Spiral Cavity
3rd Place in the November Macabre Monday Writing Contest!
This story was written for the theme Proprioception, or the sense that allows us to orient our bodies in space.
“What you need to understand, Mr. Baker, is that your cochlea is an incredibly sensitive, delicate structure. Be patient with it.” Audrey traced a two-and-three-quarters spiral in the air with her fingertip, bespeaking the perfect, miniscule mechanism of the inner ear. “Those tiny hairs that line your cochlea convert physical vibrations into nerve impulses for the brain to interpret, and the semicircular canals inform your body where you are in space and help you keep your balance, all based on the flow of fluid and vibrations in your ear. It’s mind-boggling that nature created something so small, so beautifully complex.”
Mr. Baker wrinkled his eyebrows at the spot in the air where Audrey had drawn the invisible cochlea. “Still can’t hear a darned thing.”
Audrey stifled a sigh and stole a glance at the rose-gold clock on the wall. “What about noisy restaurants? How are your hearing aids doing in situations like that?”
“I told you, I can’t hardly tell if they work or not. I’ve had this hissing, clicking noise rattling around in my ears since yesterday.” A white fleck of dandruff fell from Mr. Baker’s shoulder. Audrey had noticed other white specks in the crevices of his ear when she’d re-fitted his hearing aid. Someone needed to get this poor old man some dandruff shampoo. “I looked it up,” Mr. Baker said. “Could be a brain tumor pushing on a nerve.”
“Tinnitus is extremely common,” Audrey said. “It can be caused by loads of different things, the vast majority of which are not cancer.”
“But you can’t know ‘til you run some actual, real-life tests.” Mr. Baker’s lined face drooped. “I can’t find one doctor willing to take me seriously, not one.”
Audrey made a quick check to ensure the absence of dandruff, then laid her hand on Mr. Baker’s. “You have the right to ask for any test you want,” she said, keeping her tone light. “I’m just not that kind of a doctor, I’m afraid. Doctor of audiology – not a medical doctor. You don’t want me poking around in your brain looking for tumors.”
“What?” Mr. Baker held his hand up to his ear.
“I said, I’m not that kind of doctor.”
Mr. Baker nodded, but his frown deepened. “Still can’t hear a gol-darned thing.”
“Take your hearing aids home overnight and see how they feel. Sometimes your hearing aids and your cochlea just need a little while to get used to each other.” Audrey turned to her computer. “Go ahead and make an appointment with the front desk for the day after tomorrow, and we’ll see how you’re doing then. If you’re still having trouble, we’ll make some more adjustments.”
Audrey scanned the list of her remaining appointments for the day. From the corner of her eye, she watched Mr. Baker haul himself to his feet with determined slowness.
Then suddenly he crumpled.
His elbow caught the corner of her clipboard, which clattered to the ground beside him as he landed with a thump on the vinyl floor.
“Mr. Baker!” Audrey leapt from her chair. Don’t sue me, don’t sue me, please.
She took Mr. Baker’s arm, looking him up and down for any visible injury. Could he stand? Was he having a stroke, and they’d have to call an ambulance?
There were no obvious bumps or bruises, no one-sided facial drooping. Only a bemused look on his wrinkled face.
“Darndest thing,” he said, shaking his head.
“Can you stand?” Without waiting for his answer, Audrey picked up the office phone. “Sheila, can you come to my office? Mr. Baker just fell. No, he seems fine, but if you could help me get him up –”
“No need,” Mr. Baker grumbled, grasping a chair. “Just a little dizzy spell, that’s all.”
“Mr. Baker, let me help you.”
She expected him to protest, but the dizziness seemed to strike again as he attempted to stand. He grabbed her arm, sucking in deep, heavy breaths.
“Mr. Baker, I think maybe we should call an ambulance.”
“No.”
“Then your daughter,” Audrey said. “We’ll ask your daughter to pick you up. You’re in no condition to drive right now.”
“Don’t bother my daughter with this. I can drive just fine.”
Sheila strode into the room, and Audrey thought she detected – or was she projecting? – a hint of disdain as her receptionist surveyed the scene. “He’s up,” Sheila said flatly.
Call his daughter, Audrey mouthed. Don’t let him drive.
Sheila raised an eyebrow and took Mr. Baker’s elbow to guide him out to the lobby.
Audrey hesitated a minute, then dialed the front office again. “Sheila, I was saying Don’t let him drive. He was wanting to –”
“Yes, I gathered that,” came Sheila’s clipped voice over the phone. “I’ve called his daughter.”
“Oh, great. Thank you.” But Sheila had already hung up.
Audrey slumped in her chair and glanced at her calendar. Her next patient would be here any moment.
As she reached for her water bottle, Audrey noticed a fleck of white on her sleeve.
Mr. Baker’s dandruff had flaked off onto her arm. Gross.
She swiped at it and found a few other stubborn pieces clinging to her.
She was still wiping at the white flecks when her office phone buzzed and Sheila’s voice patched through to announce her next appointment.
That night, when Audrey leaned over her sink to spit out a mouthful of toothpaste, a plump drop of blood fell and burst against the white porcelain.
She reached her hand up to her nose, her lips, her gums. No blood.
Audrey gently touched the soft flesh of her ear with her finger, and it came away wet and red.
That’s odd.
Audrey held a tissue to her ear until the flow stopped, then continued getting ready for bed.
Audrey’s office phone buzzed, and Sheila’s voice announced, “Mr. Baker’s here to see you.”
Audrey moved to the sink to wash her hands, and the gentle splash of the water sounded strange and distant, as though her ears were stuffed with cotton. She must be getting a cold. She was a bit disoriented, the way she sometimes was when battling a sinus infection, though her nose hadn’t yet become stuffy. There was an unpleasant fullness in her ears, and an intermittent tinnitus that kept distracting her. Not a subtle ringing in her ears – this hissing, crackling noise was something she’d never experienced before.
Her office door opened. Audrey turned, then gasped and fell back a step.
A woman with frizzled, steel-grey hair pushed a wheelchair through the door. In the wheelchair was a man who resembled Mr. Baker.
His white hair wasn’t combed. His usual meticulous clothing had been replaced by a too-large flannel shirt. Rather than sitting straight, he was slumped in the wheelchair, his head lolling back against the headrest.
“What happened?” Audrey whispered. “Mr. Baker was doing great on Wednesday, until he fell.”
“Dunno,” Mr. Baker’s daughter grunted. “He collapsed again Wednesday night. Doctors did some tests yesterday, didn’t find anything, and discharged him. I thought it might’ve been a stroke, but the doctors say no.” She shrugged and shoved her father’s wheelchair beside the table.
Audrey’s eyes met Mr. Baker’s, and a shock of cold flooded from her head to her fingertips.
The harmless grumpiness in his gaze was gone. His eyes were wide, disoriented, darting from place to place as though searching for firm ground, a deep-seated horror in their depths.
He opened his mouth as though to speak, but the only sound that issued from him was a low-throated moan.
“If his symptoms have worsened, you should take him back to the hospital.” Audrey put a hand on his shoulder, and he jerked away, his arm flailing erratically.
His daughter grabbed his arm and pushed it back down to his side, holding it firm until he stopped struggling. “Sorry, he’s been doing that since yesterday. Him going downhill like this, it’s the last thing I need, let me tell you. And, as if this isn’t bad enough, I can feel a cold coming on.”
“Let’s reschedule,” Audrey said. She stood, and a wave of dizziness caught her by surprise. She must have stood up too fast.
As the dizziness subsided, she unlocked the brakes on Mr. Baker’s wheelchair. “He’s in no condition to be talking about hearing aids today.”
His daughter groaned. “I have a life, you know. I dragged him into the car for this, and I don’t want to have to do it again.”
A hot surge of anger welled up in Audrey, but she swallowed it. “We’ll keep in touch, and you can tell us what day and time will work best for –”
A sudden, agonizing shriek split the air of the sanitized office. Mr. Baker’s back arched, and he writhed in his wheelchair, screaming louder.
“What in –” His daughter covered her ears, her eyes wide.
“I’m going to call an ambulance!” Audrey scrambled toward her office phone.
Mr. Baker flailed his arms. One of them connected with the side of his head, and he held it there, pressing his forearm up against his ear.
9-1-1. Police, fire or medical?
“Medical.” Audrey raised her voice over Mr. Baker’s screams.
What’s the address?
As he thrashed, Mr. Baker tipped to the side and tumbled from his wheelchair, landing with a sickening thump on the vinyl floor.
“Do something!” Audrey shrieked at the daughter, who stood pressed up against the wall.
The door opened, and Sheila’s face appeared. Her eyes landed on Mr. Baker, and she paled. “Call an ambulance!”
“I’m calling an ambulance, Sheila!” Audrey snapped, then gasped the address of the audiology office into the phone.
An ambulance is on its way. Please explain what’s happening.
Audrey opened her mouth, but at a sudden change in Mr. Baker’s screams the words died in her throat.
The scream became a wail, a plea, high and keening. He writhed on the floor, his arms pressed over his ears, his legs kicking purposelessly.
Then he stopped, panting.
Audrey crept closer and knelt down beside him.
His eyes went glassy. Like water flowing from a sieve, the horror slowly drained from them.
His breathing eased, then slowed. Then, so gradually that she could not identify the moment until it had passed, he went still.
Hello? The voice on the phone was tinny, distant. Can you hear me? Please describe what’s going on.
“I think –” Audrey’s voice sounded odd and distorted to her own ears. “Please hurry. I think he might be dead.”
Mr. Baker’s daughter stood against the wall, hands over her mouth. “Dad?”
Dizziness swarmed Audrey’s head, and she sat down. The emergency operator’s voice faded to the background of her consciousness, drowned by the hissing, clicking roar in her ears.
After the EMTs carted off the sheet-covered body that once belonged to Mr. Baker, Audrey closed the office for the rest of the day.
Sheila left immediately, but Audrey stayed until the late-autumn sunlight faded, overtaken by the early twilight.
Audrey sat in her office, staring first at her computer screen, then at the wall showcasing hearing aids of various price levels, then at the ear molds she took a strange, soothing joy in making for each of her patients.
Dizziness came in waves as afternoon wound into evening, and the strange, hissing tinnitus in her ears worsened.
Thoughts came in fits and starts, mingled with the memory of Mr. Baker’s face, agonized and then still.
Audrey could feel the chill that settled in the air outside, though the walls of the building were packed with insulation to protect against the elements. She didn’t know how she could sense the cold without feeling it on her skin. She just could.
Audrey shivered and turned toward the door, and her eyes came to rest on a glimmer of green on the floor, one of Sheila’s earrings. It must have fallen off in the commotion.
And there was Mr. Baker’s wheelchair, abandoned in the corner.
Audrey stared at it. She’d have to find a way to get it back to his daughter.
She started to turn away, then paused.
She leaned closer, squinting.
There was something white on the black cushion of the armchair. Something tiny. And it was moving.
Audrey knelt down beside the wheelchair.
Was it a maggot? Some kind of worm?
A miniscule white body, segmented and bulging and bizarrely flexible, inched slowly across the black leather cushion. So tiny she could hardly see it, but there it was – something alive.
A host of other barely-visible white flecks littered the cushion. Mr. Baker’s dandruff.
But no –
An unsettling fear crept into Audrey’s mind, and the hair on her arms rose. She needed a plastic bag and tweezers. She stood, and suddenly the floor smacked hard against her face.
Gasping in quick, hard breaths, Audrey rolled to her back, and the fluorescent lights glared down at her.
How had she wound up on the floor?
Slowly, Audrey hauled herself to her knees. Her body was at once heavy and weightless, as though the floor had turned to jelly. Pressing her hands flat against the side of her desk, she scooted across the floor toward the microscope that she kept on her shelf – a decoration, until today.
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.
Audrey crawled into a chair, sucking in deep breaths to keep the dizziness at bay. She squirted immersion oil at the glass slide under the microscope, but the oil sprayed all over the table as her hand swung in wide, clumsy movements.
She needed to see this thing, this strange white fleck. So tiny she had almost missed it.
After several attempts, she pinned the squirming white maggot-thing beneath another plate of glass. She leaned down to peer through the microscope but slammed her face into it instead.
Blood trickled down the bridge of her nose and plopped onto the table with a bright red splatter.
Panic rose within her like water filling her lungs, but she pushed it down.
She needed to see it, whatever it was.
Audrey pressed her face to the side of the microscope and guided herself up to its lens. She had to lean her face against the eye piece to keep it steady.
The slide was blurry.
She tried to turn the dial, but she couldn’t seem to find her arm.
If she lifted her eyes from the microscope, she might not be able to get them onto it again. She could feel her arm bump and scrape against a hard surface – the table or her chair, perhaps. Her arm seemed a separate entity from her, though she could feel its pain.
Her arm smacked against the microscope, jamming the lens against the cut on the bridge of her nose.
The image cleared. Audrey gasped.
She could see it now, the creature under the glass.
A slender white body, an eyeless head with a single gaping mouth. Tiny, delicate ridges along its back, mimicking microscopic hairs. Arching its back, the creature curled into a spiral – two and three quarter turns.
Then, in a burst, a flurry of microscopic white, squirming creatures issued from it, wriggling, trapped in the immersion oil.
Audrey jerked her head backward in shock, and with a breath-shattering crash she hit the floor. She rolled to her side to stand, but the movement was too much for her confused and disoriented brain.
Like a carsick child, her body heaved, and she vomited on the vinyl floor.
Her gaze landed on her hand, scattered with a flock of white flecks, almost too small to detect. How long had they been there?
From her own ears, a brigade of hungry infant parasites?
There was her phone, resting beside the keyboard on her desk. If she could just reach it…
Night had been swallowed by morning, a hungry red sun rising in the sky.
In Audrey’s office, fluorescent lights illuminated her tidy desk, the rose-gold metallic accents so carefully placed around the office, the mess of immersion oil on the table, her vomit on the floor, and Audrey herself, exhausted and flailing as she threw her uncooperative arm once more toward her phone. It slid from her grasp and skittered across the floor.
Audrey vomited again, the taste grainy and bitter in her mouth.
Trying to drag herself, she slipped. Her head collided with the floor, and blood streaked the grey vinyl flooring.
Her hand scrabbled for the phone.
There – she had it. Finally.
She pressed her fingers against the phone screen, trying to give them an anchor, something to show her body where it was in space.
9-
2-
No, that’s wrong. Go back.
9-1
The clicking and hissing in Audrey’s ears rose to a deafening roar.
Then, in the corner of her vision, the door opened.
The movement made her stomach churn.
A pair of rain boots appeared, followed by a dark blue sleeve, and a hand that grasped the glittering green earring on the floor.
Faintly, as though from across a chasm, Audrey heard a scream.
Audrey lay still when the EMTs burst into her office. The hissing and clicking within her ears filled her head, clamoring, devouring her from the inside out.
The crescendo was coming, she knew. Whatever had made Mr. Baker scream, then wail, then go silent.
It was nearly her time.
Please see. Her clumsy arms would not point. The microscope, the tiny, disgusting creatures, whatever they are. Tell someone. Please.
Hands pulled at her, maneuvering her onto a stretcher.
A sudden, burning pain sliced in her ear as the hissing became a keening screech. Audrey’s eyes flew open, and she knew she was screaming, though she couldn’t hear it.
The shrieking sound drilled –
And stabbed –
Her wild, disoriented gaze fell for a moment on a dark blue sleeve beside her, littered with a constellation of tiny white flecks.
Thank you so much! Haha that may be the best reaction I’ve ever gotten!
Holy shit. This is good.