The muffled bang of the front door closing downstairs tugged Graham from the on and off snoozing he’d been indulging in since Katie had got up, two hours before. He opened his gummy eyes with exaggerated care, looked left and right without moving hid head, then congratulated himself for avoiding a morning spent fighting the Saturday crowds in town. He replayed the bang of the door, filtering it through gossamer layers of guilt, trying to match Katie’s possible mood to it. Maybe it was a slightly petulant bang? Definitely not an angry slam. No. Not that. Maybe, he thought brightly, it was a ‘ho ho, this’ll learn him, the cheeky scamp’ sort of bang? Mentally he lapsed back to near comatose, while relaxing the muscles around his neck and shoulders and sinking once more into the warm pillows. ‘It doesn’t matter really, she’ll either be ‘made up cause of a token tat of clothing, or she’ll be pissed off at getting back empty-handed.’ No matter what went on between them on a Saturday morning, it would be forgotten after the coin toss of her obsessive shopping. He reached over and turned off the lamp that Katie had, rather hopefully, left on.
He must have dozed off again. It was nearing eleven when he finally mustered the energy to lift his shaven head up and look at the clock. He flicked the lamp back on. Groaning into a lazy grin, he fell back heavily onto the pillows, rubbing his scalp vigorously and turning the movement into a hugely satisfying stretch. “Right”, he said, swinging his legs out from under the quilt and standing up in front of the full length mirror. He took up a body builders pose and sucked in his generous belly. ‘Hah, only need to shift a few pounds and I’ll be fit as you like’ he thought and, like every week, almost believed it. Lowering his arms he shoved a hand into his boxer shorts and rummaged around the clammy flesh inside. On a whim he pulled the shorts down and kicked them off with his feet. He gave himself a couple of rough squeezes and flapped his cock from side to side for a bit, to encourage some blood flow then, sucking his belly in again, earnestly studied his genitals. ‘Not bloody bad.’ He cupped his balls in the palm of his hand and lifted them, jiggling as though weighing a bag of sweets, cock bouncing on top. He let it all fall back into its natural position then laid his palm flat over the bristly hair above his groin. He moved his palm up half an inch and inspected the result – the base of his cock was visible, although seemingly ringed with a black line where the pubes were pulled taut. It did though, he had to admit, make his length seem slightly more generous. Maybe he should trim the area. What would Katie say on seeing it, though? Dicey. Not the sort of thing he’d want to mention first, but then again was it worth the risk of surprising her and watching her lip curl in distaste or, even worse, hilarity? ‘Maybe next week’ he thought morosely. Losing interest in the mirror he turned the lamp off and then walked towards the shower room, grabbing his towel as he past the banister. It was slightly damp from the previous evening, and gave off a stale odour but he couldn’t be bothered rummaging through the cupboard right now.
Listening to the radio above the shoshhh of the shower, Graham spent a good fifteen minutes soaping and rubbing his body. It was his only ritual, cleansing himself of the week’s boredom, irritations and arguments. Not until this was done could he feel the weekend had properly started, regardless of the quality of the occasional lie-in. He shampooed his stubbly head with eyes shut tight, using his thumbs to push out the tiredness and stress from the nape of his neck. Leaning with his back against the tiles he lost himself first to the precision flossing of his teeth, then the soothing hum and fuzz of the toothbrush, fresh toothpaste applied three times, each tooth methodically and lovingly tended. Finally, the ears. Once out of the shower, and wearing a towel around his waist, Graham would start with the first of four ear buds per ear but he always started while under the spraying water by gently probing the external crannies with his forefinger, searching for a rare but oh so satisfying bleb of wax. It was just as his right forefinger began feeling its way into the opening to the ear that Graham stood on the lid from Katie’s conditioner, left there earlier in her haste and somehow not seen or stumbled upon by him as he luxuriated his way through his cleansing routine. He yelped as the hard plastic bit into the ball of his foot, jerked his leg up, sending the other foot skidding, and felt too many sensations at once as he dropped. Did he bang his head on the tiled wall? Too late, a split second of concussion, muffled but loud noise exploding in his ears, sparks behind his eyes and… nothing. Just the sound of the hot water stotting off his skin.
Lights seemed to come on in the fug of his mind. Nerves groggily joining in a roll-call, some fine but stunned, others beginning a low-level moan. Eyes still closed, Graham realised what had happened. Nothing felt like it was seriously hurt, there was no creeping agony of a body part realising it was broken. He didn’t feel great, but then his six foot frame was curled unceremoniously in the tray of a small shower cubicle, so no surprises there. He took in a deep, dewy, breath to prepare for the effort of standing up. That was when he noticed sounds and sensations emanating from his right ear. The sounds, similar to when someone’s phone calls you from the depths of their trouser pocket, seemed to have a solidity while the sensations appeared to be partly made up of… sounds. Graham screwed his eyes up tightly then tried to open them, his only way of trying to force his brain to engage clearly. It sent a message to his right arm, telling it to investigate. Nothing happened. ‘It’s broken! My bloody arm’s broken so badly it’s paralysed!’ Fear bent and pushed its way through Graham’s scrunched-up body, finally settling in his throat where it seemed to clench his windpipe. ‘Calm down, mate… calm down… that’s it… use the left arm…’ Hesitantly he began to move his left hand to his head. It reached his left ear, then slid over his scalp an inch at a time, Graham’s body seemingly afraid of what it might find at its destination. He ignored thoughts of paralysis, forced his reluctant hand closer to where his head seemed to rest on his (‘Dear god, not paralysed, please no…’) right hand. Which was, on inspection, curled up under his ear. In fact (his tremulous fingers told him) it seemed to have entered his ear somewhat. At least, the tips of two fingers and his thumb had. Stricken with horror and disgust, fear and fascination, Graham tried desperately to think this through… no, impossible, his mind was a whirl, should he pull the digits out? Would that make bleeding out more likely? Did the emergency services prefer foreign objects left in the wound? What did they do on CSI? ‘They’re not foreign objects; they’re my bloody fingers…’ He let out a shivering sob.
His right hand twitched. His left hand recoiled, and Graham himself twitched considerably. He moved his left hand to the ear again; it recoiled yet again as it felt the fingers that were pressed into his ear squirm and shudder. Jesus wept, he was going into shock. He was spasming in shock and it was going to hurt like hell and where the bloody hell was Katie… The strangest sensation halted the flow of tumbling thoughts. In his ear. The one with half his bloody hand in it. There it was again, something that felt heavy and strong and alien, something that felt like it ought to hurt, ought to be doing damage but… but could hardly be called a sensation at all, now Graham thought about it. He felt he had a sense of something simultaneously in his ear, yet the ear being far away at the same time. At that moment he heard the broken call of a seagull on a nearby rooftop, and the shouts and clashes of next doors’ children in their garden. What he wouldn’t give to be in the garden with them instead of lying, dripping wet in this most unwanted of predicaments. The predicament caught his attention again; more squirming from the fingers that felt at least an inch within his auditory canal. Again his left hand gave the distinct impression that it wanted away from its rebellious twin but again he made it make contact. The squirming was spasmodic, pauses of up to three seconds separated brief bouts of frenzied activity. If he wasn’t mistaken… oh god. The panic that was lodged in his throat increased slightly. It felt to him that the movements of the offending hand were driving the fingers and thumb further into his ear. With a new-found sense of urgency Graham gripped right hand with left and began to tug, furiously. He surprised himself with his efforts, felt his face redden with exertion, his weight shift, and his breath come in short desperate bursts only one step away from groans. His body slid within its own tangle on the hard and wet porcelain underneath it but the right hand remained resolutely stuck fast. He sensed his strength was about to run out and made one last effort, gripping so hard he fancied his wrist would crack. Teeth bared, hot water running into his eyes and mouth he….. yelled as his left hand lost its hold, sending his temple cracking against the rim of the shower tray, dizzying him slightly but not enough to miss the swell of sensation, the decrease in hearing that told him the digits had been forced into his ear by another good half inch. Crying with confusion he made to grip the wrist once more with his left hand but his left hand was petulantly refusing to involve itself for the moment.
The letterbox in the front door clacked and deposited three bills and a pizza delivery leaflet on the doormat below. The children in the garden outside were arguing over possession of a snail, and the seagull had given up its plaintive cries and had thrust an inquisitive head under its wing and started rummaging for mites. Inside the shower room, steam was building up heavily and fat drips were shivering on the rim of the mirror and the handle on the window. Ten minutes passed. Graham lay still, breathing shallowly as he faced the wall. The base of his spine ached as it protested its unnatural curve. His legs, knees close enough to his face for him to see the fading scars left by a tumble from his Chopper thirty years before, felt swollen and numb. His lips were slightly pouting, the best way he could find to limit the amount of shower water that entered his mouth. His eyes were glazed with an inner horror, a horror that had near-paralysed him as he had come to fancy that his right hand had turned against him, and was burrowing into his ear with purpose. Nonsense, of course, but what else could he think? None of this made sense, things were happening that he could barely bring himself to consider. It was only with great effort that he stopped his mind pulling him into a screaming freefall of full-blown, screeching hysteria. And so he lay there, staring. And his right hand continued burrowing. Unknown to Graham, as his left hand had solidly refused any more scouting missions, the last two fingers had joined the others and all were now working together, coming together at the tips, then extending forwards, spasming and jostling. Behind them came the strength of the hand, and the wrist, pushing methodically and propelling the digits onwards. Twisting slightly on every third push. Meat and gristle gave way millimetrically, forced aside. The sound inside the inner ear was nightmarish. Minute creaks and rips coruscated against the backdrop roar of a tidal wave drawn, like a slow saw, over wet bone. It was the noise of this inner horror that was constantly threatening to tip Graham over the edge.
Without intending or even noticing, Graham had begun to shunt himself, inch by inch, from the bottom of the shower using his left arm. He almost shouted with joy when he realised but then began to wonder exactly how concussed he was to have already forgotten his movements of the past five minutes. It must be pretty bad because when he tried to tense his arm further, it struck him that he had no control over his muscles, feeling instead like his arm had gone dead on him. Without warning his left hand slipped; a shout was cut short as his head thudded, right side down, back onto the shower tray. His mouth formed itself for a shout of agony but there was none, just the atrocious and bewildering sounds of amplified tearing and snapping. Of absurdly distant shuffling. And above it all a fuzzy, somehow morose, yet perfectly absent tone, like the hum of an amplifier after it’s just been turned on. He realised, rather than felt, that the fingers were deeper than ever. A low groan escaped his lips, and rose like a kettle’s whistle until all that could be heard was a cracked keening from the back of his throat, not loud enough to cover the sounds of movement made as his left arm, once again, began to lever him upwards. Again and again his head thudded into the ceramic. Again and again he felt, or was it heard, the breach widening, more and more of his right hand invading his increasingly stretched and distorted ear.
By now, Grahams consciousness had shrunk. He could see, but he couldn’t move his eyes. His torso, from the shoulders down, was numb. More than that; it was as if it had been painlessly removed from him, although it filled his vision. He saw that his chest was no longer rising and falling. Saw, but couldn’t bring any emotion to bear. His legs; they hadn’t moved for some time now. He had lost the ability to feel, it seemed. The connection with himself, and with his surroundings, had disappeared and been replaced with the sounds and vibrations within his skull as the right hand spastically and determinedly continued its path. The hot water continued to spray down, and to pool under him, and to gurgle its way down the drain.
The moment that the base of his palm finally popped through the grotesquely swollen and bruised entrance to his ear, Graham felt a degree of sensation return to the hand. Rather than understanding this via a cogent thought process, the information was placed into what was left of his mind, like a half-swilled drink set on a bar. Even to what remained of him, having already gone through so much, it didn’t feel right. The tips of his fingers, which seemed to be at best resting, were immense and tiny at the same time. They inhabited no space that was discernable, and they seemed to be swaying like anemones in a sluggish pacific tide. Brushing against them and adding another dimension to Grahams now limited experience of the moment were contradictory tubes; dusty and inconsequential forms with the weight of barely anything. They slid and danced away from the fingers, feeling wet yet powder-dry and each encounter bringing a dull sensation somewhere near the top of the skull. Not pleasant, not unpleasant, just existing and being and, at a huge remove, more terrifying than…. what? Nothing… Polymer-solid and electrifyingly blue tubes leading from the skull, downwards. Shivering like flab, but thinner than a thought.
Grahams left hand, dragging a dead-weight arm behind it, sought out his left ear.
This one took longer to penetrate, mainly because there was now no way to lever the head up and allow gravity to help with the burrowing hand. Not that Graham was aware of time or, in fact, of much anything beyond the sounds and vague sensations that started at the ruined ear holes and ended somewhere in the void that his skull had apparently become. His mind, or what was left of it, was merely a fixed-position camera with a stream of extraordinary and incomprehensible information, both sensory and visual. Currently, though, the visual imagery was somewhat unexceptional as his face remained by his knee. Echoes of a mind unravelling and releasing any hold on sanity occasionally surfaced, weaker and more distant each time and during these moments his awareness sputtered and fluctuated like a guttering candle grasping for last motes of air in an almost-vacuum.
Once the fingers of his left hand finally breached the entrance to the skull, those of the right stiffened, until tips touched tips through the gangle of gossamer tubes. More wriggling, more pushing until the opposing fingers could hook each other by crooking their top knuckles. The work speeded as one hand helped the other, gripping and tugging and hooking and pulling. Graham saw, from an out of body window cracked and filthy with numb and inconsequential horror, the moment when the breach was complete and both arms were wrist-deep in his head. Within, in mirrored movement, the hands met in the midst of the tubes, held them gently and looped, wrapping some slack around their wrists. They relaxed down, grasped and slowly, with obvious effort, pulled up towards the roof of the skull. Looping again they caught up more slack, pulled and relaxed. Looped, pulled, relaxed. Over and over and measured with purpose.
The view from Graham’s eyes changed slightly. The knee, reddening from the lengthy exposure to hot and dashing water, twitched. A few seconds later it twitched again. Again and again, each twitch imperceptibly stronger than the one before it. Under the cascading shower, amid the hiss and shosh of it all, dimples appeared in the tips of Grahams toes. Every few seconds the dimples grew and the toes shrank. Soon the toes were half-length, each with a pucker at the end, only the end kept retracting. First the toes, then the feet, folding in on themselves in strict cadence with the activity of the hands buried deep in his skull. Pulling, pulling, tugging, reducing inch by inch the shins and after that the knees, the thighs in a bewildering manner witnessed by Graham only in that his view moved and slid as his balance altered and his centre of gravity shifted higher up his body. Inside his head, the hands continued their symmetry.
The skull, now stuffed with dark and appalling matter, stopped at the upper jaw. From within, and behind the few teeth that hadn’t popped during the cannibalising change in form, pallid fingers and thumbs splayed out, supporting it. The skull swayed ever so gently, then what was left of Graham moved forward towards the lip of the shower, digits working like the legs of some foul spider. Bracing itself, with four fingers on the lip, it jumped over and onto the tiled floor, then trotted to the stairs leading to the bedroom, sounding like a typewriter made of bones and flesh. It leapt, nimbly, onto the first stair.
The front door slammed shut some time later.
“Graham. I’m ba-ack!”
Katie walked into the front room and, after dumping the five bulging carrier bags onto the sofa, carried on through to the kitchen where she boiled the kettle and made two cups of instant coffee. She hummed along to the radio, happy with her purchases and therefore inclined to treat Graham’s inability to be up, showered and ready for the day as a cute eccentricity, not the ignorant and typically offensive selfishness it would have been if the shopping had been less fruitful. Carrying both cups in one hand, she went up the stairs to the landing, tutted, and went into the bathroom and turned off the shower. Not looking down as she did so, she failed to notice the scattering of teeth and Graham’s silver chain lying near the plug hole. One of the coffee cups was burning her knuckle so she transferred it to her free hand and turned to mount the last stairs. The bedroom door was wide open, the heavy curtains still drawn, leaving the room in darkness. She tip-toed to the door then stopped, stifling a grin with a twist of her lips. ‘Well, he always makes me ju…’ A slight, scuffling sound above and behind her made Katie turn around. Her head continued round to look up to the top of the wardrobe that sat to her left. A strange shape leapt at her. Landed on her face as she fell backwards, its odd heaviness adding to her shock to propel her through the door. The press of two cruel hands cut off the shriek that hurt her throat even as it was trapped. Scalding coffee wet both legs.
Katie’s fall was checked momentarily when she landed back-first in a coarse, thick-roped and sticky web, a rough rectangle stretching from floor to ceiling and set back at an angle. After a few moments, this gave and she toppled the last couple of feet onto the carpet, web folding in on her and sticking to her exposed skin like cold marmalade. As she landed the form on her face began to move frantically in the darkness. The two smallest fingers worked to spool out and attach finer strands of web, first to her mouth and then, with the strands growing thicker it moved slowly back down her struggling body, connecting the flaps of the original web that stuck to her sides. Katie’s heels drummed on the bedroom floor, her head shook violently from side to side and, unseen, her eyes screamed a wet and wild terror as revulsion, snot and sweat drenched her skin. Her movements slowed and lessened with the methodical progress that saw the creature reach her thighs. Within minutes it was finished and Katie lay wrapped from nose to feet, the only movement coming from her still-twitching head, and her chest that stuttered and spasmed with unuttered sobs. Against the dim light from the beyond the bedroom door Katie registered a shape moving slowly towards her, up her bound body. The grotesque and arachnid shadow stopped on her chest and seemed to lean in, whether to see or scent her, and deep beyond the scarred glass that encased what remained of Graham’s being, a final and almost silent howl grew and then died as his useless and drying eyes faced her indignity. Rocking back somewhat, the creature raised one finger. Splitting at the tip, the nail and flesh began to peel back until two inches of ghostly white bone shone gently in the gloom. Katie’s swollen eyes briefly registered a light shape, and then it was striking down, breaking the skin of her neck and crunching through the muscles and gristle. Her last breaths whistled and burped around the wound and her movements slowed to nothing.
Several hours later, as the sky darkened to evening and the street lights came on in sullen orange, the door to number thirty eight opened. A woman stepped out, hunched slightly, then pulled the door closed. Hefting a small valise, she looked first up, then down the empty street. She scuttled three or four steps, then looked up and down once more. Twitches racked her shoulders, then she scuttled forward once more. Twitches became shrugging, she darted forward two steps, then tentatively at first walked off towards the main road, her footsteps becoming more assured as she went.
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