Crawling

A story about a strange object.

There is something inside my house.

A week ago, I was jogging in the park. It was a brisk, cool morning in October. I was passing by an old, overgrown shrub when I saw a faint glimmer in between the branches. My curiosity piqued, I bent down and reached into the branches to take the thing out and look at it.

I held in my hand a little brass-colored bauble, a little bigger than a baseball and slightly oval shaped.

It had a thin groove along the midsection.

It wasn't exactly heavy, but it had a bit of a heft to it. Curiously, it was almost warm to the touch.

I stood for a while studying the thing in my hand, trying to wonder what it was or why it was there.

I stuffed it in a pocket of my coat and rushed home.

I studied it under the light of my desk lamp later that day.

From the groove on the middle, I thought it could be screwed open but it wouldn't budge no matter how hard I pried at it.

On the other side, there were strange symbols etched into it, like some sort of code or language.

Over the next few days I left the thing on a shelf in my basement.

Every time I picked it up, it seemed to get warmer to the touch.

One day, I heard a loud cracking sound coming from the basement. I rushed down to it to see what the racket was when I saw the strangest thing.

The thing had broken open. It didn't fall from the shelf, it just cracked open by itself. Stranger still, it had spilled a sticky, grayish substance all over the shelf and it was dripping to the floor.

I spent a good hour cleaning up the gray sludge, which stained the wooden shelf pretty badly. At the end of such a tedious job, I carefully picked up the fragments of the burst object, smooth like the shards of a shattered vase, and on touch realized how cool they were.

That was very unusual.

As I cautiously flipped them over in my palms, examining them, I grimaced with the sniff of the foul odor that hung in the air, its existence inevitable. It wasn't like anything I'd smelled before.

It was musty and strong, and made breathing difficult. As for the pieces of the strange...trinket I'd discovered, it emitted its own bitter and dizzying scent, one it hadn't possessed when found. In fact, upon discovery, it seemed odorless. I later disposed of its remains, giving no more thought to the resulting scent of the bauble's pieces and to the liquid's that remained for a few short hours before dying off.

Later, I started hearing scuttling sounds coming from behind a chair in the den, like the footsteps of a large insect.

I looked behind the chair and there was nothing. I dismissed it as imagination and went about my business.

The next day, I tried to make a phone call only to discover that the phone line had been chewed to pieces.

Then I heard the same scuttling coming from the kitchen. I grabbed the baseball bat I always kept under my bed and went to investigate, apprehensive.

There was nothing.

Today, I kept hearing the scuttling sound, it grew louder every time as if some terrible insect was stalking me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I would see a small shadow linger for just a few seconds before darting out of view. I spent hours with all the lights on in the house, looking behind every piece of furniture and under every shadow. I'm not sure exactly what I expected to find. I just knew that something was in my presence.

Although I couldn't exactly see it, I could feel it.

I started typing this to keep myself calm.

I have the bat laying next to me in case the thing comes in here.

It is quiet now.

Uncomfortably quiet.

I think I heard sometthg/.,kl;