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10:25pm.
Face covered in sweat, the Dude writhed on the couch in the darkness of his house.
Wretched, good lord, he felt wretched.
The cold sweat ran down his forehead and was getting into his eyes. He rubbed at them and saw sparks, saw bursts of something. Dear lord, he felt truly awful. There was a lamp somewhere that he had switched on earlier in the day, and in the absence of a lampshade, the bulb, sitting atop the lamp base like a glowing eye, cast a sharp and hostile light over the room.
The day had started fine, and now this, out of nowhere.
Curled in on himself, clutching his sides, his stomach pulled by the most unpleasant sensations. He coughed - an awful, hacking sound - then began gagging. It felt like his esophagus was being wringed out like a wet dish towel. Nausea roiled through him like a wave.
The clock on the wall ticked away with metronome-like steadiness. His dog barked outside. He needed air, he longed for some crisp, cool relief.
A strange feeling had been blooming inside his gums, near one of his back molars. It started out like a faint prickling, a little pin-prick of pain concentrated in a single spot. Small, barely noticeable. As he lay there, sweating and shivering, the pin-prick feeling grew into a more pressing pain, less sharp but more insistent, radiating from the gums and into the tooth. It felt like his molar was being pushed, but from the other side, pushed upwards by a force inside his gums. Like a pustulating infection under the skin, straining towards the surface.
He didn't feel wretched - he was wretched.
He knew his neighbours looked at him and saw he was built wrong.
Body formed from ash instead of clay.
His heart rate increased as he realised the painful force was slowly but surely pushing his tooth out of his mouth from the inside. He bolted upright and shoved two fingers into his mouth and felt around but found nothing out of place. And yet, the pain persisted and grew.
After a few minutes he began to groan from the pain. He slid from the couch, making his way towards the bathroom. Turning the light on, he saw the patch of black mold on the ceiling, right in the top left corner. The colour of it seemed like a black void that sucked light inside of itself. A negative space. How long had that mold been there?
Just then, a ripping, white-hot pain shot through his gums. Stunned, the Dude yelled out something unintelligible, grabbing the edge of the sink. He looked in the mirror and wrenched his jaw open with his hands just in time to see his back molar unnaturally shake, rattle, and rip itself out from his gums, leaving behind a torn-up, fleshy hole.
He pitched himself forwards and threw up in the sink, dry-heaving for a while after vomiting up the entire contents of his stomach, and what felt like the stomach itself, too. Opening his bleary eyes, on the surface of the mess of bile and blood in the sink he saw the white glint of his tooth. He blacked out and hit the floor hard.
11:55pm.
It had been unusually cold the last couple of weeks. The inside of his house was cool and damp, and standing shirtless near the window didn't help the chill that ran through him. Tasting iron inside his mouth, he coughed and spat out blood. It landed on the dirty carpet with a wet sound. The hole where his molar used to be throbbed unpleasantly.
He ran his hand over the glass and watched the condensation slowly drip down, watched the tracks the droplets made before they collected on the windowsill in a small puddle. That must have been happening for a while, as he could see a patch of mold in the bottom corner. He stared at it, the dark spot kept drawing his eye.
As he stared, his eyeball began to feel unpleasant. He blinked rapidly and rubbed his eye but the uncomfortable pressure persisted.
He remembered what happened to his tooth and the breath caught in his throat.
If there was an infection below the surface of the earth, how did it get out?
Now and again a farmer comes face to face with a two-headed animal.
A sensation of something slipping and sliding down rippled through the Dude's body, his head, his shoulders, down his arms. He thought he could hear the sound of it, and for a brief moment it was like he was standing in the rain. Something was raining on him, over him.
Suddenly nauseous, he moved his hand to clutch at the curtain, ripping it off the window on his way down to the floor.
He lay there for the length of ten breaths, the curtain still in his fist. The sliding and slipping sensation was gone, and so was the ache in his eye. The clock on the wall ticked away steadily.
1:26am.
Had the day actually started out fine? He had stood for a long time that morning in the bathroom, staring at the patch of black mold on the ceiling, right in the corner. It had been there for a long time. When was the last time he talked to someone? He could hear his dog barking outside.
He sat on the couch and shivered, throwing his eyes over the room. It looked empty, mostly everything was packed away into boxes which had been pushed against the wall. He didn't want to move, it wasn't his idea. His mind drifted back to the mold on the bathroom ceiling.
Something was poking out from between the couch cushions and he pulled it out. It was a crumpled scrap of paper with a shopping list written on it.
“Pepsi, milk, beef”, he read out loud. “Beef jerky, tennis ball – some list – cereal.”
His eyes scanned through the list until they landed on IF IT'S GONE IT MEANS IT WAS DISEASED written in small but messy hand writing.
He squinted and brought the paper closer to his face. Underneath the words, the list continued: teeth, blood--
He scrunched the paper up and threw it against the wall. The hairs on his arms bristled as fear bubbled in his stomach. Just then, the singular light bulb lighting up the room blew out with a small but sharp noise.
A darkness like that can drive a man mad.
Snow drifted down from the sky outside.
Three knocks sounded at the door.
He jumped up and ran over, pressing his ear to the wood. He was breathing hard, his heart hammered in his chest.
With shaking fingers, he moved the peep-hole cover away and looked through.
He was standing outside.
The Dude thought he would have gladly lived the rest of his life without seeing something like this.
As if sensing he was being watched, his doppelganger looked up at the peep hole and spoke in a deep voice, “if it's diseased it has to go,” flashing a smile.
The nausea came back full force and the Dude doubled over, pushing himself away from the door. He heard knocking again. Everything hurt, his head pounded. He scrambled in the darkness until he bumped into something and fell over, then proceeded to crawl on the floor until he was in the bedroom. His stomach cramped as he heaved himself upwards to sit on the bed.
He sat there for a while, or maybe not long at all. He strained his ears – silence. If the clock didn't tick maybe time didn't pass.
Someone called him on the phone last night but he couldn't understand the person on the other end. He could hear noises but couldn't parse words. He had taken the phone with him into the bathroom and stared at the mold on the ceiling as the person on the other end hissed and gurgled into his ear.
He shivered, cold sweat pouring down his back. The slipping feeling was back, he could feel pin pricks all over his body.
In the dark corner of his room, behind a pile of carboard boxes, something began to move.
3:16am
A clattering noise woke him up with a start.
He was laying in his bath tub, fully clothed now, one hand draped over the edge. A hunting knife lay on the floor tiles – it slipping from his hand and dropping to the floor must have been what woke him up.
He reached down and picked it up, bringing the blade closer to his face. The titanium seemed to shine even in the dim light. The Dude remembered buying the knife on his birthday a month ago. He didn't buy it for the occasion, the day just happened to be his birthday, he only realised later in the day when he was out in the woods by his house, using it to carve symbols into a tree.
He remembered the sap leaking out, the colour of dried blood.
It was either him or the wood.
Slowly, he sat up and pulled himself from the tub. His head was pounding in sync with the throbbing pain in his gums. He touched his head and winced, moving his finger across his skin until he felt the tender line of a wound. He moved to the sink still full of the stinking mess from earlier and looked in the mirror. There was a large gash on his forehead, but the blood streaked up towards his scalp, as if he had been upside down while bleeding.
He glanced down at the knife in his hand. The blade hummed. He felt like he was standing in the rain, something was dripping over him. He looked back at the mirror and saw that the gash on his forehead had begun to seep anew, the coagulated wound had cracked open like dry desert earth and the blood was running down his face.
He smiled at his reflection. He knew he had never been a lucky man, and he knew the world wasn't a fair place. His heart was full of selfish desire. He watched the blood run down his nose and swore he could feel the breathing of the earth beneath his feet.
5:00am
He never felt lucky but he never felt weak. A holy surrender.
Shattered glass lay scattered on the floor of his living room, glinting like dew in the meadow. Air blew in through the window, crisp and cool.
The Dude lay face down on the floor amongst the glass. Every sensation felt far away, every feeling felt second-hand.
Born through pain, brought into this world from another, come now, come again.
He could see everything so clearly.
He managed to prop himself up on his elbows and spit out a glob of blood. There wasn't much strength in the action and instead of spitting on the floor, the mixture of saliva and blood dribbled and dripped down his chin. Somewhere almost exactly between the beginning and the end of this action his mind focused on itself for a split second in order to think, why me?
A deep voice, not his, spoke inside his head.
YOU SHOULD START GETTING READY, BOY, YOU KNOW WHY?
And the Dude answered through clenched, bloodstained teeth:
"Because there's a sickness bubbling up the surface and we're here to cleanse the earth. Fuck it. Amen".