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.

I left the mess untouched (for the sake of further study and because I didn't really feel like cleaning it up) and returned to the hallway and began pacing back and forth in front of the door. It stood monolithic like a stone barrier locking in a crypt. I doubted the bungie cord would hold. The tumult inside the music room indicated a powerful beast, with limbs capable of yanking and smashing. Perhaps the door itself was a feeble barricade, I thought. And if the creature really had grown large enough or long enough to fill up the room entire, chances were it would keep growing. In size and strength. I needed to encase it somehow.

Cement was out of the question. I didn't possess the proper materials or the proper kiln for heating limestone. And other kinds of adhesives seemed like a waste of time, barring Gorilla Wood Glue; and I'd used up the whole tube insulating my front door. What a quandary I was in! Had the door opened the other direction, I could've built a barrier by simply stacking all of my heavy belongings on front of it. Pulling a door closed with inanimate objects required innovative thinking, and I was delirious from fear and lack-of-sleep.

That's when I envisioned an ingenious apparatus. Something simple, yet effective. I dashed away. My plan only required a collection of heavy items and a single lever tool, and I was certain I'd stored a crowbar somewhere in my storage room. You remember that particular space, of course. It's the room to which I referred earlier as a "cess-pile."

As the garbage had begun to pile up and rot and coagulate, I'd observed how similar to sewage the heap appeared and invented the clever double entendre. You'll also be pleased to learn that, keeping with the disposition of my living space, the item I needed was likely lodged beneath sediments of items I did not need. And who knew what exact form those items had adopted? I certainly didn't, given that the room had been closed off for years now.

Swallowing my trepidation, I turned and gripped the handle and tried to shove the door open. It lodged against something inside. Enraged, I took several steps back and launched myself against against the wooden barrier, and the hinges cracked against the frame as the door went askew.

But it gave another few inches, enough to fit my girth. The smell, dear reader! A horrible miasma belched forth from the dark crack. I nearly fainted from it. The fetor was an unspeakable amalgamation of decaying fruit, sewage, and the sweet, fetid odor of something else. I couldn't enter. Who knew what plague festered inside?

But of course I had no choice. This was a matter of life and damnation. I retrieved an old shirt from my bedroom, tied the fabric around my face, securing my nose and mouth. Then I slipped sideways into the abyss. The stench penetrated my mask and stifled my nostrils. I felt bile climb up my throat, and while I succeeded in shoving it down, the task distracted me, and I forgot for a moment that I was blind, and the room contained invisible hurtles.

My shin lodged against an obstruction. I tumbled forward into the dark, and something large and crinkly rose up to meet me. I crash-landed. I belly-flopped. My face imprinted itself upon a spongey surface of decomposing paper, muffling my cry of terror. I felt like I'd fallen into the stomach of monster.

Something possessed me then, dear reader. My panic expanded inside my chest, turned to rage. A small supernova exploded inside me. And I started thrashing, digging, biting. I tore at the mound of garbage, and the damp materials came loose in my hands. Rotting paper, an old necklace, empty bottles of perfume, magazines, a dusty lipstick cylinder.

I was in hell. A dark, airless, fetid hell, and I wanted to burrow deeper, because I no longer cared or gave a flying, rancid piece of shit! I pulled, I ripped, I chewed. The muck was in my eyes, in my mouth, stuck in my teeth. I was a rabid zombie, raging against the light and the dark and the damned sediments of dross entrapping me.

I ripped at old bits of paper, moldy socks, dusty books, lengths of yarn. I tore away segments of cardboard. I gripped the edge of a hair curler and wrenched it free and an avalanche of junk quickly replenished the the pit. Another explosion expanded inside my stomach. I howled in rage.

"Arrrrrrghghaaaaffaaahhhhh!!" I bellowed, too furious to mouth any curses or obscenities. And then I dove head first into the heap. My head and shoulders tunneled beneath the surface, into more complete darkness, where the smell of death became tangible. I thrashed more. I thrust my hands into the sediments beneath and began wriggling back and forth like an eel. It didn't matter that I couldn't breathe, that I would likely suffocate head-first down a tunnel of my own making.

I'd locate the damned tool, even if it killed me. My legs kicked wildly in the air, and I used them to propel myself deeper. My nose collided with the corner of something. I tasted blood in my mouth. But I persisted, dear reader. My higher brain functions had died, and my lower animal instincts had roared to life, possessed me with that one singular purpose.

That's when my hand brushed a cold object. It wasn't the crowbar, no. It was something else, dry and brittle and waxen. Suddenly a horrible dread calcified my limbs. I traced the object's contours, ran my finger along a serious of slender tributaries, found the tendons, the knuckles--Lord Help me--the fingers! I was gripping a human hand! Buried at the very bottom of the debris!

My heart froze. I was suspended there upside down in an airless tunnel, gripping cold damp flesh. The void opened. A rotting chamber in my subconscious cracked open and expelled all the horrors trapped therein. Yes, I'd neglected to do something. Something important.

Next thing I knew, I was free, curled against the wall opposite the storage room door. Panting, gasping, trying to recall how I'd changed location so quickly. My memory was vacant. Everything had disappeared down that mysterious chasm in my mind. Even the details of my encounter were growing fuzzy. Neither could I explain the crowbar in my fist. How had I found it? What strange dream had I burrowed into that I could submerge myself and emerge later with the sought-after crowbar, albeit without my memory. Regardless, there the tool would stay. I never planned on letting go.

Note: There's an additional theory about the pork n' beans that I forgot to mention earlier. I hope you don't mind me addressing it briefly now. While I was quite taken at first with the scavenger thesis, another thought surfaced later that I barely took seriously; I've since begun to wonder if my wry musings then somehow brushed against the truth. Namely that the creature too was frustrated.

My adversary just wanted me to finish something, any goddamned thing, for a change.