Journey Home Page #3

I wrote this story as a response to my experiences with cancer.

• Horror

								

Slowly the wetness faded.  The deep infernal warbling of the birds outside slowly returned to their cherubic chirping.  The breeze lost its wicked and wet qualities and now sounded once again like a normal summer day, and the rhythmic echoes that I had honed in on to steady myself slowly eroded to the shrill tones of the cordless phone on the table before me.  It had been ringing incessantly, but I had felt so detached from the world that I was unable to recognize it. 
I stared at the phone as the world around me started to return.  The blinders that were narrowing my vision were being slowly removed, and the swirling motions steadied themselves
One ring
My stomach calmed and I noticed the broken plate.  It hadn’t shattered, bu instead broke in half.  The remnants of food scattered over the dirty floor.  Large ants and other bugs had already started breaking it apart to carry off to their unholy lairs.
Another ring
I turned my head back to the table, my eyes looking over my hands.  No blood, thankfully.  When I heard the plate I had been worried that I might have cut myself.  My next thought went to the deplorable state of my surroundings, and how a minor scrape could have led to some sort of infection that would have left me hospitalized.
Another ring
At this point I noticed the cordless phone in front of me.  I knew it had been ringing, but for how long?  How long had I been struggling with whatever the hell that was?  At least once?  Twice?  Was it ringing when I first came in?  
Another ring.
Slowly I loosened the tense grip of my fists, and flexed my rigid fingers to allow the blood to flow back through them.  The world was now steady and stable, balance had returned and the world around me had steadied to its normal state.
Another ring
“Fuuuuuuck,” I thought, “Doesn’t this guy have an answering machine?”  The incessant ringing was now wearing on me, and I could feel my anger rise with every shrill chirp.  I reached a hand out and grabbed the receiver.  Instant regret washed over me as my fingers felt something sticky on the underside.  I hoped it was just old soda, though then my mind went to the carpet of insects that had covered the scraps that hit the floor from the broken plate.  
Another ring
Before I even pulled the receiver to my head I hit the talk button.  That was enough of that.  The ear piece slowly found its way to the side of my head, and damp static filled my ear.  
“Hello.” I said shortly.  
No response.  Just the crackling of static. 
“Hello?” I said again, this time a question.
I strained to listen for anything besides the static.  Was I hearing faint noises beneath it?  I wasn’t sure.  My ear struggled to hear, and I stopped breathing to reduce the background noise.  
A few seconds went by, I was about to hang up but then my ears caught it.  I thought I had heard faint noises, but now I was sure.  It was labored breathing.  It had the dampness of a lifetime smoker that was struggling with emphysema.  A wet wheezing that was strained, as if the person was exhausted by the mere concept of breathing.  Soon I heard more.  A smacking noise accompanied the breathing.  Not like hands slapping into each other, but lips and tongues,  the sloppy wetness of chewing that comes when you are sick and your head is so thick with congestion that the only choice you have is a perpetual state of mouth-breathing.
The sloppy breathing poured from the phone, giving my ear a cold dampness.  I recoiled at the feeling of the fluid seeping from the receiver’s tiny ear holes, jerking the old cordless phone away from my head.  I stared down at it in disbelief and watched as a small puddle of what I hoped was water collected in the recess where my ear once was.  I had pulled the receiver from my head, but the horrific soft squelching still hung in the air as if the phone still clung to the side of my face.
A wriggling movement pulled my attention away from my hands.
“What the hell?” I thought as I pulled my eyes from the weeping receiver and back to the rest of the house.
Everything was different.  It was the same ramshackle house with filth-covered boards and rusty nails keeping its patchwork frame together, but it was somehow different.  Slightly skewed.  The doorway was no longer a rectangle, but instead seemed bent into an unnatural shape that stretched up into nothingness.  Large dust balls, roughly head-sized, hung lazily in the air.  I squinted my eyes to try to get a better look at them, but their already vague and hazy appearance just became more unfocused the harder I tried to see them.
The inside of the house darkened.  The sunlight that spilled in from cracked boards and naked windows dimmed at some point while I had taken the phone call.  I moved to the window, attempting to dodge the murky spheres on the way.  It was an impossible task, but I soon found out that I moved right through them.  They didn’t displace, they didn’t sway or move, they simply hung in the air unnaturally.  I glanced outside to see the once sunny farmland that had surrounded the house was now a twisted hellscape mockery of itself.
The normally fertile dirt that was lined in soft rows was now dry, barren, and cracked.  The once green crops that sprouted were now crooked and bent like arthritic fingers twisting from the ground.  My grip tightened around the receiver.  My jaw tightened and I could feel my heartrate start to spike.  The loose gravel road looked more like a river, the rocks and dirt flowing and rolling over each other as it made its way past the house.
I put my other hand on the counter in front of the window to steady myself and I breathed in slowly and deeply.  I looked down at the phone.  The water had stopped pouring out but was still pooled in the ear-hole.  The wet breathing was still there, consistent and wheezing.  It took on a different quality.  Sharp short breaths barked out of the phone and bubbles of air burst from the water with each staccato breath.  Was it coughing?  No.  Laughing.
It laughed at me.  I glanced around looking for anything I could find that could be used as a weapon.  I didn’t know why, I only knew I felt threatened.  I was naked and vulnerable and needed something to make me feel protected.
More movement.  A slithering in the corner of my eye, but this time I saw it.  It looked like a large pipe, but it was soft and had the yellowish hue of sickly flesh.  I followed it with my eyes, and I realized it was constantly moving.  It had the peristaltic motions of a worm, or intestines.  At one end it exited the house through one of the many rotted  holes, the other end trailed through the house.  

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