Tale #125: Being a Good Host (Part 1)

Tale #125: Being a Good Host (Part 1) (Content Tags: Body horror, psychological horror, mental deterioration, sanity slippage, wetting, messing, diapers, first-person perspective, adult protagonist) I know that it has burrowed itself inside of me. I know that it has been eating me from the inside out. I know that I'm not crazy. It sits like a seed inside of my body, being nourished by my flesh and bones. Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. An all consuming parasite that has affixed itself to my biology, to make itself into an extension of my own being. The thing inside of me was like an artificial organ that had been grafted to a real one, as to hide in plain sight. Of course nobody believed me. It sounded crazy to them; I sounded crazy to them. For a while, I thought they might be right about that. There was enough self-awareness in my head to recognize that I was a classical hypochondriac that was easily swayed by my own bio-feedback. I was losing weight and I felt like shit, but maybe that was just the flu? Perhaps a fresh variant of Corona? Foggy thoughts and a sour stomach weren't things that were breaking new ground in the world of illness. But then it started to talk to me. It began to communicate with me, from within my own thoughts. It confirmed its presence to me, as well as its intentions on using my body for its own purposes. It wasn't content to be a passive parasite, and it was anything but a typical one. No known parasites had the capacity to think in any complex way. They were like insects in their mannerisms; no real thinking involved, just mechanical survival. Whatever was inside me was not normal; whether from the stars or beyond the veil of reality, it was itself a sapient being. I grew to refer to it as Leech, because that's what it effectively was. Leech fed off my vitality and contributed nothing to our one-sided relationship; I was but a host, in more than one definition of the word. After just one month of my original symptoms, I'd lost over twenty pounds. Being a heavier guy, it hadn't been all that noticeable to anyone else, but my scale had been more than willing to show me the truth. If it hadn't come with such a sense of illness, then I would have been ecstatic about the weight loss. But Leech was to blame; another organism was literally consuming me. Leech didn't show up on any scans that I had done. Insurance wouldn't pay for my panic, so it was a lot of money out of pocket I ended up paying. No doctor would take my raving seriously, and after hearing my diatribe about the second being sharing my skin, most either rushed me out of the office or made serious recommendations to seek mental health services. They just all thought I was crazy. It became harder to focus at work during this time. I worked in a cubicle in an office building, doing accounting for a tech company. I'd be sitting at my keyboard for minutes on end, just vacantly staring out into space and contemplating my own miserable existence. I became more withdrawn than I already normally was and more irritable. How could I continue on some humdrum day-to-day, whenever Leech was burrowed inside of me? For all I knew, I was a dying man who was being expected to keep counting the beans. Then the accidents began to happen. In my early thirties, I hadn't awoken to a puddle since getting too drunk in college, and before that, it would have been grade school. I wrote the first occurrence off as understandable stress. But then there was a second, and a third, and so on. Luckily, I lived alone in a nice apartment that had its own laundry room, but that didn't stop me from feeling personally ashamed of my lapse in control. After a week straight of having to wash bedsheets, I overcame my own ego and picked up some 'adult fitted briefs'. Fancy talk for fucking Pull-Ups. That would solve the nighttime issues, at least for the moment, but then I found myself dribbling in my underwear during the day too. That was far more problematic than adult bedwetting, and it could cause serious issues for me at work if I ended up pissing my pants at my desk. My first consideration was pads to put in my underwear, but that seemed possible ineffective, so I started wearing the pull-ups full time. Another month would go by, more weight would be lost, and while I was no longer feeling as sick, I was still overwhelmed by a tiring malaise. Leech only spoke to me when he had something to say, and oftentimes his words were indistinguishable from the bitter pitter-patter of my own anxiety. A voice to point out failings, to spread doubts, to strike fear and taunt my psyche. I knew Leech was real, but I had nobody I could confide in. Stuck as a prisoner in my own perceptions of the world, where no other soul could share my view. Another affliction that had struck me was the very traumatic event of waking up and spitting out a tooth. There had been nothing loose the night before, and my dental hygiene might not have been the greatest, but I'd never just had a tooth fall out. Luckily it was one from further back, so people didn't see it when I talked to them. But then it happened again a week later. A trip to the dentist would have been optimal, but my own fear kept me away. Dental work had always freaked me out, from early childhood, and so I rarely actually went to see one. My fear felt magnified now though, because I knew the seriousness of the matter should have been given far more weight than my juvenile phobia. For similar reasons, I stopped going to the doctor, and I cancelled my appointment with a therapist. It was clearly against my best interests, but I couldn't overcome the massive fear response in my brain. It was like being a little kid again and being frozen from terror; to be too meek to do the proper thing. Was it Leech who was doing it to me? Did he know that me going to such places would put him in danger of eventually being discovered? It hadn't shown up on any conclusive tests or scans, but they had mostly been at the beginning; it was possible that Leech was maturing to a point where he wouldn't be so invisible. Theories like that were irrelevant when I couldn't muster the courage to go. I never even followed up with seeing a urologist about my worsening bladder problems. After weeks of daytime dribbling, I'd started to have spasms that lead to larger emptying of my bladder. There were days where I had to change during my lunch break, because my padded brief had become too wet. Things continued that way for a while, until the day that I shit myself. At the time, I'd been sitting on the bus after work. I'd worked late to catch up on my work, so the bus was sparsely seated. I'd had my head leaned against the window, and nausea had made me close my eyes. There was a sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach, one that made me think I might throw up. The cold sweat across my brow corroborated this. But instead of the sick feeling traveling up, it dropped down. Before I knew what was happening, I was shitting my pull-up. The mess was like a boiling sludge, and it shot into my padding like a firehose. It was fortunate that nobody was sitting next to me at the time, because it was loud and it stank like hell. The next twenty minutes of my trip was spent sitting there bowlegged with hot mud oozing all over my ass. Forced to feel it, forced to smell it, forced to live it. My biggest worry was that I'd leak and end up ruining my work pants. Walking home from the bus stop where I got dropped off was another ten minutes, and it sure wasn't a simple matter to be waddling around with pudding in my pants. Just as I entered my apartment, I felt another wave of nausea hit me and I splattered my seat with more mushy filth. That did cause me to ruin my work pants. Wish I could say that was a one-time occurrence, but it was something that was escalating at the same pace that my wetting accidents had. Sharting was becoming a daily occurrence in my Pull-Ups, and I'd woken up to a foul odor a few times. Slowly, what was small started to become bigger; sharts became full logs getting pushed into my pants, even if their firmness would never have been attributed to illness like the first disaster had been. '*You need to wear a real diaper. You can't stop shitting your pants.*' Was that Leech or was it my own subconscious? Either way, the validity of the message couldn't be denied. The adult Pull-Ups couldn't keep holding up to what I was doing in them, and I needed something that wouldn't so easily let the smell seep out. I'd already had to suffer the shame of lying about farting, when the truth was that I was standing there with a steaming dump in my pants. In addition, it was getting to a point where the Pull-Ups I had bought weren't fitting properly any longer. More weight had dropped off my bones and my waistline had diminished; it was less clear, but I also thought that my feet had gotten smaller, as they had more room in my shoes than usual. The new diapers I bought were called 'Megamax', and they boasted a superior capacity to most choices on the market. There were some other options, but many of them were coated in infantile designs that either betrayed they were for a fetishist or for someone with cognitive defects. Something plain white and dignified was the only thing my ego could bear. They were certainly more cumbersome than the Pull-Ups had been, and more difficult to maneuver around with. I spent that first weekend with them at home, just getting used to walking in them and finding which clothes best veiled them. It was a pleasant surprise to not have to worry about leaking, and they did a much better job at mitigating foul odors than the trainers had. During that same weekend, I found myself spacing out more frequently. Minutes would pass without my knowledge, and I'd just be staring into space with my mouth hung open. It would take time to shake out of it, and I'd notice that I had drool on my chin afterwards, as well as that I would have used my diaper in some way. Headaches were plaguing me around the same time, and I worried it might mean that Leech was doing something to me. My mind had been clouded to varying degrees since the beginning, but now it felt more like a dense fog. It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep a train of thought and words kept escaping me. For lack of a better word, I felt stupid. Stupid was not a good thing for a number-cruncher to feel. Mental acuity was king in accounting, and all of mine had felt like it'd slipped away. How could I go back to work like this? Coffee was the only thing I could think to supplement with. I started drinking a lot more of the bitter brew during my days in the office, with the hope that the caffeine would keep my mind stimulated enough to cut through the dense fog in my head. That helped, at least a little bit. On a less pleasant note, it also made my diaper dependency all the more apparent; all that coffee was hell on my bowels, and the caffeine kept me pissing myself more frequently than before. I was still having to change on my lunch breaks, even with far thicker padding. One day in particular was really bad. There was a crucial deadline that I had to meet, and my struggles had led me to being way behind where I needed to be. Filled with worry that I'd get chewed out for missing the deadline, I worked right through lunch in a frantic attempt to catch up. My diaper ended up springing a leak and I had to go home early, to save myself the shame of showing everyone my current incontinence. My boss called me in the next day to talk about how I'd been performing. He sounded displeased with what my work had looked like the last few months, and he also began to question if everything was alright, as he'd gotten complaints from other employees about me. I blushed when 'odor' was mentioned as one of the complaints, and I wasn't really sure how to explain it. I didn't know how to explain *any* of it. What was I supposed to say? That an otherworldly parasite had taken lodging inside of me? That my mind and body were being fed on? That said parasite had almost assuredly taken away my bladder and bowel control? That all sounded crazy. If I tried explaining the truth, then my boss would think I was a nutter and I'd almost assuredly be fired. I didn't have much to say if I couldn't talk about Leech. Muttering something about feeling 'ill' was all I could really muster. My boss started to try talk again, chastising my lack of communication, but then I sent him a message that was loud and clear. I was spacing out, starting to drool on myself, but my body had something to say. Very powerfully and very audibly, I evacuated my bowels into my diaper. It was a wet, sloppy affair that left no doubt to the ears what they were hearing. It was like that first accident that I'd had; explosive diarrhea that was punctuated by pungent sounding flatulence and semi-solid splattering. Oddly enough, it didn't feel so bad this time. I snapped back to it after I'd pumped at least a gallon of the boiling sludge into the confines of the Megamax. Disgust or embarrassment would have been understandable emotions, but I felt neither. Instead, I felt pleasantly relaxed by sitting in my own foul mess. My boss was less relaxed by the situation at hand. Understandably so, as he'd just watched me soil myself very heavily while I was sitting there in front of him. The repulsion and shock were clear as day on his face. "D-did you just...?" He was asking, but it was more rhetorical than anything. We both knew what I'd done, and since I wasn't staining the chair in his office, it was also probably pretty evident to him that I was wearing some kind of diaper. "..E-excuse me." I shakily stuttered, giving the public defecation the same casual defense as I would to a fart or a burp. We stared at eachother for a moment, and I wiped the drool from my lips. After composing himself again, the older man took a breath away from me and put his hands together. "Look, I think maybe you've been... Working too hard. I want you to take a leave of absence and go get whatever is wrong all sorted out." "...But my accounts--" "--Will be managed by someone else. You have plenty of PTO and sick days. You said you weren't feeling well, and I can't have you being sick in the office." To my boss's credit, he was extraordinarily professional. I'd just drooled and shit myself in front of him, yet he was brushing past it to address my problem from a more abstract position. "You can come back to work once you have a clean bill of health from a physician and a psychologist. A few months away from the spreadsheets will do you a world of good." He walked me out of his office and politely looked away from the bulging backside of my pants from where the diaper had so hadly swelled. Even if he wasn't watching, he could definitely hear the sloshing of the boiling bog inside my Megamax. That was the last time I ever worked at that job again. It was the last time I could call that spot in the cubicle farm my second home. My last day at work had been getting scolded and then crapping violently into my adult diaper. I'd accumulated a lot of paid time off over the years that I had worked there. So much that I'd be solvent for the next few months, at least when adding in the sick pay that I was entitled to. It would be a lot of time spent at home with no human contact. I wouldn't be alone though. I could never be alone, not when Leech was right there inside of me. With the way I was falling apart though, what would be left in a few months?