Chapter 1 – Chap 1

I’d worked the path out myself. No chance in hell was I forking over my hard earned cash to that little piss-ant at the gate. Reports of a haunted farm were thin superstitious speculation at best, I figured.

Follow a specific route and you find yourself somewhere you shouldn’t. Legend goes the people on the farm are just a collection of ghosts stuck on repeat. Trapped living the same night on a loop in a place that doesn’t exist anymore.

Yeah, right.

But Mrs. Winstead’s daughter had been missing for weeks. Last seen at the carnival. Half the people I questioned insisted she’d been eaten by the corn-maze that supposedly led to Kausterman’s farm.

But with no body to speak of, I decided to rule out the obvious nonsense they kept clogging up my investigation with. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I actually found the place, though. Turns out the truth is stranger than fiction after all.

I’d been working the case for weeks at that point. And hitting the bottle as hard as I was hitting dead ends. Honestly it could all be a fever dream, I reasoned. But, on I pressed.

First stop on ‘the farm that shouldn’t exist’, was the haunted house attraction to the far right of entryway. It sat beside an abandoned race track filled with rusted tricycles for the kids. There was a hill with an empty fire pit between the two. A butt bucket in the middle, presumably for the workers to take smoke breaks.

Speaking of which, I figured the easiest way to find them would be the haunted house. It’d take time to set up before they opened so they’d no doubt be getting dressed and doing their spot checks on the equipment.

But as it stood, the place seemed vacant. I must’ve been early. Good lord was this place cheesier than a Packers game in Wisconsin.

That’s when Frankenstein barrelled into me wearing lifts and a fresh coat of green paint. “Ah shit. Sorry, bud. You know we’re not open yet, right?”

“You got any more costumes hiding back there? Don’t feel like plowing into a chainsaw tonight”.

“Nah, no chainsaw, dude,” he turned around, cupping his mouth, “Hey guys! Are we late? There’s some dude here already”.

A werewolf and some punk made up like a skeleton stumbled in reeking of pot. “Hey bud. You lost? Place ain’t even open yet”.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Name’s Detective Chambers. Can I ask you boys a few questions?” I said, pulling out my notepad.

The stoners looked primed for a quick exit. An undead clown wandered in with an uneasy look on his creepy fucking face.

“Jesus Christ,” I gasped. Almost screaming unintentionally. Fucking clowns, man. Seriously?

“Uuh. Are you a… um. Animal control guy? There’s a whole pack of skunks out back and -” That stupid fucking clown faced ghoul stammered through his stoned fucking grin.

“I don’t give a shit about the reefer, alright?” I pulled out a picture of Mrs. Winstead’s little girl and offered it to the group. “I’m looking for Mary Winstead. Age thirteen. Last seen three weeks ago around the carnival”.

They slowly passed it around, shaking their heads. It was hard to get a good read on them, given that they had makeup plastering their dumb faces and were covertly freaking out about how high they were in front of me.

God damn druggies, I tell ya.

“Our boss is upstairs though. Can’t hear nothin’ on account of the floors up there. You might wanna ask him,” said Frankenstein.

“He’s not dressed as an idiot clown, I hope?” I said, glaring into the clowns beady little eyes.

“Nah. Just me,” he stammered after a minute and began looking around awkwardly as I continued to stare daggers into his soul.

“And the stairs… are?” I questioned, averting my gaze from the zombified joker. Like pulling teeth with this lot. My god.

“Right. Sorry dude. End of the hall, hang a right, go right again and it’s all the way at the end. Can’t miss it”.

“My ass,” the werewolf countered. “You miss it all the time, genius. Guy walked around for twenty minutes the other day – oh,” he interrupted himself after noticing my unimpressed expression. “You… don’t care”.

“I surely do not”.

“But don’t call you Shirley, am I right?”

I walked away, and told them to lay off the dope. “You little shits do drugs before work again and I’ll come in and bust all your asses”.

“Yes sir,” they answered unconvincingly as a group.

“He was clearly setting you up for that though”. The clown murmured as I turned the corner.

I wandered down the annoyingly long hall and followed Frankenstein’s directions. That’s when the bony arm leapt out of the wall with a mechanical smack. A witches laugh cackled from the speakers.

Assholes.

They turned on the sensors. I took the first right turn as smoke crept up from the vents and covered the floors.

“Welcome to the hooouse of nightmares,” I heard one of them say over the speakers like a ghost. “No one gets out aliiiiive“. The witch cackled again as a door opened and a half-assed skeleton popped out. I shook my head and took the next right.

And the next.

Wait.

I should have come full circle.

That’s a pretty good trick. My guess was the hallways got shorter until you spiraled your way into the center and hit the staircase. So I carried on, turning to the right as stupid attractions jumped at me and creepy music played.

The stoner on the speakers began taunting me by name since I was the only one there.

“You’re going to die Chambers”

“We have your wife and kids in the basement”

“This isn’t a joke – you’re seriously about to die”

“You’re actually just in a hospital hallucinating”

“You’re mother’s having a heart attack right now”

Shit like that. Little bastards.

After about fifteen turns, I’d had enough. My new theory was that the spiral was on a slant I wasn’t noticing and slowly making its way underground. But for the life of me I couldn’t notice a difference in the length of each hallway.

So I turned around.

Only to be met with another right turn.

Fuck.

Do they also have doors they can open and close? This was getting too elaborate to be true. I sprinted toward the end of the hall only for a very realistic mechanical hand to pop out of the ground and snare my ankle, sending me slamming face first onto the steel floor.

“You son of a bitch! Do you realize how dangerous that shit is?” I spat blood on the wall from biting my tongue. I looked back. No hand in sight.

I got up and made my way to the turn and studied the other wall. Only for that fucking skeleton to pop out again.

Motherfucker.

I grabbed it in anger, choosing to rip it from the wall.

Expect… Holy shit.

That thing was not plastic. I was absolutely certain this thing was real bone with polyester hair and fake spider-webs glued to it. Damn this place was convincing.

I pulled it off the track and tossed it down the hall to continue my investigation and find a hidden passageway out of here.

The second I started to climb over the skeleton’s bottom attachment, it pulled back into the wall and slammed the doors shut. With me on top of it. I can not stress enough how much I hated this fucking house.

I felt around in the pitch blackness of what amounted to be the space of a broom closet on wheels. I couldn’t find any trace of a back passage so I tried to push my way out the metal door flaps.

Only, I couldn’t because the things felt like they were welded shut. I yelled as loud as could for the stoners. “Hey! Dipshits! You locked me in the skeleton’s closet!”

“There he goes again, blaming everyone else for his own misfortune”

“We don’t have a skeleton closet”

“I told you, you’re gonna die here”

“Seriously,” I screamed, “Knock it off, get me THE FUCK out of here”. This shit stopped being funny a long time ago. And I was getting rightfully pissed.

Then I heard her.

“Daddy, please! They’re hurting me and Mommy!”

Even in the blackness all I could see was red.

I screamed bloody murder and beat my fist just as bloody trying to get that fucking door open. I listened for nearly twenty minutes to them taunting me. My daughter crying for help. Screaming at them that they were sick fucks.

I ignored the breathing sounds behind me and the wetness on the back of my neck. The sensation of spiders crawling up my legs. The alternating temperature changes from freezing cold to scorching hot. That fucking pipe that burst and started flooding the room. The walls closing in, slowly but surely but always getting smaller and smaller and smaller and more cramped until-

Until a thought hit me.

I’ll just shoot so many fucking holes in this thing that I can tear myself through.

And right at that moment. Woosh.

The doors opened and whipped me the fuck out. Along with three feet of water. I again, slammed face first on the ground. Spitting up more blood as I pushed myself to my knees.

A man I didn’t recognize had activated the sensor and was standing there awestruck.

“Thank god I found you,” it was a man dressed smartly. Suit and tie. Styled hair. All that jazz.

“And you are?” I answered with rage still threatening to make me bite through my own teeth. I was gradually coming to terms with the fact that everything I’d just experienced was in my head. They fucking drugged me. I would need help getting out.

“I’m Max. My friend and I work at the carnival. He said some dude had been lost in the maze for hours and was worried you stumbled into the farm. I’m glad you’re alright”.

“So you’re part of the ghost hustle? Taking victims money so they can die out on a farm? Get drugged by idiot hick stoners?”

“So do you want my help or not? Cuz I can just leave you here”. He had my number.

“Reluctantly and with many reservations. I have to insist you get me the fuck out of this house. I’ve been drugged and-“

I decided not to announce out loud that I’d just about shot him half a dozen times through the metal door.

Holy shit.

“Well, fancy man. Lead the way”. I gestured in all directions.

He hesitated with a worried expression. “I don’t know the way out of this part”.

The moron had just walked the fuck in, “Dammit son, have you been drugged too?”

He crossed his arms. “No. And neither have you. The mental gymnastics your putting yourself through are astonishing”.

“What the hell good are you then? Why did you come to help if you don’t know the way out?” I was yelling now.

“I just saved your life asshole,” he began to pace nervously. “We have to get to the second floor and-” Suddenly a trapdoor opened, sending him plummeting down.

“What the fuck,” I sprang into action, diving toward it to try and grab him. No luck.

“Shit,” His voice echoed from below. I scanned the hallway looking for the skeleton to pull him up. It was gone.

“I’m coming down. Basement’s gotta have an exit near the back,” I said as I began lowering myself. Clearly there was no way out of this damn spiral anyway.

Pain shot through my hands and I dropped down about four feet. I forgot how much they hurt after pounding on that door for so long. They’d been numb until I actually put them to use. I suspected a broken knuckle or two in my left fingers. Just great.

“I’m fine by the way,” Max said as if it mattered. Sitting flat on his ass on the wood floor.

I surveyed the damage on my hand under the red lights that lit the basement area. “Good for you…” I said while the witch recording cackled again from above.

The basement had four directions to choose from, set like a cross. A sign dangled from the top of the doorways. I turned in a circle to read each: Never, Eat, Sour, Wheat

“You think that one leads to a kitchen?” I pointed my face toward the eastern sign.

“You don’t want that. They’re directions,” He stood up, making the same conclusion I had.

“No shit, Sherlock. Which way is up, though?” Each path was pitch black beyond the fading light from the chamber we were in. I took a step into the Eat hallway causing a series of blue lights to turn on and light the hallway in sequence.

“Hold on,” he grabbed my shoulder. “We need to figure which one is right”.

“We have no clues, kid. Better just follow instinct”. I stepped out and the lights turned off.

“Well, personally. I don’t like the sound of Eat, even if it’s just for east”. He walked over to the Wheat path, which lit up yellow. I took a step into Sour. Nothing. “Step out”. He did and my path turned bright pink. We checked Never. Green.

“Well green means go,” he said. “But the sign says Never… this is a mind game”.

“In keeping with the lay of the land, the fields are west, the house is north, the highway is-” he cut me off before I could finish.

“How long have you been spinning in circles, though? These might not be actual directions”. He was right. In fact, that was dead on. The house was spinning us around specifically to lose our sense of direction. And this was why.

Water dripped onto my hair as I crossed the center again. Fucking pipe. “Choose a path. Now. No point in doddling”. He spun around looking at each anxiously. So I chose for him, “Forget it – we’re taking Eat or east or whatever the fuck”. And stormed down it.

As soon as we both entered our route, the red light turned off. Followed one by one by all the sets of blue lights we crossed so we could only see forward. I heard a large metal slam from behind. “Ignore it,” I said.

Up ahead the lights became faded and choppy, like something was blocking parts of them. I looked closely at the next one. Teeth. They’d been glued to the inside of the bulb, surrounding the source. Like a mouth swallowing coloured light.

I wondered if Wheat would have looked less sinister. As we walked for what felt like miles, I noticed the teeth getting closer to each other. As if the mouth was gradually closing. Max saw the exit first.

“Oh shit. I don’t like the looks of that”. He wasn’t joking. Up ahead was the end of the hall. And where a door should be, a massive mouth took its place with a closed set of teeth and dark gums. It looked human, lacking lips and proper gum care. And it stunk of gingivitis.

“We have to go back,” he sounded like he was about to cry.

“Didn’t you hear that sound before?” I replied, “That was a door. We’re locked in. Plus, I’m not going back into the darkness again”. We were trapped.

“Should’ve chose Wheat” he muttered.

He began pacing around, panicking. Not knowing what to do. “Shut up,” I said after the third of fourth, What do we do? He sat down again. I noticed a speaker in the corner a split second before it came on.

“How do you open a mouth without consent?”

I locked my jaw and did my best to force it open. What a gross way to phrase the question. “You can’t?” I answered.

“Death doesn’t need consent,” the speaker countered. Gross. I wondered if this mouth was really dead. Or really alive in the first place so that it could die. “Fuck this,” I said pulling out my gun.

I heard a whoa from Max before I took three shots at the front tooth. They didn’t make it all the way through. Embedding themselves in the teeth with a spiderweb of hairline fractures. I kicked at it to finish it off.

The cracks grew deeper and right at the last kick, the mouth opened just enough to try and snatch my ankle in its bite. I corrected in time to aim higher and it broke off and fell backward into the mouth.

“Innovation bites the hand that feeds”. The speaker laughed.

I looked beyond the broken tooth’s spot. I gagged at the smell. Pungent rot. The stench of stomach acid and garbage. Vomit and decaying earth.

There were pools of black liquid on all sides of the tongue. With what looked like chunks of infected flesh floating on top. I saw the remnants of the tooth I’d broken to the right. Melting. Smoking in the acidic liquid and making it bubble with a cartoonish squeal. Like a flat tire.

The tongue was covered in a thick layer of white mold. Left half pink by a red light shining beyond the throat. I couldn’t see properly, but I strongly suspected we’d find ourselves back in the room we started. Which at this point I was all for.

One of the three remaining light sets shut off. “We have to knock out another tooth,” I said and kicked at it. It was loose.

“Are you crazy? You’re gonna climb into that thing?” He stood back up and looked through the hole. I kicked again. It knocked back a few inches.

“The throat is an exit,” I said kicking again. It didn’t budge. We would have to pull it back like a baby tooth. “Grab the tooth and pull,” I demanded.

“Screw that,” he was a real pain in my ass. “It’s just gonna bite again”. He was right, but we had no choice.

“Just watch your fingers. Take it from the side,” I was getting fed up with this. No pun intended. It was slippery with the yellow plaque that formed a thick coat. It tried to nip at our hands and we both fell back. But it worked. The tooth was six inches closer to us. I kicked again. A set of lights shut off.

“It’s getting looser,” I said as we repeated the process. It was easier to grip now that our hands had worked grooves into the layers of decay. It continued to try and chew our hands futility. We finally had enough space to push it up instead of out.

We shoved it as a team and it tore out with a sickening crunch. Rancid blood sprayed out and began raining down from the open wound. Staining the bottom teeth and joining the acid pool. The entirety of the liquid began to smoke and boil.

Max looked up at the hole and looked sick, “Oh god,” he ran to the end of light. I saw the squirming brown mass moving around inside start to spread out and separate in all directions. Cockroaches.

They scurried out into the mouth and the hallway. Max was shaking like a leaf. “We have to do it,” I insisted.

“Nope. Fuck this. I’d rather die. I don’t do cockroaches”. They continued to stream out without slowing. “Clowns,” I said.

“What?”

“I’m scared of clowns”. I said trying to comfort him. I was bad at that.

“Well, there’s not a million fucking clowns crawling around on the walls is there?”

“Nope. But there’s one in this house ready to jump out at any second. Once we leave the hall we can move past these nasty little shits at least,” I walked him over to the mouth, “Look”.

They lined the walls. Skittering around and stopping before the acid pools before turning around to crawl through the teeth. “They won’t cross the liquid. They’re just filling the hall we’re in. Once we get out…”

“You’re right. Okay. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck”. I got it. This was gonna suck. The bloody, rotting mouth was full of decay, acid, mold and cockroaches. It was hard to think of a more disgusting combination.

“You have to go first”. It sounded cruel but I knew if I wasn’t behind him he would chicken out. I told him as much. It took a bit more convincing but he began to push his way between the space in the front teeth. The mouth opened again.

“Don’t move,” I yelled, “it’s gonna keep trying to bite us the entire time. Just don’t change position while it’s opened”. He stopped. I made sure not to tell him about the cockroaches that were raining down onto his back from the hole. I’m sure he knew, given that he was crying like a baby. The mouth closed.

He pushed further and went to steady himself on the tongue. Causing his hand to fly off the wet field of mold. I reached through and grabbed him so he didn’t lose his balance, yelling for him not to touch the acid.

I cursed as the teeth clamped down again and caught my upper arms. It tore my jacket and nicked my flesh making me bleed. I steeled myself so I didn’t release Max before he found a way to steady himself. He desperately dug through the mold with his fingernails.

Then he started screaming. Squirming and scratching at his face so much that I almost let go. Roaches were swarming us and had made their way to his hair and face.

“Straighten out your body and go stiff,” I yelled. He did and I pulled back and grabbed his calves to shove him as hard as I could so he’d shoot down the tongue like a slip and slide. It worked and he went careening down the back of the throat. Cockroaches flew off him into the acid and the tongue made a swallowing motion.

He squealed and I could hear him frantically brush himself off. Jumping around and hiding in a corner. The last blue light turned off and the tongue shoved itself into the gap so only faint red bled through the cracks.

I heard Max saying something, but the tongue muffled it. Then it quickly shot back and covered the throat. It was trying to separate us.

I did the same with my tongue and felt around where the connective muscle was, lining it up with my own teeth. Dead center. I felt around in the dark for the lower teeth of the door and tried to line up a shot in the pitch black. I emptied my clip into it.

The tongue fell and began twitching back and forth trying to lift itself back up. It worked. Blood and acidic saliva began pouring out of the tongue and lower glands of the mouth, overflowing and streaming through the teeth. I heard my boots begin to burn and melt and quickly shoved myself into the open gap of the teeth.

It bit down as hard as it could and the bottoms started to crack as acid ate through them. I heard a pop to my right from the lower jaw. The mouth started grinding.

I pulled myself out as the gap grew tighter. They switched directions and I heard the other side of the jaw bone pop. I reloaded as fast as I could while the acid ate through my soles.

I stood on one foot and emptied my first clip into its upper teeth. I switched feet and reloaded. Then repeated on the other side as the teeth ground themselves down. The incisors snapped off and the bottom teeth next to the center shattered. I felt the acid hit my socks and took off my boots to stand on them. Then balled my jacket up so I could try and kick out the last tooth. I needed to make space.

Top-left.

Aim

Fire

I missed. Nearly tumbling over.

My boots were toast. I used the last remnants of my jacket to make my way onto the bottom front teeth. I laid on my back sideways on them and kicked out the tooth that was grinding toward me.

I lost my balance and started rolling over toward the acid. Then swung my body around as fast as I could and used the slippery tongue to gain some semblance of stability.

I felt Max reach out and grab my ankles. His body lying flat on the mold.

The teeth switched directions and started grinding toward my hands with its last remaining front tooth. I straightened my wrists and got ready to push off. “Ready?” I yelled to Max as he straightened my legs out and got in position to pull.

“Go,” he called and yanked at my legs while I pushed off. We were seconds away from the tooth grinding my fingers to a pulp.

We spilled out backwards into the room. Him landing on his ass and I of course landing directly on my fucking face again. I spat out a tooth this time. How fitting.

I stood up to get a look at the room. Same as before. The sign for Eat still read Eat. So they weren’t really directions. Max and I looked at each other in agreement.

“Wheat”