by Z. Rider
I hesitate at an intersection, my choices right or left. Left goes in the direction I last saw A.J. Maybe. More so than right does.
Holy shit—what was that back there?
I go left.
The power tool starts up again in my head, chunking as it catches in something before buzzing free. My bowels want to let go, just open like a trap door and dump everything out. I push through another set of doors into darkness that’s cool against my face. My ears prick as a sharp bang reverberates through the walls. I swallow my heart back down and push into the darkness.
I’m getting to where I really fucking hate the dark.
Far up the hall, light glows faintly in a doorway. I pin my hopes on that door—at least it’s something to work toward.
A little girl’s laugh cascades, far off, but the hairs at the back of my neck bristle. The way the laugh bounces around, I can’t tell which direction it’s coming from. It could be right next to me, but I don’t think it is, and I’m glad when it ripples away.
My heart’s galloping. I press my hand against the thin top, as if I can quiet my heart by holding it.
The room ahead is silent, not even the buzz of fluorescent lights. I dread what I’ll find there. Anything this place beckons you to, it can’t be good. But what are my options? All I can do is wander until I find the fucking way out.
At this point, they can keep my clothes, wallet, and phone. If I can find a way out, I’m taking it, even if it misses the property pick-up area. I’d rather freeze to death outside my locked car than stick around this place.
This place is not fucking fun.
I chance a look over my shoulder, into darkness. Swallowing, I turn back to the room. Just an open door, and the door obscures much of my view inside, but light washes the empty wall straight ahead of me. I’m all for light. Worse than wandering through the dark is wandering through the dark alone.
I hope A.J. finds me before I have a breakdown.
I creep up and curl my fingers around the door’s frame, take a deep breath, and pull my head and shoulders around the edge.
Nothing. Nothing remarkable, at least. The small room holds a bare shelving unit, an empty steel desk, and an old wooden captain’s chair on casters. The light’s blue glow comes from a shaded lamp on the desk.
I could, I think, close this door and just hide here until they start taking the place apart. Probably they’ll turn all the lights on then. People will come through collecting props and other stuff that’s not nailed down. They’ll say, “What are you still doing here?”
Hell, when I don’t pick up my stuff, maybe they’ll send people in looking for me. I’m okay with that. I guess I got kind of lost, I’ll say.
I’m in the room now, peeking around the end of the desk to make sure there really isn’t anything to worry about in here.
A soft scraping draws my eyes to a grate set low in the wall.
Metal rustles. Cloth whispers. I back into the door, fumbling behind me for the handle, just in case I need to book out of there.
A whispered curse sounds inside the wall. Soft noises sift behind the dark grating.
I crouch, my muscles tight and twitching, ready to launch me back upright.
Beyond the grate is blackness.
Something pale dips into view.
I pop up, banging my shoulder on the door handle. The impact is a dull throb. I keep my eyes on the grate.
A bare foot slams against it.
I jerk.
White drywall debris drifts from the bottom edge of the grate, littering the floor.
The foot kicks again. The grate rattles. With another kick, it pops half off, hanging from a screw in one corner.
A second foot shoves forward. The grate clatters to the floor.
I’m ready to run, but I’ve also got a knuckle between my teeth, watching tensely. Hoping I won’t have to run. Hoping it’s some other funhouse customer I can pair up with, because I am so over doing this by myself. I clutch the door harder as an ankle pokes into the room, then a rucked-up pajama leg. A muffled grunt comes from inside. Legs slide out, then hips, a flat stomach, its muscles jumping. The twisted-up bottom of a pajama top exposes ribs. Nothing suspicious so far. And I really want it to be someone I can cling to for the rest of this fucking trip.
I leave the door to go help, grabbing the newcomer just above the knees. He bucks at my touch, kicks out, and tries to turn as if he’s going to climb back up inside.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m in this shit too.”
“Nate?”
“A.J.?” I yank on his legs.
When his ass drops to the floor and his head ducks out of the hole in the wall, I say, “Holy shit, am I glad to see you.” His arm, when I grab it to pull him up, is hot with sweat. Dirt smears his cheek. He rocks unsteadily to his feet.
“I think we should get out of here,” I say. I really want to get out of here.
“You and me both.” His voice is hoarse, like I wasn’t the only one who’d been yelling myself jagged.
I drag him by the front of his shirt. “Come on.”
“Did they stick you?” he says as we go through the doorway, heading into the darkness.
“What?”
A scream vibrates the walls. It’s right above us, and as we crane our heads, it turns into a full-bellied laugh that booms through the ceiling.
“Out,” I say.
“Yeah.”
The hallway feels shorter on the way back up, with A.J.’s feet padding beside my paper footfalls. I wave one arm ahead of us, drag him behind. I already know there’s not supposed to be anything in our way until we get to the doors, but that almost increases the fear my fingers will find something.
When I reach the door finally, I hold it open for A.J., taking big gulps of the bright light on the other side while he squints and lifts his arm over his eyes.
“What were you doing in the walls?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
I let the door fall shut as he shuffles past me.
When we near the mouth of the corridor that leads back down to the Room I Don’t Want to Think About, I swallow, my throat dry. I’m on the verge of telling him about it, but I don’t want to talk about it here. Maybe a few days from now, after it’s had time to feel more like a bad dream.
Except there won’t be a few days from now. A.J. leaves in the morning.
I remember I was glad about that a couple hours ago.
Yeah… it’s probably for the best. Maybe I’ll write it down in a letter later.
I move past the mouth of the corridor, my head down. A.J. hardly seems to notice, for all the looking around he’s doing—swiveling his head, tipping it back, throwing looks behind him.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
He’s pale. His hair is damp spikes. He turns his eyes toward me, and they’re almost black—in a startled and big-pupiled way, not solid like the ones I saw earlier.
Storms hunker in the gulfs of his eyes.
“I don’t know what they stuck me with,” he says.
I push through another door. Lights flicker beyond it. A.J. bumps into me as I stop at the outskirt of a patient ward that’s just one long, dim room lined with cots, thirty or so, jutting from the walls.
A decrepit moan sounds from one of the beds. Someone farther up whispers in a senseless rhythm that seems to chase itself.
A.J. peeks over my shoulder, his chest nudging my arm.
Someone halfway down shouts staccato curses, then just as abruptly shuts back up.
The back of my shirt tickles me as A.J.’s fingers curl into it.
Straight ahead, probably seventy feet away, stands a half-open door. Bright light spills through it. Shadows in the room lick at the light’s edges, but it holds them back.
We just have to make it to that door.
Small feet patter, far up the way.
A little girl’s hair bounces on her shoulders as she runs by the open door.
A.J.’s grip ti
ghtens in my shirt, pulling the collar against my neck.
I glance over my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be okay when we get out of here.” His knuckles nudge my spine.
I creep forward. My slippers rustle. A.J. crowds me, stepping on my heel. It doesn’t make things easier. My trepidation feeds off his, like there’s a cauldron inside me and he’s adding logs to the fire underneath it.
Fighting the urge to shrug him off, I press on, watching the beds from the corners of my eyes.
The moan comes again, like rusty bedsprings.
A woman reaches toward the ceiling from flat on her back, loose flesh hanging slack from her arms. “I want my baby back! You can’t take my baby! You can’t take my baby!”
I shuffle toward to the next pair of beds, silent so far, but just as I pass them someone says—quiet but clear as crystal—“They’ll get you too.”
I swallow.
The moan comes again.
A smacking to the left turns my head. The bed jiggles. The middle of the sheet bounces. The smacking is wet, short, and furious, and the man doing it huffs heavy breaths, his chin tilted up, his lips twitching.
A.J. pushes me onward.
We’re getting closer to the patient who’s whispering in circles, and now I can make out the words:
and then you go to the room and then they strap you down and then they turn on the saw and then you see all the colors and then you go to the room and then they strap you down and then
I blink, trying to clear my ears. Trying to clear the sound of my own voice in my head, saying those words, gibbering round and round.
they turn on the saw and then you see
Bedsprings squeak. Torsos sit up, thirty patients suddenly bolt upright and staring, their mouths moving in concert, speaking with one voice: mine.
all the colors you see all the colors you see all the colors
I jolt for the door. A.J. still has hold of my shirt, and it hitches tight against my throat, but it doesn’t stop me. On my way through, I grab back for A.J.’s wrist, clasp it, and yank him out with me. Then I lunge in again—all the colors all the colors—to haul the door shut.
A.J. stands blinking in his creased and sweaty pajamas in the lightly buzzing hallway, and I say, “Did you see all the colors?” It wasn’t what I fucking meant to say. I try again: “All the colors?”
He shakes his head, drags the back of his hand across his mouth.
The ceiling bounces under a heavy thud.
My heart taps like a piano key hitting the same tight wire over and over. “Let’s go,” I say, turning. Trying to catch my breath.
colors colors colors
A.J. jerks me back by my shirt. “Not that way.”
I start walking the way he wants to go, opposite of the way the little girl went.
“Did it fuck with your head?” I ask. I have no idea anymore where we are in relation to where we came in. So much for us being map masters. “It’s like something else crawled in my skull and started mimicking me.”
colorscolorscolors
A.J.’s shoulder brushes mine as he looks back over his shoulder again. I can hear him breathing.
It tastes like colors.
“Fuck,” I say through gritted teeth. I grasp my hair by the roots. “Fucking stop it.”
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I don’t even know. It feels better where we are though, in the light. The temperature’s good—just a little cool. Sweat is starting to dry on my forehead.
“Through here,” he says.
The distant boom of fake thunder rolls somewhere above us. High-pitched hyena laughter pulls at the skin behind my ears. When that’s gone, there’s the sound of a drip splashing somewhere up the hall.
A.J. says, “This isn’t at all like I’d thought it would be.”
Yeah, me either.
“It’s mostly just fucking irritating,” he says. He doesn’t seem as bad off as he did. At least he’s talking. And not nonsensically. His back’s straighter again too. He has color back in his cheeks.
And I’m not hearing the colorscolorscolors anymore. We’re good, I think. We might be good now.
The splashing drip sounds again, somewhere ahead.
“I thought there’d be creatures and people grabbing us and shit,” A.J. says. “So far I’ve crawled around in ductwork and walked through a bunch of people saying crazy shit in bed. I want my fifty bucks back.”
A little ways down the hall, cracked tiles peek from a doorway. A bathroom it looks like. I kind of have to go, but I wouldn’t stop to take a leak in a bathroom here no matter how bad I needed to. Jesus, I’d rather whip it out and piss on a wall. Light flickers in the ceiling, making shadows blink over the broken tiles. Layers of dirt dull them. As we near the entrance, the slow drip is louder.
I hope to God Cherry Bomb Babe isn’t in there fucking waiting for me again.
“Let’s peek in,” A.J. says. “Although it’s probably more nothing. So far the only exciting thing that’s happened just pissed me off.” He’s slowing. The muscles in my back tighten. If A.J. wants to stick his head in the door on our way by, fine. I move to his other side so I can just keep walking past.
His footfalls stop.
He’ll see I’m not interested in a few seconds and catch up.
Instead he says, “Whoa. Shit.”
Pieces of tile shift under his feet as he steps inside.
Damn it.
I stop and lift my eyes to the ceiling, not turning around. He’ll come.
I hope.
“Look at this.”
“Is it moving?” I ask. Is it missing half its face? Is it coming after me? I’m going to have nightmares; I know it.
“No,” he says.
Is it two sawed-up bodies? Is one of them blond? “Does it smell?”
There’s a pause before he says, “Yeah, some.”
I don’t even want to know.
The wet noise of something sliding through thick liquid makes my bowels twist. A soft clunk comes, like metal hitting the side of a basin of paint. “What is it?” I say.
“Gross,” he says.
“Is there a door leading anywhere?”
“No.”
“Then it’s not gonna get us out of here. Come on.”
“Hold on. I want to see what this is.”
I don’t. I shift my weight, still facing down the hall, my ears straining for distant thumps and scrapes and the far-off buzz of a power tool.
Another set of swinging doors is twenty feet ahead, and another corridor T’s off this one just ahead of it. So we have options. One of those options will eventually get us the fuck out of here. The sooner, the better.
Another drip plunks. Metal clunks dully.
A.J. says, “Ugh.”
“What is it?”
“Ugh. Come look.” His voice has a flat nasal sound, like he’s pinching his nostrils shut. Which totally makes me want to go look at the disgusting thing he’s found—not.
There’s a plop, then a slurp, like something fell in the liquid in the basin and got sucked under. A.J. whispers, “Shit,” to himself. Metal clunks and scrapes again.
A ghostly moan wells in the hallway behind me. I turn, my eyes darting, my breaths slow but shallow. I’m trying to listen. My gaze sweeps the ceiling, the dingy walls, a broken In Case of Fire box. Any glass that might have fallen to the floor when its window was smashed is long gone, and the clasps that once held an extinguisher or axe hang empty. A lot of good that does us.
Liquid sloshes in the other room. Broken tiles crunch under A.J.’s weight.
The moan wraps around me, and I circle slowly, caught in it. My skin goes cold. Prickles crawl through my scalp.
The moan turns to a chh chh chh chh chh that fades away, and I’m left with the ragged gasp of my own breath.
In the bathroom, something plunks wetly. A.J. swears.
I can’t stand out here alone a second longer. “Hey, let’s get out of
here, okay?” I start toward the door.
“Just a sec.”
“Fuck your ‘secs,’ let’s—Holy shit.”
The place is a bloodbath. Glistening red clings to the filthy walls. Dark puddles pool in low spots on the floor. There’s a drain, rusty and ancient, and blood winks just beyond the edge of its hole.
A.J. kneels at the side of an old therapy tub, its white porcelain crackled and smeared with blood and grimy handprints. A dark red blossom creeps up the knee of his pajamas. Blood streaks the side of his bare toe, making it look oddly vulnerable there on the pitted tiles. He’s got a metal pipe in his fist—maybe a piece from the broken shower overhead. He clutches the edge of the tub while he slides the pipe through the viscous liquid inside it. The pipe’s end scrapes the bottom—that’s the dull clunking sound I was hearing. The blood is thick and sluggish, sloshing slowly with his movements.
My chest tightens; I’m anxious of what his pipe might pull up to the surface.
The chill from the tiles creeps through my paper slippers. I hug myself. The room smells rich and earthy and cold, with a high note that hits the back of my nostrils like wet copper.
A.J. levers the pipe against the tub’s edge, trying to raise something he’s caught on the other end. His bicep stands out. His teeth grit, his lips drawn back.
Sweat shines on his neck.
“What is it?” My tongue’s stiff like a hard sponge. I swallow to try to get some spit back. Whatever he’s got must be attached to the bottom of the tub or something. Nothing should be that hard to lever up.
A rounded hump pops through the turgid muck.
A chh of breath cuts from A.J.
Blood streams off the hump in rivulets, washing it a pale pink and winking white. Crevices where the blood clings stay dark.
The thing glistens wetly.
“Intestines, I think,” A.J. says, his voice low.
“Ugh. Drop it. Let’s go.”
“Hold on.” He leans weight on the pipe, bringing its other end just above the dark surface. Rising bent-backed, he plants a foot under him and levers the pipe to lift the twisted lump even higher. It hangs over the pipe’s end like a thick, burn-scarred, albino snake, trailing off either side, back into the murk.
