Deathshead

The quiet knocking is what woke me. I could feel the coldness on my exposed skin as I lay alone in the big bed. She was not there with me tonight, so I slept uneasily. If she had been there, I wonder what we would have done. I might not have awoke at all until morning. But she was not there beside me that night and so I woke up from the gentle rapping coming from the wall. It sounded almost polite, as if something over there was trying to get my attention but also did not want to disturb me, like a slight knock on an open office door. But it was not like human knocking, no one-two-three-knock nor some intricate musical pattern; just a single low thump every few seconds. I kept my eyes closed, listening. Knock, one, two, three, four, five, knock. Six seconds apart, consistently. It could not have been the wind repeatedly driving a tree branch into the window, that would not sound so rhythmically precise; and, anyway, that sound was not coming from the window but from the adjacent room.

The knocking proceeded as I lay in bed, wrapped in thick blankets to keep out the cold. I did not want to get up, but curiosity and anxiety won me over, seized me almost, and so I got up. I knew the layout of the room and so it took me only three precise strides to reach the door. My head began spinning from rising too quickly, so I stood there by the doorway to recover. I could hear it much more clearly now. The small, indistinct sound had become a louder, though still not very loud, knocking. Round and blurry around the edges; the warm color of dark orange.

I opened the door to the kitchen and turned on the lights. Their electric glow blinded me and I needed another second to recover and restore my sight. The room was sparsely decorated, so the blank white walls reflected all the more light. The window was still open; I had forgotten to close it. Next to me on the wall, some two or three feet away, sat a moth, gently rapping.

Eyes fixated on the creature, I began to think of a plan, which glass to pick to capture it with and release it back, when a sensation overcame me of the strangeness of that insect. I took another step into the room to behold its form more accurately and was struck by a feeling of both awe and a deep primal revulsion. The creature, or animal, was quite large, perhaps a full span across. Its wings were full and looked quite fleshy, though their color was that of dark wood and its veined texture looked to my tired mind alternately like that of animal matter or of dead wood. The most peculiar part, though, was its body. In the dead center of its wide thorax sat the splitting image of a human skull looking back at me with dark eyes. Right below the death’s head, coming from the hind part of its thorax, was a large inflate corema, as I now know it to be called, a tubular, fleshy, hairy protrusion, inflated at will by the moth and curved inwards toward the wall on which it knocked with it. Knock, one, two, three, four, five, knock.

Upon closer inspection of the moth, an even stronger revulsion overcame me and I had to steady myself against the table. The anxious part of my mind seemed to drown out everything with nothing but mindless screeching. I could not let it stay here, but neither could I remove it; I felt rooted to the ground. I could do nothing but stare at it, my hand searching for purchase on the tabletop. Then, it stopped its knocking. Suddenly, it was as if it stared at me. It did not move, rather, it stopped moving, and yet, I could feel the death’s head’s empty eyes turning toward me. With surprising vigor, I sprinted around the table and took a glass out of the cabinet, yet, before I could apply it to that fiend, it had taken off from the wall and began flying around the room. I tried to follow it, but it darted around the room so quickly, I did not see it coming toward me until it was already inches from my face. I ducked out of the way, dropping the glass, and fled to my room.

I stood behind the closed door for a minute until my heart had calmed down enough for me to be able to distinguish its beating from the knocking of the moth. I listened intently– And I could hear naught but the rush of blood through my head. Rattled but now calmed down, I lay down in bed again in the hopes that the beast had escaped through the open window and would bother me no more. Though I was only in the kitchen for a handful of minutes, all the warmth had already drained out of my bunk. Still, exhaustion made me more than glad to be back under covers and soon I dove into that swoony swirl of thoughts in free association that circles the deeper parts of sleep. I thought of warm things, of fireplaces and stoves, hot coals and heated stones on the flanks of volcanoes in the icy north where cold winds blow over barren plains under darkened skies which open up to thunderstorms of great violence, knocking about trees and whole mountains while I lay safe and warm in my bed, hearing only the distant knocking of those–

Another knock penetrated the walls of my sleep, one that came not from that realm of Morpheus, but from the other room again. My conscious mind had heard it and dragged me up from drowning to the cold, wet beach of wakefulness. This time, more determined and eager to go back to sleep, I got up quickly and strode across to the door. I waited. A knock came from the other side, directly on the thin wooden door. Opening it would surely rouse that malicious moth and give me no time to grab another glass, not with the shards of the last attempt in front of the cabinet. There was, however, a broom in the corner that I might just be able to reach in time.

So, armed with nothing more than an insomniac’s exaggerated sense of derring-do, I opened the door. I dove straight for the corner of the room where the broom stood. The moth flapped its enormous wings behind me, I could hear it. I grabbed the instrument, turned around and swung the head with all my might. I missed the moth by a hand’s breadth, but it tumbled in the air from the turbulence, giving me more time to strike again. I missed again, but struck once more, slowly driving it towards the still open window. Finally, I managed to shoo it out into the darkness and closed the window behind it. Only then did I notice that I had accidentally stepped in a piece of broken glass. Adrenaline had made me ignorant to that fact, but now that the hormonal rush was subsiding, the pain was starting to catch up with me.

I grabbed a towel from near the sink and, struggling to hold my injured foot and the already soaked towel in my right hand, jumped one-leggedly back to the bedroom and then on towards the bath. My sure strides had been replaced by uncertain hops as I tried to navigate the small apartment monopedally while also trying not to get any blood on the floor. With every small jump, my foot began to hurt more, each time sending an electric shock through my body. I had driven out that flying foe and could now theoretically tackle this remaining problem with all the time and care in the world, slowly hopping to the bathroom to wash and bandage the wound and then clean up the kitchen, and yet the incident had agitated me to a degree far larger than the momentary excitement from that duel could explain: I felt restless and could not get to the bath quickly enough and in my frenzied state I spilled some of my own blood on the off-white tiles of the hallway floor.

I stumbled through the bathroom door and sunk onto the toilet. A curved angular shard from the edge of the glass’s bottom had pierced the calloused skin on the ball of my right foot. Blood was slowly dripping out, but neither flowing nor – God forbid – gushing, which greatly relieved me. My right hand was already stained red, so, with nothing to lose, I grabbed with it the shard and immediately felt a jolt of pain zap up through my spine, lighting up the inside of my head like a pinball machine. I retracted my hand, tried to relax, tried to breathe more slowly. I would have to rip it out in one go if I wanted to have any chance to get it out. Any other method would have to be foiled by my own squeamishness and intolerance to pain.

With great reluctance and anticipated nausea, I placed my fingers around the shard of glass, touching the warm, rough skin of my sole and inhaled one final time. Breath held, eyes closed, I yank–

–ed it out in one motion and immediately collapsed to the floor. I jerked around on the ground; pain shot through me in waves. I could focus on nothing else, just burning, drowning agony. I breathed in quick gasps like a fish dropped on land by a cruel eagle and wound my body around itself until the pain slowly, slowly diminished. Then I lay there. I looked at the ceiling. Then I got up. I could not put too much pressure on my right foot, but I still managed to clean the wound and bandage it. I tried cleaning up some of the mess I made of the floor but only managed to smear the blood around some; it would have to wait and I was much too tired to tackle it then and there in any case.

So, feeling a slight headache from tiredness and exertion coming on, I took one last look around the room and, hand on the doorhandle, was all but on my way the bedroom, when I could hear a faint knock coming from behind me. Immediately, I froze. My spine had crystallized with fear. I could not feel my limbs, only the cold sweat collecting on my back. Another knock. I counted. One, two, three, four, five, knock. Slowly, frightened, praying to gods neither I nor anyone else had prayed to in since time immemorial, I turned around. There, on the closed bathroom window, sat the moth. It was sitting on the outside, its body turned towards me, so I could not see the skull imprint on its back, but I knew it still. And there was its inflatable knocker which it used to pound on the glass. Determined, I walked up to it. In that moment I cared not if the wound reopened; I would not show weakness in front of that infernal fiend.

I stood in front of the window. I could see the underside of the moth’s body, ribbed and covered in tiny hairs, its legs strangely thin. I knew not what to do or say, could only feel a fiery swirl of anger rising in me. I pounded on the windowpane, just once, yet the moth did not care. It sat, unmoving, unceasing in its rapping. I pounded again and again, yet the moth did not even seem to acknowledge my efforts. ‘Fool… fool,’ it seemed to say with each sequential knock. ‘Fool… fool…’

Dejectedly I took a step back from the window. I was searching the room for something, anything, when my eyes landed on the glass shard that I had thrown from me after pulling it out. I had cleaned it and laid it on the edge of the sink. I rushed to grab, just to have something in hand with which to ward off this evil insect. Weapon in hand, I stepped up to the window once again, ready to strike at this winged evil, even at the cost of a broken windowpane, when with a solid thunk another moth, exactly like the first, landed right beside it. I was startled and could not react for quite a few seconds in which I beheld their dual cacophony: knock, knock, one, two, three, four, knock, knock. My heart felt weak, weakened by this hellish percussive symphony. The shard dropped from my hand. I took another step back. Another moth landed beside the pair, the third of the bunch, and it too began to knock. Then came another and another still, all knocking, all rapping, all screaming ‘fool,’ all begging to be let in, begging for me to open the window, to let them in.

After this, I fled into the closet in the hallway. It was the only part of the apartment without a window, so I felt safer there than anywhere else. I could still hear the faint knocking sounds coming from the bathroom for quite a while until they finally gave up and subsided, though I do not know how long I waited for that. I am still sitting here beside the shoeboxes and the winter coats, waiting for the sun to come up and my love to come home to release me from this miniscule cell and return me to the land of the living with her warm, life-spending embrace.