Tale #25: Absolutes and Absolutely-Nots (Illustration)

Tale #25: Absolutes and Absolutely-Nots (Part 3 to Shortcomings and Goings) (Content Tags: Ongoing story, messy diapers, age regression, mental regression, surreal horror, monster) Day to day, I felt the listless call of my own demise. The air was thick with tension, with paranoia, and of course with the putrid plumes that so often wafted up from the sagging rear of my diaper. There could never be a peaceful moment, never a moment of rest for my tormented mind. How could there be? I was a wounded fawn being stalked by the maw of an unimaginable horror. Every turned corner, every time I closed my eyes, I feared that the beast would pounce and tear what remained of me away. It made me jumpy, distracted, and unable to function in this mangled role that I'd had to assume. I was already considered slow by my peers, so being even more vacant was only drawing more mockery. Unsurprisingly, I cared very little about the jeers and jabs of a bunch of snot-nosed grade schoolers; they were absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of my current predicament. Children might be monsters, but only one 'child' was a monster that I really feared. I was continuing my plan, the best I could. With Pull-Ups a distant memory, there was one last place that he could find me alone outside my house, and I'd been safe from the tendrils of his influence. It was odd to be actually happy for a full return to diapers, but they'd admittedly made me safer than ever before. Any humiliation or disgust was a secondary feeling to survival, to fear. Sure, I didn't like sitting in my own stinking filth, nor did I like the negative attention that it earned me, but I often felt too detached from this new reality to dwell on it. Soiling myself had just become a thing that happened every day, sometimes multiple times. It'd become casual. The beast hadn't given me any more trouble lately, and I was actually starting to get a sense that it might be done trying to hunt me. How long could a starving coyote lay outside the warren of a wounded rabbit? With how it hunted, couldn't it simply pick another target to prey upon? That'd ironically sent me, the wounded hare, down a rabbit hole of intrigue. There had to be a reason for the fixation, and if I could figure that out, then maybe I could also figure out a way to repel the monster for good, or maybe even slay it. I was almost perfectly confident that it was a physical entity, due to the weight of its presence, so that must mean it could be captured or killed, right? That led to some pretty uncomfortable introspection though. I had to face the facts: I was small, weak, and my mental output was but a fraction of what it had been at the start. Internally, I felt that my intellect had hardly changed, but externally I fumbled simple things and was the dimwit of my classroom. All in all, I wasn't a very impressive specimen to be used in hunting an eldritch abomination. But I was also the only one that had the capability to do so. Nobody else could see him, since he never made himself known to them, and I wasn't even sure if that was a conscious ability or not. It was possible, strange as it all was, that the entity had some kind of inherent cloaking mechanism that flashed it between dimensions whenever the presence of another person made itself clear. I began to write everything down, my notes looking like barely legible scrawls with a plethora of spelling and syntax sins. I documented every encounter that I'd had with the monster, and every question that it had asked me, accompanied by what the question had taken from me. There was an interesting curve in the data. In the beginning, it had showed up very frequently, but it had taken only minuscule things. Then, it became a little less frequent and started to take much bigger things. Now? Since he'd assumed this current form, the beast had been showing up less and less, and taking smaller and smaller things from him. This made a case for either a behavior or something circumstantial. Maybe it had rules it had to follow? Well, not 'rules' as we would know them, but rather a protocol of hunting that was ingrained in it; absolutes that dictated how it should feed. Maybe it had started only with tasting him? Or maybe it had to soften him up, before it could begin to take larger bites? Its behavior now was easier to understand. It was desperate and hungry, and it couldn't reach its prey. The few times he'd seen it in the last month had made the creature strain credulity of its fleshy facade with how aggressive and animalistic it now seemed. It kept showing up at windows and at the door, but it couldn't get in, even when his parents left either open for large enough periods of time for it to sneak in. I was quickly becoming agoraphobic for a very rational reason. The outside was a vicious jungle, while the inside of my house was absolute sanctuary. A less rational part of my brain almost wanted to feed a little bit more of myself to the beast, so I wouldn't have to worry about it at school either. I strung up my notes on a white posterboard, sloppily taping each one, so that I had a larger visualization of everything I currently knew. There was one thing that stood out in terms of building a defense: my ability to hear those dreadful questions. It never laid a hand on me physically, but it attacked verbally and then mentally. The question was a way to spark a memory, whether I wanted to remember things or not, and that memory seemed to be the thing that it fed on. If I couldn't hear the questions, then it wouldn't have anything to devour, right? I was too much of a coward to perforate my eardrums. It was technically the most surefire solution to deafen myself, but it would also be the most painful and potentially permanent, and I wasn't even fully confident that this tactic would work at all. No, I'd need to try something less severe first. It came to me soon after, when my dad had come back from a hunting trip. Earplugs! Little orange foamy pieces that I could stuff deep into my ears to make any words completely unintelligible. I asked my dad if I could have a pair, but he denied me, commenting that he didn't want me playing with his things. That didn't really matter, since I had a good idea of where he kept them, the only real question was whether it was a safe place to go. The garage. It wasn't technically a part of the house by connection, but it was still considered 'part' of the house, wasn't it? That distinction was the pivotal factor here. It was either safe, or it wasn't. I had to really deliberate on the whole thing, and whether or not this was a worthwhile risk to take; I could just *make* earplugs, couldn't I? But I knew they wouldn't be anywhere near as effective as something meant to blunt literal gunshots. Anything I made myself would just be a risk all its own to use, and what materials did I even have on hand? The only puffy thing I had access to were my diapers, and while that fluff did a great job at cushioning my rump and wicking away wetness, I had my doubts that it'd be malleable to work with. I had to go into the garage, regardless of the risks, and it had to be alone. I couldn't go in with my parents, since I wasn't allowed to have what I planned to take, and I didn't really have any 'friends', since I was smelly pariah to my peers. There was nobody I could effectively use to ward off the brutal abyss of the beast. I did it. I steeled my nerves, I tugged up my diaper like the man I still considered myself to be, and I march-waddled out the back door. Less than five feet away was the door to the garage, so I leaped forward and grabbed onto the knob, swinging the door inward in one fell swoop. I shut it behind me, unsure whether that might help, and I quickly plodded on to seek out what I sought. The garage was kept tidy, courtesy of my tightly wound father, but there were still a lot of nooks and crannies that I had to dig through. "Golf clubs, lawn chairs, tackle box, don't know what this is, dumbbells, firewood..." I mumbled out loud to myself, my finger scanning the walls for anything that looked related to camping or hunting. "Whhhheeeenn....Whhennn...." My body froze up as I heard a raspy, wheezing voice behind me. It sounded winded, coarse and scratchy, like a life-long smoker on their last leg. "Waaaaassss...." I had to hurry. I started to fumble things off the shelves, desperately needing to find those earplugs. For whatever reason, the creature was struggling right now, so there was still time left to defend myself. "Theeeee.. laaast---laaasst--tiiime..." I tried to block it out. If I let myself hear what it was saying, or if I worried about how close it was, then I would be screwed. I *had* to find those earplugs. "..Y--y--yhhhhouuu....p-poooped innn h-heere?" I'd just found them. In my reckless ravaging, the orange gifts from god had tumbled out of a cardboard box full of the suckers. I grabbed two of them off the ground behind me and started to raise them to my ears. I wasn't fast enough. "I...I was five. I was playing in here while my dad was working on his car. I thought I just had to fart, but I ended up pooping my favorite pair of Toy Story undies, the ones with the sheriff badges..." There was a gassy rumble and the sound of something downright diarrheal from my diaper. I could feel something hot and sticky against my bottom. I felt stunned, and instead of putting in the earplugs, I looked up to satisfy a morbid curiosity. It looked like a nightmare. The creature's disguise, the form of a creepy little boy, was sickly looking. The features on its face were gaunt and sunken in. It looked like the skinsuit was a wet shirt being stretched taut over an unearthly, unsightly form. Bumpy, boney, and as if hundreds of squirming worms were wriggling right underneath that sallow skin. If the entity wasn't already making me soil myself, the sight of it would have done the job instead. It had looked bad the last time I saw it, and when it'd seemed angry, it'd looked like its false flesh was ready to burst at the seams. This time it looked like it was barely holding itself together at all, like it might have genuinely starved to death if I hadn't gotten gung-ho about being more proactive. "When...was...the..first time...you...used the potty?" The questions seemed different this time. I'd been used to each encounter having the questions be progressively geared younger, but these seemed more sporadic, like it was going back to things it had skipped over. This question had a lot more proximity with the one I'd been asked in the bathroom, but going up instead of down. Compulsively, I answered him, and simultaneously grunted out a large solid turd into the back of my Huggies. I could literally see him starting to appear healthier, my forced memories giving him sustenance. The beast was getting its energy back, and the wheezing began to disappear from its voice. "What was your mother's nickname for you as a toddler? Did you want to give up your diapers? Did you like using the potty? When did you stop sucking your thumb? When did you stop wetting the bed? When was the last time you pooped the bed? Did your friends ever find out? Did you get punished for it? Death by a thousand cuts, or in this case, nibbles. This wasn't a shark passing back and forth taking bites, this was a humanoid piranha swarm nicking the legs over and over until the wound became a problem. With its apparent hunger, it was no surprise it was going hog-wild now, even if it was taking small bites. "Captain Stinky...No...No...Ten...Twelve...Eight...Yes.. Yes.." I didn't even have time to expound upon each question, my mind being painfully barraged by upturned memories, dug violently out of my subconscious. Each answer fed him, each answer transformed me, and each answer resulted in a sloppy, plopping payload in my pants. It was uncontrollable, and it happened in under a minute; each sequential strain and push adding more to puffy pair of babypants that could only do so much. My shorts had disappeared at some point anyways, which was at least good news for my rapidly filling diaper, but it was quickly becoming too difficult to maintain this stance with how heavy and full my pants were becoming. "...When was the first time you stole a diaper and why did you act like a baby?" "I was four, and I really, really wanted my diapers back...I really liked them, I was jealous of a neighbor that still got to wear them...So, I waited for him to get changed, and I stole a damp one to put on, then I acted like a baby in my room, I played pretend....I wanted to just be a dumb baby so badly, and so I squatted down and started to poop--" This was a revelation of another color, and something that I'd buried deep inside. There was a treasure trove of things I wanted to stay deep below the surface, but the beast had finally dredged up the start of something juicy. In the middle of my guilty answer, my diaper had continued to accept my very charitable dirty donation of droppings, but all the questions had proved too much. I farted too hard, pushed out too powerful of a load, and I lost my balance and started to fall forward. I fell *into* the creature, midsentence. I don't know how, but I'd gone into some sort of strange pocket dimension within its core. It was a black void, but film reels zipped all around me, moving fast enough to create motion in the pictures. It was a massive, perpetually shifting tapestry of reels. I saw one and recognized that I was the person in it. It was some existential slice of my own history, the very memory I'd just been previously sharing. I reached out and grabbed it, trying to pull it out of the nothingness. My other hand grabbed another one, and then I started to double up with each clenched fist. I could feel something from contact with them, but I couldn't explain it. Suddenly, a white hole appeared behind me and began to suck me backwards like a cosmic vacuum; I tried to hold onto the reels, but they eventually snapped off from wherever their 'end' was, and I tumbled back outside the creature. I was still holding something in my hands...Something was coming from the creature. It let out a pained howl, two inky snakes coming from its torso, and with my hands gripping the both of them. It wasn't even pretending to sound human right now, just making animalistic screeches and guttural roars. The garage door suddenly opened, and the entity disappeared, taking its 'reels' with it. My mother poked her head in and looked at me sitting on the floor, surrounded by the chaos of my earplug search. "There you are, Captain Stinky! Have you been making a big mess in here?" She chided, coming closer and wrinkling her nose. "Oh yes you have! Shoo-wee!" She picked me up from underneath the armpits and my extremely full diaper sagged down unimpeded, which betrayed just how many attacks I'd weathered from the encounter. I still didn't know what I'd lost though, or maybe with those film reels, I had gained something? I couldn't be absolutely sure either way. Right after the inevitable diaper change, I, would need to find a mirror and regroup my plans.