The Pipes
- by Arcadia Molinas -
For too damn long those pipes have been banging. Morning, bang. Night, bang. All day, all night, bang, bang, bang. I haven’t slept for weeks. And do you know what a lack of sleep does to a girl? It makes her go fucking nuts, that’s what.
I get up from bed and start to pace my tiny room. The air in my home is stifling. There’s only one window, and I’ve already cracked it as wide as it can go. I can’t really remember the last time I went outside. The noise is all I think about. It’s long strayed from the playful gargle of water and waste, or the creaking tick of expanding and contracting copper. It’s become the dull, mean knock of a thing without hope. At times it slows down, stretches between bangs like an over-chewed piece of gum but then it ratt-att-atts like a hungry chainsaw as if making up for lost time.
“This house has been here for more than sixty years,” Finch, my new landlord, said to me when I moved in. His eyes were milky green, and the smell of onions clung to his body like a frightened child. It was hard to face him head on, the stench was so strong, “you may hear the floorboards creak or a door groan here and there but it’s nothing to worry about. These walls,” and he rapped his knuckles on one, “are old and thin. You’ll get used to it all.” He slithered back into the open maw of his house, an old wooden house just like mine, on the other side of the road. As he shut the door, he turned to look at me, and his eyes curdled like spoiled milk.
I need to find the pipes. I must hunt down the noise. It beats though every surface of this cramped apartment, the crockery rattles in their cupboards, the fridge hums to its beat. I need to find its source. This is no way to live. There’s a lump in my throat like an uncracked walnut, threatening to release something nasty and vile into my room. Suddenly the noise lets out one, long, dragged-out moan. I stop in my tracks. For an entire beat there’s silence. I don’t even dare to breathe. Is this it? My eyes travel from the door to the bedside wall, and immediately the noise erupts into a throbbing thud. It rattles down my throat. It unsettles my guts. It sickens me. The thuds pick up the pace until they’re revving like a busted-up bike. I groan and sit on the floor. I start to rock myself back and forth.
“Come now, it can’t be more than a light tapping. A minor nuisance,” Finch told me after the first couple of sleepless nights. “Buy some earplugs if it annoys you that much. It’s an old house, it’s not meant to have such sensitive people inside.” His onion smell clung to me like bad breath. Meanwhile the noise banged in the background like a chuckle. “If it persists, I’ll get involved,” Finch licked his lips.
The very first day I moved in I heard it. I woke up in the middle of the night, sticky with sleep, gunk in my eyes, and for a split-second thought someone was speaking to me. I woke up with a jolt, the sound raspy like metal being stretched with pliers. What’s happening? I blinked. As I shook the sleep off, my skin started to crawl. The noise became urgent, hollow, panicked. Is it coming from behind my bed? I scrambled out of the sheets and the further away I was the quieter the noise got. Over the next couple of days, the noise slowly invaded every crevice of the house. It spread like a virus looking for a host, inched over the floor, seeped under the doors, swallowed the toilet, the sink, the shower. When it wormed into the kitchen, there was nowhere else to go. The apartment became infested and now, when I shower, it rains on me from the showerhead, when I make coffee, it gurgles in my moka pot, when I smoke my cigarettes, it crinkles in the tobacco. It’s bored a hole in my head and I hear it everywhere, bang, calling to me, bang, trying to say something, bang, I just don’t know what.
If I had first heard it from behind my bed, that’s where I must look now. Really look. I scramble to the kitchen and grab a hammer from a drawer. The noise starts thumping louder, as if it senses my intentions. There’s a franticness to it, an edge. I feel the same, the noise and I are locked in. With the claw, I start to work at one of the nails on the wooden beams. Up close like this, I notice all types of dents on the wood’s surface. The edges around the nails are splintering, as if hacked at. Had the noise already brought someone else to this exact point? I dig at the nails clamping the planks together and pry them away with ease, as if they were greased. The noise is unrelenting, thudding in my ears so loudly it feels like my own heartbeat. My mouth fills with saliva. With a great creak, the top part of the board pops out. I grab at the edges and wriggle it, loosening it further. The noise propels an octave higher. It's close –the source– I can feel it. With one final crunch the plank breaks free. I hoist it to one side, reach for my phone and shine a light inside.
The swollen pipes heave. What I see brings it all back to me.
Finch and his onion smell wafting into my house. Me, gesturing towards my room with a frenzied smile. Rapping on the walls with my knuckles trying to imitate the sound. Finch’s bemused face as he shakes his head and points at his ears. Pleading with him. Finch shrugging and grabbing a hammer from the kitchen, tearing at the planks. Finch stepping back and leaning as I looked in. My eyes growing like ripples in a pond, the scream that followed. All those mangled bodies meshed together, compressed between the house’s wheezing pipes. The oxidized limbs and the nibbled guts spilling out. The rotten hair and gangrenous fingernails, the maggots swirling in the decay. And the smell, that undeniable onion smell. Finch twitching and his cold hands around my throat. The tussle for the hammer. Grabbing it from his reptilian fingers and swinging it as hard as I could across the side of his head. The blood spurting. His crushed cranium like a crumpled piece of paper hanging limply off his neck. Stuffing him in the wall on top of the other bodies and breathlessly boarding the wall back up.
And there it is again: Finch’s corpse, his milky eyes dangling from their sockets, piled on top of a mountain of rotting bodies. The noise goes quiet and before I have time to think, I grab the wooden plank and nail it all back into place.
I collapse on my bed biting back tears. I’m so exhausted I can’t feel my aching arms, or my pounding head. I close my eyes, I’m so tired, if I could only sleep a little, give my brain a rest, I could figure out exactly what to do next. Just as I’m about to finally drift off, one solitary bang jolts me awake. I get up from bed and start to pace my tiny room. The air in my apartment is stifling. There’s only one window, and I’ve already cracked it as wide as it can go. I can’t really remember the last time I went outside.
Arcadia Molinas is the online editor of Worms.
