed why it gave off such putrid smells.
The creature’s face unwrapped like a present and birthed into a mantis’s beak, abandoning camouflage. A pink pulsing tongue curled out of the darkness from its mouth and pitched forth an intestine’s worth of waded, dissolved, and acid stained paper. A buffet of discarded cloth, wrappers, and cardboard were regurgitated into a stack.
Past meals.
I wish what followed came from a place of bravery. In reality, it was more like the tests they give you with the little hammer at a physical. A reflex born from fear. I bent down into the digestive muck that coagulated on my sneakers and stuck my hands under the last divider. I found a full roll, and I tried to peel it free, but I was just out of reach.
The man thing sniffed at me. Then, it spoke again, this time dropping all attempts at human vocalization.
“PPPPPPPPAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPPPEEEEEEEERRRRRR. PLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAASSSSSSEEEEE.”
I groped blindly at the toilet roll holder in the last stall. I was able to jam my knuckles into a metal toilet paper holder, resulting in a fresh skin wax. Blood streaked down from my hand and smattered against the grimy bathroom tiles.
The creature bobbed its head. Countless eyes spotted my injury. Tweezers in the monstrosity’s mouth snapped at the blood and its eyes pulsed with excitement. It was made clear that this was a race. Get him another roll, or risk my new friend discovering he enjoyed the taste of blood more than Charmin.
I shoved my fist against the back of the box to find a ledge inside the paper’s holder. I worked my digits together and gained leverage with each subtle movement, my shoulder feeling close to tearing clean off my bones. Eventually, my fingers snagged the edge of the paper and pulled the entire roll down in a fast motion.
The paper tumbled out meters away from the behemoth in my stall. I slid the wad across and presented it before the thing’s mouth.
The creature paused… then drifted toward its next meal. Its slinky-lengthened beak snatched it like a mantis plucking out a mate’s head. Little fingers on the inside of its proboscis maw added the rapidly disintegrating rolls to a growing cornucopia of sustenance. The monsters little efforts balled-up the watery sloshing paper that slid out its gullet. I glanced at its face in time to catch its red eyes rolling white. A delight of nourishment poured forth from every crevice and notch in the thing’s scaly face.
Once it consumed its haul, the monster’s visage reformed into a jigsaw puzzle sculpted in marrow and muscle. His outer skin slipped onto him like a well-worn coat, and then he smiled at me. And as it finished reforming, I realized… I knew the face staring at me.
In a moment, the monstrosity returned to its proper form: that of a pale old man with black ratty hair.
Pressing them like papier-mâché into the sinks and building what looked like a nest.
The old man I’d seen during my last trip had been here this whole time, gorging on whatever other trash he could gather. A moth could blend into a tree… and this thing could blend into a man and roam the theater prowling for dinner.
The frail man recoiled and slunk out of the stall as its neck shrunk back into form. The thing wearing the old man uttered a last word to me as it opened the stall door and exited into the bathroom.
“Full.”
The last thing I glimpsed of him were his goliath sized boots as he marched off into the lobby.
I was alone in the muck and wreckage he’d left behind. I waited and shook in the remains of the collapsed toilet until a dad and his kid marched in after probably seeing the latest Minions film playing in Theater Six. They stared at me in shock as I sat on the white floor, covered in saliva and blood.
It took an hour before I could bring myself to tell the theater management about the ordeal. They were about as helpful as you’d expect. I tried to spare as many details as I could to make the events in the restroom sound more believable. It was fruitless.
“So this guy was eating… the toiler paper? Is that correct?” A female manager said while scribbling down notes about the encounter.
She flipped back to her first page of documentation.
“Did you spot any drug paraphernalia on him?”
Cops did eventually check the restroom. A mess of slime and the bashed-in stall was the only evidence to support my story.
“What about cameras?” I said while police scanned the restroom. “Don’t you guy’s video tape this place?”
“Those are an insurance policy. You see how many people are coming to this place?” The woman said and pointed to the nothingness occupying the lobby.
The cops took my statement and told me they’d call. For all of my effort, the outcome was a police report, a refunded ticket, and a comped popcorn.
As I left the theater in a daze, I passed Jeff stumbling out of the movie we were supposed to see. I pretended to not see him and slipped out into the night.
All I can recall after was reaching my car as I crossed past the homeless encampment one last time. People were still stirring inside, and I got quickly lost in the orange glow of a communal barrel drum fire.
Thoughts of the thing from the stall living amongst the homeless hit me. I imagined it out in the shadows, hiding in plain sight, praying on vagrants when it couldn’t find proper sustenance. It had considered chowing on me, after all. Maybe what I witnessed was its version of fine dining. Humans would do… but paper was preferred. I took a last look at the tattered men milling about the park and realized these folks were home cooking.
Voices cast back from the encampment. Laughter. Coughing.
I haven’t been back to the theater since that night. In my dreams, I still see that thing’s red dichoptic eyes, and that crooked craw yearning for dinner.
I’ll end with a word of advice. A moral, if such a thing could be parsed from my nightmare. The next time someone in the restroom calls for a roll of toilet paper roll, pass one along.
You never know who’s in the next stall.