Hanging Out With The Boys

You know how it is.

Transcript

The doorbell chimed and I was immediately accosted by the familiar odor of rot and loss. It was a comfy feeling, especially given all the books that were sat in the corner. The lady at the counter barely looked up from her phone and grunted a greeting.

Mechanically, I put my hand in my pocket for the ten dollar bill I'd folded up just ten minutes before. I'd miss it just as much as I'd missed all the others, which was to say, not very much. But I guess it was slowly strangling my budget like everything else in life.

I slowly walked up to the counter, bill in hand. The lady showed me only the whites of her eyes. Christ alive, for it to be such a slow day…

I'd never liked Lucille much. She was cold and distant on a good day, and on a bad day, well, she was like this, acting like someone twenty years her junior. I'd spent the entire drive over thinking of whether I should cancel the deal with her and just go somewhere else, but… But the endeavor I was engaged in was already too weird to begin with. Lucille was great simply by the fact that she was so terrible; it wasn't like this was something I really wanted anyone to inquire about. And I could buy what I needed off the regular market, but it would be so much more expensive, and I just wasn't in a financial situation where I could justify trading convenience for such a hefty fee. Probably never would be, if I was being honest with myself.

“So, how's it been going?” I asked, trying to keep my tone cheerful and friendly.

She finally raised her eyes from whatever mobile junk she was playing to meet me. Disgust was all I saw in there. “You know how it's going, Mark. Slow. Badly. My aunt was hospitalized again.”

“Same thing?” I tried to feign concern, but, to be honest, I'd met Lucille's aunt. Enough said.

“Yeah, same thing. So you better be getting more than your usual.” There it was. Her entrepreneurial spirit. Browbeating her most loyal customer. Frankly, I'd been in the thrift store a hundred times (maybe more) and only twice had I seen someone shopping other than myself. Only twice.

“Err… yeah. Sure. But you've got the usual, right?”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course I have your usual. What do you think? It's Thursday after all, and here you are.”

Mind, it wasn't me who made our little exchange a Thursday thing. Thursday had simply been the day I started, and kept at for the first couple of months. Then when I tried to switch over to Wednesday, she'd griped. Thursday and she had been a complete fit. 

“Yeah. Here I am, with my ten dollars.”

“Twelve. It's twelve now.”

“Twelve?”

“Yeah. Inflation. And my aunt.”

I wanted to say something. Many rancid phrases curdled at the edge of my tongue. Inflation. Her aunt. If anything was enough, this was it. I was going to have to take the monetary bullet. 

“Ten.” I felt proud at myself for saying just that.

“No, Twelve. That’s what it's going to be, or I'm not going to go through all this trouble for you.”

I scoffed. “What trouble? Keeping me in mind when you're at a garage sale? To do the thing you were already going to do?”

“It is trouble. The having it ready for you every week type of trouble? And if it's not trouble, then why don't you go to the garage sales yourself?”

I felt the wind leave my sails. She was right. She was rude, but she was right. I could just do it all myself. And this was a service she was giving me, Twelve dollars wasn't a lot (it was still less than I'd pay in the big box store), and…

And I reached into my pocket to bring out my wallet. To my luck, there were four crisp dollar bills in there alongside their larger brethren. Two sufficed.

“Thank you.” She smiled a vicious hunter smile, knowing she'd completely gotten one over on me. As the bills folded onto the table, Lucille started scrounging around in that enigmatic space under the counter. With a slightly smug flourish, she smacked a zip locked bag of socks down and swooped my hard earned money away in a singular motion.

They were… I liked to describe them to myself, but there was really nothing special about any of them. No fancy designs, no print, just standard, boring socks. If I wasn't buying them for the express purpose I was, I would a million percent be scammed.

“Thank you,” I said, and spun away with bag in hand in the direction of the door. I could feel Lucille's smirk burning a hole in my back as I went.

I couldn’t help but chastise my weakness as I drove home. She was going to try the same maneuver again, and soon. I gave it two months, max. Her aunt was going to be sick again (read, she was going to relapse back into cirhossis), and times would be tough, and I would do nothing but comply until I was staring down the barrel of twenty dollars. 

But I had it. My bag of socks. And that in and of itself was a kind of cowardice. An inability to accept the fact that I was being tricked, and change. Grow. Just…

I pulled into my driveway. It was the same driveway I'd seen for over twenty years. I wanted to leave, go somewhere else, but there was a bag of socks in my hand. 

Coward. Fool. Idiot.

I turned my key in the front door's latch, and was immediately confronted by the smell of second hand clothing. Rancid. Utterly rancid. People didn't sell their stuff to Lucille until it was useless, or they themselves were dead. It had been years. So many years. And every room had the stench to prove it. I'd tried lots of different ways to clear it up; candles, incense, perfume. None worked long enough, and, as it turned out, the easiest thing to do was just get used to it.

I shambled over to my room, bag of mildewy clothing in hand. It was the same room I'd slept in for, again, over twenty years. And even that I was too cowardly to change, long after my parents had died and bequeathed me the house. 

No, not cowardly. Even branding myself with that was some kind of excuse. It obfuscated the truth. What was the truth? I wasn’t sure.

But there it was. The same bed that I’d slept on since I was a kid. I looked upon it every day, and each time I did it filled me with a mixture of nostalgia and hatred. It wasn’t like my childhood wasn’t so great anyways, it was just that… I couldn’t even begin to picture the time beyond it. Heck, I couldn’t even change out the mattress, raggedy though it was. Apparently that was necessary.

I had a bag of socks in my hand.

I opened the bag, and was immediately accosted by the odor. Or, at least, I thought I was. I wasn't. I imposed the memory of dozens of previous bags of stench on myself. It was fine. If the socks had been worn, they'd been touched so sparingly that it was as if I'd wrenched them from a pack myself. Maybe Lucille and gotten into the habit of shoplifting. Without the aggressive smell, I barely felt the usual disgust I did as I wriggled one of the little white articles of cloth out of the bag and placed it gingerly on the floor beside my bed. A tiny sliver of shadow from the bed fell on the sock, the rest bathing in the warm old light of the bulb above. It was just enough.

I stood there and stared at it. Stood and stared, and stared, and stood, and stared, and… 

And nothing was happening. Concerned, I flipped through my phone's calendar. I hadn’t missed a single day, had I? No. Not even last Wednesday, when I'd run dry and had to sacrifice one of my own. Was it the shadow?

I wriggled the sock deeper into the shade with the tip of my foot.I heard a slight shuffle of something, somewhere, like a mouse scampering along the floor. Then a sigh, then a squeak, then…

Then a blackened and burnt arm, thin as a tree stick, wriggled out of the space below. With one of its four curled talons it pierced the hide of my newly purchased sock, and raised it up to the light as though considering it like a glass of fine wine.

“Ah,” rasped an all too familiar voice, “ah, you spoil me. You certain you can afford such a delightful vintage?”

“Ummm… nah. Just came from Lucille’s like every other time. Guess some kid moved off to college or something and couldn’t fit everything in their closet. You know. But she upped the rate.”

Out from under the bed came a deathly cackle. “Heh, heh, heh. Oh, that delightful little scoundrel. She’ll bleed you of all your money yet.”

I scowled at the gnarled little finger which had cleaved through the sock. The nails which furled from it were as thick and sharp as when I had first seen them, when I had run screaming to my parents, only for them to find nothing at all. Had Graythus the want, they could have slashed me apart then and there. But that wasn’t my Graythus, no. They wouldn’t do that. But they could.

“I think you meant to say that you’ll bleed me of all my money yet,” I intoned.

“No, I would mean to say that I’ll bleed you of all your money yet,” the beast snickered. “But I will not. Money is not such an object that this tiny sum is worth your whole life, no?”

I sighed. It was the same argument we’d had a thousand times before. See, I’d fed Graythus, the demon under my bed, a sock a day since I was a little kid. The deal back then was that if I gave them a sock, they wouldn’t eat me. Of course, when I got older, I saw the obvious problems with this deal, namely that, well… Graythus couldn’t exist in the light. Like at all. So if I just moved the mattress or shone a flashlight, whelp, that was the end of that. Then came the new deal. The one where this demon would ‘save my life and the lives of many more I held dearly.’ As if.

“You know,” I began, “I was thinking of talking to you about that.”

“Oh? How so? You know that in matters of such cosmic importance, I may not divulge much.”

“Of course. Sure. But like… you know I’ve never believed you, right?”

Silence. 

“I… no, I was not aware of such an attitude. But it does not matter if you believe. It is just enough that I am fed. That and only that.”

“Look. If you can’t even escape the space outside my bed, then how are you to ‘save a great deal of humanity?’ That doesn’t make any sense. The only person ever around this bed is me. And maybe Alice, too, if you hadn’t scared her off.”

“Twas the smell of the place that frightened her, child. Not my snacking.”

“And the smell is because of you. You know that.”

“But it matters not either way, sproutling. You do a great service to the world by keeping me fed, even if you are not to understand why.”

“Yeah. Of course. We’ve been through this song and dance before. So instead of me asking directly… why can’t I know? Like, give me a general scope of the scene. What are the consequences of me knowing?”

“Do you seek honesty, little one?”

“Yes. Obviously.”

“I cannot say for twofold reasons. One, because your knowledge would disrupt my activity. Your curiosity would overwhelm you, and you would do things that you ought not to do. And secondly, you believe me. It is as simple as that.”

I stared at the finger in disbelief as it slowly wriggled its way back into the deep darkness below my bed. From within came a great smacking sound, and purrs of satisfaction.

I mean, Graythus was probably right. I wouldn’t believe them. They were a demon that lurked under my bed. They were a freeloader on my money and a parasite on the progress of my life. I hadn’t done a lot of things because of them. Because they needed me to uphold a bargain we’d started when I was a child. A child! It was only out of weakness, out of pity that I allowed this thing to happen at all. 

But… 

But they were a demon that lived under my bed. Like, this was quite evidently true. I’d put up cameras in my room to see if there was any activity from the thing when I slept. None that I could see. There were no tunnels under my house. The thing did not drink, or move, and its very physiology would be impossible for a human without them suffering from severe health complications. I mean, it looked like each of Graythus’ arms were four feet in length, but only an inch or two in width. The thing was mythology incarnate. So why wouldn’t I believe it when it said something outlandish?

“No,” I started, the desperation creeping into my voice. “No, I would believe you. You are a demon under my bed. Enough said. You must know and see things that I’d never be able to observe.”

“Well rationalized, child. I have. And I will, long after your death. But then that leaves the first reason, does it not?”

I wanted to scream. I wanted answers, and I’d wanted them for twenty years. When I was a kid, talking about Graythus got me lectures from adults, and beatings from my parents if I was too loud about the whole thing. Graythus didn’t exist. I was seeing things. I was being stupid. Eventually I became so browbeaten that I never mentioned the thing to anyone. Holding a secret about the whole thing, especially when I knew nothing about it, well…it felt almost as bad as being sent to my room without supper. It was humiliating. Castrating, even. 

To be human was to think, to be curious. And Graythus would never tell me anything. They were a black hole of information. …And socks.

“Look, Graythus. I’m tired.”

“Oh, then sleep, little one.”

“No. Don’t pull that. I’m tired of this. This nonsense. You’ll tell me more about yourself, about your ‘destiny’, or…”

“Or you’ll do what, child?” Two pairs of hands snaked their way out of the darkness, their remarkably sharp nails clicking softly on the wooden floor.

“Or… no. No, no, no. You can’t blackmail me with your talons. I know how this flows. You can’t hurt me, or I won’t be here to feed you. How long can you go without food, eh? A week? A month, maybe? How long would it be before they know I’m dead? And how much longer before the house is up for auction? Will the real estate agents throw the furniture in the mix? Will a little kid be the one to inherit this bed? That’s too many variables to risk for you, and you know it. I know it. So stop with the blustering. Tell me. Or I’m moving the mattress.”

“You wouldn’t!” The voice shrieked.

“Oh, I would. I can’t spend another decade or two waiting. Curiosity is burning up my innards, and the fire within will consume you, too.”

“You’re a liar. You know I can’t say! I am not kidding you, little one! The thing is too sensitive, the task too important! It cannot be seen! It cannot be known!”

Fury burned through all my limbs. “And it cannot be known because there is nothing to be known. That is the truth. You’re nothing more than a little trickster spirit who’s stolen so much of my life. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“No, more! Much, much more!”

“Less!”

“More!”

Without thinking, I jumped forward and shoved the main mattress off kilter, so that half of it fell to the floor. I looked down, and…

And screaming, boiling. It was naught but a blackened tangle of arms, interconnected with each other by sock fibers. As the lamplight above shone down upon it, the flesh below oozed and sizzled, vanishing into dusty smoke.

Soon, there was nothing but a mess of thinly woven yarn. 

I stood there, blinking. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even begin to consider…

I was right? It really had been a bluff? 

And I had killed it over this bluff? 

I mean, it was a monster, right?

Right?

With not a thought passing through my mind, I went into the kitchen to get a trash bag and a pair of gloves. If I was going to do anything, it was clean up that strange sock residue that was on the floor. I mean, I had earned myself that space. Earned through murder, but still. Earned. 

Silence. Calm. Peace. All these things buzzed through my head. I was free, free from the shackles I’d wrought about myself for all those years. 

I returned with equipment in tow. Oddly enough, there was a tinny buzzing noise coming from somewhere, or that might have just been my tinnitus. I Nudged the mattress fully on its side so I could get a good look at the floor, and…

And…

Something was wrong. Not just the fact that there was a whole pack’s worth of sock thread on the floor. The floor itself was wrong. Strange, even. Warped and burnt and rusted and… 

And maybe that had just been because the demon had sat there for so many years. A being such as that was sure to have a corrupting presence, wasn’t it? 

But I couldn’t help but feel uneasy, looking at something which I couldn’t quite put my finger on… was it the fact that the texture of the floor seemed to be shifting, or the fact that very clearly scratched on the hardwood floor by talons sharper than steel was the word RUN in all caps?

Yeah, could have been either one of those. I leaned closer to get a better look.

Yeah. Um… something was happening, and I absolutely could not say what it was. The very ground seemed to be warbling like the throat of a sparrow, up and down in such rapid succession that only the general movement was visible, and not the thing’s absolute position. 

Something was below the house. Or below in a more perpendicular sense, like opposed to the very reality I stood in.

Or maybe it was nothing. I mean, the hot water pipes ran below my bedroom at some point, that was for sure. Maybe the ‘warbling’ was nothing more than my house getting ready for my evening shower.

RUN.

I would never have seen that writing if Graythus was still there. I mean, in all my years of sleeping on that bed I hadn’t. That message was clearly a failsafe, right? If I did what I had done, there it would be, a final gift from an old friend betrayed. 

RUN.

Yep. The ground was definitely moving. Now it was more pulsating than warbling, the very floorboards creaking and cracking in protest. Something was there. Something I wasn’t meant to see.

My conscious part of my mind told the rest of me to move. I didn’t listen. The muscles in my legs felt like great slabs of stone; they could not be shaken by anything other than the greatest force. 

Fortunately, the greatest force was there, right below my feet. 

RUN.

Run.

A crack turned into a snap, and a hand with serrated talons much like Graythus’ poked out from the darkness below.

Not just a hand. An arm. 

A very, very long arm. No, much longer than that. So long that it was only when the thing began scraping against the ceiling that I finally saw its elbow. It was all twisty and knobby and burnt, and…

And the hand itself padded around the ceiling, searching for something by way of touch. 

Run.

Another floorboard snapped, this one closer to the bathroom door. Out of the pit stretched another hand, as scraggly and scorched as its brother. It, too, was uncomfortably long.

Another erupted from under the dresser. The arm had to twist and turn itself in various grotesque ways in order to get out from under the furniture, but sure enough, it succeeded. I could not help but vomit in my mouth a little as I heard its bones break and suture themselves back together. 

Run. 

Another by the window sill. 

Another in the bathroom.

Run.

But my legs would not move. Everything about the entire situation told me that I was going ot die if I did not do something, and fast, and yet…

And yet, I wanted to see what was going to happen. 

That was the problem. Literal demons were bursting forth from the bowels of hell, and yet the most basic instincts in my blood were being overwhelmed by my humanity. My stupid, stupid humanity. And, I mean… considering what I was looking at, would it make sense to run, anyway? 

Crack. Another hand burst forth from… well, this one’s position was much less distinctive. It was kind of close to the window, but, you know, less close to the window than that prior one, so it wasn’t the one that was by the window, but…

And then another. And another. And another. The floor had become a jumbled mass of splinters, the air was devoured by the shadowy mist which fell off the legion of arms, and the sound of their fingers skittering across the ceiling was like some bad dubstep. Or leadup to dubstep. Not that I would know. 

The door was right behind me, still. Run. I could run. Forever. Leave this place, this demon, this life I felt I’d caged myself in for the benefit of someone I’d killed. Someone who hadn’t been lying to me, it seemed. 

Crack. Skitter. Stand. Three words were all that was happening. Crack. Skitter. Stand. I was the last. 

I’d lost count of their numbers. It was probably thirty at this point, but the rate at which they emerged from the ground was accelerating even still. Almost half the ceiling was covered by the padding of their long, sharp fingers. 

Yeah, this was only going to keep happening. Eventually the room would be one solid blob of unholy appendages. It was really only a matter of time before one of them erupted beneath my feet, leaving me nowhere at all to stand. Or skewered me with its razor sharp fingernails. Either way, the entire thing was getting boring. It was time to leave. 

I backed up, keeping my eyes locked on my newfound demonspawn. They still seemed to not acknowledge my presence. In fact, I backed up so hard I wound up smacking straight into the door. My fingers fumbled around behind me, feeling the tarnished brass knob in the exact same spot it always had been. 

I pushed the door open with my weight. The hands still did nothing.

The door…

The door bumped into something. Something thin, long, and stringy. 

I turned around in only a bit of shock. An arm. Another one, sprouting from the hallway, grasping at the disgusting popcorn ceiling. Little bits of the ‘popcorn’ were chipping off as the thing skittered around. I shuddered in nausea. Not at the demon, mind, but at the mess i was going to have to clean up.

“At the mess I was going to have to clean up?” Yeah, that was a truly ridiculous thought for me to be having when faced with the revelation that not only had the things taken over my bedroom, but that they were starting to eat the entire house. 

Yes, as I turned around to look in the other direction in the hallway, I saw no fewer than three of the limbs investigating the kitchen, opening and closing the cabinets and such.

The entire house was off limits. I backed out into the hallway, careful to not further molest my new hallway friend. 

It was just a few steps down the hallway to the left. That left me face to face with the living room, and eight great new appendage acquaintances, one of whom had already done me the courtesy of knocking over the big old fashioned reading lamp. Thankfully, nothing had caught on fire. Yet. 

Even so far divorced from the spot my bed had once occupied, I could still hear great hustle and bustle from below. More were coming. Many, many more. 

So what was I going to do? Just take my car and stay at a hotel?

That was a strange question. Yeah. Of course. I wasn’t going to stay here, in the demonic limb infested house. Duh.

And then?

Now was absolutely not the right time to think about that. That was hotel time type thought. I had a job. I could recoup the losses eventually, get the house condemned, move away… there was time for all that. Time when I was, you know… not in probably mortal danger.

And yet, they still hadn’t done anything to me yet, had they? They seemed to be the exact same thing as Graythus, only larger. And Graythus had never hurt me, either. I had… I had hurt them.

It didn’t matter. I resolved myself to move forward. The path to the door was clear, and from there, well, I didn’t know. Not like I ever really knew what the future was going to be, anyways. 

I walked, foot in front of foot. Still, the arms did nothing. 

I stood right in front of the door. 

If I left, I would leave forever. That much I would resolve myself to, at least. 

I brought my arm forward…

A great screeching, sucking sound exploded through the room. The arm nearest the couch moved at such a speed it must have created a vacuum in the air. One second, it was there, scrambling around the ceiling like all its kindred. The next, well, its claws were anchored squarely on the doorknob, just taunting me to try. 

Yes, one lick of those talons could sever my hand from my arm. Trying was not something I was going to do. 

My heart pounded like the myriad of arms thumping against the ceiling. This was it. They were going to kill me. If not the door, then the window…

I looked to the window. I moved the curtains back. Out in the street a dozen or so arms had erupted from the asphalt. They were so tall that they stretched into the sky like so many magic beanstalks. 

Oh.

Yeah.

I moved to open the latch anyways. The same horrid sound exploded as the hand which had knocked over the lamp moved to secure the latch. I jumped back in terror. 

Then I felt a tingling all across my body, a message so strong that its shaking in my bones caused my brain to translate it into a word. One single word.

SOCK.