Alright, I'm finished. Sorry again.
(Disclaimer: If something is italized i
t's a thought.)
The Scraping Mass
The hot cup of coffee warms my hands as I sit down at my desk and carefully place the cup next to my keyboard. I try to take a sip while I’m waiting for my PC to run up but the black elixir of every journalist like myself is still too hot and leaves my lips burning. My body however tells me he just needs the coffee so badly since I stayed up all night. I just had 2 hours of sleep in the morning and as much as I tried it, I can’t really sleep in the daytime. On the other hand staying up was necessary for my current case as an investigative journalist. A long yawn leaves my mouth and I take another sip of coffee.
“Almost drinkable”
I open up the video footage of last night and see almost only black as the video starts. There has actually been a cold shimmer of moonlight sneaking through the curtains but everything was darker through the lens of my camera. Although it was dark, I know where I was. I sat in the corner of the room hidden in a pile of baskets next to an old bookshelf.
“Alright this should the moment when…”
It was the moment. The speakers of the PC dispense the voices of two women in the corridor. They speak Spanish. One of them seems to be angry about something and talks really fast while the other one responds calmly and slowly, probably disagreeing. Unfortunately I don’t understand a thing. I never learned any Spanish.
“Luckily Maggie will translate it tomorrow.”
The screen lightens up as one of the women presses the light switch. I remember holing up behind my wall of baskets while filming through a gap between them. My Camera focussed the women. The calm old lady is small, about 70 years old and with her wrinkles and her hair more grey than brown she looks like a typical Hispanic grandma. Although she is walking slowly she enters the room first while the other woman continues her tirade behind her. She is taller and her age must be somewhere around 60.
The women continue talking and start taking things out of drawers while the screen shows my attempts to capture the room as much as possible. The room is a normal living room with a TV, a couch, an armchair, some closets and a shelf with photos of the small old lady and her family. As the camera turns back on the old women, they are coiling the huge heavy carpet. The floor underneath it was covered with symbols drawn with chalk. Runes, stars, circles, well whatever you’d expect from witches. However no pentagrams, although some signs looked similar. Last night this was the moment I was sure, I was in the right house. They were from the group of women I was looking for, a circle of witches practising Brujeria, which is basically Spanish witchcraft.
While the women continue preparing for their nightly occult event by renewing the chalk symbols, placing candles and taking artefacts like bones, wooden figures, roses, feathers, salt and different powders out of the closets, I start losing my attention for the video and catch myself staring out of the window. It is dark already and my town almost disappears in the darkness of the young night. Only the occasional streetlamps and a few lighted windows allow for the view of some houses gardens and streets. The summer was gone for almost a month now. I try getting myself to look on my screen again, but I’m so tired and I have one of this moments again.
“Who am I doing this for?”
It is more than just one question. I hate that my reports about Satanists, witches and weird sects are mainly consumed by religious people who think that they are any better than them, although they also believe in their invented supernatural being they call god. Some fear those witches, some laugh about them and some try to keep their kids away from sects by using my work but I laugh about all of them just like they laugh about the freaks I present them in my reports.
“They deny their own rule about themselves and admit inferiority to something that is not proven to exist, while I’m my own lord.”
“Who am I doing this for?”
The other part of the question is the purpose behind all of it. My job is kind of fun and I get into thrilling situations that others just dream of, but I’m alone. My small apartment is only populated by me, but no wife, no girlfriend and while I do have a couple of friends none of them are that close to me, none of them feel special. My mom died years ago and my dad has always been an asshole.
“Who do I live for?”
Myself. I live for myself and I got to continue examining this damn video. My cup still has some coffee in it but it has to be cold now. I try forcing my eyes back to my screen but there is something next to my cup. It looks like some kind of disgusting white worm, wait no, a maggot, fat, ugly with a glimmering surface and a small black face-like front with two surprisingly big teeth. Or are those pincers? Any way they look really damn nasty, possibly able to rip through my skin if I’m not careful. The maggot creeps towards my fingers, leaving behind a slim trail of red blood, drying on my desk.
“Maggots turn into flies and flies are insects. They shouldn’t have red blood right?”
“Well maybe it ate from something dead or even had a living host. I heard some maggots do that.”
I quickly pull my fingers away from the sharp pincers and sent my eyes searching for some weapon against the insect. The old dictionary I don’t even use anymore is just perfect. With it I push the maggot of my desk. Then I drop it straight on the disgusting thing. The heavy book falls, hits the ground with a loud pop and buries the maggot under it. I decide to clean it up tomorrow and get back to the video.
Since I am tired I skip to the most interesting part. It is at some point in the middle of their rituals that the younger of the two witches from the previous scenes either recognized me or she has too much fantasy even for a witch. Luckily she says it in English, because some of the younger women seem to not speak Spanish. They were only able to recite some of the phrases the circle of want–to–be-witches chanted or mumbled depending on their rituals. The screen shows the two old and five other women in the dark room, only lit by candles, sitting on the ground around their chalk symbols, except for the oldest woman who sits on a regular chair.
"I can feel someone is nearby and that person is watching us," says the younger of the two boss-witches.
Of course all of the younger ones look around in panic immediately. Some are baling their fists ready to go searching. I remember getting ready to fight my way through them and run away if they find me. My hands gripped tight around the camera.
But the host of this meeting has another Idea. She says "No," stands up from her chair and shuffles towards one of her closets. "We will deal with this our way."
She comes back with a little box and pours the substance from inside it into a chalk circle on the ground. Turns out it’s some kind of black powder. The old woman looks around into the faces of the others "I’m thinking about a curse."
So the women try to curse me. All of them begin to close the circle by holding hands as the two old witches begin chanting in Spanish. As they proceed the black powder begins to shimmer a little because of the flickering light of the candles. While chanting the oldest woman draws a little knife, cuts her forearm and lets a few drops of blood fall onto the black powder. Then she passes the knife and the others do the same. After everyone was done the chanting dies and I pause the video.
“A curse, ridiculous. They probably just shared HIV with their knife.”
I close the video and turn off my PC knowing that this is going to be a good report, but I am surely not going to continue today. My eyelids feel heavy and looking outside my window I don’t see any other lighted windows anymore.
“Time to go to bed.”
I turn around to my bed which is in the same room as my working desk, the room I’m already in and let out a yawn.
But the shock makes the yawn stick in my throat.
The wall behind my bed is sprinkled with about a hundred fat white maggots. Their soft pale bodies leave thin lines of dark red blood wherever they creep. The only thing I can do is stare as the maggots crawl on the ceiling, the floor and my bed. Whenever a maggot touches another it made a hushed scraping noise.
Is this the curse? No, curses don’t exist, just like god. There has to be a natural explanation. A fly probably laid eggs in my apartment.
“But it’s October. It should be way too cold for maggots” a quiet voice replies inside my head.
Deciding to push the voice aside it’s still obvious I couldn’t stay here this night. Luckily a friend of mine has gone on vacation and asked me to watch his house. I grab his key, my jacket and my purse with my driver’s license while making sure that I don’t touch any maggots. His house is on the other end of my town.
As I take a look back into my bedroom a white pile of maggots is moving towards me in the corridor. The maggots are crawling over each other, leaving blood red stains on the other larvae. Their movement and collisions create this disgusting raspy scraping noise again as the pile of maggots continues its way in my direction.
I forcefully slam the door shut and leave my apartment. After locking the front door I run down the stairs to my car.
On my way driving to my friend’s house I calm down a little. The maggots are disgusting but they should not be dangerous. I open up the window to breathe the fresh air of the night. Tomorrow I would call an exterminator and things would be alright. I stop at the red-light at one of the few crossroads in town that actually has nightly traffic lights and wait for it to turn green as I suddenly hear the scraping noise again. Looking out of my car window I suddenly see thin runnels of blood running down the traffic light poles followed by a swarm of huge meaty white maggots, scraping louder than ever.
“Oh, no. This can’t be.”
With a short angry scream I kick the gas pedal and drive off ignoring the red-light. “The curse can’t be real. It just can’t,” I say to myself quietly.
Maybe it is some kind of plague cause by a mutation or the climate change caused the maggots to emerge once more in autumn.
“But why do they bleed red? Why do they seem to follow me?”
It has to be a plague. They probably want people as a host but it’s impossible that they are following me in particular.
“Or is it?”
"Tooooooot"
"Wha…?"
I realize I’ve been driving in the middle of the street. My hands rapidly wrestle the wheel, the Car jumps to the right and with a lot of luck I manage to avoid the collision with the jeep driving in my opposing direction. It leaves me on the driver’s seat sweating and with the shock still in my bones and my heart beating like a jack-hammer. I couldn’t go on like this. What I needed was to calm down and sleep but I could not sleep yet.
“Coffee’s gotta do.”
I leave the road at the next gas station. After buying a coffee from the young man at the counter I ask "Have you seen any maggots lately?"
The guy behind the counter seems surprised. "You mean fat worms, sir? No, I haven’t."
I thank him and take a look at some of the magazines in hope for distraction but in my head I still hear the scraping and the only thing I could think of are the sharp pincers.
"Click"
I turn around towards the sound expecting a giant maggot ready to bury its pincers into my body. But it turns out to be just the gas station guy playing with his lighter. As I watch him roll a cigarette I notice my heart is still beating at insane speed although I am also somehow tired. Counting on the coffee to help me think better I remove the cap from the cardboard cup without even really paying attention. I don’t like gas station coffee so I usually try to get as much as possible of it down quickly. My hands press the warm cup of coffee against my lips as I lean my head back and take a huge draught, prepared for the worst.
A painful taste of iron explodes in my mouth and the drink rushes down my throat like boiling metal accompanied by thick and sticky soft lumps causing me to retch. Holding my throat I bend down. “What is this?”
I gaze into my cup. It’s filled with swashing warm red blood. The metallic damp of it creeps into my nose. “Don’t puke. Don’t puke”
A dozen live white maggots fidget in the blood. Another one crawls up the cup greedily looking at me with his tiny brown eyes.
It’s too much. The puke shoots through my throat and I can’t hold it back. It presses my lips open and I vomit on the ground, my jeans and the comfortable sneakers. Powerless I drop to my knees right into the red puddle of puke. A half bitter half metallic taste fills my mouth.
"Sir?"
"I….I’m sorry," I mumble horrified, then I look up to the gas station guy.
He smiles at me but his right eye is completely red, apart from two white points, two maggots in the middle. The scraping noise seems to rasp directly at my eardrums. I try to warn him but my warning transforms into a high-pitched scream as hundreds of maggots suddenly emerge from under his shirt, covering him with their bodies and crawling towards me, their pincers bloody and clicking.
I push myself up and clumsily rise to my feet as the swarm approaches. Stumbling I run to the door. Behind me thousands of white and blood-soaked red maggots creep all over the gas station scraping and rasping. The young man is still standing where he was, covered in white and red and staring at me.
Suddenly I lay at the floor beside the newspaper rack I crashed into. I see the maggots coming closer, somehow get back up and stumble out of the door to my car.
About to grab my keys I notice my right hand still squeezing the cardboard cup. The maggots from the inside creep over my hand and already dig themselves into my skin. My right hand turned red and I drop the cup and my left hand manages to swipe at least some of the maggots off me as the door of the gas station opens and releases a never ending stream of white and red heading towards my car.
"Oh shit."
I ignore my hand, dig my pocket for the keys find them and unlock the car. Two meters separate me from the scraping mass of crawlers as I eventually jump in and clam the door. The engine starts with a loud roar and I drive off with squeaking wheels.
Leaving the gas station behind me, I turn on the headlamps to see something on the dark road. The buzzing in my head sounds uncannily similar to the scraping as I continue driving fast without a destination.
“They are after me and they will follow. It’s the curse.”
Panic creeps through me like maggots through a corpse and I pound the gas pedal.
“I’m a goddamn corpse already. They feast on me because they know I’m dead.”
“No, I want to survive.”
I drive even faster. The scraping hasn’t stopped but I scarcely notice it.
“It will probably never stop”
Ahead of me the street takes a turn. I have to slow down but my legs don’t react. As I look down they’re covered in maggots and blood. The rasping of thousands of soft bodies and small pincers adds to the sound of the roaring engine. I scream….
…and then everything spins around me.
I wake up in my bed with a pillow in my face. Feeling nothing but warmth I open my eyes.
The pillow I was laying on turns out to be an airbag. My body is a red bloody mess under a white carpet of maggots, scraping rasping and generating heat in the process. Surprisingly I can barely feel them feasting on my body until a sharp pain burns through me as they cr
