It had lain there undiscovered for three weeks, each day
growing bigger and bigger, until it filled its lair, no more room to expand.
Things had made their homes in it, a whole new ecosystem feeding off its waste.
It had grown fat and strong with neglect and leftovers. But now it needed a new
food source. It was hungry, and it was ready to move.
This is the story of the last time I washed up the dishes.
It is a story of hubris, and bowel-clenching terror, and ultimately, of the
human spirit’s ability to overcome any odds, no matter how icky. And it starts
with a confession.
When certain circumstances arise, I can be what is commonly
known as a filthmonster. It’s not that I create more mess than other people, in
fact considering I barely eat I probably create less; it’s more that I just
leave things that I don’t want to do until tomorrow, a tomorrow which
inevitably lasts for several days. And in this case, the thing I didn’t want to
do was wash the plates up, because it is the second most boring job on the
planet (right behind being the psychologist who is paid to listen to Paris
Hilton’s problems for an hour a week). So they’d been left for a while in the
sink, ready to be cleansed of baked bean sauce and chicken supernoodles
(healthy diet); and my housemates had added their own debris, reasoning that if
I wasn’t cleaning plates then why should they? And for a while, this seemed to
be fine. I hadn’t gone into the kitchen, existing instead on a mix of crisps
and MacDonalds, whilst the others had just stolen plates from the kitchen
downstairs.
I only started to become concerned when, in my bed in the
dead of night, I began to hear a kind of scraping sound coming from our
kitchen. I knew my friends were stuck in their room watching movies (yes, that
kind) so, fearing some oddly inept culinary burglary was afoot, I crept down
the corridor to check it out. I peered through the small glass pane of the
door; no shadows moving, no sound of heavy breathing, no shuffling of clothes
to denote someone furiously masturbating over the cutlery. I opened the door
and turned on the light.
I should have backed out there and then. I should have
slowly shut the door, as quietly as possible, and called someone professional,
someone who knew what they were doing, maybe an exterminator, or the Ghostbusters.
I should have washed up about three weeks earlier.
But despite the horror of what lay in that kitchen, despite
the Frankensteinian creation which I saw before me, and despite the fact that I
began to cough because of the cloud of mould spores in the air, I walked into that
kitchen and confronted my misdeeds.
In the sink, for a given value of “in”, was a fetid mass of
stinking filth. Plates piled high on top of each other were joined together
with mounds of green fur, hairs waving gently in the new air from the corridor.
Glasses which on first glance looked like they were full of liquid turned out
with a little closer inspection to be filled with some kind of purple-grey
moss. One bowl, which had been used to mix eggs and flour, had a few baby
maggots taking their first crawls towards freedom. And worse than all of this,
covering the bottom of the sink and extending arms out towards the walls and
floor, a brown sludge like solidified gravy was creeping towards me, glistening
with unholy light as its tendrils crept out to take hold of my very soul.
I’ll admit that the mould spores in the air may have been
starting to get to me at this point, the bottle of wine I’d drunk before bed
not really helping me to resist its hallucinatory powers, but seriously, it was
fucking grim.
But still, I did not run, though it was only with difficulty
that I didn’t produce a brown mess of my own right there. I knew that this was
my creation, my monster, and only I could defeat it. Also, if I didn’t clean
it, the other two definitely wouldn’t. And after all, it was only a bit of
mould (although that bowl was going in the bin, I mean, maggots?); how
difficult could it be? So I donned a pair of rubber gloves, grabbed a scrubbing
brush, and set to work.
As soon as I’d touched the first plate, however, I knew that
I’d made a big mistake. Even through the rubber gloves I could feel a kind of
pulsing, a regular rhythm which was making the whole putrid pile vibrate,
almost like... a heartbeat. No, that couldn’t be right; it was just dirty
crockery. No worries. Gritting my teeth and willing myself on, I ran some hot
water, laboriously applied fairy liquid, and began work, levering the plates
off each other one by one as if opening large, hideous-smelling mussels. Seven,
eight, clean; the green mould had receded, beaten into submission by the power
of my manly arms and scrubbing brush. It had put up a fight, the yellow of my
gloves stained beyond saving; but I was winning.
I levered the ninth and final plate up, scrubbed, clean; now
for the bowls. Maggot bowl was swiftly deposited in the bin, followed by a fair
bit of bleach to kill the things in it; the others were covered in the same
purply-grey stuff as the glasses, but again it was no match for my mighty
scrubber. I thought, for a second, that I heard a low moaning sound come from
the depths of the pile, a pile I was still only halfway down, but dismissed it;
I would not be halted in my mission of cleanliness. Swiftly dispatching the
last bowl, then the glasses, I knew that nothing could stop me.
But then I moved aside the chopping board, still stained red
with what I hoped was tomato (because this wasn’t worth Hep B), and then I
realised what I had done. I was only halfway down the pile, but I’d cleaned up
all the crockery and cutlery we owned. The low moans and the strange heartbeat
weren’t just figments of my imagination. This mound, this fetid hill... it
wasn’t dirty washing.
It was breathing. It was alive. And, free of its protective crockery
shell, it knew I was there.
Now I wanted to run; I wanted to get out of there while I
still could, before this monster engulfed me as it had engulfed my dishes. But
almost immediately I felt myself trapped in a battle of wills with the
creature, its stench and putrefaction against my willpower and mounting nausea;
and then it spoke to me.
You cannot hope to
win, it said in a voice like worms crawling over bare skin. You made me, and now you will make me
strong.
No, I whispered in what remained of my mind. No, I’m
cleaning you, I’m cleaning...
You can’t defeat me.
Your fairy liquid is no match for my decay. I will consume you, my creator, and
then, the world.
I felt myself slipping under its influence, felt my hand
drag off a rubber glove and, against my will, reaching out to touch the
glistening brown surface. It will consume me, it will consume the world…
But my other hand had reached the bottle of bleach I’d used
to kill the maggots, the lid still unscrewed because I’m lazy. With a last,
desperate, Herculean effort I tipped the bottle six inches and the bleach
flowed out over the thing in the sink. It screamed as the liquid cut a swathe
through the sludge, screamed into my mind as it reached the centre of the mass;
and deflated, collapsed into a pile of stinking, non-sentient matter.
Gasping for breath, shaking, I poured the rest of the bleach
over this heap, and sure that the beast was dead, left the rest of the job to
the cleaner. I had defeated the monster; it was up to others to take away the
body. Also I was tired and I hate cleaning.
So what can we take away from my travails? Two things: one,
don’t ever, ever leave the washing up for this long. Or, alternatively, if you
are an evil supergenius who wants to take over the world and needs an army of
slime-monsters for your evil plan, mix baked bean sauce and chicken flavoured supernoodles and just sit back and watch it grow.
Preferably with some kind of gas mask on.
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