The Niggling
The town is quiet now they’re all dead. Overgrown grass decorates the houses of the formerly affluent. We pass through silently, all but for the music in our headphones. Something relaxing, lyricless.
The woman at the head of our squad, Alexa, said not to speak, and “Don’t remove your headphones under any circumstances.” A single word would be a doorway for it to creep into your mind and poke your fears with its fingers. Whatever “it” is.
Ahead there’s a shop, its door in tatters and its barred window caved in. The others spot it too. Dave signals to line up and have our guns ready. Alexa’s the only one of us unarmed and yet ventures forward ignoring the signal. I see Dave sigh.
Hunched down to the grass, letting it brush through her hair, she approaches the door. We stand ready, but who knows what for.
I look across at Dave who merely shrugs, and the feeling hits me: that niggling doubt festering at the pit of my stomach. In through my nose and out through my mouth, I breath, trying to focus on the music.
Alexa creeps nearer to the door and peers inside. She turns and signals back the all-clear. The sighs of relief are all felt if not heard. But she doesn’t look relieved, her eyebrows furrow in… frustration?
Then I see it, her headphones aren’t plugged into anything like ours. They’re for show.
I gasp and everything in me wants to say something. Is she lying to us? Is it all a test? To see whether we’ll follow any order. I march over to her and the rest of the squad watches me, concerned.
Her head spins to meet my eyes, though she looks a little past them. I grab hold of her headphone wire and wave it in front of her smug face, waiting for something of an explanation. In my peripherals, Dave looks on mortified.
Alexa removes her headphones and mouths, I don’t need them. The feeling in my stomach bubbles up and I grip my rifle a little tighter, my finger hovering over the trigger. My cheeks burn up to my eyes. It’s all a lie, isn’t it? I think but I’m too afraid to say it or remove my own headphones, just in case. Alexa’s icy stare makes me doubt myself.
I push away and march back to Dave and the others. They’re all thinking the same, it’s in their eyes. In the end we resolve to push on through the town. Worst case scenario: We listen to music. Nothing too drastic.
Deeper into the town we pass a school, its playground desolate. It’s strange to see a place like this so lifeless, somewhere normally filled with children zooming around. It’s the closest we’ve seen a building come to being intact since we entered town.
Dave pats on my shoulder and I swivel around and nearly blow his head off. Today I’m beyond jumpy. He holds his hands up apologetically, I attempt a smile in return. Then I look past him, into one of the pristine windows of the school. And there she stands. My mother.
I freeze in place, the air punched out of my lungs and the blood drained from every vessel. The rest of the squad haven’t noticed yet, they’re still marching forward. She looks exactly as she did the last time we spoke.
‘What about me? I always wanted to see my daughter get married. To walk down the aisle with a man.’
The words burn in my ears and before I can pull myself together, I’m crying. Moments I felt I was past are still present.
Alexa’s the first to notice, likely because she’s the only one who can hear. She stops the rest of the squad and hurries back to me, her flesh moving along an invisible barrier around my flesh.
Her eyes dart to the window and she smiles. Part of me questions who the hell she is and what she wants, but the rest is stuck on that window. I stare unblinkingly at the mother who neglected me and that niggling feeling claws at my heart.
Alexa rips my headphones from my head in a moment so quick I don’t even register it happening. The music is gone, and I hear the wind rustling the leaves. She grins madly, and the squad tenses up, pointing their rifles at us.
‘Why the fuck would you do that?!’ I grab her shoulders and shake. In fact, my whole body is shaking with her.
‘Too late for you anyway now. At least now we get to talk.’ She sneers at my hands on her. ‘And if you don’t remove your hands, you won’t have hands to remove. Point your gun at me if it makes you feel better.’
I let go and stand back, trying to calm down. Dave is watching me, burning a hole into the side of my face. Everyone’s eyes and guns on us.
‘What do you mean “too late for me?”’
‘Tell the rest of them everything’s okay.’ She eyes me up and down and smirks. ‘I get all shy under pressure,’ she adds sarcastically as she turns her head to Dave and winks.
Against my instincts, I signal to him that everything’s fine.
‘Good. Now follow me, we’re going monster hunting.’ She walks toward the school and signals to Dave and the others to wait behind. She looks to me. ‘You coming?’
Reluctantly, I oblige and check my rifle is loaded.
Inside the school, the air is eerily still. The lights are out and the sun is failing to find a way in. It reminds me of my teenage years, skulking down high school corridors attempting to avoid the gaze of anyone and everyone. The lockers stand as monuments to my anxiety, where bullies would stand as roadblocks.
Alexa ambles ahead with her phone in hand as a torch, my gun trained on her back. Why am I following her? Why did I see Mum? What is it that we’re hunting?
‘You didn’t answer me.’
‘I’m known for that.’ She spins on her heel, her orange curls whipping around her pointed face. ‘Do you feel it? The Niggling? Like everything you’ve ever doubted about yourself has come to the surface? All the questions circling the toilet bowl that is your mind, trying to flush? The bogeyman coming to crawl across your brain and pluck out every bit of happiness until you’re nothing but a puddle on the floor?’ Her eyes are wide and wild.
I don’t know what to say. My stomach squirms and every word rings true. But that’s only rational given the circumstances. Of course I’d be anxious on a mission in an abandoned town, hunting for… well, that’s anyone’s guess. I push past her, lighting the torch under my rifle, and hear her laugh.
‘Words are one way for it to get in. Words seed doubt, and doubt is like… catnip and it’s got the munchies. Can’t resist a good bit of doubt.’
We move on in silence for a while. All the questions I want to ask merely drifting in fog. I wonder what Dave and the others are doing and whether they’ll follow us. Most of all I wonder why I’m continuing down a darkened hall into an abandoned school with a lunatic.
She breaks the silence. ‘What did you see?’
I don’t have the energy to fight it. ‘My mother. We… we didn’t have the best relationship.’
The hallway breaks off into a concourse area with a winding staircase in the middle. Around are scattered chairs and overturned tables. Spilled drinks and rotting food litter the ground and if there were any life, I’m sure it would’ve been rats. Instead there’s this thick emptiness, the absence of anything breathing.
Or that’s what I thought. Across the way, a tub of rotten sandwiches topples down from a cupboard and a dark figure scuttles to the ground behind a table. Our torches are on it and Alexa ushers me forward with an eyebrow.
Our feet are silent across the hard floor, edging forward heel first then carefully lowering to our toes and repeating. My heart pounds in my ears like my own personal theme tune. The pit of my stomach squirms but I push the thought away. Every inch of me needs to be focused on the table and what lies beyond it.
I take the right while Alexa hooks left. We pounce around the table, my gun in the face of the figure. What looks back at us is a child, maybe eleven years old, male from what I can tell. His eyeballs sunken into dark pits and his skin looks bleached. He smiles distantly up at the ceiling.
‘I’m useless, aren’t I? You always said so. Can’t even die properly, you said,’ he says, his voice weak.
Alexa shrugs at me. She kneels to his eyelevel, her hand on his cheek. ‘Hey there, I’m Alexa. What’s your name?’ Her voice softer, clearly trying. Maybe she isn’t heartless.
The boy seems not to hear her, and his eyes roll back in his skull, going white. His body collapses with a smack on the floor. Alexa puts her fingers to his neck and shakes her head.
He’s dead.
She rises to her feet, her face tensed to a diamond. ‘Must be close.’ And strides away.
I’ve been in the military for a little over five years, but I’d never seen anyone die. A lump catches in my throat that won’t swallow down and I can’t breathe. But words succeed in pushing through. ‘We can’t just leave him here.’
Alexa stops a few metres from me, her back turned. ‘Tell me,’ her face turns to me now and I’m unprepared for her harsh eyes. They’re ice picks to my lungs, piercing away my breath. ‘What would be the point?’
‘He’s… he’s just a kid.’ And I know how pathetic I sound, how pathetic I’ve always sounded. I wonder if I’m right about this, or whether I’m being stupid again. ‘Why me?’
‘Why you what?’
‘Why am I the one in here with you and not any of the others? Actually, what are we even doing here? Why am I wasting my time here with you? And who are you, Alexa?’ Once the words start, they tumble out like a burst pipe. ‘Because you dropped out of nowhere, told all of us what to do with that condescending attitude like you’re better than us, sneering through those cold, dead eyes, and then you lie to us — ’
‘I never lied,’ she snaps.
‘You told us to wear those headphones. “No talking,” what happened to that? You didn’t even wear the fucking things.’ I ready my rifle at her, my heart banging against my chest. There’s a voice in my head that whispers, Pull the trigger. Why shouldn’t you? You’ve always been powerless, and she’s always been so, so powerful. Now look at her.
Alexa’s face is unfazed, the only way I can tell she’s paying attention is her eyebrow is arched, annoyed. ‘You’re only embarrassing yourself. Put down the gun.’
Still so arrogant. Shoot her. Sweat slides down my fingers and along the trigger. The rifle is hot in my hands now, begging to be used.
‘Fine,’ she says. ‘But I’m sick of waiting for you.’ Alexa walks away into the darkness.
She’s leaving and I’m frozen… again. The gun pounds in my grip with every beat of my pulse.
‘Wait! Don’t move!’ I call to the abyss as she turns a corner. And I am left alone.
The boy still needs to be buried and so I make my way back. His body so small and fragile that I’m scared I’ll break him when I attempt to lift. Bones click, and his slender muscles are tight and heavy.
I search around me for anything to help and want to cry when there’s nothing. So much has happened in a short span of time. I’m overwhelmed. The easiest thing to do now would be to crawl into a ball and wait. But then a voice calls out to me, one so familiar.
‘Always knew you’d fail,’ my mother says, standing over me. ‘And look at you now. Can’t even lift a child without blubbering like a baby. Scared of an unarmed woman who should’ve been terrified. Instead I find you like this. A waste of life.’ She paces around me, surveying me with judgemental eyes. Her smell is the same overindulgent smack of perfume; it flows through my nostrils and down my throat choking me.
Despite it all, things begin to make sense. My hand reaches for my rifle. My thoughts feel heavy. Each one comes at a cost.
I bolster the courage to speak. ‘Do you remember what I last said to you, Mum?’ I force my teary eyes to meet hers. ‘That I hoped no one else ever has to go through what you did to me. I left you, finally with some power over my life.’
I remember everything that Alexa said, and I feel so incredibly stupid. Each word is laced with self-doubt, but I push on. ‘I joined the military, I didn’t have to fear someone like you… And that’s when I got the call.’
She stares at me emotionlessly. I grip my rifle.
All the people who died here, the boy who felt useless, Alexa’s words, it all clicks into place.
‘You died, Mum. Two years after I signed up. After everything you did, I still saw you in that coffin.’ I take in a deep breath. ‘You’re not real. Even if you feel like you are.’ Atop jangling legs, I force myself to stand, the barrel of my gun pointed at her. ‘What was the boy’s name?’
My mother smiles and contorts to the shape of the dead boy, eyes rolled back to the whites. ‘My name is — ’
In an instant, I pull the trigger and thick green puss spurts from its neck. In the shock I hold down the trigger, the metal rattling through the halls of the dead school. He squirms and writhes along the ground like a spider hit with spray. Arms stretch to thin, long, black branches which sprout hairs that wind along the ground, clutching for purchase.
I lock in another magazine into the rifle and continue to shake the building with lead. The hairs become branches which explode into steaming puss. The creature continues to fight until… it stops. Dead.
I nearly open fire again when I hear Alexa’s voice behind me. ‘Don’t shoot. You’d actually do it this time.’
Shaking, I ask, ‘What was it?’
She offers a reassuring smile, which is visibly effortful. ‘Names are unimportant.’ She peers down at the disgusting corpse laid out across the concourse. ‘Something evil. What’s important is that it’s gone. Now let’s bury the boy.’
