Earworm

A critic gets his just desserts

Alistair Finch, a critic of the highest�"or perhaps lowest�"calibre, sat in the opulent leather of his office chair, the city lights below him a blur of insignificant pinpricks. His gaze, sharp and predatory, was fixed not on the panoramic view, but on the crisp printout of his latest review. It was a masterpiece of deprecation, a meticulously crafted verbal shiv slipped between the ribs of an earnest, albeit amateur, playwright.

“...a theatrical experience akin to watching paint dry, if the paint were mixed with the putrid bile of a thousand failed ambitions,” he’d written, a faint smile playing on his lips even now as he read it. He savored the sting, not of the words on his tongue, but of the imagined agony they would inflict. He pictured the playwright, pale and trembling, the words burrowing into their self-perception, taking root, and growing. He liked to think of his criticisms as a particularly virulent strain of earworm, investing away at their brains, eroding their confidence, until all that remained was a hollowed-out shell of artistic aspiration. It was a delicious, almost erotic, power.

He ran a manicured finger over the biting prose, the faint scent of expensive paper and his own self-satisfaction filling the air. He was a god in his small, gilded corner of the world, shaping narratives, crushing spirits, all from the sterile comfort of his domain. The concept of empathy was a foreign country he had no desire to visit. Others were merely raw material for his wit, fodder for his disdain.

The night deepened, a velvet cloak drawn over the city. Alistair, sated by his day’s work and the imagined suffering of his latest victim, retired to his equally sterile apartment. He drifted into a deep sleep, the kind of untroubled slumber only the truly unburdened�"or the profoundly callous�"could achieve.

Then, he felt it.

It started as a faint tickle, a whisper-light sensation against the delicate skin inside his ear. He twitched, half-asleep, assuming it was a stray hair or a dust motes. But the tickle did not fade. It moved.

Alistair’s eyes snapped open. The room was shrouded in the inky blackness of a moonless night, the silence absolute save for the frantic pounding of his own heart. The sensation intensified, becoming distinct. Not a tickle, but a pressure. And it was moving inward.

A cold dread, unlike any he had ever known, seized him. It felt segmented, infinitesimally small, yet distinct. He heard it now, a faint, almost imperceptible scritch-scritch-scritch against the cartilage and bone of his ear canal. It was burrowing, an alien presence invading his most private sanctuary.

Panic, raw and visceral, erupted. He slapped his hand to his ear, thrashing his head against the pillow. He pounded, pressing, trying to dislodge whatever horror had dared to breach his defenses. He felt a sharp, piercing pain, a momentary burning as if something had bitten or scraped, and then�"nothing.

The sensation ceased.

Alistair froze, his hand still clamped to his ear, his breath ragged. The room was silent once more. Had it been a dream? A vivid, terrifying nightmare brought on by too much self-congratulation? He slowly lifted his hand, his fingers trembling. He probed his earlobe, then the outer rim. Nothing. No blood, no sign of anything untoward.

He lay there, heart hammering, straining to hear. The silence pressed in on him, heavy and suffocating. He slowly pushed himself up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He reached for the lamp, his hand shaking so violently he almost missed the switch.

Light flooded the room, harsh and unforgiving. He stumbled to the bathroom, flipping on the brighter overhead light. He stared into the mirror, his face pale, eyes wide and bloodshot. He prodded his ear again, rotating his head, trying to see if anything was visible. Nothing.

But the feeling… the memory of that invasive crawl was too vivid, too real. He could still almost feel the faint pressure, the slight displacement of his flesh as it had burrowed deeper. He imagined it now, curled up somewhere inside his skull, a parasitic slug feeding on his brain matter.

He spent the rest of the night awake, pacing, clutching his head, convinced he could hear faint whispers, not from outside, but from within. They were indistinct at first, like static, but with a horrifyingly familiar cadence. They sounded like his own words, his venomous criticisms, echoing in the cavern of his mind.

Alistair Finch, the master of the earworm, had finally been infected by his own disease. And as the dark hours crawled towards dawn, he knew, with a horrifying certainty, that this was only the beginning of his journey.into a very personal private hell.