Cosmic

‘What possessed you to buy an underground flat?’ W. says. To be close to the earth, he says, was that it? To be close to the toads and the worms, and to the creatures of the earth?

Slug trails along the floorboards. Curled up woodlice in room corners. ‘The flat’s being taken back by nature’, W. says. He’s right. The walls are green. Mushrooms grow from the ceiling.  And then there’s the damp, of course. The ever-present damp. Is it alive? Is it dead? It’s beyond life, and beyond death, that’s what W. thinks.

They should send scientists out to study it, my damp, W. says. They should try and communicate with it, like the scientists in Solaris. It’s more intelligent than us, W. says, he’s sure of it. My damp has something momentous to say, something profound. In fact, isn’t it saying it now, for those who have ears to hear it? Isn’t it rumbling in the darkness? I should know, W. says. I live with it. – ‘You understand the damp’, W. says. Or rather, it understands itself in me.

And there are the rats, too, he shouldn’t forget them. My rats, that’s how he thinks of them. My rats, my familiars, living under my floorboards. He’d hear them chattering if he pressed his ear to the floor, W. knows that. He’d hear them speaking their obscene language, for all that I tell him that the rats are all dead.

What next?, W. wonders. What will be the next plague? There are the slugs, of course, but they’re scarcely a plague. There are the ants – and the mushrooms. But W. believes something more dreadful is gathering itself in my flat to begin, W. says. Something Lovecraftian. Something cosmic …