I’m writing this after leaving my house for the last time. I could tell you about screaming and crying as I crawled away from my home, but it wouldn’t make any sense to you now. It may not make sense to you when I’m done either, but I have to try, if only for myself. So I’ll start at a beginning. The notes my father started writing the day he lost my mother to it. The day they went to my great-grandmother’s house and entered the Maze.
Barbara had told me we should get someone to do this. An estate agent maybe, or some junk peddler that was willing to pour through a lifetime of my grandmother’s accumulated detritus. But I’d insisted on doing it ourselves. I told her it was because I didn’t trust someone else to go through her belongings, but that was only a small part of it. Truth was that I’d heard from Mom years ago that my grandmother had become a hoarder—a twisted, old scrap of a woman that had somehow outlived her own children while slowly rotting away in this rambling place of tall grass and large rooms packed tight and dark with…what?
When we first got here that morning, I suggested we start in the house. I guessed it was where anything of value would be and hopefully it would the easiest to tackle. When we opened the front door, I stifled a gag. The house had expelled a long breath into our faces—a dry, thick cough filled with roach dust and mouse droppings, decaying paper and rotten time. Glancing at Barb, I shrugged and turned on my flashlight as I stepped inside.
The house was three floors tall. The first two floors consisted of around eight large rooms each, while the third was comprised of four smaller rooms on the sides running toward a middle attic area that was the largest space in the house. Every room, every hallway, almost every conceivable space in the house, was full of clutter. Reams of newspaper. Stacks of porcelain. Columns of books and mesas of furniture. Piles of clothes that had likely once been neatly stacked, but had long since fallen into mounds of moldy disarray. Everything was coated with dust and filth—the thick, ropy kind of dust that reminded me of jungle vines. It was like the house was slowly eating everything, reclaiming ground from an intruder.
And now we were the intruders. Explorers of some foreign land or alien world, unsure of the geography and uncertain of what we might find behind the next door or around the corner. Maybe that’s why, when I started to realize we were lost, I didn’t think it strange at first. We were on the second floor, in a room we had been in at least twice before, I was sure of it, but I wasn’t entirely clear which way to go.
Part of it was the darkness—the power had been off for months and it would be at least a day or two before the power company turned it back on for our clean-up. But the claustrophobic semi-twilight that pervaded all the rooms wasn’t the main problem.
It was the stuff. We weren’t walking into rooms as much as we were following trails and hiking through canyons. Most places stuff was stacked or piled higher than our heads, and other than the high ceilings above and the occasional glimpse of a distant wall, you often had little sense of where you were in the larger context of the room, let alone the house. The paths would wind, this way and that, and I estimated that a given room might contain five or more different paths that sometimes interconnected and branched off into other areas of the house.
In the abstract, it was almost impressive, but we weren’t in the abstract. We were walking between neverending walls of trash, breathing in air that made my lungs ache while my heart steadily picked up pace the longer that we walked without a real sense of where we were going. It made no sense—the house was large, but not that large. We had to hit a wall or the stairs or something soon.
And yet we didn’t. I felt Barbara’s hand growing sweaty in mine, and when she asked the question, I resented it, not because she asked, but because she already knew the answer as well as I did, and her saying it only gave voice to my own fears.
“We’re lost in here, aren’t we?”
I slowed to a stop and looked back at her. In the offset glow of my flashlight, her face looked pale and ghostly floating in the dark. She looked tired, but more than that, she looked worried. Maybe even a little scared. Squeezing her hand, I tried to smile.
“Uh, yeah, I guess we are. It’s all just a maze, isn’t it?” I gave a short laugh I didn’t feel. “But it can’t go on forever, can it? We’ll just hit a wall or door eventually and reorient from there.”
Her eyes didn’t leave mine as she gave a slight nod. “I guess, but we’re on the second floor. We already went through these rooms, and I don’t remember them being this bad. Cluttered sure, junky even. But not like this. I don’t remember anything like this.”
I turned away so she wouldn’t see my face as I shrugged. She was right, of course. I didn’t remember anything this bad in any room we’d seen. But we just missed it, right? Or it looked worse when you were in the middle of it. What other answer could there be?
“I think we just need to keep going. We’ll find something we recognize soon enough.” Without waiting for a response, I grasped her hand tighter and started forward again.
We walked on for a few more minutes before finally reaching some stairs. They went up to the third floor but…I swear I’d never seen them before. The stairs we’d seen had been a continuation of stairs from the first to the second floor and on up to the third. These were isolated, with no stairs going down at all, and made in a narrow and curling style that was very different than what we’d seen anywhere in the house. Still, the third floor had been the least cluttered when we went up before. Maybe it would be easier to find the other stairs and go all the way down from up there.
“What do you think the other buildings are like?”
I blinked, my foot on top of the first step. “What do you mean?” I started walking again, and when I tugged at her hand, Barbara slowly started ascending behind me.
“I mean, that storage shed is large—bigger than a lot of people’s houses. But that outbuilding? It’s massive.”
Nodding, I kept taking the steps slowly. “Yeah, she ran an antique shop for nearly fifty years. That’s where she kept all the stuff she didn’t have room for in the shop. I haven’t been in there since I was a kid, and it was already full then.” I felt her shudder and I gave her hand a squeeze I hoped was comforting. This really was too much for us to handle. I saw it now, and I was sorry for bringing her in there in the first place. “When we get out of here, let’s go get a motel room, yeah? I’ll call the lawyer tomorrow and see if he can recommend an estate agent or something.” We’d just made it to the top of the stairs after what seemed like far too long of a climb. And there were more walls of junk here too, though they were a bit more spaced out at least. Guessing at which way led to the center of the house, I began taking us down one of the rotting halls my great-grandmother had made.
“Good. Yes, this is…I didn’t know someone could live like this. I almost feel like we’re walking through her mind, poor thing. It makes me want to go home and throw away everything we…”
click click click click
Barbara’s hand tightened on mine. “What was that?”
I turned, shining my light down both ends of the trash corridor we were in. “I don’t know. Maybe something just hitting something else?”
Her voice trembled slightly when she spoke again. “But it sounded…alive.”
I could hear blood in my ears as I shook my head. “I doubt there’s anything in here other than mice and spiders and bugs.” Puffing out a long breath, I shined my light up at the ceiling. “I guess there could be a raccoon or bat or something. We just need to keep an eye out and be careful. These rooms are smaller, so we have to be getting close.”
We walked for another couple of minutes when the sound came again.
click click click click
This time it was closer—close enough that I could hear a stealthy rustling noise underneath the hard clicks that echoed through the murk of the maze. Barbara put her flashlight against my shoulder as she stepped closer.
“That isn’t a random sound. Something is in here with us.”
I nodded. “Let’s hurry and get out of here.”
The flashlight pressed into my shoulder painfully as she whispered in my ear. “Just breakthrough if you have to. Push over a wall or whatever and let’s cut through so we can find the stairs.”
Glancing back at her, I shook my head as I kept my voice lower too. “It could cause things to collapse in ways we can’t predict. Push the wrong wall and you could have hundreds of pounds blocking a door or falling down on us. Better we keep going and…”
click click click click
It was right ahead of us now, the softer whisper of something sliding across the dirty floor clearly now the sound of something approaching. Instinctively I started backing up. Whatever it was, raccoon or…whatever…we just needed to turn around. Barbara’s light pitched up as I stepped backward, and as it shined down the path in front of us, we began to scream.
Parts of it looked like a man, and other parts, more like a dog or a rangey coyote. Long, skeletal arms covered in pale, blue-veined skin that slid back to large membranous webs that ran from the armpits to the mid-torso of the thing as it scrawled forward on thin-fingered, hard clawed hands. Its spine was pronounced and twisted, almost like a dinosaur’s fin or the raised upper peaks of someone deformed and in the last stages of malnutrition.
Except the rest of the body wasn’t thin-looking at all. To the contrary, the serpentine spine tapered down to hard, thick ribs barely visible beneath pendulous sacks of flesh. Below this, two short but powerful looking legs folded like a hound’s quivering moistly as though tensed to jump or perhaps trembling with excitement as it slid forward again.
click click click click
I’d been transfixed for a moment by the horror of it all, and hearing the sound brought me out of it. My eyes found the movement that matched that hard and terrible noise buried in the center of a long, dark head that was framed by four dimly shining eyes, two on each side of a nose and mouth that were more of a snout—elongated and lipless, yellowed teeth jutted out from between the black gums, chattering like a snake’s warning as the thing drew near. I felt myself sinking back into a kind of stupor at seeing it all—it was all too nightmarish to be real.
But then my eye drifted to one of its own, and there I saw the truth of it. Its hunger, and worse, its insanity. I had the dim thought that it wanted us for more than our meat. It wanted to keep us there with it forever.
A sharp moan escaped me as I grabbed Barbara’s arm and began to run back the other way. We hadn’t gone that far, or taken any turns, so we should be able to reach the twisting stairs back to the second floor easily. But…Where were they? This was impossib…
click click click click
Even with us running, it was somehow catching up to us. There must be a turn I forgot, maybe this one up ahead. Besides, running lost was better than letting that thing catch up.
click click click click
It took me a moment to realize it was above us, and in that moment, it landed on Barbara, slamming her to the ground and pulling her free from my grasp. I turned around to reach for her, to fight it off, but it was already dragging her away into the dark.
I chased them, I swear to God I did. I tried to find them. I ran and yelled for what felt like an hour, but there was never any sound of them after her first startled scream as it brought her down and took her from me. I kept walking, wandering corridors of trash that were impossibly long. There was no way this could all fit in that house, or even ten of those houses. I was going to die in this place, and that was fine. At least Barbara wouldn’t
Suddenly there was a door ahead, though much larger and different than any I’d seen in the house. Reaching it, I saw it slid along a track and had a small latch to keep it closed. I tripped the latch and yanked it aside easily, wincing at the bright afternoon sunlight as I stumbled back out into the world.
Looking back at the door I’d just come through, I saw I was leaving the large outbuilding now. It was impossible, of course. I’d been on the third floor of the house five hundred yards away, and now I was stepping out here…but none of this made any sense. I just needed to try and find Barbara.
I called her phone, but there was no answer. More than that, I could find no trace of her in the car. I felt sure she’d left her purse and coffee cup behind, but there was no sign of them anymore.
Maybe I should have gone back inside and tried again to find Barbara. Jerod, if you read this, maybe you’ll think your father is a coward for abandoning your mother there. But I was terrified, and more and more of my fear was not that my wife had been abducted by some monster in the darkness of that place, but that she’d never been with me at all. That I was suffering some kind of breakdown.
So I decided to go home. To see if I found her there, and if I didn’t, I’d call you or the police. It seemed like a reasonable plan at the time.
I felt the first fresh blossom of unease when I pulled into the driveway and didn’t see your mother’s car. I went inside and she wasn’t there. More than that, I didn’t see any signs of her having been there. None of her clothes, her books, her makeup or her art. All of it was gone. I remembered every bit of it, but somehow it had been wiped away, leaving most of the house bare. I thought about you, about how you wouldn’t exist without her, and that should have made me want to call you more, but instead it just made me afraid. I was so terribly alone and sad and very, very afraid, and this all had to be a bad dream or a brain tumor or something, and I was just so tired all of a sudden and…
And there was still a bed. So I laid down and I slept a dreamless sleep.
When I woke up, I saw walls around me.
To the left of the bed were stacks of cans—large, bomb shelter-sized cans of fruit and beans as tall as the ceiling. To the right were mounds of old electronics webbed together with cords and cables and bound tight. The only path forward was at the foot of the bed—a narrow corridor out into the greater twilight of the place.
Using my phone as a light, I went forward. I tried calling for help, of course, but no one answered no matter who I called. There was no telling how long it would take for someone to come look for me either—I’d realized at some point after escaping the outbuilding that it was the same afternoon we’d gone in, even though in the Maze I would have sworn days had gone by.
So I dug this notebook free from a wall I was passing by. There was a pen near too—the first good luck I’ve had in some time. When I started, I was still half-convinced I was crazy. But as I’ve written this, I think I’ve changed my mind. I think I died at some point and this is Hell.
I can hear it coming for me now. Chattering its teeth and dragging its meat along the floor. I hope it will take me to Barbara and we don’t suffer too long. I hope I am just crazy, but I don’t think that’s true. I’m sorry, Jerod. I know even reading all of this will leave you with questions, but you can’t look for them. Stay away from her house. From ours too, I guess. They’re…infected. Just stay away and take care of yourself.
And whatever you do, don’t follow us here.
My parents have now been missing for two months. There’s no sign of foul play other than their disappearance, but there’s a ton of evidence that something is wrong. Nearly five tons, to be exact.
When I went to check on them five days after they were supposed to have gone to my great-grandmother’s house, I couldn’t get into the front door. There was a pathway inside between piles of trash, but it was too narrow for me. When I got back to my car, I called 911.
I explained to the cops that something had happened in there. The house was filled, top to bottom, with garbage and old junk, none of which had been there three weeks earlier. The police looked at me skeptically, suggesting that maybe my parents had just hid their hoarding tendencies from me. When I told them that was impossible and that they were idiots, they just smiled and told me to have a nice day.
It’s not a crime to disappear, so technically there was nothing they could do. And at the time, I had no idea why the house was like that and no way of exploring it myself. So I hired a crew of guys to come in and clean it out. To catalogue everything they took out and bring me anything that looked like it would be of interest. Something that would help me figure out what had happened to my parents.
The head guy looked at me skeptically but kept his mouth shut. I was paying them well, and whether I was crazy or really trying to find parents that had had their house oddly vandalized with mountains of garbage, it really was all the same to them. To their credit, they were fairly careful with removing everything. I sat outside almost the entire time, and a half-dozen times they brought me various items to look at, but they were never anything I recognized. By the end of the second week of work they were almost done, and it was as they were bringing out my parents’ bed that it struck me that it was the very first thing that I’d seen that was familiar. What had happened to all their furniture? All their stuff they’d had for years that I would recognize? I almost asked them to set the bed aside for me to look at, but then one of the young guys came up to me with something in his hands.
The notebook.
I spent the next hour reading through it twice before heading home. My head was spinning, and I was unsure what to do next. I could carry it to the police, but would they listen? And could I blame them if they didn’t?
Rolling up to my front door, I unlocked it and…
I was staring into a tunnel of rotting cardboard and mildew, this time wide enough for me to get in. I looked down at the notebook in my lap. What had Dad said?
Infected.
Shuddering, I tried to roll back, but I didn’t turn sharp enough and the wheels of my chair banged into the railing behind me. Looking back into the murk of what had been my house, I thought I saw something coming toward me.
click click click click
I tried to go forward again, but the wheel was caught, and now I could see it, much like my father had described. It squinted its four glowing eyes against the morning sunlight, but didn’t slow down as it crawled toward me.
click click click click
Grunting, I shifted my weight and pulled forward, freeing my wheel as I turned around sharply and started to head down the ramp toward my…I lurched in the chair as it stopped abruptly. Looking behind me, I could see the thing, gripping a wheel in one long-fingered hand as it pulled its bulk up toward me.
click click click click
I let out a scream and pitched myself forward, scraping my elbows as I slid further down the ramp. Glancing back, I saw it was still coming over the chair, holding the ramp rails to pull itself forward as it landed with a wet thump in the spot where I’d been sitting a few seconds before. For a moment I just stared at it dumbly, its twinkling eyes seeming to shine brighter than everything. In that instant, I felt the world growing dark around me, the air thick and musty. It…it was trying to pull me into the Maze.
Clenching my eyes shut, I turned away and began crawling in the direction of the car, or where I hoped it was. I felt grass between my fingers, then dirty wood planks, then grass again. Just stay grass, just stay outside, just get to the car…I felt my hand touch rubber and when I opened my eyes, I was at my car. Looking back, the thing crawling after me was gone. The front door to the house was even shut back like nothing had even happened. The only thing out of place was my wheelchair, stuck halfway down the ramp with something thick and shining dripping from the leather seat.
I’m writing all this down at a restaurant a hundred miles from what I used to call home. The town is big enough I was able to rent a new chair without much trouble, and there’s a hotel at the interstate that will work for now. It’s brightly lit and full of people, and I could use a little of both right now.
I called the guy that was cleaning my parents’ house and told him my address. Told him to throw away the wheelchair on the ramp and to find the notebook that would be laying out somewhere on the porch. To find it and throw it inside the house without going in. I don’t know if it would affect him any more than the stuff at my parents’, but I don’t want anyone else on my conscience. In a couple of weeks it won’t matter. I’ll put their house for sale, and as for mine? My fire insurance is paid up.
I’m no closer to understanding what happened to them now than when this all started, but that’s okay, because truth be told, I don’t want to know. I don’t want any part of whatever world that I glimpsed at my threshold and that ate my parents whole. I’d rather just forget as much as I can and leave it all behind.
It doesn’t mean I don’t miss them. I do, terribly. But the best parts of them I’ll always have with me. How much they loved me and each other. How they tried to live good lives and teach me from their own mistakes, even at the end.
I keep thinking about this time I had a big fight with Dad about getting a car. Getting all the equipment for me to be able to drive made any vehicle way more expensive, but I was young, and I still wanted a cool car. Dad could have just told me they couldn’t afford more than they were already spending, but they’d always tried to shield me from that. They didn’t want me to feel like my disability made me more expensive, more burdensome, even though I knew that it did.
So instead, he used it as a chance to teach me a lesson. He told me that there were all kinds of people in the world, and all kinds of traps they fell into. One of the biggest was thinking that material things were going to make them happy, or somehow a better person. He said that people spent their whole lives worrying about how big their house was or how nice their car was, not because they didn’t have what they needed, but because at some point they’d decided that decorating their life was more important than living it.
He told me he didn’t believe in the Devil, but if such a thing existed, that’s how it got people. By tricking them into being miserable, into hating themselves, by dangling something shiny just out of reach. Whispering in their ear that this time, when they got this thing, they’d finally have enough.
Accept it never worked like that. Just look at my great-grandmother. She was rich as hell, but what did it matter? She’d driven everyone away, and from what my mother had heard, she was still just steady buying stuff to fill that giant house of hers until it burst. And you know why?
Why, I’d asked, still irritated because I knew I’d lost the car fight, still guilty because I knew I never should have started the fight to begin with.
“Because at a certain point, you stop owning things. And they start owning you.”
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