The Thing in The Hallway Won't Let Me Leave My Room

 

I

Through my peephole, I saw that it was still there. The flayed skin glistened under the dim glow of the hanging incandescent lightbulb. It knew I was watching and came close until the peephole framed only its visage. The conjoined faces of my neighbors stared into me, with mouths that might’ve been kissing once, it grinned or tried to. Their tongues had fused to become fat and forked and it now used to lick at the glass of my peephole.

It pulls back without warning and once more I get a good look at it. Two human forms smashed together. The smaller one clinging to the larger one’s torso, resembling a gibbon and her young but distorted into something fleshy and vile. I can see the sinew of its exposed muscles, the blood vessels, and the flaps of flesh that hang off it. I can see the hanging skinned testicles on the larger body and can see that the clinging body grinds itself into him where their groins meet. But whether it’s in agony or ecstasy I can’t tell. It runs off into the dark corners of the hallway but I’m not fooled. I know it’s trying to lure me out and I don’t want to find out why.

I need your help, please. I’m trapped on the 4th floor of Rochester Heights, in room 405, a dilapidated highrise Apartment in east Oakland. Within the last 6 hours, at what must have been dead midnight, something horrible happened. Whether it was an invading force or a corrupting evil I don’t know, but I can’t leave and my room is the only safety I have. And even then I don’t know how long until it gets in. I’ll have to go back, recount all that’s happened leading up to this, and maybe, just maybe, someone can help me.

It all started with that damn fetish. Not the sexual perversion type, no it was an idol. It was 4 a.m. and I was about to throw in a load of laundry before I was off to bed and there it was. Splayed out smack dab in the middle of our laundromat, still slick with blood. I didn’t know what I was looking at, some spindly thing strung up to a wooden crescent frame. But with each passing second more of its form registered in my mind and I nearly doubled over and lost my breakfast at the realization that it was a skinned headless dog, crucified.

The cops were called and it was found out that the new cameras were touted by management and used as a justification for another yet another outrageous rent hike…was nothing more than a “deterrent.” As in they’re useless and not even hooked up to a power source. They’ve let my bathtub sink halfway into the room underneath me so while it was infuriating, I wasn’t surprised.

Later it came to be known that the dog was Mrs. Lorent’s beloved poodle, Butterball. The poor widow was hysterical and demanding a full-scale investigation. She might have gotten her way had nightfall not greeted us with yet another fucked up finding. Harold, a shut-in who lived on the top floor was found dead.

I’m a night owl through and through, so I was awake when the discovery was made. There was no commotion but hushed whispers and tensed bodies. I tend to creep around the stairwell between the 4th and 3rd floor since it’s scarcely populated and has a small accessible window that I can smoke out of. I was trying to fish for a signal this time since my wifi was acting up and my cell signal was dead altogether. That’s when I heard them walking down the stairs, talking. Eleana and Macey from the 4th floor. I could tell from their tone of voice something was wrong, that and the time. 2 a.m. No one but me was up this late here most days. I strained my ears to listen in.

“Folded like a fucking pretzel and there was a mess everywhere. Tony says he thinks he’s been there since they found the hag’s dog in the laundromat. He tried calling the cops but it’s not going through.” Eleana was whispering to Macey

“Well, who was it?” Macey asked.

“That creep Harold from the 2nd floor. The one that Carter beat up for stalking his girlfriend, what was her name?… John?”

“It’s Joanna, don’t be mean, this is serious. What did Tony do about the body?”

“Sorry, I just think she’s frumpy and plain. Way out of Carter’s league. And nothing, yet. He told the manager and he tried calling the police too but no luck. He wants the body out of here as soon as possible so he sent Tony out to the station in person. But it’s been 2 hours since and he hasn’t even texted me once. I’m starting to get worried.”

“Wanna go look for him?”

“No, that would be dramatic of me, we’re not even dating, just messing around. Still… You know the Donut Royal is open 24/7. We can get a few and meet Tony halfway there.” Eleana said, and the two started walking down the stairs.

I froze and the thought to try to sneak away came to me too late. The two women didn’t even acknowledge me as they walked past me. I knew 3 things then. That Eleana is fucking our maintenance man, that I’m either invisible or detestable enough to be invisible, and that Harold was dead. I wouldn’t know it then but I would learn later that night that this was just the beginning of a nightmare.

I finished my cigarette and sulked back upstairs, still unaware that anything was wrong. I should have paid attention more to my surroundings during my trek because I’m certain by then it had started. I only picked up on the fact that every light was dimmer, not by much but enough for it to be noticeable.

I went back to my room, bolted the door, and tried getting my laptop to connect to the internet again. The only two pages it loaded up were ones I already had open before the wifi shat out. Reddit, and a random porn site that only played a very low-quality section of a video I was trying to get off to. It wasn’t cutting it so I decided to use my imagination but after 15 minutes and a cramped hand, I decided to try to settle in for an early night.

I gave it up after 45 restless minutes and pressed my ear to the wall next door. The couple there, Joanna and Carter, were young and hot-blooded fucking all hours of the night, and I had gotten off to the sounds a few times. Sometimes they went at it around the building in communal spaces they thought were empty late hours of the night. I had caught them a few times but it was never reciprocated. They’d finish and sheepishly walk away and none were wiser of my presence. Now they were quiet except for the natural shifts and breathing that came with sleep.

I wondered if they knew Harold was dead, and I wondered how’d they react when they found out. I wasn’t there for the supposed blowout between him and Carter, but I had heard about it. Macey and Eleana love to gossip above my smoking spot. I think Harold caught them like I had and the poor fellow, trapped within the cage of his delusions, confronted Carter. Everyone knew he had a thing for Joanna, and she was too polite or sympathetic to ever be stern with him. So he must’ve interpreted it as reciprocation and it ended with him getting stomped out and the residents being quietly grateful for it.

Poor Harold, in his mid-40s and living with his geriatric mother because he was too messed up in the head to go anywhere else. Mary was her name I think and then I felt a horrible tinge of guilt. Did she know of her son’s death and where was she? I hoped she had her mind completely slipped away tonight so that she couldn’t comprehend what had happened to Harold.

I used to fear ending up like him the most, but that was before tonight. Sleepless and frustrated I felt the ache for another cigarette and I went for a smoke. I pondered why no one else was freaking out about his death or why it was being kept secret. I didn’t consider it until then but if he was dead and he truly died in such an agonized way… who had done it? And were they still around? Cold sweat trickled down my face at the question and I felt compelled to turn around and head back to my room.

After two more steps, I decided to do just that but something else was off. The hallway was darker now, much more than before and the air was cold in a way that’s hard to describe, it’s bitter chilling piercing straight into nerve and bone. Vertigo threatened to overcome me with each passing moment as the persuasive wrongness intensified. I couldn’t define it at first but as I kept walking it became clear, the hallway was longer than it should’ve been. I froze, unable to make sense of that fact and I scrutinized my surroundings a bit more. The ceiling was higher too, by a few feet. My mouth was dry now and I tried to swallow but nothing could bring me back to lucidity.

Foot over foot I forced myself to walk back towards my room and I was halfway there when once more my heart stilled in abject fear. At the end of the hallway, from the 5th floor, someone was descending the stairs. Rational thought should have driven me to head toward them and ask or warn them about what was happening. But some deep instinct knew it was wrong in all the ways a living thing could be. Even the stairs leading up to the upper floors felt wrong as if they weren’t of this world.

I’d have to get closer to this approaching thing If I wanted to get to my room so I turned back around and tried to dash as silently but quickly as possible down the hall but feared I would be spotted before I could fling myself down them.

A storage closet to my right that was never locked served as my refuge and I tried to slink into it as quietly as possible. The closet used a repurposed apartment door so it had a peephole for me to gaze out of. Minutes passed by at an agonizing pace but it did eventually come into view. From the periphery it emerged, robed in ornate cloth and moving as if it were dancing on air. Upon looking down I saw that it was skating across the air, legless and floating. From its hood a strange blinking light cast out onto the dark hallway. As it was at eye level with me and directly in front of me I caught a side profile of its face and I held my breath to stifle a gasp.

Its face was like TV static, flickering in black-and-white chaos. I closed my eyes then, fearing that it would turn to face me and I’d get an unadulterated look at it. In the still moments, as I waited for it to fling the door open, I thought back to all the other strange shit I had heard about leading up to now. Tony had found nearly a dozen dead animals around the apartment perimeter in the last few days, he didn’t want to talk about the state he found them in, and I wondered if they were anything like butterball, skinned and crucified.

I waited until my body ached and I mustered the courage to peer into the hole once more. An empty hallway greeted me and I slowly opened the door and crept my way out. This floor was only occupied by me, Macey, Eleana, Carter, and Joanna. I went to their door and caught myself when I went to knock. I hesitated for a moment before I tried the knob. I winced as it creaked open and I made my way in, trying to close the door as quietly as possible. I called out for them in a hushed voice but as I looked around their empty living room I felt silly. Before I left I decided to check their room, someone needed to know about the wrongness of what was happening, and I still don’t know what the fuck is happening.

I didn’t recognize them at first, I thought it was a pile of blankets but as the heavy movement and labored breath caused something to click in my head I couldn’t stifle the yell. It caused the head, or more aptly, heads to snap up to face me and I had no delusions of what it was. Carter and Joanna permanently joined at their groins, chest, and mouth. They had been fucking missionary when it happened so Carter had his body draped over Joannas and her arms and legs clasped around his torso, waist, and ass. I thought they had been flayed at first but the more I looked the more it seemed like the flesh had sloughed off them.

They… it hoisted itself up on all fours if you can call it that, and let out a breathy moan in both male and female voices. The conjoined mouth grinned at me and as it took a step towards me I finally snapped out of it. We both ran at the same time but it was slowed by it’s deformed mass, but the distance between us was still too close for any comfort as I ran out into the hallway and towards my room.

I thanked God that I hadn’t locked my door as I threw it open and turned to slam it shut. I screamed the moment I was face to face with the abomination, and without a moment to spare I bolted and locked it. It tried the knob a few times before it resorted to gentle taps and then deafening pounding and then silence. Now it’s just waiting there for me but what I fear most is that whatever did that to them will come around, lured by its presence, and do the same to me.

It’s been hours since but the sun has not risen. I tried sleeping in the bathtub, I couldn’t stand the proximity of my bed to Joanne’s and Carter’s. But when I stepped in I remembered that half the tub couldn’t support my weight as water damage had left it half sunk into the floor. So I went back to the living room and saw my laptop still sitting there with this webpage open. Please if anyone can help me or has any ideas, nows the fucking time. I don’t know how much longer I have left, just now I decided to peer out my window and was greeted by stygian darkness but what really scares me is the few breaks in it. Occasionally lighting flashes across the sky and illuminates the world below, a lifeless sand sea. Lighting cut through in brilliant flashes, stained by black and white patterning like TV static.

II

A lot has happened since my last post but i’d like to thank you all for your suggestions. Especially the bathtub suggestion. Salt is ineffective against whatever is happening here and I’ve learned my lesson about trying to static noise.

I haven’t slept since and Joanna and Carter are still prowling the hallway, fucking with me. I can only guess that whatever warped their bodies also twisted their minds. I thought I was screwed but then I was reminded of the bathtub. I went to it with my pack filled with a few bottles of water and my laptop.

The landlord and management have known about it for 6 months now. Water had seeped into the walls and started to rot away the floor, so much so that the bathtub’s far end was noticeably sunk in. When I showered I hugged the drain end, fearful that my weight would cause it to fall through the floor. Now I went to that end and stepped in. It sagged and groaned with my weight but held so I started jumping on it, landing with as much force as I could muster until on the 3rd try the floor gave way and I went with it.

I landed badly, cracking my side across the outer rim of the tub, and had the wind knocked out of me but I had done it. My tub and some of the floor were in my downstairs neighbor’s bathroom. Picking off bits of debris I struggled to my feet and stepped out into the living room. A single mother named Naomi lived here with two toddlers, I had never talked to her but had a brief interaction with her son who asked me my name of all things. I knew they often spent the night at her baby daddy’s house (once again Eleana’s and Macey’s gossip keying me in) and it held true tonight. The living room and bedroom were empty and I was grateful.

I tried to hurry as my fall down a floor wasn’t exactly silent and if anything else was out there it surely heard. I rushed down the hallway in long strides, trying not to look but there were details you could not but notice.

A section of brick wall had discolored monochrome, black and white, and back to faded red. I didn’t stop to observe, I had to keep moving. Only once I came upon several blood-stained doors did my pace slow but I didn’t stop. I tried to not think about the people who lived there or what had happened to them but by now the apartment should’ve been full of the sounds of life instead of the bleak oppressive silence I was drowning in.

I made it to the stairs and practically lept down an entire flight of stairs to the second floor. Blood pumping and confidence high I was running now. This hallway was warped like the one on the 4th floor but in much more extreme ways. The walls had not only narrowed but they were slanted, warping and turning at an angle with every foot until the hallway was nearly spiraled. I had to slow to a stop to get my bearings as it was all so dizzying. The floor beneath my feet ceased to be shitty faux wood laminate and was isntead a smooth stone that felt almost slippery.

The brick walls had melted away to some mottled and stringy maroon cloth thrown over what looked to be grating made of the same smooth stone. It looked almost organic but at the same time, it could’ve been fabric. The thick dangling strands made me think of sea anemone tendrils and I shuddered at the thought of touching them.

So I forced myself to run once more, past an open door to a room that had a body perfectly bisected and sprawled out on the floor. The pile of intestines between the two halves writhing and rising into the air. It freaked me out enough that I ran past the next open door with my eyes shut tight. It was Harold’s room and I feared seeing what had become of him. I thought mercy was on my side as the hallway eventually straightened out and the next half dozen doors were shut. But as I came up to the last doors that lined the hallway the one to my left flung open with incredible force.

Flayed hands from a black void reached out to grab at me and I pivoted out of the way just before they made contact. But I couldn’t stop my momentum and went stumbling onto the cold slippery floor. I tried scrambling back up as the door to my right opened and from it, Sarah Palmer emerged.

I knew it was her despite her corrupted form, flayed and covered in sinewy tumor-like growths. The severely obese woman had merged into her mobility scooter and she used it to move forward. Sloughed flesh made it difficult as it had wrapped around the wheels but still, it inched forward. The center of her abdomen had split open into a gaping hole and with a quiver and a moan, it erupted with some vile bile-like fluid as it vomited a small figure out onto the floor before me.

The newly birthed child got up at the same time I did and followed me in my panicked rush down the rest of the hallway and onto the stairway. The toddler-sized thing made of diseased and partially digested sinew was fast shrieked like a joyous child as it closed the gap between us with a leap. It was my turn to shriek as I tried shaking it off. As it scaled up my back towards my shoulder I took hold of the thing with my hands and pried it off. The flesh was gelatinous and my fingers suck into it in ways that made my stomach churn.

“Tag you’re it!” the thing said in a voice I thought was vaguely familiar.

Disgust drove me to fling it at the wall with all the force I could muster and its body crunched and splattered on impact with the wall that had reverted back to normal. It let out a small pained groan as it slid off the wall into the floor. As I ran by it spoke in an agonized whisper that I could not rend from my mind no matter how much I try

“Chris, why? I just wanted to play,” it said and I had to stifle a heaving gasp as I cleared the flight of stairs into the first-floor lobby.

The only child who knew my name here was Naomi’s son, they weren’t supposed to be here, not tonight. They had always left on weeknights to their father’s house. Had Naomi called off the attempts of reconciliation off tonight of all nights? Or had this begun earlier than I had thought? I didn’t know and wouldn’t ponder it until I was out of this nightmare.

The lobby was normal by all means except for the lack of lights, but now the darkness did nothing to deter me. The exit was right there and I ran towards it. The double glass doors froze me in place, not because they were bolted but because of what lay beyond. Pitch dark world where nothing could be seen, except for the momentary brilliance brought out by flashes of lightning ripped across the sky like whips made of TV static. In those moments I saw them, a line of things just waiting for me to step out.

One was a smooth-skinned pale humanoid with a hole right through its chest that leaked inky black fluid, it had no face. Another was a tangle of violet tendrils that appeared to be made of smaller writhing strands. Then there was one that was a massive looming serpentine thing doted with eyes the size of human heads, each iris alien in shape, and one end that I assumed to be it’s head was tusked with mandibles that must’ve been six feet in length. There were dozens of others but their forms were too varied, too abstract to ever accurately describe.

What drew my attention the most was the many puddles and stains of crimson at their feet and scraps of clothing, one of them obviously being Macey’s distinctive denim Jacket. One work boot lay on its side, one I thought might’ve belonged to a maintenance worker. I would not be leaving… not here. I tried to comfort myself by telling myself that whatever was keeping me here wasn’t letting them in but it wasn’t reassuring in any measure.

I ended up crawling underneath the shitty lobby desk and curling up into a ball for what felt like hours. It could’ve been longer for all I know but nothing mattered in that moment, I was fucked. Only when I heard the sound of a procession shuffling by did I stir. Peaking out from my hiding place I saw them, the robed figures, 6 of them now. Upon their shoulders, they bore the weight of a marble slab, and upon it, a huddled figure. I watched them, backs to me, shuffle down the room and into the hallway that led to the manager’s office.

I tried sulking out as silently as possible to bear witness to the ritual that was about to unfold. The bearers lowered themselves and the slab and as light gleamed across it I realized who it was. The body was bent back into itself until it formed a circle. The belly was pointed out to the world the back and spine contorted and twisted, the eyes empty. But goddamn the mouth, Harold was grinning ear to ear in an expression of pure ecstasy.

The chanting began then, as the flung back and twisted glare of Harold’s body lay upon me. Strange throaty vocalizations, deep and reverberating and inhuman. The sound of a mountain splitting apart or two worlds coming together. The vibrational forces of the universe melting away a border that kept the background machinations of a reality unseen. Somehow I knew this, that we had been pulled into this nightmare, but by what or who I still didn’t know.

They continued the hum chants until the space in front of them began to ripple like water and when they ceased so did the distortion. Half a heartbeat passed before it shattered, like glass, and beyond it a massive eye. I flinched, hoping it didn’t see me but if it did, it must’ve not cared since it retreated back into the darkness before it hauled itself out. A spindly arachnid leg, covered in jagged angles and spines stepped out followed by another and another. Until a towering pinwheeled monstrosity of legs and appendages emerging from a central core stood before the cultists. An eye with concentric pupils was at its center and the rest of it radiated out like a sea urchin.

Every aspect of it told of the agonies it could inflict, it looked like pain incarnate with the sheer amount of sharp corners and serrated spines. Every inch of its being was meant to cause harm, and the longer I looked at it the more detail came to me. Hooks and sythed ends, tendrils laden with hungry gnashing mouths. The thing that stood out the most was the way it distorted the space around it. Though it was within a confined space as I gazed upon it seemed to expand the air around it so that some hidden aspect of itself could be felt. This was a part of a much larger whole and I got the impression that some massive hands on a cosmic scale held this thing out before us and yet they were one and the same.

I looked away, not wanting to gaze upon this abomination, this emanation of pain, any longer. It spoke in an alien language then, a sound so vile like a rusty nail being dragged along my eardrums and corneas. But I understood it, unmistakable gratitude.

I slunk back into my hiding spot and waited for it to be over, waited for them to leave and they did, moving through the hallway, past the stairs into the basement laundromat and into the community room. It’s been hours since and they’ve still not emerged. I took the time to try to silently rummage around and in the manager’s office. Next to a pile of fine pulp of flesh that had still Mr.Roderick’s weeping face, our landlord, an axe. I picked up, knowing it would be of no use to me should I face those cultists or the pain entity.

What I did know is that Harold had a role to play in this in some way or another and that his room was just a floor above. If there’s any chance of escape or answers, it would be there. If you don’t hear back from me, I’m dead. I’m certain that there’s no way anyone from outside this hell can help, even then I still ask that you’ll wish me luck. I certainly know I’ll need it.

III

Rochester Heights had always been a hell hole. I know that now, I mean I never doubted that some of the people here were assholes but in the time I’ve had to reflect I realize how either indigent or cruel they were to each other. Maybe when people group together like that with no goal beyond inhabitance unpleasant things arise. I lamented once that to them I was nothing but a sulking shadow only half-remembered. Once my landlord had forgotten I even lived there and sent Tony to get the place ready for a new tenant. Now, I’m not so sure I mind as much, being one of the forgotten ones might’ve saved my life.

I was ready for the horrors of the 2nd-floor hallway, meeting the grasping hands with an overhead axe swing that nearly severed one hand at the wrist. Pulling back I used the butt end to smash away another grasping hand until I could slip past them.

Sarah Palmer was next, swiveling around in her mobility scooter to face me but it was too late. The heel of the axe sunk into flesh soft as putty and as I yanked the axe loose half her face sloughed off. I heard her chuckle as I ran past. Something was burning in me, even if I died here, I had to know the what and how of Rochester’s descent into madness.

Harold’s room door was still ajar and I made sure to bolt the door the moment I ran in, only then did I slowly turn around. I thought it was graphorrhea at first. I had read about it one late night, a disorder most often associated with schizophrenics. The incoherent ramblings written and spoken.

The living room floor and adjacent floor contained countless sharp-edged sigils and glyphs. They looked occultic in their configurations but the actual characters themselves were completely foreign. Dead center at the circle was free of the scrawl but stained with brownish-red blood. I knew it was where Tony had found Harold’s body. There was a journal left on the coffee table and flipping through I confirmed that it was his.

In the few minutes I had in that room I didn’t have much time to really understand its contents. And though I still have it and I’ve spent hours since pouring over it, I’ve only been able to come up with a rudimentary understanding of what Harold was on to. I’ll summarize it here the best I can.

Harold moved back in with his mother after an episode that cost him his job a year prior. They lived off her social security checks and he deeply resented her for her advanced age, every day she’d wake up with less of her mind intact. He was also having issues with extreme sexual frustration and began clinging delusionally to Joanne’s politeness as a signal that she wanted him.

The confrontation with her boyfriend Carter was the breaking point. It wasn’t the reason why he did all this, but it was the final straw. But he had reason to resent everyone here and he detailed all his grievances big and small. I learned then the difference between being someone pushed to the wayside but still scrutinized with an eye of assumed threat like Harold and being forgotten altogether, like me. In his pages upon pages of detailed slights never once did my name come up, my existence failed to register to someone who was uncomfortably similar. It made me feel bitter and I don’t know why.

Then there was talk of what he dubbed “The Background World,” I still don’t quite understand what it is and its purpose but that’s the thing that ties this all together, I’ll let Harold explain in his own words.

I first saw it in a dream, then a vision. It started with a tusked worm taking a bite out of the thin air, and like a scalloped finger, it peeled back what I thought was real to show me the machinations that ran behind what could be seen. Two places within the same space but never allowed to touch or interact. As above so below and from below to above, everything is mirrored. If it exists here in our layer it exists below, within The Background World.

That was the first rule it told me, the most important for creating an interstice where we can finally meet. The second rule is that for an Autarch to touch the human domain something must be offered to it, a life or part of one. Most often the offering is someone else. The greater the offering the more an Autarch can manipulate the human domain as long as it’s within its sphere of influence. The most powerful offerings are oneself, a year of your life, or the greatest joy you’ll ever feel. The greatest offer one can make to an Autarch is your own life.

There’s more, he mentions that the Autarch he’s in contact with is one that operates within the sphere of agony, pain is its domain and Harold knew pain better than most. The best I can piece together is that somehow he came into contact with this entity. Maybe it preyed on him for being vulnerable or maybe its influence scrambled his thoughts, or maybe what he learned was too much for any mind to bear without consequence.

I say this because I don’t believe that Harold was crazy, ill, and in need of help but there are enough commonalities in the strange runic language and his journaling that it feels as if he was truly uncovering something. He was not a stark raving madman, at least not until he let himself sink deeper into the influence of what had been encircling him.

He spent the week leading up to the fateful night of his death preparing for Rochester’s fall into the background world. 16 fetishes were placed around the apartment to mark the boundary for where the Autarch would lift the veil and let our worlds merge. 6 of them were made from parts of his mother. The rest from strays and pets around the apartment. The last of them was Mrs. Lorent’s dog, in the laundromat. Mirrored above and below, even if they were removed they still created something in the background world that sanctioned this hell.

Harold lamented that he never placed one in the basement below it and that was my chance. Maybe just maybe the building was only partially within the insterstice and if I could make it to the 2nd basement and emerge it would be into the outside I had always known, or maybe I’d step righ into The Background World. Regardless, I had no choice but to try.

I scrounged around the apartment and found that Harold was a heavy drinker with a taste for cheap vodka. I fashioned 5 Molotovs with what he had and started the trek back down to the 1st floor.

Stepping into the hallway I was greeted by them, the conjoined endlessly fucking monstrosity that had started this. I greeted them with a sprinter’s launching bolt and an axe swing. The side of Carter’s and Joanna’s faces took the blow and though the flesh came away in a huge chunk and I heard the clinking of teeth splattering across stone floors they didn’t even flinch.

Carter tried lunging at me, arm outstretched but I flung myself against the wall and was trying to slip behind them. they pivoted around to try to face me but the strange distribution of their weight made them cumbersome and the fear I felt was gone. Another axe swing sunk deep into compromised muscle and bone and cleaved through them far easier than uncorrupted tissues. It was enough to nearly decapitate them and they let out this horrible wheezing gasp. Another lunging grasp was met with an axe blow that sent nearly half his fingers skipping across the ground and one last swing to their neck finished it.

Though their head was on the floor before me they did not die. What remained of their face was opening and closing its mouth and I could see that the destroyed cheek was starting to restructure and regenerate. This truly was hell, willed into existence by a resentful heart. The body didn’t fall and wasn’t still either, jerking and twitching about, it eventually started grasping towards its head.

I had the Molotov lit by the time it took hold of its neck and thrown in the moment it lifted it up. They erupted into a ball of fire and I swore I heard screaming, as if some part of their warped mind registered what had just occurred and I hoped that the fire would be enough to put an end to them. The 2nd Molotov was thrown into the corner where Sarah and the hands tried and failed once more to apprehend me, I was gonna burn this place down if I could. Maybe then I would be able to spare them. The third was thrown atop the lobby desk. The last two were for the laundromat. I didn’t know if the building would actually burn but I wanted to cause some harm, to do anything.

The mad dash to the laundry was the fastest I’ve ever run, I’m sure of it. I was certain that the commotion and the fires would have caused the Autarch and its cultist to emerge from management’s office but nothing ever impeded my flight down the stairs into the laundry room.

I landed on soft floors and the lights now were dim and blood red but even then I saw the horror that lay before me. A pulsating mass, a conglomerate of flesh formed at the center of the room, and it stretched out across the floor, walls, and machines. Every inch was living tissue and sinews, nerves, blood vessels, all of it. A dozen limbs raked and reached out at open air weakly and I swore they had some identifying features. A watch that could’ve belonged to Jose from the 7th floor, a sleeve of a distinctive neon green sweater from Kiana a college student.

I didn’t need another reason, the 4th Molotov was thrown on the fleshy floor behind me and the final directly at the tumor. The dark was eclipsed by the burning sun that stood behind me. The threshold of the sub-basement and my hopeful exit was before me now but I hesitated for a moment. The heat licked at my spine and my eyes watered at the rising smoke. If I was wrong I would be fucked, but I’d be fucked fire or not.

I moved forward and the moment my foot touched the first step the world behind me plunged back into darkness as the fire extinguished. In an instant it all ceased, the heat, the smoke, a curtain of silence fell and a wave of dread rose. I knew I shouldn’t have looked back but I couldn’t help myself, with a thundering heart I threw my gaze back and saw it. The Autarch of Agony that had caused all this, goaded and tempted Harold with its promise of pain to all he hated. The center of its eye blossomed before me and grew to encompass all before it in its vision.

Yes, it was a vision that it showed me, screams around me rose to a crescendo as the tumor grew to the size of the apartment itself, a living edifice. And yet it still paled in size compared to the Autarch who looked down on it. The countless tendrils and their instruments of torture reached down to the tower of flesh and it raked and sliced and tore and ate and… it all grew back. It would continue so, for eternity. That was a dark wish of Harold. The thing began to bulge and split apart, a perfect copy of its spherical form, mitosis. This thing could split itself and that’s how it planned to fulfill its promise and continue to operate without being bound to it.

I screamed, or I think I did because when I was able to pry my eyes away from it to look around I saw the shadow of my exit, the descent into the sub-basement. I ran, refusing to look back, I wouldn’t, couldn’t look back. So into the murky depths, I went.

I had been in the subbasement once before, small and damp it had only a few fold-up tables and chairs. There were no entries or exits except a single narrow staircase and a seldom-used door, leftovers from a bygone era. It was barred and locked at all times but the door was old, wooden and I was certain it would only take a good kick to break it down.

But what lay before me was not the basement, no it was some dark plane of reality that could not have been The Background World. I had seen brief glimpses of it just outside my window and this was different. Narrow and claustrophobic but at the same time impossibly expansive. Light did not exist here, even when I tried my lighter the air around me wicked away illuimantion. I reached out to touch concrete walls and found that I was in a tunnel. With no other option, I walked and walked until time ceased to have meaning. I know I must’ve been there for hours since hunger and exhaustion forced me to rest, but comfort was impossible so after a few minutes I got back up and pushed forward.

When at last I came upon an exit dimly illuminated it hurt my eyes that had been bathed in darkness for so long, a shallow staircase that led down to the sub-basement I had always known. The door was there and with a frenzied kick it fell away and I burst out to the world above with a half-scream of joy and a half-maddened sob. It was midday and Rochester Heights did not exist anymore. I had emerged from a subbasement into an empty, overgrown lot.

A homeless man nearby turned to glare at me momentarily before returning to whatever he was doing. Nothing exists of my ordeal and no one even remembers of Rochester Heights. I’ve done searches on the residents and it’s like they don’t exist. Everything and everyone marked by the Agony Autarch have ceased to exist meaningfully, or have been rewritten out of history. I found Macey’s mother and called to ask about her daughter and she swore to me she never had children. The company that owns the lot told me it’s been unoccupied and on the market for half a year.

I’ve not been the same since my escape from Rochester Heights. There’s so much left in this goddamn journal but every time I look at it I get this sense of overwhelming doom. There’s so many questions, if what exists below is reflected above, and vice versa hows the world changed? Now as a speak there’s a tower of flesh that rises high above the world below and it casts its long shadow into the world above and i shudder to think at how it will manifest.

I know Rochester Heights has cast it’s shadow over me, darkened my heart one way or another. The people there didn’t deserve what happened to them, and Harold deserved better but in hatred or love their gaze eluded me. Once I resented that but now I find solace in it. The nightmares will never end, and I will never be ok. But at least any that casts it’s hateful gaze upon our world will see nothing but a shadow in my place.

---

Credit: Santiago Del Mar

Bad Blood

 

I never thought that dying would save my life. But then death has always been a funny son-of-a-bitch.

Three weeks ago I made an appointment to see my regular doctor about an annoying cough that wouldn’t go away. It got so bad I swore that Gary, the guy who sat in the cubicle next to me at work, wanted to strangle me with my own phone cord. But I didn’t like him much, either, so I considered us even.

I walked into my doctor’s office figuring I’d gotten myself another case of Bronchitis. I expected to walk out in five minutes with a prescription for the good cough medicine that makes me feel all warm and squishy as I drift off in front of the TV. She insisted on an x-ray, though, so I humored her, figuring I didn’t have much choice if I wanted to walk out with that precious slip of paper.

“They say the quickest way to a man’s heart is with radiation,” I joked, and she laughed her way out of the room.

But when she walked in a little later, with the developed x-ray in hand, she wasn’t laughing. She popped the film sheet into the holding clips and flipped the light switch, revealing the black-and-white image of my lungs. Specifically, the gray cloud that had settled over them, like the weather at a doomed parade. I’m no trained professional, but the crowd of dark spots gathered in my lungs didn’t look right to me.

Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer is what it’s called, though to me, ‘non-small’ sounds like a nice way of saying ‘big and scary.’ And yet they said I was lucky. That they caught it early enough to give me a fighting chance, so long as we took what they called an ‘aggressive plan of attack.’

Let me tell you, I didn’t feel lucky. There isn’t enough TV in the world to distract you from a diagnosis like that. Pretty soon your thoughts start to turn in on themselves. You analyze and re-analyze every choice and cringe-inducing mistake you’ve ever made. More than anything, my mind kept returning to all those times I’d lectured my parents about their pack-a-day smoking habit. I’d leave them informational flyers and email them links to support groups. “It might be cool if you don’t die,” I’d tell them. “Maybe stick around for a bit, just to see how it goes.” I eventually gave up when I realized they were never going to change, and I was somehow becoming the bad guy for trying to keep my parents alive.

Well, guess what? Those assholes retired to Florida with a clean bill of health, and they left me holding the check. Or more accurately the medical bill. We might have been blood, but it had slowly become bad blood. They were the reason I didn’t carry a phone anymore, so I didn’t have to live with the possibility of a surprise phone call. I didn’t even bother calling to tell them about my diagnosis. Either I would do that when the treatments were over, to celebrate my victory over their second-hand gift to me, or my obituary would be the greatest I-Told-You-So in modern-day history.

You can call it petty. I call it something to look forward to.

When I signed in for my first chemo session, the girl who handed me the dictionary-sized stack of paperwork to fill out asked if I had someone to drive me home. I thought it was a pretty stupid question on account of us living in a city, where public transportation is always about ten feet away. Seeing the look on my face, she explained that chemo takes a lot out of a person.

“I think that’s the idea,” I said. When she missed the obvious- and some would say brilliant joke- and went on to describe the feelings of nausea and exhaustion I might experience as a side-effect of the treatment, I could see she wasn’t going to let the subject go easily. Being that I was already experiencing nausea and exhaustion, I did the right thing and lied to her face. “Don’t worry,” I said, “an old friend will be waiting to pick me up.”

If it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t a total lie. I consider the A-Train to be a very old, very dear, very smelly and piss-stained friend.

After filling out all that paperwork, I never wanted to use my arm again, which was right about the time a nurse brought me to the Infusion Room and told me we’d be using my arm for the treatment. My Oncologist showed up, who I found to be a man who had never smiled in his life. He told me I’d be receiving my own, personalized blend of chemo and pre-medications, including anti-nausea meds, anxiety meds, allergy meds, and steroids. I asked him if he could add a shot of whiskey to that cocktail, but the joke went over like a cardboard flamethrower.

When the doctor with the fantastic sense of humor left, the nurse hooked me up to the poison drip and gave me a few tips about how I might feel. She said the steroids might give me energy, while the allergy and anti-anxiety drugs might make me sleepy. “So an eight-ball,” I said. When she gave me a confused look I added, “Coke and heroin. The only way to party.”

“Hopefully it’s not that strong,” she said.

“And what about this stuff?” I asked, nodding to the clear liquid dripping into my bloodstream. “How will that make me feel?”

“Usually not great. But it makes the cancer cells feel even worse.”

I could certainly agree with that kind of logic. “The enemy of my enemy,” I said, and finally she smiled. Then she sat in a chair across the room and got busy forgetting I existed.

* * * * * *

Nearly five hours later I walked out of the Oncology building feeling like I’d just gone on a weekend bender with Hunter Thompson and Satan’s pharmacist. The sun had gone down, and the city’s more colorful citizens were starting to crawl out of their caves. I felt like I was swimming in slow motion through a crowd of grinning, talking fish, and they were all trying to sell me something. I had the vague thought that there was someone I was supposed to meet, until about three blocks later when I remembered that it was a lie I’d told that nosy woman at the front desk to get her off my back.

By the time I reached the stairs leading down to the subway, my head felt like an overinflated balloon about to float up into the sky, leaving behind sad children and crying hippies concerned for the dolphins that would choke on me. The light glittered up at me from the subway like a flashlight dropped in the ocean, and I followed it down into the cold, dark ground.

I didn’t have to wait long for the next train, which was good because the benches were looking way too comfortable to risk sitting on them and falling asleep. When a dirty subway bench starts looking like a king-sized bed, you know you’re in trouble.

The A-Train was crowded, but luckily not packed too tight with people. Most of them were probably heading to a game or a concert or whatever it is normal people did for fun. It was only by some miracle that I found an empty seat.

My breath must have stunk like radioactive rat’s ass, because the woman in the seat next to me turned away and gave me a nice look at the back of her neck. She pretended like I wasn’t there, which, to be fair, was pretty much true. I wasn’t all there. Not really. My brain felt like old jelly, and my veins burned like a gasoline fire. As the automatic doors closed, and the train squeaked out of the station, I could feel my head being pulled toward the floor. The invisible cowboy called Sleep had roped my neck and was swiftly taking me down, tying my hands and feet together to leave me helpless. The last thing I heard was a tinny-sounding announcement about a delay due to construction on the tracks. I distantly remembered something about a big, expensive project to dig a new tunnel and add extra subway lines, but I could barely think over the thumping of the tracks beneath us.

The rhythmic sound grew slower and heavier, and my eyelids did the same. They were impossibly heavy, unable to stay open. My head swirled with chemicals and the muffled sounds of voices drifting away to nothing as I fell and fell through the darkness.

* * * * * *

In my dream I was sitting in a cubicle, surrounded by shadows. My arms, both of them, were hooked up to tubes, long tubes that ran high above my head and into the shadows. Inside the tubes were what looked like tiny, black ants. A parade of them, marching into my veins. Making my arms itch and burn. So many ants they moved like liquid. Like oil sludge through an engine. I tried to pull the tubes from my arms but they wouldn’t budge, like they were soldered to my flesh. A permanent part of me. I looked up to see the bags they were attached to, where the ants were coming from. The origin of their death march.

Instead of IV bags, I saw two bodies dangling above me in the dark. The tubes ran from their arms to mine, their faces just barely visible.

It was mom and dad. Smiling down at me. Squeezing their arms to make the ants march faster.

Laughing as they fed me the blackness that lived inside them.

* * * * * *

Before my eyes were open, I knew something was wrong.

Usually falling asleep on the subway meant missing a stop. Life had continued on without you, and it was on you to shake off the sleep and catch up. But this time it was all wrong.

This time something had changed.

Not only had someone turned the volume down, they’d changed the channel entirely. Tuned into a different frequency, on another wavelength. The scattered voices of the A-Train crowd had fallen silent, replaced by the strange, overbearing echo of the steel cars moving through the tunnel, tick-tick-ticking like a drawn-out time bomb.

My eyelids opened like two, forgotten sarcophagi, dry and scratchy as the ancient desert. I was staring down at my own shirt, my neck bent at a sharp angle. As I picked my head up, pain shot through my shoulders and neck, the muscles sore from so much time spent hunched over. I would have cursed or cried out, but my throat was even drier than my eyes, and no sound came out when I tried.

Blinking, trying to focus, I looked around at the train car, attempting to make sense of what I saw. The train’s overhead lights had gone out, leaving the car to be lit only by a single strip of yellow emergency lights. Much stronger were the lights coming through the windows from the subway tunnel. They strobed past, illuminating the inside of the car from front to back, a slow, steady pattern like we were being scanned by an alien ship.

But the really strange thing, the thing that made me blink the sleep from my eyes and fight the pounding in my temple, was what those lights lit up.

The train car appeared to be transporting not commuters, but corpses. A few dozen dead bodies sitting upright in their seats, rocking back and forth from the movement of the train. Light flickered slowly past them from the tunnel outside, playing across their slumped, unmoving forms. I watched the bodies sway in the strobe light, feeling the moment stretch on and on, just me and a train car full of dead bodies, moving through the earth like a serpent in the night.

It had to be a dream. It was too surreal, too bizarre to be real life. I glanced up, expecting to see my parents still strung up by tubes, but saw only the ceiling of the train car illuminated by passing lights. On weak, sleep-heavy legs I stood, needing more than anything to know what was going on. To know what frequency I’d woken up in.

I don’t know if it was the cocktail of chemicals swimming in my veins or the adrenaline rush of fear, but my legs shook like a newborn deer learning to walk. I stared at the dark train car, silently begging, praying for someone to move and break the spell. Only the rocking of the train moved the bodies, swayed them in their seats, the faint sound of their clothes shifting against the metal and plastic benches.

For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me until just then that I’d been sitting next to someone when I fell asleep. The woman who pretended I didn’t exist. I was starting to think she was right, that I was a ghost drifting through the afterlife. Which was crazy, of course, but then so was what I’d woken up to.

I looked back to the seat next to mine and found her exactly where I’d left her. Her head was slumped over, like the others, and she looked just as dead as them, her head swaying to the rhythmic rocking of the train.

But she wasn’t exactly as I’d left her. There was something different, something new about her. The neck she’d shown me when I sat down had something sticking out of it, almost like a large pyramid at the base of her skull. It was thick and short, and it came to a sharp point. Careful not to disturb her, I steadied myself against the swaying of the train and leaned in for a better look.

It looked like an arrowhead erupting from the nape of her neck, complete with a dribble of dried blood at the entry point. As I got closer, I made out tiny rows of barbs. Just when I thought the woman had the oddest piercing I’d ever seen, the thing on her neck did something I really, really wished it hadn’t done.

It moved.

Like the tail of a rat settling into its nest, the thing on her neck shifted and buried in deeper. My dry throat found its voice again as I nearly fell back, letting out a small, guttural cry. The woman’s slumped head shifted in what at first I thought was the movement of the train taking a sharp curve in the tunnel. But then it moved again, this time rising up, the neck craning, the head turning toward the sound I’d made like a sluggish dog alerted to trouble.

If I thought the barbed tail moving in her neck was shocking, it was nothing compared to the sight of the woman’s eyes. Her eyelids rose like curtains at the world’s worst play, revealing two white orbs. The centers were barely discolored by what used to be her corneas. In the passing lights of the subway tunnel I saw no recognition, no reaction to the light. The woman, if she was even aware of me, couldn’t see me, couldn’t make out my horrified expression staring back at her, no matter how much she craned her neck and aimed her dead, milky eyeballs at me, her mouth slack and her features as barren as the surface of a cold moon. The way her head tilted reminded me of a puppet. As if not moving by choice, but by something working it from inside.

With a hard realization dawning on me, I turned away from the white-eyed woman and looked at the next closest person to me. A young guy in a hoodie rocked in his seat, arms limp at his side, head slumped over. Inching closer to peek over his hood, I made out the already familiar shape on the back of his neck. A barbed tail surrounded by dried blood. The girl next to him, wearing hoop earrings and a fake fur coat, had the same on her neck.

I looked around the darkened train car, still slipping through the tunnels, lights passing in rhythm like the beat of a funeral hymn. And in that moment, alone among the bobbing, half-dead commuters of a train that didn’t appear to be stopping, I finally realized the inarguable truth of what I’d woken up to.

“I’m dead.”

At the sound of my voice, little more than a whisper, the slumped head of every person in the train car shot up. I froze in place as a hundred heads holding two hundred white eyes scanned the dark, ears tilted, trying to locate the source of the sound. Their movements were exactly like the woman’s. The moves of a puppet. Suddenly I felt like I was going to piss my pants. I held it, though, held my piss and held my breath as the slack-jawed crowd with the tails in their necks scanned the train car from their seats for whatever didn’t belong. Whatever wasn’t one of them. What they would do if they found it- if they found me- was not something I wanted to find out.

At that point, I realized I had two options. The train didn’t appear to be making any stops, and it was only a matter of time until the blind, infected whatever-they-were people in that train caught me standing in their midst. My first option was to sit back down in my seat and wait it out, wait until the train stopped on its own or someone shut it down. There was no telling how long that would take, though, and by that time I would probably piss myself and get sniffed out by the white-eyed creeps.

The other option was to shut it down myself.

* * * * * *

There was no way of knowing what had happened to the train conductor, but considering we’d blown past the last few stops without signs of slowing down, it was safe to assume they either knew what was happening, and wanted no part of it, or they’d been taken over as well. Either way, it meant making my way up to the conductor’s car, getting inside, and somehow convincing the conductor to stop the train. Whether that meant by words or by force, I didn’t know.

One more glance at the woman I’d slept next to was all I needed to make up my mind. There was no way I was going to sit next to her and calmly wait for a miracle to save me. Not with that unblinking, slightly drooling look on her deadened face. I’d rather sit next to a crying baby on a flight from New York to Singapore. My only consolation was that I’d sat at the front of the train, and so only had to cross one car to reach the conductor.

With the slowest, quietest footsteps I’ve ever taken in my life, I made the excruciating trek from the back of the car to the front, holding the poles to keep me steady when I could, every inch of the way staring at the white, unblinking eyes around me. Watching for the slightest hint of recognition. When I passed someone standing, their stiffened arms hooked around the poles, I moved around them at the pace of a glacier. By the time I reached the door at the front of the car my legs were sore from staying so tense- and they’d already been tired from the personalized poison cocktail swimming through them.

With the sliding door finally in front of me, I knew I’d reached a crucial moment. Do or die, if you will. After spending so much time being as silent as possible, I was about to break that silence very abruptly. There was no slow, quiet way to do it, once the door was even slightly open the wind from the moving train would rush in, and there was no way of knowing how the puppets were going to react to it. Not well, if I had to guess. But there was no going back. No other way.

With my tense fingers wrapped around the cold handle, my body like a coiled spring, I wrenched the sliding door open and at the same flung myself through the open space, the wind hitting me like a full-body punch, then spun and wrenched the door shut again, holding the handle in case anyone tried to pull it open.

The wind buffeted my body, my clothes flapping like a flag in a storm as the two cars bumped and swayed together. A small chain on either side was all that kept me from tumbling off the train and into the dark tunnel. Through the door’s window I watched the car I’d just escaped from come to life like the world’s worst puppet show. Passengers lurched to their crooked feet and stumbled blindly toward the door, bumping and fumbling past each other to find the noise they’d just heard. I held on tight to the handle, relieved to see none of them try to open it. Not with any conviction. A few of them reached out and slapped at the door, making movements that resembled a functioning human, or maybe a dog trying to recreate something it had done accidentally. But luckily for me, it wasn’t coordinated enough to actually open the heavy door.

Their blind eyes stared out the window, nothing separating us but a half-inch of glass and a world of understanding. These weren’t human faces in front of me. They were something alien, filtered through a layer of human bone and muscle. I’d walked among them, tempting death with each footstep.

But now. Now came the hard part.

I could see him in there. Through the thick, dirty glass of the final door, I watched as the train conductor sat perfectly still in his seat, his hand resting on a large button on the console. Since he was wearing a windbreaker with the collar pulled up, I couldn’t get a look at his neck to see what might be hiding there. But the eeriness of his posture, the crooked way he sat in his chair with his foot on the pedal, didn’t give me much hope.

After about half a minute, as I gathered my courage from the wind, the button under the conductor’s hand started to flash. It looked like some kind of alert, but I had no idea how train’s operated, so it was only a guess. After another thirty seconds passed and he hadn’t pressed the button- assumedly because he couldn’t see it- it began to buzz sharply, so loud I could hear it over the wind and the clatter of the train. The moment the noise started, the conductor slapped at the button, shutting off both the noise and the light at once.

Just like that, I understood what I was looking at. It was some kind of dead man’s switch, designed to make sure the conductor was still both alive and awake to turn it off in the event of an emergency.

Apparently he was both alive and awake, but probably not the way the designers had planned. His mindless reaction to the stimuli was what kept the train going. It was a repeating pattern: Thing makes noise. Hit thing until it stops making noise. Repeat. To be honest, it didn’t look much different from the way I looked at work, which hit a little too close to home for me.

If that thought bothered me, it was nothing compared to the realization that I was on standing on a train- between moving cars no less- that was being operated by a blind man, himself operated by some kind of parasite that had dug itself into his brain. It was only a matter of time before we ran into trouble, be it a stopped train or some other blockage the conductor would have no skills to see, much less avoid.

With a look around for something, anything I could use as a weapon, and coming up with a big, fat nothing, I gripped the handle of the conductor’s car, took a breath, prayed silently to every god I’d ever heard of and a few I hadn’t, and flung open the door.

The conductor turned to face with me with a slackened face and two, milky-white eyes that looked right through me. He was a large man, with pock-marked skin and a graying beard. He rose from the seat like his shoulders had ropes attached to them, a bad performance of Peter Pan with two uncoordinated stagehands just out of view working the pulley system. I had the bright idea that maybe he could be reasoned with, that whatever was controlling him might understand the words taken in by the ears of its host. I figured it was worth a shot trying to reason with him, at least for the sake of my own conscience. With only a second or two to spare, I thought of the most diplomatic thing I could come up with on such short notice.

“Sit down. I don’t want to kill you.”

It certainly wasn’t my worst work. I paused for a moment, to see how my extended olive branch would be received. To my surprise, the conductor paused as well. He cocked his head like a dog hearing the peanut butter jar, and opened his mouth. Except that wasn’t right. It wasn’t that he opened his mouth, but rather his mouth was opened for him. I waited to hear what he had to say in return, the first words exchanged between two different species since…well maybe ever. It might turn out to be a historic occasion. Potential planetary war avoided by two individuals breaking down the walls of communication.

Except that’s not what happened. Instead of words, a noise rose up from inside his throat like the droning song of a cicada during a hot summer. I watched in disgust as two, thick antennae pushed past the conductor’s tongue and lips, feeling the air around it. I thought it was part of the thing that was controlling him, conducting the conductor, so to speak, until it managed to crawl all the way out of his mouth, tail and all. It was a totally separate creature from the one in his neck.

How many of those things were inside him? And more importantly, was I going to throw up on myself?

It was long, nearly a foot from end to end, with a sectioned body like a blackish-pink worm, and a spiked tail that wrapped around the conductor’s neck. It made its way onto his shoulder with surprising speed, wet with saliva and fast as hell. The face, if you could call it that, was little more than an eyeless suction cup lined with rows of needle-like teeth that glistened as they shifted. As the creature tested the air with its twitching antennae, its long body tensed and coiled, I had already decided what thought needed to be communicated between our two species next.

“You are one nasty little bastard,” I said.

And that’s when it jumped at me.

* * * * * *

The thing sprung off the conductor’s shoulder aimed right for my face, its wormy mouth open and teeth rotating. I barely had time to move. Purely by instinct, my hands shot up in front of my face, blocking it from being hit. Instead, the creature wrapped around my wrist and squeezed tight, like a boa constrictor with a mouse in its grip.

Its antennae twitched wildly, tail whipping at my arm as it struggled to reach my face. I felt its needle-teeth clamp down on my exposed wrist. My nerves lit up as it bit down hard, teeth digging in. I screamed. Tried to smash it against the train wall. I was desperate to get it off me, but it moved, making me slam my own injured arm into the wall. I screamed again.

It pulled its suction cup mouth from my arm and hissed like a cockroach, its tiny teeth wet with my blood. I tried to shout back at it, tell it to crawl up its own ass, but it went again for my face. Served me right. Now wasn’t the time for witty comebacks. I did everything I could to shake it off, smash it against something, but it was too fast. Too slippery.

Suddenly I remembered the conductor was still there, and I turned to find his puppet hands reaching out toward me.

He wanted to restrain me, to help the creature that had just crawled out of his mouth do its job. I raised my fist to punch him right in his creepy beard, realizing too late it was the arm that currently had a demonic worm wrapped around it.

I’d screwed up, exposing my face to the slimy beast to do God knew what. But just when I thought it was over, just when I thought I was the next puppet in the world’s nastiest children’s show, something funny happened.

The creature on my arm seized up, its long body going so tense it cut off the circulation to my hand. I felt waves of peristalsis pulse through its form. A sound almost like a wet cough came from its needled mouth, and as I watched it twist and convulse around my arm, I noticed even the conductor seemed to be listening to the sick sounds it made. The creature’s skin shifted to a gray pallor. Then its grip loosened, no longer restricting my blood flow.

Whatever it was doing, I didn’t wait to find out. I reached out, grabbed it around the middle and squeezed as hard as I could. It squished and popped between my fingers like a rotten tomato. Once it had completely stopped squirming I dropped it. It fell to the floor with two, soft thumps- one for each half.

I stared down at it in disbelief, ignoring the smell of my newly-painted hand. I looked up at the conductor, expecting him to lash out at me, to demand revenge for whatever the hell had just happened to his tenant. But the large button, which must have been flashing while I’d fought the creature on my arm, began to buzz for attention. He cocked his head, listening blindly to the noise, then fumbled back into his seat as if I was no longer there.

He slapped the button to make it stop buzzing. Back at work like nothing had happened. But he was too late. The emergency brakes engaged, nearly throwing us both to the floor.

With a long, dry screech of metal, the train came to a stop in the dark tunnel. I breathed a hesitant sigh of relief. We were no longer in danger of smashing into something up ahead, but being that we were sitting dead on the tracks, the risk was now that another train would smash into us.

Not exactly a big difference results-wise.

I stepped over the dead worm-thing while keeping a close eye on the blind conductor. Without a button to press he’d become just as useless as all his blind passengers behind us.

Mounted under the console was a heavy tin box with first aid equipment inside. I used it to smash in the conductor’s head, starting with the tail in the back of his neck. He didn’t scream- the creature did enough of it for the two of them.

* * * * * *

After taking care of the conductor and his passenger, I opened the dented, metal box and used one of the bandages inside to wipe the slime off my hands, the other to wrap my bleeding arm. Then I found a heavy flashlight that worked well and felt solid in my hand.

I checked in on the train passengers through the window. They’d returned to their seats and were once again sitting blind and half-dead, as if awaiting instructions. What those instructions would be I didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. There was only one thing I did know: I needed to get off that train and find my way out. Maybe warn people about what I’d seen down there. But that was a very distant second. If there was time.

I climbed down between the train cars, nearly falling off in the process. My clothes got dirty with oil and grease but I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was leaving the train of the damned behind, and getting above ground.

At that point, I noticed something interesting- the big bite wound in my arm wasn’t bothering me at all. I studied the bandage under the beam of the flashlight and found the blood had already stopped flowing. Even though the skin around it was red and inflamed, it didn’t hurt at all. In fact, it was almost numb to the touch. It made me think of mosquitoes, and how their saliva works like an anesthetic so we don’t feel them working on us. From what I recalled, they even inject us with anticoagulants to keep the blood flowing. Could these things do something similar? Numb us up but heal the entry wound instead to preserve the host?

I didn’t want to think about that, either. Not until I got the hell out of hell.

With the flashlight in hand, I looked both ways down the tunnel, where we’d come from and where we were going. They both looked equally unpromising. I decided to move forward, telling myself it was a sign of optimism or some bullshit. The truth was, I didn’t want to walk along the train and past all those windows, to catch even one glimpse of all the lifeless puppets in there. Just the thought of it sent a chill up my tired back.

The tunnel lights were a lot further apart than I remembered. Where before they’d passed by in a steady, hypnotic pattern to light up the train car of seemingly dead bodies, on foot they were a few minutes apart, meaning I spent more time in the dark than I did the light. The flashlight helped, though even combined the lights weren’t enough to beat back the shadows of that cold, dead place. Dirt and small rocks crunched under my dragging feet, echoing off the walls. It felt like an eternity down there in the dark. Emptiness behind, infinity ahead.

But the real problem was, I wasn’t alone in those tunnels.

Living in the city, you get used to the sounds of rodents and insects. The scratching of rats, the pitter-patter of roaches searching for food. You don’t like it, of course, but you kind of accept the inevitability of dirty things in your life. They can be kept at bay for a little while, killed and contained and kept away from your food, but eventually they always find their way back in.

Except what I was hearing wasn’t rats. And it wasn’t roaches, either.

All around me, coming from the shadows and off the walls, was the shuffle of rocks and dirt. Invisible things sliding through the darkness. Crawling and slipping along the ground and over the train tracks. I knew exactly what they were, what they were looking for, and I considered turning off the flashlight to make sure they didn’t find it. Then I remembered it didn’t matter anyway. They were blind as bats. More so, since they were actually blind. It probably didn’t matter if I kept the flashlight on, just that I not make any noise.

I decided to keep it on so I could see better and not trip in the dark, thus making noise and attracting attention. Still, I didn’t aim it directly down at the ground. There was no point in pushing it, and I really didn’t want to see the ground moving around my feet.

* * * * * *

After what must have been eight or nine years- or twenty minutes, depending on how you do the math- I found a door. It was unlocked, thankfully, and it led to a maintenance area that looked like it hadn’t been used in over a decade. It was a large room, carpeted in dust and rat droppings, without a single light bulb to light it up. I didn’t know what a damned thing in it was used for other than a few broken-down generators and an old mop, but I wasn’t planning on sticking around to find out. I hurried through the stale-smelling place, through another door, and up a stairwell thick with cobwebs and cigarette butts, tripping over my own feet the entire way.

After a few turns and another door, I found myself ejected unceremoniously into a subway station I’d never been in. It really didn’t matter, so long as it got me that much closer to ground level. Though as I weaved my way across the platform and up another flight of stairs, I noted that the station was completely empty. Not even the ticket booth was occupied. The sight was troubling, but at that moment I cared only about getting to the surface, about reaching the air, and the light, and God help me, even the people. My legs were tired and my head pounded and my lungs felt like they would burst, but I charged up those final steps faster than I’d ever run before. Like an overdue baby ready to be born.

Finally I was free. Above ground and out of the grave. The night air felt cool and refreshing on my hot, sweaty skin, and even the city’s smoggy air was an improvement on what I’d been breathing. I gave myself a few seconds to enjoy the victory and take in the feeling. I’d made it. I’d looked death in its eyeless, suction-cupped face and lived to talk about it.

When the novelty of being alive wore off, which took all of ten seconds, I spotted a police officer standing near an intersection. The traffic was at a stand-still, and my guess was she was there to direct it. Seeing a real, live authority figure, the responsibility of warning someone about what I’d seen hit me like it hadn’t before. People needed to know what was going on. To stop it from spreading. And if I was going to be the selfless hero to do it, recognized for the rest of my life as the man who saved them all, then all the better.

“Officer!” I shouted as I ran up to her. “Down there. The subway. They need help! Creatures. Horrible things.” My words were a mess, coming out a few at a time and mostly out of order.

But as she turned to face me, to look not at me but through me, with those clouded-over eyes and that blank expression, I knew my words didn’t matter. None of it mattered, because no one cared. Not the officer in front of me. Not the people standing blindly around us. Not even the drivers in all the cars stopped all along the street, as far away as I could see.

The city was eerily quiet, yet still full of people. But to call them people was an exaggeration. They were puppets. A city of puppets, standing around waiting for their strings to be pulled. The only sounds I heard were the idling of car engines and the useless changing of traffic signals. That and the crawling. The shuffling and slithering of legless things in the alleys and under the ground.

I backed away from the police officer before she could open her mouth and birth the inevitable. When I found a somewhat secluded place in a small park, away from all the white-eyed, slack-faced puppets, I sat down on a bench and buried my face in my hands.

Was I the only one not taken by those things? And if so, should I feel lucky about it, or somehow offended? Was I actually beneath the standards of blind, brain-sucking worms? As I sat on the bench, contemplating what to do next, where to go or who to call, I rubbed my aching neck. Between the chemo cocktail and my adventure down below, which included the cardio-heavy act of beating a man to death, I was tired to my bones.

My fingers touched something. Something on my neck. I jumped up from the bench, panic coursing through me, and slapped and clawed at the back of my head to pull whatever it was loose. I would die before I let one of those things turn me into a puppet. No way I was letting them win after all I’d gone through.

But nothing came. There was no tail, no creature. I looked at my hand and found it stained with dried blood. Touching my neck again, carefully, I felt a large wound there, all caked with scabs and coagulated blood, and only a faint stinging to go with it, more from my clumsy slapping and clawing than anything.

It didn’t make sense. But then, then I thought of the anesthetic in the mosquito saliva. The coagulant. And I thought of what happened in the conductor’s car when the creature bit my arm. It was almost like an allergic reaction I’d witnessed. A violent response to something foreign and dangerous.

A reaction to my blood. To the chemical cocktail floating in my veins. The chemo had turned my blood toxic, not just a bad taste but a dangerous one. Those four hours under the needle had been like being fitted for armor, a radioactive shield protecting me from the tiny, vile dragons of the world.

The enemy of my enemy.

As I stood there, trying to understand how dying had saved my life, how the monster inside me had protected me from the ones outside, I became aware of footsteps on the sidewalk nearby. They were normal footsteps, not the shuffling of puppet feet, and as I stood silently in the small park I watched a hooded figure walk past. She was fairly tall, a young woman in a purple hoodie, and when she turned to casually glance at me without stopping, I saw beneath her hood.

She had no hair, only eyebrows, and a hard stare that said she’s been to hell and back. She was gorgeous, in a princess warrior kind of way. With those gray eyes she’d stared down the same death as me, taken the same poisons, killing herself to live. After we locked eyes for one, intense moment, she simply nodded, then kept walking until she disappeared around a corner. Two ships passing in the night.

I took a deep breath, filling up my diseased lungs with night air, inflating those twin monsters inside me. Monsters locked away in a rib cage. Then I found a phone and dialed a number I hadn’t dialed in years, watching the puppets walk blindly past. Fake lives with fake meaning.

My father picked up, though it was on speakerphone as usual. My mother was in the room, too. They both started talking at once, asking about the things they were hearing about on the news. I cut them off, stopping them from talking over each other, and told them to listen to me very, very carefully.

“There’s good news and there’s bad news,” I explained to them. “The good news is, I have cancer. The bad news is, you don’t.”

I hung up before they could say another word. Then I went off to find the princess warrior. It was time to start a new tribe. A poisonous tribe. One free of strings.

---

Credits

 

I Hate Eating

 

Nothing but raw meat for months now. Though, that’s not the worst part. No, that’s the bones and the teeth…they cut your throat on the way down. I’m sick to my stomach all the time, but I can’t vomit.

Day in and day out…it’s always the same. The chasing, the screaming, the inevitable silence…then only punctuated by the squelching of our mouths masticating flesh. I see it in the other’s eyes too, we’re all disgusted with ourselves. Some still weep while they chew…I got over that weeks ago.

Before I was bitten, I did everything in my power to stay alive. Kept my wife and I locked up safe in the basement. We survived the initial wave, but eventually ran out of food, and I needed to go out for supplies.

They snuck up on me in the supermarket. Having found a few cans of beans, I was so excited that I let my guard down…just for a second. Once I felt the teeth sink into my arm, I knew it was over. 100% infection rate, no cure, no immunity…I’d told my wife that if I was compromised, I wouldn’t come back, that I would never risk her safety.

I reached for my gun…had it nearly pointed at my head when one of them grabbed my arm and stopped me. They pinned me to the ground and just waited for it to take over. It doesn’t share its “thoughts” with me, so I still don’t fully understand its actions, but what I have figured out is that those that are healthy and strong become new hosts. Those that are old, weak, injured, many women…most children…become food.

It was several hours before I heard her voice. “Ben?! Ben, where are you?!”

NO! I told her to stay put! Never to come looking for me!

Desperately, I tried to call out to her, to tell her to run. But I was no longer in control of my vocal cords…no longer in control of anything. In horror, I watched my own body rise from the ground and follow the others in her direction.

She tried to flee…but she wasn’t quick enough…we caught her in seconds. I still hear her screaming every night, and see myself tearing holes in her beautiful face.

Now, I wish for death every day. Every time we find a new group of survivors, I pray one of them will finally put a bullet in my head. Blow me up, crush my skull…anything to stop this madness.

Today, I thought I might get lucky. We came across a heavily fortified house, and I watched several of my compatriots fall to booby traps on the perimeter. Unfortunately, I was with the group that breached the door.

He stopped a few of us before he ran out of ammo, but inevitably, we overwhelmed him and held him in place. Strong…a new host.

At least no feeding for now.

Then I heard a child whimper in the next room.

My head turned. 

----

Credits

The Extension Cord House

The house stood amongst the trees like an open sore, a condemned heap of lumber and tattered shingles that was dwarfed by the forest surrounding it. The structure begged to be demolished, and the wildlife looked ready to reclaim it at a moment's notice. The longer I looked at it, the more I wondered if I was at the wrong address.

My watch beeped and I lowered the binoculars, feeling the chilly air nip at the back of my neck. It had just turned ten o’clock, but lying in the weeds it felt like three in the morning. The moon couldn’t seem to get a word in through the clouds, and the house itself seemed to radiate its own perpetual darkness. Even from across the street, the house felt wrong.

I got off my stomach and crouched in the grass, chewing my lip. My gut urged me to go home, and I thought of my car, parked on the agricultural road about a hundred yards away. I could just leave and forget about this place, forget it even existed. Just the thought of leaving made me feel guilty, and I couldn’t help but dig my phone out of my pocket. I thought of Teddy, and I started to sweat.

I read the text again, for the thousandth time.

-Heading there now, sure you haven’t changed your mind?-

Teddy was my younger brother. We didn’t have the best childhood growing up— between our father being in and out of prison and our mother working double shifts, we were left to our own devices the majority of the time. It was something that made us stray from the path of normal blue-collar children. With my mother struggling to make ends meet and the continuous lack of money, it was easy to pick us out from the other kids at school, something that would eventually get us into constant trouble in years of bullying and being outcasts. Despite the hardship, Teddy and I found ways to ease our path through a life where money had the final say.

We started taking it, whenever we could.

It started small, and innocently if I might add. A couple bucks here and there from other students, enough to afford things we didn’t have, like laundry soap or deodorant. With enough practice, we learned to lift wallets and purses with ease. We preyed on other students at our high school for whatever cash their parents sent them with, be it book rental fees or lunch money.

It wasn’t personal, it was just there. And the worst part of it all, the money came easy.

We always distanced ourselves from the owners of the money we took, and we only attempted if we were sure we could get it without there being an altercation. We didn’t want to be anywhere near them when they realized it was gone, either. In the end I think it helped with our guilt. For all we knew, they assumed they lost it.

When we got older and out of school, we started casing places together. Planning. Trying to be better. Pickpocketing on the street was tough, and the pay didn’t justify the risk. We hit our first house before we were twenty, spent weeks making sure they wouldn’t be home. At first the few hundred bucks in cash didn’t seem worth it, but the yield from pawning trinkets ended up being the real prize. Engagement rings, heirloom watches, coin collections. The investment of scoping houses and scouring them would triple, sometimes quadruple a day of pulling wallets. Each score would provide enough to catch everything up and buy necessities, even allow a few weeks of downtime.

As the years passed we honed our craft, planning each job patiently, methodically. Countless hours practicing lockpicking on dummy locks and researching home surveillance. Memorizing mail routes, garbage pickup.

The best houses to hit were those who went out on the town for the night. Whether it be a club, or a casino.

We were pretty damn good at it, too. Enough to make a living off of it, easily. We would spend two weeks planning, and hit the house on the weekend. Everything seemed to be going well, almost foolproof, until the last house we hit together. Teddy was getting impatient. Cocky. Swore only one week of planning would be enough, that we were taking too much time. I reluctantly agreed, my gut feeling pushed away by the thought of the extra money.

We cased a place outside of town, and waited for a Friday night. Watching from the field across the street, we observed as a couple left and locked the door behind them, all dressed up for a night out. They got in the only car in the driveway and drove away, the house barely lit with some of the kitchen lights on. Nobody else looked to be inside. The coast looked clear.

Teddy stood watch while I picked the lock, and when we got in we went straight to the bedroom. We tossed the drawers and moved on to the closet like we usually did, but something wasn’t right. The lights started to come on in the house, followed by the scuffs of little feet on the carpet.

Standing in the doorway was a preteen girl, and three little kids, each had to be under ten years old. Turns out the babysitter and the couple's children had been hanging out in the basement, watching movies. Together we all froze, the children terrified and crying as they looked at the two scary men in ski-masks, their eyes falling to the crowbars in our hands. Teddy was the first to move, raising his crowbar in an attempt to scare them off. The kids started to scream and I told Teddy to back off, deciding it was best to just call it a bust and walk away.

We had to jump through the window and make a run for it, and we got away clean, but there was something about that night that put me off the whole thing. The look in their eyes when they caught us, and the uncertainty I felt when Teddy walked toward them.

I didn’t want to do it anymore. Despite Teddy’s frustration I went clean, got a job stocking goods at a local store, earning an actual check while I sat on my nest egg. Teddy tried to do the same, but proved unable to adjust to a normal life where money had to be earned instead of taken. I tried to get him on the right track, and he tried to fight me every step of the way. In the end we parted ways, and he went back to casing places alone while I spent my nights stocking shelves and trying to blend in as a normal person.

As the months passed, I started to enjoy my new attempt at life. I even met a girl at the store I was working at and we started seeing each other. We didn’t have a lot of money, and I was slowly bleeding my nest egg going on dates and buying things for my apartment. The urge to do another job would return, but each time I would think of the look of terror on the faces of those kids and it would melt away.

Even last week, when I got a text from Teddy. Another attempt to get me back in, something he would do every couple weeks, despite our falling out. He had been doing jobs on his own for a while now, focusing on houses out in the country. Said he had found one almost completely surrounded by trees, one that nearly looked abandoned. There were rumors a hoarder had lived there. He talked a good game and even sent me the address. I knew he wanted me back because we worked better as a team. The thought was tantalizing, imagining finding a nice necklace or earrings, something I couldn’t afford with my wage job. Aside from the money, I missed the bond we shared when we worked together. I missed him. The act of no longer doing the jobs and trying to be clean cut felt like I was missing a limb. Despite the lure to join him, I refused. I couldn’t get the image of the children from the last job out of my head.

Three days ago, he sent me another text.

-Heading there now, sure you haven’t changed your mind?-

I refused again and wished him well, and as he went off to make more than three of my checks put together, I went on a date instead.

When I got back home, I texted him to see how it went, and he didn’t respond. He didn't answer my calls, either. Even though we weren't working together any more, he still always answered his phone. The next day, I went to his apartment, and found he wasn't home. His car wasn't there, either.

I checked public records to see if he had gotten arrested. When that turned nothing up, I started to worry. I looked up the address, and placed an anonymous phone call through wifi-calling at the local library. They performed a wellness check, and said “not only was there no one there, it looked like the place was going to cave in at any second.” They assumed I had given them the wrong address.

Another day passed. Another day of calling, stopping by his apartment, checking everywhere he would’ve normally been. It was like he had just vanished out of thin air. The only lead I had was the house.

This house.

I looked at the text for a little bit longer, before tucking my phone away. I climbed onto my knees and looked through the binoculars again, panning them over the porch, the windows, the driveway. It really did look like it was going to collapse at any second.

I checked both sides of the street, and saw the same abyssal darkness for as far as I could see. There wasn’t a car coming for miles in either direction. I walked quickly up the driveway, my backpack feeling oddly comforting on my shoulders. I had brought everything I would need to get into the house; my worn set of lockpicks, a flashlight, and my crowbar. I had dressed dark and in layers to fight against the chill, but my blood was running hot at the thought that something had happened to Teddy.

I walked quickly, repeatedly scanning between the door and the windows and making sure there wasn’t any movement. The house already looked like it would be painless to get into. No CCTV, no automatic porchlight, no key code lock, no barking dog. This would’ve been easy money, if the place didn’t look like it had been abandoned for twenty years.

The porch steps creaked under my feet as I climbed them, preemptively readying my picks by the time I hit the door. I worked quickly, inserting the tensioner and jimmying the pick until the plug turned. I glanced behind me to make sure nobody was there, and turned the knob. The knob turned freely but the door didn’t budge. Not like it was being held by a deadbolt, like it wasn’t moving at all. Midway through the door was a mail slot, and I lifted the cover to peek in.

There was nothing but a dusty gloom. No lighting, whatsoever.

I pocketed the picks and pulled the little crowbar from my bag, wedging the tip in between the door and the frame around it. The wood splintered but the door remained solidly in place— I would be here all day and all I would get was a mess.

Crowbar in hand, I left the porch and circled around the house, looking through the windows as I worked my way to the back. The windows were covered in a film of dust and dirt, and I could barely see inside. I decided I would find a way in through the back, away from the view of the road.

The lawn was erratically overgrown, tufts of weeds protruding up to waist height that nearly made me trip every other step. The dark outside seemed to suffocate, and between the lack of visibility and the rugged terrain I started to feel out of my depth. Part of me wished I was still back at the store stocking shelves, but the thought of Teddy pushed me forward. Maybe he had gotten in and the floor had collapsed, or maybe he had knocked his head or something. These reaching thoughts felt silly, but they kept me from thinking of something worse.

Around the right corner, I hugged the wall until I reached the backyard. The place hadn’t seen a mower in years; new saplings and bushes had sprouted amongst the fray of tall grass. Old wooden benches had wasted away, and a frayed rope dangled from a tree from the overbearing weight of a tire swing. I looked away from the forgotten yard and focused on the house, stopping in my tracks immediately.

One of the windows had been shattered.

Something I would expect Teddy to do, if he couldn’t find another option. There wasn’t much glass on the ground outside, whoever busted it was trying to get in. I looked over the window sill, my eyes moving from the jagged glass, to the nails buried into the wood, on the inside sill. There were dozens, each beaten and bent crudely in a hurry. Whoever had put these in, they wanted to keep people out.

I knocked a few pointed shards with my crowbar before climbing in. My gloves were thick and made for such a thing, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t get any unnecessary cuts. Last thing I needed was bleeding out on the way back to the car.

My boots met the tiled floor in a crunch of glass. I was in a little bathroom; a small toilet next to a tiny sink, and a glass shower stall tucked next to a water softener. What drew my attention however, was the immediate tangle in the floor past the glass. It was nearly impossible to tell what it was exactly, but the sight made my heart race. After long seconds of trying to make sense of it, I relented and dug my flashlight out of my pack. The press of the flashlight’s button was loud, and the illumination was reeling after being in the dark for so long. Even as I identified the strange mess, I couldn’t help but feel confused.

It was a sprawl of extension cords, horribly knotted and strewn everywhere. A multicolored collection of yellow and orange, like someone had made a complete mess of it and dumped it off in the bathroom. Except the pile didn’t stop. It continued into the hall behind it, like tentacles feeling out the space. I stood there for a while, the flashlight trailing the lead to try and find the reasoning behind it, but it led out of the room.

For the moment, I tried to ignore it.

Find Teddy. That’s why we’re here, that’s all that matters.

A brief scan of the bathroom told me there was nothing of interest, extension cords aside. The toilet hadn’t been cleaned in ages, a black calcified buildup lining the bowl. The water softener was old but wasn’t idling, the only thing I could hear was the sounds of my own breathing, and the glass grating beneath my feet. There didn’t seem to be any power running in the house.

With the flashlight pointing ahead and the crowbar hefted in my other hand, I moved on from the bathroom, taking a slow step over the ridiculous knot of cords. When I took my first step into the hall, I planted my foot in the only bare spot on the floor that wasn’t covered. As I took another step, I nearly tripped. The extension cords were everywhere, a neverending weave that trailed the entire length of the hall, and the sitting room beyond it. Not just a few spools connected together— but hundreds, all twisted and looped in a continuous spread that covered the floor as far as I could see.

Three-pronged cords plugged into two. The ones that weren’t braided tight to make sure they wouldn’t come loose were spliced together and mummified with electrical tape. The more I followed the trail to try and make sense of it the worse it looked. It had to be miles worth of cord.

I took my time navigating the littered floor, stepping slowly as I took in the house around me. The wallpaper was peeling from the walls, and the portraits that hadn’t been knocked off the walls had shattered frames, the pictures beneath scratched out angrily. I looked within the sprawl on the floor for clues, any sign that Teddy had been through here. The house was very old, but the mesh of cords kept me from seeing any sign of footprints. The rubber coating squeezed and twisted as I worked my way through what I learned to be the ground floor of a bilevel house, that contained nothing but dust covered laundry units on one side, and mold-ridden couches on the other. The stairwell door leading to the upper level was hanging open, held in place by the cords clutter. There was a door next to it, with a bare space in the floor that would accommodate it opening. My first guess would be a basement, or a storm shelter.

I decided to clear the upstairs first.

Taking the stairs was a feat in itself. The continuing tangle of cords proceeded both up and down the steps, and I had to ascend sideways to keep from falling. They draped over the steps like a head of hair, dirty strands weaving through each other in the maddening mess. I placed each step delicately, in fear of falling and getting caught in it.

The upper level was split into three different portions; a living room with a fireplace on the side, a dining room with a long table and chairs, and a kitchen. In the middle of it all was the front door, and when I shined the light upon it, I felt my blood run cold. The front door was barred in place, several planks lined across it, each secured with nails driven both into the door itself and the frame around it. The nails were bent and rusted, several of them broken off on their way in. At the foot of the door was a pile of mail; damp and moldy envelopes strewn across the floor of cords.

Different gauges and lengths, all wired into the same maddening mass.

The living room was bare aside from a smoking table, and the ashtray was filled to the brim with cigarette butts. The dining room table was littered with the remnants of picked apart meals, plates and trays splattered with long-dried food that looked like it had been played with. The kitchen was littered with dirty pots and pans, and the dishes that hadn’t made it to the fly-buzzing sink were shattered against the counter tops. Even in the rattiest of houses, I had never seen such filth.

I looked around the mass of cords for signs of Teddy, for his flashlight, his gloves, anything— and found nothing but dirt and grime.

The stairs I ascended wound around to the top level; a balconied hallway to a few rooms at each end of the exposed hall. The flashlight served as my eyes as I trailed the corridor from the living room, stopping halfway at the ceiling in the center of the hall, and the dark crevice lurking above.

The attic stairs were pulled down, revealing an open hole in its place. I kept the light on it, feeling a chill that was spreading throughout the room. The cords trailed up there as well, a single braid that looked like it had been drug up it. Transfixed on the attic entrance, my fingers tightened against the crowbar, my breath a cloud of fog. There was something about the attic entrance, something that unsettled me more than the house as a whole. I stared at the attic in the eerie silence, feeling the sweat chill on the back of my neck.

Through the silence, I could hear something; a faint echo that stood my nerves on end. A scream, muffled and far away.

Below me.

I thought of the basement door on the level below. I looked away from the attic and headed back downstairs, traversing the tangle as I went. The scream rang again, and I quickened my pace, nearly sliding down the steps to the landing next to the basement door. The doorknob was cold to the touch. When I opened it, I was hit with the stagnant aroma of decay, a sickening smell that washed into the room.

The basement was dark, a single staircase of planks leading down to bare concrete. I descended, each step creaked under my weight like it was ready to give out at any second. The cords were starting to thin, a cluster of single trails that led into the wall of the basement, into what looked like a hole in the wall. The cinder blocks had been broken apart, leading to another dark expanse.

I heard the scream again, a little louder. It was coming from the hole.

I wanted nothing more than to turn and leave, to climb back out through the bathroom and run to my car. Instead, I climbed in.

The air was thick and musty, the damp smell of dirt and clay clogging my nostrils. There was a tunnel carved out behind the hole, a crude passage that slowly descended into the earth. I followed the trails of cords at my feet, the sweat on my forehead chilling as I worked my way forward.

Through the wicked tunnel I could see a faint glow ahead, like a flickering candle in the dark.

There was a distant humming, a slow drone that echoed down the man-made tunnel. The crowbar shook in my hand, and the flashlight beam jittered ahead of me. Fighting every urge to run, my feet reluctantly marched forward, each step bringing me closer to the glimmer underground. The passage was narrow, and I felt the walls close in around me. The extension cords continued to trail ahead at my feet, worn threads leading me deeper into the tunnels.

I came to a fork in the passage; one lit path down the center, and two branching off on either side into total darkness. I shined the light down each, mentally weighing the options as the humming droned in the distance. Down the left, I jumped at the sight of rats scurrying away. The right was littered with tiny masses of fur, bigger rodents that looked like they had died painfully, the walls coated in dark, dry splatters. Something had torn them to pieces.

As I looked down the lit passage, I heard the scream again, a weak cry of desperation.

Teddy.

I darted down the center passage, keeping my head low to keep from banging it on the crags above. There was a sickening smell in the air, a toxic smell, like car exhaust. The light continued to spill until I could see clearly without the flashlight, the crowbar held close as the passage started to open up around me. I could see something ahead— a set of steel doors illuminated by a flickering light above, next to an old generator that was chugging away. The generator shook with every chug, the belt looking like it would fly off the pulley at any second.

Chained to the generator, was Teddy.

Shackles bound his wrists and several rusted chains fastened him to the generator, forcing him to lie awkwardly in place. He squinted as I approached, cowering away as I stepped into the light. His face was heavily bruised, and he had several strange gashes on his body, like someone was trying to carve him alive.

He lit up when he saw me, his eyes a mixture of dread and disbelief. He looked happy to see me, but worried.

He could barely speak, each word came out as an incoherent drool. I got my picks and focused on the shackles, popping the primitive locks with ease one after another. By the time we got the chains free, he was able to form a sentence.

“Did she see you?”

I looked into his eyes, and his usual carefree demeanor was reduced to a look of pure terror. He looked lost. Broken.

“Who?”

Behind us, a mechanical scream echoed in the tunnel. Teddy started to hyperventilate, and I helped him to his feet. His legs shook as he stood, but I ushered him away from the generator, handing him the flashlight so he could navigate while I helped him walk. Together we went back into the darkness, the mechanical scream getting louder as we returned to the fork in the road. It was a quick, dry cackle that sounded like jagged nails on a chalkboard.

The sound was coming from the left tunnel, and in the darkness, I could see a shifting silhouette through a flurry of sparks, moving towards us in quick, twitching motions. The sight of it— whatever it was, made Teddy shake.

“We have to move, now!” I urged Teddy, shoving him along.

We made our way back down the tunnel, the scream haunting us every step of the way. There was another cry along with it, a high-pitched howl that bellowed after us as we bounded towards the hole in the wall. I helped Teddy through, and he wheezed as he struggled to vault the broken blocks. By the time I ducked through, I could see the features of the shape that was chasing us.

Wild, thin hair. Sunken, beady eyes. A nightgown barely hanging off wiry limbs. The shriek of the weapon in her hands.

Teddy limped up the stairs, and tripped on the extension cords. The flashlight clattered away, its beam making a kaleidoscope through the dozens of layers of cord. Stumbling myself, I helped him up and guided him into the little bathroom, towards the window we had gotten in from. His limbs struggled to obey, and I had to give him a boost to make it up and out.

As Teddy landed awkwardly on the grass outside, I heard the dual screams racing up behind me. I turned just in time to see the shape flying towards me, the mechanical cry vibrating the air as she brought her weapon down. I raised the crowbar defensively and a flurry of sparks splashed through the dingy bathroom.

Through the glow of sparks I saw an old woman, her face decrepit and rotting beneath tight skin. Clutched in her veiny hands was an electric meat carver, a thin cord trailing behind the bottom, directly spliced into another thick cord. She was strong despite her size, and the dated carver sparked off the crowbar, nearly sawing into my chest, a sick burning smell emanating from the carver’s motor.

Teddy climbed to his feet, and reached a hand through the window. I looked into the eyes of the hag and pushed her as hard as I could, sending her into the shower stall in a crash of broken glass. She thrashed wildly through the debris, climbing to her feet through the wreckage, her eyes already back on me.

I looked at the tangle at my feet, and tossed the crowbar to Teddy. I knelt down and grabbed an armful of the cords, and just as the hag rushed me again, I threw them at her. She swung again as the cords constricted, the mess of rubber and tape and copper enveloping her like a cluster of serpents. I dove out the window to the sound of sizzles and pops, and as Teddy helped me to my feet, it was joined by the sound of electrocution.

The bathroom became a haze of black smoke, and we watched as the hag seized against her now volatile restraints. As she fell to the floor, her gown caught fire, and the last thing I could see was the simultaneous ignition of melting electrical tape.

Teddy and I fled the house, working our way through the uneven yard as quickly as we could. He rambled apologies about what he had gotten us into, but I ignored him and focused on the road ahead, as well as the house behind us. Even after we were down the driveway, I expected the hag to catch up, screaming while wielding that meat carver. But each time I looked back, there was nothing but the swaying trees that surrounded the house. Trees that looked eager to consume.

By the time we made it back to the agricultural road, we could smell the smoke. The horrid melting smell of an electrical fire and rotting wood wafted through the trees. By the time I helped Teddy into the passenger seat, I could see the glow in the distance.

I started the car and pulled away, the tires spitting gravel as we got the hell out of there.

Heading toward the nearest hospital, we drove through the smoke wafting over the road, our eyes drifting toward the glow within the trees.

The Extension Cord House was lit up like a burning star, a roaring blaze of green and blue hues that reached spitefully towards the sky.

Leaving the madness behind, I glanced in the rearview mirror, and felt my stomach twist up. In the dancing shadows of the fire, I swore I could see something shambling out of the driveway, a thin figure with a burning trail behind them, like a leash. 

***

—AHS