The Parasite Pudding

The sweet old lady downstairs brought me a bowl of pudding every single day.

I hate sweets. So I smiled, said thank you, carried it inside, and poured every last bowl down the drain.

Two and a half months later, my pipes were clogged solid.

I finally called a plumber to snake the line.

What he dragged out of my drain stopped my heart cold.

It wasn't pudding.

It was never pudding.

Chapter 1

For two and a half months, the sweet old woman downstairs brought me a bowl of pudding every single night. And every single night, I poured it straight down the drain.

I thought that made me clever.

I thought the pudding was the problem.

I had no idea what I was feeding.

I'm Sadie. I live alone, and I like it that way. What most people call lonely, I call quiet.

My place at Birchwood Court cost me every dollar I had, and it was worth it. Two bedrooms, downtown, sunlight cut into clean stripes across the floor, the whole apartment smelling of coffee and dry paper. Ordered. Contained. Mine.

I could handle a lot of things. What I couldn't handle was someone deciding my life needed fixing.

Then came Mrs. Prewitt.

She lived directly below me. Somewhere around sixty, retired, always in the same faded floral apron, with a smile so warm it looked almost painful. The kind that folded her whole face into creases and never quite settled.

We met in the elevator. She picked up my keys when I dropped them.

"You're the girl from upstairs, aren't you? I'm right below you. Prewitt." She patted the back of my hand. "Anything you need, sweetheart, you come to me."

I nodded, said thanks, figured it was just the usual neighbor small talk.

I was wrong.

After that, her "caring" became a program in my life I couldn't uninstall. Six-thirty, every evening, the doorbell.

And there she'd be. That too-bright smile. Both hands wrapped around an old white bowl painted with red roses, the glaze gone soft and crackled with age. Inside it: pudding, thick and half-translucent, tapioca pearls suspended in the middle of it, studded with dark little raisins, giving off a sweetness so heavy I could taste it from the doorway.

"Eat it while it's hot, sweetheart. A girl living all alone has to keep her strength up."

The first time, I took it to be polite. Back in the kitchen, I tried a spoonful.

The sweetness went off on my tongue like a struck match. Syrupy, cloying, so sweet my scalp prickled, the gluey weight of it clinging in my throat so I had to work to swallow.

I hate sweets. I especially hate this kind. Sweet with no bottom to it. Just thick, and endless.

That bowl wasn't nourishment. It was a punishment.

And I couldn't say no.

Her eyes were too eager. That for-your-own-good goodwill came at you like a soft net. The more you pulled against it, the tighter it drew.

I tried every excuse I had.

"Really, Mrs. Prewitt, I don't eat much in the evenings."

"Then it's perfect, it won't fill you up. Good for your skin!"

"My stomach's been off lately. I can't do anything this sweet."

She thumped her own chest. "Barely any sugar in it, sweetheart. Easy on the stomach!"

"I've got an early flight tomorrow"

"Then you need it tonight. All that traveling ahead, best to build your strength up first."

Every no I owned died against that airtight logic. She'd hold the bowl out with a look that left no room to argue, and I'd feel like a child being spoon-fed medicine.

So I took the easy way out. Not the brave one. I poured it down the drain.

But I want to be clear about what that was. It wasn't me caving. It was the last patch of ground I had, and I held it.

Every evening I took the bowl with a polite little smile, shut the door, and let the smile fall off my face. I carried it to the sink. I turned on the tap. I poured the whole cloying mess into the drain and ran the water long after it was gone, scrubbing the basin, rinsing until there was nothing left to find.

My home. My stomach. My habits. She didn't get to remodel any of it and call it love.

That was the deal I'd made with myself. Every bowl gone was a small, private win. A door I got to keep shut.

I kept it up for nearly two and a half months. I got used to the six-thirty bell. Used to taking a bowl I'd never touch. Used to rinsing it away under the cover of running water.

I thought I'd found the perfect balance. Peace on the surface. Quiet underneath.

I was proud of myself, pouring my little nuisance down the drain, night after night.

I didn't know I wasn't pouring anything away.

I was feeding it. Down there in the dark of my own pipes, in the quiet, something had already begun to take root.

Chapter 2

It started with a smell.

That morning I was making breakfast, same as always. I turned on the tap to rinse a cup, and the water in the sink barely moved. It just sat there, turning in a slow circle, like something below was holding it back.

Then it rose up out of the drain. A smell.

Not the sour reek of rotting food. Something else. Sweet, with a raw, meaty edge underneath that turned my stomach. Like fruit going soft on top of a cut of meat left out too long.

It was the pudding's smell. But worse. Fermented. Like the sweetness had aged and curdled and come back stronger.

I told myself I'd dropped something down there. I crouched, opened the trap under the sink, checked inside.

Clean. Empty.

Whatever it was, it was coming from somewhere deeper.

Over the next few days it got worse.

The water stopped going down at all. The smell thickened. It stopped keeping to the kitchen. It crept into the living room, settled into the couch cushions, into the clean air I was so proud of.

The ordered life I'd built, wrecked by a stench I couldn't find.

I couldn't sit still. First thing every evening I went straight to the kitchen to check the drain. Nothing there. Just the smell, getting louder.

So I bought the strongest drain cleaner on the shelf and poured the whole bottle in.

It didn't help. It did the opposite.

The pipes made a sound. A thick, wet gurgle, deep down in the wall. Then the smell surged back twice as strong, that sweet rot laced now with chemical burn, and I gagged over the sink.

It didn't feel like I'd poured in something to kill it.

It felt like I'd fed it.

I was losing my grip. This space I'd built to be safe, to be mine. Something was wrong inside it now. In its veins. Some sick thing turning over, down where I couldn't reach.

And right as the smell had me half out of my mind, six-thirty. The doorbell.

Mrs. Prewitt.

The same gentle smile. The same white bowl cradled in both hands.

"I put in a few extra raisins today, sweetheart. Good for your iron."

I forced down the churn in my gut and dragged my face into something like a smile. As I took the bowl I stepped back without meaning to, sick with the fear she'd catch that smell leaking out of my apartment.

Her eyes flicked across my face. Then, light as anything, past my shoulder. Toward the kitchen.

She was still smiling. But it had changed. It held on my face a beat too long, a beat too bright, and for one cold second it wasn't kindness at all. It was checking. Like she knew exactly what was happening in there. Like it pleased her.

A ridiculous thought.

The smell. Could it have anything to do with the pudding I'd been pouring out?

No. I'd killed it every time. Sugar and tapioca, that was all it was. How does that turn into a smell like this? Coincidence.

But my stomach wouldn't settle.

I couldn't look her in the eye. There was something behind that smile I couldn't read.

Deep down, the first alarm went off.

And it wasn't the secret that scared me now. Not that she'd worked out I'd been pouring her pudding away.

What scared me was the thing underneath it. The truth I couldn't even picture yet, waiting somewhere behind that sweet, patient smile.

Chapter 3

The pipes finally gave out completely.

Half the kitchen sink stood full of cloudy gray water. The bathroom drain started backing up onto the floor. That sweet, rotten stench owned the whole apartment now. I was living inside something huge and slowly rotting, breathing air that came in wet.

I couldn't take it anymore.

My whole life ran on clean and ordered. This was the opposite of both, and it was close to breaking me.

I called the building manager and got the name of a plumber with a good reputation. Chuck Rourke.

On the phone I only said the clog was bad and the smell was worse. I didn't dare mention the thing I'd been doing every night for two and a half months.

He showed up half an hour later.

Fifties, dark-skinned, coveralls stained with grease, but with sharp bright eyes and the shrewd look of a man who'd seen it all.

He got one boot in the door, took a hard sniff, and his brow dropped into a knot.

"Miss, something in here ain't right."

He walked to the kitchen, took one look at the sink, and called it. "This ain't your regular clog. It's way down the main line, and it's packed in tight."

I stood off to the side, heart slamming, like a criminal waiting on a verdict.

Chuck pulled a machine out of a toolbox the size of a chest. A powered drain auger, a tight coil of steel cable, an ugly rotating head on the end.

He fed the cable down the drain, foot by foot, and hit the switch.

The machine roared. The whole kitchen floor buzzed under my feet.

I stared into that black mouth of a drain like I could see the cable down in the dark, fighting something.

Sounds came up the pipe. A wet, creaking drag. A hard, jerking resistance.

It didn't sound like a cable chewing through the usual sludge or a knot of hair.

It sounded like it was cutting through something tough. Something with give to it.

For half a second I could have sworn I heard something down there fighting back. Screaming.

Chuck's face changed. The easy confidence drained out of it, notch by notch. Sweat beaded along his hairline. The muscles in his forearms went tight on the controls.

"Huh," he muttered. "This one's got some fight in it."

The seconds crawled. My breath stalled in my chest.

Then the pitch of the machine shifted, and the resistance let go.

"Got it," Chuck said. But there was nothing glad in his face. He'd gone white.

He killed the motor and started drawing the cable back out, slow.

My heart climbed into my throat.

As the cable came up, a stench a hundred times worse than before erupted out of the drain. I clamped a hand over my mouth and nose and backed away, stomach heaving, half a second from bringing everything up right there.

Then I saw it.

Wrapped around the auger head, dragged up out of the dark inch by inch: a slick mass, dull gray-white, with a wet shine to it.

Not hair. Not sludge. Not the food-scrap knot I'd braced for.

Something else. Something I didn't have words for.

Twisted, coiled, snarled, like plant roots and animal tissue had been braided together and grafted where they were never meant to join. Over all of it, a slick, half-translucent coating.

The exact same coating as the pudding. Exactly the same.

But this wasn't dead.

Chuck shook it loose onto the tile, and the thing spread a little.

And it was moving.

Not trembling from being dragged. Moving. A slow, deliberate clench and release, coming from somewhere inside itself.

Like it had its own pulse.

The water on the tile gave it a sick, wrong shine. Alive-looking. Wrong-looking.

I froze where I stood. Cold went up through the soles of my feet and out the top of my skull.

Chuck stared too. Half a life spent fixing pipes, and it was plain on his face he had never seen anything like this.

His hands shook as he worked it off the cable with a pair of pliers and dropped it on the floor.

Spread out, I could see it better.

About the size of a grown man's fist. And between the gray-white strands of it, little red flecks. Not fully broken down. They looked exactly like the raisins in the pudding.

Chuck wiped the cold sweat off his forehead. His voice came out shaking.

"Miss, this this ain't no ordinary clog."

He touched the tip of the pliers to it.

It snapped tight.

He threw the pliers down like they had burned him. He looked up at me, gone pale under the grime, and his lips wouldn't hold still.

"That's not grease. That's not food waste."

"This thing. It's alive?"

Chapter 4