My name is Samuel Singer, and a few days ago, I accidentally gave away my favorite childhood toy, Bob.
After I retrieved my stuffed bear Bob from Narrow Street Antiques and escaped the perils that lie there, life began to settle back into the ordinary. I stored him carefully in my hall closet, both because my sentiment towards him had been marred by the terrors of the antique store, and partly for dignity’s sake, as he is a small stuffed bear, and I am a grown man.
Then, because this is Habitsville, and I’m Sam Singer, something extremely strange began to happen.
Bob started to move.
It wasn’t like he was walking around my house on his little two stuffed legs—at least, not at first. But one day I came home from work, and there he was: out of the closet, face down in the middle of the hallway, as though I had caught him in the process of crawling to my bedroom door.
I picked him up. There didn’t seem to be anything weird about him, no army of ants carrying him on their tiny shoulders. So, I dusted him off, and put him back into the closet.
Then, it happened again.
I came home from work, and there he was, facedown a few feet closer to my bedroom than he had been before. The closet door was ajar, and there was no sign as to how the door opened, or what carried the toy so far down the hallway. Though I had no idea what had happened, I decided to store Bob in a different place, to see if that would keep him in place.
My first thought was that I was losing my mind. But feeling fairly confident in my sanity up to that point, I decided to do what reporters do best.
So, to keep an eye on things and get to the bottom of what was happening, I placed Bob in my bedroom.
I put him on the window seat, right across from my bed. As my eyes closed that night, my last sight was his small silhouette, and the outline of his little pink head as he gazed out at Habitsville.
When I woke up, he was in my bed.
Not just in my bed, he was in my arms. Cuddled up against my stomach like I used to hold him when I was a child.
My instincts kicking in, I immediately flung him across the room. He landed with a gentle jingle onto the floor, but he didn’t move.
When I worked up enough nerve, I decided to put him back into his original hall closet, with a chair in front of the door. I tried to keep the panic I felt rising at bay, but it was difficult. Was I sleepwalking? What the hell was going on? I held my ear against the closet door for any sign of life, and immediately felt ridiculous for doing so.
I pulled myself together. I went to work, and when I came back, I checked the closet with bated breath.
It was closed. Whatever force was taking Bob out of the closet had been thwarted by the chair in front of the door. That night, I listened for sound of the sliding of furniture against wood, but I never heard it. I slept soundly, confident that I had put a stop to whatever was happening.
That night, I had the strangest dream.
I had woken in the middle of the night, my throat dry. I got up to get a glass of water, blearily stepping into the hallway to make my way to the kitchen. But, something caught my eye: movement.
There, halfway down the hallway, was Bob, crawling towards me.
The chair had been pushed to the side, the closet opened; the stuffed bear moved towards me, jolting in an unfamiliar way, pushing on its stomach without any of its limbs moving. With every lurch, the bells in his stomach would jingle ever so slightly.
My eyes widened, and I immediately felt awake and terrified. I tried to retreat, my first thought being to leave the house entirely—but as I raised my foot to take a step back, I found that I couldn’t. An invisible barrier sat between where I was and behind me. My only choice was to stand there, still in shock and fear, as the little thing crawled towards me.
Eventually, it reached my bare feet standing on the wood floor. It paused for a second, and relief briefly flooded my chest as I thought perhaps it was over.
Then, it crawled onto my foot.
There was something warm and alive on the bottom of Bob. Something inching along, carrying his small stuffed body along with it.
The only movement I could muster was violent shaking, as the thing climbed up my leg, pinching me slightly to get a grip.
When it got to my stomach, I could see what it was.
There, protruding from Bob’s stomach, was a small, pink, child’s finger.
It hesitated for a moment, pinched tightly on my shirt like a beetle.
Then, it plunged, hard and quick, directly into my navel, through my clothes and skin.
As the finger entered, Bob fell to the floor.
A high jingle as he hit the wood, and I was awake.
Light streamed through my window-- it was morning. Covered in a sheen of sweat, I immediately lifted my shirt to examine my stomach. I ran my fingers over my skin, checking for the point of entry the finger had made in my dream, but there was nothing. I was intact.
Cautiously I crept to my bedroom door, and peered out into the hallway. At the end was the closet, still closed, with the chair in front of it.
My anxiety weaned, and I felt silly for letting a dream scare me. It was bad enough to be so worried about a childhood toy, I didn’t need to add nightmares to the list. My morning went about as usual, and everything was as it should be when I left.
When it first started, I thought I was hungry.
There was a definite rumbling in my stomach, and I had a sort of hunger feeling. Only, the rumbling wasn’t as it usually was when my stomach was growling. It felt like a strange sort of itch, somewhere deep in my abdomen. It didn’t hurt, really, it just felt tight and odd.
And my hunger—it was different too. Usually when I need to eat, my mind wanders to the different types of foods that I might want. But this was different. I wasn’t hungry, in the usual sense. Instead, I felt something like a need to sneeze. And, there was another sensation as well.
I was mesmerized by my own fingers.
I noticed it the most when I was typing. I’m a professional reporter, and since this is the 21rst century, much of my job is writing on the computer. There was something about the way they were dancing along the keys—it fascinated and enthralled me.
“Sam.” A pause. “Sam.”
I looked up. There, standing at my desk, looking mildly annoyed, was my coworkers and friend Heather. Her eyes glanced from me to my hands. “Are you okay? You look completely zoned out.”
I shook my head a little bit. “I’m fine, just didn’t get the best sleep last night.” I tried to direct my eyes to the brown centers of her’s, instead of drifting back towards my hands.
She didn’t seem to notice. “I just wanted to know if you wanted to grab lunch together? I can hear your stomach growling from my desk.”
I laughed nervously. Had half the day passed already? And then, I said something that surprised me. “Actually, I’m not that hungry right now. You go ahead.”
She furrowed her brow. “You sure?” I nodded, and she left. I was glad she was gone, because the impulse to stare at my hands had been festering throughout the short conversation.
In fact, long after my coworkers had left the office, I was still sitting at my desk, typing whatever came to mind, just so I could watch my fingers move. Eventually, after it had turned dark outside, I was able to tear myself away.
I tried to keep from staring at them on the way home. I started to cook dinner for myself, but for some reason, none of my food seemed appetizing. The baby carrots, maybe, but they weren’t worth preparing. I went to bed early, though I wasn’t tired.
As I lay awake in my bed, I couldn’t help myself. I turned on my bed side lamp, sat up, and stared at them. There was just something different about my fingers that day. That itching in my stomach grew stronger, and my sneeze-like urge intensified. And then, I did something that I can’t explain.
I stuck my pointer finger into my mouth, all the way to the knuckle.
I sat there for a moment, surprised with myself. That itch in my stomach, that strange sneeze feeling in my head—I knew what it was telling me now.
It took everything within my power not to bite down as hard as I could.
The shock of the desire was enough for me to pull my finger out of my mouth.
I shoved my hands under my back, my breathing fast. Eventually, the impulse subsided slightly. The strange feeling in my stomach faded, and eventually, far later than normal, my eyes grew heavy.
Just before I began to drift off to sleep, I remembered:
I had forgotten to check Bob’s closet.
I woke up nervous. I hesitantly checked down the hallway, and was strangely surprised to find the closet and the chair undisturbed. I didn’t bother with breakfast, I just watched my fingers dress me, and then tried to keep my eyes on the road as my hands drove me to work.
I sat at my desk, but I wasn’t being productive. It was like my mind couldn’t move away from my fingers, and that feeling of dread of the previous night, when I had wanted to—I couldn’t even think about it.
I felt a touch on my shoulder, and I jumped.
“Hi Heather,” I said tiredly, attempting a smile.
“Hey…” she said, her eyes traveling over my face. It’s a shame she knows me so well. “Are you okay?”
“Still having trouble sleeping,” I said dismissively, watching my fingers give a casual wave.
“That sucks,” she said, but there was a hint of suspicion in her voice. “Do you want to grab lunch today?”
I almost said no. I still wasn’t hungry, and I wanted to stay in the office and watch my fingers type for as long as I could. But then, something changed. That feeling in my stomach intensified, the rumbling going all the way to my sides and back to the center. And that sensation, that I had once called hunger but now knew it to be something else, grew incredibly strong.
I went to lunch with Heather.
We had gotten sandwiches from the nearby café, and though Heather was eating with gusto, I had hardly touched mine. I was too busy staring at the hands.
But not my own.
I couldn’t take my eyes off of Heather’s fingers.
I knew it was wrong. We had sat at the tables outside, and because it was a bit cold, there was no one else around. She was talking steadily to me, something about a story she was working on for the paper, but I couldn’t hear her. The sneeze-feeling in my head had grown to a deep ringing, and my stomach was practically vibrating with the movement within.
She wiped her hands on her napkin, then wrapped her fingers around her drink, then set them on the table. She was asking me a question I couldn’t hear. She was tapping her pointer finger impatiently, and I remembered how it felt last night, when I had finally given in, if just a little bit, to this compulsion within me.
And then, I grabbed her hand.
“What are you doing—” she started, which quickly turned to yells of pain as I shoved her finger into my mouth, and ground it against my teeth.
I bit hard, right at the knuckle, ignoring Heather’s other fist beating against my shoulders and head. The scurrying in my stomach got even more frenzied, excited at the prospect of this thirst finally being quenched. I tasted blood, I felt flesh come away from the bone, I felt awake, I felt hungry—
And then, Heather brought her knee up, hard and fast into my stomach.
I let go, and stepped back a few steps.
There was something wrong, something off.
I coughed once, twice, three times.
I could feel something working its way up, through some tube I didn’t know the name of, past my lungs, up through my throat.
I held it for a moment in my mouth, warm and soft, before spluttering it onto the street.
There it was. A small, pink, child’s finger.
Heather was screaming something at me, holding her still attached but highly mangled finger and hand close to her chest, looking between me and the thing that now sat on the cold pavement of the street. But I wasn’t listening to her.
I watched as the finger crawled, pulling itself like a swollen maggot.
I saw as it fell, singular and horrible, into the storm drain.
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