The door across the hall from Cartoon Boy was just slightly ajar, and Mike saw the whites of two eyes staring out at him.
“Uh he… uh he… uh he he.” The tiny laughter had to belong to a toddler, maybe a two year old.
But the sound of the gurgly voice sent Mike further down the hall.
“He he he… uh he he.”
Mike glanced over his shoulder. A black toddler stood there, nude, fingering his protruding belly button. His skin crawled with wiggles, stark dots against his skin, and just like Cartoon Boy, they tunneled through his body.
The little boy sucked on his finger, giggled again.
Mike could tell he was a boy because of the puny twisted knot of flesh between his legs. Then the baby got down on all fours and crawled toward him. His limbs disappeared into the wriggling river and he looked like a tiny torso floating on the surface.
“Oh hell naw.” Mike turned, sprinted, splashing maggots into the air. He passed multiple doors, wondered if his brother could be inside any of them. “James? Where the fuck are you, man?”
Doors cracked open and slammed shut again as he passed. Mike caught quick glimpses of children, their faces stretched into mischievous grins.
He stopped, turned, checked for the swim-ming infant as he took blind steps backward.
And the baby was there, clinging to his leg, almost weightless. It cooed at him, gurgled and drooled a thick yellow paste. It smiled its swollen toothless gums at him.
Mike screamed, a hoarse shriek that tore his throat. He kicked his leg, but the baby climbed him like a cat. He reached down to grab it, palmed its head like a cantaloupe. As he peeled it away from his jeans, his thumb popped into its mouth; the child sucked on it, fluttered its eyelids.
“Get the fuck off me!” Mike tried to toss him away, but the toddler clung to his arm, shimmied his way to Mike’s back. To the backpack.
“Mmmm…”
Peeling the bag from his shoulders, he was ready to defend his loot, to grip the baby by the throat and punt him across the hallway. The baby was head-first in the bag, its legs kicking in the air. Mike grabbed it by the ankles and yanked it out.
“What the… what the fuck?”
The treasure was gone. The baby chewed sloppy, rotting meat with its gums, rolled it around its mouth with its tongue; rank soup dripped from its body. Mike now saw the bag was saturated with a dark pungent fluid, felt the wet spot on the back of his shirt. And of course, the meat roiled with maggots.
The baby wiggled, tried bending itself to get to the beefy contents of the bag. Mike flung both into the air, watched them disappear into the living river with a splash. He turned and ran, wasting no time. The hallway just kept going, doors kept zooming past.
Finding James seemed more and more impossible. It would take him a lifetime, maybe two, to check every door in that hallway.
Mama was right, Mike thought. This place is absolute evil.
But he couldn’t leave without James. No matter how much his instinct told him to flee, he wouldn’t give in to it. He would keep looking, had to, regardless of how long it took. And it was then he had a feeling of finality, that he would never leave this place. That he would spend the rest of his days with the flies and maggots and children, searching through the vast hallway, checking doors until he turned to dust. But he shook the thoughts from his head, took a deep breath. James needed him to be strong, he couldn’t freak out now.
So, at random and without much thought, he chose another door. And he entered.
The twins sat in the middle of the room. When Mike entered, they looked up, acknow-ledged him with a set of smiles. The pulsing maggots dove in and out of their black flesh.
Mike thought they were identical, two skinny bald boys, but their nudity revealed that the one in the back was female. And even though they looked starved, emaciated, they looked happy to be together in their room, kept smiling and giggling at each other, at Mike. The girl sat behind her brother with her legs wrapped around his waist. They almost looked Siamese, but when the girl leaned back and started picking larvae from her brother’s back and stuffing them into her mouth, Mike could see they weren’t connected. The boy tittered as his sister groomed him, plucked the living morsels and popped them into her mouth.
They looked up at Mike again, didn’t seem to mind his intrusion at all. “Hi,” they said in perfect unison.
All Mike could do was purse his lips and furrow his brow. The room, like Cartoon Boy’s, was small, a perfect square. And of course, the flies were there, omnipresent, watching as Mike wandered deeper and deeper into the devil’s labyrinth. Ever buzzing were the flies.
Lining the walls, crammed shoulder to shoulder, were lots and lots of stuffed animals, like a plush forest. Bears and puppies and monkeys and elephants and unicorns, all with a film of grime hardening their synthetic fur. Mike couldn’t take a step without feeling cotton squash under his boots, some of the animals equipped with squeaky sounds buried in their soft viscera. It was like a whimsical audience for the twins as they cleansed each other, whispered jokes only they could hear or understand.
“Are you new here?” the girl said.
“Come sit with us,” the boy said. “Help me clean my sister.”
“What is this place? Where the fuck is my brother?” Mike was on the verge of tears. He didn’t want to imagine James becoming one of these children; had to shove the images of his brother’s scrawny body awash with maggots out of his head.
“This is forever. Forever and ever.” They said this together, switched positions so the boy could pick the snacks from his twin sister’s back. “Your brother is part of Infinity House now. With us. With you. With the flies.”
“You know where he is?” Mike advanced on them, puffed his chest up and pointed a stiff finger. “You better speak up, motherfuckers. Where is he?”
The twins looked at each other, whispered, laughed.
A bubbling anger filled Mike, and he growled like a rabid pitbull. He stomped across the room, every other step a squeak, grabbed the boy by the throat and lifted him into the air. The boy weighed nothing, dangled from Mike’s grip like an empty sack. The girl cackled from the ground, crawled under her brother with an open mouth to catch the pale wiggling rain.
Mike ignored the ones crawling onto his hand. Ignored the flies that settled on his face, buzzed in his ear. The boy had a smell like bad cheese, but Mike ignored that too. “Tell me where he is ‘fore I break your fuckin’ neck, fool.”
“I can’t wait to play with our new brother. We can never have too many playmates,” the boy said. He smiled, displayed his gapped grin. Larvae pushed out of the space where his teeth met his gums, fed on the tartar caked there.
Mike winced as he felt the tiny burrowers digging into the flesh of his arm; they kept falling out of the boy, pouring down onto his sister who chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed.
“Fuck you then.” Mike bared his teeth as he squeezed. His fingers dug into the boy’s throat like it was cooked meat. The flesh broke away with ease, and an avalanche of maggots spilled out. The boy never stopped smiling, didn’t even flinch as his neck was torn to shreds by Mike’s fingers. The girl cackled as she grabbed handfuls of maggots like candy from a grisly piñata.
With a gasp, Mike tossed the boy away, raked his nails across his own arms to rid them of the thrashing pale bodies. What the fuck, he thought. What the fuck is this?
Pure evil. You’re in the devil’s house now. These are his children, and now your brother is one of them.
“No!”
The girl straddled her brother, stomach to stomach, and sucked on the ragged neck wound. Mike gagged at the sound of crunching maggot meat. The boy smiled up at him, a smile full of sparkling delight as he was fed upon. Even as the girl feasted, Mike could see the frenzied larvae mending the wound, pasting it shut with their goop.
Mike went for the door, kicked away teddy bears and plush bunny rabbits.
“We are family now.” The twins’ v
oices meshed into one demonic sound.
Something splashed over Mike’s back, felt like gravel hitting him. Another wave hit him, slid down the back of his neck, and when he felt the tickling sensation of movement, he flapped his shirt, clawed at his back, neck, and head.
The twins stood now, facing Mike, tossing handfuls at him. They sprinkled him with living confetti that slid into places he couldn’t reach. “F-fuck you, man. Ngghhh…” Mike danced in place, not wanting another leathery capsule to touch his naked skin.
You’ll never escape them. You belong to the devil now.
The twins locked arms and spun, skipped and sang.
“Locked inside Infinity House, we’ll be here forever. If you want to be one of us, you only have to enter.”
Mike recognized the tune as Pop Goes the Weasel. Maggots piled at their feet as they spun, turning to a milky paste as they crushed them under bare feet.
“The flies won’t let the time pass by, the maggots are our brothers. We’ll never age, we’ll never die, we’ll never see our mothers.”
Mike hopped back into the hall; the river’s level had risen, now up to his shins; the doors looked taller, the ceiling higher. He slammed the door, wiped the tears and sweat from his face with his forearm.
“James!” His voice cracked. With his head resting on the door, the flies crawling into his hair, buzzing and buzzing, he wept. He wept harder than he ever had before. He tried collecting himself, but it only made him cry harder.
You killed him. You’re both dead.
“Shut up. Please shut up.” Mike grunted and swallowed his panic down, choked on the pressure swelling in his chest at the thought that he’d never see his brother again, never see the light of day again.
And then he ran. He screamed as he went, wading through the rising thickness; zig-zagging insects smacked into his face. He saw faces peering out from doors, but he didn’t look them in the eye, just kept running. Baby cries and children’s laughter hit him from all sides, and he pushed on and on, pushed himself to the limits of his body. His legs ached, threatened to lock up, go limp on him; his lungs burned and his stomach cramped.
And just when he didn’t think he could run any more, when he thought he’d fall over and be submerged and consumed, he found himself at what appeared to be the end of the hall, and facing him, tall and as black as an abyss, stood double doors. To his left and right, empty hallways stretched out as far as his eye could see, but there were no doors there, as if the bare walls were waiting for fresh tenants.
From his side of the twin behemoth doors, he thought he heard weeping. He imagined James on the other side, clawing at the wood and crying for his brother to save him.
“James? Is… is that you?” His voice came out squeaky, his throat raw. There was no answer. He pressed his ear to the door, heard the faint crying of children.
Clenching his teeth and breathing deep through is nostrils, Mike shoved the doors in.
The walls, floor, and ceiling were animated with movement. But not from flies or maggots.
Photographs. Each one flickered images like tiny television screens, every photo displaying its own horrors. The cries and whimpers of children floated in the room like fog.
Under his left foot, Mike focused on the photo there and watched as a scene played out. A boy, maybe nine years old, sat shirtless on a hardwood floor. From the photograph’s viewpoint, the boy faced Mike, wiped his face with the back of his arm, but never stopped crying. A shadow grew from the floor until it covered the boy like a blanket, casting the shape of a large man on the wall. When the man stepped forward, the boy scooted backward until the back of his head struck the wall behind him. The man wore striped boxer shorts, but nothing else, and as he took another step, he slid out of them.
Mike turned his head so he wouldn’t have to see the rest, but his eyes only landed on another photo. A girl, younger than the boy, lay on her stomach in a pool of blood, nude. The man stood above her with both hands on her head, and he twisted it and twisted it as if to unscrew it. It came free with a wet pop; the old man leaned over and kissed the lips, ragged strips of flesh dangling from the neck stump and raining blood onto the twitching body beneath it.
Mike turned away, but was face to face with the living, repulsive wallpaper. Boys and girls of varying sizes and ages, all trapped in an infinite loop of atrocity. As Mike scanned them, hoping he wouldn’t see his brother’s face, he witnessed what the old man had done throughout the years, saw the acts that earned him his place in this Infinity House. Though the faces of the children varied with each photograph, the old man’s violence was constant.
Though he felt sorry for these kids, he knew the children occupying the rooms in the house were no longer innocent. Their purity long ago stolen from them by the old man and his darkness, they were now part of the house, part of the evil that filled it.
Find your brother. Get him out of here.
As Mike backed his way toward the double doors, unable to force his eyes away from the vicious pictures, guttural laughter seeped from the walls. Vibrating bumps rose from the surface of the glossy photos like tumors. The rapid movement of the children’s undoing continued to play out on the surface of these growths, then turned to iridescence as the bumps sprouted wings. As the flies launched themselves into the air, more sprouted from the pictures and the thunderous cackling rattled Mike’s brain.
The flies filled the air like a buzzing hailstorm. He squeezed his lips shut, squinted as he swatted his way toward the doors that he could no longer see through the thickness of the bugs.
The old man’s face peered out of the pictures, each one laughing, all staring at Mike with their empty eye-pits. As the laughter grew louder, the flies multiplied. With an adrenaline-fuelled lunge, Mike’s hands found the door handles. He yanked them, struggled to open the doors against the chaos of the flies, then stumbled into the hallway and fell face-first into the maggots. They crawled into his mouth, pulsed on his tongue, tried burrowing into the corners of his eyes, into his nostrils.
He whimpered as he jumped to his feet, dry heaved and spat and clawed at his body. A final booming cackle slammed the double doors shut behind him.
His eyes shot down the hall, the direction from which he had come, and the children were there, watching him. So many of them, all black and brown skinned.
Kids from the Oak, he thought. All of the missing children. He recognized some of the faces from the photos. They smiled at him, every one, and he knew at least one of the little motherfuckers knew where James was.
“Hey!” Mike waded through the knee-high flood toward them. “Where the fuck is my brother?”
The children laughed like they were playing tag, ran around each other in playful pandemonium. As Mike stomped toward them, they went back into their rooms, slammed their doors, and cackled from the other side.
But Mike was done playing games. All his years in the Oak, all his years fighting for his life, for James’s life, not knowing if they would eat on any given night, not knowing if they’d be murdered by some fucking crackhead or gun-toting thug. The sight of Mama’s beaten body, naked, torn up and left in front of their house like roadkill.
And now this fucking place, this Infinity House, swallowed his brother whole and refused to give him back. Enticed them with illusions of a better life, trapped them like flies in a spider web.
Mike saw red. He flexed his fingers before curling them into fists, clenched his teeth until his jaw hurt. Burning hatred and anger rushed through his veins like venom, and Mike couldn’t hold it back.
He thrust open the first door he came to and rushed inside. The chubby girl with long beaded braids had no time to react as Mike dove on top of her and pummeled her face in with a storm of fists. The room was pink, coated with flies, and littered with dolls like miniature corpses. Mike kept punching, and as the girl’s face folded in on itself, the larvae pulsed and repaired her, and all the while she laughed and laughed.
Mike roared as he flew from th
at room to the one across the hall, turned the little Mexican boy inside into a pile of quivering meat. Maggots scurried from his mouth as he said over and over again, “Quieres jugar conmigo?”
Mike panted as he criss-crossed from one side of the hall to the other, entering every room and bashing the inhabitants until they were unrecognizable. But no matter how hard he hit, no matter how mutilated the children became, they still laughed, still wanted to play. Mike’s knuckles were torn raw, his arms stained with dark red and black fluid from his fingertips to his elbows.
He stood in the hall, panting, sucking for oxygen, but only getting the thick tainted air of the house. A high-pitched shriek erupted from his belly as he fell to his hands and knees. The maggots crawled over him, started to engulf him, but he didn’t stop them this time. They climbed him, bit at him, dug into him, and Mike only watched.
You failed him. How could you let this happen?
“I’m sorry…”
Just down the hall was a face, the same one from before, sticking out sideways from its bedroom door, white as a ghost.
The child waved him over, checked up and down the hall, then waved him over again.
Mike had to force himself to stand. There was a strong sensation of wiggling inside of him, spreading like fire throughout his body. His brain slammed against the inside of his skull, his body begged him to lie back down, to give up, give in to the house.
“H-have you s-seen my brother?” He meant to shout it, but it came out a choked mutter.
The child, now standing in the hall, nodded. The pale-faced kid appeared to be a girl, and as Mike stumbled toward her, he could tell she wore some kind of porcelain mask. She jumped up and down, clapped, then ran into her room.
Mike followed, nearly collapsing a few times on the way. His breaths rattled in his throat; his skin burned with electric agony as the maggots burrowed deeper.
He fell into the room, heard the door creak and click shut behind him. The smell of this room was different…semi-pleasant. The ess-ence of rot was still there, but above that was a sweet perfume.
Infinity House Page 4