Inertia

An isolated and bereaved man discovers what so many of us do in time: that middle age steals over us far sooner than expected, and that so too can life’s subtler cruelties.

***Content Warning: This episode contains body horror, deals with themes of major depression and parental loss, and may be triggering for those with mycophobia. Listener discretion is advised.***

Transcript

(Sounds of gentle rain)

NARRATOR

Episode 52: Inertia.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The patter of the soft June rain on the rooftop mingles with the white noise of Finn’s mind. Cocoa, a beautiful seven-year-old chocolate brown cat, leaps up onto the recliner to gently paw at Finn’s hand, a gesture which Finn does not acknowledge, barely even notices. After a few minutes of intermittent pawing with no response, Cocoa grows bored and leaps back to the ground to slink off in mild disappointment.

If someone were to ask Finn what he is thinking about, he would not be able to answer meaningfully. But there is no one left to ask any more.

And so he sits, staring at the dim wall in the unlit living room, and the rain patter slowly gives way to an overcast, oppressive afternoon.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

It has been three years since his parents died, his father’s heart failure coming only four months after his mother’s fifteen-month-long battle with cancer came to its cruel end. Losing her had already devastated him emotionally – losing both of them in such quick succession left Finn completely shattered.

The days following his father’s funeral, he spent wandering listlessly around the old two-story house of his childhood, stumbling over long-buried memories in each room and alternating between crying until his eyes felt like raisins, and lying and staring mindlessly at the ceiling, too drained to feel or do anything.

When his manager called to tell him that his approved leave was exhausted and that he needed to return to work by Monday, Finn simply said that he wouldn’t be coming back at all, and to forward his last check to his parents’ address. He hung up without giving his manager a chance to respond, feeling absolutely nothing in that moment.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

An only child, Finn’s parents had left him the house in the countryside, and a modest inheritance, enough to keep him from needing to worry about working for a while, maybe a few years if he was frugal. And so he had simply stayed there, making only one four-hour trip back to the city to collect the remainder of his meager belongings, mostly books and clothes, and to return his apartment key to his landlord.

There was nothing to keep him there. The few friends he’d made in the city had all slowly drifted away over the years, moving away or getting married and starting families, or even simply becoming people with whom he had nothing in common. All of his romantic entanglements had led to nothing lasting, and with the passage of the years, dating felt increasingly like a burden with no real purpose.

With the loss of his parents, Finn almost felt like he had lost all remaining connections to wider humanity. And afterward, all he craved was solitude and silence.

If his cat was his only companion from then on, Finn told himself, he was perfectly happy with it. And maybe he could use the time to take up the musical and writing projects that work had pushed to the side for so many years.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

That never happened, though.

Instead, his days slowly became untethered from the calendar and the clock. He slept and woke at increasingly random hours, ate erratic meals with less and less frequently to avoid the unpleasant necessity of driving to the grocery store in town. When the rare visitor came to his house, delivery drivers and hunters asking for property access and the odd late-night drunkard who’d gotten lost on the back roads trying to avoid police, it threw him into a state of enraged panic, his perfectly crystallized solitude shattered by that minor intrusion.

What he occupied his days doing, he could never really say. In the first year, sometimes he would pass the whole day reading, or working his way through the DVD sets his parents had collected of old television: Centennial, Roots, Green Acres, The Twilight Zone, Monty Python and The Carol Burnett Show. Or sometimes he would set up a chess board and play both sides, pretending that he was playing with his father, as they did when he was a boy.

But slowly, that became something else. He started to lose time simply sitting, deep in thought. And whenever he thought of taking up a project, whether it was cleaning or repairing the old house as it desperately needed, or working on his own fading creative impulses, a sense of inertia gathered in him, one that made it feel like getting out of his father’s old La-Z-Boy recliner was a task of such titanic proportions that it was madness to even attempt it.

It was as if some spider took up residence in his brain, slowly spreading grey threads of web throughout his mind to catch every aspiration and ambition, fattening itself upon every hope captured and drained to a dead husk.

Even Cocoa, beloved as he is, can rarely stir Finn from his seat, and sometimes the cat’s frustratedly playful antics arouse from Finn irritable shouted outbursts that leave him feeling ashamed.

Now that the money left to him, along with his meager savings, is at last running out, he knows that he needs to find a job again, reenter the human world. But the mere thought of sitting down to a job interview, feigning enthusiasm until his cheeks are sore with false smiles, makes him feel physically ill.

For the past two weeks, he has barely left the recliner, even though the prolonged sitting exacerbates the lower back pain and carpal tunnel syndrome that have troubled him more and more over the last decade.

The days bleed into one another, senseless, each morning weighing too heavily and each evening seeming to come far too soon. Time stretches out into an endless grey plain, more barren than the parched prairies and struggling wheat fields outside of Finn’s window, with no defining features to mark any movement.

And every time Finn thinks of all he needs to do – washing the dishes that have been fermenting in the sink, or cleaning Cocoa’s litter box, or driving into town and hunt for job applications – it feels as if some invisible hand emerges from somewhere underneath his stomach, creeps spiderlike along his spine, and reaches up to flip off some switch in his brain, leaving him a limp, muscleless mass of atrophying flesh.

Only when Cocoa begins to cry and paw at a clearly empty feeding bowl does he at last muster the will to rise from his waking coma. His body, stiff with disuse, proves harder to shift from the recliner than he expects, almost as though still more unseen hands have gripped him and struggle to hold him down.

Once he is out of the chair, though, he feels surprisingly light. A few paces toward the kitchen, and a sudden dizziness makes him feel as though he might begin to spin right up into the air, and his heart suddenly begins to pound. Leaning against the wall, he closes his eyes and waits for it to pass, and after about thirty seconds, he is able to continue forward.

Finn suddenly realizes he has not eaten for at least two full days, and mutters irritably at himself. After refilling Cocoa’s water and food bowls, he rummages around in the fridge, which is almost bare except for a near-empty carton of milk. This he opens and sniffs at uncertainly, then pours himself a bowl of Cheerios and munches it joylessly, mechanically, standing before his kitchen counter. He cannot help but think that the cereal tastes like the cardboard box it came in, and before he has finished half of it, he pours the remainder into a Tupperware container and puts it back into the refrigerator.

Moving into the bathroom to brush his neglected teeth, he pauses as soon as he flips on the light, squinting into the mirror above the sink. Long silvery hairs trail from the undersides of his arms, and partially turning, he sees that they stream from all along his back. He brushes at them, to no avail, then begins to pluck at them. They prove infuriatingly stubborn, and seem to adhere slightly to his skin and clothing.

Thoroughly disgusted, he strips off his long-unchanged clothes and hops into the shower, turning the water temperature up until it steams copiously and thoroughly lathering himself with soap.

In the breathless living room, Cocoa paws curiously at the silvery filaments that ripple upon the recliner, like the many legs of a hunting centipede.

(Unnerving music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Those few small acts of basic daily functioning break, at least for a while, the unnamable lethargy that has held sway over Finn. Clean and in fresh clothes, he spends the afternoon catching up on all the little household chores he has been neglecting, and afterward, even summons the spirit to drive into town for groceries. He returns home an hour and a half later, having splurged on some ingredients to make the decadent beef stroganoff recipe his mother taught him – a luxury he perhaps should not indulge, but which he excuses as a small  celebration for his minor victory over inertia. As he begins the preparations for dinner, he looks with a rare swelling of satisfaction at the three application forms he also picked up in town, from the diner, the gas station, and one of the two local banks.

Over the stovetop, he even smiles gently at the memory of the warm smile the clerk at the grocery store gave him. Jenny Nilssen, he recalls her name belatedly, had been two grades behind him in school, and he’d never looked at her twice then. Now, though, he cannot help but feel the stirrings of attraction, remembering that smile.

He eats that evening with an appetite he hasn’t felt in weeks, and after cleaning up the kitchen, he plays and cuddles with Cocoa, trying to make up for all of the attention he has failed to give the cat. When, a little after eleven o’clock, he settles in to sleep – not in his recliner, but in his proper bed – he feels like he has shed ten years, and has the wholly forgotten feeling that tomorrow is full of promise.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

That feeling dissipates with the grey dawn, and when he stumbles down the stairs after almost ten hours of unsatisfying sleep, and looks at the application forms lying upon the table, his mood sinks even further. The tedium of filling them out, the needlessly grueling process of interviewing for at least two jobs that really any person capable of tying their shoes could do, and the prospect of being rejected even for those, drains what little vitality he has managed to collect. He slouches back toward the living room, abandoning half-formed plans of breakfast and coffee, and seeking refuge in his armchair.

Cocoa comes to greet him with a playful mew, looking up at him with big, expectant green eyes. Finn pats his lap, half-heartedly trying to coax the cat into cuddling in his lap, but Cocoa instead paws at his sweatpants leg in a quiet request for play.

Biting back the irritation that flares alarmingly within him, Finn begins wearily to shift his diminished bulk out of the chair, and again feels that strange sensation that something holds him down. Only this time, it is a little more insistent, more obviously physical, and as he pulls himself up from his seat, there is a series of small snapping sounds behind him.

Looking back, he sees that the back and seat of the La-Z-Boy are covered in those same hairlike filaments he noticed clinging to him the day before.

The fuck? he breathes, as he hesitantly, gingerly touches the  chair.

The long, pale tendrils move, ever so slightly, toward his touch, and he recoils with a small cry of alarm. Ignoring Cocoa’s repeated mew, he moves again closer to the chair, testing to see that it was not mere imagination or misinterpretation on his part. Again, the filaments move, subtly but certainly, toward his fingers.

Nausea floods over him, and he struggles to overcome the urge to retch. Energized by sheer revulsion, he runs to the kitchen, fetching out from under the sink a bottle of bleach. His hands feeling unsteady, he pours out a liberal amount into a washcloth, not bothering to dilute it. He hesitates only momentarily over the recliner, considering briefly what the bleach will do to the fabric before deciding he doesn’t care, then begins to scrub furiously at the patches of the strange substance, which he can only think of as growth. The filaments are only slightly less fragile than spiderweb, and disintegrate readily upon contact with the bleach-soaked rag. In only a couple of minutes, the recliner is completely cleansed. This is such a relief to Finn that he hardly minds the splotchy alteration of the originally slate fabric.

Cocoa meows a third time, then races up the stairs, bored with the lack of attention he’s receiving.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

He spends the rest of the day cleaning the house with a thoroughness he hasn’t employed since his parents passed. By the time night falls, the whole house smells of cleaning solution and hot water, and the wooden surfaces of the house almost seem to glimmer under the artificial light.

Taking only a brief moment to heat up some leftovers for a quick dinner, Finn afterward begins to fill out the paperwork that has lain neglected on the table. Just before two o’clock in the morning, he finishes the last application form. Cocoa, having fallen asleep at his feet hours prior, looks up curiously as he stands, stretches stiffly, and begins to move around the house, turning out the lights before going to bed.

As he climbs the stairs, a warm feeling of accomplishment suffuses his body, mingling not unpleasantly with the aching of his weary body. And as he falls asleep, he sees again Jenny Nilssen’s gentle smile in the warm, uterine darkness behind his closed eyelids.

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

A week passes, without any phone calls from prospective employers. When he works up the nerve to call them, one by one, the answer is always the same: thank you for your interest, we’ve chosen someone else.

This is part of the process, he tells himself. Throw out more lines.

But instead of driving into town, or even picking up the newspaper to look through the ads, he tells himself it can be done tomorrow, and sits in his recliner, staring blankly at the television as old reruns play on and on.

And when he shifts and feels the slight sense of resistance to his movement, he tells himself he is only imagining things. When he feels the slight brush of thin filaments across his forearms, he tells himself it is only cat hair.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

He sinks back into the old grey inertia, hardly moving except to relieve himself. The only time he bothers to really get up and move around the house is to feed and water Cocoa, utterly neglecting the needs of his own body, and leaving the last of the leftovers to spoil and mold in the refrigerator.

All thought of driving into town again, and certainly of talking to Jenny, withers in his numb and atrophying mind.

Even when he returns to the recliner one day to see, unequivocally, the pallid hirsute growth that has spread in a patch vaguely mimicking the shape of his own resting form, Finn cannot summon any further concern.

What does it matter, he thinks, if it spreads, if it covers him, if it swallows him? No one will miss him anyway.

He begins to cry then, soundlessly and without change of expression. The loneliness that has gradually overwhelmed his waking hours spills out of his eyes in those hot, salty tears, and rolls downward to feed the thing that slowly grows beneath him.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When the La-Z-Boy disappears entirely under the blanket of silvery growth, Finn reluctantly takes it apart, dragging it piece by piece out of the house and piling them beside the black trash dumpster at the end of his gravel driveway.

Then he retreats to his bedroom, lying for hours and staring up at the ceiling. There, too, the thing begins to grow, and when changing the sheets daily appears to slow it not at all, he surrenders to its inevitable spread, drawing the window curtains so that he need not see it.

Disturbed only by the cat’s occasional scratching at his bedroom door, he lies in the perpetual gloom, finding solace solely in the oblivion of his erratic sleep.

Outside the bedroom, Cocoa ranges restlessly throughout the house, meowing uncertainly at the patches of hoary, hairlike that erupt, millimeter by millimeter, from the inner surfaces of every room. When its tendrils reach out to grasp at his sleek coat, he hisses and runs to hide in the ever-vanishing spaces free from its subtle invasion.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Jenny Nilssen hesitates as she reaches the intersection at the edge of town. The right turn leads homeward, and the left, if she remembers the way correctly, leads toward the Reardon place.

Years ago, she had dreamt of Finn Reardon asking her out, or to the prom. She’d been far too shy and full of self-doubt to act upon that desire then, and with the many changes of passing decades, she’d forgotten all about him, married twice. Her first husband had died in an accident at the grain elevator, and she’d divorced her second when she learned  of his months-long affair with one of his sixteen-year-old students.

She’d forgotten all about those old dreams, and the old optimism of youth, settling into a dreary life of working dead-end jobs in a small town where she never quite felt she belonged, but which she could also never escape, held there by the obligation of caring for her multiple sclerosis -plagued mother, by lack of money and opportunity.

When Finn Reardon returned to the county, she thought nothing of it, aside from feeling a vague sympathetic sorrow at the loss of his parents. The first few times she saw him in the store, she thought he’d aged well, but also that he looked so pitiful and underfed, and that he seemed so quiet and aloof. And slowly, she began to think that maybe the two of them, lonely and troubled in their own ways, might provide the companionship for each other that they both so desperately lacked.

And the last time she spoke to him, it seemed that maybe he reciprocated her growing interest in him. But he has not returned in over three weeks, and she has begun to worry about him, living all alone in that old house far from well-traveled roads. Still, she wonders if she is every bit as naïve and dreamy as the high school girl who silently, distantly fawned over a boy who hardly knew she existed.

Jenny inhales deeply, and takes the left-hand turn.

It is out of her way, and she has never actually driven to the Reardon house, but having spent her whole life in this sparsely populated county, she knows it better than she even realizes. Fourteen miles and twenty minutes later, she is pulling into the drive of the Reardon house, which nestles dark and silent between fields of high green corn and tallgrass pastures.

Renewed doubt grips her as she kills the engine and regards the house, telling herself that she has no business here, that she will make a fool of herself. Still, she gets out of the car and walks up to the front door, where she offers a brisk knock utterly at odds with her timid uncertainty.

There is no answer. She almost turns to leave, but instead once more knocks, and when still no reply is forthcoming, she opens the unlocked door and calls a faltering hello into the house. Still no answer, and for a moment her eyes are bewildered by the darkness within the house, but a faint must that is at once earthy and fruity makes her wrinkle her nose in instinctive revulsion.

With a wild trilling meow, a beautiful brown cat runs toward her, rubbing at her ankles insistently and purring with expectancy. The poor creature, she thinks when she reaches down to pet it, feels reduced to skin and bones, and she wonders how long it has gone without eating. With that thought comes a stomach-lurching dread of what lies within the house, undiscovered and waiting for her to see.

Gradually, her eyes adjust, as she sees with breathless disbelief and disgust that the walls of the interior are thickly covered in greyish fuzz. For a moment, she tries to tell herself it must be some hideous form of carpeting Finn has installed on his walls, but it takes only brief inspection, and another whiff of the house’s miasma, to assure her that it is not.

Jenny calls once more into the house, a little more loudly now. When silence remains unbroken, she ventures cautiously inside, pulling her shirt up to cover her mouth and nose. She takes great care to stay away from the walls, whose unwholesome coat seems to ripple slightly as she passes by. With increasing horror, she realizes that it is not just the walls that are covered, but the ceiling too, and that there are seemingly random patches of growth on the floor and the furniture too.

Struggling to control a rising urge to empty her stomach, she searches through the first floor, stopping with only the briefest glance into the kitchen, not daring to look any more closely out of what has begun to overflow the sink. Turning instead toward the stairs, she climbs them cautiously, avoiding as best she can those parts being overtaken by the proliferous mold – if it is indeed mold.

When she reaches the bedroom and slowly opens the door, she can no longer suppress her rising panic. She screams, then runs to the bathroom to vomit into the as of yet uncontaminated sink.

Within the bedroom, the great human-sized cocoon pulse softly, rhythmically. It shows no response at all when the woman without retreats, sobbing, down the stairs, nor as the cat voices surprise at being picked up, as the door slams behind them and then the car engine roars to life only to fade into the distance.

Silence and darkness return to the house, and that which grows there continues to grow, undisturbed.

(Bleak, sad music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. If you’re feeling particularly generous, you can support the show on our Patreon page or at darkerpastures.buzzsprout.com, and unlock special subscriber-only content. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]