Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Monsters — Monster who didn't hear you right, and tried to become less scaly
It takes two months of living in her grandmother's house, out on the edge of the village, sorting through everything after the funeral, for Carole to crack.
For the first month, she just thought she was crumbling under everything, seeing things, hearing things, the scaly coiled rasp and the breathing and the eyes in the dark just her own disintegrating mind inverting the source of the problem and projecting it outside, blaming its own malfunction on not me, see?
But. The claw marks on the door, from the day she spent hours sitting on the floor of the shower, shaking under long-cold water; they're not in her head. And the more and more often she spends the night with the pillow clamped around her head against the scape and restless slither around and around the bed, the more often she finds shed scales. They're not imaginary.
After two months, she opens the door to the cellar — the too-dark cellar, its lone dangling lightbulb a lonely point in a featureless sea of dark it cannot touch — and talks down into the dark.
"I know you're there." Holding her nauseous stomach. "I'm not — you were here before me, I'm not here to get rid of you. You must have been here when Gran was — and she thrived, right up until the end, so you can't be — all bad. So it's your home, far more than mine. I'm just — can you. In the night. I need to sleep. You're very—" and her voice cracks over the last word, and she can't, she can't any more, closes the door and leans her forehead on it, shivers for a long time before she drags herself away.
It retreats for nearly two weeks, but it's not gone; in some ways more present than ever. A strange, yeasty smell rises through the floor from the dark below, she can hear it, thrashing and coiling, scales endlessly clinking, and hours of low moaning in the nights.
It's almost a relief when she lies in bed, pillow over her face, and its feet around the room herald its return. It sounds different; quieter. Its movements hiss instead of click.
She lets a hand slip limply over the side of the bed, fingers dangling nearly to the floor, and nearly screams; it's not the first time it's brushed deniably past her, but now — instead of a ghost touch in the dark, cool scales, it goes past at its accustomed distance and insteads of air and movement, a lush forest of silky fug drags endlessly over the skin of her arm, like the world's softest, longest dog.
She sits bolt upright with an abortive noise of — something braying in her throat. Bright eyes stare back, aback, from the dark.
It understood her. It understood her well enough to metamorphically oblige a misheard, muffled, inarticulate plea.