Worryeater
by K. Thompson
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
Two minutes to midnight and Bridget’s insides feel as though someone stuck a whisk inside her and gave it a good twirl. She’s nauseated and keeps running off to sit in front of the toilet. Every time, she pees a little; her hands are raw from washing. She compulsively counts the seconds ticking away in groups of four.
Her second-floor apartment came with an ancient-seeming and ornate grandfather clock. It’s oak, she thinks, stained almost black. The glass door concealing its pendulum and weights is edged by botanical designs. It is the only piece of furniture that came with her apartment. Any damage to it would come out of her security deposit. This stipulation had almost been a dealbreaker, but if she wanted to live alone this apartment was her most affordable option. Bridget wanted to live alone more than anything.
Was it worth it? Her nasty inner monologue bores her. Of course it’s worth any price not to have roommates disturbing her attempts to be less mentally ill. Thirty seconds to midnight, and she’s interrupted her own count. The counting started as box breathing, but Bridget’s brain turns every coping mechanism sour. Her jaw has been viciously clenched this entire time.
All thoughts of relaxing dissipate as Westminster Chimes rings out. Bridget shudders as she listens to the quarter bells, each note inevitable as death. Her eyes focus on the case carvings as the melody ceases and the clock strikes the first of twelve singular chimes. The vines and dagger-shaped leaves shift and stretch. The clock strikes two, and two gaunt elbows push out from the wood, extending perpendicular to the clock until yard-long forearms protrude, wrists contorted. The clock strikes three, and one hand slams against the old hardwood floors, then another. Each is about as large as Bridget’s torso, more fingers than palms.
The clock strikes four, and those monstrous hands pull at the floor until both arms and the naked crown of a head are birthed from the wood. The clock strikes five and the entire featureless head is out, followed by an impossibly thin neck and shoulders twice Bridget’s width. The clock strikes six, and the chest emerges, flat and tapered at the waist. The clock strikes seven, and the left leg stretches forward, bending so Worryeater is half-squatting. The clock strikes eight, and the other leg is visible, both feet long and flat. This is all of it. There is nothing left.
It squats before Bridget like a gargoyle, so close she can feel the air shift as the clock strikes nine and its features rise from what passes for its skin. In place of the leaves and vines, a black carapace of interlinking plates covers it from head to toe. The fingertips and chin remain a dull brown. A helmet has formed over its bulbous head, spines stretching out like the palps of a beetle and then fanning down the contours of its emaciated form. The clock strikes ten, and finally the chin splits. Worryeater’s gash of a mouth is crowded with crooked gray teeth. Its gums are pitch black, glistening with saliva that, uninterrupted by lips, runs down its sharp chin. The clock strikes two more times; Worryeater breathes, waits.
Bridget has stopped breathing, yet her heart hammers against her chest. She sits still in the oversized t-shirt she sleeps in, hands balled on her knees. She stares at its hands and presses her thighs together.
“Bridget,” Worryeater says, raising Bridget’s chin with one finger so she stares where its eyes might be. Its mouth barely moves when it speaks; its voice is resonant and impossible to gender.
She quivers. “Hello, again.”
“I can’t resist you.” The finger bends and brushes against her cheek, icy against her flushed skin. “I’ve never known anyone quite as satiating as you.”
“Flatterer,” Bridget manages.
“Never, never.” It breathes, so earnest her stomach flops. “Tell me about your day, Bridget.”
“I went to the cafe to work today.” She sighs. “When they… when I got my drink, I thought about throwing it in the barista’s face. I thought about that for two hours and I barely answered any emails.”
“Why would you think something like that?” It asks, first its finger then its whole hand trailing down to rest on her collarbone.
“I don’t know. Intrusive thought.”
“Are you sure?” Its hand drags between her breasts and over her stomach. It slips under her shirt. “Why would you think about it if you didn’t want to do it? They look at you like you’re crazy, don’t they? They pretend you talk too quietly.”
Bridget shivers and lies, “I don’t know.”
“Check, Bridget.” The hand travels up to her sternum, two fingers lying flat against it while the rest of its fingers rest over her heart. It squeezes gently. “Check for us both.”
Someone grabs Bridget’s brain and focuses it on the incident. The cafe closest to her house employs a blue-haired, fuzzy-cheeked barista who looks at her funny. They smile at Bridget, but always in a pitying way, a presumptuous way. They also never seem to hear her when she speaks at her normal volume. They remind her of old roommates and friends, people who were always asking her to open up and then punishing her for being crazier than they suspected.
None of it is any reason to throw a steaming cappuccino at them. None of it is any reason to imagine them screaming and clutching at the melting strips of their face. It’s awful to want to hurt someone like that because they snubbed you. Incel behavior, abhorrent and inexcusable. Imagine if Bridget hadn’t caught herself and instead of just thinking about it, her wrist twitched and she actually did it?
“Oh, yes, Bridget,” Worryeater sighs. Its hand sears her sternum. She trembles and bites her lip until she tastes blood, choking back whimpers and sobs. “You’ve always done this.”
Over the years she’s thought about tripping other girls during the mile run, pushing her college roommate in front of a subway train, children running in front of her car while she’s going five over, deliberately driving through playgrounds, running people off the road because they honk at her, stabbing her sister in the hand with a fork at Thanksgiving, feeding shrimp to an ex with an allergy, leaving her house with a kitchen knife and stabbing the first person she sees, swerving to avoid a deer and hitting a car full of mostly babies, setting her family’s church on fire, drowning another child in a wave pool, sitting on another ex’s face so hard she’d suffocate, running over beloved family dogs, and punching thousands of random pedestrians in the face as she passes. Bridget never does any of it. But she still thinks about it.
Worryeater lets out a noise somewhere between a groan and a growl. It is content now. Its hand slips from beneath her shirt and returns, impossibly warm, to her cheek.
Bridget slumps back against the couch. She feels empty but ashamed. It took so much from her this time, and while the intensity of her obsessions wanes, she knows they’re still lurking. She wonders, not for the first time, if it’s in Worryeater’s interests to get rid of them entirely. Suddenly, she knows a way to find out.
Bridget tries to look as pitiful as possible as she says, “I have therapy tomorrow.”
Worryeater doesn’t react. She wonders if it realizes she’s been hiding therapy. Maybe it was stupid to think she could hide anything from it. Its voice is as slow and nonchalant as ever, “I see. You’ll have to tell me about it in a few days. You’ve worn me out, Bridget.”
She shivers. It fingers a lock of her hair, but as the clock strikes the quarter, it’s gone as if it never existed at all.
Dr. Ramos sits across from her, ankles crossed, her straight brown hair framing her symmetrical brown face. She is always expressionless.
She asks, “How was your drive here, Bridget?”
“Fine,” Bridget answers automatically. She decides to throw her a bone. “I know the route now, and there weren’t many people out.”
Dr. Ramos nods. “I can imagine that would be comforting for you.”
“I guess… it’s hard to imagine hurting someone when nobody’s around.” But not impossible.
“If only OCD were that easy.” She smiles briefly, ironically, in a way Bridget has never seen before. She asks, “Would that be easy for you? Being completely alone?”
Yes, God, yes. The chastisement is immediate: as if Bridget could survive without other people making her cappuccinos! As if she could survive without seeing herself in the cold black of other people’s pupils.
All she says is, “I don’t like people.”
Dr. Ramos nods. “Why do you think that is?”
It’s such a stereotypical therapist thing to ask. Instead of scoffing, she answers, “They look at me like I’m crazy. They pretend my voice is too quiet.”
“Everyone?”
Bridget shrugs. Here comes the reframe.
“It’s frustrating when people don’t see us the way we’d like.” She nods again, jots something down. “But I think it’s very easy to give people more power than they deserve when you think like this. Nobody can read your mind, Bridget.”
Worryeater can. For an insane moment, she considers telling Dr. Ramos about her midnight visitations. No, no, no, no, no.
Ashamed, Bridget says, “I know I’m supposed to think better of people—“
“What I’m suggesting is that when you think someone is looking at you like you’re crazy, you could think, ‘So what?’ Let people be wrong about you.”
But they aren’t wrong. Bridget shakes the thought out of her mind and lets the advice sink in. So what indeed. She asks, “Will that help?”
“Yes and no.” She taps her pen on her lower lip. Bridget stares. “It’s less about the obsessions and more about making your triggers less… well, triggering.”
Making you less of a meal, Bridget hears in Worryeater’s voice. She has an urge to leave the office and never come back.
A curious thing happens when Worryeater visits three days later: when it is reaching inside her chest, she thinks about Dr. Ramos.
It is feeding on an intrusive thought she had in her first therapy session: smashing her thin glass cup and shoving the longest shard into the good doctor’s carotid artery. Worryeater feeds on the glass biting into Bridget’s palm and the jidaigeki spurt of impossibly red blood. Then she sees Dr. Ramos sitting next to her on the couch, expressionless. You are not your thoughts, she says.
Worryeater makes an awful, guttural sound. It grabs Bridget by the throat, her neck puny and snappable. It squeezes, and every nerve in her body is overwhelmed with aimless hatred, her own wickedness—blood and ball lightning and cyanide gas—as repulsive as a blanket of cockroaches tucked around her. She screams until she goes hoarse. She’d scratch if she could. Until she bled.
Before it withdraws its hand, it rasps, “You will not escape me, Bridget.”
She whimpers and collapses against the couch, face-down. So spent she can’t even get up to turn the lights off, she thinks about how she never considered escape before. Her final thought of the day is that she ought to.
“I’m writing a story,” Bridget says unprompted at her next therapy session. “Can I tell you about it? I’m stuck and it’s really bothering me.”
Dr. Ramos frowns; this isn’t exactly what insurance pays her to do. She nods and gestures for Bridget to go ahead.
“It’s about someone with OCD, and this monster visits them. It feeds on their intrusive thoughts.” She bites her lip. You sound insane even when you remove yourself from the equation. “I’m trying to figure out how they’d get the monster to go away without magically curing their OCD.”
“A little unrealistic for your monster story?”
Bridget catches herself glaring at Dr. Ramos. She thinks about dropping the subject, fantasizes about quitting therapy. You’re ridiculous. In the end, she just nods.
“Sorry,” the doctor relents. “Tell me more about the monster.”
“It’s big. No eyes. Lives in a grandfather clock.”
“I’d never have come up with that,” Dr. Ramos says, attempting a compliment. “I’m not a very creative person, Bridget, but if it were my story I think I’d have the protagonist go to the library and research the monster. Or call someone to take a look at the clock.”
Bridget’s hand twitches with the effort to resist slapping her forehead. She says, “That’s a good idea.”
“Thank you.” Dr. Ramos crosses her legs. “You’ve never mentioned your writing.”
“I’ve never written anything before.”
“I guess this idea is too big for your brain.” She smiles. “Thank you for sharing.”
She has no idea how right she is, Bridget thinks.
Bridget hopes to find an old forum or two discussing her problem. No such luck.
She searches “clock monster” and “clock demon” and finds page upon page of TTRPG homebrews and horrendous erotica. “Clock monster eats intrusive thoughts” yields unrelated articles about OCD, no clocks. She digs her fingers into her lank hair and pulls, the pressure anchoring her as she scrolls through page after page.
She knows without trying her small town’s miniscule library will be a bust. Bridget did her email job there until she got tired of the ancient librarians looking at her like some kind of sex pervert. The only nonfiction books about whatever you wanted to call Worryeater they had were likely unironic exorcism guides, and she’s not that far gone. Yet.
Out of options barely an hour after she started looking for options, Bridget latches onto Dr. Ramos’s Hail Mary: clock repair. It’s so simple, too simple. She starts filtering through every clock repair company in her county, bypassing those with well-designed websites and employees who look under forty years old. Bridget figures the more time in the clock trenches the higher chances of encountering some semblance of her situation.
She finds Debicki Brothers Clock Repair, two towns over and staffed by Maurice and Milton Debicki. The website is atrocious: all gold Times New Roman over a stretched jpeg of forest green marble. The single image of the brothers is so compressed she can’t make out any of their faces’ details. The poor lighting makes them look orange, their hair bright white. Jackpot. Bridget calls and makes an appointment for one of them to come look at the grandfather clock in a few days. Bridget is over the moon with preemptive relief.
Distracting Worryeater is simple enough. She feeds it one of her oldest and most succulent involuntary fantasies: she’s taking first communion, eight years old all in white with her hair meticulously straightened. She walks up the aisle with her hands clasped, and out of the corner of her eye she spots a heavy, gilt candelabra. As she passes, she kicks it with force, and it topples to the ground. The lit tapers catch on a pew, then fire leaps to the seated churchgoers, then the runners, then the next pew. Nothing resists the flame; the people do nothing but scream. She watches her babcia’s face melt into a Halloween mask. Only her fellow communicants run, and they do it in circles like chickens. Bridget stands in the middle of the chancel, untouched.
You’re going to Hell for that, she had thought at the time, fully expecting to spontaneously combust during Communion. On some level, Bridget still expects the Lord will make an example of her someday.
As it trembles with ecstasy at her shame, she wonders if Worryeater is punishment for her lack of control over her own mind. Its palps flutter in such an obscene way she knows it can’t belong to a universe with a benevolent creator. It is the product of some blunt evil, an elegant and depraved calculus. She has one coherent thought: Take and eat; this is my body.
Worryeater leaves her to contemplate the Blood of the Lamb without a word. Later, Bridget will be paranoid that the lack of aftercare means it knows what she wants to do. But feeling its fingers around her throat when she isn’t paying attention convinces her that if it suspected, it wouldn’t be subtle.
A week after she moved in, she awoke to Worryeater’s hand on her cheek. A finger on her lips, and then it was drawing the memory of dog fur in her mother’s tire treads from her mind, gnawing on its sharp, snagging edges until it was toothless. The relief had been so palpable at first that she hadn’t noticed or cared when the next evening she spent two hours compulsively explaining to herself that she was not an animal abuser.
It took a year for Bridget to realize Worryeater never fed on the same pain twice, that the inflammation never subsided. Pathologically, she couched her conclusion in the language of doubt: Maybe I need an actual therapist.
She wakes up the next day with the lamp still on, far too late for her taste. There’s barely enough time to make her living room presentable for the old man she expects to solve all her problems.
He rings the doorbell at five after. Out of habit, she looks in the peephole and finds a short man with a round head, round wire glasses, and forest green coveralls. Bridget takes a deep breath to prepare herself; she expects this is going to be the most excruciating encounter of her life.
Once the door is open, he asks, “Miss Stanislawski?”
He has the voice and yellow teeth of a heavy smoker. His nametag reads “Milton.” Face to face she can recognize him from the awful picture on their website: he’s shorter than his brother with a less defined jaw. She nods at her name and invites him inside.
“That’s the clock in question,” she tells him.
Debicki glances at her like she’s stupid and walks over to the clock, setting his toolbag on the floor with a rattle and a thunk. His eyes sweep over it, inventorying its features. A bored glaze spreads across his tiny blue eyes. Nothing special, apparently.
He asks, “What’s wrong with it?”
The pitch of her voice shifts up an octave as she answers, “I’m not sure. I…was hoping you could tell.”
He narrows his eyes and frowns. “Looks fine to me, unless there’s something you’re not telling me.”
His efficiency blindsides her. Bridget had hoped to draw out this moment, to prolong revealing how far gone she really is. Bur it’s not like her landlord can evict her for saying outlandish things to a clock repairman. So what? So what if you’re crazy? Let them be wrong about you. Let them be wrong about you. She takes a few deep breaths, swallows, and says, “I know how this is going to sound, trust me I’ve thought about it. But I swear, some nights at midnight a monster comes out of my clock and feeds on my fears… well, sort of. I have these intrusive thoughts, and…,”
She projects her self-hatred onto the utter blankness on Debicki’s face. After a beat, the old man rubs his eyes vigorously under his lenses and moves to lean on the arm of the sofa.
“I promise I’m not trying to waste your time—“
“I know, Miss Stanislawski.” He raises a hand, almost papal. “Give me a second. I don’t like to talk about this, but old Pole to young Pole, I’ll tell you what I know.”
“Does it have to do with Poland?”
“No. Far as I can tell, it’s a clock thing. Maybe sundials, too, who knows?” He produces a cloth from his pocket and wipes his glasses. “About fifty years ago, I knew a guy. Bert Schmidt. Drinking buddies but not really friends, you know? Real weird guy, big ego but ended most nights crying like a baby.
“Anyway, one night Bert sits next to me. ‘Milton,’ he says, ‘you fix clocks, right?’ Which was a stupid question because he knew I did. I say as much and this story comes tumbling out of him; a version of what you just told me but more details and barely a lick of sense. I figure he’s having nightmares so I tell him he needs a shrink not a repairman. He gets all quiet, at least until he’s drunk himself stupid. He leaves before me and forgets his wallet on the bar. At this point, I’m feeling a little sentimental, so I play courier. Of course, since I’m there, he won’t let me leave until I look at the clock. He got it, and I think the whole house, from his inheritance. Beautiful thing, but he’s got this ring of salt around the base. I can’t tell you why that detail stuck in my head. For all his faults, Bert was not a superstitious man.
“Few days later, it’s Sunday dinner at my parents’ house. I figure if anyone knows what Bert’s dealing with it’s my father. My brother and I learned our craft from him. The Debickis have been fixing clocks in the Old Country since before the Partition. So I ask him about what Bert described. And he gets this look of disgust on his face and says, ‘They are not of God.’ Which isn’t very comforting, but then he explains.
“It’s not a demon in the Biblical sense. Nobody’s ever been able to capture one for study, so we’ve got no idea where they come from or what they are. We don’t even know if they’re ever visible or merely forces twisting up people’s minds.”
“Like a sentient hallucination?” Bridget interjects.
“Guess so.” Debicki sighs. “In any event, me telling you about this is all I can do for you. You have to get rid of it.”
“How do I do that?”
“Tell it to leave and never come back.” He catches her incredulous glance. “That’s not the hard part, Miss Stanislawski. The hard part is you have to mean it. It’ll know if you don’t.”
Of course I mean it. Almost immediately, she sinks into the tar pit of doubt at her mind’s center. Doubting disorder, she remembers Dr. Ramos calling OCD once. She realizes with horror she’s at a natural, clinical disadvantage.
Debicki smiles. He stands, picks up his bag, and heads to the door.
“Wait,” she says.
He doesn’t turn to face her, but he stops.
“What happened to Bert?”
He shrugs. “Never saw him again. I’m pretty sure he ended up in Baltimore. Left the clock, but maybe he kept the monster.”
At her next session, Bridget asks her therapist, “How can I tell if I’m actually sure about something?”
“About what?”
“Anything.” She gnaws on her lower lip. “Everything.”
“Well,” Dr. Ramos pauses, her brow furrowing more deeply than Bridget has ever seen it furrow. “I suppose you can’t. Doubts are natural. Not to the degree you experience them, obviously, but people without OCD deal with doubt all the time.”
Yes, but what if my complete certainty is the only way I can escape the clutches of an eldritch beast? She can’t think of a way to boil this sentiment into something acceptable. She frowns, thinking about using her fiction cop-out again.
Before she can say anything, Dr. Ramos meets her gaze and explains, “In DBT, there’s a skill called Opposite Action. The idea is to regulate yourself by acting contrary to the emotion you’re trying to regulate. Doubt is that emotion, so if you want to feel sure, it might be helpful to act sure.”
“Fake it ‘til you make it?”
“Fake it ‘til you make it, Bridget.”
Two minutes to midnight and Bridget’s insides feel like she’s forgotten to smoke the beehive lodged inside her stomach. She’s nauseated, but she refuses to move from her spot on the couch. She has been practicing certainty all day, and she fears what fresh spirals await her before the toilet bowl.
Bridget imagines herself as a diver on the edge of the board, fully committed to the ludicrous thing she’s about to do. It is surprisingly effective. In the endless blue of her imagination, she escapes from the ticking clock.
But it still strikes twelve.
Worryeater emerges limb by limb from the clock in time with the thudding of Bridget’s heart. Its blunt teeth shine dully in the warm lamplight. Bridget raises her gaze to where its eyes might be, and its jaw clenches. A smile?
“Bridget,” it greets.
“Worryeater,” she replies, surprised at the evenness of her voice. Her toes curl as if on the edge of some great precipice. She jumps: “I don’t want to see you again. Ever.”
All warmth drains from the room. It has not even twitched. Bridget’s jaw rattles, and her foot begs to jostle, but she holds her form. It waits ten minutes, perhaps imagining she would break from silence alone. She only breathes, waits.
It finally asks, “Are you sure, Bridget?”
“Yes.” The doubt she’s prepared to deflect does not arrive.
Its jaw slackens. “I have enjoyed our time together” is all it says before disappearing.
Bridget waits for the quarter chimes before she lets herself grin. Her most cynical self, buried under a mountain of pride and relief, warns that this celebration might be premature. Who’s to say Worryeater wouldn’t return to ask the same question tomorrow? Bridget answers herself: Then I’ll do it again tomorrow.
Humming to herself, Bridget turns the light off and climbs into her bed. She falls into an effortless and luxurious sleep, the first of many.
| EXHIBIT FOUR: Return to “Swimmer“ | Proceed to the next Gallery Two: Leeches attraction, “The Flesh Factory“ |