Kthaahthikha

The man who lives in my refrigerator has been hissing at me again. He slips about with eyes like two bright points of fire, skittering across the tiles at night when I’m trying to fall asleep. His teeth, being long like sticks of chewing gum, catch the glow from my bedside lamp when he sits at the entrance to my room. I can only ever see his silhouette for the most part, a squat, narrow figure with those two bright eyes and the hissing. Long, drawn-out, like air escaping from an untied balloon.

I’m not frightened of the man in my refrigerator. I go to hunt him down from time to time, but mostly just for the quiet, and not because he scares me. But he’s always hidden away into a corner of the piping, slipping through the coolant fluids making little chitt-chitt-chitt noises and then staring at me with a harsh expression from beneath the lid of the Tupperware container.

I got tired of the man in the refrigerator eventually, and so I bought a monster to get rid of him. The man at the store assured me that it was the best of its kind, very efficient and powerfully-muscled despite its lean frame. I took it home in a shoe-box with holes in the lid that it kept poking its little fingers through like soft black worms.

The monster was very long and slippery. It was folded up neatly in the shoebox like a new business shirt, and I had to carefully unravel it as though it were Christmas time all over and the lights for the tree were tangled. The monster scuttled away into a corner of the rookery and began to play solitaire quietly, watching the clock on the wall tick by and keeping a careful count of the various noises that manages to come through the sides of the walls. I didn’t see much of it from them on. From time to time I heard scuffles and skitters in the crawl space, and what sounded like my ex-wife’s hair brushing against the inside of a garbage bag. Mostly it kept to itself.

One day I found the monster folded into a careful cube, sat amidst the clean washing which I had yet to remove from the dryer. When I attempted to disentangle it, it proved meshed and viscous like crackling on a baking tray. I flushed the monster down the toilet and in despair I asked the undine that swims through the storm drains for some advice about the man in my refrigerator.

The undine slipped about and came at me with avarice in her eyes. Streaked with silt and flecks of caramel wrappings, her white flesh was veined with little blue lines that had always suggested her to be an octopus. This was confirmed when I finally succumbed to her advances and was bastardised by her numerous tentacles. Her form wrapped about me like heavy bedclothes after a nightmare, she whispered a single word of advice before carrying me down into the sewers – Take solace in the careful explanations of the book.

When I climbed from my kitchen sink I was unsure of what she had meant. I dried myself and stayed well clear of the refrigerator – for I though I had never thought him capable of it the man had proven himself something of a killer. I took to carrying my pewter knives in my pockets and a special adze that was known for having ended the life of one of the forgotten Queens of China.

In the attic, amidst a jumble of old collage memorabilia, I found a nest constructed of torn bibles and science magazines in which a small gryphon was lying, curled about a deep black book. The gryphon refused to yield it to me, and I was forced to slit my finger and allow a drop of the anaemic to dribble down upon its beak. The creature slithered off amidst poorly-maintained tiki statues and was heard to metamorphose into a pupil being with seven eyes and an anus-like, jag-toothed jaw. It began to eat the furniture and rapidly gestate, arms reaching out of its back as a woman bearing a resemblance to a young Martine Beswick collapsed trembling upon the floor. Her feral gold eyes forewarned against rape – I took the book and retreated down into my study, when the fire djinni kept me warm.

The book I held was fashioned after the manner of a basilisk egg, being accessible only by caressing the spine and applying pressure to several points around the southern pole. The book broke wide, its numerous cilla wriggling about and following the gesture of my hands as they turned the page.

It was on the seven hundred and first passage of the eighteenth chapter that I uncovered the secret of the man who lives in my refrigerator’s secret. I made my way to the control centre that rests beside my selection of Chinese classics, removing the fuse that supplies outlets in my galley kitchen. In my haste to preserve pineapples and delicately-flavoured Devon I had failed to remember to preserve myself.