The Bottled Worm

It was hot tonight in Yucatan. I had imbibed the local Tequila, but not too much and like the bottled worm, swirled with my Mexican dove, Estrella, the pearl I had been seeking my whole life and now held onto tight.

Her father disapproved of me, an entitled gringo from Belgravia, and tonight he displayed his grievance with the loudest possible cursings and flicked unctuous oils upon my countenance as his countrymen closed in around me.

"For seducing my Estrella you will die pale Gringo!"

The affronted father dragged his protesting daughter away by her crimson sash and they were gone into the  fuchsia-scented night leaving me to rub the curses from my eyes.

"Goodbye!" I heard Estrella cry from beyond the cactus sky.

Staggering back to my taverna I clambered into bed and sweating profusely fell into a fretful slumber flecked terribly with worrisome twists and turns.

It was the dead of Mexico's night when I awoke and consulted my pocket watch.

3.33am. 

That devilish time, loaded with kills, like the revolvers of the father and the hateful Senórs gathered round pointing their bullets at my face. 

I shivered and shook my head, the rank perspiration soaking my thin sheet. 

They were gone. Thank God.

The vengeful allusions with spurs.

I drank some warm tequila from the bottle by my side, the bloated worm gone as I began the foul churn of sleep once more.

It was then I saw it 

On the corner of the wall. 

Something was clinging.

I gripped my cover and squinted in the inked dark but I could not discern it's nature.

Yet I knew in my bones that this phantom on the wall was some new curse, some fresh black magic from Estrella's father. 

A shaft of moonlight tore between the flimsy lace curtains illuminating the shadows and I stared in horror at the writhing thing stuck to the ceiling like a bubbling mould.

The entity was at first scarlet and in turns yellow and black, the hues of death's putrescence and it reeked like an open grave.

It's dreadful form glistened and snaked like wet seething muscled larvae and it folded over itself with a slippery squelching sound, the sliding pushing out bubbles of sputum, which burst and dropped, viscous dribbles landing onto the floorboards.

In all my years traversing the Hispanic worlds I had never spied such a loathsome deformity of science as this demonic eel adhering to my ceiling, a lap-dog of the warlock father, who, through nefarious words, has ripped it from its airless lair and sent it straight to me from Hell itself.

I was tormented by it's blasphemy. 

I grasped my rosary and as the abomination slithered I counted out my prayers.

"Dear God in Heaven, save me from this beast of hate! I beg you Lord!"

But my pleading was to no avail. 

The monstrous mollusc released a limb.

It lowered slowly to the floor, a thick tentacle smeared with fetid slime, gradually feeling its way across my shadowed room like a serpent from the pit. 

I froze with fear, my rosary dropped. I simply could not move as that hideous appendage found the bowl of fruit beside my cot.

Instantly upon its touch the oranges and lemons withered and furred like rotting organs and in my terror it was then I realized that the mouth of the tendril contained also an eye.

It was a plump blue eyeball of such wrath and cruelty staring straight up at me that my blood turned to ice and I shuddered uncontrollably. 

Next in the creature's hellish grip were my rosary beads, which it dabbed and tongued with its purple lips at the maw of its trunk, the skin creasing as it coiled around the sacred trinket and then it was gone.

My prayers digested. 

That baleful eye fastened upon then me and in it's murderous depths I saw myself, the lethario I am, for years seducing the daughters of insulted men and fleeing the trail of broken hearts and fruiting bellies behind me, the gringo lover detested by all of them.

Yet then I saw within that orb the outstretched arms of Estrella, my betrothed Senorita, beseeching me to flee with her that very night, away from the witchery of her home.

Finally it was her father in its eye, casting darkened spells and conjuring this infernal octopoid to do his bidding and devour me.

And so it was with a swirling humour of remorse, regret, guilt, anger, sorrow and unrequited love that I let go of the bed sheet and, surrendering to my doom, allowed the worm's widening mouth full purchase of my head before it sucked me up whole within it's acidic siphon, wherein I now lie dissolving, my heart-valves melting as I whisper one last time to my lost love,

"Estrella, goodbye!"