Susan opened her eyes. There was light, but it was mood-set and unobtrusive. Her vision eased into focus. What she saw was intriguing and unsettling.
On the wall in front of her was a mural of blandly colored tiles celebrating man’s creativity for disposing of his peers. She first saw an unfortunate chap being “quartered,” if memory of eleventh grade history could be trusted. His wrists and ankles were secured to four horses, one aimed for each cardinal point. The steeds were big enough to sell beer, and by their insanely eager expressions, they could do with a trough of the good stuff.
Just above this encouraging illustration was a cauldron supporting a pair of women on its lip, one on either side. They faced away from one another, hands bound behind backs and necks connected by a taut double-noose. The choices were clear: forward to hanging or backward into the bubbling liquid (presumably corrosive, if the floating skull was any indication). One of the condemned had made her decision and was tilted irrevocably forward, dooming her domino counterpart for the soup.
The last depiction was that of a man feeding on a much smaller man—the realist’s ending to Jack and the Beanstalk, perhaps. Or maybe the light snack of a cannibal with a shrinking ray. The subjects’ real sizes weren’t obvious without a point of reference. What was obvious was that Smaller’s battle was over; Larger had him like a candy bar and was already spine-deep into his belly. His ragged beard wore a smear of fresh blood blotted by the dark stuff flowing from his meal’s severed and dangling intestines.
Susan was well associated with the macabre, had done the rounds from Poe to King; the notion of fellow humans meeting their ends gruesomely was nothing too moving. What got to her, though, what tightened a net around her insides, was in their faces. In place of the customary twists and stretches of remorse/pain/terror was placidity, calm acceptance, quietude. They were no more dejected than a forty-year-old unwrapping yet another birthday tie.
Having had her fill of Charles Manson’s Louvre, she let her body get back on speaking terms with gravity. It was in this way she realized she was lying down, and that the wall painting was actually a ceiling painting.
You’re cold, too, her body related smugly. And while I’ve got your attention, why don’t you check out your feet?
She did, first by feel. If everything else was neutral and all she knew was the relative locations of her body parts, she might have thought she’d woken up on the beach with her feet nestled into the sand—their slender pads were at least three inches lower than her back. But unless the apocalypse blueprints had fallen from heaven and landed face-down, she was not gazing into the skies of the Pacific. Also as likely was that some silly bastard had papier-mâchéd her feet, which meant her unwiggleable toes were cause for serious concern. She sat up and assessed the situation.
“What…the…?” Her justifiably distracted mind could find no suitable expletive to finish the thought, but the words she did manage picked up a mocking edge before returning to her as echoes, amused that her feet were submerged in the hardwood floor. No, submerged was not right. Merged—now that fit without a shoehorn. The form-fitting planks cut off visual contact above the ankles, as if holding her in a pair of foot-guillotines. Worse yet, all communication below the calves had been canceled.
Susan looked around without seeing anything.
“What the fuck is this?” She tried using her elbows and hands to slide back and registered twin snakes of pain. Of course it didn’t work, her legs were stuck in the up position; moving the way she did was like trying to pull a key out of a lock sideways. In a better state of mind this would have been encouraging—there must be something left of her below that didn’t want to bend over the fulcrum—but the only state she was better than now was absolute meltdown, and that was strictly tentative.
Susan had heard of amputees experiencing “phantom limbs,” their severed nerve endings having nothing better to do than to convince the brain that the lost part was itchy or in pain. She had a new one for the quacks supremo: antiphantom limbs. Feet you know are there (nevermind the lack of evidence) that have gone neurologically mute. This exceedingly unpleasant sensation came when she stood, hoping to step out as if the floor were nothing more than an ambitiously dense swamp. That she dropped her rear back to its polished origin was extremely fortunate; she had no desire to topple forward and either destroy her existing joints or create new ones.
Where am I? she thought, a bit surprised the question was only just occurring to her. She surveyed the scene again, this time giving over most of her attention to the task.
Straight ahead, above the miniature towers of her thighs, was a hallway. Height, about twelve feet; width, maybe eight; length…indefinite. Maybe infinite. It started with a white arch sculpted by a classical hand, uniform grooving from the floor to the braided vine at its apex. Beyond this was a stretch of red, felt-covered wall guarded by two identical busts atop two identical pedestals. And then another arch. And then a wall, two busts and two pedestals. Arch, wall, busts, pedestals. Arch wall busts pedestals arch wall busts pedestals arch wall busts pedestals arch…
Susan turned away, her midsection suddenly home to a school of vertigo eels. This was of little assistance; to her left was the same scene. It was like looking down the throat of an eternal snake, its arch-ribcage and red felt muscle tissue closing in on the distant point she somehow knew was no point. Just another arch. Or maybe a stretch of red felt.
She closed her eyes, and ever so slowly did her head turn away from the left and past the front. Her mind, now venturing into the absurd, occupied itself with an apt quote from Grandpa Tim-Tim (the childhood title had outlived diapers, training wheels, even a fifteen-year affair with Camel Ultralights): Yer guardian angel done shit the bed, darlin’!
A deep breath aggravated her mummified throat. It felt like someone had been in there with a bucket of salt. She opened her eyes. Now it felt like they’d left the bucket.
Same. The same thing. Her heavenly protector had indeed painted the sheets on this one. Soiled ‘em righteously. Might even need a new mattress.
No way I’m looking behind me, she thought, eyelids once again slammed shut. Nuh-uh, too risky. If I see what I think I’m going to see, I’ll lose it. Friggin’ Looney Tunes. Brain’ll split like a cracked engine block and then it’s toodles, time to gnaw off the baggage and crawl down the hall singing “It’s A Small World” until I run out of red ink.
She giggled, and this was by far the scariest thing yet.
Alright, think. We’re way past assuming this is just a dream. I’ll still hope I’m really in my own bed with Boots licking my toes and wondering why I’m shivering so much, but counting on it is pretty much out.
Susan pinched herself on the forearm.
Worth a shot. So, when I open my eyes again, where do I look? Carnival of Fun Times and Happy Faces above me, the world’s longest bathroom hunt ahead, to the sides and probably behind. Sounds like the process of elimination strikes again.
She put her head between her knees, scolded her trigger-happy tear ducts and rejoined the land of the seeing.
“Where…how long has this been here?” she spoke with rising volume, and the hallways muttered her disbelief back at her.
On the floor, stationed at the exact midpoint of the square created by her entombed feet and rapidly stiffening buttcheeks, was a piece of yellow paper cut into a flawless circle. She raised it to her face with restrained curiosity, like the first caveman to discover something shiny.
It was a variation of the “Have A Nice Day!” face. The coloring was dead on, as was the overextended arc of a smile, but the eyes…with these the artist had taken some serious liberties. Where the original’s were friendly, welcoming, empathetic ovals, really getting behind the whole I-care-how-your-life-is-going movement, these were blasted, strung out, wrecked from a marathon session of finals cramming and a coffee bean away from making sleep a permanent impossibility.
She flipped it over. The back of the two dimensional head was blank, save for two words:
DON’T BLINK!
The message reminded her of the Valentine’s Day scavenger hunt hosted by Danny Swanson, her college sweetheart; the curves of the letters were excited, almost giddy with their own secrets.
Susan inspected the round card with a more discriminating eye, turning it over in her hands, changing the angle and holding it up to the light. Well, the last she tried to do, and then released her grip and let the thing somersault to the floor. She didn’t notice that it landed face down.
“No lights,” she muttered distantly. And there weren’t. There was visibility, everything uniformly illuminated, but it really couldn’t be called light. It was more of a tang that coated everything, something her eyes could taste rather than see.
An emotion jumped into her as desperately as a soldier would dive into his company’s foxhole in flight of a live grenade. It wasn’t panic—she wasn’t over that cliff yet, but it wasn’t far off either. Panic’s second cousin, maybe. In any case, the invading emotion plunged into her center, the place where she’d thus far kept her stress under wraps, and forced it out until her skin bubbled with it. The sudden need to act, to free herself and find a way out, was undeniable.
Using every available muscle group she ripped from side to side and backward, thwarting the pain with her accelerating frenzy. Her left leg had almost adopted its unnatural angle for good when she found an object to refocus her aimless energy on.
“Don’t blink?” she asked the back of the yellow head by her feet. “Don’t blink!” She flapped her eyelids at the thing, turning the room (foyer? intersection? furbished purgatory?) into a strobe-lit version of itself. With a final salute from the most emotionally satisfying finger, she looked away, the world now fuzzy through her glazed eyes.
She didn’t weep. Crying was for the mourning, the bereaved, and so far nothing had been taken from her. A small piece of sanity, yes, one that had as much chance of regrowth as the countless brain cells she’d diligently wiped out in college (“Thinning the herd, natural selection don’cha know, Darwin would be proud!”), but nothing else was lost for certain.
With this thought she blinked back the errant puddles and looked to her left, which might as well be called west. At first the figure she saw far down the hall was dismissed as a mirage, an oasis for one who thirsted for hope. Another blink made the image clearer though, and she allowed herself to turn the tiny shadow into a human silhouette.
“Hey!” she cried, then again with her hands cupped around her mouth as a megaphone. “Hey! Could I get a hand here? I seem to have proven my mom right and finally pogoed too high! I could also use a beer and, I’ll hate myself in the morning for it, a smoke! Any brand’s fine, long as it’ll burn!”
She let loose a cannon blast of hearty laughter. The second shot was far less enthusiastic, and the third was little more than an ambitious hiccup. The distant figure did not call back, nor did it move an inch. She suddenly wished she was still alone.
Reality sneered. What did you think, it taunted, your white knight was going to slip by the laws of physics and find a starting point in infinity just because you did? Ride in on his glorious mount built for two, scoop you up and gallop into the sunset? Her icy logic paused a moment, reveling in its own destructive power before finishing the job: You know the sun doesn’t set here.
Why, she couldn’t begin to guess, but the need to look back up at the morbid ceiling painting swept over her. A whimper escaped when she did: the heads of the doomed had turned to face her. The soon-to-be-quartered man, the women on the cauldron, even Señor Crunchbar had trained his eyes on her, as if her situation had suddenly become more interesting than their own.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and went back to the west hallway. The one that would never see a sunset.
It was still occupied. Worse yet, the visitor was closer, and Grandpa Tim-Tim’s deification of luck was still too caught up with its spastic colon to step in.
Susan checked the other corridors, briefly so as not to instigate her already twisting stomach. She even wrung herself like a wet rag to see behind. It looked exactly like the other two; endless and empty.
Should she yell again? Try to bargain with the being, or at least find out what it wants? She brought her head to the left and realized that, although she had yet to see it actually move, the distance between them had lost another arch, leaving maybe fifteen more.
No, somewhere in her mind she knew it would not respond.
And somewhere even deeper she had an idea of what it wanted.
A weapon. She needed a weapon, something to protect herself. Nothing was within arm’s reach…hell, nothing was within a three hour drive down here (“down” was purely speculative, but it seems to fit, doesn’t it?)…so she checked herself: sparse jewelry and night clothing. Her grandmother’s ring would be useless, but the necklace? Maybe, if the thing came close enough to strangle, but a better Plan A would be welcomed.
When her hands went to her sides and recognized the bulk in the left pocket, she experienced the momentary ecstasy of one holding a lotto ticket matching five of the six numbers so far. Susan emptied both, letting the ring of keys fall to the ground with an insulted clash as she flipped the lid of her cell phone. Her smile evaporated. No service: the fourteen ball came up and she needed a forty-two.
She knew it, she knew her phone was just as likely to complete a call from this place as her keys were liable to find something to unlock, but she raised the antenna and swung the useless gadget around anyway. Doing this always reminded her of Egon from Ghostbusters scanning for PKE readings, though this was the first time she actually considered the detection of ghost resin a real possibility.
Her arm stopped in mid-swing, pointed directly to her left. The west hall. The slim muscles of her thumb and forefinger brought the lid down with no active request from her brain. It saluted her with the pleasant jingle she’d never quite gotten sick of. Her arm made a calculated descent to the floor, smooth and steady as a toll gate.
Her eyes stay fixed on the space vacated by the phone, and for that second they are her only organs left at work. It’s the calm, a cliché coveter would affirm. The calm before the storm.
Closer. Yes, by much. Six arches, to those who are counting. Her heart returns, lobbing gushes of hot liquid.
Human. Vaguely. Air is once again admitted, tentatively. Her chest barely rises.
Dead.
Susan blinks. It—he, probably—advances another arch. No movement is involved. He is beneath the ninth white curve before the blink, the eighth after. It is like the drop of a single page in a flipbook.
A fever expanded from her chest and set her extremities ablaze. The rock in her throat made breathing choppy and absorbed most of her cry. She could not look away, would not—terror, that fair-weather companion with a knack for regaining your trust immediately, convinced her that her gaze was as good as two lances pinning the shoulders of her foe—but nor could she stifle the need to reglaze her drying eyes. Her lids served her, and the corpse was instantly promoted to the seventh arch.
Susan pulled herself until her butt was flush with her calves and groped around with her hand. Search as it might, it found nothing but slickly buffed floor. In a remarkably bold (yet mostly reflexive) move, she slipped her eyes from their post to locate the item of interest and then bolted them back. It took less than a second, but that was long enough to spot the circle of paper near her right leg, turned away from her like a sulky child.
Her fingers wrapped around their target and brought it to where she could see without risking an unmonitored moment for the west hall. The Sunset Hall.
DON’T BLINK, it continued to advise, trembling with the rest of her arm. She turned it over and was met again by the speed-head smiley, only now it no longer looked like a student working on a few too many credit hours. The white ovals, nearly overtaken by ruptured capillaries and flexed open like they wanted the whole head unpeeled, spoke of a different pursuit entirely. It suddenly felt bad in her hands, rotten, like a flake of the dead man’s skin. She threw it aside with fear and disgust. And a blink.
Her shock ebbed long enough for her to hate the habitual flaps of skin below her eyebrows. They were now the enemy—no need for the magnified view of the cadaver to confirm it. Even if it meant ending up like the smiley from hell, she had to keep them open.
Acting as a point of reference, the mound of decomposing flesh took some of the dizzying effects away from the hallway, but staring it down made Susan feel sick just the same. And worrisome. Was it affronted by her glare? Did it take it as a challenge like a wild dog would? The prospect of pissing off a dead guy seemed laughable, but when one encounters a corpse standing under its own power, one is obligated to reassess one’s assumptions about corpses altogether.
She looked away.
Nothing had changed elsewhere. She was still tethered to the meeting point of four impossible hallways, flanked by one cell phone and one set of keys. She opened the phone and was not rewarded for her hope. It went back to the floor. The keys she lifted in front of her, letting them dangle from the “Life’s a beach” key tag. They rotated back and forth in a mesmerizing search for equilibrium, like a baby’s mobile. The more she watched, the more each piece of metal resembled a tiny saw. Her eyes drifted to her trapped legs in the background.
It won’t come to that, she told herself, swallowing the splash of bile delivered by her appalled stomach. The thin conviction behind her promise got her standing.
Despite the relief of straightening her spine and freeing her overindulged rear as she stood, she grimaced at the strangeness of it. As far as her brain was concerned, a pair of nubs supported her—her lower half had turned insect. The sensation was easily disregarded, though, and she tried to haul her right leg out with a high-knee. Not a stroke or even a kiss—another gem from Timid-’n’-Tactful Tim-Tim. She switched it up, hoping maybe she secretly favored the left leg in daily activities. If she did, it wasn’t enough to build sufficient muscle for this job. Living on Jupiter may not have done that.
To retreat to a sitting position would have been wise, and if she hadn’t checked back in on Not-White-Knight’s progress she might have done just that. The mere notion of the too round, far too motionless—photographically motionless, made even eerier by the ghost lighting and M.C. Escher hallway—corpse fanned her intense need to be moving down the opposite corridor just as damn soon as she could, but now, after several snuck blinks, he was close enough to see, to really see.
The Sunset Hall’s occupant was not the product of a peaceful death. A drowning, most likely. Grey patches of skin peeled from it like old paint. What nails remained were purple and softly curling. It was clothed in nothing but a reflective film of slime. Everything was bloated, bulbous. Except the genitals—they were shrunken, still hiding from the trauma they must have seen coming. The head, hairless and slate-colored with blotches of black, was tilted upward by an engorged throat. This may have given it a comical undead-bullfrog look, were it not for the nearly empty sockets on either side of its exaggerated nose. Nearly empty; the waters that had damaged it so abhorrently must have been populated with critters of the eye-pecking variety. What little they left hung in ragged tendrils halfway down its floppy jowls like lifeless milky worms.
A scream escaped her mortified throat. Her feet tried to follow suit, but the wooden gullets below had seemingly infinite control over their own esophageal muscles. Her body, woefully invested in the forward progress she had no way of maintaining, bent and careened in awkward desperation, arms flailing as if the air would thicken to their aid. The tendons behind her knees wailed against a stretch they were never meant to accommodate, sent gory pictures of the aftermath to her mind, but were able to right her in the end. Overright her in fact, dropping her to the floor with a spanking so fierce she thought she may have added another crack.
Susan kept her eyes open throughout the ordeal. They squinted and they teared, ached to wipe the world away and start anew, but the lids never touched. It was as if some force from the most primitive component of her brain, the part immune to emotional cataclysm, knew sight was imperative to her continued existence, knew she depended on it as surely as she did the contractions of her heart.
And so she saw. She saw the north hallway through the foggy ocean glossing her pupils, saw the stretched marshmallows that were her quivering thighs, saw the furry floor suckling her feet. And then she saw the creature. She was drawn to it like a rodent caught in a cobra’s hypnotic gaze, could not turn away once it marked her. The no-color blob wavered behind her tears, stalking her in plain sight. Waiting.
The reunification of her rear and the unforgiving floor knocked some semblance of coherence back into her, enough to rein her screams in to muffled sobbing and halt her fruitless attempt at freedom. What she needed right now, right this very instant, was to keep her eyelids stapled to her brows. She wasn’t even going to risk wiping the wetness from them one at a time. Because it might be closer if she did, and one thing she was running incredibly short on was “closer.”
She got her lungs to re-establish a steady pace only after intense negotiations. The salty cheek-rivers receded to sticky tracts sometime after, and with her vision more or less clear she confirmed that the graveless thing had made no further advances. Beyond it she spotted the wet footprints left at each preceding station, evenly spaced down the hall like some twisted version of Hollywood Boulevard. It was this that flipped the Oh-Shit switch inside back to the ON position—nevermind that she’d woken into a living nightmare, forget about the floor that had eaten her feet, even disregard the erect corpse. The unblemished space between those lima bean puddles, the irrefutable evidence that it had been changing position without ever moving, now that’s grounds for panic.
He’s just a fly on the wall, she whispered inside. Just a dead…slimy…four-hundred-pound fly…standing perfectly still on the wall. This last ditch attempt at calm meant for any part of her that would listen was rejected most blatantly by her heart, which only upped the frantic pace of its Morse code tapping.
Her hands traveled the floor like scavenging spiders, pouncing on the only two items left in the world. As she was right handed, the keys were first to go. She hurled them much like the cop who’s already spent his last clip on the advancing alien throws his weapon, and they lived up to the cinematic futility admirably. The squish of the corpse’s flabby right breast was audible over the metallic ruckus, a thick, juicy sound that made her want to vomit. The cell connected with a shoulder and was jarred open by the floor. Its cheerful boo-do-do! greeting sung in four directions.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” Susan screamed, slamming her eyes so violently she almost heard them shake on their hinges. She pressed the lids further with her fingers—incapable of trusting them to stay shut on their own—with such conviction that the tears were only permitted leave when they forced an opening by sheer bulk.
Blind! was her eureka. It can’t finish its attack if I don’t finish the blink! Haha, I win, you waterlogged, arch-hopping bastard! I’ll keep myself blind until…
Until…
The deluded bliss shattered.
Until what? Until the decomposing fucking zeppelin ten feet away gives up and goes home? Right. If the dead are long on anything, it’s patience. So until I starve then. Became a corpse myself. Then maybe it’ll be willing to settle its grievances over a game of checkers.
This joke bounced of her murdered sense of humor and rolled into oblivion. What was she going to do? What?
With the deliberation at a standstill, imagination took over. It’s just waiting on one more blink, it cooed. Two, tops. Then it’ll have what it wants right in front of it, and no mommy to tell it not to play with its food. An image came along with this caption, one of the rotting carcass reaching forward ever so slowly, gobs of slimy skin falling of its blubbery arms to mix with the cooling sweat of her legs. Forward…forward…she could feel the cold, spongy fingertips on her face…
Susan’s eyelids retracted like sprung window shades, training on the body death misplaced. It was close enough to dance with, had she still the decidedly underappreciated gift of mobility.
The rabid tremors navigating the breath fleeing her quivering lips infected her entire body as her head panned nightmarishly upward, taking in every detail like a debuting coroner. The ashy leg-flesh hung like raw chicken, its yellowed bones peaking through gaping cracks and jagged holes. Colonies of mushroom bulbs sprouted from many of the flab-folds, thriving particularly around the miniaturized genitals and the perimeter of its considerable bellybutton. The bluish sausage link fingers hung at the ready, as stationary and minutely bent as a gunslinger’s at high noon. Despite the complete absence of life, a goodly number of maggot tunnels dotted the nail edges.
Now, being faced with this thing, this abomination that simply could not exist within the reaches of God’s hand, was traumatic, but it was the maggot holes that did her in. The emergency glass of her brain was obliterated.
Power of attorney was granted her arms, which decided she was getting free with or without her feet. The pain was distant, a thunderstorm in the next town over, as her saturated hands and bruised elbows did what they could to drag her away…which turned out to be quite a bit. She spun counterclockwise, every panted shriek seeming to add to her achingly dry eyes. Susan ignored the grinding, tearing noise that would have reminded her of a twisting tree branch, and the resounding crack that followed. The colossal agony went briefly unacknowledged too, doused by barrels of endorphins, but the sight of her unearthed tibia pointing through her calf like a partially husked ear of corn could not be dismissed.
The length of time it took her lungs to wind up was unreal. In silence the skin and muscle slid back even farther from the crookedly snapped bone with sultry grace, like an otherwise naked woman slowly dropping her mink coat. Stray flaps of flesh were soon lost in a tide of red, which gathered on the hardwood and expanded to soak her shorts and form a moat around her ankles. The sound that finally came from her inflated chest was a gym class whistle, skirting the farthest reaches of audibility.
Her stomach had held onto the tracks far longer than could be reasonably expected of it, and now rolled into the final terminal—last stop, everyone off. The bile branded her throat as the bulk splattered between her thighs, mingling with the blood to give it an oatmeal-with-strawberry-swirl look. A few chunks stuck to her exposed bone. This sight brought on another bout of wretching, one that ended ten heaves past empty.
Everything became far, inconsequential. She was not here, not a completely defenseless, profusely bleeding individual in the presence of something terrible. She was down the hall somewhere, sympathizing with that unfortunate person. The west one maybe. “Sunset Hall” came to mind for some reason.
The horrible mess in front of the woman—was her name Susan too? —was a bit too much to handle, so she instead looked beyond her to the east hallway. She was unsure why, but she expected it to be very disorienting. It wasn’t. In fact, the unsettling endlessness seemed to have abandoned it entirely, leaving no more than an interesting two-dimensional picture. Wasn’t that nice? Even the strange feeling behind her left eye, a sort of cold dryness, seemed unimportant.
But something was wrong, and she discerned it quickly. Shouldn’t she be able to see that ever-present superimposed image of the left side of her nose? For some reason—maybe one of those pesky conscious thoughts trying to break through—her hand rose with the steadiness of a paint mixer and touched her cheek. (The woman in front of that awful thing did the same.) It dabbed a gooey substance. Her fingers walked further up like a drunk trying the white line and found her eyelid. It gave to her touch like a loose drum.
At once her disembodied mind was vacuumed back into its rightful chamber, and she, Susan, looked up with everything that could be called clarity.
The decaying head atop the chipped and frayed shoulders was there. It had an empty eye socket with white paste dribbling from it. It had another socket. This one was full. Full with her own left eye, looking down at her.
Susan shrieked, closed her remaining eye, and saw no more.
