Spawn of the Pickle Loaf

Part 12, In Which Our Tragic Hero Temporarily Loses His Sanity

I have a confession, dear reader.

I haven't been entirely honest with you. Or at least, by omitting certain facts, I've probably caused you to make assumptions that aren't true. When I commenced my tale, I spoke about what was then the present--the mystery of my missing coke bottle (which I still haven't located)--and you might be interested to learn that a great deal has changed since I began speaking.

I don't know what dimension you reside in, or whether time moves at the same rate for you as it does for me, or if, come to think of it, time exists for you at all; but if you experience the past, present, and future like I do, chances are you've imagined my story's telling taking place all at once. Over the course of an hour, or a few hours.

Not so, my sentient narrative device. An interminable span of time has passed since I began speaking. Horrific, life-altering events have transpired. Forgive me, first of all, for taking so long to relate my tale, and second of all, for obscuring the truth. But I possess an excuse, namely that I haven't been quite myself lately. The condition of my existence has changed drastically. For better? For worse? Have I slain the beast, you ask? Did I manage to finally rearrange my music room? Have I, in fact, perished, and am I speaking to you from beyond the firmament, where the old ones dwell, where all is madness and blind entropy?

I'd rather not let on just yet. Our journey together will be more rewarding if you experience the succession of events as I did--ignorant of their outcome. Befuddled. Terrified, dear reader. That's right--we're about to embark upon an outrageous expedition, one that dwarfs the absurdities I've hitherto described.

But first, I'd like to offer a few thoughts about the message I found scrawled in the pork n' beans. Admittedly, I didn't give it much consideration during the immediate aftermath. Not because I thought the message insignificant, but because the subsequent events overshadowed the phenomenon. I was much too preoccupied with surviving my adversary's sneak attack to mull over the cryptic scribble.

However, once I locked the beast inside the music room and all the commotion died down and my pulse relaxed, the conundrum slithered inside my brain again. Cautiously, I slipped into the kitchen, half expecting the words to have dematerialized, scrambled back inside my subconsciousness, a hallucination after all.

But it was a vain hope. The message was still there, tangible, physical. Nothing about it had changed. "Eat me," it read. The little ridges of pork slop fringing the words were even beginning to develop a hardened dermis, exposed to the lukewarm air for too long. I stood and gaped at it, trying to piece together a puzzle in my mind, but none of the pieces would fit. The scenario was too absurd. Never mind that my houseguest had somehow learned, not only how to think, but how to express its thoughts in writing (albeit primitive hieroglyphics). I was more concerned with the desires manifest in the message.

"Eat me," the monster had written. A bid for self-destruction, perhaps? Was my adversary as miserable as I? Did it wish to leap down the void of my gullet and finally extinguish its wretched half-existence? The thought had merit. But, then again, in my stupidity, I'd offered the pickle loaf plenty of opportunities to creep upon me while I slept, and if it were really that desperate to end everything, chances were it would've succeeded by then.

Next came a wholly unnerving thought. What if the monster was some kind of parasite? Oh god! What if its mission was not simply to assassinate me, but to burrow through my guts and wrap its coils around my brain stem? Control me, dear reader! Make me like a scavenger! Imagine me lurching from room to room, reborn into a horrible, brainless afterlife by my adversary. That would be an idiotic kind of hell, wouldn't it? A stupid, preposterous, inane sort of hell.

It explained too why the pickle loaf kept biding its time, why it persisted in these cruel games. The creature had all the time in the world! Or at least whatever time I had left to survive. Maybe that was its ploy--torturing me to the point of paralysis and then slithering out of hiding when I was weak and vulnerable. I concluded that vigilance was essential, the only judgment I could properly make given the ambiguity of my circumstances.