13 Mar I Live Among Parasites

Posted at 11:00h in Strange and Unexplained by CreepypastaStories.com 1 Comment

📅 Published on March 13, 2021

“I Live Among Parasites”

Written by William Dalphin
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

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🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 7 minutes

Rating: 9.69/10. From 13 votes.

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I’m alone now.

They’re in the other room, eating.

The dog.

They’re eating the dog.

They don’t even try to hide it from me. I’m apparently so weak, I’m not a threat to them. They hid it when the cops came by. They broke out into smiles, acted personable and friendly, told them I was delusional but not violent. They’re mostly right. Every time I look at them, I want to kill them, but then I see my wife’s face, my son’s face, and I can’t do it. Besides, they’d probably overpower me.

I don’t know where “they” came from. It started with a sore on my wife’s back. At first, she thought it was from where her bra chafed, but after a few days it began to swell and blister. I told her it looked like a boil, that she should go get it lanced. She asked me to do it. “By a professional,” I said. I didn’t want to touch it.

She asked me to look at it again days later. It had gotten so big, the skin around it was red and angry, and the shiny bubble of the infected area was cloudy white, but when I looked closer, I saw movement in it. Something red seemed to swirl inside.

“That looks really bad,” I told her. “You really need to go see a doctor about it.”

She twisted her arms behind her. “Maybe I can get it myself,” she said. She tried to pop it like a zit, but I could see her tensing in pain every time she prodded at it.

I couldn’t watch; it was too gross. I started leaving when she gave a shriek.

She had burst it. There was pus running down her back and on her fingers. There was a smell too. Something rotten. I lost all desire to have anything to eat that day when the odor hit me.

But the most noticeable thing was the long, segmented, wriggling worm thing that hung down from the open wound.

“What on earth is that?!”

She didn’t seem to feel it, but I could feel it on my own spine, the way that thing squirmed like it was pinned under a rock and trying to get free.

“Does it look better?” she asked.

Jesus Christ, woman, there’s some sort of centipede or something hanging out!

I should have known there was something wrong, the way she didn’t immediately panic from being told that. Who in their right mind wouldn’t panic if someone told them there was a living creature crawling out of their giant burst boil?

“Can you pull it out?”

Can I pull it out? Hell, no! I’m not pulling that out. But it was my wife, and I was reasonably upset and needed to kill that thing, so yes. Yes, I’ll try to pull it out.

Oh god, please don’t let it touch me.

I went and got tweezers. No way I was using my fingers. I got that little bugger dead to rights in the grip of the tweezers, but that’s when I discovered it wasn’t trying to wriggle free.

It was trying to wriggle back in.

It was strong, too. What kind of nightmare did that thing come from that it could fight back?

And then my wife started screaming. Agonizing wails like I had a grip on her guts and was pulling them out. I almost let go, but I was too determined to not let that thing loose.

Our son, bless his heart, came racing into the room to save his mommy from whatever was hurting her.

“Get out, get out!” I yelled.

“What’s wrong with Mommy?” he asked.

“She’ll be fine in just a second! Just get out and don’t look!”

Then I pinched the tweezers so hard they snipped the end off of that thing, and with what almost seemed like glee, it slithered back into my wife’s back and was gone, leaving just a wriggling little bit hanging from the tweezers. I rushed to the bathroom, in part because I felt ready to puke, and in part because I wanted to be rid of the thing. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I should have hung onto it. Instead, I flushed it down the toilet and spent several minutes gripping my knees and waiting for my last meal to pay me a visit.

She was gone. Not physically, but my wife wasn’t there anymore.

When I went back to check on her, she was just humming to herself and putting a bandage over the spot on her back. There was a nasty-looking stain on the sheets where she’d been sitting. She looked at me and asked if I was alright.

“Me?!” I cried. “You have a centipede crawling around inside you!”

“No, I don’t,” she replied.

“I saw it!” I said. “We need to get to a hospital!”

I grabbed her wrist and suddenly she wrenched free and grabbed mine instead. Good lord, her grip was strong. She twisted my arm and shoved me away.

“I’m fine,” she said.

She told me the next day that she’d been to see a doctor, and I believed her. She said the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong and had congratulated her on doing such a fine job of popping it. Dear god, I just accepted what she told me as the truth.

Then three days later, she got him…my son. I didn’t know! I hadn’t realized yet that she wasn’t her anymore. If I had known, don’t you think I’d have taken him out of there the very first night? I would have driven to the far corner of the globe to keep him safe.

I came home, and he was already asleep in bed.

“What’s wrong with Tim?” I asked it…the thing that pretended to be my wife.

“Oh, he’s not feeling well, the poor dear.”

The poor dear.

I went in and checked on him to see how he was doing. He was asleep, so I didn’t wake him.

It wasn’t until the day after, while keeping tabs on him in the bath, that I noticed the red welt forming between his shoulder blades.

“What’s that?” I asked him. “Did you get hurt?”

“That’s my lucky mark,” he said.

“Lucky mark?”

“Mommy says it’ll bring me luck.”

God, no, it still hadn’t dawned on me. I can tell you now, but when I was living it, I wasn’t putting two and two together. All I knew was my son had a mark on his back that was starting to look red and swollen, and since the incident with my wife four nights ago was over, and a doctor had supposedly given her a clean bill of health, I didn’t think the two were related.

By the fifth night, it was exactly the same. An angry, red blister, swollen with milky pus that seemed to be stirring underneath his skin.

“This is some sort of infection,” I told the thing pretending to be my wife.

“Don’t be silly. It’s just a blister,” she insisted. “It’ll go away.”

“No, it won’t. This is exactly like what you had. Maybe the thing that I saw coming out of your back got into him. We need to take him to the hospital immediately!”

“Don’t trouble yourself. If it looks this bad in the morning, I’ll take him tomorrow,” it promised.

“I’m taking him now!” I yelled.

“No, you won’t,” she said, and her face went completely blank, just all expression lost. She opened her mouth, and her jaw hung down like it was loose in its socket, and even though she wasn’t moving her jaw or her lips, I could still hear her talking. “If you try to take him, I will split you from groin to gullet.”

I have never seen anything so awful as my wife’s face all blank and her mouth hanging open while some thick second voice lurched out of her and threatened to disembowel me. Was I scared? You’re damn right, I was scared. And to make her point, the thing grabbed a handful of my gut and squeezed so hard I thought she was going to actually tear me apart right there. I was yelling in pain, and she just looked at me without any sort of expression and clenched my flesh in her fist so hard I ended up with a black and yellow bruise for days afterward.

Who the hell cares about bruises, though?

I was scared, and I knew it wasn’t my wife anymore. I wanted to get my son out of there, but she never slept anymore. I suspect she had been faking sleeping all along. Me? I hadn’t slept in our bed since the first night. I had changed the sheets, but the stain from the stuff running down her back had left a mark on the mattress too, and I knew it was there and had no idea whether it was contagious or not.

Two days later, the boil on my son’s back had dwindled to a red sore spot again, but he was just like his mother now. Always smiling and acting like everything was okay. Never sleeping, either. He’d let me put him…it…to bed, but when I’d go to check on it later, I’d catch it with its eyes open before it shut them to try and convince me it was asleep.

I can’t keep pretending they’re my family.

And then, of course, with me being outnumbered, they decided it was no longer necessary to keep up appearances when we were alone. They’d sit down on the couch in front of the television and just let the bodies shut off…jaws hanging open, eyes rolled up back in their sockets, holding hands like a loving mother and son, but I suspect something far more insidious. Maybe some sort of silent communication? If I got up, or the phone rang, or someone came to the door, they’d immediately snap back to their game of pretending to be human.

I’ve told others, but after the first several looks of sympathy for a man losing his mind, I gave up. It sounds cliché, but give me a break. You don’t know how true it is until something this bizarre and frightening happens to you and nobody believes you. The police came and almost dragged me away, but the wife and son things convinced them not to. I’m the money-earner, after all. They probably wouldn’t know what to do to make a living.

I can’t sleep. They’re waiting for me to fall asleep. They’re in no rush. They can wait me out. It’s been weeks now, and they just sit there and watch television and smile, and every now and then they both turn to look at me at the same time to see if I’ve dozed off. Joke’s on them, though, because I’ve been taking naps in the car after work before I drive home.

The real problem is, we’re running out of food. I kept a freezer in the basement, stocked with a good month’s worth of stuff, and they ate through it all, like a pair of ravenous hyenas. Neither of them leaves, so nobody goes grocery shopping. I make sure to just eat at work, hoping to starve them out into the open, but then they go and do what they’ve just done.

Now that the dog’s gone, there’s only one thing left for them to eat. Won’t that be a hell of a dilemma for them?