I have an admission to make. I am a slob. A hopeless slob. I never clean my room, and I haven’t washed my bedsheets in many, many months. This last part really got me into trouble recently.
It all started several months ago. My sheets were really starting to smell, but my job at the factory keeps me so busy, I just never had time to clean them. I probably wouldn’t have anyway, actually. When I first noticed that I’d made a mistake in not doing so, it was because I started waking up feeling slightly nauseous, and sometimes I would have sores here and there, or big red blotches on my skin. I figured I had an abundance of mites, those little microscopic creatures that inhabit virtually everything where humans and other animals live. They’re usually really harmless, and in fact tend to help by eating harmful bacteria and things. But I think I must’ve had so many of them that they’d run out of other things to eat, so they’d started on me.
You couldn’t see them, of course, but you knew they were there. I didn’t pay much attention to them, because even washing your sheets doesn’t actually help much. They come back. They always do. And they were so tiny that there was really nothing you could do to get rid of them anyway.
But, in another few weeks, I started noticing them. They were huge, at least by mite standards. I’m pretty sure that these ones were creatures that developed in order to eat the smaller ones. In fact, in hindsight I think that there were probably several scales of smaller ones, each eating the next smallest bugs in the food chain.
Since these were still very small, they could only be seen when one was literally right down in their living space; in other words, when I’d lay down to sleep, I could just make them out, scurrying around on my pillow and on my blanket. But within a few more weeks, I started seeing bigger and bigger mites, until soon they were the size of tiny cockroaches, or waterbugs. They looked like those mites you’d see in electrographic photos in magazines like Discover and National Geographic, only much bigger. You certainly didn’t need any equipment to make out their tiny little bodies. They had strange, collapsing mandibles, and god knows how many feelers, coming out of every nook and cranny on their little exoskeletons. Long, stretched out hind legs dwarfed the front ones, and gave them a stooped over, racecar look.
Soon, I noticed ever bigger hierarchies of creatures. Some were as big as rats. They were literally swarming all over my room. I’d have to really look where I was going, and plan my steps carefully, to avoid stepping on one and making an ugly mess which I’d then have to either clean up, or leave as food for the others. I didn’t want to do either, because they left an icky goo when you stepped on them, and I definitely didn’t want to encourage their growth by allowing them to partake in a macabre, cannibalistic feast of their own dead.
By the end of the month that the rat-sized mites began showing up, I’d started seeing ones the size of small dogs running around. By this time, I had started naming them, but it soon got to be too much. None of them ever seemed to hear me, and I doubt that they even had aural sensory equipment anyway. But even if they had, they probably wouldn’t have been too keen on listening anyway. Some of them even scowled at me, if I understand their strange, alien faces right.
Speaking of their faces… these newer, larger species had begun to develop less intricate exoskeletons, with fewer feelers and smoother skin. They seemed to look almost amphibian. Their eyes were no longer the multi-ocular bulbs that the smaller ones had. These newer eyes were deep sockets from which you could just make out some sort of tan, mucous-glazed gland within. Their mouths were less like traps and more like sphincters, with strange, spiky toothlike structures lining the outside, all the way around in a disturbing circle of horror.
I think there were scores of these, and maybe dozens more hiding behind furniture. Their numbers were smaller than the populations of the smallest sized mites, having less food to eat and more mass to feed. I didn’t notice any more growth for a long time after that.
Until today. There’s a big, pink squid-like thing sitting at the end of my bed as I write this, asking me where the bathroom is. This is the first one that’s made any kind of noise whatsoever, and it startled the bejesus out of me when it spoke. It was a raspy speech, like wet paper sliding over charcoal. Fuck if I know where it learned to speak English, primitive though it is, having only showed up a few minutes ago, from god knows where.
This one has a scaly texture like the others, but is covered in some kind of mucous. Along its sides are some kind of glands, embedded in a sticky, bright red membrane, along a sort of stripe that goes right down from the center of its chest to the tips of its eerie, spiky, sucker-encrusted tentacles. It seems to have a sort of separated abdomen and thorax system, and the whole of it looks like a cross between an insect and a gargantuan mollusk. On the top of what I can only assume is its head is a mound of fuzzy little digits, like hair but with knuckles, for god’s sake.
It just left the room. I’m going to try and find something sharp but solid to hit it with. I’ve got to take action, because now I’m really feeling threatened by the thing, and I don’t think I could take having any more of those godforsaken beasts around. That’s the only one I’ve seen, but it must be around eight feet tall, counting the shock of feelers on the top of what must be the head.
When it asked me about the bathroom, I pointed and muttered something about downstairs to the right. It got up and, at the doorway, turned to face me. At least I think that was its face. It looked at me with one big orifice in the middle of its head, which I can only assume is some kind of thing that functions as both eye and mouth. Something about the way it looked at me was unutterably terrible and sinister, and I got the most peculiar sensation, in the pit of my stomach, that the thing was perhaps almost sneering at me threateningly, as if it had horrible plans for me when it got back.
It’s left behind a noxious smell, I’ve just noticed. Something like you’d smell in a zoo: the odor of hay and shit and rotten meat. It hangs in the air as if it were actually tangible, and I think I might even be able to see a yellowish vapor of–
Oh god it’s just returned and said something in a horrifyingly low gurgling rasp about “developing the breed”! I think that means that the beast wants