The Haunting of the Holy Mackerel

(August 14, 2016)

13: Hideous

Though not as one might say sentient, the presence in the Skull Fracture had purpose, to a degree, and awareness, to a degree, and spiteful hate to an unimaginable degree. It did not sleep, though it was nocturnal—during the day it felt compelled to hide within its nest, and its nest happened to be a shabby bar in a small Oregon town. For the moment.

Even though no direct sunlight reached it, the entity felt itself limited. It was like helium let out of a child's balloon: it spread through the entire space, and yet it became incredibly tenuous in the spreading. And as the helium in a child's balloon could not possibly lift a building, so the thing that now dwelled in the Skull Fracture could not do violence. Not to something as large as a human.

Smaller things, now, were different.

A colony of German roaches had made its home in the Skull Fracture so long that a mutation in the species had occurred, allowing them to live on beer-soaked bar coasters. About eleven thousand of the half-inch-long pests infested the spaces beneath and between the floors, the little runs along the inside of the baseboards, and the dark niches behind the bottles of rarely-called-for liquors. Mr. Digges, the owner of the Skull Fracture for the past twenty years, had terminated the pest-control business that formerly had the contract on the place. The humans who came in didn't seem to mind seeing the occasional bug, and if they bugs had any objections to the humans, they kept quiet about it.

Now the extermination began. The haunter had no animus toward the insects, but life was life. Each time it engulfed and devoured a living creature, the haunter became stronger, moved further toward being able to manifest in the physical plane.

The biker, Honker Dillinberg, had been absorbed completely. For a short time there in the gas station, the haunter had managed to shape a semi-solid body from the morphic memory of the doomed biker. It had even flickered with a little bit of the man's intelligence, not much (not that he had much to begin with), but enough to sort-of walk and more than enough to claim its second victim, Vetch, the attendant.

Now it could manifest a little bit more than it could have before absorbing the life force of two humans. It could not be solid enough to, say, pour and drink alcohol, but it could now arrange its substance to seize any skittering cockroach and . . . drain it. If it had a sense of taste, and if it could detect the flavor, it would have found the tiny little meals bitter. But all it sensed was the dim spark of cockroach-life. Within a few hours, no insect remained alive in the Skull Fracture—not only the cockroaches, but the ants and silverfish, neither as numerous, had been exterminated. Now if the haunter tried to shape a body, it would be partly human—the general body shape, at least—and partly insect. Maybe six limbs and a human mouth with pincers instead of teeth.

But wait, folks, that's not all. In the crawlspace beneath the bar—truly a crawlspace, barely eighteen inches from rank, moldy earth to the softening wood beams—there dwelled a colony of rats. These rats would never become coachmen for a disguised princess, nor would they ever cook a meal for a French restaurant critic. These were not cute rats. These were brown rats, incorrectly called Norway rats.

Brown rats are ugly customers: The heaviest of any species in the Muroidea superfamily (all the mice, rats, gerbils, voles, hamsters and their relations), it can be a foot long. Its body is fairly sparsely covered with stiff, bristly fur. It has powerful teeth and has been known to gnaw through concrete and even steel. Cornered, it fights like something three times its size and weight. They have in various places and various times killed sheep, chickens, pigs, cows, horses, and humans.

There is a story from World War I of some troops in a trench who saw one of their fallen soldiers in No Man's Land, and through binoculars they thought they saw him breathing. Six times small groups went out to rescue him, and each time the opposing soldiers (the story has been told of German, French, and British troops) sighted in on and killed the rescue parties, though they carried flags of truce.

Finally, as the fallen man's mates launched smoke bombs, two others managed to crawl all the way to their presumably wounded comrade. He seemed to struggle to breathe—his chest heaved.

They grabbed his arms and dragged him back and dumped him into the trench, where friends caught him and broke his fall. Then his tunic burst open and a dozen rats, that had been busily eating away inside the chest cavity, spilled out and ran, leaving only a few scraps of skin and mostly bones of the victim.

However, the rats beneath the Skull Fracture were not as obtrusive. In fact, they were the largest and most thriving colony left in Gravity Falls these days—the Gnomes had incorporated as a low-cost pest-control agency and rounded up and cooked and ate hundreds of these kind of rats. However, once again Digges was too cheap to hire even the Gnomes.

But the vaporous, nearly invisible haunter found them. It closed on them like quicksand closing over the head of an unlucky traveler who had blundered into a bog. The rats had more intelligence than the roaches, more self-awareness, and if they'd had anything to bite, they would have given the haunted a fierce battle. But their teeth couldn't close on its paranormal substance. Its stuff invaded their lungs and killed them from the inside out.

And then any shape the thing might form would be part human, part insect, and part rat.

The worst parts of each.

All that day the haunter surged through the building. It wanted to get out. However—

Even though at night it could venture outside, there was a price. Its center of intelligence, its mind, had to remain here in the spot it haunted. A physical manifestation—like the motorcycle, which had been easy to take over but the frustratingly limited in its uses—might range far and wide, but the connection between the mind and the manifestation meant that the haunter got only a dim and distant perception of what was happening.

It wanted more.

With enough life forces it could grow stronger.

With enough, it could become more aware.

With enough, it could break out into the world—

A small group of people in Asia tell legends of such a creature. They don't' call it a ghost or a spirit or even a demon, though they fear it like a devil of the night.

No.

Their word for such a thing as the haunter had become was—

A Hunger.