The Hunchback's Captive

I was facedown in swamp muck beneath a moss green moon, gasping for air and choking on aquatic slime, when a female hunchback grabbed me by the ankles and pulled me ashore. Red will-o’-the-wisps twirled through the fog about us, while dark pines creaked ominously overhead.

What had led me to sleepwalk to such a place? Had I been dreaming of what might lay beyond the edge of the city, far from its apathetic citizenry, tangible greed, all that privilege and expectation? Away from the howls and squeals of cars, trains, and other oiled machines? Had my soul looked to escape the leech-suck of it all?

And who was this savior of mine, this decrepit hag wearing nothing but a potato sack for a garment? I inquired, but she would not speak. Instead she hummed, though not in any musical sense. Rather, that soft buzzing deep within her dewlapped neck sounded more like an electric power line.

How strange, I thought, this woman’s presence near such a terrible, noxious swamp, for she was frail, homely, her crooked form like that of an armadillo rising to its haunches. Her eyes were bulbous, intense, the outer whites thick with veins that came and went like tiny bursts of lightning. Yet regardless of her appearance, I felt drawn to her, safe even, despite the fact that she drooled continuously while helping me to my shoeless feet.

As we trudged away from that vile swamp to a nearby path—where the pines still creaked but fog no longer violated our hair—the old woman began pulling stones from the pockets of her garment and hurling them into the forest. Squat green lizards leapt from fallen logs to avoid being hit by the projectiles, their red eyes flashing like the brake lights of cars, a large coin protruding from each flat mouth.

I grasped the woman’s skeletal hand. “Hey, that’s GOLD!” I said. “Why do you scare them away?”

Again, no reply. Instead she yanked at the crutch of my arm and we continued on in silence, the moon arcing high overhead as it shuffled the forest shadows.

A crumbling stone cottage soon came into view, its cracked windows aglow with dim lanterns that prodded at the encroaching darkness. We stepped through the open door and the hunchback led me to a medieval-looking chair at the center of the living room and nudged me into it. A fire crackled in the stone hearth.

Dehydrated, I inquired about a glass of water. “Ma’am, if I could trouble you for—”

This seemed to trigger the appearance of several ropes from a shadowy, cobwebbed corner. They raced across the floor like snakes and quickly set about securing my arms and legs to the chair. A black cauldron then materialized over the fire. Dream or no dream, I was terrified, and so pleaded with the old hag to let me go. “My good woman, please!” But the crooked thing turned away, her head hidden behind that large hump. And then a cat of the most unkempt black fur, licking the red-stained claws of one tightly curled paw, appeared to my left. That’s when the awful question arose in my mind: Were these creatures going to eat me?

That really got me struggling, which in turn got the cat howling. The hunchback then wobbled up to me and started to gnaw at my chest with her toothless gums. I was ready to scream at a volume detrimental to my vocal chords when the floorboards ahead of me cracked apart and fell away, uncovering the gaping mouth of a large, moss-lipped hole.

A pair of white eyes rose through the darkness.

Whatever it was, it did not reveal itself. Instead, a large tentacle shot out of the opening and slapped against my chest, piercing me with a small stinger. I screamed for help but my captor was dancing a jig, her hair writhing about in the likeness of a gorgon. Nearby, the cat sat stiff on its haunches, its neck unnaturally elongated like a giraffe which it held at a forty-five degree angle toward the hole—the freakish creation of some insane taxidermist. A fly crawled inside the frozen animal’s wide-open mouth, stopping on occasion to taste the landscape with its proboscis.

By now the tentacle had shot some kind of liquid into my bloodstream, a bluish secretion I watched drip from the retracting stinger. The tentacle then slithered back into the hole, and darkness sealed itself over me like tar.

My next experience took the form of an intense, recurring nightmare, one in which I found myself running through the streets of my city beneath leaning skyscrapers. Windows shattered overhead, raining shards of glass, while the open hoods of cars shot out $100 bills. I screamed as falling glass sliced me apart like deli meat, layer by layer.

The dream repeated multiple times, always with another few layers of my body being sliced away by the falling glass. By the end of the final dream I was nothing more than a conscious thread of animated flesh crawling through the smog of the city, a six foot worm. And like a worm, I seemed to be in search of a puddle of muck to drown in.

When at last I awoke—perhaps hours later, I had no way of knowing—I was lying naked on a log-frame bed, hunchback and filthy cat nowhere to be seen. But someone had recently been there, for, in addition to the bed, the interior of the cottage was now adorned with paintings, chairs, and other simple furnishings. Sunlight poured in through the windows, and classic literature and poetry lined the bookshelves. Furthermore, an abundance of canned goods were stacked neatly inside the doorless kitchen cabinets, while a bowl of fresh fruit sat on a small table beneath the kitchen window.

Tying on a robe left hanging on a hook, and prodded along by rising hunger pangs, I shuffled over to the bowl of fruit and snatched an apple. The moment I bit into it I began to cough. This led to a coughing fit, which lasted for several minutes until I gagged out a long, flowing cloud of—car exhaust!

What followed next can only be described as a surreal deluge of modernity.

First I puked out my wallet, car keys, and wrist watch, these trailed by long wires with electrical outlets at their ends. Worming through this clunky release were myriad sounds and smells—the din of traffic, the odor of fast food burgers, various commercial jingles, the sound alerts of incoming messages. And as I spat out bits of plastic between final gags, an iridescent cloud of polluted air rose out of my throat and spread across the ceiling.

The attack was far from over. I was struck again, this time more violently. It was as if my body had some desperate need to purge itself of its former prison, the city, like a gorilla trying to kick and claw its way through the walls of a zoo.

Suddenly my throat expanded and I spat out batteries, video games, DVDs, my cell phone, and large balls of computer chips. It was very uncomfortable, though I never felt any pain.

When at last the bizarre heaving came to an end, I glanced out the window and took notice of a flowerbox, its shriveled petunias beginning to rise and bloom. Just then the front door creaked open with a flood of light and in trotted a gray cat, clean and loudly purring. The cat was followed in by a beautiful young woman in a yellow sundress.

I straightened my tired body and smiled, then moved to greet her, my need to be social now quite acute. As I did so, the bile-covered cell phone in the pile of expelled items began to ring. This stopped me dead in my tracks. Instinctively, I began to turn around. At this the cat’s back rose like a shark fin, and the woman scowled at me with the intensity of a wolf.

I held up a finger and, without a word, backtracked to the pile of junk and pulled out the phone. I thought, what if it’s a family emergency? My boss with a new deadline? Someone who could explain this crazy delusion? But I really had no way of knowing, for the screen did not display a number.

Outside, the sunlight went dim as if blocked by a passing cloud. I looked over, saw the petunias in the flowerbox droop and fade. A butterfly gliding nearby burst into dust, and the fruit in the bowl turned to mold, the mush beneath twitchy with maggots.

Still I held the phone. I couldn’t put it down!

This triggered a terrible reaction in the woman, whose eyes suddenly popped out of her head, rolled up to the wall, and turned into salamanders. Next, her head decomposed down to the skull, and her long hair smacked the floor like a wet mop. The woman then went limp as she twisted to the ground, morphing into a puddle of swamp muck full of wiggling mosquito larvae. The cat hissed and scratched at the air, and a moment later its body jerked in multiple directions as it collapsed to the floor in a lifeless heap.

I stepped back and glared at the phone; the call was still coming in, and I had an overwhelming need to answer it. But why not? Wasn’t this all just a dream?

I pushed the button and brought the phone to my ear. “Hello?” A terrible scream burst through the earpiece like a firecracker, and tortured voices arose behind it, these mingled with the barks and howls of some diabolical beast. Something cracked like a whip, and the phone morphed into a screeching bat. The animal wiggled angrily out of my hand, then crashed through the nearby window where it fell into the flowerbox and died. The petunias, in turn, puked out their nectar.

And then the floorboards in front of me dropped out. And again those orb-like eyes floated up and up through the darkness. I knew right then from where that phone call had come.

Meanwhile in the muck puddle, a wispy, rising form began to materialize into a full-grown hunchback. The fur of the dead cat blackened while its bones reassembled and propped up the shaky corpse, those tiny jaws chomping madly as if eating taffy. Beneath the cauldron, the logs ignited with a loud burst, and the knives over the mantle trembled and smacked the cottage walls with a kind of inanimate anticipation that raised the hair on my arms. Several gray tentacles, tightly covered in screaming, fiery maws, rose out of the hole and slithered toward me.

I bolted for the door, tripping over the emaciated, extended arm of the grotesque hunchback as she glared up at me with bulging eyes, her fat blue tongue swirling over the lips of an exaggerated mouth full of alligator-like teeth tinged red. I grabbed a nearby chair and pulled myself up, then leapt forward and flew out the cottage door into a full-on lightning storm. I ran as fast as I could, bolts exploding all around me, running as if the last train bound for reality was about to leave the station forever.

Down I went, sliding and falling through that awful forest of dark pines and twirling red will-o’-the-wisps, all the way back to the familiar smog of my city, its filthy streets swamped with broken glass and money and all the things I had come to love and despise; all that I had come to depend on.

(From the book The Hunchback's Captive and Others)