It started in a bar on a trip to Poland.
I was imbibing.
On my own, as the bar was already thinning out and I was already feeling it. God, what time was it? Maybe two in the morning. Although if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of debauched drunkenness it’s that a bar is never truly empty, which means you’re never really alone, because there’s always the bartender. The bartender is your friend.
“Hey you. Yes you. You buy or no? If you no buy you leave home, OK? You don’t sleep in bar, OK?”
I nodded. “Another vodka please.”
A bartender in Poland is always your friend. If you keep paying, he’ll keep serving. Just don’t pass out, or puke, or try to flirt with him.
My phone kept vibrating in my pocket. It was annoying, but I’d promised my friend Cormac (not his real name—but shout out if you’re reading this, buddy!) that I would keep my phone on at all times. It’s a work trip. Don’t worry about it, I’d said. I also promised him I wouldn’t drink. Yet you can’t keep all your promises and still call yourself a mensch. That’s what he was messaging me about: my drinking “problem”. It’s a work trip. Don’t worry about it.
The bartender set the vodka glass down hard in front of me, waking me up. “Thank you kindly, sir,” I said, and enquired how much I owed him.
His answer really woke me up.
“How much?”
My phone vibrated.
I took it out and carefully looked at the screen, which was filled with messages like: “answer me you alcoholic cunt”, “you alive?” and “you’re a degenerate, you know that”.
I put the phone on the bar and started going through the złoty in my pockets.
It was hard, so I took a break and downed the vodka.
“Another, please. For my math skills.”
“Go home OK.”
“Not OK.”
The bartender shook his head, no doubt tired from putting up with English tourists all day, and left me alone. But he didn’t bring me another drink. Finally, I left some money on the bar, everything I had on me, and swam to my feet. Leaning on the bar, I bid him a good night and wished him a happy and prosperous life with a fine woman and many healthy children.
“I call you taxi,” he said.
“Afraid not,” I said, pointing at the money on the bar. “I’m broke. No more pieniadze.”
He muttered something under his breath which made two of the remaining patrons chuckle. My phone vibrated. Swaying, I made my way to the exit and passed into the street.
Sweet nighttime! With its cold air like a helpful slap to a drunken face. Perk up, motherfucker! The medieval atmosphere, with Wawel Castle looking down on you and the guy in the tower who plays the trumpet every hour. And me, trying to keep sharp enough to find my way to my AirBnb.
But tonight the night streets were eerie.
Empty and dark, and the only sounds were a distant, howling wind, and the rattle of receding trams. Always receding, as if away from me…
I wandered along the main street, passing between patches of light, then turned into what I believed was the street leading to the place I was staying, but it wasn’t, and all the streets looked alike, and even though I was sure I only turned one-hundred and eighty degrees and walked straight, I couldn’t even find my way back to the main street. It was as if the city had ensnared me. Lured me in and closed all the exits. And there was no one to help, and all the shops were closed, and all the windows were dark.
I saw then a small figure loitering ahead under a streetlight.
But when I neared, it had gone.
It soon appeared again, but this time behind me. Keeping a distance. The tapping of its soles faint and intermittent. I rounded a corner, and so did it. Or were the tapping soles perhaps mine? The air had somehow warmed and no longer delivered its welcome slap. Sleep, motherfucker. Sleep…
My phone vibrated but I was too scared to take it out and look at it. Besides, the surroundings now seemed familiar. I rounded a corner, expecting to come upon my building—
But instead there stood the small figure!
It looked like a boy.
He was wearing an odd red hat, but a mensch would never be afraid of a boy, no matter how Polish. So, “Hello,” I yelled out, and said the address of my AirBnb, and asked, “Do you know perhaps where this is? Wiesz gdzie to?”
He said nothing, but began to rub his belly and smack his lips, and I saw that his red-capped head was disproportionately large for his body, and his arms were dreadfully thin.
“Where are your parents? Gdzie ty rodzice?” I asked. Maybe they would know the way home. Another thought: what was a boy doing out at this ungodly hour anyway?
My heart was beating faster.
“Gdzie ty rodzice,” he repeated in a rasping, unchildlike voice. Then he rubbed his belly once more, smacked his lips and, pointing to himself with an abnormally long finger that terminated on a fingernail—It caught the streetlight like an organic blade, like a werewolf’s yellowed fang.—that grew upwards at a disgustingly unnatural angle, said: “Kneadly.”
I ran.
Frightened sober, I ran. Away from that wretched creature! To anywhere at all, past the sleeping city, through the desolate streets, heart and feet pounding in horrified rhythm. Yet he was there. Everywhere I ran: Kneadly loomed, ahead, behind, and beside. Those gangly arms and that rasping voice that sounded like old trams and dying cats. That red hat like an unwavering beacon of the promise of unbounded horror!
I fell against a wide door.
My door. The door to my AirBnb, my sanctuary. And he was not there. I looked, and he was not there. With trembling fingers I punched in the security code, opened the door and slid inside and closed it, slumping backwards to make sure the lock took. I was safe at last. Mentally clear but sweating, I plodded up the unlit stairwell past the signs in English warning me to be quiet in consideration to the locals living in the building, and entered my unit.
I took off my jacket and threw it to the ground.
What a night, I thought. Maybe it was time to cut down on the drinking. Hallucinating about some menacing freak-child. My therapist would have a field day with that. But that was for later. What I needed now was a drink. Something to quiet the heart and still the nerves. Something small. I rummaged through my stuff until I found a half-finished bottle of brandy, and took a swig from the bottle. Vodka was for getting sloshed. Brandy was for gentlemen and connoisseurs, refined men of the age which I was approaching. It therefore suited me. I took another drink, and crawled into my unmade bed with the bottle, cradling it, carressing it…
“Gdzie ty rodzice“
The sweet fuck was that?
“Kneadly—”
And he was there, standing at the foot of my bed with his giant head down and shoulders sloped forward. I could hear the smacking of his lips. The trams had all left the city. The cats had all died.
I threw the bottle of brandy at him.
It missed, crashing against the wall and leaving a wet, brown, dripping stain. Everything stank of urine and alcohol.
“What the hell do you want me?” I screamed.
He lifted his head.
“Kneadly.”
And he leapt onto the bed, then on top of me, and I tried beating him away, tossing him aside, but despite his small size he was heavier than a sack of bricks, than a hundred bags of wheat, than any human could possibly be. I had trouble breathing. I couldn’t speak. He seemed to be sinking into me, crushing me. I hadn’t even the energy to swing at him, and, wheezing, could only stare at his globular, protruding eyes, and his ears, tufted with long red hairs and sticking out from his head like pot handles. His neck, I saw now, was as thin as his arms, and it was a sin against the laws of physics that it managed to hold up his massive head.
And he was cold, so god-awfully cold.
His chilling inhuman heaviness sapped not only my ability but my will to fight, to struggle against him. It was therefore through dimming eyes that I saw him lift up his shirt and expose his bulbous belly, freckled and containing one long vertical scar. He rubbed his belly with his hands, smacked his lips—and, tearing into his own flesh with his long fingers and crooked, blade-like fingernails, opened himself along the line of the scar, letting all his warm and steaming innards, organs and intestines, fall out upon me.
In my head I wailed!
In my room, all possibility of sound had been suffocated out of me. Helpless, I but cried silent tears that ran down my cheeks and neck and mixed with the bloody mess on top of me.
But just as I expected my own death, he began to pick up his intestines and slide them to the mattress on either side of me, and I could breathe. Weakly but sufficiently. Deep within my condensed chest, my lungs pumped: inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling…
I couldn’t tell what was worse, the sight of his vacant belly, with its loose flaps of flesh, or the putrid smell of his insides, conjuring for me the inner sanctum of a cannibal slaughterhouse. Then there was his breath, which seeped from between his lips even when they were closed, greenish in hue and boggy in texture. He leaned his face closer now to mine, and whispered his name, and I smelled even more pungently his diet of horseradish and garlic. Then he parted his lips and snarled, letting fall his warted tongue and revealing his teeth, sharp and jutting forward from his gums as unnaturally as his fingernails. They angled toward me, and from their tips saliva dripped onto my face as acid, as pure and undiluted, hissing alcohol—
With desperation I threw my right arm straight at his head!
It took all my strength!
And it failed.
He ducked easily under my hand, and all I could manage was to grab a fistful of his red hat and pull it off. But how that drove him mad! He clutched at his baldness, at the few remaining wisps of hair, at the pale skin which had never seen the sun. Then he receded, and with a kind of sheepishness stretched out one of his spindly limbs, as if politely asking for his hat back, and for reasons I do not understand except to say they were deeply instinctual, I obliged him by handing it over.
He clutched the hat solemnly to his chest, bowed slightly while still straddling my crushed and helpless body, pulled his vitals back into his belly, sealed his belly along the line of his scar, and was standing once more at the foot of my bed with the red hat replaced upon his head. Winking, he disappeared.
I was left alone, gasping and gagging on the bed, still soaked with blood and snot and bile. The wall, however, was unstained; and the brandy stood unshattered and half-full on the floor, topped carefully by its red bottle cap.
I showered.
Then I sat in a chair and by the light of dawn wrote out all that had happened to me so that I would never forget it. As I wrote, I felt myself being released from something ancient. After I finished, I read what I’d written and could barely make out my own fucking voice in all that shit. It was like reading a story, even though I was still holding the ballpoint pen and I could still remember in vivid goddamn detail everything that had happened. The details were mine but there was no way the words were. Anyway, what I felt most right then was sober.
I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since.
Whenever Cormac messages me, I write back right away. He’s the only person I’ve ever told about Kneadly until now.
I told my therapist that what happened in Lesser Poland was just me getting absolutely, almost fatally, sloshed, but that’s not true. What happened was a lot more fucked up and mythological than that. “You did something very difficult. You tackled your demon head on and you won,” my therapist says.
Some days, I think he’s right.