Dig Ten Graves (3 page)

Emancipation, With Teeth
     Ernie started to die one Monday morning as he was getting ready for work.  He was brushing his teeth at the time, and didn’t feel as if he was hovering at the crossroads of his own mortality or teetering on the edge of life and death.  What he did feel—very keenly, in fact—was that he was running late.
     The first indication that all was not right was a strange, almost sweet, stab of melancholy.  It only lasted a moment, making him pause with his toothbrush at his molars, staring blankly into the bathroom mirror.  His heart lurched unexpectedly and tears brimmed in his eyes.  The lines of his face looked suddenly deeper to him and he experienced that moment, that awful moment, of clarity, when one realizes that everything is wrong and always was, and will never, ever, in a million years, be right.
     And then it passed.
     He shook his head, mumbled from behind his toothbrush, and scrubbed away.  As the weird bout of melancholy passed, he noticed that the tips of the fingers of his left hand ached.  After putting his toothbrush back in the cabinet he examined them.  They looked fine, perfectly ordinary, the same long thin fingers that tapped away at a keyboard all day, every day, entering pointless data about pointless projects. 
     But still they ached, a vague throbbing ache, like blood pounding beneath his nails.  He looked at them, frowning.  My fingers are trying to tell me something, he thought, and laughed a little at the idea.  Yeah, they’re piping in after all these years to complain about having to type all the time.  They’re gonna organize, join a union.  Abused digits of the world, unite!
     The worst thing that could be said about the way his fingers looked was that the nails needed clipping.  Without thinking about it, Ernie reached in the open cabinet and grabbed the clippers and started to trim his nails over the sink.
     It was the index finger of his left hand.  As he started to clip the nail, something pulsed strongly there, strong enough to make him wince, and he noticed a strange yellow-white sliver sticking out, so small he hadn’t even noticed it before.
     A splinter or something, he thought.  Or maybe dead nail that hadn’t come off the way it was supposed to.  The new nail had grown right over it, that’s what it was.  He carefully pinched the sliver with his clippers, tried to gently pull it out.
     The clippers slipped and he tried again, with even more care.  The throbbing in that finger seemed to be getting worse as he prodded and poked at it.  Better get it, he thought distractedly.  Don’t wanna get an infection or something.
     Finally, he managed to snag the little sliver with the clippers.  Slowly, he started to pull it out.
     And it hurt, much more than it should have.  Ernie gritted his teeth and pulled, and the stubborn sliver started to come out and what should have been a tiny, insignificant little piece of nothing turned out to be bigger, much bigger, than seemed possible.
     With mounting alarm, Ernie kept pulling, and the sliver kept coming except it wasn’t a sliver, it was way too long and only the very tip of it seemed brittle, the rest was soft and wet and it kept coming out of his finger.  One inch, two, three, and his stomach flip-flopped and went hollow.  Another inch, and another.
     After six inches, six impossible inches, Ernie became aware of blood dripping into the sink, faster and faster, and some other fluid besides, like horrible yellow pus or something.  His heart was pounding, dread and disbelief vying for the dominant spot in his brain. 
     And he kept pulling, faster now, aware of a low rumble in his chest, an awful groan coming out of his mouth and his knees getting weak.  He supported himself against the sink and pulled the thing out of his finger.  Crazy, he thought, this is fucking crazy, Jesus, oh Jesus, just get it out of me, and he knew he would start panicking any second now if it didn’t stop.
     Twelve inches, blood pouring now, all mixed up with something thick and yellow and foul-smelling in the sink, and just when it seemed like it was about to end, had to end, the thing moved.
     The long thin white body snapped like a worm, splattering more blood and fluid across the bathroom mirror.  Ernie screamed, finally dropping the clippers, and grasped the thing in his hand and yanked. 
     It came out entirely, and Ernie felt it pulse in his fist, a living thing, no question about it.  It started to wrap around his hand but Ernie screamed again and threw it into the bathtub.  It hit the porcelain with a wet plopping sound, twitched once, and lay still.
     He stared at it, the taste of toothpaste still fresh in his mouth, his hair still damp from the shower.  Blood dripped lethargically from his index finger onto the floor.  He stared with numb horror at the thing in the bathtub. 
     In stories he’d read, this was always the part where the protagonist said to himself it’s not real, I’m not seeing this, it’s not real, and Ernie tried to do that, he tried to set his jaw and re-assert his own version of reality.  But it didn’t take.  He was nothing if not a pragmatist, a realist.  And the proof was still right there, right in his shower, smearing the clean white porcelain with blood and bile.
     It came out of my finger, he thought.  Right out from my… my finger.  Right out, yeah.  He started to giggle, a muted, huffing sound from deep in his chest.  He leaned against the sink and stared and giggled like a loony.
     But only after a few seconds he started to pull himself together.  He took several deep breaths, tore his eyes away from the ugly thing in the bathtub, and looked at his finger. 
     The bleeding had already slowed down to a thin trickle, and the only indication that some hideous parasite had emerged from it was some bruising around the tip of the nail. 
     He turned on the water in the sink, flushing the blood and gore down the drain, and then washed his finger very gingerly.  He dried it carefully on the towel and fished in the cabinet for the bandages.  One-handed, he unwrapped the little band-aid and placed it methodically over the tip of his finger.
     He faced the bathtub again, half-expecting it to be gone, just like one of those stories, snuck away while his back was turned, only to jump on him  when he least expected it.
     But it hadn’t gone anywhere.  It lay dead in the tub, already seeming to go stiff, like a snakeskin or a used condom. 
     I can’t do it, he thought.  I can’t bring myself to clean this mess up right now.
     After work, he thought.  Yeah, when I get home from work, first thing.  I’ll get some gloves and some bleach and an industrial strength garbage bag and I’ll get rid of it.  Right when I get home from work.
     The thought of not going to work that day never even entered his mind.       

He was thirty-five years old, never married, consistently clean-shaven and well-dressed.  He rarely smiled, and when he did it was inevitably a sort of sardonic, half-amused grin that never touched his eyes.  Acquaintances speculated behind his back about his sexuality. 
     “I’ve never even heard him talk about girls, let alone date one,” Rose (who sat in the cubicle opposite Ernie) said, and Perry (a clerk from the production department, who spent way too much time in the data entry office) said, “And a dude that well-kept, he’s gotta be gay.”
     They laughed.  Ernie was just stepping into the offices from the outside hall, had heard the conversation, but only nodded politely at his co-workers and said, “Good morning, Rose.  Heya, Perry, how are you this morning?”
     Perry had been leaning against Rose’s cubicle but straightened up now and said, “Howdy, Ernie.  How was your weekend?  Do anything good?”
     Ernie set his bag on his desk, slid into his chair and flipped on the computer.  “Not really.  Work to catch up on.”  Then, not sounding very interested, “You?”
     He didn’t hear Perry’s response, but nodded as he opened the 10-8 reports for the morning and mumbled “Uh-huh,” and “Right,” and “Uh-huh,” again. 
     Perry’s voice seemed to melt away into a vague background humming as Ernie focused on the day’s tasks.  Even the horrifying events of that morning shambled into the darkness in the back of his mind as he collated the morning reports and prepared to key the call results from the weekend. 
     Perry left at some point—Ernie didn’t know when, exactly—and for the next four hours the entire universe consisted of a computer screen and various hard-copy reports in a neat stack on the left side of his desk.  His cubicle was clean and orderly and stripped down to essentials—desk, well-organized file cabinet, a tiny, unobtrusive alarm clock in the far right corner, in and out baskets right next to the entrance.  There were no plants, no knick-knacks, no photographs.  Anything superfluous to the job had no place there.
     And that was the world Ernie occupied until the little alarm clock chimed twelve.  Lunch.  Ernie sighed, leaned back in his chair and rubbed a hand over his face.  The band-aid on his finger scraped his nose, and for a split second the image of what had come out of it flashed like a bad dream through his head.  He shook it out, and noticed Rose standing at the entrance of his world. 
     She looked nervous, smiling uneasily, shuffling her feet.  She was a nice-looking girl, maybe ten years younger than Ernie, with blondish hair and glasses.  “Hi, Ernie.”
     “Oh.  Hello, Rose.”
     She seemed to wilt under his direct gaze, and looked everywhere but at him.  “Hi,” she said again.  Then, “Um, hey, I was wondering.  What, um, what are you doing for lunch today?”
     “I hadn’t really thought about it.  I’ll probably just go next door, get a burger.”
     “Oh.  Well, you know, that new Chinese place opened up at the corner, I don’t know if you noticed that.”
     “I noticed, yes.”
     “I was thinking, if you don’t have other plans for lunch, if you wanted to go over there.  With me, I mean.  I was, you know, thinking we could have… we could have lunch together.”
     He looked at her, puzzled.  “I don’t really care for Chinese food, Rose.”
     “Oh,” she said.  “Well, then, that’s fine.  We could go anywhere you want to go, I guess.”
     He frowned.  “Well.  As I said.  I think I’m just going to grab a burger from next door.  You know.”
     “Ah, right,” she said, and laughed for some reason Ernie couldn’t fathom.  “Right, okay then.  Have a good lunch,” and she hurried off and out of the office.
     Ernie stared after her, wondering what the hell that had been about, and only after she’d left did it occur to him.  Oh, he thought.  It wasn’t lunch.  It was me.  She wanted to have lunch with me!  Huh.  Interesting.
     But only mildly interesting.  Having lunch with Rose would be a pointless gesture, and a step in the wrong direction.  Lunch would lead to dinner—an actual, make-no-mistake-about-it date—and that would lead to a full-on “relationship” and that, of course, meant total and complete disaster.  He’d had “relationships” before, and they always equaled the same thing; personal anxiety and disarray. 
     So, no lunch with Rose.  Not now, not ever.
     He stood up from his desk and started out of his cubicle, and out of nowhere a horrible pain knifed through his stomach and he nearly doubled over in agony.  He gripped the edge of his desk, sweat suddenly standing out on his forehead.  The pain was like a cramp, a monstrously awful cramp, and for a few terrifying seconds Ernie thought his bowels were going to let go right there, right in the office. 
     He gritted his teeth, his eyes tightly shut, and the pain held his stomach, squeezing like a huge hand wringing out a dishrag. 
     Please, he thought.  Don’t let me foul myself.  God, don’t let me do that.
     After a few seconds that seemed to drag on forever, the pain began to pass, and Ernie stood up straight.  He wiped the sweat from his face with his left hand, sighed with relief, and then noticed the blood smeared along his palm. 
     He stared at it numbly for a moment.  Blood?  Again?  The band-aid on his finger was still tight and showed no signs of blood leaking through.  Where had…?
     He touched his forehead and again his hand came away bloody.  With mounting alarm, he ran his fingers along his head until he found the source of the blood—it was at his temple, his right temple.  He felt it gingerly, and thought he could detect a slight wound, like a small cut or something.
     Now how the hell did I do that? he thought, and the pain in his stomach lashed out again and he grunted and stumbled out of his cubicle and toward the bathroom at the far end of the office.
     Fortunately, everyone else had already left for lunch—they generally took off a good two or three minutes before noon, to Ernie’s irritation—so no one saw the crazy spectacle of Ernie careening through the office like a drunk.  He slammed through the door and made it to the toilet stall just in time.
     It wasn’t his bowels that threatened to evacuate this time.  The door slammed shut behind him and he fell on his knees like a penitent in front of the bowl. 
     He knew right away this was no case of food poisoning or nervous stomach or anything else that had any rational explanation.  For one thing, it hurt horribly, and felt much too large to actually make it through his throat.  But when it did, when it finally pushed its way up his throat and out of his mouth, it felt as if it was moving.   
     He had his eyes tightly closed, but was not surprised when he didn’t hear an ugly splash of water, the sound you were supposed to hear when you threw up the entire contents of your stomach into a toilet bowl.
     No, there was no splash of water.  What there was, and what made Ernie not want to open his eyes, was an insistent, insect buzzing.
     “No, no, no,” he said, falling away from the toilet and against the door of the stall.  He didn’t open his eyes.  “Go away, whatever you are.”
     But the buzzing sound didn’t go away.  If anything it got louder, and Ernie judged that whatever it was hovered directly over the toilet.  Right in front of him.
     Ernie swallowed hard, set his jaw, and opened his eyes.
     What it was, he couldn’t have said.  But what it looked like, well… it looked like a bee.  A bee just about the size of Ernie’s head, yellow and black and covered with whatever vile contents had previously been in his stomach.  It looked like a bee in that it had little wings and a segmented body and was yellow, but the head, the head was not the head of a bee. 
     That part of it looked almost human, with brown eyes that glared at Ernie and a very human mouth that even now sneered at him angrily.  It even had hair, matted wetly to its scalp. 
     But the thing that finally pushed the scream out of him, the detail that dragged him completely over the brink into utter horror, was that the face was not just any face.  It was Ernie’s face.
     Ernie screamed again, pushed himself up to get the hell out of the stall, and the bee-thing rose up above the toilet to the same height, so that their eyes were at the same level.  It buzzed furiously and Ernie clutched at the door with fingers now blood and sweat-slick.
     The bee-thing croaked out a long syllable, a harsh aaaahhh sound, and dive-bombed Ernie’s head.  Instinctively, Ernie raised his arms to ward it off and it careened off his elbow, bumped against the wall unevenly, and came at him again.  He swiped at it, his fingers brushing against the damp, fuzzy hide, and it hovered backwards and out of his reach.
     He couldn’t get out of the stall in time, he knew that, and even if he could, he certainly couldn’t do it without looking away from the creature attacking him.  And he wasn’t about to do that.  The bee-thing buzzed and croaked, Ernie screamed and yammered, and as it shot at him again he balled up his fist and punched it right in its very human nose.
     To Ernie’s surprise, the thing dropped to the floor of the toilet stall and buzzed uselessly, flopping around.  Blood cascaded down its face and it glared at Ernie and its mouth opened and closed in impotent anger.  It seemed like it was trying to say something, and Ernie could only stare in numb dread.
     Finally, the bee-thing worked a sound out of its mouth, in a long hoarse creak.  It said, “Youuuuu…. fucker….”
     Ernie yelped and brought his shoe down hard on the thing’s body.  It crunched under his heel, broke open like a dropped melon, and blood splattered the small space.
     Sobbing, Ernie threw open the door and stumbled out of the stall.  He nearly fell onto the sink, caught himself, and with a shaking hand turned on the cold water faucet full-blast.  His head pounded savagely.  He cupped his hands under the water and splashed his face and tried to get his breathing under control.
     And this time, he did give in to that old scary movie cliché.  He splashed water into his face over and over, mumbling, “It’s not real, it’s not real, that can’t possibly be real.  It’s your imagination, Ernie, just your crazy imagination…”
     But he still knew, in his gut, that it wasn’t his imagination.  Hell, he had no imagination.  And one glance over his shoulder at the blood-streaked floor under the bathroom stall was all he needed to reaffirm the reality of the situation.
     His band-aid was getting soaked and the fingers of his left hand were throbbing again.  He pushed his mind away from that.  It was all horrible enough without the thought of another tapeworm-like parasite coming out of his finger. 
     When he’d calmed down enough to draw air in and out of his lungs in a somewhat normal fashion, he turned off the water faucet and took a deep breath.  He didn’t glance behind him again.  Instead, he looked in the mirror. 
     His face was white and drawn, with black circles under his eyes.  He looked sick.  As he watched, the cut at his right temple started dripping blood down his face again.  Impatiently, he wiped it away, leaned closer toward the mirror to get a better look.
     It was more a gash than a cut, he saw now.  Did the bee-thing do that?  No, he remembered, it was bleeding before he’d even dashed into the bathroom.    He tried to attach some significance to it, but after the bee-thing and the worm in the finger, a wound on his temple seemed pretty inconsequential. 
     He gave up on staunching the flow of blood and let it run down his face, skim along the curve of his jaw, and drip off his chin and into the sink.  He stared at his face in the mirror and tried, without success, to enforce some logic on what had just happened to him. 
     The gash in his temple continued to bleed, without showing any signs of slowing down.  He frowned, leaned closer to the mirror again, and tentatively touched the gash.
     And a little set of teeth inside the wound snapped viciously at his finger.
     He jerked backwards, too shocked this time to even scream, and his back slammed into the door of the toilet stall.  His shoe slipped in the pool of blood that leaked out of the bee-thing, and he nearly fell but caught himself on the doorframe and half-stumbled into the far wall. 
     Even from across the bathroom, he could see it in the mirror, little teeth gleaming white in the fluorescent light, little teeth snapping and gnashing in a wound that widened and lengthened even as he watched.  An ugly vicious little mouth, emerging right there in his temple, and it didn’t make any sense, it couldn’t possibly happen, and yet there it was.
     He could hear it quite clearly, the gnashing and snapping, and his terror by now was so great he had gone numb.  He could only stare.  The little mouth twisted and raged, and another sound came out of it, a soft, high-pitched hissing and snarling. 
     Ernie said, “Oh Christ.  Oh Christ, what is that?” and his voice was barely a whisper.
     And much to his surprise, the vicious little mouth answered.
     
Oh Christ
, it said, mockingly. 
Oh Christ, help me!
     Its voice was high-pitched and willowy, like a child who’d sucked up a balloon full of helium.  Ernie shook his head.  “No,” he said, very firmly.  “No, no.  That can’t happen.”
     
That can’t happen
, the mouth said. 
Wah, wah, wah.  You’re a stupid little fuck, Ernie
.
     The mouth twisted into a sneer, and Ernie felt the skin of his scalp pucker and stretch to accommodate it.  It hurt, but not near as much as it seemed it should have. 
     And Ernie’s orderly, logical mind, without any prompting from him, made a valiant but ultimately fruitless effort to put it all together, to catalogue and identify what was happening to him.
     There’s a mouth, he said to himself.  A little mouth, with little teeth, in my right temple.  A little mouth, and it’s talking to me.
     It’s talking mean to me.
     Something inside him snapped.  He lunged at the mirror, slammed his fists against it, as if the little mouth only existed somewhere in his reflection.  He screamed, “What do you want?  What do you want with me?”
     
I’ll tell you
, the mouth wheezed. 
If you stop killing me
.
     “What?”
     
Stop killing me, you moron.  Stop braining me in the bathtub and stomping on me with your expensive shoes.  You know.  It articulated very clearly: Stop.  Killing.  Me.
     Ernie covered his mouth with his hands, tears and blood running down his face.  He said, “Oh my God, why is this happening to me?”