the
long
fingers
.

It starts with a scratch.Ellie is taking her rubbish downstairs - food waste and wrappings emptied from the kitchen bin, tied in a knot, then taken out of her first floor apartment, down the stairwell, past the letter boxes and out through the back into the parking garage (where there are no cars). From there, Ellie takes a left to the drive-in entrance of the garage and a right around the corner to the cracked double doors of the disposal unit. The white paint is bubbled and faded, and marked by splinters and scratches, particularly around the edges.This is where the scratch is. It's the sound that Ellie hears after the clattering noise of the rubbish being hoisted into the dumpster. It's subtle, like paint flecks peeling from brickwork, or a nail digging at the concrete lines between them. Just a scratch.Ellie often has this odd reaction to noises she thinks might be little creatures. She's never been good at baby talk or pet talk, or talking to something that isn't recognizable as a direct peer, so she says into the darkness behind the dumpster, "Uh. Hello?"Her voice doesn't echo in the filthy, claustrophobic acoustics of the disposal unit. There's no response from whatever it is that had scratched behind the dumpster. Aside from Ellie's breathing, it is utterly silent.The air here is thick, still, and rancid.Ellie frowns and takes a step back out from the darkness of the unit and into the early-morning grey light. She attempts to firmly close the white wood doors, but although the locks were new, the frame was ancient and the door itself half-rotted from the inside and worn on the outside by the rain. As such when Ellie steps away, the wind picks up and blasts the doors back open.She startles every time this happens.And she does not hear the second scratch.

Later that evening Ellie is downstairs again. This time she is waiting for a friend, leaning against the brickwork corner at the entrance to the parking garage. She's mildly annoyed at herself because she'd headed downstairs too soon without taking her phone for distraction, but then didn't want to run back upstairs for fear of missing her friend. They were bringing take-out and needed help getting it out the car.The garage always carried an eerie feeling inside it. Each parking space was empty and lit up by yellowing light. Without the gloss of a row of vehicles it was easy to see the interior concrete walls, the material matched by four pillars spaced out evenly from the front to the back. Any sounds carry easily over the often-damp pavement and echoes of those sounds bounce in the metal gratings and pipes that crowd the ceiling.From where she is stood, Ellie reckons she must be directly below her fridge. Her apartment occupies the space directly above the front half of the garage. She envisions the layout, looking up, matching pipes and ventilation to which rooms they might be under. The wind then briefly picks up and Ellie takes a step back to spare herself from a thick drizzle of rain swept in her direction. The stark line between wet and dry that marked out the entrance now disrupted.Each time that a car turns down Ellie's road she stops leaning and stands up straight to peer out from the entrance, only to be left disappointed when the car isn't her friend and turns away at the junction instead of towards her building. The engine sounds fade and the town-at-night ambiance picks up again. Electric street light buzz. Occasional generic shouts. The current of the nearby river.If there is too long without a passing car then the garage lights shut off - Ellie needs to move occasionally to trigger whatever sensor it is that turns the lights back on. Without the lights there is no electric buzz and the garage feels all too dark and cavernous and when Ellie waves her hand there's a loud click and it all flickers to life again.It happens twice without event. Silence, darkness, click, light. Then on the third instance the pattern changes. Silence, darkness, click, light, gasp. Ellie's breath caught half-way through her throat and her heart almost missing a beat. Without a sound the disposal unit door had swung open and from her angle and position Ellie could only just see the white edge of it. It is held in place and Ellie can see part of what holds it.Four white bony fingers. Even in the rain they appear dry, the knuckles gnarled and cracked. There is a facsimile of nails, but they appear to be the same texture as the rest of the digit, dug into the door for extra grip. Ellie thinks that maybe if she leans further out then she might see what the fingers belong to. It could just as well be a person, though a person would have surely moved by now or made their presence better known.Ellie says nothing, just as the maybe-person remains silent. It is quiet, aside from the drizzle of rain, and the door is held still. The fingers remain gripped at its edge.Ellie swallows.She considers speaking.She is relieved when she chooses not to.She decides she shouldn't make her own presence known.Stood where she is looking out to the outside world draped in shadows and the mist of rain, Ellie reckons the fingers could be one of two things. They could be nothing, a trick of the light, the same illusion as a coat appearing as a person when seen at the wrong angle from her bed. Or they could be something, most certainly not a person - intrinsically she just seems to know that - they could be something.Then suddenly light blinds Ellie, sweeping from the road and turning into the parking garage entrance. The sound of an engine smothers the electric buzz of the lights above and a silver hatchback comes between Ellie and the maybe-something. The car stops in front of her and Ellie's friend inside rolls the window down."Hey! Wanna grab the food and I'll go park?"

Together Ellie and her friend watch a horror film and fill up on fast-food. It had been a few weeks since Ellie had seen her friend and though she is quiet for most of the evening, it doesn't take too long for her mind to be taken off the odd maybe-something that she had seen downstairs. Ellie has been really looking forward to catching up with her friend, she doesn't want to miss out on it.After the film they spend a while sat on opposite ends of the sofa just chatting, both of them internally trying to decide if they should suggest a second film or call it a night. Ellie's friend also considers asking Ellie how she's feeling - but in a way that's more genuine than the usual greeting or surface level conversation. They have noticed Ellie being more quiet than usual, and they think that Ellie's odd living conditions must get lonely.However, Ellie says she has work tomorrow and so starts the usual farewell ritual, "Not that I'm trying to kick you out," She says."No, yeah, I totally get it. I've got work too," Ellie's friend replies, patting themself down to make sure they've got everything."Thanks for coming though," Ellie says."We need to do this more often," Her friend insists, "Especially now that I'm living closer.""Yeah, definitely. Could grab lunch on the weekend?""Yeah!"It's almost eleven at night so at each door between Ellie's apartment and the downstairs garage she makes sure not to let them swing closed too loudly. Even if no one would be disturbed, it feels wrong to make too much noise at night. She doesn't let the backdoor into the garage close at all, holding it open just-to with her foot as she waves her friend off. She figures it's polite to linger long enough to see them safely leave.Then after they've gone Ellie lingers longer still, gaze caught at the corner of the garage entrance. From here she can't see the disposal unit doors, she can't know if they are still held open. The maybe-something is maybe gone and the only way she would be able to confirm would be by leaving the safety of the back doorway and going to investigate.Instead of investigating Ellie retreats inside and closes the door behind her. With her back pressing against the door she takes a long, shaky breath out and then laughs at herself. She knows she couldn't have seen what she had seen, or at least she is trying to convince herself that she couldn't.To assure herself she turns and opens the door again.She looks at the right side of the garage entrance.She sees nothing is there.Nothing but the wall.She thinks that should make her feel better, the second look, but she's not as assured as she expected to be when she heads back upstairs. She takes them two at a time and double checks that her apartment door is locked once safely inside.

Ellie is determined to have an uneventful day. She always needs one to decompress from entertaining company, no matter who that company is. So she wakes, she washes herself up, she dresses, and she eats breakfast at her dining area table. The early morning sun is the only light, fixing Ellie and her cereal in a dull grey square. Ellie stares absent-mindedly at the corner of the window, transfixed by a little web without its spider.Ellie then tidies the main room of her apartment, finally clearing up the waste left behind by the take-out. Already the bin is full again, but she makes the decision to deal with that in the evening after work. She doesn't examine why she wants to delay it too closely.Ellie works at a failing retail store on her town's high-street. It has been struggling to rebrand itself away from being a pound store now that prices had to go up and it had to branch out from its usual cheap stock. Foot traffic had become more and more sparse over the year and Ellie is given plenty of time to stare into space, day-dreaming.Twice she has to be pulled from her day-dreams. Both times her gaze is torn from the corner of the front display window towards an impatient, but too tired to care customer."Sorry, sorry," Ellie also mutters both times.Ellie doesn't hang around in town after her shift, instead opting to walk straight home. Her apartment building is tucked away between the river and the high-street, far enough from the center of town to be a quiet location, but close enough that Ellie doesn't need a car to get anywhere. She cuts through a tightly packed residential street, then down a steep left-curved road to her building.There are two ways to get into Ellie's building. Through the parking garage at the back where she only needs a door code, or around the front where she needs a main key. Usually she goes the back way, too lazy to fumble through her purse for the key, but today she opts for the front entrance to avoid the garage.The front of the building is a little bit sad. The two ground floor apartments always have their white curtains closed, as does one of the first floor apartments, and both third floor apartments. The explanation is the two stack of real-estate VACANCY signs adjacent to each other over the front door. This building had only one occupant.Ellie takes the stairs up to her apartment by twos and is out of breath by the time she closes her front door behind her. She takes a moment's rest with her back against the door. She breathes in, then out, then she peels her work clothes off as she heads into her bedroom. It's only three steps, since her bedroom is directly opposite the front door.She remembers after making a late dinner that she hasn't taken the bin out yet, but it isn't too full and it is already dark outside, so she figures it can wait. She shoves the rubbish on top down hard enough to keep it balanced without spilling.Her friend then texts her about meeting up on the coming weekend and she texts back positively. She has been wanting to hang out more.

"Ridiculous. Ridiculous. You are being ridiculous," Ellie tells herself, pacing the length of her living room. She reaches the kitchen and the overflowing bin, then she turns around and walks the length again to the glass balconette doors. She scolds herself another time, turns, and heads back towards the overflowing bin, "Being ridiculous."Sometimes Ellie finds it hard to do things. In those situations she paces, she chews on her lip, she scolds herself, and she then eventually sucks in a deep breath and gets to it. Sometimes it takes minutes, sometimes it takes hours. When she does get to it she has to hold her breath and brace herself, so her chest is tight as she pulls the bin-bag out from the plastic tub under the sink. She ties a knot at the top and hoists the bag through the hall and out of her apartment.Ellie lets herself breathe out once she's heading down the stairs, telling herself that obviously this wasn't so hard. That she has been getting herself worked up over nothing and how nonsense that has been. She turns left at the bottom of the stairs and hurries past the letterboxes and out into the empty parking garage.As soon as she is out the door Ellie comes to a sudden stop, slippers scuffing the pavement, bin-bag knocking the side of her leg, breath caught in the back of her throat.Ellie drops the bin-bag.Ellie swallows the breath and holds it in.Ellie opens and closes her hand, hesitating to move.Then she turns quick on her heel and runs back inside.The bin-bag is left discarded in the parking garage, split slightly at the bottom from where it had been dropped. Also left behind is the thing that had caused Ellie to run. The fingers. They had moved now from the doors of the disposal unit to the corner of the parking garage entrance. In broad daylight there is no mistaking them, they are not a maybe-something, they are not a trick of rain and shadow. Seeing the digits once in the dark is an over-active imagination. Seeing them for a second time while in daylight is harder to ignore.Ellie races up the stairs two at a time, then she runs into her apartment and slams her door behind her. She doesn't want to acknowledge it; that there is a thing in her building, a creature that holds itself poised around blind corners. She doesn't want to acknowledge that it might not just go away, that it might be waiting around that corner for her. In fact, she chooses not to.

Ellie is not on the work rota for the next two days. This helps her to not think about needing to leave her apartment. She has enough frozen meals and canned goods to not need to make a grocery run and she hasn't any social obligations until the weekend.She is aware of the thing she saw downstairs, but she doesn't want to disturb it, or to pick at it, or to do anything that might make it all worse. She wants it to go away on its own, a strange unexplained not-maybe-something. Overnight she has decided that whatever the long fingers belong to is an it. Not a person. An it.On the first day Ellie tries to function as normal, though she doesn't brush her teeth or get properly dressed. She spends the day in the clothes she slept in and passes the time with whatever is on TV and the endless scroll on her phone.Breakfast is the last of the cereal, the box and plastic bag shoved into the bin. Lunch is skipped entirely. Dinner is oven chips and chicken nuggets. She sits at the table to eat, but it doesn't help her feel like an adult about it. Overcooked chip scraps and breadcrumbs from the nuggets are scraped into the bin, filling the gaps between food wrappers.While eating, her gaze fixates on the corner of the table and not the window.On the second day Ellie struggles to feel normal. She neglects her teeth again and opts not to dress properly either. She can't stop thinking about all the rubbish she left in the parking garage. The split bin-bag and the potential smell and the chance that someone walking by might see it. Ellie is the only person in her building, but her building is not the only one on the road.What plagues her is the thought that someone might walk by and think of her home as dirty. She knows she would be the source of that thought. The idea gnaws at her and so she starts to convince herself, "It's been a day," maybe the thing is gone.Ellie mutters this idea while pacing the length of the hall between her front door and living room. She spends five minutes doing this before she finally heads into the stairwell, then she descends and ascends the first four steps for another eight minutes."It's gone. It will be gone. It should be gone," She tells herself. It's what she needs to say to commit to taking the rest of the steps down to the ground floor. The stairs face the front door of the building, you can reach the bottom and head outside without ever turning towards the letter boxes or the back door, so Ellie only turns around once she's actually at the bottom.That's when she sees the door is open.She sees also the contents of her bin-bag.It has been split and the contents strewn across the ground.Four long fingers cling to the doorframe.

On the third day Ellie calls in sick. She rarely does this, she knows she's got plenty of sick days, and she still feels guilty over it. She tells her manager she has some kind of flu, that she is probably infectious, and that she can barely leave her bed. She does not tell her manager that some kind of rancid smelling thing is clinging to her back door. She does not tell her manager that she is afraid to leave her apartment, just in case the thing has moved again.Ellie still has enough dried food and cans that even after depleting her freezer she doesn't need to worry about shopping. Her meals might become a bit sad, but that doesn't bother Ellie too much.Her friend texts her to ask if they are still good for the coming weekend and Ellie is less positive this time. She tells her friend the same thing as she told her manager, she is unwell, she doesn't want to infect anyone. She knows she couldn't tell her manager about the thing, but she considers briefly telling her friend. Maybe they would help. Maybe they would find it utterly disgusting. Maybe they would see the garbage in the garage, the dirty plates on Ellie's kitchen counters, the bin that was already starting to overflow again, and their friend would say, 'No wonder you have an infestation.'The filth is how Ellie knows the thing is real. It has a smell to it. The same smell that clings to the walls of the disposal unit. The smell that tells Ellie that this thing is real is the smell that shames her away from telling anyone about it.So the smell itself is shame and it permeates the building and the person in it.Ellie lies in her bed with her phone in her hand and considers that maybe she has always been unclean. There have been insects in her apartment before. She had to deep-clean the kitchen to get rid of them, taking apart the counters to pull out her oven. In the space that is between the wall and the oven was food waste that had fallen and gotten stuck. It existed there half-rotted and infested. The sight and smell and shame of it made Ellie sick.Sorry you're sick, Ellie's friend texts her, We'll hang out soon though? I could come over.They absolutely could not.

Ellie can not sleep, or Ellie is dreaming that she can not sleep.The building is meant to be empty. Out front are two adjacent stacks of vacancy signs and out back is an empty parking garage. It's only ever Ellie's waste inside the disposal unit.The building is meant to be empty and Ellie can not sleep, or Ellie is dreaming that she can not sleep, because there is movement above her bedroom. It sounds like footsteps. Like three people pacing up and down their own room.They must have room to pace because the building is meant to be empty.

On the seventh day Ellie had missed her shift, so when the eighth day comes around she calls her manager to explain that she won't be coming into work anymore. She accepts it as a failure on her part, of course. She has lied about her situation, she hasn't been sick at all, she has been trapped. Maybe someone else might be able to get themselves untrapped. Accept that a thing is just a thing and get on with cleaning their home of it.Of course, Ellie does not tell her manager about the thing. That can't be explained.The phonecall happens in Ellie's living room where she tells her manager in a choked voice that something has come up, her situation has changed, and she won't be able to come in anymore. The manager, irritated and already thinking about how to replace Ellie, does not pry.After the call ends Ellie lets herself deflate down to her knees. She drops her phone for it to tumble dully on the carpet, then she herself follows it down to lie on her side. Her fall and her weight disturb the carpet and from between the fibres just in front of her face an insect unborrows. It's a little black-brown thing with many segmented legs, twitching antennae, and mandibles that click to taste the air. It walks an aimless circle, first towards Ellie and then away and then it starts to burrow again.The bugs are back. Ellie isn't surprised, though the revelation twists at her expression and stings her eyes. The cupboard beneath the sink is overflowing with rubbish, the countertops are crowded with dirty plates. Ellie has been eating from cans or making pasta sauces from the dwindling supplies in her dry cupboards. At first she had tried to keep on top of the food waste and dirty plates, but it started to seem so insignificant when she ran out of room under the sink. She had since stopped trying, so now the bugs are back.Ellie's phone buzzes just above her head. She reaches to drag it into view and sees - distorted sideways from being parallel to the screen - that her friend is texting her. Her friend wants to see her tomorrow, they're worried, Ellie has been more distant than usual and she doesn't need to push anyone away. She can talk, if she needs to. They offer again to come over tomorrow and they are insistent about it.Ellie digs her fingers into the carpet, feeling the rough scratch of the fibres. It's not the bugs, or the mess, or the thing downstairs that tightens Ellie's chest now and sends a shiver down her spine. It's the threat of a visitor. Ellie pushes herself back to her knees because she knows her friend, she knows that they will visit, and if they do they will see the state that her home is in and what Ellie has allowed herself to waste into.In certain conditions, shame becomes a motivator."You are being pathetic. Ridiculous," Ellie tells herself, pushing up to her feet. She takes one step towards the kitchen and then turns to pace towards the balconette, "Disgusting. Living like this," She says. She turns to face the kitchen once again, "Come on."She decides to get to work.She drags the bins from under the sink.She ties them tight at the top.She stares down the hall to her front door."Ridiculous," She tells herself again, a bin-bag knot held tight in each hand, her own knuckles white with tension. She grinds one foot against the carpet and an insect scurries away from her heel to join the little line marching from her sink to her fridge.That grinding is all she is capable of for a few seconds, telling herself, "Just do it. Just unstick yourself."Ellie's phone buzzes again in the middle of the floor. She glances at it and then back down the hall and then sucks in a deep breath through her teeth (- the taste of her kitchen tightens her throat). Ellie marches forward. One foot after the other down the hall, "Ridiculous, disgusting," she mutters to herself until turning right and freezing where she stands.Her heart stops and her throat seizes up and she opens her mouth to make a scream barely louder than a whisper. A choked, spluttering little sound.Ellie's front door is wide open. It is held rigidly in place by five outstretched appendages, two gripping the edges and three flat against the surface. The thing is here, clung to the opposite wall of the door, flattened out over the frame and poised with a dozen more arms holding it in place, the appendages pressing into the carpet and the ceiling.Ellie hadn't seen the fingers on her approach and now there are so many of them. Too many to count.She can't figure out what she is looking at. She's not sure how she's meant to comprehend it. Her chest feels tight, any sound in her lungs and throat empties out entirely, and she begins to feel light-headed.Ellie takes an accidental, stumbling step backwards and when she moves the thing moves too. Front appendages slacken and the tip of its body peels back, glistening lines acting as wet connective tissue between the thing and the wall.Ellie continues to stumble back until she hits her bedroom door and that jolts her into panic-informed action. She moves quickly, rushing into her bedroom to slam the door closed behind her. The corners of her vision blur out and the only thing she can think to do is childishly hide under the covers of her bed.She grips the sheets tight to her body, as tight as she can. Her hands seem to be the only part of her capable of tension, and even that quickly starts to fade. Ellie squeezes her eyes shut, she tries to tell herself this is all a feverish nightmare. That she could will herself to wake up in a version of her home that isn't permeated with the stench of something rotten.Surely she can wake up. This isn't really happening. Surely she can wake up. This is only maybe-real.

It's dark all of a sudden. The only light being the pale blue of night barely penetrating Ellie's bedroom curtains. Ellie thinks maybe it worked, that maybe she had woken up. For exactly five seconds she is able to trick herself into thinking it was all a dream, and that behind her is a clean apartment, empty of infestation.It is the smell that convinces her otherwise. The rancid heat that started in the disposal unit and had coiled its way across the inside walls of Ellie's building until there was no escape from breathing it in.It's in her bedroom now.The door had creaked open a second ago.The thing rolls footsteps on her floor and ceiling.The mattress dips with the weight of the thing on her bed.Ellie can't move, her limbs don't want to. It's sleep paralysis, her mind frightened enough to wake before the rest of her muscles. She can't pull herself away from the thing behind her or stop her bedsheets from slipping away.One by one the fingers settle over the side of Ellie's face. One presses over her forehead. Another curls under her chin. The third digs under her eye just above her cheek bone and red flares inverted at the top of her vision.The fourth finger presses against the corner of her mouth and then digs, curling between her lips, prying at her teeth. The grip on Ellie's face tightens and the thing pulls itself close. An appendage wraps around and between her legs, some kind of arm crosses over Ellie's chest. There is a slither of skin between her pants and her shirt and that is where she feels the wet press of a tongue larger than her torso.Ellie's mouth is pried open and the finger digs in and scrapes against her tongue.The taste is smoke and burnt caramel.