Satan's Dollar Store & other stories

Cracked

I was at work one day when my wife called to tell me she was hearing some weird sounds coming from the kitchen. She said it was like a rustling noise, as if someone was crumpling up newspapers behind the sink. I said she should just ignore it, but she said “easy for you to say”. She was trying to get some work done and it was driving her crazy.
“Maybe it’s mice,” she suggested.
“Or rats,” I said to myself after pausing to think long enough not to say it out loud. There was no sense in making the situation any worse. I told her I’d look into it when I got home, but if she had some other suggestions she should go right ahead and do whatever she thought best.
“I don’t want to do anything,” she replied. “I guess I’ll just go into the office after all.”
That night when we got home we didn’t hear anything in the kitchen. I decided to inspect the perimeter of the house to see if there was any way any varmints could have gotten in, but I was already pretty sure of the answer. Our house was made of cinder block walls and a solid cement floor. There were no cracks that I could find, nothing to indicate there was any entry point for rats or mice or squirrels or anything like that. It could have been cockroaches, I thought, except that where we lived there were no cockroaches. Ants don’t typically make a lot of noise so I ruled them out as well.
“It was coming from behind the sink,” my wife reminded me, so we got out the flashlight and looked under there. It was possible. We had redone the kitchen at one point and put in new cabinets that were not flush against the concrete walls. If something had somehow found a way into the house, and then behind the cabinets, there was definitely a few inches of horizontal space behind the kitchen sink that could be inhabited. And there was a way in from the front, an electrical outlet that did not have a cover around it.
There were two questions now. One, how did it get there, and two, how to get it out, whatever it was. A trap didn’t make sense until we had a better idea of what the thing was – or things were, if there were more than one of them – and the same went for poison. I was all for poison, though. I could take the temporary stench of a decaying corpse of any kind as long as it meant an end to the problem. If there really was a problem. After all, I had never yet heard a thing, and didn’t hear the noises for a few days after that.
It wasn’t until the weekend, when I happened to be around at mid-morning when I did finally hear it. Like my wife had said, it sounded like something crumpling paper, or crackling those really tiny packing material things that go off like little fireworks when you crease them with your palm. I tip-toed into the kitchen as if I was afraid it would stop at my approach, but it didn’t. The noises continued. I could narrow it down, not to behind the kitchen sink, but over to the right a bit, behind the cabinet where we used to keep the cat food before we finally got rid of the damn cat.
It had to be rats. I don’t know why I came to that conclusion, but I had had some experience with rats in a previous lifetime, and I thought I could smell them now. I decided again not to tell my wife about this suspicion, but went down to the store and bought some poison. This poison came in pretty blue blocks that allegedly tasted like peanut butter. That ought to do the trick, I told myself, and rushed home to toss a couple of the blocks through the open electrical outlet. Then I stood back and waited, silently for a time, unti finally I heard some tiny creeping noises, as whatever it was seemed to scurry closer and closer to the poison. I imagined I could hear gnawing then, and chewing, and swallowing, and just as I was about to do a silent fist pump celebration, I heard a frantic squeaking come from behind the sink, and then a banging sound like a little tiny head being bashed against a wall. I stopped in mid-pump and held my breath in anticipation of more victimly outbursts, but instead there was silence, Just like that.
We didn’t hear any more sounds after that, and didn’t smell any rotting corpses either. It was as if the poison had managed to evaporate the creature, or teleport it bodily to another dimension. Several times during the following week I inspected the perimeter of the house, but saw no dead creatures, and found no cracks. The whole thing remained a mystery, and I was on the verge of depositing the remaining poison blocks in the trash, when my wife shushed me one morning, and directed my attention once again to the kitchen. It was back. Or they were, whatever it or they was or were. The same scratchy noises. The same rustling paper, coming now from the other side, to the left of the sink instead of off to the right. I hurried to put some more poison down and waited for the familiar chomping, but it didn’t take the bait this time. I waited and waited but all I got for my patience was to be treated to the endless rustling, which was beginning to really make me mad. I was thinking about ripping out the entire cabinet system just to see, just to find out what was back there, and hopefully kill it dead and find the hole it crawled in from and stop it up as well. But that would have cost a lot of money, so I backed away from that decision. My wife would not have gone for it either, at least not yet.
That day would come soon enough, the day the things began to speak. At first we couldn’t make out the words. They were whispered and rushed and unclear. It didn’t even sound like words the first time we heard it. It sounded more like somebody who couldn’t whistle trying really hard to whistle, and I know what that sounds like because I’m one of those people who do that. My wife and I crept into the kitchen and sat at the table and strained our ears, because the sound was somehow oddly compelling. It was almost like music. She was the first one to realize it was speech. It was all sped up, she told me, like one of those old record players you could play the records faster than you were supposed to. I don’t know how she understood it, and for a few minutes I figured she was maybe going crazy. That was not necessarily a new idea, but I thought about it long enough not to say it out loud. What was the point, after all? I did try to make some suggestions about what it could be, but she kept shushing me, so eventually I shut up and just listened, and then suddenly it began to become clear even to my waxy ears. It did sound like speeded up words, high-pitched and silvery but definitely English. There were syllables I could make out now and then, like ‘-er’ and ‘un-‘ and ‘-tion’, but never an entire word altogether. My wife was having no better luck. This had gone on for something like a half an hour when I just lost it. I jumped up and stomped over to the sink and shouted as loud as I could, “WILL WHATEVER YOU ARE JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP?”
That did the trick. There was no further conversation or whatever you call it for the rest of that day. But that was the last time I yelled at them. After all, it wasn’t their fault. Over time, we got to understand what they were saying, those poor creatures. We got used to the noises and didn’t even try to poison them again after we found out more about them. They were only people, after all, unlucky people who’d been careless enough to have this appalling misfortune catch up with them. Yes, they were irrelevant and that was partially their own doing. Their lives were pointless and meaningless, true, but lots of our lives are like that, and we don’t all have to pay such a price. No one could explain it. It didn’t make any sense, but somehow, some way, they were people who had gotten lost in the system, fallen through the cracks, and there they were, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. At least they’re not nocturnal, and once my wife explained her work-at-home situation, they were more considerate about when they voiced their futile complaints. I still think about tearing the house down some days, but mostly I just live with it. You can get used to pretty much anything in this life. At least that’s what they tell me.