M'Hablas!: The Caterpillar

Hello! Welcome back to the October Frights Blog Hop! I'm always excited to be part of it, and this year we have a mini book fair, too! You can find the links to that, as well as to the other participating blogs, below the story.

Here's a short story I wrote a while back, inspired by a random caterpillar, so tiny, so fuzzy...but what if he wasn't so tiny? What if there were layers to what he meant?

The Caterpillar

“I told you that would happen,” I mutter, erasing furiously. But I'm not talking about the jagged sketch slowly coming to life in my notebook.

Bulging eyes and fine hairs sprouting from a bulbous, segmented body. I don't like the curve of its body. The eraser flashes, grinding out lines.

"I said someone--would--get--hurt, if you--didn't--"

Again, I'm not talking about the caterpillar that is filling the page with angry pencil scratches.

"It'll be fine," my boss said.

“No it won’t, it—” I insisted, but he cut me off.

“We’re behind schedule,” he said, turning away. An unspoken sentence wriggled its way through the mush of my brain, The company is losing money. Faster, faster, faster. The words gnawed at me. I made eye contact with my coworker, Sam, and I could tell the same rage was chewing him up. We went for a smoke break and bitched, but that hardly calmed me down. Sam puffed out a noxious cloud and sighed, “Guess we better go up.”

I didn’t answer, but I followed him.

With a hiss, the pencil flashes across the page. The lines are darkening as the sketch takes shape, leaving behind the faint skeleton, leaping off the page, coming to life. I pause. I pick up my tea and sip. Fragrant leaf juice. My hand starts shaking again and I force it to continue drawing. I don’t know what I’ll do when the drawing is done…it’s so close. The outlines of everything are there, the details filling in—little feet—little claws—more fine hairs—dripping—even smaller hairs—droplets—I want to slow down. I don’t want to finish it. But I can’t stop or the shakes will catch up. The pain will find me.

“What would you do, if you could have any job in the world?” Sam asked. We were at the top of the building, stacking shingles.

“I’d be an artist, I guess,” I said. “Concept art for movies. Watch my drawings come to life. You?”

Sam paused.

“It’s stupid.”

“No, tell me!” I said and swatted him with a loose shingle before tossing it off the roof.

“An entomologist,” Sam admitted.

“A bug scientist?” I laughed, but then caught the hurt in his eyes. “That’s actually cool,” I hurried to assure him.

“I particularly wanted to study larval stages,” Sam continued, looking out over the treetops. “Maybe we’re in a larval stage, and we’ll spin cocoons soon, and emerge changed.”

I scoffed.

“More like this is the cocoon,” I said, throwing another broken shingle off the roof. I hefted a stack of the damn things and headed up the roof, going slowly to avoid slipping. “I feel like anatomical sludge being sloshed around inside a wrapper.”

“I’d like to study you, then,” Sam said, mischievously.

“Oh god,” muttered. Sam just laughed, a bright sound that bounced out over the trees into the sun.

The drawing forms like a moth out of anatomical sludge. I think of my boss’s face as I sketch it. But I see it angry in my mind’s eye. I hear his voice.

“We’re going to have to let Sam go.”

I have one last thing to make the drawing complete. I need to change this face. The eraser flashes.

“Why?” I demanded. “That’s stupid! Sam’s the only good worker we have, myself included.”

“Don’t call me stupid,” my boss warned, his voice dripping with ice. I glanced at the cross on the wall behind his desk.

“Does it have anything to do with his new tattoo? His Satanic tattoo?” I asked, filling the word with sarcasm.

“You’re on thin ice already, don’t try pulling that card,” my boss snapped. I stood up and shook my head.

“I’m warning you,” I said.

“Get out.”

The pencil stops.

There. The face is perfect. The features are taut with horror and pain. I lay the pencil down next to the notebook and let out a long, shaky sigh. It’s done. I glance at the clock and groan. It’s twelve fifteen. I need to be in bed. Instead, I stare at the drawing and sip my cold tea. Leaf juice.

The caterpillar in the drawing is plump and hairy, with huge eyes that glitter with a thousand lenses. Its mandibles are buried in the neck of my boss, who thrashes in the claws of the gigantic larva. I shake my head and slam down my tea. I need some sleep.

Sam’s laugh, bouncing, rolling, falling, tumbling, so bright, fading away…mandibles and blood. Satanic tattoo. You’re on thin ice! We’re going to have to let Sam go. He doesn’t deserve this! The silken threads of a cocoon covered me with slithering smoothness. It’s time to transform, to metamorphose!

I don’t sleep. The dreams tumble and my alarm saves me from them, only to dump me back into the harsh grey reality. The grief hasn’t caught up. Yet.

I drive to work, barely awake, hugging my coffee. I stop at a cafe to grab a breakfast burrito and three cop cars and an ambulance wail by while I wait for yet another coffee. I shudder.

My boss isn’t at work. No one can get a hold of him. I just get his voicemail. I send him forty texts and stare blearily at the two other guys on the crew. They can’t get a hold of him, either. We just stand there. No one wants to go back to that job. And maybe our boss doesn’t either.

Maybe I should cut him some slack.

“This is typical,” I mutter.

After another five minutes of waiting, I’ve had enough.

“I’m going to drive to his house,” I say. “Maybe he’s still asleep.”

But he’s not. The three emergency vehicles I saw earlier are waiting for me at his house. There’s a cop, holding out his hand to stop me. But as he does, another stumbles out of the house and throws up in the snow.

A paramedic is leading a hysterical woman out of the house—my boss’s wife.

“It was a caterpillar!” She wails as the paramedic tries to calm her down. “A giant caterpillar!”

My stomach goes cold and I drop my coffee.

“There’s nothing to see here,” the first cop tells me.

“B-but,” I stammer. “What happened? Where’s my boss?”

“We’re looking,” the cop says. The one behind him throws up in the snow again. “It doesn’t look good. Go home.”

“It ate him alive!” Screams his wife as she is bundled into a car.

At home, I face the drawing, pinned up on the wall.

I told you this would happen.

But I’m not talking about the impossible.

My drawing had come to life somehow. Where was the giant caterpillar now? Cocooned somewhere? Preparing to metamorphose? I look at my hands. Had I become the caterpillar in the night? Stupid.

But his wife couldn’t have hallucinated my drawing in the same night. They were still looking for his body. But there were no remains. The caterpillar had devoured him utterly. I know it.

The roof was icy. We shouldn’t have been up there. And the harnesses were so old…Sam bounced like his laughter off the edge of the roof. The damn harness broke, like I had told my boss a hundred times it would. I nearly slipped off the edge myself, rushing, breathless, to look down on Sam, lying broken in the snow.

I dialed frantically with numb fingers and waited in the cold sunlight as the ambulance drove thirty miles to get to us. I made it safely down to Sam’s side and covered him with almost all of my clothes.

“Can you move anything?” I asked.

“You have pretty eyes, Jake,” he whispered.

“Can you feel your legs?” I demanded.

He made it to the hospital. He made it a whole two days, completely encased in a cocoon of plaster. And then his eyes faded. And Sam faded like the echo of his laughter.

I open my eyes and they are stinging. The drawing swims before me. The vicious caterpillar devouring my boss, whose face is twisted in all the horrible agony I have felt these past three days. He wanted us to come back to work today. Sam was barely cold. The pencil snaps in my hand.

"I said someone--would--get--hurt, if you—didn't--"

And I’m not talking about the caterpillar.

I shouldn’t have pushed back when my boss threatened to fire Sam. Sam would still be alive.

Crunching crawls through the snow outside and a shiver runs down my spine. Something is out there.

I grab my baseball bat and creep to the window. Something bumps against the house. Something huge. It slithers across the siding. I peer through the frosty glass. Something large has made a wide rut through the snow on the lawn.

The door creaks. Creaks louder. I hold my breath, my hands shaking, squeezing the bat. Creaaaaaaak…

Bam! With a thunderous crash, the door caves in and huge rolls of monstrous flesh push through, fine hairs dancing in a halo around it. I scream and drop the bat, scrambling backwards over the floor.

The monster swings its head toward me and the light sparkles in its thousand eye lenses.

“Jake,” the caterpillar says.

“You died,” I rasp.

“No…no, no, no, I metamorphosed,” Sam says, and his laugh bounces through the air.