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  He dropped to the floor and turned quickly, ready to puke into the toilet bowl. He repeatedly spat water into the bowl. Waiting for something else to happen, the pain rose in his chest now, making his eyes water. A burning sensation seared his stomach as acids ascended up to his throat.

  Come on, just do it! Peter thought to himself, tears now streaming from his bulging eyes.

  He pushed again, and vomit flew from his mouth, burning and leaving a foul taste. He began to lose his breath, it wouldn’t stop. More and more vomit sluiced out, the force held it together in one streamline movement like water running from a tap. After what felt like an eternity of choking, the vomiting stopped.

  He sat on the floor with sweat dripping from his forehead, panting and trying to catch his breath.

  “Oh no,” he exclaimed.

  The pain was rushing to his chest again. He turned back to the bowl, bracing himself for the onslaught of stomach acids and bile attacking his insides.

  The punishment continued, he pushed and heaved and growled horribly, animal like noises filled the room, until it began to come out. Peter started to choke, this vomit was something else. It was…solid.

  A long green, serpent-like thing was coming out of Peter's mouth. His eyes widened with terror. He was helpless, he could do nothing except watch as this continuously growing green thing made its way out of his mouth and into the toilet. The thing was so long it had begun to coil around the bowl, rising closer and closer to the top of the toilet.

  Another pain, stronger this time, stabbed at Peter's stomach. He jumped to his feet and the long green thing finally dropped out of his mouth. It was mostly in the toilet bowl, but some of it was hanging over the side. He couldn’t tell exactly how long it was, but it was about two inches wide.

  “What…in the hell is that?” Peter gasped, still recovering from the prolonged choking.

  His thoughts were racing; there was nothing logical that he could think of to cause such a horrible thing come out of his mouth. Perhaps, somehow his vomit had managed to solidify and compact together before coming out? It happens with bowel movements, it could happen with vomit, right? Maybe the sheer volume of fat in the food he had been eating made it all join together? After a solid month of nothing but takeaway and junk food every day, it had to have some kind of effect on him, right?

  Peter went to the kitchen to get a drink. He needed something to take that horrible taste out of his mouth. He gulped a glass of water. The taste was still there as he gulped a second glass down. The horrible taste was not going away. He decided that brushing his teeth would get rid of it.

  More worryingly than the taste, how was he going to get rid of that vomit thing from the toilet?

  There was no way he was going to be able to flush it. He’d have to scoop it into a bin bag or something, and that would mean touching it.

  Maybe I have some gloves around here somewhere.

  Making his way back to the bathroom, Peter was still holding his stomach. The whole ordeal had left him feeling very tender. Gulping water down so fast hadn’t really helped. If anything it had probably made him feel a bit worse. This made him worry. The last thing he wanted was to start puking again. He didn’t think he would be able to handle that.

  He walked into the bathroom and grabbed his toothbrush. He stared at himself in the mirror for a moment.

  “God, I look green,” he said to himself. “Almost as green as that thi…”

  He looked to the toilet. There was nothing there.

  Well, where the hell did it go? It couldn’t exactly get up and walk away.

  Was it possible that he had imagined it, or dreamt it? No, he could still feel the tenderness in his stomach. But that just meant he'd vomited. It didn’t necessarily mean he had vomited the jolly green giant’s left arm. Maybe he was so ill that he'd hallucinated the whole thing? That had to be the explanation for it, nothing else made any sense.

  “Oh well, at least I don’t have to clean it up now.”

  He brushed his teeth and went back to bed, hoping to sleep off whatever horrible trip he was suffering.

  Peter woke to something stroking his foot. Something soft and wet. He jerked his leg, sitting up and pulling his knees to his chest. There was something moving at the bottom of the bed. He could see the quilt rising and falling as whatever it was wriggled back and forth underneath. It changed its direction and moved toward Peter. Frozen with fear, Peter couldn’t think to move, or to lift the quilt. He sat still as the quilt was rising in his direction.

  Something dark and green began to emerge from beneath the quilt. It wasn’t a snake, but it reminded Peter of one. It was long and green, and slithered out from the quilt in a serpent-like manner. Still frozen, he felt this thing start to coil around his neck. Peter couldn’t see any facial features. He couldn’t see anything to distinguish a head from a body. He could feel the thing tightening around his neck. Not enough to choke him. It was more like he was being massaged. He slowly began to climb out of bed and grabbed the thing at each end and then tried to pull it from his neck. It was too slippery, his hands slid straight off.

  “Don’t make me cut you off!” he said.

  Rushing to the kitchen, he pulled the cutlery drawer open. Empty!

  Why am I such a messy bastard?

  Peter’s eyes searched the kitchen for a knife. The counter was littered with rubbish from leftover takeaway boxes and greasy wrappers. He began to throw the boxes from the counter in an attempt to find a knife underneath them. One of the boxes opened as it hit the floor. A leftover slice of pizza lay in the box, blue mould starting to form along the sides.

  The green serpent like creature flew from Peter’s neck to the ground. A large sharp, pointed bone rose from the creature's mid-section. It stabbed at the pizza and pulled it back into its body. The pizza was gone. Slowly, almost casually, the creature slithered up Peter's leg and body until it had resumed its former position around his shoulders and neck.

  It wants food, Peter thought. It doesn’t want to eat me, it just wants food.

  He rummaged through more of the boxes until he came across some old kebab meat. He left the box open on the counter.

  “OK, go on,” he said. “You want it, eat up."

  The creature again jumped from his neck. Its bone like pincer appeared, grabbing the meat and then disappeared again in one swift motion.

  “Holy shit, you’re like some kind of cool pet!” Peter said. “Although, I made you, didn’t I? So you’re my…child? Oh crap, this is weird.”

  The thing said nothing, it made no noise. It just enjoyed its new home, around Peter’s flabby neck.

  After a while of rummaging through old takeaway boxes and feeding his new pet, eventually Peter had gotten through the lot. All the boxes were empty. A worrying thought crept into his mind. What was going to happen now that he had no food left to feed the creature? Would it try to eat him? It hadn’t done yet, but it had been feeding on all the takeaway food. How much did it need to eat? He hadn’t stopped to think about that. Would it just keep on eating forever, or would it get full and wait until the next day? He eventually came to the conclusion that this thing would somehow let him know when it wanted more food.

  Having lived pretty much his whole adult life sat in front of the TV, eating takeaway food, which was paid for by the money left to him from his deceased parents, Peter had no friends. He had nobody he could call to tell about this thing, so he couldn’t think of anything else to do other than sit in front of the TV as normal and wait for this thing to let him know it was hungry again.

  Hours passed by, the creature had shown no sign of being hungry again. It didn’t do anything at all apart from sit on Peter’s shoulders. For all he knew, the thing could be asleep. Getting hungry now himself, he decided that he would order some more food. It would probably be a good idea to order extra for his green tentacle friend. Having no idea at all how much to order, he thought it best to be safe and order too much. He picked up his phone and hit the s
peed dial for his favourite takeaway place, The Fat Friar.

  He ordered two large mixed kebabs, two extra-large meat feast pizzas, a bucket of fried chicken, two cheese burgers, two chicken burgers and a garlic bread with cheese. Peter had no idea if this creature cared about variety, but he did, and he wanted to have some choice left after this thing had eaten its share.

  When the delivery man arrived he gave Peter a very strange look. He had obviously noticed the green creature wrapped around his neck.

  “New pet snake,” Peter joked.

  “Cool,” the delivery man humoured him. “So, you live in this big place all by yourself?”

  “Yeah, Keith,” Peter replied while squinting to read the guy’s name badge. “The Bridge Manor is all mine. Neat, eh?”

  "Indeed it is. And it's Keitel, not Keith." He waited for a moment.

  "Oh, I'm sorry, my vision isn't what it used to be. Too much TV, I bet." Peter laughed.

  Keitel just nodded. "That's thirty-four sixty."

  Peter paid the man, closed the door, and carried the mountain of food into the living room. He opened the containers and boxes and waited to see which the creature would choose first. The green thing slid down from Peter’s neck and slithered over to one of the pizzas. Lightning fast, its pincers stabbed each slice of pizza and slid it back into its body. Within seconds the entire pizza was gone.

  Peter’s jaw dropped in amazement. He quickly realised that if he didn’t eat soon then there would be nothing left to eat. He shoveled one of the cheese burgers into his mouth, barely chewing it at all. Then he did the same with one of the chicken burgers. He took a little bit more time while eating a kebab. He watched curiously as the creature moved from box to box, dragging the food away with its pincer and devouring it so quickly.

  When all the boxes were empty, the creature slid up Peter’s leg and swiftly took the kebab straight out of his hand. Again, the kebab was dragged into the body and it was gone.

  “Where the hell do you put it all?” Peter asked.

  The creature slid back down to the floor and started to move from box to box. It slid over each box to find that it was empty. Watching these actions made it clear to Peter that the thing was still hungry. He should have ordered more.

  “There’s none left,” Peter said “You ate almost all of it, I didn’t even get much, and I had to rush that!”

  Peter belched, he could smell the foul stench of the food he had tried to consume so quickly. The scent of the half chewed burger crept into his nostrils. The creature sprung from the floor and landed right on Peter’s face. Its pincer protruded from the top of its body and stabbed at Peter’s tongue. It was attempting to pull the tongue from Peter’s mouth, mistaking it for a piece of meat. The tongue would not move. Muffled cries came from Peter’s mouth as he tried to pry the thing away from his face. The thing still pulled at the tongue, again it would not budge. Instead the creature slithered into his mouth. Peter’s airwaves were completely blocked by the bloated green creature. He was choking to death, but even while choking he could feel the creature moving back to the place of its birth. Back to a place it would find food.

  He woke up, disorientated and confused on the living room floor. Presuming that he had passed out through choking on the alien vomit, he felt stomach grumble with hunger. Rushing to the phone, he hit the speed dial to his favourite fast food outlet - The Fat Friar.

  The Storm

  Matt Hickman

  She lay in the sturdy, oak framed bed in the main bedroom of the cabin. There were no windows in the room, nothing allowing any view of anything outside of the four walls. Illumination within the room was provided by the small lamp that resided on the bedside table. The light offered by the dim bulb was not enough to brighten the entire area, casting dark shadows over the rest of the room - cascading reflective light rays into the wooden joists above, shadows danced downwards onto the old wooden floor.

  The room was entirely calm, she couldn’t hear a sound from within or from elsewhere within the entire cabin – total silence. She lay perfectly still with the bed clothes pulled up tightly around her waist, her back leaning against the headboard, hugging her knees as they were bent up towards her chest.

  Suddenly, she heard a faint scratching sound that seemed to emanate from just outside the bedroom door, it made her freeze in terror. Listening intently to the sound, it was eerie. Similar to the sound of a finger nail being slowly drawn backwards and forwards against a hard surface.

  At first it was almost silent, barely audible. Was it her imagination?

  She stared at the metal handle on the bedroom door, expecting it to turn at any moment but it stayed put. The noise very slowly began to intensify in rate and volume, beginning to augment until the noise became more intense; it now sounded like a hundred fingers scraping themselves quickly down a blackboard. The escalation of noise was matched by the swelling of terror from within as it became distracting, almost unbearable - building, spreading, until suddenly…nothing.

  She sat deadly still, encased with dread - unable to move even if she wanted to. Holding her breath, she listened.

  Silence - no longer a sound.

  Daring a glimpse around the room she saw nothing, nothing hidden away in the shadows, nothing ready to pounce.

  There was definitely a sound. Was she being paranoid?

  She was in a strange room on her own. Maybe her imagination was getting carried away, it was a possibility.

  She remained glued to the spot, a slight flicker of light from the bulb in the lamp made her heart thunder once more in her chest. She risked a glance to her side, two further flickers of light and the lamp continued to illuminate the room uninterrupted. Again, she questioned herself. Is there something faulty with the electrics in the cabin? It was the only light in the room. Is it just a bulb on the blink? She didn’t know.

  For a full thirty seconds there wasn’t a sound. The thumping sensation of the heartbeat in her chest and neck slowly started to subside, when suddenly the scratching noise returned. Fiercer and faster than before, rising and rising to the point of a pain within her skull, she squeezed her eyes shut in an attempt to keep the noise from invading her mind.

  As quickly as it had started, it stopped. She looked around the room frantically, her face covered with sweat, her breathing deep and erratic - she was paralysed with fear, she didn’t dare move.

  In one of the rays of light cast from the lamp near the entrance to the room, she spotted the shadow of something small slowly crawling under the small gap between the bottom of the door and the wooden floor.

  It crawled slowly at first, alone – then another, and another. Then there were dozens, their numbers increasing rapidly into hundreds. Surging into the room from the gap beneath the door, they marched in a line and quickly started to clamber up onto the wooden frame at the foot of the bed.

  Debilitated with horror, she sat still and stared in apprehension as she saw the spiders quickly running beneath the sheets of her bed and up the front of her legs, scratching and biting on their way. They continued their ascent up the front of her nightgown, up her legs, stomach and breasts, their legs scratching and ripping into her skin like thousands of agonising pinpricks. Dozens of them had made their way to the top of the bed clothes and were scurrying towards her face.

  Unable to move, she screamed at the top of her lungs but no sound escaped. Several of the spiders invaded her open mouth and clawed inside, clambering up her nose and down her throat.

  *******

  Lisa Harper awoke suddenly with a scream, desperately clawing and brushing the spiders from her body, gagging and spitting as she leapt up from her slumber. She stopped, suddenly disorientated and unaware of where she was. She quickly took in her surroundings - the conservatory of the log cabin.

  The candles that she had lit earlier had long since burned out, not even a trace of their scent remained. The rest of the cabin still lay in complete darkness because of the power cut due to the raging storm outside.
The porch swing rocked backwards and forwards violently from where she had woken up and leapt from it in her blind panic.

  Spotting her wine glass and bottle, both tipped over and empty, her fuzzy head and dry mouth suggested the obvious - she had drunken too much and fallen asleep. Grabbing her phone from beside the patio swing, she picked it up and checked the display; the time was 1:13 am. The signal display showed no bars, it had remained that way since the storm first started to move in earlier at about 21:30 pm.

  She surveyed the scene outside, through the large conservatory doors. Situated at the far end of the building, it provided the only view to the outside from the entire cabin, overlooking the spectacular view of the lake. Despite the storm, it was still a warm summer night, clouds rolled in, and the sharp, fresh aroma of ozone invaded the air.

  Forked lightning lit up the sky dramatically like a fireworks display over the lake - cascading in the distance like bolts of pure visual static and electricity. Thunder roared, echoing and rocking the landscape, shaking the cabin and its entire structure to its very foundations. Rain hammered down, bouncing from the surface of the lake, hammering down the grass and shrubs around the perimeter of the water. Rain flooded quickly down from the sloping roof of the cabin, flowing down the large glass panels in the doors, and off down the wooden incline of the approach path to the cabin.

  Despite the warm buzz provided by the alcohol running through her veins, Lisa felt nervous. She was in an unknown place, alone. Her mind cast back to the incident in her apartment eighteen months ago. She couldn’t believe that her friend Cathy had talked her into meeting her here, at her holiday home in the southern tip of the Lake District, for a quiet weekend away together.

  It had been a horrible period of her life. She thought back with anger and disgust at the assault she'd suffered in her own apartment, by a stranger nonetheless, then the subsequent physical and psychological treatment. The scars and stitches on her body had long since healed, her mental scars had not. The persistent night terrors were an everlasting reminder of the episode.