I’ve always had a habit of cracking my knuckles. Well, not always. When I was younger, I wasn’t able to do it at all. In fact the most impressive I could do was the occasional snap of my toes when I scrunched them up in the early morning. But as I grew older, I watched the people around me more and more. I was young, just starting high school. Of course I wanted to fit in. So I would try. At first all that happened was a rather unimpressive pop from one finger on my left hand. But as the days stretched longer and longer, I found I had built up quite a habit. Now I struggle to make it through a day where I don’t hear the satisfying crack. I can do it with one hand. One finger pushing on another. I think I saw it in a movie or tv-show once.
I was used to accidentally cracking my knuckles too loud. Once in the middle on an exam, the entire row turned to look at me. It’s ironic really; the thing that I learned to fit in had made me stand out even more. Not that I minded too much, I loved things that I could talk about. I could make a story from any little inconvenience. I think that if I had better social skills and charisma, I might have pursued quite a successful career in stand up comedy. But that was not the case. No, instead all I had were funny little tales to tell my friends and an annoying childhood habit to carry with me.
It was on one such occasion that it happened. It was a summer night, still air that hung thick with warm damp, promising rain to come. I never slept well on those nights. I always felt like I was on holiday, the first night in a new country. The pillow would feel too soft or too high and the mattress would make your shoulders stiff by the next morning, giving little chance of a restful night. They would always be what I would blame for the bags under my eyes or my sour attitude once the sun had risen. But that was only because I knew those issues could be fixed. The worst thing was, and always would be in my mind, the heavy humid air. Night air is not supposed to be warm. Night air should not hang but be blown by the wind, cutting through the people on the streets below and letting central heating and large blankets protect those inside. But at least on holiday, you could find a fan of sorts close by. And when that was running, you could feel the tip of your nose turn to ice and then bundle up in your covers as it should be. And at least on holiday, that kind of weather isn’t unusual.
You see, unusually warm or cold weather does something to houses, or at least houses like mine. It causes them to shift slightly. To the point where stairways will creak with nothing on them, and window frames will crack like a bullwhip; startling you from sleep. An old house settling is normal, but the dark and alien feeling of the night air on your skin sends your mind into havoc. Each sound is a killer, every stray movement in the corner of your vision is a spirit. And each time you slip off, on the cusp of dreaming, your mind convinces you that those strange black figures in your mind’s eye are right behind you. I hated it.
So I was up late, using a thin hardback book as a fan, while I scrolled mindlessly through some social media site or other. My body was so tired. I could feel my muscles, aching from the run I had been on earlier in the day. My eyes were half open and I had convinced myself that if I closed one eye at a time they would stop feeling like lead. I wanted nothing more than the climb under my bedsheet and drift off to sleep. But something stopped me. Perhaps it was the beginning of the Insomnia I was diagnosed with a few months after this. Perhaps it was something else. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I was awake and mindlessly, as I so often did then, cracked three fingers on my right hand in quick succession. I thought nothing of it until I heard the accompanying crack of the windows in the house settling. I didn’t think of it as being an echo of my own actions. I think I more saw it as expected. I had allowed for noise to exist so late into the night when usually there would be nothing. It made me jump, slightly. And I was very aware of the fact that if there was anyone awake in the house, they would know I was awake too.
It was a strange, unbidden thought. And I dismissed it out of hand. I was always paranoid at night. There was a certain danger to being awake too late. As a child that danger had been my parents. I had been caught once or twice reading well past midnight and it hadn’t taken long for me to learn that it was far better to finish the chapter tomorrow than to risk leaving the light on and being found out. I suppose that stuck with me into young adulthood. Maybe pop culture helped too. Bad things always seem to happen after midnight. They were right. At least in my case.
I was really struggling to stay awake now. Deciding it was time to hit the hay, I stretched myself out from the crouched position I had been in. I felt a few small pop’s in my lower back. And then, almost immediately after, I heard the sound of the walls in the house settling. The wood creaking a crude imitation of me. Though strangely, the sound seemed much further off than it should have. That was enough to make me keep the light on, regardless of the electricity bill I was trying so hard to stay on top of. It was hard to sleep in the harsh yellow light, but at least I felt safe. As I fell into unconsciousness, I could convince myself it was daytime and that I was dozing off peacefully under the midday sun.
When I woke up, it was early morning. Not too early, maybe 5am or so. There was knocking on my door, harsh and abrupt. The kind that expects an answer. So I pulled myself out of bed and opened it. A police officer stood there. He looked much too serious for the time of morning and if he was shocked or embarrassed by seeing a woman in boxers and a sheer T-shirt open the door, he didn’t show it.
“Sorry to wake you, miss” he said. “There’s been an incident last night. We was wondering if you’d seen anything.”
I grumbled out some half coherent sentences saying I “hadn’t heard anything“ and “did he know what time it was?” and that this was a “very nice neighbourhood so what could really be so bad?”
Apparently when I had been busy trying not to pass out at my computer, two young women had been attacked when walking home from a night out. Apparently they had been at a friend’s house and decided to leave around 2am. When they were making their way home someone had followed. That someone had smashed the fingers of the first girl and then pushed the second where she had fractured her spine. I saw the photos online later. And I remember thinking how strange it was that the police had determined the attacker had used a hammer. Because the bones of the first girl had been broken completely, but there was no bruising at all on the skin. It was a healthy, fresh pink with no visible wounds at all. Even the skin stretched over the bone that had impaled the middle of her hand seemed healthy.
That had been...unnerving. They never caught the guy. My mum had called to tell me, very sternly, that I was to take a taxi home whenever I was out too late, no matter how drunk I felt. And that was really the extent to which it affected my life. It seems cruel to say but I never thought about those girls except when they were brought up in conversation. Then I would get to tell my story of being woken up by a burly policeman and questioned. It was fun, to insert yourself into a narrative. Even if you did somewhat belong. But the character of bystander always needs some embellishing. And my friends all knew that.
Then, before I knew it, it was another humid night. And I was up late again. It had been a sunny few days but that day had been the first warm one. Very warm in fact. I remember thinking it was perfect weather for a summer gala. It was much the same as last time. I was lost in my thoughts scrolling through some blog and then absentmindedly cracked my shoulders. Well maybe not absentmindedly...It was like an itch. Something that begged you to pay attention, something you couldn’t ignore. So I didn’t. I had no reason too.
This time I heard the scream outside my bedroom window. My first reaction seems silly in retrospect. I hid. Under the covers. I pulled them tight around me and held still, waiting for something to happen. I was scared of course. A man was screaming right outside of my home, and it was a bloodcurdling scream. I’ve never heard anything like it. I don’t want to hear anything like it again. And what if some crazed lunatic had done something to him? What if it was the same man that had attacked the girls. What if...he saw me look out of the window and came for me.
My mind has trouble at times from distinguishing the possible from the impossible. Or at least the very improbable. Even so, after a long few minutes, the screaming hadn’t stopped. I told myself I had to look. Because if this man was suffering, I had to know so I could call an ambulance. Or perhaps the police.
I don’t know what I expected when I pulled back the curtain. I think I at least expected blood. There wasn’t any. What there was, at first glance, was a normal man lying on the pavement. He looked a bit pale but that might have just been the moonlight. I was ready to lean out the window and tell him to shut up. I was so tired and he was so loud and fearful and quite honestly I did not want to hear some crazy man scream for no good reason. It’s as I opened the window and leaned forward that I saw what was wrong. And it was very wrong.
His shoulder seemed to be cut in half. And not a clean half. There were jagged pierced of what I could only assume were bone jutting out of the skin at strange angles. It seemed as though his arm had been grabbed and then pushed upwards while the rest of his body had remained completely still, some of the bone going through his shoulder, stretching his skin to below his ear. The rest had been forced through his collarbone, creating a terrifying picture of skin was stretched impossibly across a mosaic of shattered bone. No fall could’ve done this. This was deliberate. Some psycho must have came at this poor man with a shovel or a sledgehammer or something. And then left him to die, to bleed out on the streets.
And then I remembered. The horror had taken me away from my first observation. I was so sure this man’s injuries would kill him. There was no blood anywhere. No wounds. Just the awful contortion of his upper body. It didn’t seem possible.
It was there, leaning out through my bedroom window, that I felt it. An itching. It started at the middle of my shoulder blades and crawled up further, becoming more insistent. I don’t know why I tried to ignore it. I had no reason to believe anything bad could happen from cracking my back.Maybe it was the shock from what I was seeing. I couldn’t indulge in a stupid habit when there was a man below me who so clearly should be dead. Instead I let it travel up further and further until it surrounded my neck. And stopped.
I gasped. I must have been quiet before, observing in shocked silence. It was the first noise I had made. The man look up at me. The action looked painful and he had not stopped screaming, though it had gotten quieter. Perhaps he was losing his voice. It was as he looked up at me that I felt the itch grow stronger. I needed to crack my neck. I needed to in the way that you need to breathe. No matter how long you hold your breath, it’s an eventuality that at some point, you have to breathe. The feeling gripped me, and I suddenly had a terrible, terrible feeling about this.
I stared back at the man who had gone quiet. His eyes were filled with undiluted fear. I watched those eyes follow my shaking arm as it gripped the side of my head firmly. And pulled.
There was a stunningly loud crack. One I hadn’t expected. It echoed around the room. My gaze hadn’t left the man who was lying there. It never left. Not even as the bones in his neck popped out of place and shattered. One by one. Even as the pieces drove themselves into his spinal cord and blood vessels and windpipe. He was breathing faster and faster, sucking those hard little fragments into his lungs where they tore away at his insides. I did not move as he spluttered dark red and made a sound no human should be able to make with their voice box intact. Looking back, I don’t think it was.
He collapsed in a heap, half on the road, blood leaking from his mouth and nose. And still I could not turn away. Because his neck was still convulsing. I could still see the bones shift and push through muscle, stretching the skin. And then finally, after what might have been hours, it stopped. And I could be sure he was dead.
The ambulance arrived after a woman on a jog had found him, or so the police told me. I told them I hadn’t been awake. I had no idea what had happened. They said other neighbours had been woken up by the screams, why wasn’t I? I told them how heavy a sleeper I was, and a classic family story of how my mother had slept through an actual hurricane. They exchanged looks. As if they were not in the mood to listen to a chatterbox at 6am on a Sunday morning.
They let me go. Of course they did. There was no evidence to convict me. Still, I laid in my bed for days afterwards. Fighting the urge to cry or scream. Constantly fighting the urge to crack my aching back.
I know better now. I know that if I keep busy, I can keep my mind off the itching. I moved as well. To a small run down cottage in the country. Very far away from anyone else. I have to leave an hour before my work to get there on time now, but that’s okay. I think this thing has a radius of sorts. The closest person is affected. But if there is no-one close, I don’t think it does anything.
That’s not to say there haven’t been accidents. People out walking on horribly warm summer nights. How am I to know they’re there until it’s much too late? People tend to avoid coming close anyway. The stories of mangled dog walkers are enough to keep the young kids away. The pictures do the trick for everyone else.
I am trying to stop. I don’t crack my knuckles much anymore. I don’t crack anything much. It’s only when that insatiable need crawls across my skin that I do. I have to leave work sometimes and drive home just to crack a few fingers. Once or twice I haven’t made it that far. I have learned to keep a looser grip on the steering wheel now. So it can’t be said that I’m not trying. But even now, my whole body itches and shudders and I can’t help but hear the soothing pop of joints as they ease up again. And it is so very soothing. As I said, it’s a habit. And a habit is a very hard thing to break.
