The Bang

He was sleeping, when he was suddenly woken.

He lived alone, and it wasn't the alarm, that wasn't due for an hour, he double-checked his clock. The alarm was birdsong so he knew it wasn't that.

It was the sound of a heavy hammer hitting a metal tube with some force, and it was repeating every ten seconds.

At first, he thought someone might be banging on the door, but it was too loud and the wrong tone for that, it sort of rang when the hammer hit. He got out of bed and pulled on a nightgown, he couldn't tell where the sound was coming from. It was close but had no direction. It just kept banging.

He checked the other bedroom, was somewhere else, he wondered if it might be in the attic, so he got his step ladder and went up, but when he was up there it seemed to come below him, but it was in his head and starting to hurt.

He went to the bathroom, the noise was the same, then downstairs to the kitchen and the front room, then he heard his alarm clock going off, so went back upstairs to switch it off.

The alarm switched off, the banging went on, and now it felt like his skull was being hit from the inside every time that hammer hit the metal.

Maybe it was outside.

He went back downstairs and out into the back yard. He still couldn't place it. Was it inside? It definitely wasn't outside.

He went back it and down the corridor to the front door and opened it. The street was quiet, but his head wasn't, he shut the door and went back inside, he was going to call the NHS helpline, it was only a noise wasn't it? But it was in his head.

Then he felt something running from his nose.

He wiped it with his hand and was shocked to see blood, he never got nosebleeds, so he grabbed some tissues, and started to feel nauseous.

Then, suddenly, his head exploded, and his body fell to the floor.

In the ruins of what had been his head was a tiny, ugly, malevolent goblin holding a hammer and a steel tube.

It walked away and through the back door leaving a trail of tiny bloody footprints through the house, climbed the back fence and made its way into the next hose and using its evil power took up residence in the neighbour's head.

Addendum:

The music I used is from the film "Blue Collar" by Captain Beefheart, Ry Cooder and Jack Nitzsche because the main rhythm is provided by a car body printing press, which is the noise I imagined for this story.