by Z. Rider
I walk toward the mouth of yellow light—like a normal person. A stretch of wall inside comes into view: flat, beige, grimy, scratched. As A.J. eases the door wider, a knot of dingy sheets appear on the floor. When I follow its creases, I realize it’s the tail of a nightgown in the same dingy blue as my Insylum jammies. The folds puddle against a pale ankle. A girl, a young woman maybe, kneels in front of the wall. A soiled canvas straitjacket, its buckles pulled tight, clinches her arms across her front. Her frazzled mane of rust-colored hair flutters as she rubs her face against the wall—not her cheek but a full-on frontal with her forehead tipped back as she licks. I think she’s licking, at least—big long strokes. She lifts up on her knees and sinks back down, shuffles a little closer to the doorway and rises up again.
The shrieker hits a new high. We should have closed her window. She’s just irritating at this point. It’s a wonder she hasn’t blown out her vocal cords.
A.J.’s shoulder bumps mine. I glance toward his sharp profile. His eyes shoot my way. The corner of his mouth tips up. He’s clearly enjoying the anticipation, but this feels more like another tableau to me. No door in the way, but all we’re here for is to watch. If this keeps on, I’m going to need a Red Bull to make it through this funhouse.
The room’s sickly light comes from a caged bulb in the ceiling. On the far side of the woman, faded stains cover the lower wall. The ones nearest her glisten, but I can’t make out what they are—if they’re anything at all.
Her head moves in slow, sensual circles, like she’s working an ice cream cone—or something else, and I shift uncomfortably, more embarrassed than turned on. Or maybe embarrassed about feeling that little tug in my groin, right here and now, in a funhouse. That thought snaps me to A.J.—and Delia. The discomfort shoots up. I cross my arms, chewing the inside of my cheek. Wanting this moment to move on to another, one that doesn’t make me think about my best friend and my sister together.
The woman pulls back, taking in at her work. With her hair out of the way, I can see tall, crooked letters, the rich glossy color of sangria.
HELP ME
She turns. Her eyes are crazed. Her bangs half stick up, half lay matted to her forehead. She’s grinning, I think, but I don’t know how she could be. My arms clamp tight against my chest as her empty nose socket burbles green snot. Blood sputters from the gaping darkness where her jaw should be, little popping spit bubbles of it.
A.J. whispers, “Holy shit.”
Her tongue pushes out, grayish pink and shrugging like a worm on a hook.
I stagger back from the doorway, squeezing my stomach. I can’t look at her face, but I can’t not look. Even when I force my chin away, toward the safety of the hallway’s wall, I can’t stop seeing what looks like someone who ate a cherry bomb for breakfast.
A wet noise gurgles from her throat, like water trying to get through a pipe stuffed with air.
She throws her body forward and lands with a smack on her trapped arms. Her head stays up, crimson blood and yellow snot drooling in glossy strands from where her jaw used to be.
Her eyes lock with mine.
She undulates, shoulders rising, belly pushing down. Her bare toes dig against the scuffed, filthy floor. The buckles down the front of her straitjacket scrape like claws as she pushes herself forward. Her gown whispers. Her hips rise; her shoulders droop. She pushes forward, her gory grin aimed right at me.
Gore bubbles from the hole in her face, and I stumble another few steps backward.
A.J. clutches the wall beside the door, leaning in for another look. “Holy fucking shit.”
My shoulders thud against a wall, jarring my teeth.
With a low-throated croak, the door to her room starts to swing. A.J. dips out of its way, but he still wants to see.
And I can still see: milky green snot dribbles from the woman’s nose hole. The tip of her tongue curls upward and swipes at the ooze, leaving a glistening smear that makes my insides clench like a diarrhea cramp.
The swath of light from her room shrinks as though the closing door is eating it up.
It slams shut, A.J. jumping out of the way just in time.
“Holy shit, this place is crazy,” I breathe. My heart thuds, hard. I wipe my mouth with the back of my arm. My lips tingle like they’re worried they’re going to get ripped off like hers, and I wipe my mouth again.
“Holy fuck, right?” A.J. says.
The flickering lights make me feel like I’m coming apart. I press the heel of my hand to my eye, trying to get some reality back. My brain runs to safety, and safety has always been behind a game. I say, “Imagine something like that on a game card.”
“What kind of damage points could you get from a psycho patient with half a face?”
That day in that basement boys’ room when A.J. was helping me gather my scattered Pokémon cards, he’d stopped, crouched next to a urinal, and stared at the one he’d just lifted from the floor. He’d had hair then. His hair had always been a messy brown mop, until just recently.
You have a Reshiram holo? He’d looked at me—the first time, I think, anyone had looked at me with a mixture of awe and respect.
I traded it for his Red Collection Terrakion Super Rare holo, and a friendship was born.
“Mental health points,” I say as the freak up the hall bangs her door. The way I’m thinking, and suddenly I’m thinking very fast—because safety is in the escape into my head—you’d come into the game as a visitor, maybe you’re stopping by to see your old crazy uncle as a favor to your mom, and you wind up lost in the halls, trying to find your way out. You have to try to hang on to your sanity—your mental health points—while shit like that thing in that room across the hall comes after you.
My voice is a whisper in the flickering corridor: “The cards would be killer.”
This could be the game, this could actually be the game that vaults me from store clerk to cult game designer.
A.J. sidles up to the window of the door hiding the girl with half a face, and I can still hear—underneath the screams from up the hall—wet guttural grunts from the other side of it.
Suddenly I very much don’t want A.J. to open it back up, or even slide the shutter on the window open.
“There’s a whole lot more to see still,” I say.
“That was the balls, huh?” He sports a grin as he turns away from it.
And it’s quiet suddenly. No more bangs, no more screaming. Just a soft scratching, fingernails on metal, coming from up the hall.
The noise bristles along my nerves. “We should go, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Up the hall, something pops, like the welds on a boiler giving out.
The skin behind my ears pulls tight. I turn my head, every detail passing in slow motion: A.J., also looking toward the pop, the hallway wall, the shadows at the far end—
The dented door flies open, slamming into the wall beside it.
A victory crow reverberates, hitting me in a wave of noise, right in the chest.
“Shit.” Grabbing my arm, A.J. yanks me toward the swinging doors at the end of the corridor.
Bare feet thump into the hall. The thing, freed, shrieks.
It’s like having metal prongs hammered into my eardrums.
With my heart pounding, I push past A.J. and through the doors, into darkness.
He jerks me backward. My foot flies up, wanting to keep going. My back slams his chest, and he clamps his arm around me to drag us both against the wall behind the door we just came through.
Under the door’s edge, blue light flickers.
I’m not sure if it’s my heart lub-dubbing or A.J.’s, but I can feel the fast, heavy beat of it in my back.
Feet pound in the hall, hard enough to bounce the floor under my feet. The freak unleashes another victory shriek. I press my fingers against my ears, my elbows jutting forward.
A.J.’s arm tightens across my chest.
Both doors fly open. The nearest bangs my elbows, savin
g my nose from being flattened. The shrieking thing, her long skinny arms flying in the air, sails past our hiding place in the shadows behind the door and straight down the dark corridor, her pale pajamas making her look like a smudged photograph of a ghost before she and her screaming are swallowed by the blackness completely.
The doors swing a few times before settling.
A.J.’s grip eases. I let out my breath. Between us there’s heat, the dampness of my own sweat against my back. I shrug away, wiping my forehead with a trembling arm.
“What now?” I ask.
“That way.” There’s just enough light to make out A.J. pointing straight ahead from where we’re standing—not the way the screamer went.
Cold creeps through the bottoms of my slippers.
Whichever way we go, except back into the other hallway, it’ll be pitch-black.
A.J.’s already moving. He stops, all pale edges and shadows. “It’s going to be bad either way,” he says.
The cold crawls up my shinbones. I’m frozen in place.
“Or we could just stand here,” he says, “until they pack us up with the rest of the place when they load it onto the trucks. Maybe we’ll wind up in Albuquerque.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to the people who disappeared.” The cold locks my knees.
“No one fucking disappeared,” he says, turning away. “Come on.”
3
You Can Have It
My fingertips bump over seams and rounded bolt heads in the nearest wall. A distant clang makes my shoulders hitch. I look up, into unending blackness. It has weight, and it presses against my eyes. Cool air buffets my cheeks. Why does darkness always seem colder?
My fingertips hit vinyl sheeting to my left. It bows inward under their touch.
A.J., who’s been dragging his hand along the opposite wall, says, “Dead end.”
“What about through here?”
“Through where?”
I push the sheeting, making it whisper. There’s another noise too, a humming. In the darkness it sounds like it’s coming from both outside and inside my head, and it makes my ears feel weird, like the darkness itself is a veil the sound has to push through, either to get in or to get out, and I can feel that veil brushing against all-too-sensitive nerves in my skin.
“Well hell,” A.J. says, “let’s go.”
I push the vinyl flaps. Warmer air spills through them. I’m already into the idea of going through here, just to get warm again. Sucking in a breath, I push into the frenzied hum.
And the smell.
I press the back of my arm under my nose. My lips peel back. It’s a sweet, rotting stink, the kind that clings to your nostrils like a fine spray of oil.
Behind me, the vinyl falls back into place. Soft ticks hit the walls. The flaps rustle again as A.J. reaches through.
“Fuck.” His voice creaks like he’s holding in pot smoke. I know what he means. God, the stench. I shuffle forward, paper slippers rustling over metal floor. Small things squish and pop under my toes. I don’t even want to know. I sweep my free arm in front of me. A wet tick lands near my foot. I push my breath out, slow, not relishing having to draw it back in. Sweet decay licks the roof of my mouth as I do. I cough and shuffle another step forward, feeling for obstructions—hoping for a door.
A.J. pats the wall like he’s looking for a light switch. I don’t think he’s come all the way into the room. Smart guy.
Buzzing zips past my ear.
I cough again.
Something bounces off my forearm, leaving a cool damp spot where it hit. “Ugh.”
“What?”
“Something touched me.” My voice sounds odd behind my cupped hand.
A click, and the room appears in sterile, bluish light.
For the space of a breath, I can’t move.
A gurney. A horde of black flies crawling and buzzing over a carcass. Maggots wriggling from winking, glistening holes. They dot the floor like bloated rice—the things I’ve been popping under my feet.
Something hits my hair, like a fat raindrop. I look up, mouth gaped open, and snap it shut. Fat maggots squirm through waffle holes in the lighting grate, thousands of them squashed together—wriggling down, squeezing through. The ceiling undulates with them.
I jump back with a yelp, turning—grabbing the wall to keep from smashing my face into it. A.J.’s saying, “Holy shit.” His eyes turned toward the ceiling as I shoulder past him, through the flaps, and into the hallway.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I sweep my hands down my arms.
“Holy fucking shit.” A.J. lets the vinyl flaps fall shut.
“Do I have anything in my hair?” I tip forward, scrubbing my fingers through it.
His body throws a shadow over me. He picks through my hair. “I think you’re good.”
“Oh my fucking God.” I walk a circle, scrubbing my hair. Now that we can see the hallway, thanks to the light filtering through the flaps, I’m relieved it’s just a boring hallway, the same burnished metal as the other one and, aside from the one doorway, completely empty. “Oh my fucking God.”
A.J. peeks through the flaps again. “Think they’re real?”
“They felt goddamned real to me. What the fuck is on the gurney?” I didn’t get a good look, and I don’t want a second. I’m okay if I never see another maggot in my life.
He lets the flap fall shut. “I think it was a pig.” A smile tugs at him as he watches me pace and swear. Easy for him. I rub my arm where the first maggot bounced off. Just… ugh. Fuck.
“Can they even do that?” I ask. “Isn’t that some kind of fucking health hazard?”
“Yeah, you could have tripped and hit your head running out of there.” The smile breaks through again. “You should have seen yourself.”
“Fuck off.” I rub my arms. “Those things touched me.”
“They’re just bugs. Come on.”
“Come on where?”
“Back the way we came. Leave the light on—at least we’ll be able to see some of the way.”
“I’m leaving the fucking light on because I’m not reaching back in that room. This place is lame as shit.” At this moment, I’m missing good old-fashioned haunted houses, the ones where they pretty much chase you through, one jump scare after another, maybe some creepy rubbery things brushing your face, maybe you go through one of those tunnels where you feel like you’re losing your balance, then someone chases you out of the building with an emasculated chainsaw. Good times, right? None of this maggot shit.
A.J. slings an arm over my shoulder. “Come on. I’ll take point next time.”
“You can have it.”
The faint light helps. I’m not looking forward to losing it again, but already shadows cling to us like webs. A few more steps, and A.J. disappears except for the whites of his eyes as he grins back at me. There’s the pale line of his cheek, a quick flash of teeth. I remember this isn’t the real A.J., the one I grew up with. It’s Strange New A.J., the one who came out of boot camp.
“Wanna stop by and see your girlfriend?” he says when the flickering light under the swinging doors comes into sight. “She seemed to like you.”
“You and Jawless Jane can go ahead and fuck off.”
“Is that what you’re going to call her?”
“I was thinking Cherry Bomb Babe actually.” I can see the lettering at the top of the game card, a fat drip of blood welling at the bottom of the Y.
“Nice,” he says.
“I think it could really work.”
“I’m looking forward to playing it when I get back.”
I can do without him humoring me when he gets back from Afghanistan. I feel like Peter Pan must have before he went to Neverland, his friends turning into strangers around him. Doing grown-up things Peter had no fucking interest in.
We turn down the corridor Sherry Shrieker’d screamed down. Darkness enfolds us. I ghost my fingertips along the wall, nervous about what they might skate through next but at
the same time afraid there might be some creep-o standing there leering at us in the dark, and I’d rather know about him than have him creeping silently behind us.
“I think I might be able to turn it into something,” I say, because talking about the game is better than thinking about all the other things—the not-so-funhouse, the Delia Situation, the way the guy walking next to me in the dark is someone I hardly recognize anymore but that there’s just enough ghost there to fool me from one moment to another.
“Corner,” he says. My fingers meet up with a wall in front of us, confirming his call.
Worse than having to find our way out of this place would be having to do it alone, I think. As much as I don’t want to see him again, I’m not ready to not see him ever again quite yet.
For a second, I find a stupid part of me wishing he weren’t leaving. We could make this mental hospital game together, like the space opera one I’d tried to do last year, the one that got way out of hand with all the rules and conditions and details you had to keep up with over each turn. I’d put too much in it—A.J. kept telling me that—and now even I see that. The game needs to be simple. You’ve got one goal: get the hell out of the loony bin with your sanity intact. Everything in the game has to be an obstacle to that, from Shrieking Sherry to the crazy doctor who wants to strap you down and saw your skull open.
Noises come through the wall. I lean my cheek on it and hear a dry, frantic whisper. A shriek cuts through, so close the metal tingles my ear.
My fingers reach the end of the wall. “Corner,” I say.
“Intersection,” A.J. says.
“Which way?”
“Well, over here”—I think he’s patting the wall beside him—“is the room with the flies.”
That makes sense. All those Friday and Saturday game nights in A.J.’s dad’s basement weren’t a total waste: we can map our way through anything.
“So your way goes up along the other side of that dead end we came to,” I say.
