They didn’t believe him about the Mavromoth. They didn’t believe him about anything . It was a symptom. Everything now was a symptom. But Liz, his wife? Forty years, and she given him those “oh-come- on-Mick” eyes, like she used to when he’d have a beer or two after work and say the bus was late. She’d stood up quickly and started rearranging his flowers, looking angry and sad and ashamed, like he was taunting her. She pressed a photograph into his hand before she left; a baby, a grandchild, one that he couldn’t remember.
The Mavromoth had seen to that. They think that he’s scared of the dark. The way that they speak to him; like he’s a big baby who wants the light left on to protect him from the monsters under the bed. He isn’t stupid. The Mavromoth wouldn’t fit there. It’s too big to squeeze in, but also too small to see. It’s infinite, and infinitesimal. He’d tell them that, but he doesn’t know how. Words now seem to float around the murk of his mind, scratching and biting athim, but always eluding capture. They give him tablets to help him sleep. He doesn’t swallow them, but they don’t check. He’s not any trouble, you see,not like the others; the bed-wetters and the midnight screamers and the bare-footed wanderers. Yet. He lies back on his bed, silver shoals of starlight swimming over his sheets from a crack in the curtains. He holds his breath, straining his ears. He’d first heard the Mavromoth the day he’d misplaced his keys. Then the afternoon when he couldn’t remember what he’d gone to the supermarket for; then the night that he’d left the back door open; a horrible trumpeting growl in the distance that echoed through his skull like a scream in a cave.
He hears a thud, and his heart jolts. The walls begin to shake. He tries to scream, to call for help, but he’s completely frozen. He sees the Mavromoth in his mind, sees it crashing through the sleeping neighbourhood, it’s black, ragged ears flapping, its trunk smashing wind screens and pulling up lampposts as it inexorably advances. He sees its bloody tusks scratching along the ground, it’s back stooped, its skinny, starved ribs visible through the skin that’s as thin as an eyelid; purple, veined and bruised as it pants out, sagging and black when it wheezes in. It’s at the window. He can see its eye, unblinking, empty, ringed with red. It trumpets and the sound makes Mick’s stomach twist and sweat run down his face. He feels that he’s choking; that he can’t breathe, like he’s about to pass out. He wishes he would pass out. But he doesn’t. He just lies there, waiting. The Mavromoth’s trunk reaches in through the window, like a filthy tentacle, and clamps itself to Mick’s scalp.
It digs in, like teeth into fruit, and Mick feels the trunk begin to twist; his head like the stubborn lid of a jam jar that won’t open. But the Mavromoth wants what’s inside.
He feels like his entire head will explode, but still the trunk keeps grip, until there’s a rip, and the sound of a sucker popping free, and his scalp comes loose. The Mavromoth tosses it over his shoulder, and Mick watches it bounce off the white wall. The trunk returns to his head, and he canfeel it probing his brain, slurping, groping at what’s private, like the unbidden, dirty hands of a stranger on a packed train.
Mick retches and convulses as the Mavromoth sucksout all that he holds dear; his will clamping meekly around the trunk, like the jaws of the crocodile in those “Just-So Stories” that he used to read his daughter. “How did the elephant get its trunk, daddy?”
He holds that memory aloft, like a flickering, dim talisman against perpetual night, but the Mavromoth is insatiable, merciless. It rears back, and inhales, and it’s gone, forever. His pyjamas are wet in the morning. They lead him to the bathroom by the arm, like he’s an invalid. They feed him breakfast, spooning in mushy scrambled egg and porridge like he’s forgotten how to chew. He sits in his chair all afternoon, and watches people that he doesn’t recognise come and go.
Later, a woman comes in to see him, and sits next to him and holds his hand. She keeps crying. He doesn’t know why. He just wishes that she’d go away. She keeps saying “Mick” over and over again. Is that his name? He can’t remember.
He goes to bed, and within seconds, is sound asleep.
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©2011 Nicola Belte
Nicola Belte lives in Birmingham, U.K, and writes fiction. You can find her at her blog, here: http://nicolabelte.blogspot.com/
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