Skelmoth

We discovered the crab when emptying the washing machine's lint collector. It was no bigger than a five pence piece and translucent. Its limbs were caught in the lint. Most would have flushed it down the sink, but we decided to keep the crab. We placed it in a jam jar, half filled with water, and fed it prawns from the freezer.

We kept the jam jar near the kettle and whenever one of us was waiting for the water to boil we would bring our faces close to the curving glass and smile at the crab. It seemed to recognise us and would raise its claws in greeting. Occasionally it would tap upon the glass, softly, with no violence, just enough for us to know it was trying to communicate.

We soon found that it only ate the prawns if it was starving. At the pet shop, we purchased a number of different feeds. It enjoyed bloodworms the most. When we emptied them into the jar, it would devour them, stuffing its mandibles until its innards shone redly. We brought the jar to the dinner table, so that it could eat with us.

Some mornings, when we came downstairs, we found a ghostly second version of the crab in the jam jar. We fished out this remnant with pliers. Often it collapsed upon contact. Soon enough the crab’s claws were hampered by the glass and it struggled, at times, to settle into a comfortable position to sleep. We moved it to a tank; this, we positioned at the foot of the dinner table. 

Inside the tank was a grey plastic cove, dotted with red and white ferns. The crab slumbered here throughout the day. It emerged only to eat its bloodworms and, we felt, be part of the family. We were a laughing family back then, and our lives felt filled with great joy. The crab tapped occasionally upon the glass and this tapping seemed to coincide with our laughter, as if it were laughing with us. 

I cannot remember which of us had the dream first. But it became the dream we all had, night after night. It consisted of a cavern, vast, with water dripping from the stalactites, and the dripping echoing, and other sounds, sounds like words, but not words we could make out, only really the vague feeling of the words, resounding about the cave. The feeling of the words was Skelmoth. 

We did not know what it meant, but we awoke with the word upon our tongues. We thought nothing of the dream.

The crab grew bigger. When it found it could push open the lid of the tank with a claw, it escaped. When this first happened, we feared the worst, that somehow it had been snatched up by the birds or trampled by the tires of a car, but instead we found it in the linen basket, nestled among our discarded clothes. It looked up at us blissfully, with two black eyes, and we decided that perhaps we had no need for a tank, that the crab could simply wander the house. 

The crab’s newfound freedom quickly translated to dinner time anecdotes. Sometimes the crab climbed into the shower with us or followed us, insistently, about the house, watching with watery eyes as we made sandwiches or collected items for school. We discussed its favourite perches and sleeping spots - under the sofa, upon the shelving above the boiler, once, in the washing machine, as if trying to return to its place of origin.

I don’t wish to discuss the welts that began appearing on our arms and legs. Welts in the shape of a tightly curved ‘c’. Nor do I wish to discuss the time we rushed ourselves into a car and drove to hospital, as one of us, one of the younger ones, had lost too much blood. When we returned, we discussed what we would do with the crab. It sat innocently - or apparently innocently - at our feet. We could not face driving out to the sea and letting it go free. It would die, we felt. And was it not our fault that the crab could not fend for itself? Was it not us who had robbed it of the experience necessary to survive? 

But we could no longer give the crab free reign of the house, especially not at night, so we closed it in the front room. Within an hour, we were woken by a rhythmic tapping, repeated every minute. One, two, three, of the claw upon the door, and kept up at all hours. After three nights of broken sleep, it was agreed that the shed would be emptied of tools and made into a home for the crab. 

The dreams did not diminish though. We found ourselves in the cavern every night, but now we could sense there was some great beast slumbering within the cavern alongside us. We could not turn our heads to see it. The word - Skelmoth - became clearer in the dream and started to bleed into our everyday lives. We found ourselves idly writing the word on notebooks and hearing it, faintly, within the walls of our house. We still did not know what it meant, only that it could not be escaped.

On the day we moved the crab to the shed, a light rain was falling. The crab exited the house side-wise, tempted, as it was, by a bucket filled with earthworms (these were the replacement for the blood worms which were now too expensive to feed it). It paused when it stepped out into the fresh air and looked to the sky. Its mandibles twitched. The crab was the size of a wheelbarrow at this point. Its shell had hardened to a crisp white that glittered like sandstone. It adjusted, quickly, to the feel of the outside air and then, remembering the earthworms, came scuttling after us.

We locked it in the shed. Back inside, we attended to our guilt. We knew the shed would be cold, too cold for the crab, and lonely, though we reasoned that a crab could not get lonely. Every night, we went out to the shed with buckets of food. At first, the crab was eager to see us. It would scrap its claws against the wood and strike insistently at the door so that the lock rattled, but as the days wore on, the crab seemed to grow tired of this game. When we arrived, we would find it lying, legs and claws tucked beneath itself, sleeping. Although in the mornings when we came to collect the bucket, we always found it empty.

Skelmoth - this word continued to disturb us. We began to search for it in libraries and on the internet. We found only nonsense. On certain occasions, we would be reading books and glance the word, only to look again and find that we had simply misread some other innocuous set of letters. The only mention we found of Skelmoth was in the manuscript of a cloister of medieval nuns. The word - well, the lithograph - was merely a picture of horses, but when you looked at it, the word came clearly to light. Skelmoth. An author of an article on this particular lithograph was disturbed and searched for the word elsewhere, but he found nothing, and when we looked into the details, he had died some forty years prior.

Pets were going missing. Mostly dogs. Posters were pasted onto lamp posts and telegraph poles, displaying frolicking canines in back gardens and cats perched neatly on windowsills. The police were involved; a facebook group was created: October Country Pet Lookout. Some pets were never seen again, and a glut of funerals took place. Others returned home, limping, bloodied, as if they had been fighting for their life. A dog was found washed up in the river, disembowelled and partially eaten. This disturbed everybody in the village, and soon enough pets were locked indoors, for fear they may become the next victim.

On occasion, we would find two crabs in the shed, one asleep and the other, ghost-like, made of fine, paper-like skin. These residues of our crab were robust enough that they could be removed and placed in the garden like statues. The rain got to them eventually, and they would diminish, collapsing in upon themselves, before the wind wafted away their fragments or the jackdaws arrived to feast.

Then, one night, a neighbour appeared at our door. He had his phone out and wished to show us the cuts on his dog’s stomach. He insisted on coming in. In the front room, he showed us the cuts. Three gashes across the stomach. It’s the crab, he said. We indicated the locked shed. It burrows out of the shed, he said. It goes through the ground. It needs to be got rid of, he said, before it does any more damage. Then he went madly to the backdoor. We surged after him but already he was in the garden. He had picked up a spade from the set of tools leant against the fence and begun striking at the shed’s lock. We tried to stop him, but he lashed at us. This is madness, we said, standing back now, but he kept beating at the lock and when it cracked and came off, we felt our hearts sink.

This was it, we thought, foolishly, not knowing what would soon occur.

In the shadows of the shed, only the outline of the crab could be seen. It was vast now and when it stood, we saw the shed could barely contain it. Our neighbour tried to strike at the crab with the spade, but up came the claw and severed the shaft in two. He turned to the other implements on the lawn, but before he could reach them, the crab gripped him by the waist and lifted him from the ground. 

He screamed and grappled with the pincers as they dug into his stomach.

The crab pulled itself from the garden shed. There was a moment where it looked at the neighbour, squirming in its claw and the neighbour's terrified face was reflected in the blackness of its eyes. It looked upon him with malicious indifference; there was no anger from the attack with the spade, nor a hatred towards him, instead only the cold acknowledgement of its place and his place within the order of the world. It dropped him upon the garden lawn. We saw what we must do.

We pinned him to the floor, placing our weight on his limbs. His legs kicked and thrashed, gouging lines into the soil. He continued to scream, but we knew that no one would come to help him. The crab observed us. It wished us to utter its name before it feasted.

Our voices rose as one.

Skelmoth, we chanted into the night air. 

Skelmoth, we chanted as its mandibles touched our neighbour’s neck.

Skelmoth, we chanted, knowing not what we had become.