Teether

• A fever dream of fears, contracts, and contagion.

I walk through a sunlit city of golden sandstone buildings and limestone pavements. Tall plane trees cast jagged shadows across promenades and long streets, where the locals gasp out the heavy air of a summer clearly in full bloom. The very texture of this city is woven from memories of the spellbinding Palma de Mallorca, which I visited some years ago.

By all accounts it is an idyllic place, in an idyllic time, beneath idyllic weather. And yet—let’s be honest—such glorious alignments rarely last, least of all in the dreams of a man sleeping a common sleep, untouched by blissful opiates. Every dream, however radiant on the surface, carries with it a darker undertow. And drifting toward me along that current is a pack of brooding men in suits. Their jackets are dry, it must be said, but within them flows some pitch-black liquid, no doubt highly flammable.

They swarm around me, attach themselves to me like bumblebees to a flower. Bumblebees rolled in black grease. One of them grips my arm, holds me firm, and begins steering me forward. None of them bothers to explain a thing. In fact, they hardly look at me at all—I’m nothing more than luggage to be delivered to a designated place.

They drag me into an old terraced house—dark and utterly derelict, like an emptied commercial space left waiting for a buyer. The marés walls are soaked with damp, exuding the slow decay of centuries. Nothing more than a hollow vessel, waiting for whatever is about to unfold inside it.

An agreement hangs in the air. I am to consent to something. But just as surely, a problem hangs there too—an unspoken agreement with an unspoken flaw.

We move deeper into the long room, the daylight from the entrance dissolving into dusk.

They set me before a portly man of middle age, perhaps older—it’s hard to tell, his skin stretched smooth and taut by the sheer weight of his body. He draws so close that a thin man could hardly squeeze between us. Yet when he moves across the room, he doesn’t sway side to side as one might expect from such bulk—he glides.

He begins to press down on me. He stares straight into my eyes, and suddenly I lose all control of my body—I cannot move, I am utterly paralyzed.

He opens his shiny, greasy mouth and begins to speak in a gibberish far outside the scope of human comprehension. An unbroken chain of words in a single tone, first like fevered incantation, then in my dissolving mind transforming into an assault of vibrations, a manipulative droning stream. His lips writhe ceaselessly, rubbing, twisting, warping, as though they were pliant jelly whipped from every side by the paddles of a runaway mixer.

To watch him and hear him is pure torment. I cannot close my eyes, cannot block my ears, cannot move a single finger’s breadth.

Now his face begins to draw closer—close already, yet still coming, closer and closer, without pause.

And then evil floods his features—it seeps into every pore of his skin, every crease, the soft tissue around his bulging eyes. I see nothing but that damned face, sweaty, sticky, veined with purple capillaries, the very mask of black magic.

One eye remains fixed on me, while the other—at one of those dreadful moments when time itself stretches thin—turns aside and slightly downward, as if he were staring at the root of his own nose.

His face grows crimson with rage, skin pulled so tight it seems ready to burst—he is like a smoked piglet.

And still he never ceases his muttering.

He lunges. Seizes my hand. Not like a man whose mind snaps in an instant, but like a beast. A confident predator, long waiting for its prey.

In the next moment he sinks his teeth into my hand—right between the thumb and forefinger. It is astonishing how wide his mouth suddenly becomes, this pig-faced creature with his puffed cheeks. Only my thumb and little finger jut free, along with the tips of the others, writhing in spasm like worms scorched on hot asphalt.

His mouth is full, yet his mumbling chant continues—because now I repeat it myself, in agony.

He bites and bites, harder and harder. He is a machine, a grinder stuck in a single act of destruction. The pain is already unbearable, yet with each second it climbs higher still. I feel my fingers will snap off entirely.

The suited men remind me of the agreement. I still don’t know what it concerns, but in this moment of horror I would accept any condition. They’ve unleashed upon me an archetypal monster from the box, a thing that exists only to break. And I am already broken. I would agree to anything, just to make it end. But the squinting pig-man does not relent—he clamps me like a dog with a dislocated jaw. And in that squinting eye I glimpse a contagion.

My vision clouds. His face loses its contours, turns into a shifting mass, a mere mask of unleashed bestiality.

When my sight clears, I no longer see him at all—now I am staring at myself through his eyes. I look exactly like him. And it is I who am biting into my own hand.

I am biting my own hand and cannot stop, though the pain is past endurance.

And then I wake. The pain wakes me. I lie in my bed, at home, in the bedroom. My wife sleeps peacefully beside me, the dogs dozing at our feet as they always do.

But I still see that wicked face. The thick lips, the squinting eye, the sticky skin—it has seeped into my eyes and poured straight into my mind. This is no hazy dream-memory; I see it with perfect clarity. And that muttering has become a vibration that now squeezes my heart and wrings my lungs.

It is the dead of night, and I am seized by dread and horror. I want to pull the covers up to my neck, over my ears, like a child hiding from the boogeyman.

To this day I do not know what I agreed to in that dark, damp house, what the true subject of the pact was meant to be. Perhaps those suited men only wished to infect me with the disease of that smoked piglet. What such a sickness might entail—I dare not even imagine.