The Maze

Written By: Nicole Zelniker

There are no missing posters on the walls of the bar, no indication that girls vanish from here without a trace. There are no frantic family members or angry boyfriends, no indication that six wayward girls ever found this place at all. Tom is far too careful for that.

She’s in her mid-twenties, this new girl, a few years younger than him. He caught a glimpse of her ID when she ordered, quickly scanning for the “2” at the start of her birth year. He doesn’t like them too young – he’s not a monster – but older girls don’t do anything for him. The crow’s feet; the stretch marks. Not his speed. He prefers them fresh.

This girl isn’t his usual type. She’s a little bigger, a little louder. But she came onto him, and it was too easy to slip something in her drink when she turned around to thank the waitress. She’s not from West Virginia, just passing through on her way down to Georgia. No, she doesn’t have family in the area. No, she doesn’t have a partner, or very many friends. She is in between jobs.

No one will notice if she disappears.

Tom ushers her out of the bar a few minutes after she finishes her drink. She wobbles on her feet, already unsteady, and gets into the back of his sedan without question. Curly hair, so dark it’s almost black, hangs limply in front of her face. She’s asleep by the time he peels out of the parking lot.

It’s going to be a good night.

Tom tightens the rope around the girl’s wrists and steps back to admire his handiwork. His knot isn’t especially tight, but the girl will be too drugged to undo it. For the first year or so, he would watch YouTube tutorials teaching him the best way to tie someone up. He got BDSM adverts for a long time after that.

He glances around the room, if it can be called a room. Four walls, a floor, and a ceiling, at least. All cement. A bare lightbulb flickers overheat. Besides the kitchen chair the girl currently sits in and a dented mini fridge in the corner of the room, there is no furniture. The wall she faces opens up into a deep, dark hallway, the beginning of the maze.

The girl wakes in increments. A groan. A twitch. Hazel eyes half-open. She blinks herself back into awareness. Shakes her head, dark curls loose around her light brown face. “What …”

“Welcome back,” he says. “How are you feeling?”

“My head …” She groans again. Overkill, he thinks. She’s probably dizzy and maybe she has a headache, but it’s not that bad.

“In a few minutes, I’m going to let you go,” he explains, pacing around her chair. Goosebumps crawl up his arm at the anticipation. “This basement is a maze. I’ll give you a thirty-second head start. If I catch you before you find the door, I’ll kill you slowly.” He should print instructions or record a video or something. That way he wouldn’t have to explain it over and over.

The girl meets his gaze dead on. She’s still, not shaking. She must think she has a chance. Some of them do. Think they have a chance, that is.

“And if I find the door?” she asks.

Tom grins. “I’ll make it quick.” But not too quick. He prefers to take his time, disassemble them slowly before he buries them in the garden, but there has to be some sort of reward for their win. Otherwise, it isn’t a game.

“Fuck me,” she mutters under her breath. Here is where girls often beg. They won’t tell anyone, which is a lie. They have people who will look for them, which is also a lie. He always asks about that, parents and siblings and friends and partners. The girls he picks are always alone.

“D’you get off on this?” the girl asks.

He decides to be honest with her. “After, yeah.” It’s the thrill of the chase for him, the hunt through the maze he so carefully constructed over the years. It’s a work of genius, really. Too bad no one else can appreciate it.

“Of course you do,” the girl says. Then she leans forward – as far as she can with the ropes binding her to the chair – and dry heaves.

Side effect of the drugs he gave her. No matter. He turns to the fridge and grabs a bottled water. She is of no use to him if she’s too sick to run.

A Crack! behind him makes him jump. When he turns around, the girl is gone.

The scene that lays before him is one of carnage. The ropes torn, spread across the floor. The chair is busted, the top half smashed to pieces on the floor, the bottom tipped over on its side.

What the fuck.

He glances around the room. The girl is nowhere, which is impossible. The hallway looms, dark and gaping like a mouth. He flicks on the hallway light with his phone, from where he monitors the basement. Lights, door, air, all in his pocket. It’s connected to the cameras, too. Six of them, all in different places in the maze.

The lights go on one at a time, illuminating three feet. Then six. Then nine.

At the very end of the hallway, the girl stands, eighteen feet out. She cocks her head and grins at him, and her mouth is full of sharp, crowded teeth.

Tom shouts, dropping the water. It rolls against his foot.

“Do you even remember my name?” the girl asks, taking a step. Then another. “Do you remember any of their names? Because I do.”

“What is this?” Tom asks, his voice a high-pitched whisper. “What are you?”

“The first girl. Camden. She was twenty-two years old. A college dropout. She was planning to go back in the spring, get her degree in biomedical engineering. That was three years ago.”

She’s halfway down the hallway now. “Jessica, the second. Twenty-years-old. A caregiver to her mother, who’d just died. She was isolated here, planning to head back to her hometown in Maine. But you got to her first.”

She stepped over the threshold, back into the room. The light gleamed off her jagged teeth, making them shine. “Meghan. Alice. Rio. Victoria.” She stops less than a foot from Tom, and Tom finds himself unable to move. “And me. I’m Stella, by the way.”

“What is this?” Tom asks again.

“You’ll have a thirty second head start.” She cracks her knuckles, drawing Tom’s eyes to her hands. Her nails are longer than they were before, and sharper, too. More like claws.

He’s shaking now. Something about her is viscerally wrong, more predator than girl. “I’ll stop,” Tom says, taking one step back. “I’ll turn myself in. Please.”

Stella matches him step for step, until he’s backed into the corner adjacent to the fridge. “Mmm, a little too late for that. Besides, I don’t trust cops. I’m sure you understand why.” She leans forward, her jagged teeth at his ear. She growls, then whispers, “Run.”

Tom runs.

He handles his phone as he goes, turning all the lights on. He thinks, briefly, that he may have a better chance in the dark, until he thinks of Stella’s clawed fingers and jagged teeth. Whatever she is, it isn’t human. Whatever she is, he would bet money that she could see better in the dark than he could.

He watches the time tick down. Twenty seconds. Fifteen. He pulls up the cameras, but doesn’t see her. There aren’t any in the room he started in, and she hasn’t made it past the first one yet.

Ten second. Five.

The door is locked from the inside, a code only he knows the numbers for. It’s an ending point for the girls, but he can get past if. If he can find the door, he can make it out alive.

Three. Two. One.

The clock ticks down to zero. Tom pivots, racing through his own maze while keeping an eye on the cameras, picking directions for speed until he can confirm which way Stella decides to go.

There. She meanders down the first hallway, her back to the camera. She stretches her arms above her head, works out a crick in her neck, then takes off in a dead sprint, clearing the first hallway in a flash.

No person should be able to move that fast.

She turns left. Tom goes right. Overhead, the lights flicker.

He slows down, then catches himself. No time for that.

Tom looks at the second camera, sees Stella approach it and grins to himself. She’s on the other side of the maze.

But then he takes a second look.

That isn’t Stella.

The girl in the screen is thinner, her skin darker. Her curls strain against the confines of a French braid. The girl catches sight of the camera and lunges.

Tom jumps, stopping himself from screaming only with a hand over his mouth. He knows that girl. Why does he know that girl?

Victoria, the sixth victim. Somehow here, in his tunnels. Somehow alive.

They aren’t alone.

Tom’s heart thuds in his ears. His chest aches with exertion and fear. What the fuck are these girls? He killed Victoria. He knows he did. He remembers her at the door, frantic as she typed in different lock combinations.

The light in the hallway dies.

Tom freezes. He reaches out a hand, touches the wall. He knows his own maze well enough. If he can keep one hand on the wall, he should be able to find his way out.

Up ahead, something click, click, clicks.

The lights turn on, blinding him. He blinks a few times and when he can see again, he thinks he must be imagining the girl on the ceiling. Blonde and tall, with freckles splashed across her whole face. Meghan. His third victim.

He had been so happy with how things had gone that night. How she pleaded for her life. How she gave him quite a bit of a challenge, avoiding the cameras up until the very end.

She smiled, revealing the same too-sharp set of teeth he saw in Stella.

Then she started crawling on the ceiling.

Tom shouted, too alarmed to muffle the noise, and took off in the other direction. Behind him, Meghan laughed, low and harsh, and Tom skidded to a stop before booking it down another hallway. He went to check his cameras and realized he must have dropped his phone somewhere.

The door. He had to find the door.

He reaches the stairwell. Halfway there. He’s panting when he reaches the top, and he’s clutching a stitch in his side, but he keeps moving.

He rounds the corner and gasps. Two girls this time. Alice, petite with dyed red locs, her features narrow. Rio, curvier, hair cropped close to her head. They smiled at him, twin mouths of fanged teeth, and Tom skittered to a stop. They step toward him, almost in sync, and the jarring symmetry is enough to get Tom moving again. The light flickers again, and when he looks back, the girls seem to come for him in slow motion. He loses them at last feigning left before going straight instead.

He maneuvers around several more turns and finally, finally, the door.

It’s silver and metal, steel reinforced with titanium. The keypad is black, white numbers glowing faintly. He punches in the code – 844433, TIE on the keyboard, his initials – and pulls on the handle.

Camden and Jessica lunge at him from the other side.

Tom shrieks, and they are on him. A sharp, white-hot agony spreads through his leg as his ankle snaps beneath him. He scrambles backwards, into the wall, but he’s too late. Meghan and Alice, three and four, appear to his left. Rio and Victoria, five and six, stand to his right. Six girls, six too-sharp smiles. Six deaths at his hand, and yet they are here.

Stella rounds the corner slowly, meandering, not at all in a rush. She takes her place between Camden and Jessica, one and two. Something warm and wet appears under Tom, and he realizes he’s just pissed himself.

“Please don’t do this,” he sobs. “I won’t tell anyone. No one would believe me.”

“I said that,” says one of the girls to his left. Alice. Her voice is soft and lyrical, a sharp contrast to her sharp teeth and claws. “I told you I wouldn’t tell anyone if you let me go. I didn’t make it to the door. You killed me slowly.”

“I made it,” Meghan says. “He said he’d kill me fast, but he didn’t.” Her voice is hoarse and he remembers strangling her with a rope. Was her voice always like this? Did the rope damage her vocal chords when she died?

“Please,” Tom begs, his voice a dying wheeze in his throat. “Please.”

“You made it to the door,” Stella says, smirking. Her eyes aren’t quite hazel in this light. More a reddish-brown. “But I never promised I’d make it slow.” She takes a step back. “Have at him.”

All at once, his six victims lunge, snarling like rabbit dogs. His ankle burns with pain as one of them crushes it beneath her palm before digging their sharp nails into his calf, tearing until something pops in his leg. Someone rips into his shoulder with rows of yellowy fangs, forcing him to scream his throat raw.

He’s hot, burning, burning, and then he’s cold, shivering, ice in his veins. He watches a girl take his left hand in her mouth and claim it in two swift bites, severing it from his arm. Blood spurts from the wound. Another girl licks his wrist at the stump.

His vision flickers, gray before black, and he topples over onto his handless arm. He hears them still, even when he can’t see them, shrieking and growling and sobbing, whispers of Thank you Stella thank you, until he doesn’t hear anything at all.

***

Police Incident Report

Reporting officer: Brett Marshall Bard

Incident date and location: 9/21, at the home of Thomas Isaac Everett

Incident description: At 9 a.m. on September the 21st, Thomas Isaac Everett failed to report to work. I and several of my fellow officers tried to reach him to no avail. At the end of the shift, I, Jackson Stone, and Roger Harris went to Everett’s home to check in. There, we found a trail of bloodied footsteps leading to an empty bookshelf, which appeared to cover a secret entrance to a stone stairwell. Us three followed the staircase down and came to a metal door, which was unlocked.

Inside … I’ve never seen anything like it. The door led to a massive stone hallway, which upon later examination appeared to be part of an underground maze. We followed the bloody trail to a small room, where we found Everett’s body. If what was left of him could be called a body.

The only part of Everett that appeared still intact were his bones, skeleton still relatively whole with several scraps of skin still attached. His face was whole, pale white and sunken with a lack of blood. Bits and pieces of organ meat lay haphazardly around the rest of the room. Upon seeing the desecrated remains of our colleague, Jackson Stone vanished down the hall to be sick.

I asked Roger Harris to survey the scene with me, but he did not seem to hear or see me. He stared straight ahead. I stepped around the body to retrieve a note attached to the refrigerator door with a silver magnet. It read:

Rest in peace Camden DeCosta, Jessica Zimmerman, Meghan Oliver, Alice Lockman-Smith, Rio Galarza, Victoria Washington, and Stella Monroe.

Underneath that was a box of what looked like evidence, photographs of Everett with different women. Receipts of various supplies, such as a rope and a knife. Printed Google searches of how to tie a knot. On the far side of the room, someone had painted the word Monster on the wall above what was left of Tom Everett, written in what could only be his own blood.

Nicole Zelniker (she/they) is the author of several books, including FROM WHERE WE ARE and WE ARE MADE OF SCARS & STARLIGHT, which have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and the young adult novel ALL I KNOW SO FAR. In their free time, Nicole enjoys re-reading their favorite books, talking about the intersection of queerness and disability on the internet, and bothering her devastatingly cute tabby cat, Artemis.