I admit it.

In the subsequent months, I completely forgot about the pickle loaf sandwich putrefying behind my refrigerator door. Such is the disposition of my mind. If I wish to compartmentalize something, lock it away and throw away the key, I can be disturbingly successful.

A year passed, I think. During that interim, I spent most of my time watching television. I lived on canned cuisine, stacks of beeferoni from the storage cabinet, baked beans and potatoes. Survival food. But I don't mind eschewing luxury. I never have, and I never will. Especially what with the current state of the world.

Two or three more times I tried to rearrange the music room, but in every instance, that damned tangle of cords hijacked my efforts. So I didn't venture into that section of the house much either. In fact, I started avoiding most of the space beyond the living room, vacating my bed--which had become a repository for CPU's, mother boards, cooling fans I'd given up on selling--and sleeping on my couch. I sleep best with white noise, anyway, even if it is all explosions and gunfire and pundits strangling each other over tables.

I think the world must've really fallen into disarray at some point during the interim. I don't know exactly what happened--who first attacked who, for instance; or which party released the deadly chemicals into the atmosphere--but I did grow to suspect that something was awry when the mice stopped visiting. Also when my television suddenly spluttered and displayed only silver static.

One night, as I drifted in that lambent space between sleeping and waking, I suddenly remembered it (the pickle loaf, goddamnit!), and I experienced a fear more fathomless than any I'd yet encountered. I felt as if my stomach had been replaced by a singularity, a cosmic abyss which would devour the rest of my body, collapse me and suck me in, flopping like a mannequin. The fear was so overwhelming that I knew I would never sleep again unless I faced it, so I stood and tiptoed to where the pickle loaf lurked, probably a horrifying cancroid by now. How long had it been sitting there? I wondered. What grotesque form had the sea of hairs grown into?

I had to circumnavigate a number of things. Since the first fateful night, I'd accumulated a bicycle frame, an Olympic bench press, and a number of smaller oddments over which I had to mount and climb and grunt. And once at the refrigerator door, I became so scared, I felt I would black out then and there, just collapse onto the kitchen tiles.

But I gathered myself. I took a deep breath and put things into perspective. Whatever the pickle loaf had become was only organic matter, after all. I wasn't in any real mortal peril. The grotesque might have an indirect effect upon one's biology if revulsion is strong enough, but only a deranged man would fear physical consequences from a moldy sandwich. Perhaps I could treat it like a kind of science experiment, something a biologist might perform under controlled lab conditions. Like the biologist, I could detach my emotions and examine the specimen with analytical fascination, no matter how expansive its anatomy had become.

No polyps, cilia, or fungi, no spinellus, no sabdariffa or hyphae, no hairy walls of excrescence, no slimy appendages from yellow adenoids could scare me.

Maybe the outgrowth had died even, withered and crumbled into gray dust. This I assured myself as I gripped the door handle, heart hammering in my tonsils. I stood like that for a few minutes, just clenching the dusty plastic, preparing myself for the emotional strain I'd doubtless undergo. Perhaps that was another mistake--forming expectations. I tried to anticipate the horrors therein and only set myself up for shock when the creature subverted my presumptions.

I ripped open the door and beheld a nightmare.

Nothing.

The Sargento had withered away into blue soot, and the olives sat hunkered in their cloud of brine, but the corner between them lay empty. Nothing. The plate, the bread, the pickle loaf, were all gone, vanished without a single crumb of residue to divulge their bygone presence. Absurdities upon absurdities. My mind performed cartweels, clawed after explanations.

At some point during the prior months, I must've removed the pickle loaf myself, disposed of it somewhere, cleaned and disinfected the disaster zone. But this theory was preposterous for several reasons.

First, I believe in knowing thyself; and, as you, the reader, have likely surmised, I don't possess the temperament for such an unsavory task. I wish I'd been bestowed with a passion for scrubbing away bacteria. Such a disposition would've improved my quality of life significantly, but the Lord, or the higher powers, saw fit to manifest in me a chronic aversion to cleaning up anything, much less the abhorrent malformation my meal had doubtless become.

Second, even if I, myself, did it, how could the deed have slipped my mind? How could I have experienced the mental and emotional strain of opening the door, staring at that monstrous anemone, touching it even indirectly, and then forgotten the whole thing? Third, if I or someone else were to commit to cleaning out the fridge, why remove the pickle loaf but leave the other spoiled items alone? Had the culprit been me, I would've killed two birds with one stone, ousted the Sargento, at least.

Why then would an intruder go to the trouble of sneaking in, quietly prying the boards and nails from the door and parsing through my belongings, only to kindly remove a single unpalatable dish from my refrigerator? A charitable scavenger he must be; or else, the theory is untenable.

A thought dawned on me as I stood there with the overhead lamp illuminating the kitchen. A horrible, grotesque, unthinkable, outrageous thought. We've arrived at our thesis now, dear reader, and I hope you'll follow me as I take a leap into the metaphysical, that blurry expanse between science and philosophy. You've endured me patiently so far (assuming my narrative device has emotions and some semblance of a moral compass), but I promise, by the end, my tale will sound credible despite its freakish qualities. Bear with me as I cut to the chase.

I am haunted by a pickle loaf sandwich.

The notion seems comical, I know; but hold off your smirking for a moment. People have been haunted by far stranger things. Mix the biological with only a drop of the preternatural and you might breed new phenomenon in tight, forgotten spaces. The universe is large, but it's also small. Who's to say new grotesque forms of life couldn't proliferate in the corner of a common fridge? 

Who's to say the carpet of mold growing from the top slice couldn't have become cognizant as it spread, proliferated into a new weird branch of the evolutionary tree, pulled its diffused form together and sprouted limbs or tendrils or what-have-you's, propelled itself forward with enough force to crack open the door, slipped beneath the rubber lip, and slithered out of sight into the dusty space beneath the fridge?

I experienced another sinking revelation as I thought about the state of my living space. The spawn of the pickle loaf had no reason to leave. Why would it? Here it had everything it could possibly need, mounds of discarded food cans to scavenge, boxes and chairs and bottles and rummage and residue under which to slither. 

An indoor landfill. Layers upon layers of relics, the sentimental and the trivial, whose depths, for all I know might sink into a moldering floor and become more sediment for the earth. If I were a hairy protoplasm seeking to flourish, what better location than this secluded hole?

And here was the tricky part: I didn't know if our hypothetical monster wished me good or ill, or if it wished anything at all. Perhaps it was a brainless extension of the fungi kingdom, indifferent to my wellbeing, concerned only with preserving its own anatomy. Or perhaps it had grown into something more malevolent, a kind of sentient hunter.

What mattered was I would never be at peace until I discovered exactly where it had crawled.

Snapping into action, I shut the door and proceeded to turn on every bulb in the house, the overhead lamp in the kitchen, the one in the living room, the torchiere beside my easy chair, the bathroom light, the bedroom light, the lamp in the corner of the music room. I half-expected the additional light to divulge something monstrous, but everything remained in its proper place. All the objects around me were perfectly stationary. Inanimate. Insentient. 

I became paralyzed again, thrown to and fro by my warring compulsions. On one hand, I felt foolish. What a deranged conclusion to draw, I thought. What a lunatic I was. Fabricating a monster out of my scattered memory.

But my other compulsion, my more intuitive one, warned me to be wary. For it's the small things, the inconsequential things, that'll take a man out in the end. I was fairly certain the sandwich had mutated into a dangerous predator, and that small certainty was enough.

Just as well. I paced fruitlessly for another half-hour and, turning up nothing, decided I should at least try to get in a few winks. I checked all the crannies around my easy chair, then settled into it, extending the foot rest so I could keep my body as elevated as possible from the dark aperture beneath. And then I lay awake for seven straight hours, stiff as a log.

To this day, I'm still convinced that my insomnia saved my life that night. For as I sat there, staring at the television static, I knew for sure that I heard something. It was nothing striking. Hardly the sort of unearthly sound to confirm my worst suspicions. But the sound was real. Unmistakably real. 

Just down the hall, I heard a metallic moan. A hinge creaking. Not a draft--for I'd long since sealed off every crack in the house. Not the foundation settling--for my dwelling has never been the kind of structure to shift. No, it was a purposeful sound. The sound of a creature with motives.

I sat completely still, gripping my arm wrests, pinpricks of sweat breaking-out all over my forehead. Another creak. I allowed my eyes to slide towards my peripheral where the nearest hallway door lurked, and I swear it had cracked open a few good inches, just wide enough for a malleable protoplasm to slide through. I didn't see the monster directly, dear reader, but I knew, without a doubt, that it was there. Would you like to know how?

As I sat there petrified like a tree fossil, a peculiar scent manifested in my nostrils. The scent of home. Now the scent of hell.

I smelled--you guessed it, dear reader-- the scent of a pickle loaf sandwich.