I don’t talk about this much, but I used to have a roommate.
It was a few years ago, when I was just an intern at the Habitsville Gazette. It was before any of my stories had been published, before anyone knew the name Samuel Singer. Rent in Habitsville is low, but my zero-dollar paycheck from the newspaper office was even lower, and the only way I could afford rent was to split it with somebody else.
Ironically, it was from a newspaper ad that I met Steven.
He was as broke as I was, but we each could scrape together enough to survive (and, truthfully, he was the only one who answered my ad), so we got a small place and moved in. We couldn’t afford living room furniture in the beginning, so we tended to keep to ourselves, opting instead to hang out in our individual rooms when we were home. It was a comfortable, if unfamiliar symbiotic relationship.
Until he brought it home.
Steven was proud of the couch he had found on the side of the road, but I wasn’t so sure. It was old, dirty, and pretty torn up. I’m no décor snob, but even this was a bit much for me.
“There’s a huge rip on that cushion.”
He shrugged. “We can flip it.”
“and the smell?”
He waved his hand dismissively. “We can clean it.” Then, after seeing the look on my face, he corrected himself. “I can clean it.”
I ran my gaze over the lumpy object again, in all its sickly green glory. The tragedy of it all was that at some point, this was a pretty nice sofa—I could see where once the ill color was a vivid emerald, the matted material was once soft velvet, and dry rot hanging off the bottom was once shined wooden molding. It probably once was a piece in some rich person’s parlor in the 1950’s—but now it looked like trash.
I leaned in a bit closer and squinted. “And what about the stain?”
Steven furrowed his brow. “What stain?”
I couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it, it was so huge. It stood out dark violet against the green, and I could tell it spread across the bottom right cushion and the back. It didn’t take long to see that there was something odd about it—it wasn’t a splatter, like someone had spilled something, or a passing car had thrown a drink out of the window while it was sitting out on the curb. There were no droplet marks around it, no uneven spreading—it was as though it seeped upward from somewhere below.
I pointed to it, and Steven blinked once, twice, a third time, then looked surprised. “Oh wow, you weren’t kidding. I don’t know how I missed that.”
He bent closer to it, his face curious. I had a strange feeling as the distance between him and sofa closed, a gut sensation that I should tell him to stop, or pull him back. The instinct heightened when he raised a hand to it, and a surge of fear rippled down my back as he pressed a pointer finger to the dark mass.
Then, he pulled it away, stood back up, and shrugged.
“I’ll clean that too,” he said, and that was it.
I let Steven keep the couch that I hated, mostly because I avoid confrontation, but also because I couldn’t afford to get us a better one. It was hard to argue against a free couch when your alternative is a giant empty space in the middle of your living room.
And to his credit, Steven did flip the ripped cushion, and he did clean the couch. He got out the vacuum, and some sort of upholstery cleaner he found online, and set to work. Eventually, the smell mildew and must faded from the thing, and even though I never used it, I found that I didn’t mind the old couch.
What I did mind, however, was that Steven seemed to be… secretly cleaning it.
As strange as it sounds, there is really no other way to see it. I actually caught my roommate trying to quietly scrub our sofa in the dead of night. I had gotten up for a drink of water, and there he was on his knees, yellow rubber gloves on his hands, rubbing a rag against the dingy velvet with vigor.
I didn’t know what to say. So, I crept past him, got my water, and went back to bed.
The next day, I walked out of my room, and Steven was already awake. He was sitting on the sofa, on the side with the turned over cushion. He was still wearing his cleaning gloves, and he was looking ahead, as though he was watching the turned-off television.
“Hey man,” I said casually, though I was feeling uneasy.
“Hey,” he answered, his voice measured and normal, though his eyes stayed staring ahead.
I was walking towards the kitchen, making my way along the back of the sofa, when I stopped. I eyed the silhouette of Steven’s head for a moment, then opened my mouth to ask about the bizarre cleaning episode I had come across during the night. But before I could, he spoke first.
“Do you think it’s getting bigger?”
I blinked. “What?”
“The stain,” he said, nodding across from him as though referring to another person, “Do you think it’s getting bigger?”
His question surprised me, but I peeked over the back of the sofa to look anyway. There was the stain, as dark and ominous as it had been that first day. And oddly, I thought Steven was right. It did look bigger, like it had spread over the past week.
“It’s probably all of that product you’re using on it,” I said, trying to seem unbothered. “There’s such a thing as over cleaning,” I added, hoping that if I hinted that I had seen Steven the previous night, he would explain his strange behavior.
“Yeah, maybe,” he answered absent-mindedly, then turned to look ahead once more.
When I got home from work, he was still there. The television had those rainbow bars on it, with that high-pitched ringing. I grabbed the remote and shut it off. Steven didn’t seem to notice.
I’m going to be honest, I thought Steven was cracking up a bit. I ran through a possible mental health intervention in my mind, but the thought of instigating that made me feel like I was going to have a panic attack of my own. Instead, I started asking around to see if anybody I knew was in need of a roommate—either I was getting out, or Steven was.
And then, the stain spread.
At first, I didn’t notice it. Steven was on his hands and knees scrubbing the thing so much that it had a permanent dark mark across the entire right side. I figured it was constantly damp from all of the cleaner he had sloshed together in an old bucket he had taken to carrying around with his rubber-gloved hands.
But eventually, I saw that the stain had crept down onto the floor.
Initially, I was pissed. Steven’s couch neurosis was going to cost me my security deposit, and like I said, in that time of my life every cent counted.
But when I brought this up to Steven, his reaction replaced my anger with concern.
“What do you mean, it’s on the floor?” he asked with terse, bloodless lips.
The self-righteous speech about accountability and responsibility I had rehearsed in my head was put on hold. I pointed towards the dark spot that had dripped down the furniture and onto the carpet. “Right there.”
Steven’s eyes slowly turned to where I gestured, his face gaunt and withered. He stared at the stain and said nothing. I was able to see how pale he looked, how tired. Though it was 76 and sunny outside, he wore the same black turtleneck that I had seen him in the day before. There was obviously something going on, something that I knew nothing about. I felt bad for the guy—but I also felt a powerful uneasiness right in the deepest pit of my stomach.
“Steven—I don’t think that’s doing anything. It’s not that big of a deal, really—“I regretted bringing up the stain at all, for pointing out its spread; but that regret was quickly replaced with horror as Steven brought his shaking hands together, and began to peel off his gloves.
“I’ll just have to scrub harder then,” Steven said, spittle flying as he struggled with his with gloves. And then, they were off, empty rubber sacks that fell to the ground.
There was a moment, just after the gloves came off, that I was certain Steven was wearing another pair underneath.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t.
Under the bright yellow mitts were mottled, violet hands. The nails were mustard and cracked, and the cuticles were peeled and rimmed with scarlet. As I stared, an acrid scent wafted to my nostrils, the dank stench of detritus and decay.
What was worse, was what he did next.
Steven began to scrub.
I wanted to stop him, but sheer terror stuck me in place. I watched as Steven brought his fingers to the carpet and pressed impossibly hard, moving in a vicious rhythm back and forth across the carpet. His fingertips were stark with pressure, then bloodied from broken nails that snapped off in all directions.
“Steven—” I said, but he didn’t slow his pace. The softs pads of his fingers grew shiny from friction, rubbed raw against the fabric, and all the while the stain stayed the same. When the skin blistered and broke, I finally lunged forward and tried to push Steven by his shoulders. “Hey, man—stop it, you’re hurting yourself—”
He didn’t say anything, only gave a guttural grunt and attempted to shake me off. As the red of the blood mingled with the deep purple of the stain, I reached out and grabbed Steven’s hands.
He immediately grew still.
I finally let myself exhale, but the relief I felt quickly gave way to dread as Steven lifted his chin towards me, a disturbingly empty, yet animalistic look in his eye.
“You shouldn’t have touched it.”
I swallowed. “What do you mean?”
Steven slowly held up his mangled hands towards me, loose bits of flesh and nail hanging from exposed bone, with strings of brown carpet clinging to the sticky bits. “The stain,” he replied lowly, nodding at his hands. “Now it’ll get on you too.”
Then with that, Steven grabbed hold of the bottom of his turtleneck, and with one harsh pull, unveiled one of the worst sights I had ever seen.
His torso was a splotchy violet, like a huge birthmark that spready down from his arms and towards his waist. I could see there was a ring of ordinary flesh just above his belt, like as the stain crept from the sofa to the floor, it was now flowing over the expanse of Steven’s body. A purple circle was choked around his neck, inching closer to his chin.
The smell was the worst part. The faint stench that had been following Steven around for weeks was intensely putrid when exposed to the open air, and my eyes watered with the sting of it. It was as though his body was rotting from the inside out.
As my eyes traveled over Steven’s form, he moved calmly and quietly, picking up the rubber gloves he had tossed aside.
With a terrible squelch of blood and pulp, he forced his hands back into the slight holes.
Then, he looked at me.
“Sam,” he said clinically. “We’ve got to get that stain off of you.”
I felt the color drain from my face. Slowly, I looked down. My hands didn’t have any hint of the diseased color that Steven was coated in. But when I turned back towards my roommate, his eyes were focused on my skin. It was as though he could see something that I couldn’t.
He took a step forward.
I took a step back.
My leg hit something behind me, and I turned to see the sofa, in all of its sickly green glory, blocking me from my easiest escape route.
Steven was staring at me, and his face was concerned. “Steven,” I said again, trying to keep my voice light and friendly, “there’s nothing to worry about. See?” I held up my hands to him, turning them to either side. “It didn’t get on me. I’m fine.”
To my dismay, my roommate shook his head. “I was fine too, Sam.” He said, as the pitter patter of blood dripped from the opening of his gloves. “I was fine.”
That was the moment he lunged for me.
Time seemed to stand still. My feet were locked in place as Steven came towards me, his orange-smeared hands raised. I glanced to the spot below me on the carpet, where bits of his skin and the jagged chunks of nail littered the floor. Then, I looked back into the cold, determined eyes of my assailant, and I swore for a moment, they shone a deep, dark, sickly violet.
Then in one second, I stepped out of the way.
It was too quick for Steven to change direction, and he crashed into the emerald sofa hard, though it didn’t move an inch. He laid there for a second, in the velvet embrace of the furniture, his discolored body pressed against the matching expanse of stain.
He turned his head towards me, a look of pure terror on his face. Like, somehow he knew what was going to happen next.
There was a terrible grinding, slurping sound, as, hands-first, Steven was pulled in the slight crack between the sofa cushion, and the sofa’s back. He didn’t say a word, not a whimper, nor a scream.
He just silently slid deeper and deeper into the stained split, until he was gone. A second later, something slid back out—two yellow rubber gloves, licked clean.
I dropped the sofa off on the curb that same night, careful to only touch the left side.
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