Trap
by Stuart Smith
"Help me. He's back. He's going to kill us."
Sleep deprived eyes flash wide open and stare at a lightless room. That voice again.
"Fuck off. Leave me alone!"
His voice strained with fear. This was the third day.
"He's in the bathroom."
"There's no one in the bathroom. Fuck Off! Please!"
"He's going to kill me - then he's going to kill you."
The voice in Marvin Dictachi's head sounded primitive, inhuman, alien. It buzzed in his skull and seared his tightened nerves.
"Kill him first. Kill him first before he gets us both!"
Marvin grasped the shaft of his bedside light and his fingers crawled up its length to switch it on. The light exposed his dank bedroom in all its sepia glory.
"Go. Go to the bathroom." Said the voice as Marvin vice-gripped his head by loose tufts of thinning gray hair. Then silence. No sound at all. Even the city was dead at four in the morning.
Next, he was standing. He was standing beside his bed in the brown light of his bedroom. He didn't remember standing, it just happened. He was standing in stained, striped pyjamas and he was looking at the bedroom door. He looked at the door knowing that in the hallway, to the left was the bathroom, and in the bathroom was 'him'.
"Kill him." The voice whispered.
The door was already ajar. There was no axe murderer he told himself, no knife-wielding madman, no gun-toting psychopath waiting for him. There was nothing to be afraid of and so he took a step towards his fear. Then another, then another. Then he threw open the bedroom door and strode to the bathroom, his sleepless boiled eyeballs pointing the way ahead. The door pretended to hang there concealing the horror within. Marvin pushed it open with his toe and stepped inside. He grasped the pull-cord light switch as a spider fell off it onto his sleeve and, with heart-pumping abandon, switched on the light. Both his eyes squeazed shut and he tensed his jaw in anticipation of the gunshot or axe blow to cleave him into two pieces, but nothing happened. One eye opened. He stood in his own, small, dirty shit hole of a bathroom. Alone.
He swayed there in silence for eight and a half minutes waiting for his heart to calm before his bladder signified bodily duties. He thrust his hand into his pyjama pants and pulled out his cock and pointed its sleepy one-eyed head to the toilet bowl. The tiny spider had worked its way from his sleeve to his collar and as he began the first drips of a night-piss, his ear started to tickle and he scrunched up his shoulder and lent into his neck to itch it without letting go of his dick. The itch turned from mild tickle to urgent irritant and he slapped his free hand over the top of his head to the ear on the opposite side. His finger probed inside but the intrusion was too deep. He sprayed his piss onto his linoleum floor, when suddenly the voice in his head screamed. It was louder than anything he'd heard before and he clapped both hands to his skull to try to silence it.
He fell to the floor still squirting yellow urine when his mind and body changed. Marvin Dictachi no longer had possession them. His body became stiff and bent and moved on all fours. His eyes rolled separately in his head and his face rippled different contortions from mournful frown to evil clown-like grimaces. The voice in his head still screamed, but now its language had no meaning. The entity that controlled Marvin's body made him shoot out a leg to slam the bathroom door. The voice screamed harder and then silence. From inside Marvin's opposite ear, a bluebottle escaped and frantically whizzed around the tiny room. Marvin's rolling eyes steadied themselves to track the insect as if still learning how to see. Eventually they traced its path with ease and when the fly settled on the floor they were both pointing right at it. Marvin's body reared back on his knees, very slowly, and then paused, his head twisted to one side and his shiney pink scalp catching the yellow light from the single sixty watt bulb.
The fly landed on the floor and scuttled along the edge of a large puddle of urine, her compound eyes aware of a gap under the bath where she might be safe for a few seconds. Towering above her was a gargantuan out-of-focus blur of horror that hung above her like a giant apocalyptic black thunderstorm. She was seconds away from safety when the enormous blur suddenly came into focus. A massive pink shiny wall appeared from nowhere trailing streamers of gray hair. Two black headlights and a twisted yellow toothy grill. Then, crunch - sweet, instant death. Her remains were crushed and streaked across the floor. The head that hit her cracked on impact and skidded to the base of the bathroom sink where it cracked again and came to rest. Thick hot red gushed from its wounds and seeped into pissey sticky yellow.
Hours later, when Marvin's body finally went cold, the head pilot crawled out his ear cockpit. He crawled across the linoleum expanse to climb the spore-pitted flowered cliff face to hang upside down at the foot of the hilly artex desert. Then he made his way back to where he was before - the drawstring light switch cord. It rose into the sky before him like some kind of impossibly tall and thin rope skyscraper. Finally, he climbed the cord and sat on top of the pink plastic saucer cap to view his wreckage that lie there in its crimson lake of blood above him. He cherished the recent memory of being able to smile. The tiny house spider then waited for more flies to murder in new and creative ways.
