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The Hermit Crab God

by ego_bot

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“Behold the truth of this world, Koji, my friend,” said Masa. Pretending sophistication. “We live in a world made by humans, for humans. Don’t need a college degree to figure that out.”

Koji puffed on his cigarette. He was trying to enjoy the sunset in silence, but his friend kept going on about the trash strewn across the beach. As if anyone actually gave a shit about that.

“My dad drove me up to this beach all the time when I was little,” Koji said.

Masa took a sip from his plastic bottle of green tea. “Is that right?”

“We came up here to catch fish for my aquarium—snails, clams, whatever. Anyway, the place was pristine back then. I swear. No trash.”

“A lot’s changed since then.” Masa gestured his green tea bottle towards the ocean. “All those countries. All those corporations, those boats out there—these days they’ve got plastic to spare. How nice of the currents to deliver it all to our lovely beaches.”

Koji took a long drag of his cigarette, let the smoke mix with his thoughts. “We must be idiots to want to be biologists.” He exhaled. “All the coral on this island will be white as snow before we graduate, and nothing you and I do will make a damn difference, ever.”

“That’s the spirit. Rest easy knowing humans will get what’s coming to us. Nature will make sure of it, yeah? And either way”—Masa took another swig of his tea, then held the bottle out—“the sun will rise again in the morning. Hey, want a sip?”

Koji accepted the plastic without thinking. It was weightless—empty. He shot a glare at his grinning excuse for a friend who had just handed him trash.

“Hold on to that for me, will you?” Masa said as he walked up the bluff. “Looks like they finally got the campfire going. You coming, or you want to mope at the sunset a little longer?”

“I’ll mope.”

“Well, just don’t keep Kaori waiting—she’ll cheer you up, for sure!” And with some piggish kissing sounds, Masa was off.

Koji looked at Masa’s empty green tea bottle, still in his hand. He loosened his grip and the trash fell to the beach with a hollow thud. Oops.

As he looked back at the dying sunset, inhaling a fading cigarette, he noticed movement below: a pale, blurry dot crawling farther down the beach. A chunk of solid white, the only distinguishable shape in the twilight gloom. The object was cylindrical—too symmetrical, too white to be any sort of animal.

Koji flicked his cigarette onto the beach. He scooched down the bluff, treading over the coral rubble and the tideline. For every seashell, a bottlecap. For every wad of sea grass, some tangled fishing line. And finally, shuffling amidst the unmoving debris, the white pill bottle. Alive.

He reached for the thing without a second thought. The bottle had a weight to it, like holding a stone. When he turned it over, two chunky claws and two pairs of spindly legs splayed from the opening. A crustacean dweller was attempting to retreat inside its improvised polymer shell, but its fat array of proboscis refused to fit. The only part that could fit inside was its body.

Its body.

The question had never occurred to Koji. Despite all his classes, all his dives, all his time near the ocean . . .

What did a hermit crab’s body look like? The hidden part, the forbidden part, the part inside the shell.

Koji grabbed the crab’s claws. The creature offered frail resistance, still failing to force its claws and limbs deeper into the pill bottle.

When Koji pulled on the claws, the bottle didn’t budge. Something was tugging back from the inside, hooked onto the interior of the pill bottle like an anchor.

He yanked harder the second time. Violently. With a soft sound of scraping flesh, the pill bottle came off. He dropped the container onto the beach.

He could feel the animal writhing in his palm—vulnerable, suddenly smaller. He held the creature centimeters from his face. Pupils adjusted to the darkness, under the last red light of day, he made his observation.

Koji’s brain took a moment to register the thing.

His eyes sprung open. Stomach turned, intestines twisted, gut bubbled into his throat, heart slammed against his sternum. Adrenaline surged in his bloodstream, his skin turned spongy with sweat. His quaking hands fumbled the creature somewhere into the darkened tide.

This was not the first time he had seen a hermit crab’s body.

---

He saw it in the campfire that night.

The hunk of biomatter glittered in the flame-lit smoke. A mass of misshapen meat twisted from the crab’s body like a scaleless, hunchbacked shrimp. Its pale fleshiness contrasted with its armored front, as if a distantly related species had been fused onto a crab’s rear to serve as a tail: a worm-crab; a sea-cucumber-spider; an invertebrate-crustacean chimera. Koji could see every spur of muscle and synapse as the organic spiral squeezed shut, tightening its curl like a contracting heartbeat. Miniscule hairs glistened across the flesh of the shrimp-tail. Diminutive digits sprouted from the mass like eyes on a potato, each moving like they had a brain of their own. Koji remembered how it felt in his hand; he could still feel it, the prickles against his palm, those pseudo-legs twisting lightly into the crevices in his fingers, the wet wriggling in his ears.

Koji finally peeled his eyes away from the demon in the fire.

He glanced to his right and saw more of them: scaleless shrimp-tails, squirming and screaming on a thin wooden skewer. He shrieked, reeling backwards off his stool and falling into the dirt.

“What the hell, Koji?” Masa was holding the skewer of prawns he’d been grilling.

“What’s wrong?” Kaori asked from the other side of the fire. It almost sounded like she cared. Another classmate asked if Koji was on drugs.

Koji scrambled to his feet and headed for his tent, but the thing must have followed him. He could hear it outside the tent—its shrimp-like tail pulsing against the zipper, hairs rustling against the nylon, legs and sensors and claws scratching at the openings, feeling for a way in.

---

It was wriggling in his rice the next morning. The body—the hidden part, the forbidden part, the part that was supposed to be inside the shell—was an elongated, grub-like finger twisting around his sausages, burrowing into the grilled mackerel as if trying to use the corpse of its marine brethren as a shell.

On the ride home, as Koji was dropping his cigarette out the window, he saw thousands of worm-crab-chimeras writhing in the road, squished to jelly under the wheels of the car. When he looked at the ocean, it was out there, too—a mountainous leviathan in the distant ocean haze.

He tried to sleep that night back in his dorm, but it was in his room with him. Curled in the corner, claws and face against the wall, the naked bulge protruding in his direction. It crept closer as the night went on, slinking sideways, sporadically, clicking against the wooden floor until—

The clicks stopped at the foot of his futon.

He could still hear its body, wet and pulsing. He sensed the weight of it as it clawed its way onto the futon and under his blanket. Stubbly hairs and antennae prickled against his feet, up his calves. Cold fleshiness fidgeted against his belly. Pointed feet pierced his chest like acupuncture needles. Koji was simultaneously quaking and petrified; he had to force himself to open his eyes, and he saw it for only a moment: the pair of eyestalks that had probed their way in front of his vision, those beady black knobs, rotating in a frenzy as if searching for a rationalization to its torment.

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Knock knock knock knock knock knock

While Koji waited for the door to open, the arthropodal chimera waited with him—a cat-sized wad of keratin pulsing against the wall at the end of the hallway.

Kaori opened the door with a sigh. “The answer is no, Koji.”

“No, it’s—it’s not that, I—”

“Why weren’t you in lab today?” She looked him up and down. “Have you slept since this weekend? Have you even changed clothes?”

Koji just frowned, and the annoyance in her eyes surrendered to pity.

In her apartment, Kaori pulled a wooden lunchbox container from her fridge and a pair of metal chopsticks from a drawer. She had prepared this bento box herself, an intentional alternative to the pre-packaged disposable plastic contraptions from the convenience stores or supermarkets. Doing her part, she used to call it.

“Did you have lunch today?” she asked.

Koji ignored the bento and the question. “You mentioned for post-grad—for your thesis, you wanted to focus on . . .” He choked. Couldn’t get the word out.

“I was thinking about a thesis in carcinology,” she offered. “I always thought crabs were cute.”

Koji barely resisted a dry heave. He rubbed his face with his palms.

“What can you tell me about”—his eyes moved to the entryway where the horror was shambling atop their shoes, trying to crawl backwards up the entrance step, rear pulsing like a plump caterpillar—“hermit crabs. Their anatomy. What’s the point of”—he choked, swallowed—“of the soft part of their body?”

Kaori turned to the entryway to follow Koji’s gaze, then looked back at him with newfound suspicion. “The abdomen?”

“Sure. I mean, why not just evolve its own shell? Wouldn’t that have been simpler, more efficient?”

She shook her head, annoyed. “What’s efficient in survival is to fill an ecological niche that already exists. For an animal to grow its own shell takes a lot of energy. Somewhere along the evolutionary chain, hermit crabs must have gained the instinct to hide under protection discarded by another animal. Their abdomens evolved a smooth, spiral shape that could better hook inside a snail shell, and that worked better than—”

“If it’s such an efficient niche,” Koji interrupted, “then why do the things use garbage as shells?”

Kaori frowned. Her eyes flickered downward. “There’s a lot to say about that. With the diminishing availability of shells and the increasing prevalence of plastic, well . . . If a bottle cap has the same weight and texture as a shell, then it’s like I said. Evolution will fill a niche that exists. Some scientists even theorize the light weight and color of plastic might provide a competitive advantage compared to normal shells.”

“And if someone were to remove one?”

Kaori studied the question. “Did you take a hermit crab’s shell?”

He stared at her, then at the thing still wriggling up the entryway. He swallowed thickly.

“Koji, removing a hermit crab’s shell can cause serious stress to the animal, maybe even kill it. If you did that, then—”

“No, you don’t understand. The crab was using a little plastic bottle as a shell, I didn’t even think about—”

“If you truly cared about learning about marine ecosystems, then maybe you would know it’s best to leave the plastic and let the crab change shells on its own when it finds something better. If anything, you could have taken a picture of it, documented it for data.”

“Back off, would you? All I did was try to remove some plastic from the environment, I—”

“No. You’ve never cared about that. You’ve never helped clean a single beach. We both know you don’t believe in anything.”

“Believe in anything?” Koji let his jaw hang open. He turned to regard the monstrosity that was now pulling itself across Kaori’s apartment floor, a viscous trail of black blood behind it. “You mean . . . the supernatural? Like the kami?”

Kaori flinched. “What? No, I’m talking about nature. Real, physical animals! See, this drives me crazy. No one here understands the natural world, not even a little bit! Why are you even here, Koji? It’s like you’re studying marine biology because you had nothing better to do. If we can’t even get aspiring biologists to respect nature, then there truly is no hope for this world.”

“Okay, but let’s be practical here. Humans are a part of nature, after all. We’re not special, the environment isn’t some stupid god we’re obligated to worship. And honestly”—Koji chuckled, done pretending—“why should we care about nature? Because if you think nature ever gave a damn about us, then you’re more naïve than I thought.”

Kaori’s face was shocked at first, then sad. A display of unfiltered disappointment.

“You feel guilty,” she said. “I think a part of you realizes this. Deep down, you feel guilty for something. It’s either guilt, or . . .”

Koji’s face softened with realization. “Or?”

“Or fear. Because one thing’s for sure: If the kami were real . . . if nature was some vengeful, uncaring god, well, they certainly wouldn’t be taking kindly to you now, would they?”

Koji widened his eyes. He looked back to the floor and the entryway, scanning the apartment for the ghoulish arthropod.

The thing had vanished.

Kaori shook her head and reached for the bento and chopsticks. “Just take this and go,” she insisted. “You need to eat. Go home, get some rest, and think about the impact you really want to leave on this world.” She opened the bento lid, held the container towards him, and Koji dared to glance inside.

A twisting collection of claws and eyestalks and tails and abdomens overflowed from the bento—a mess of corpulent clumps of meat drenched in a sauce of blood and pus, waiting to be plucked with a grab of the chopsticks.

Koji didn’t feel it coming: the stomach bile that bubbled up his esophagus, erupted from his mouth like a water gun stream, and skimmed across the bento and onto Kaori’s arms and lap.

---

Koji shuffled into his Thursday class twenty minutes late—Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior. He sat in his usual spot at the back of the classroom, Masa on one side, an arthropodal chimera on the other.

“Where have you been?” Masa whispered, eyes staring straight ahead. “You smell like shit, by the way.”

Koji’s eyes were glazed. The professor’s meandering lecture was an incomprehensible background drone. “I think something’s seriously wrong with me, Masa.”

Masa scooched his seat a few centimeters away, then turned his head enough for the briefest eye contact.

“Something happened to me on the beach that night,” Koji continued. “When we were watching the sunset, after you walked away I . . . I saw something I shouldn’t have. Something I’ve been trying to push out of my brain for a long time, but it returned, and—”

Masa scooched his chair a few more centimeters away. In the background, the professor’s lecture took form.

“—and this takes us back to Richard Dawkins’s assertion of the belief in gods as an evolutionary by-product of ‘something else. Remember, Dawkins gave several examples of what feature of natural selection this ‘something else’ could be. Perhaps a byproduct of trust in parent figures, or even a side-effect of love. Dawkins argues that the belief in gods is an unintended consequence of our evolutionary instinct, like a moth drawn to a flame only because it had evolved to follow the light of the stars and moon—”

Koji curled his lips in spite.

Gods weren’t a delusion; there was one on his desk right in front of him. He could make a scientific observation of its thin cylindrical eyes, of the suppressed bubbling from the opening between the teethy appendages. Its abdomen was oversized, bleeding from its pores. He could pet it like a puppy, and its hairs sliced his fingers with microscopic cuts.

“What the hell’s your problem?” Masa could barely contain his whisper.

“Gods,” Koji uttered. He pondered the word for a moment, then allowed himself a smile. “It’s like what you said at the beach, Masa. Nature would make sure humans get what’s coming for us. Do you think they’ve come for me, first? Are the kami punishing me for the things I’ve done to them?”

Masa’s confusion morphed to concern. Some of the other students started to notice. “No clue what you’re talking about. Since when do you believe in that old stuff?”

“It’s everywhere I go.” Koji clawed at his skull, dug into his skin. Maybe crushing his own brain would stop the crab from preying on his mind, feasting on his emotions, scavenging his thoughts. “It’s inside my fucking head.”

Terror overtook Masa’s calm. The entire class was looking back at them. The professor’s lecture had turned silent.

“Koji, you’ve got to calm down. Please, just—just calm down, okay? Head home, take a shower, go do something you enjoy, and tomorrow’s a new day, yeah?”

Koji shot his colleague a hateful grin. “The sun will rise again in the morning, right?” He ground his teeth and brought his curled fingers down to the desk. Suddenly he straightened his posture, rotated his neck, blew out a deep and disruptive exhalation across the classroom. “You’re right Masa. I think I’ll take a trip to the beach. That will clear my head. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The class watched as Koji left, taking his demon with him.

---

“Why do I want to become a biologist?”

Koji read this question on the opening slide of his presentation. He looked out at the class, maybe twenty students, bored and shadowed faces in the downturned lights. Kaori and Masa’s faces stood out, etched with concern.

“The truth is,” Koji said, “until a few days ago, I didn’t know the answer to that question myself. Allow me to start from the beginning.”

The next slide showed a haphazard collage of shell-less hermit crabs. His professor grinned, curious. Some chuckles rose from the audience.

“When I was a boy,” Koji said, “I took the shell off a hermit crab and crushed the life out of it.”

The class turned dead quiet.

The grin on the professor’s face had disappeared. Masa slinked lower in his seat, and Kaori buried her face in her hands.

“It was a little guy. Small enough to fit between my chubby toddler fingers. I was a little guy, too. Three years old, maybe four—kids are all just little psychopaths, right?” He laughed. “To think, I’d tried to push out this memory for most of my life, only for it to spring from the recesses of my unconscious just this last weekend . . .”

Koji clicked to the next slide. This time all the shell-less crabs were pale and limp. The class began to rustle and whisper.

“I see you all judging me, but here’s the thing: You’re all as guilty as I was! Your parents did the same thing my dad did. They took you to the park to catch bugs for your terrariums, or to the beach to catch little fish for your aquarium. You all had your exotic pets, your leopard geckos, your parrots, your tarantulas, your chinchillas. Even now, how many of you have flimsy plastic water bottles on your desk as I speak? And why shouldn’t you?! Nature is there, ripe for the plucking. It’s not only a part of our culture, but it’s a part of our species—our psychology, our evolution. As a child, I understood that. I remember how good I felt when I killed it. Flattening its grainy organs into paste between my fingertips. The twitching of its claws as its brain sent out its last neural signals. I can’t even begin to describe the buzz I felt as I snuffed a living being out of existence. I felt like a god.”

He clicked to the next slide—a video—but held off on pressing play. His voice was turning hateful.

“I was wrong, though. Humans aren’t gods. We’re vermin, every one of us, and nature’s going to kill us, just like it kills everything. I, for one, embrace the chaos. Which brings me back to my question: Why do I want to become a marine biologist?” He looked Kaori in the eyes as he started the video. “The truth is, I never did. I’m just here for a front-row seat.”

The video was cellphone footage. A beach somewhere, nighttime, waves crashing in the background, harsh breathing in the mic, heavy crunches atop dead coral. Suddenly the camera lowered towards a tiny conical shell illuminated by the cellphone’s flashlight.

A hermit crab.

The camera flipped briefly to the cameraman’s face. Koji’s face.

“Ooh, found one!” After some rustling, the camera focused back on the little crab. Its shell had been removed. A finger and thumb grasped the plump spiral-shaped abdomen, felt it up and down a few times, enjoying its texture. Then a squeeze, and the abdomen popped. A shrimp-colored fruit snack.

The sound of waves in the video was now overpowered by a gleeful laughter: Koji’s laughter in the video, and his laughter in the classroom. “We’re all FUCKED!”

Some of the students yelled in anger. The professor slammed the laptop shut. Kaori shielded her eyes. Masa scrambled out of the classroom.

The hermit crab god was coiled around Koji’s neck, hugging his skull.

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Host Commentary

Our author this week asked us to pass on this message…

If you can remind even one listener to boycott single-use plastic, or to eat less meat and seafood, or to leave nature be and never take shells from the beach or bugs from the park… to reflect on the ways we can all improve and make a difference for nature and biodiversity… well then that’s a win in my book.

I recently spoke with a nature photographer who was very passionate about hermit crabs, and he made me want to not give up. I suppose just because horror is often hopeless  doesn’t mean I have to be. Maybe horror can just be a way to get the nihilism out of our system.

 

Maybe. As I started to write this hosting script, we were coming to the end of a general submissions period. One thing that always crops up when I’m reading story submissions is the instinct of some writers to shy away from making a character really horrible. The thing is that writers tend to empathise with their characters. This is generally good, because it helps them to understand their characters’ motivations, but then as a result, and often subconsciously, they end up wanting to soften those same characters’ awfulness.

Now, there might be an argument for that in some genres, but in horror, it’s often best if you go full evil. You have to drag your instincts out of your subconscious and make them conscious to do this, of course – or find a good editor to tell you to do it – but if you’re going to make someone a villain, go all-in.

What I like about this piece is that Koji is all-in. Right from the opening, he’s horrible. These lines:

 “His friend kept going on about the trash strewn across the beach. As if anyone actually gave a shit about that.”

Instantly, we know who he is. He isn’t our author, who feels very differently about such things, he’s someone, something, very different. That’s good writing. That’s a writer who has paid attention. Who has studied and observed. As a biologist might, perhaps.

Humans are naturally empathic. We are social creatures who perpetually create systems to allow us to connect with other humans. Storytelling is a big part of that, of course. Stories allow us to see other perspectives, to appreciate other experiences, to see inside other shells. Koji has turned off his empathy, or perhaps never had much of it to begin with, and up until now, that’s probably been more useful than not. “What’s the point,” he asks, “of the soft part of their body?”

What is the point? Why care? The sun will rise again in the morning, right? He has what he wants. Why should anything else matter?

But it does matter. It’s destroying him from the inside out. Koji doesn’t understand that, at least not in time, but our author does. Koji is losing his mind to the hermit crab god, because he was hollow inside, and it…

… moved in.

We must care. We must. It’s hard, sometimes, and none of us can do everything or help everyone. We cannot have zero environmental impact and still live our lives, and sure, it’s tempting to think, ‘well, I can’t do everything so why do anything?’ But we must keep caring, we must at least try. Never give that up because, if we do, if we give up our humanity, then what else is left?

Just a few billion wriggling creatures cloaked in plastic trash.

Maybe horror can be a way to get nihilism out of our system.

Really excellent work from ego_bot who also, by the way, donated his fee from this story to the pod. So thank you, both for the story and for that.

I’ve put a link to the PADI Aware Foundation in the show notes: this organisation mobilizes a global network of divers and dive centres to remove ocean debris and combat plastic pollution, as well as safeguard biodiversity and protect endangered species. Check them out. Oh, and if you want to hear some other beachside eco horror stories from us, why not go back and listen to episode 931: What He Woke, by Jess Whitecroft, and 978: Where the Brass Band Plays, by Katie McIvor. Again, there are links in the show notes.