Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash
The house where Madeline grew up looks different. As she stands on the threshold, sweeping her eyes around the entryway and the living room, everything appears softer and warmer than before. The light is a dim orange. The couch and her father’s armchair are beyond overstuffed, bulging cartoonishly. In the center of it all, the tree shimmers and twinkles like something on a Hallmark card, lights embedded in deep green.
“Come on in! It’s wonderful to see you. Here, honey, let me take your bags.” Her mother smiles up at her. Madeline is a couple heads taller, she has been since middle school, but her mother has never looked this small before. Her father is small too, drowning in his chair. Removing her backpack and setting down her suitcase, she steps inside and shuts the door behind her, closing off the frigid outdoors. It’s like a Hobbit hole. Tiny little people in a hospitable cave of a home.
“How was the drive?” Her father asks, peering over the wire frames of his enormous glasses.
“Not too bad.” Madeline takes off her heavy blue coat and hangs it on one of the hooks by the door.
“I heard on the weather report that there was a blizzard.”
“There was, but it wasn’t too bad. My car’s got good traction and strong headlights.” She remembers when it really started storming that afternoon, out in the flat fields. Watching the snow blast against her windshield felt like being at the car wash.
“I’m glad you made it safely,” her mother says, taking Madeline’s coat off the hook and carrying it to the hall closet. “Are you hungry? I’m starved.”
They eat a dense, sticky casserole for dinner. Luna, their old striped cat, circles underneath the table as they dine, rubbing against each of their shins in turn. It’s unusual for her to give up her affection so readily. When Madeline lived here before, she remembers, Luna would accept no more than a scratch on the head before darting away.
“Did your finals go well?” Her father asks, lifting a sharp shiny fork.
“I haven’t had them yet, Dad.” Madeline smiles. ”They do finals after the break for whatever reason.”
“Oh, of course. I’m sorry, I should’ve remembered.”
“It’s okay. Anyways, I think I’m pretty well prepared.”
“I’m sure you are, always our little scholar.” Her father grins across the table. He must have had some dental work done since her last visit in the summer. His gap tooth is gone.
Soon after dinner, it comes time for bed. Madeline’s room is also smaller than she remembers it. The ceiling is lower, and the walls closer. She isn’t tired yet, so she takes her laptop and props herself up in bed to watch a movie on the small screen. After clicking around a while, she settles on some meathead ‘80s action thing. The foam pads of her headphones clasp warmly around her ears and fill them with the sounds of machine gun fire. At first, the movie is loud enough that she doesn’t notice the scratching. Soon it is too loud to be ignored. A rough scraping noise comes from under her bed, over and over, in triplet rhythm. Chk. Chk. Chk.
“Luna?” Madeline removes her headphones. She already knows it isn’t the cat. The sound is too dull and coarse to come from those tiny needle claws. Chk. Chk. Chk. If not Luna, then what? It sounds much too large to be a mouse. Maybe it’s a rat. A rat with greasy grey fur and long yellowed front teeth. Maybe it’s grinding them together, sharpening them on each other. Chk. Chk. Chk. Madeline realizes that she must look. Must find out. With one trembling hand, she lifts her phone from the nightstand and turns on its flashlight. The dim room seems to cower from the harsh white glow, slinking away. She leans towards the edge of her bed. Chk. Lifts the dangling sheet. Chk. Shines her flashlight. Chk. Looks beneath.
Madeline only catches a glimpse of it before she leaps back up onto the mattress. Something that was almost a scream comes out of her as a choked, rattling wheeze. She inhales and makes the sound again, a rush of air emptying from her as her diaphragm constricts itself. Against all instincts, she approaches the edge of the bed. She has to look again, to be sure. Chk. Chk. Chk. The phone’s light lands on a pale hand, opening and closing, ragged nails dragging against the hardwood floor. Madeline turns off her light and sits in the center of her bed, knees clutched to her chest. A sound worse than the scratching comes from below.
“Please…” A hoarse, clotted voice whispers up to her. “Don’t be afraid.”
For a third time, Madeline feels her body tilt forward. Everything head is shrieking to stay still, to maintain the safety of not seeing, not knowing, and yet she looks again. In the dark beyond the scratching hand, a single eye glints. The white light shines on half of a boy’s face. He looks about her age. The other half is gone, dissolved into a glistening deep red matter, a slime of tissue with edges of naked skull peeking through. Madeline can’t help herself. She dry heaves like a cat choking on a hairball, her shoulders quaking.
“I’m sorry.” She says to the boy under her bed.
“You have to go.” The boy says.
Madeline climbs down and crouches on the floor, breath shivering in and out of her. She is face to face with the boy now. There is barely anything left of him. The tatters of a knit sweater dangle from his one remaining shoulder. He lays in a pool of red ooze that was once his body, white ribs and purple ropes of entrail jutting out here and there. His still being alive is a miracle.
“What happened?” Madeline asks.
“It looked like my parents, too.” He speaks with great difficulty. A mix of blood and bile bubbles up and drools from his chapped blue lips. “Please. You have to go.” Behind his half-eaten body, the seam between the wall and the floor opens and becomes a mouth. It gapes, pink and toothless, and extends a long, reaching tongue. Madeline staggers backward, light still shining, as the tongue loops around the boy’s neck and drags him in. His nails scrabble for something to hold onto. Chk. Chk. Chkchkchkchkchkchk. There’s a thick, wet sucking noise and he’s gone.
Madeline looks around and the room has changed. The walls are no longer straight but curved, no longer plaster but flesh. All around her is a damp, pink membrane, threaded with dark veins. Now, finally, she fills her lungs enough to scream. Every breath she exhales comes out as a piercing tea kettle shriek. Still screaming, she stands upright. The door has vanished, and the chamber is tightening. She lashes out, punching and kicking. In a few places, her blows draw blood, and the room leaks a horrible tar-like substance. Desperate, she gouges her fingers in and pulls as hard as she can. A hole opens and she can see out into the hallway, which now resembles a gigantic throat. Around her ankles, the chamber has begun to fill with a pale green liquid. She can feel it eating away at her heels, see the skin of her feet beginning to blister and slough away, but it doesn’t hurt. Instead, it almost tickles.
Yanking on the fleshy membrane again, Madeline watches it tear further. She feels it pulling back, trying to close itself up, and grunts with effort as she forces her arm through, all the way the shoulder. Prying with the other hand, she manages to squeeze both arms into the hole. Next comes her head.
Madeline looks out into the throat-hallway. The entire house has turned to flesh. Each room moves slowly, throbbing. The light fixtures are glowing bulbous organs, like the lures of predatory deep-sea fish. The furniture has lost its shape and sharp edges, with each table and chair becoming a massive polyp jutting up from the floor. Arms flexing, she struggles to pull herself through the wound. Her limbs and face are streaked with ichor and the fear and effort forces feral growls and yelps from her mouth. For an agonizing moment, she feels stuck, the flesh wall constricting around her midsection, trying to pinch her in half like a cruel child with an insect. Finally, she hooks a leg through and comes tumbling out. All around her, the house pulsates.
Wobbly on her burned feet, Madeline makes a stumbling run in the direction of the door. As she passes through the living room, a voice speaks to her.
“Don’t go so soon, honey.” It’s cloying and sickly sweet, like tainted candy. “You’ve got to stay for Christmas.”
Turning, she sees a red, formless thing that still looks a bit like her father, fused to the lump that had been his armchair. The chair-father makes a low slurping sound, acid foaming from its mouth. Its glasses still hang lopsided from its unseeing face.
“Fuck you!” Madeline shouts. The chair-father lurches forward and its long tongue, like a great red worm, entangles her forearm. There’s a moment of blind panic as it begins to reel her in, but as her adrenaline surges, she seizes the tongue and wrenches it out by the root. It writhes like an eel in her grasp before going limp. Tossing it aside, she draws close to the chair-father. It gawps at her, flapping its jaw open and shut, gibbering. She sticks her hands into its mouth and pushes in opposite directions. The meat is soft, like pulled pork. It comes apart easily. With a triumphant snarl, she rips its head in half. A fountain of fluids jets from the ruined stump. Madeline staggers away in search of an exit. There is none.
As she travels from room to room, Madeline passes something that looks like a scarecrow made of viscera, and realizes it used to look like her mother. On the floor beside it is Luna, now hairless and skinless, swishing a stringy appendage back and forth. Madeline gives it a sharp kick and keeps moving. The mother-thing calls out after her, but she doesn’t hear.
Legs failing, Madeline stops next to what she hopes is an outer wall and falls to her knees. She digs her nails in again, scratching and ripping wildly. Once, when she was younger, another girl at school told her about a method of torture where a rat is placed on a bare abdomen and covered with a metal bucket. A blowtorch is applied to the bucket, and as it tries to escape being cooked, the rat burrows into the victim’s stomach. Madeline has become the rat. The skin here is thick, and tough like leather. The nail of her left middle finger peels backward and comes off. She doesn’t care. Somewhere behind her, the father-chair has grown a new head and is emitting a loud croaking noise. For a moment, Madeline thinks it’s in pain, and she almost smiles until she realizes the sound is intended to be a laugh.
“Fuck you.” She says again and digs in the pockets of her gore-splattered jeans. Grinning like a maniac, Madeline reveals a ring of keys. Finding the sharpest one, she stabs it into the wall and begins sawing back and forth. She sticks her fingers through to hold the gash open and feels cold winter air on the other side. The house is really fighting now. It squeezes tight, as if it’s biting her. Madeline keeps working. Black, tarry blood squirts onto her face in thick gouts and she cackles. When the cut is big enough, she slides her arm through, still holding her keys. She can hear them jangling on the other side.
Getting through is harder the second time. The house clenches with all its might, and she wonders if it’ll be strong enough to crush her ribs or cave in her skull. Putting her head into the hole is the worst part. The darkness, although only momentary, is absolute. She feels a tremendous muscle pressing on her cranium, and thinks for a moment that it might crack like an egg. A viscous substance smears over her eyelids, down the bridge of her nose, across her lips. Daring to open her eyes, she sees the pristine frozen front yard sparkling in the moonlight. The quiet, snow-muffled streets and countless other houses sprawling beyond.
When she’s escaped up to her chest, winter wind lashing against her face and arms, the house tries to squish her in half again. Clutching to life, crazed as a rat in a hot bucket, she keeps tugging and tearing and clawing. Screaming at the top of her lungs into the silent December night, Madeline has the insane thought that the house is giving birth to her. She falls into the snowy lawn in a spray of blood.
She lays there for a minute catching her breath before starting to laugh again. The snow feels amazing. She rolls around, flaps her limbs to make angels, shovels handfuls into her mouth and drinks the icy water. Dark windows stare blankly down at her. From the outside, it looks ordinary. Innocent.
Standing, Madeline walks to her car, parked at the curb. In the trunk is an emergency kit that her father, her real father, bought for her. It includes a spare gas can and a package of road flares. The house screams as it burns, a long howl like an air raid siren. A column of black smoke billows up. The air smells like meat.
Max Firehammer is a writer living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In his spare time, he plays the drums.