Jezzebelle Scroteé’s biggest fan was called Chap Wankstick and he admired her from afar, from nearby, and from unconventional places besides. He’d sneak into her laundry, cutting eyes holes through her peephole bras and crotchless panties, unnecessary really. He’d pop up with her toast when it was done, trying to catch a glimpse of her before falling back down into the crumby depths. Something about her appearance first thing in the morning was more honest and appealing to him than any of her glamour shots – he wanted unadulterated experiences of her.

He’d begun to ejaculate into her tubes of toothpaste after hearing that a woman was impregnated by a squid in a similar manner, and thought to himself that would be a good way to enter her life, but he’d had no such luck as of yet. He made do with sitting in her alarm clock and singing to her in the morning to arouse her, or stuffing himself into the cushions on her couch so he could cup her soft butt cheeks as she sat down. Occasionally he overstepped the mark, like when he hid along the edge of a knife and threatened to slice her head off because she was an angel and needed to go to heaven. But for the most part he simply admired her from different distances and vantage points.

That all changed the day she moved. He had spent the best part of eight months assimilating himself into her house. He had been so successful in that endeavour that he no longer had a human form. He had simply become the house itself. He could no longer hear or see her, but he felt every footstep and flick of a light switch, every toss and turn in her sleep and every piss into the toilet, as well as the warmth from her cheeks on the seat. Then she left and didn’t come back.

He sat alone for some months, wondering what he did wrong. He thought about how he should have killed her, because every woman leaves him in the end, even his mother had left him.

A new family moved in to him. A couple of overweight parents and a brat son. They redecorated him and made him sick. He couldn’t bare it and so locked himself up one night and leaked carbon monoxide into their rooms. It was a polite way of murdering them. Like how they had politely murdered the last traces of Jezzebelle he had left when they scraped her scent off his walls and gutted her from him.

He ripped his foundations from the ground, water pipes burst and blood gushed down his drive. He dragged himself across the country, his windows smashed, his interior vandalised, always hoping that one day he’d find his Jezzebelle again.

Years later, with bricks falling out and the ceiling collapsed with rot, Chap lay derelict and dying, lost and alone. He finally gave up hope and emerged from the house shell he’d wrapped himself up in, a toothless old man with overgrown fingernails that scraped the ground as he crawled away from the crumbling tomb he’d carried with him for so many years. The frame finally collapsed to dust behind him and fluttered away on a breeze like so many fireflies.

He didn’t stop crawling, and finally came before Jezzebelle’s new house after many more years. It was far grander than the crappy single-bedroom detached thing he had become. He pulled himself up by the door knob and slipped through the keyhole, just like he’d learned to do so many years ago, his long nails clattered to the ground before melting into the welcome mat.

The house was Malcolm Fitzgerald, and he was Jezzebelle’s biggest fan. He’d taken three years to become her new house. Chap allowed himself to expire as some junk mail with a lethal dose of anthrax primed to explode over Jezzebelle when she opened the envelope. He could not allow some other man to have her. But unfortunately for Chap, she got all her mail electronically now, and so Malcolm was able to dispose of his wasted remains without ever having to alert Jezzebelle to his presence.