The first rumblings began in the kitchen.

I was halfway through slicing open a can of chicken noodle soup, when something shifted inside my bowels. My arms broke out in goosebumps. My heart began drubbing inside my ribcage. Remembering my horrible experience earlier, I panicked, abandoned the metal cylinder yawning on the counter, and strode quickly to my sanctuary. Within moments, I was disgorging a torrent of macerated beeferoni into the toilet.

I recovered quickly, thank goodness, and stumbled to my feet. This incident hadn't been as agonizing as the first, and I was relieved that I'd powered through another of life's obstructions. So I napped for fifteen minutes and then resumed opening the can, awarding myself a celebration feast. I ate heartily, thankful for simple pleasures, and half an hour later, I was on my knees again, spewing-up the can's contents along with a bountiful supply of fluids.

This incident was far worse; I felt like my stomach had become a boiling sump squeezing motor oil. My insides were poison; I could feel them rotting and corroding, turning black like an old dish sponge. And I didn't feel relief afterwards like I had before. If anything, the expulsion left me feeling more like a dying fish. It was probably dehydration, I told myself. My body would recoup once its liquids were replenished.

I forced myself onto my feet, clutched my abdomen to hold my intestines together, and lurched to the other end of my bungalow. Once in my pantry, I leaned against a shelf to rest my shuddering legs. My fist closed around one of my bottles so clumsily it nearly slipped and rocketed into the air, but I held on. I unscrewed the cap and began sipping the contents cautiously, fearing another onset if I gulped with too much zeal. And for another ten minutes, I managed to hold the mouthful of water down before the damn burst again.

By then, the trip had become second nature for me. I careened through the bathroom door and barely made it to the rim before I began retching every ounce of fluid I'd been storing up in my gut. (Pardon the exhaustive descriptions, dear reader; I'm simply trying to communicate the ambience of my waking nightmare). And I really was dehydrated then. On top of the agony in my stomach, my temples throbbed with a terrible headache. My lips were parched, my tongue dried up like a dead slug. It was enough to cause me significant concern, because a body at war with its basic needs is a fragile organism indeed.

I was too tired to kneel anymore, so I slid onto the bathroom floor and lay there in the fetal position, wondering when the next bout would hit. I needed water. But that would require another trek across the bungalow, and I feared the slightest movement might set off the alarm in my esophagus again. Tap water was out of the question. I was better off sick than zombified. Which meant I could only lie there like a beached jelly fish and await the next squall. It came moments later. The horrible tremor raked my chest, and I scrambled to my knees again, but I had nothing to vomit up so I just huddled there, dry heaving.

I groaned, dear reader. Groaned. And a man only groans when life strips him completely bare. Grunting is different. When a man grunts, he maintains a certain modicum of dignity, whereas a groaning man becomes subservient to pain. Pain has mastered him. But I hadn't the will even to grunt. I was too weak, too pathetic; a wretched creature was I, squirming on the bathroom floor, yowling, caterwauling, where no one could witness my misery.

I'm not sure how long I remained that way. An hour? A day? A week? The very fabric of time seemed distorted by my agony; time sped-up, time distended. I longed for respite, for oblivion; not death necessarily but unconsciousness would've done just fine. Had someone used a mallet to bludgeon me across the head, I wouldn't have complained the slightest bit.

Meanwhile, the bouts kept coming. My body kept expelling, even though it had nothing to expel. I begged it to stop. I begged my body to calm down, or at least layoff for awhile. I was only a tender creature, after all, with soft insides. I couldn't take much more. My stomach felt week, fraying at the seems, liable shrivel-up or tear open or detonate like a stick of dynamite.

Fitting ends, all of them. The thought flickered beneath the pain, and inexplicably, I felt tears sting the corners of my eyes. Yes, this was a fitting end for a man like me, perishing alone, in a heap on his bathroom floor, too helpless, too paralyzed to save himself. An object at rest remaining, once and for all, at rest. The tears pooled, and I blinked, and they slid down the side of my face, and since my cheek was prostrate against the tile, the tears from my left eye trickled over the crest of my nose and resumed their journey across the bag beneath my left eye. This would be my legacy, I thought: the man who gave up in life then gave up in death.

I would die; and what would happen to my corpse afterward? Might I become the subject of an archeological dig? Would teams of archeologists scrape through the sediments of my bungalow and find the withered husk curled at the foot of the toilet. Would they wonder at the circumstances of his death? How close to the pathetic truth would their theories come? "This man spent the last years of his life battling a monster of his own making then died of an aching belly."

I was at death's doorstep. The realization brought a trickle of fear, but mostly it made me sad. "He had so much potential," the archeologist would say, "but he buried it like a seed, and then it died with him." All the brambles had grown up, impermeable, around me, and I had no where else to run. No matter how long I held on, I would need to let go at some point. So what was I waiting for? I would do it, I decided. I would let go and let myself drift into the void, and maybe find my missing coke bottle down there somewhere.

My eyes closed. I watched the colorful nebulae play behind my lids. Little clouds of light skipping and dancing and tumbling. A whole circus of colorful little clouds of light. They called my name in the dark. I heard music playing from behind the veil, weird, unearthly chiming notes; not happy or sad, simply alien. The death tones of my fever dream; a dream that was reality, for all I knew. I'll tell you the most disturbing aspect of the noise. It was emanating from the toilet, like a funeral march or like victory bells...

No!

My eyes snapped open. Indignation rose in my chest. No, I wouldn't let the higher powers win so easily. They'd reduced me to a gray amoeba, but I wasn't dead yet. I still had anger. Yes, I still had fury. I wasn't done living. My rage lent me enough temporary strength to force myself into a sitting position. I let out a groan which fomented into a violent yell, and the outburst nearly sent me dry heaving again, but I held the gale down. I was the gale, dear reader!

Next I drove my feet against the floor and wormed my way up the wall. My limbs had been drained of their dexterity, yet I still had enough vigor to propel myself from place to place. I steadied my body and began to shuffle through the door frame. My task was simple--reaching my stockpile of water bottles and rehydrating the dried-up tributaries in my limbs. A small step towards rebirth.

I would persevere! Yes, I would live! The journey through the hall felt like eons. I shuffled an inch at a time, stopping every few steps to recoup my energy and focus. Though my legs felt like bars of mozzarella, I urged them forward with a warrior's gusto; and I refused to stop unless they collapsed and crumbled in a moldering heap. One step, two step, three step. I paused to breathe, then again.

I was in the living room now. My feet kicked against old scraps of food and paper. I almost tripped over my TV, which some idiot had placed in the middle of the floor! But I was almost there, within yards of my oasis. No, I hadn't figured out what I would do once I'd replenished myself (I didn't truthfully know if I'd be able to keep it down this time either); but I could only focus on one task at a time. I shuffled, then breathed, then shuffled, until I was standing in the aperture between the living room and the kitchen.

And that's when I spotted it. The physical manifestation of all my nightmares. I froze, dear reader. My heart nearly stopped. If'd I'd been carrying anything in my bowels, I likely would've released it onto the floor between my legs. For wriggling in front of me, transported from the very depths of the void, ripped from the cover of a serial science fiction novel, was the monster. Or at least part of it.

A massive object stretched across the room. A viscous, translucent feeler, the color of mucus, whose diameter was that of a small tree trunk. I blinked in shock, swore to myself that the slimy green tentacle was a figment of my fevered imagination.

But it didn't dissolve or evaporate into green mist. The appendage kept moving, kept wriggling. It was reaching for something at the other end of the kitchen, over the table, inserting itself inside--good heavens--inside my pantry! I knew the creature's intent then. I acted on impulse without considering the ramifications (without thinking really at all, come to think of it); lunged forward, took three teetering steps. And I grabbed it.

My arms wrapped around the tendril. I felt the slimy dermis squish against my chest, and the creature reacted. Bands of muscles tightened beneath my grip. The tentacle became like a boa constrictor, wrenched itself backward and began sliding between my arms. I'd caught the monster by surprise! It fancied my lying on the bathroom floor in a pool of my own vomit, but I'd proven a more capable foe than it expected. The tentacle kept slipping, but I held on tenaciously, until the item in the creature's clutches thudded between my arms. Just as I thought, the demon! Stealing my water! My last bastion of survival resources!

I lodged the bottle against my chest and refused to let go, and the tendril yanked in return, nearly jerking me off my feet. We were locked in a battle of tug-of-war. I buried the item against my stomach, wedged myself against the kitchen table. Meanwhile, the appendage coiled itself around the bottle like a tree root and tried to yank both of us in with meta human strength. I could see its point of origin now. Inside the crevice between the fridge and the wall was an air duct whose grill had been removed, and the tentacle was emitting from it like toothpaste from a tube. I wasn't even afraid, dear reader. I was simply enraged. My adversary was real. And he'd been chipping away at my sanity all this time. I wanted revenge. For the life of me, I wanted retribution.

I summoned all my remaining energy (which was a lot, considering what I'd been through), leveraged my foot against the table's edge, and I wrenched it. The bottle came loose immediately. The pickle loaf gave in. I soared backward, propelled by my ferocious kick, landing in a heap of shoes and used cartons. The back of my skull struck the wall. I cast back and forth, trying to remember who I was and how I'd landed in this recumbent position. I'll be honest, it was almost comfortable. I even fancied taking a nap. But something long and black was gyrating beyond the haze of my vision.

Everything came surging back like a cataract. The creature was trying to slip away! I thrashed to my feet, lunged after it, but I was too late; the tendril was already disappearing into the air vent.

Blind with rage, I stumbled forward and tried to thrust my hand inside, but I could only reach so far, and I didn't know what barbs or teeth lurked therein. I screamed after the monster, hurled obscenities. The last thing I needed was for it to disappear again, retreat back to its hidden lair, where it could keep torturing me incessantly.

A reckless idea possessed me then. The monster couldn't very well hide if it had nothing to hide beneath. And though my walls appeared solid, it wouldn't take much to penetrate the plasterboard; I only needed something solid and dense and easy to wield. I dashed off, formulating the scheme in my mind. It was straightforward, a simple application of Newtonian physics--just pick-up a blunt force object, get a running start, and let the projectile fly...

Coincidentally, I'd balanced two objects fitting the description atop my barrier--my forty-five-pound weights. And I didn't need them in that particular place anymore now that I knew of my adversary's other escape route. I sprinted away, possessed by a fresh surge of adrenaline. My energy would surely deplete itself soon, but I could ride the wave until then.

I tackled the barrier and hefted the top weight with both hands (I didn't bother with the second, because an extra forty-five pounds would've surely broken me); then I was off, waddling like a crab as I hoisted the load down the hallway, through the living room. Back in the kitchen, I didn't hesitate, partially because my manic episode compelled me but mostly because I couldn't hold the weight any longer. I lobbed it. The metal cylinder slipped out of my fingers and punctured the wall with a deafening thud.

For a moment, it remained lodged in the plaster, protruding like the blade of a buzzsaw. Then something disconcerting occurred, dear reader; the weight popped out of its thin crater and crashed against the floor. The event was disconcerting because the weight didn't move how objects normally do when compelled by gravity. One instant the weight was stationary; the next, it popped out. Like something had shoved it. And a second glance at the dark rift confirmed my suspicion.

At first, I thought the object was a globe of fruit--emerald, glinting with moister, partitioned with rind-like veins. Then it blinked. For a monstrous eyeball was staring back at me. I stumbled backward, lightheaded with shock. The monster was there, had been there for who knows how long; and it was glaring at me with the glassy leer of a shark.

I scrambled away, terrified out of my wits. I hadn't expected my enemy to manifest itself so brazenly, and now I was panicking. A weapon! I needed a weapon! Through the living room, down the hallway, I hurtled, casting about frantically for that goddamn broom handle. Where had I left it?

But the nightmare was just getting started, dear reader. My bungalow contained further secrets. Now a horrible shuffling sound emanated from behind the walls. A hellish sliding, like thousands of snakes gesticulating into knotted pretzels. Worse, I spotted movement. Sections of my ceiling began to bulge and hang.

I knew the truth then. I knew where the monster had been hiding all this time. Not in one place, but in every place at once. The monster was everywhere. It had proliferated into my walls and filled-out the spaces therein. And now I'd blown its cover.

Now it would finish the job one way or another.