Chapter 2 – Chap 2

The next path was much of the same with yellow lights instead of blue. I looked down at my bloody hands to assess the new damage. The left was torn open at the knuckles with deep purple bruises around the pinky. The knuckle on the pinky black. Broken.

The bottom of my right hand had lost a few layers of skin from the acid. And now I was barefoot without a coat with my shirt covered in blood. Die Hard in a haunted house, I laughed miserably to myself.

The door slammed shut, causing Max to jump.

We walked for what felt like another mile before I saw a change in the ground. Max knelt down to investigate. “Plants…” He said under his breath.

Wheat. It didn’t need to be said.

After a few feet it gradually stood higher from the floor. Every yard or so it seemed to be an eighth of an inch higher. I saw where this was going. The lights flickered. Max walked up to the next piss yellow bulb.

They continued to flicker. No. Not flicker, I realized as I looked into the bulb. There was an ornately coloured wasp zipping around, searching for freedom. Shiny and green.

“Oh god,” his eyes widened, “That’s an emerald wasp”.

“And?”

“They paralyze cockroaches and mess with their heads so they can lay their eggs inside while it’s still alive. Then the babies eat their way out”.

“Good thing I’m not a cockroach,” I said, then added they should go play in the Eat hallway.

“I doubt that’s gonna matter in this haunted hellhole”. He was right. They’d probably swarm us and paralyze us in seconds before laying thousands of carnivorous eggs inside. Obviously the rules of nature didn’t apply here. “Any ideas?” I asked.

“I’m staring to warm up to the idea of starving to death,” he replied. “In fact, if I go down in here…” I knew what he was about to ask and agreed with a solemn nod. A gunshot to the head would be a great mercy at the hands of laying paralyzed on the ground for days, starving and eaten from the inside out.

We both sat down against the wall.

“I’m honestly considering it right now,” he said. “I’d already have done it if I wasn’t so much of a coward”.

“Not until we exhaust every angle. There’s something we’re missing. I’m sure of it”.

Max shook his head. “You see it right? That wheat is gonna get taller and taller until it hits the ceiling. Then it’s gonna start filling with those evil fucking wasps”. He was defeated. And right.

“That much is obvious,” I said. “But whatever this is, it doesn’t want to kill us. Not like this. It wants to terrify and torture us. It wants to drag us through broken glass first. Otherwise it would have just sent you into a pit of fire instead of a basement”. The gears started turning.

“Yeah, okay…” he started to convince himself, “It’s like a video game that seems impossible but you just don’t know the puzzle… we’re not stuck”.

“Good,” I said standing up. “Let’s go”.

Max stood up and we started walking. “So what pieces do we have…” he continued.

“Hm?”

“If it’s like a puzzle, what puzzle pieces do we have? They’ll help us see the shape of the one we’re missing.” He looked around noticing the steel grated fans on the ceiling.

fans, wasps, wheat…

“The lights,” it all clicked into place. “Fire. When the stalks are high enough, we can burn them. The answer to the puzzle is fire”.

“That’s why there’s no breeze, the fans are upside down. They’ll pull out the smoke…” Max finished my thought excitedly.

Then the speaker added its two cents.

“All your pieces fit together, but can you see the corners?”

We carried on in silence as the words spun in our heads. The wheat now up to our chests. It had to have been at least two hours that we’d been in this hall.

“So what are we-” he started before I cut him off.

I knew what the speaker was getting at. “We can’t figure out the remaining pieces because we don’t have the right information”.

“Sounds like a long winded way to say we’re screwed”.

I had no response to that.

We walked until the wheat hit our faces. It was getting difficult to move at this point. The stalks kept breaking and stabbing into my bare feet. I got used to it for about an hour until they started driving the splintered remnants deeper into my flesh.

We jumped and stopped when the speaker spoke again.

“There was once a man who took a trip and found himself infested. Parasite, parasite. Please, oh please just let me die,” the voice sang before the witch cackle rang out again.

“Did you notice that all the lights are on this time?” Max broke the silence. I hadn’t noticed. My feet were distracting me too much.

“What do you think it means?” He added.

“Last time it forced us to keep going in one direction. It doesn’t care if we go back”. I reasoned. But the door was still closed. Should we have been burning the wheat as we went? Shit. What if-

The wheat behind us rustled.

Max cried out.

There was a man who got infested

Oh fuck.

“There’s someone else in here!” Max said.

“Yep,” I let the creepy nursery rhyme play in my head again, “And I bet you dollars to donuts he’s infested with wasps”. A corner piece clicked in my mind. “There’s three more things we don’t know”. I yelled out.

“Corner pieces…” Max muttered. Then he pushed through the wheat as far to the side as he could. And kept pushing. Beyond where a wall should be. The second corner piece clicked.

I followed him into the secret passage. The wheat abruptly ended as an empty hall. One that looked exactly like our starting point.

“Holy crap,” he said, “What are the odds?”

I shook my head. “There’s probably dozens of these passageways lining the walls”. I grabbed a stalk of wheat so we could burn this underground maze to the ground. I told him that once he breaks the glass to kill the wasp immediately.

Then an image flashed in my head.

Sometimes a gut feeling doesn’t seem to make sense. Like it comes from nowhere and just somehow knows things it can’t. Yet, against all odds it’s right. I’d learned to trust my gut over the years.

“Stop!” I grabbed Max’s hand. The image of all the bottom teeth from the Eat room grinding and breaking all at once kept playing on a loop in my mind. The third corner clicked.

“It’s a trap”. I couldn’t explain it. I just knew. “I don’t know why. I can just feel it. As soon as we break this light, all the other bulbs are going to shatter”.

He thought for a minute, “Like the center of the puzzle says fire is the answer… but the corner says the center is a lie – holy crap”. This kid was sharp. Thank god.

The wheat rustled. Luckily without all the fucking wheat we could sprint our way down the hall this time. We finally stopped when we reached the point where the shortest wheat began again.

I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. Just an radiating, throbbing pain. We sat against the wall, slick with sweat. Panting for the oxygen we so desperately needed as I picked broken stalks out of my heels.

“Okay,” he said between breaths, “Fourth – corner?”

I took a deep breath and outlined everything we knew, adding, “This path is identical to where we started…”

“Is it a maze? Maybe if we could start a fire without the-“

Max cut me off by slowly standing back up. Eyes locked in absolute horror. I matched his gaze and saw the infested man’s white eyes. It stood awkwardly. Twitching and moving its limbs and fingers in weird, robot movements. No longer a man. A rotting corpse full of parasites. It smelt like shit and rotting meat.

The entire surface of its skin was squirming. Distinctive bulges were moving around and vibrating underneath. Small black dots marked the pale, rotting skin suit in random spots. Wriggling around. They were stingers trying to cut their way out.

We slowly backed away as it started making a high pitched gargling noise. At first I thought it was trying to speak. That was until a mouthful of wasps poured out then headed directly for us. We bolted in the opposite direction.

One of them buzzed in my ear. I crushed it against the walls as I ran. The stinger stuck in my palm and my fingers went completely limp after a few seconds. I pulled my gun out. Ready to end it all if needed.

The wheat was getting close to our faces now and we were slowing down. But we had a good lead. Max was ahead of me and I was losing sight of him. I didn’t bother to ask him to wait. What good would that do?

He called out for me but realized he didn’t know my name. “Chambers,” I yelled back.

“I’m gonna stick to the right until I hit the next passage,” he told me.

I slowed down and did the same. When I finally caught up to him he was sitting on the ground again.

“How long does this last?” I held up my paralyzed hand.

“Three days, I think”. Great.

I tossed him my gun, “Know how to use it?” He shook his head.

“Better figure it out quick,” I slumped down next to him. I guessed we had about three minutes to rest before we started the death crawl again.

“We’ve taken a left and a right,” he thought aloud. We were on the same track. The corn maze that led to the farm started with a right, followed by a left. It was the way you entered it. But reversing it could be the exit.

“It’s a long shot, but…”

“Yeah. This might be the fourth corner”. We didn’t stick around to second guess. The distant buzzing was enough motivation.

Each new passage took about an hour. We counted the ones we needed to skip in order to match the maze in reverse the best we could. Each time the infested man would suddenly appear, rustling through the wheat. It became clear it was the same corridor on a loop. But we stuck to it.

We hoped we were on the final one, the last path of the maze required you to just walk straight and you would find an entrance to the side that shouldn’t be there. We arrived at the start of the wheat.

“Wait,” I put out my good hand. “We have to go back,” and pointed behind us.

Max echoed my realization, “Backwards instead of straight…”

We turned around. I wasn’t surprised to see that thing standing directly behind us. Max pointed the gun at it but I stopped him. Grabbing the barrel at the last second.

This time it turned to the side. Looking directly at the yellow light with lifeless eyes.

“What’s it-“

It swung its dead, twitching hand at the bulb. Shit.

We didn’t stick around any longer. It kept swinging and missing. It had no hand-eye coordination. But eventually it would-

All the bulbs shattered in unison.

We were thrown into complete darkness. I tried to yell something to Max, but the angry chorus of buzzing was deafening. We kept running, each feeling a side of the wall for a sudden entrance. I could feel their wings brushing past my entire body. But I was moving too fast to get stung very much.

The few I took numbed my sides and left hand some more, because I used it as cover. But they didn’t hit any vital spots that would impair movement. Still, i hesitated to think of any of this as lucky.

I suddenly realized that we couldn’t communicate. Whoever found the exit wouldn’t be able to announce it. We would have to circle back on the opposite wall to-

I hit a turn. Then Max.

We collided at almost full speed. It didn’t work. We were done. I started to collapse, but Max grabbed me and threw me through back into the wheat we came from in the doorway. I landed in the red room.

Max stepped through the wheat that had overtaken the door to the Wheat path. The buzzing continued, but no wasps came out of the wheat. I sprawled out on my back and looked over to the left path. My heart attempting to jump its way out of my chest. My vision buzzing like the wasps were still darting around in the corners.

‘Sour”