The Purgatory Collective (Story 2)- Schrumpfen

Hope your ear doesn't hurt after reading this... another piece of work I want to add to my dark short story collective.

When one gazes into the finitude of human existence, it is impossible to go back to the way things once were. I am not speaking of the brave philosopher champion Plato wrote about leaving the cave and discovering truth to bring back to his fellow man.

What I speak of is bearing witness to things humans never had any business knowing about.

In the early 1700’s, there were stories of things most strange; objects being stuffed in crevices of high trees most people couldn’t climb, clothes being jammed into odd spaces in homes, and in some cases finding animals and young children forced into the tight spaces of nearby caves. These were most predominant in a small village in Germany, the name now lost. My ancestor, Dr. Gustav Muller, was regarded as a highly logical man like any doctor but wrote things most peculiar. During the elections of the local Mayor one Fall, there was a prime contender named Heinrich Weber. Mr. Weber had worked hard to get his name out into the public eye and show them more liberal practices, something many of the older denizens scoffed at. His rival and their supporters looked at every opportunity to harass Heinrich at every possible turn. One day someone made a fake scarecrow of Heinrich hanging on a noose with profanity painted all over the tree it hung from.

On top of the stress, he was struggling with having a child. His wife kept having miscarriages around the same time of year. The wives of the old town would gossip, mentioning it was their lack of faith and God punished them. Dr. Muller  was a shoulder to lean on for Heinrich Weber and would write extensively about their lifelong friendship. However, it wasn’t until one day that Heinrich fell terribly ill that Dr. Muller begun to become more involved. Heinrich complained about having vivid night terrors that were usually followed by blackouts and a lingering ear infection. He would wake up late in the afternoon and miss important meetings as well as lose important paperwork only to find it stuffed inside a crevice on his wall. Dr. Muller’s entries of his lifelong friendship begun to revolve around Heinrich’s bizarre symptoms; “It was noteworthy that these primarily happened when he was either alone or when he was in his bed going to sleep. It was always the same recurring night terror; Something would float a few feet above him and would look down upon him with piercing eyes. He described it as being part insect and part humanoid, but it was most certainly not human.” As the electoral candidate battled his night terrors and severe ear infection, he was also battling the polls.

His opponents preyed on his degrading resistance and created more aggressive propaganda and vicious rumors about him. Word got out that he was seeing a shrink and that he was complaining about being visited by a creature not of this world. Some denizens feared he was making a pact with the devil while others thought he was simply plagued with some form of dementia that he inherited from his mother, who disappeared mysteriously long ago one summer afternoon. Dr. Muller checked in on him every couple days out of the week, but Mr. Weber demanded he check in on him every weekday at 7pm, which increased to every day at 9 am and 7pm on weekdays and 10 pm on weekends. Dr. Muller certainly was a patient man, as he was procured by Mr. Weber’s requests but not because he wanted to help him more so than was he curious about his claims. He would find all sorts of things stuffed inside cabinets that Mrs. Weber swore would happen at random; “It was that of a perverse fascination of fitting large objects into tight spaces that was from a mind most disturbed.” Dr. Muller made sure to check on him as often as he could, learning that his ear infection slowly getting worse in conjunction to his mental health. Dr. Muller couldn’t believe his friend was so mentally ill.

It wasn’t soon after that Heinrich Weber begun to say things that genuinely frightened my ancestor.

“My extensive visits being greeted with tea and good mountain bread freshly made with some strawberry jam were rituals to look forward too. Upon the night of November 27th, 1712, I was no longer greeted by Mr. Weber’s wife's kind hospitality but instead with the wailings of a tortured animal. She had told me to speak with her husband and get him out of the psychosis he was in. I assured her I was no mental care official but that I would go tend to him. I told her to notify his shrink immediately. As I rushed upstairs I had felt the hairs on my head and arms stood; there was a strange electrical discharge in the air.

I will never forget opening the door and seeing Heinrich. He was drooling and mumbling like a child. “It’s eating me! God or Devil, Anybody with an ear to spare! Help me!!” His screams were unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Mr. Weber was in some sort of psychosomatic state where he believed he was being eaten. I immediately rushed to his side and assured him he was ok. However, something was not quite right. I lifted his sheets and saw his stomach. It was enlarged, with the shape of some sort of long serpentine object. It slithered about as Mr. Weber shrieked in pain. I turned over to his screaming vestige and could see something within his mouth. A small face looked back at me within Mr. Weber, watching me with a strange erotic fascination. I felt it preying on me like a hulking man about to brutally rape a young girl. I ran in utter fear and told his wife to stay away from him. She pleaded for me to stay but my cowardice took the best of me. Like a scared animal, I ran and abandoned Heinrich to his fate. That night when he was found dead, his insides eviscerated and skull caved in was the same night I lost faith in God, knowing this Schrumpfen existed in this world.

That was the last entry of Dr. Gustav Muller, a secret I suspect he kept to his grave. However, he died a few weeks later from a strange ear infection, along with his wife. His children immigrated to America with some relatives and left the town forever. We would tell this tale to our family for thrills and cheap scares.

I’m the eldest brother of two, the other being my younger sister. We both almost died due to complications in the womb, and my mom stopped trying to have more kids after several miscarriages. Despite us being born, we got sick very easily. We would get really bad ear infections every year sometime after school would start and would occasionally have to even miss classes for a week or so. My younger sister spooks easily and I would scare her all the time as a kid. My dad sometimes teased her too. One fall evening, when she was sick, we started finding our toys stashed inside very tight spaces between the firewood and bags of flour crammed within our shoes. I asked my dad about it and he simply shrugged and laughed. He always loved to joke around, but he never admitted it was him. One night, we were up watching scary movies and she complained about her ear infection. I told her the Schrumpfen was hiding in her ear. She told me to stop joking around, but I egged her on. “It wants to live in your head!” I remember saying that and immediately feeling bad about saying something so cruel. I saw her looking at me with a frozen look on her face. I thought she was trying to scare me now, so I asked her what she was looking at.

She didn’t respond.

I turn around and what I saw behind my curtain was a large hulking shadow; it was coiled like a snake but it was just floating. There was so much static that I could feel the hairs raise on my body as butterflies begun to race around inside my stomach. I turned to see what it was my sister was staring at with such intent, and the next thing I knew I woke up with an ear infection. My sister tried telling me what she saw. “It’s body was coiled like a snake but it didn’t have a snake body! It was like a centipede.” She kept telling me. I had my begun to feel truly frightened. I would come home to my clothes being stuffed in the pipe in the bathroom, to find small rocks and dead spiders crammed in my pockets, and one night after a foul smell came through the air vents my papa found something dead. He didn’t tell us what it was, but the neighborhood made a big fuss about it after word got out. Some said it was a limb from a dead body found in the woods by our neighborhood, but my mother always told us that it was a dead rat that got caught in the vent. I have always told myself that, even to this day, despite lingering doubts.

I had repeated ear infections throughout my life. I learned shortly after that experience that ear infections were relatively common in our family and to stop worrying about old tales from a forgotten village. I forgot about the hysteria my sister and I had. I ended up studying hard in school and went to Oxford to get my degree in Anthropological Studies with a focus on ancient Sumerian culture. I fell in love with the old and forgotten relics of the past, no doubt from the tales from the forgotten village I grew up with that was lost to the undertow of history., I studied and traveled around the world, learning what I can about my field. It wasn’t until my mentor discovered a temple during an excavation that made me recall my traumatic experience in my youth. Upon exploring, I was reminded of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the bizarre detail he wrote about ancient eldritch abominations that made their perverse machinations a reality on our world.

The ancient stone walls had reliefs of strange creatures but they were depictins of earthly creatures, one of them being a large centipede. The imagery of the centipede was to evoke a sense of power and helplessness to the small engravings of people. It was a devourer, something that’s only purpose was to cause fear and terror. My mentor himself named the fabled creature the Deimos Centipede, based off of one of Mar’s moons. The translation was literally “terror” or “dread”. It’s vestige was coiled like a snake around an obelisk the people in the relief worshipped, much like the way the shadow was coiled that night I suppressed in my mind. Further still, the Temple we discovered had many long pathways with strange creatures affecting humanity in some fashion. They were speculated to be Gods by my mentor, as many bizarre creatures were being worshipped by the old Sumerians. In some depictions, the humans were appeasing them out of fear while others were actually running from them. They were unknown to currently understood Sumerian mythology, which made me question whether these things were Gods or something else.

That night, we both suffered from a terrible ear infection. He barged into my room in search of his research notes, only to find them crinkled inside my water pouch. He was very upset with me, asking me what the meaning of this was. It dawned upon me that reawakening my repressed fear of the Schrumpfen had begun to cause these disturbances again and I questioned my experience as a child as these events continued to unfold.

I apologised and told him that I had downloaded the notes on my laptop for ease of convenience and explained to him that it was probably someone playing a sick joke. He calmed down. However, later that day he fell terribly ill. He complained about his ear infection worsening, so I went into a local city and picked up some medicine. Some locals didn’t like foreigners, especially from America, so I was quick. I was fair skinned, so I was an easy target to make out. Military trucks and armed militia cheering in the streets left me worrying that I would be snatched off the street any moment. I was relieved that our client had scheduled a helicopter to pick us up in the morning due to the increase radical activity in the area. One of the assistants I went with told me that these people believed in retribution for their God. Such was the way of religious belief since antiquity. It was commonplace back home for people to argue against the preposterous nature of religion to the point where it becomes a religion in of itself. Human nature seems to dictate a need to worship archetypal forces as a way of giving our existences some sort of meaning. Religion of all types had always struck me as mythology, but the words of the assistant “retribution for their God” made me think of the relief of humans worshipping those strangely inscribed beasts. Just how long has humanity worshipped these archetypal forces?

We rode in a humvee back to the camp site. The sun was setting behind the ancient mountains. I had asked the assistant, Ahmed, if he knew anything about who may have stuffed the research transcription into my water pouch. He shrugged his head. “Many things on the site have been missing or found in strange places.” He told me. “This is common when the shaytan is at work.” The humvee was going over rocks that littered the dirt road close to our campsite. I asked Ahmed if he really believed in demons. He looked at me and I will never forget the haunting words that left his mouth. “To bear witness and experience forces so nefarious is enough proof and I pray to Allah that nobody else.”

A large centipede body was wrapped around my mentor like a python strangling its prey. It’s long emaciated humanoid body was propped above my mentor, looking down at him with a disturbing smile. The teeth were twisted but sharp, no doubt carnivorous. It’s small legs were making a clicking noise as it jittered upon his sleeping body. It’s unkempt hair was frazzled and rose from the static that charged the air. It was holding a dead scorpion in its boney elongated fingers. It’s claws looked more like nails that haven’t been trimmed for years. The abomination opened its mouth and a long appendage stretched out. It had a connecting joint, like an elbow, that extended upwards. However, instead of an arm it was a an array of small whip like tentacles. It begun to make its way inside his ear, contorting its body and making its way inside. My mentors ear was stretched at unbelievable lengths.

I could hear it mumbling with delight. It echoed from its new abode, like a child returning to the womb. It relished in entering tight spaces.

The centipede half was now making its way into the ear, slowly entering. The noises the Schrumpfen made as it celebrated its newfound home begun to echo more faintly, as if I was lost in a deep cave with no end in sight. Slowly it shrunk and made its way into the head of my mentor. I could visibly see his stomach churning from the alien creature squirming inside him.

The whip like tentacles begun to come out of my mentors mouth and nostrils, whom I was too afraid to check if he was still alive. There, behind his slumped over mouth were a pair of beady white eyes and the expression of a creature delighting in the blasphemous act it just committed. I could see the mucus and bodily fluid coating the abhorrent creature glistening in the faint light of the oil lamp.

I fainted. I woke up in the emergency room in the United States embassy. I was told I was attacked by Muslim extremists but they quickly retreated due to the sound of the American choppers making its way over the camp. They saw the emergency flare shot from one of the assistants who found my body in my mentors tent and landed. I was ok, but I learned my mentor had died. I overheard the doctors comment on his entrails being devoured with no apparent cuts on his body. They wondered if they used some sort of creatures to torture my mentor, but I knew the truth.

The gleeful sound it made as it made entered my mentor disturbed me to this day more so than witnessing the sacrilegious act of human defacement.

I returned to America and moved in with my sister, who did well for herself. She became a physicist and was widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of quantum physics. She gave talks regularly at universities and empowered young woman to pursue the sciences. I myself wasn’t particularly a fan of her feminist views but was glad she was happy. That night, over a cup of coffee, I opened up to her. “Jillian” I said to her. “I saw it again. It’s after me.” She looked at me with the same frozen face she made when we saw the Schrumpfen in our childhood.

“Don’t be afraid.” she told me.

I feared what happened to my mentor would happen to her, that she would die horribly and I would stand powerless as the creature relishes in defiling her corpse. The clicking of its legs begun to ring in my head. I broke down. She hugged me and reassured me it would be fine.

You see, she was right in a sense, but things didn’t end without its share of consequences; the consequence of having too much knowledge about things humans should never have to know about. It wasn’t enough that the Schrumpfen stalked my family since my ancestors, and perhaps even farther still. My sister told me of the theory of multiple dimensions and that we are just now discovering the potential of cause and effect rippling throughout reality into different subsets of possibilities. I was baffled by her insightful lectures, and couldn’t help but wonder if the deplorable alien creature was interdimensional. My sister explained that the reason there was static was because of both dimensions being overlapped and that was how it traveled. It could be in this very room right now but we couldn’t see it, but it see’s us. Waiting for us at our most vulnerable.

That night, we slept in the same room like we did in our youth. I prayed that I wouldn’t see this thing again but God was not at my side; no God would ever allow such a thing to exist. I awoke to see it floating over me, its beady white eyes staring intently into mine like some kind of perverse intimacy. It softly rubbed my face and opened its mouth, revealing its whip like tentacles. I braced myself as I felt it’s putrid breath from the small elongated slits on its face.

It begun to make sounds of pleasure as its feelers slid across the pores of my face and gently touched around my right ear. It was teasing me and it was evident it derived sexual pleasure from causing pain. The small whiplike feelers felt like a group of spiders frantically dancing on my face. My heart raced faster and faster. I wanted to scream and wake my sister up but I didn’t want the Schrumpfen to go into my mouth and eat my intestines. My mind begun to disintegrate as I felt the helplessness of my own place in the universe. There was no reason for such evils to exist ; what humanity has done to cope with our unknown existence is ripped apart so easily, how frivolous our attempts to pretend to know truly is. As I closed my eyes, I heard a low humming noise that I have never heard in my encounters with the Schrumpfen.

Then there,  in the event horizon of all that is forsaken, was yet another creature just behind the centipede devil. It struck faster than I could make out details; a fleshy appendage extended out a 5 pronged stinger with lightning speed. The Shrumpfen screamed a most ghastly shriek. It slung back, bringing the monster about to defile my body away from me and into a set of maws. Then, silence. The demon that haunted my family for years had been silenced by a creature much larger, and more terrifying. I was not sure whether to feel at ease or scream.

This new creature was easily 15 feet in diameter. I counted 12 or 13 legs which held a bulbous mass of sleek black. It was almost arachnid, with a large thorax  and sets of eyes that darted around as it analyzed my room. It’s mouth was one of three, all lined up in a triangle shape. It briefly opened up a second maw to reveal another set of five pronged stingers. It chortled in an offbeat humming and disappeared into nothing.

I awoke my sister and explained to her what had transpired. How she slept through these events made me question my own sanity; all I could remember was the Schrumpfen and the ghastly shriek as its life was ended just as how my life was about to be ended. It’s bloodcurdling cry in its final moments of life were surely akin to my own; the only thing we shared was fear of death.

My sister told me a famous scene in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. They were being chased by an underwater sea beast and just before they were eaten a much larger monster of the deep ate the smaller creature. Qui Gon Jin then states “There’s always a bigger fish”. Just what else was out there? What unknown abominations lurked within the dimensional veils of reality?

My sister told me of the Purgatory Collective; the infamous group that works in the shadows to study and combat such things. The fact such despicable creatures exist leaves room to wonder if anything benevolent exists. After laying in my bed as the Schumpfen almost defiled my body and soul, I told her if there were benevolent gods,  then such things don’t care about us.

Later that day, my ear started to hurt.

Author's Note

Comments and criticism encouraged!