Creep

Flash Fiction by Jon Irvin III

I woke up to the noise, the squelching.

He was doing it again.

Falling out of bed, I tossed on a robe, crept down the hall, and turned the corner.

My roommate was perched at the foot of his bed, balancing on the balls of his feet. He was stripped down to only his underwear as usual. His overgrown nails dug into the headboard like an owl latched on a bough.

“Morning,” I said, not expecting an answer. Jared (if that was his real name) was rubbing lotion into his arms like he was polishing an antique.

Always the fucking lotion. He had a massive bottle of the stuff on his nightstand.

“Morning,” he mumbled, the same dead fisheyes staring past me. He looked like he was calculating how many organs he could harvest from my body before the neighbors noticed.

I shuffled to the kitchen to pour cereal, keeping an ear on him. The sound of lotion squelching carried through the paper-thin walls. It was his soundtrack, day and night. I couldn’t even bring friends over; Jared didn’t “like people in the space.” Like I enjoyed hearing his skin care symphony.

That day, curiosity got the better of me. I knocked on his doorframe, leaning in with my bowl. He always kept his room extremely warm compared to the rest of the flat. “Hey, so… is there a reason you go through a Costco-sized bottle of lotion every week?”

Jared didn’t look up. His hands glided over his legs, his bony fingers working the lotion into his pale skin. “Dry skin,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“Right.” I nodded, taking a bite of cereal. “You ever think about wearing pants? Or, like, leaving the room once in a while?” I swirled the spoon around to emphasize my point.

He paused mid-rub and looked up at me, his watery eyes locked onto mine. “Pants make it worse.”

“Mhm, of course.” I nodded.

That night, I stayed up late. Jared’s door was shut, but light spilled out from underneath it and into the hall. He never turned it off. Ever. He said it was his “heat lamp.” It wasn’t my business, but the itch of curiosity scratched at my brain. What was he doing in there all the time?

Around midnight, I heard a scraping sound, like wood on sandpaper. I tiptoed to his door. “Hey, man, everything okay in there?”

No answer.

“Jared?”

The scraping stopped. The silence was worse.

I leaned closer. The door cracked open before I could knock. Jared stood there, fully lotioned, his skin gleaming like a human candle. “Don’t come in here,” he said, voice flat.

“Right, sorry. Just checking.” I backed away, nearly tripping over my own feet. Jared shut the door; the lock clicked louder than it should have.

For the next week, I avoided him. I didn’t ask about the lotion, and I didn’t ask why the smell of bleach started wafting through the apartment.

But last night, I cracked. I woke up thirsty in the middle of the night and walked into the kitchen. It was pitch black, and I slowed when I heard that same scraping sound again. I stopped dead in my tracks when I felt a crunch beneath my feet. I jumped in surprise and flicked on the light, only to find Jared hunched over the sink, scratching himself raw with overgrown nails.

We both froze.

There was a jug of bleach on the counter and a mound of thin, white sheets of something in the sink. My eyes widened and I looked down on my feet, the same white stuff was crushed beneath my heels.

Jared was pulling layers of dead, flaking skin off of his forearms.

He paused for a moment, then continued peeling another layer of himself off before tossing it in the sink. The skin that still clung to him was a deep irritated red, and large, carved spots of his body were bleeding everywhere. He turned to me and flicked his tongue.

“Sorry, I’m molting.”