The Zolg

The Zolg was there before me. As much a fixture of my life as gravity or air or the sense of my own body. It exists in even my earliest memories as a constant warning against carelessness. It was there when I brushed my teeth, giggling in the bathtub. It was there, stealing food that fell under the table at every meal. It was there, sitting above my bed, stroking my hair with hands the size of dinner plates. Every morning there were new rules, all learned from close calls that happened the day before. Every week we reviewed its effect on us, how to improve, how to be smarter, how to be safer. For a long time, I couldn’t even distinguish the rules made for it, and the rules made for us.

Don’t touch the oven when it’s on.

Be careful of the kettle.

Don’t play with plug sockets.

Don’t put cables in your mouth.

Watch where you step.

Never use any appliance without first checking the wiring.

Always help daddy look for the Zolg as he backs out of the driveway.

Rules upon rules upon rules, growing in number and complexity until we felt stifled, all of us slowly going mad from the suffocating need for constant vigilance. Other teenagers had fun, other teenagers stepped away from the rules and embraced freedom, that’s what adulthood was meant to be about (or so I thought at the time). But not for me. The rules just kept growing. Eventually, I realised that other families don’t have Zolgs, just us. There’s only one of him and whatever inexplicable force brought him into existence saw fit to put him with us. For years it had never occurred to me to evaluate its presence as anything other than a simple fact of life, but when I saw the madness for what it was something inside me changed.

A hatred crystallised into an icy core. I was filled with memories of his little egg-shaped body and lanky arms with those huge yellow-green hands. Whole nights spent listening to him waddling down the hallway as he scratched his dangling yellow fingers over the walls, gagging at the things he’d sneak into Mum’s cooking, crying at every dead animal left on our doorstep. I hated that stupid thing, I hated it so much that one day I snapped and lashed out.

Whack! I hit it so hard it flew off the table where it had been dancing on my plate, and it hit the wall with a satisfying thud. I expected my mother to fly into a rage at this blatant transgression of family law, but instead she just ran up and held me, stroking my cheek. It felt like a nightmare, my mother clutching me and everyone crying and shouting while that thing laughed from where it lay. Why didn’t it hurt? Hadn’t I hit it? And then, as slow as a sunburn, a red outline of my own hand formed on my face, and I came to learn exactly what it was the Zolg was after.

It wanted us to hit it, to kick it, abuse it, kill it. It wanted our malice, our frustration, our carelessness. It wanted nothing but our suffering and anything we did to it just came back onto us.

A hundred times worse.

A hundred times as slow.

You should see what a broken bone looks like when it takes four hours to render into existence. Bone looks like putty being pulled apart by a child, skin reddens and depresses into long streaky welts, layers of tissue and membranous flesh pull apart laterally until finally it all tears with glacial slowness. It looks like quivering despair, like grief, not screaming agony, because when pain is that horrific and that unstoppable you don’t yell or cry or shout, you give up. You retreat. You turn catatonic and switch off.

Or you just die.

And the Zolg, despite its rockslide teeth and leering gin and hillbilly giggle, is smart and patient in surprising ways. Every time I touch an oven, or a car, or even just a light switch, I need to think a thousand things over. Did I remember to check the walls? To look at each and every plug socket? Have I seen the Zolg anywhere? Has it got its grotesque mouth clamped around a cable just out of sight, waiting for me to plug it in or switch it on? Has it wrapped its mouth around the exhaust of my car, ready to suffocate?

Every action and consequence has to be thought out in the most explicit detail. Every bump on the road has to be investigated lest it turn out to that the Zolg has cleverly watched you for days, traced where you work so it can slip out one night and waddle breathlessly to an ideal overpass bridge. My brother once broke two ribs when it managed to leap in front of a ball he went to kick. My sister spent three weeks in hospital after she poured bleach down the kitchen sink, failing to notice that the Zolg had unscrewed all the pipes and was waiting to gleefully gulp down poison.

I’m the only one left now.

My father was the first to go, not because he was careless but because he always took it upon himself to do as much as he could. You couldn’t even turn the TV on without him insisting on pressing the button for you. It always felt so controlling, so stifling, but once he was gone it became pretty clear why he did it. It was never the same without him… Mum tried so hard, but it was never the same. She had her own fears, her own struggles to contend with. I really can’t blame her for not being able to do the work of both of them.

I remember coming home from school and they were waiting for us in the living room. My older brother had gotten back before us and was sitting silently at the kitchen table, tears welled up in his eyes. God, that was the hardest. Dad looked… well he almost looked relieved. But seeing my nineteen-year-old brother cry was like a breeze block to the face and in that instant, I knew something horrific had happened.

They hid him away. I still don’t know exactly what happened, but I made a pretty good guess from the state on the lawnmower that Mum dragged out to the curb and the fact we wouldn’t see the Zolg again for at least eight days. I’d later learn that in moments like that it’ll stow away and knit itself back together slowly, which at the very least explained the giggling I heard coming from the linen closet during those horrible silent nights. Dad never did scream… I’d hazard a guess that he killed himself and I know I should feel some relief but I glimpsed his body on the way out and the thought of those injuries happening to a lifeless corpse just sends shivers down my back.

We never mowed the grass again. It was a loss too great, and over the next few weeks Mum deteriorated. She started drinking, crying late into the night while my brother would cook us food and tell us that everything would be okay. But it never would, never again. She only got worse. She might have had a chance if it was just us… but we couldn’t just abandon our vigilance, our paranoia and fear, and we had to carry on as normal. Jesus Christ, we even had to check Dad’s coffin before burying it.

For a while there, she almost came back. Looking back, it couldn’t have been more than a day or two, at most, but she did manage to set the table for us… just once. We were all there, dad dead and buried and none of us having seen the Zolg since his death, when from upstairs a door slammed shut and Mum was so startled she dropped the food she was holding. Its flat hairy feet slapped down the stairs one by one while its heavy wet gurgles punctuated our horrified silence. With a sort of mounting disbelief, I watched it walk up to the table that obscured its stumpy little body from my view and drag itself up onto one of the chairs.

Dad’s chair.

Dad’s place.

Mum had even set a plate for him, if only by instinct. And you know what? It didn’t look at me, or James, or Laurie, it looked at Mum. It knew what that single gesture would do to her, and it laughed the whole time we had to pin her down and stop her from driving a knife right into its face. It gibbered and howled with such joy at her threats, but we stopped her from doing it. And after that I don’t think she was ever the same.

That was when the drinking started. It was also when James became the new favourite. It had always shown a special interest in Dad and without him around it fell on James to become the focus of its attention. We always thought we’d been doing such a good job but without Dad things felt a thousand times harder. James was injured six times in as many months and things were never much better after that.

I remember he took me fishing. He asked Mum to keep an eye on the Zolg and stop it following us, and we went together and for a few blissful days it was just us and no one else. And he told me all about the lessons he had learned in the last few months, told me about the Zolg’s favourite resting place, some of the intricacies he had deduced, and more importantly that I would have to steel myself and be ready for what happened if he ever failed.

And, like all of them, he eventually did. But not before we found Laurie crushed to death. We think she dropped the microwave on it, but we can’t be sure. It was her first week at university and she didn’t even call to tell us, but we knew she was aware she’d done it because she called in sick to all her classes a day early. And then she just locked the door and let it happen. We didn’t even realise the Zolg had found her, but it had somehow. And the sight of her lying on her bed, pulped to the thickness of a few planks of wood as it giggled and jumped on her broken remains, will forever be lodged in my mind. I like to think she found a way of ending it, but I don’t know that at all. She could have sought help, something to ease the pain, I’m sure of it. But we don’t know for sure, and I have to wonder if she felt it all, every second of it.

She was in there all alone for at least a day and a half.

James disappeared for a few months after that and it was just me and mum. When James he finally returned, he stank of booze and had this haggard look about him, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he’d done in that time.

“It’ll get me,” he said, “sooner or later. I just wanted a taste of what life had to offer. All the good, all the bad.”

But later he would confess that he just tried to run away and lost control, heady with the belief he’d escaped the Zolg and downtrodden by the guilt of what he’d done to us. Except the Zolg had followed him, slowly and carefully and relentlessly it had followed. You can leave it behind for a while, but it won’t be cheated and somehow it just… it finds its way to you, even if you’re on the other side of the world it’ll get to you and it’ll never take more than a week. James must have known that, but he tried anyway, moving from place to place and doing God knows what. He lived with that guilt until his death even though I never gave his lapse a second thought. We were all just trying our best. I tried so hard to make him see that, to make him forgive himself but there was nothing left for him except a dark spiral downwards. He’d brought habits back with him, and with little else to do he let those habits grow into their own ugly monsters that rivalled even the Zolg.

I still don’t blame him. His suicide note was so rational, so thoughtful. He really had convinced himself he was doing us a favour, but the fact he died by pumping the Zolg full of heroin tells me he had other ideas. It was a good attempt, as far as ways to beat the Zolg go. And it was with great despair that I first saw his face and realised he hadn’t won anything at all. No one will ever know exactly how it happened. The Zolg, at least, spent four days crying in a cupboard but James died nonetheless, and it didn’t look like he’d died in ecstasy. His eyes were hollow, his skin gaunt and leathery, and his jaw had dislocated in a scream so terrible you could fit an open hand in his mouth.

However the Zolg had twisted and reinterpreted the poison in its veins, what fell on James looked a ritualistic murder gone wrong. Like a possessed corpse had gotten trapped in a box and left to rot while the demon within raged and bent its host in terrible spasms. I didn’t even tell Mum the details, but I have to guess she knew, even if she was barely present by that point. In her sunken eyes and loose skin, I saw a pale reflection of James, and came to accept that even when the Zolg doesn’t get its way… it still doesn’t lose.

The months that followed were hard. Mum was barely in her sixties, but she was being eaten alive by grief and fear. Towards the end she wouldn’t even leave the bed, to afraid to risk injuring the Zolg. I became a full-time carer and paid my own price in the process, trapped in that house while constantly working to keep the Zolg away from her. Every meal took hours to prepare, every moment of relaxation brought crashing down by either Mum or that thing.

It became brazen after Mum went catatonic. It started throwing things at me, playing with the idea of open attack as it smashed plates or slapped my phone out of my hand. I ignored it for the most part, relegating it to the back of my mind while the stress ate away at me like a cancer. There simply was no other choice, or at least, so I thought.

I used to sit and watch it stare at Mum. Sometimes it’d venture to try and push my buttons using her as a prop, but I simply ignored it until it finally gave in and just… savoured her slow and agonising death. It marvelled at her bed sores, laughed when I cleaned her, and chuckled with joy as her hair fell out. And somewhere along the line I decided that it wasn’t right for it to get so much pleasure. All of us were suffering while it was having the time of its life. If it was within my power to stop it having that little bit of joy, to deny it that happiness, then it only seemed right that I do so.

But what did that mean?

I think I knew the very first day I realised how happy her pain made it. I just didn’t want to face up to that fact, so I pretended otherwise. But some things can’t be buried, they linger in the back of your head like a guilty pleasure. And no matter how much you tell yourself you won’t do it, that it’s a line too far to be crossed, deep down you always appreciate that you can cross it*…* if you need to.

If you want to.

When did I first want to? I’d say, with complete honesty, that it was when I had to carry her to a bath, and I stubbed my toe on the bed post. They say you should fear the man who delays reaching out to take something they want. But I didn’t wait very long at all after that moment. I was quiet, calm, effortless; no conflict or worry was worn on my face. I merely took a deep breath, took her to the bathroom, and drowned her. My mother didn’t feel anything, but the Zolg sure did. For the first time in its life it directly attacked me, scuttling down the hall to come skidding around bathroom door and then leap at me with fists flailing. But that fat hairy little egg didn’t have it in it to stop me, and it yowled and cried and wept and clawed at my exposed legs as I bent down and drowned my mother in the tub. It practically tore my calves to shreds but I didn’t care, not one bit. And oh, how the irony rolled in because right before my eyes its own legs began to bleed and wilt, and the panic in its eyes betrayed the subtle inversion of rules we’d never figured out.

Until then.

When it was over, I didn’t know what scratches were from her trying to escape and which were from it, and I slumped to the side and laughed at the absurdity of it all. The little bastard was hunched over and vomiting a greasy mixture of hair and bile and its wretched jaundiced eyes wept tears of pus, and I just kept laughing at it just like it had always laughed at me. I even imitated it, holding my hands over my stomach and fake sobbing just like it did to us at Dad's funeral, and then I wheezed with joyous giggles when it ran out the room cursing me in its weird language.

Whatever force binds it, that kind of murder messes with it in unpleasant ways. And with that leverage, nothing was ever quite the same for it. It spent weeks weeping in the attic, but I found it and dragged it out into the light and watched it wither and struggle. I am quite sure it would have died if I’d followed it up with another kill, and then another. But there’s only me left and I can do nothing except savour the quiet victory of causing it such longing despair.

It still stuck around, of course. If anything, it’s more determined than ever but I don't think it'll get me. It’s also growing older. God knows what their lifespan is. I’ve found maybe two written references to them in my entire life, so it’s not like I can just check Wikipedia for an update. But it is getting older, thinner, closer to the grave. It’s just a thing, after all. Maybe it won’t happen in my lifetime, but I sure as shit won’t be having kids and I look forward to the thought of that stupid thing left old and alone in this world. It’d probably spend its remaining days dancing on our graves but joke’s on it because we’d be free, and it’d still be down on Earth playing its stupid game against players who have all left the table.

Unless of course it just goes and finds another family. In which case... well, now you know how to kill it.