The Mole

by Ryan Boughter


Written April 21, 2006




I was
in darkness. A malign clicking, faint at first, grew louder, as
of many-jointed legs scrambling through the dark. I tried to run,
but somehow my legs were bound in thick mud. I looked over my
shoulder, and saw many jaws opening, a toothless, depthless maw intent
on swallowing me whole. My mouth wouldn't work, but the piercing
shriek my throat failed to utter echoed through my brain, my very
being....


I awoke with a start, covering my mouth lest a stray scream draw the
attention of unnamable monstrosities. Beads of sweat rolled past
my eyes as they cast back and forth, trying to identify my
surroundings. The alien landscape surrounding me slowly resolved
itself into my familiar bedroom. I realized my suppressed scream
would only have woken my parents in the cold April dawn, but this gave
me small comfort.



It had been a long time since I'd had a nightmare so vivid, and waking
did not cause the dream to wane as they were wont to do. My
bedsheets were soaked with the acrid sweat of fear. I threw off
the covers, shutting off my alarm clock which I knew would shortly play
its one-note chorus, rousing the working to their rounds. The bathroom
light played through my hair as I shucked my nightgown and the bra
which I had carelessly neglected to remove the night before. Red
lines of lace and stitching were limned in my skin.



I brushed my hair, and absently ran my fingers over the two tiny,
brownish knobs at the base of my neck. A type of benign tumor, my
doctor said they were, and fairly common. I had been plagued with
them since before puberty, as they cropped up on my neck, under my
arms, at my waist, anywhere the skin was brushed or pinched by fabric
or hair. I couldn't shave my armpits for almost a year when I was
sixteen, due to the liberal crop of the tumors and the resulting
scabbing and swelling from the cryogenic liquids which removed
them. Occasionally, if I neglected the treatment, one of these
"moles" would become irritated or constricted, turning angry red and
painful, then to a necrotic black. After several weeks of this
minor agony, the mole would fall off, leaving a calloused scar and
tumorous vestiges which would remain until frozen off anyway.



Some things are best not ignored. I had an appointment with the
doctor that very day to have this latest yield of blight expunged.



As I turned toward the shower, a last look at my reflection flashed
another tiny vista of suffering. I stopped, turning my back as
fully to the mirror as i could, and beheld the worst: right between the
fading lines of my unmentionables, another, exceptionally large, tumor
seemed to have died. I backed closer to the mirror, and with a
tweezer poked at it experimentally. It was not painful like the
others, but the skin was red and swelled at its base. It was
stiff, but seemed to still have some of the suppleness of life in it,
unlike the rigid gangrenosity usual to such phenomena. I couldn't
remember seeing a tumor there before, but they had evaded my inspection
before.



The black and red provided quite a contrast with the pre-summer milkiness of my flesh. Propaganda colors, I thought to myself, recalling my civics class from last semester.



One more pass with the tweezer revealed a stout black hair, which
appeared to have wrapped around the tumor, pinching off its blood
supply. I attempted to grasp the hair to unwrap it, but it seemed
to wriggle out of the jaws of the tweezer. I tried again, and yet
another, shorter hair popped into view.



I finally snagged the first hair, but it somehow managed to wrench
itself out of the tweezer. Then, before I could touch it again --
it moved. I finally saw
that the "tumor" was not in fact black, but a sickly, swollen grey, and
the "hair" had, indeed, truly wriggled itself out of the grasp of my
tweezers.



The nightmare images from just minutes before reasserted themselves,
and the shriek I had managed to previously suppress finally burst forth.



I don't know how I managed, in my panic-stricken state, to extract the
benighted invader in its entirety from my violated flesh. I
watched it, slowly sinking beneath the surface of the water in the
toilet, as it waved its hairlike legs and chewed on the bit of ruddy
flesh it had taken with it, as if relishing the fading taste of my
blood. My hand scrabbled at the flush handle as my ragged breaths
echoed in the small bathroom and the gaping crater just below my
shoulder-blade only just started to ache.



I could remember from childhood my mother, soothing me in the dark,
reassuring me that there were no monsters, that nothing could hurt me
as I lay safely inside the house. I could remember the raw
terror, mustered by dark places and forgotten nightmares, as it bored
through my fragile brain and sought to devour the young roots of my
sanity. But I knew right at that moment, watching the swirling
waters bear that vampiric malignancy to the damp, rotting depths where
it belonged, that there were indeed monsters in the world.



And one had crawled inside my underwear to feast.



They were everywhere, all around us, never more than a few feet away
from us. Spiders, mosquitos, and, yes, ticks, just like the one
which now bore my blood and flesh down to the corrupt places, were all
around us, lying in wait to feed upon our unprotected flesh.



I examined the shower very, very carefully before stepping in.

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