Trembling With Fear 06/24/2018

Imp

The gluttonous blue body of the Imp. The dried and peeling skin of the fat bloated belly fell like wrinkled leather feathers onto my comforter. It hadn’t fed in days. It doesn’t feed on a regular schedule, not like us. It feeds like a sassy newborn going through feeding frenzies. Some days it leaves me alone—well, not really alone, but somedays at least it doesn’t gorge itself on my body. Some days it will just sit there, on the end of my bed, on my coffee table, on the shoulders of a friend whom I try to have lunch with, wrapped around the body of my baby nephew like a most terrible and horrible threat. Its gut, like the distended stomach of an Ethiopian infomercial star, slowly flattens over the course of a day or two, and then it begins to feed again.

When the Imp first began invading my space, I could pretend it wasn’t there. So small, the Imp was almost cute when I first met it; benign, I thought.

At my bones it would gnaw and an occasional tickle was all I felt. It was easy then to act like it wasn’t real, like it was just my imagination. But the tickle became less sporadic. And then the frenzies began.

The agonizing sensation of the bug eyed cretan dissolving my bone with its acid-saliva and chewing rapidly like one of those wind-up plastic mouth toys, it felt like the damn Imp was sticking its hand into my flesh and literally wrenching my guts. But I would simply take a head-first ride on the porcelain express and go on ignoring it. But the feedings became more frequent, the pain less bearable, and it stopped biting just my right arm. Somehow it learned how to chew on both my arms at the same time. And my chest. And my legs. And my spine.

When I puked blood in front of my mother, a side-effect of the pain, I was guilted into a trip to the doctor. Not my regular Dr. Keen, but a specialist, one who dealt specially with bone-feeding Imps.

The waiting room looked like any other: sterile walls, sterile music, sterile books, sterile staff. But I wasn’t the only one there with an Imp. There was a lady, with a blue Imp like mine, but it was much smaller, only as big as a Pygmy Marmoset. The thing only seemed interested in the woman’s fingers. Another woman, much older, had a marmoset-sized green Imp, perched upon her shoulder like a parrot, its jagged fingers only brushing back her hair, a benign Imp if ever there was one. There was an Orange Orangutan-sized Imp, covered in festering wounds like little pus-volcanoes, and when it saw me looking at it, it smiled, the man’s intestines it was munching on almost falling out of its mouth. A number of red Imps of varying sizes sat on their victims’ laps, their hands fishing deep for organs. The worst I saw in that waiting room was perched on the back of a chair in which a girl, no older than six, sat. This black Imp, which was too big to rest on the shoulders of the dying girl, clutched its talons on the grey waiting room chair, its spiny obsidian tail wrapped around the girl’s neck like a lazy noose, its weathered leathery wings folded in like the most horrid gargoyle, and its arms, with spikes for elbows, were dug deep into each side of the little girl’s skull. The image of that small child will forevermore be burned into my eyes; writhing in pain, her eyes sunken into her head, sweat sticking to her pale flesh, and her mother doing her best to console her baby and wishing that the Imp would leave her child, or else finish her off in much swifter fashion than it was doing.

I didn’t hear the nurse call my name, I was too enthralled in watching the Imps, studying their variations. “Honey,” my mother patted my hand. Had she ever called me “honey” before? I thought not. “it’s time to go,” she told me. I got up and followed the beaming, edge-of-retirement nurse, who had an Imp of her own. A red one stuck on her back. I don’t think it had started feeding on her quite yet, as it was still very small.

“How long have you been in pain?” Asked the doctor who refused to make eye contact.

“I dunno,” I glanced at my mother, but could not look at her long with guilt of hiding the vampiric creature from her, “a few months.” Tears welled behind my mother’s brown eyes as the doctor typed on his computer. I couldn’t remember her ever crying before.

“And before that, the…tickling, sensation you talked about, how long did that go on for?” The spectacled doctor asked with his back still turned to me.

“Few months before the real pain,” I told the doctor, who I doubted really cared.

Over the course of the next few weeks, the lanky doctor with the round ‘invisible’ glasses tried to kill the Imp. He gave me pills which were supposed to make my body too hostile for the Imp to feed on, but the evil ghoul simply stuck its finger down my throat to purge my body of the medication.

We tried intravenous drugs, which sickened me more than the Imp, though I did see the blue creature lose some of its veracity, but this was merely temporary. A few months after what the doctor proclaimed to be a victory, the Imp came back, hungrier than ever.

My body deteriorated faster than I thought possible. Every morning when I pulled myself out of bed, and later when my mother had to pull me out of bed, I looked like a different person in the mirror. I felt like that small child from the doctor’s office. My eyes were sunk deep into my cranium, and black circles bordered my sockets like a raccoon mask. Every bone on my body protruded like a porcupine’s defensive spikes.

At some point, I think around the same time as when I stopped being able to keep down foods, or even maintain a desire for food, the Imp became the larger entity in our relationship. I had dwindled down to barely over a hundred pounds, at almost six feet tall, and the Imp ballooned up like a well-fed line-backer.

As its food source dwindled, the Imp seemed less and less interested in my body. It still fed, of course, but when other people were around, usually my mother, it would fixate on their body instead, licking its lips and salivating all over itself.

“Mum,” I would say, “if you ever see the Imp, go directly to the doctor. Do not hesitate, no matter how harmless it appears.”

“Yes dear,” she would say in return, placating what she assumed was a mind rotten and on the edge of death, not a human worth arguing with. I tried many times to explain to her about the Imp, tried to tell her how dangerous it was. But she just hushed me and lulled me back to sleep, and in my pitiful castrated state, I let her.

 

You may ask, why I hadn’t taken my life, when I knew my life was basically over. The answer is, I tried. One of my mother’s past suitors had left behind an old shotgun. I watched a video on how to load and fire the gun, and the Imp turned the barrel in my weak hands at the last moment, blasting off the tip of my right foot. I was kept under special watch in the hospital, highly sedated, for a couple days. The Imp enjoyed the isolation, feeding in private.

My mother kept a close watch on my use of sharp objects and poisonous chemicals after that. I had to resort to taking apart a cheap plastic pencil sharpener for a barely suitable blade. I hacked at my veins, in the bathtub of course, I didn’t want to create an undue mess for my mother. Like cutting a steak with a butter knife, I worked at my flesh for a solid ten minutes, and when I finally opened up the Imp appeared, with my mother’s sewing kit. Once it had me looking like an emaciated homemade doll, the creature force-fed me my own blood. It didn’t care about how it tasted or the quality of the nutrients, so long as it could keep its food source going just a little bit longer. The black thread which runs in x’s down my forearms like cheap made-at-school book binding, still sits in my skin, like the binding of a book.

My mother asked me the other day if there was anywhere I would like to go, “While you still can.”

“The cliffs, just outside of town,” I told her. We are going there later today. I feel in the mood for some cliff diving, even if there is but a foot or so of water at the bottom of those cliffs. We’ll see if that fucking Imp can swim.