A Disturbance in the Night

 

Slept poorly last night. It took time falling asleep and, then, once sleep finally came, it darted out at 4:00AM when strange sounds erupted in the darkness. Gurgling and clanking, banging, haunted sounds. Scanning around the blackness I tried to locate the origin of the eerie symphony and realised it was coming from the bathroom. Before bed I had taken a shower. But before I took a shower I remembered to clean the drain which had been clogged with hair from my beard and Asia's head. The design of the catch in the drain showcases anything but German engineering / ingenuity. It's like something a B-movie toddler would design. The drain empties against gravity. There's a recess in the base of the drain about 8inches deep which creates a small well. When the well fills, water rises and moves up, reaching the perimeter of the well where there's a small slit about an inch thick where the water can spill out and away. In the middle of the well is a kind of bucket insert without a bottom, around which hair and soap scum and all sorts of sludge collects and turns a sulphury black. This small insert even stinks like sulphur; perhaps a byproduct of various chemical cleaning agents sitting in this small well full of stagnant water. So whenever I clean it, I arm myself with yellow rubber gloves, I open the window, and I try to hold my breath as long as I can while I pull out soggy, black, moldy clumps of hair and slime from the trap. After this procedure, a shower is well earned. 

I'd deposited the gooey drain excrement in the garbage bin in the bathroom, enclosing it in toilet paper to the best of my ability, so that the liquid can't seep out of the bag and into the bin. As I lay awake in bed at 4:00AM listening to the mad sounds coming from the bathroom, I wondered if somehow the remains of the drain had managed to transform by some dark supernatural force into something sentient. I pictured it inching forward on inky tendrils made of pubic hair and scum, half stuck to the fallen-over bin and trashbag that had fused to its body as it dragged itself across the floor toward the heater at the opposite end of the room, a trail of dark liquid in its wake. It sounded as if it had reached the heater and began climbing, the metal of the small trashcan clanging into the metallic bars of the German ladder-shaped heater as it ascended; watery gurgling and steaming hisses rising from its howling mouth.

This went on for ten minutes before I decided to get up and inspect the scene. When I arrived, wielding only the light from my phone, in that 4AM pitch darkness nothing was out of the ordinary. I found everything where I'd left it. The sound reduced itself to a weak muffle and there was no leaking water, no broken radiator, just an abundance of stale warm air.

I went back to bed. Instead of sleeping, I tossed and turned until 6AM when sleep returned. My alarm had been set for 9:00 due to the disturbance in the night, but morning came to me at 8:00. Needless to say, I feel like shit. The weather is wet and windy and dark enough that I should probably turn on a light now at 10:50.