By Max Zoske
We never found out how many rooms our house had. Many of the shabby rooms we rented out led into further rooms which led into further rooms, and as long as there were guests, it was impossible to count them. And there were always guests: the grieving who visited for the funerals of long estranged loved ones, the homeless who’d somehow acquired enough grimy coins to afford a lukewarm bed for the night, the travelling who’d been on their way to someplace else when night encroached on them.
But there were other rooms as well; rooms that never accommodated guests, and that had been out of use for so long that their existence was forgotten, and their doors became one with the walls. Sometimes, for reasons only the house knew, the outlines around these doors would reappear and invite one into the dusty wonders that had lain dormant behind them for unknown eternities.
My brother Levin never tired of recounting the story of how he once encountered thousands of colourful butterflies in one of these rooms, and I once entered one in which a lush forest grew, trees and brushes that stretched from the floorboards to the ceiling. Usually, after leaving such a room, it would be impossible to find it again. The next time one found oneself in the area, the slits around its door would have become one with the walls again, or the hallway in which it had been would be replaced by another one; one that forked off at a different angle, or whose cracked walls were painted a different colour.
Father never believed in these particular oddities of the upper floors of the house. Back when Levin and I had still been children, Father had an accident which left him crippled. The barkeeper of his regular pub threw him out for starting a fight, and in drunken stupor, Father crossed the busy street without looking left or right. The driver later accused him of having basically begged to be run over.
That was shortly after Mother’s death.
Father got off lightly, but his legs didn’t. After the accident, he could only walk a few metres at a time, and only with the help of a wooden walking cane. But despite the cane, Father never made it up the stairs of the house again. He was forced to live out the rest of his life on the ground floor, where the rooms were normal and the hallways always the same. And so it was up to Levin and me to take over Mother’s duties of maintaining the upper floors.
Previously forbidden territory to us, we were now tasked with cleaning the sprawling maze of hallways and doors that we’d spent all our childhood speculating about. We wiped the flickering wall lamps, polished the rusty door handles, cleaned the mouldy carpet, removed the dust-heavy spider webs. And as we did so, we explored the hidden nooks and crannies of the building, the corridors that seemed to change by the day, and those other rooms that appeared and disappeared with the whims of the house.
Father was furious whenever he learnt of these explorations, and that is what happened on that day it all started to go downhill. We were sitting downstairs, Levin operating the ancient cash register and I occupied with a book, when suddenly the sound of Father’s walking cane being slammed onto the floorboards echoed from the door to his study, followed by the coughs and grumbles that accompanied every of his movements. With a start, Levin got up and winced at the dull clunks that grew louder with every repetition, while I rushed to lock the front door.
Despite his injury, Father had remained an imposing man, a giant in our adolescent eyes. Not even the pitiful sight of the atrophied legs he dragged after the walking cane managed to weaken his mountainous aura as he built himself up before my brother. “Son, what were you up to this morning?” he demanded, and along with his rumbling voice the stench of alcohol spread through the room. He bowed down close to Levin’s face, supporting himself with both hands on the walking cane as if scrutinising a jewel he’d acquired and now suspected might be false. “Answer me.”
“I was operating the cash register,” Levin said, straining to keep himself from recoiling. “I was operating the cash register, just like you told me to.”
For a moment, everything became silent: the room, the house, the world, they all waited in dreadful anticipation, shaking and rustling in their joints as Father’s jaw muscles tightened and the veins bulged from his forehead. He shifted his weight onto his left hand, freed his right hand from the cane, swung it back, and—
The house shook with the dull thud of Father’s fist hitting my brother’s face. Levin’s head jerked backward. Blood dripped onto the floorboards.
“Have I raised a liar?” Father yelled, droplets of spit projecting from his mouth and sticking to his beard. “Do you want people to think that I raised a liar?”
“No,” Levin whimpered, legs unsteady as he tried to recover from the blow. His voice shook, and his eyes welled up with tears.
“So why did Mrs. Ivy come to my study this morning? Why did she tell me she saw you upstairs? Are you accusing Mrs. Ivy of being a liar, then?” With every word, Father’s voice regained its calm. “What did you do upstairs while you should have been down here operating the cash register?”
Levin swallowed. “I was in one of the rooms,” he said. “One of the other rooms.”
“Liar!” Father yelled, with more force than conviction. His face flushed, and the veins across his forehead swelled until they looked like they were about to burst. “There are no other rooms.”
With unsteady movements, Father placed the walking cane on the counter next to the cash register and began to unbuckle his belt. “Shirt,” he commanded, and almost mechanically Levin fumbled off his shirt with shaking hands and knelt with his back to Father.
I turned away, closed my eyes, and cupped my ears with my palms. I’d seen it all before: the leather of the belt as it came down to slice off the flesh from Levin’s back, the dull whipping sound followed by anguished sobs and whimpers, Father’s skeletal legs trembling under the weight of his body as he fought to keep himself up for one more strike, just one more strike.
Through my hands, the muffled sound of Father’s yells reached me, a cruel mantra of unwarranted punishment:
I did not raise a liar.
You are too old for this.
There are no other rooms.
You are too old for this.
* * *
After these beatings, when Father had sent Levin back to his room and disappeared into his study again, the house would be awfully silent. I’d place my hand on the wall to search for hold, my chest rising up and down as if it was I Father had punished. With the feeling of the house trembling under my palm—or was it my own hand?—I’d wait until my heart stopped hammering in my throat and sneak into the kitchen, carefully navigating my feet around the spots I knew stepping onto would cause the house to groan.
In the kitchen I would prepare two cups of tea, grab some ice from the freezer, and sneak into Levin’s room in the rear of the ground floor. There, my brother would lie in bed with his back to the door, hugging his plush Axolotl Mr. Axolotl, whom he usually kept hidden under his bed for fear of Father discovering him. (Fifteen years old and still sleeping with a plush toy? Have I fathered two girls, then?) I’d sit down on the floor next to the bed and drink my tea as I lent an ear to his rages and rants: about how much he hated it here, how much he hated his life, how much his head hurt, or his back or his face, or how much of a hypocrite Father was; how he had faint recollections of Father himself raving to Mother about the other rooms and the changing hallways.
But on that particular day, things were different. When I opened the door to Levin’s room, I found my brother sitting upright on the bed, his feet placed firmly on the ground, no trace of Mr. Axolotl in sight. Around him, the room was dim-lit and musty, furnished more sparingly than even the cheapest of our guest rooms. Only the most necessary objects filled the little chamber: a wardrobe, a bed, a night table, and a desk upon which a few fantasy books lay collecting dust.
“How bad is it?” I asked as I placed the mugs on the night table. I pressed the ice into his hands and sat down next to him on the bed.
Levin shrugged. I could see that the injuries weren’t that bad compared to some of those he’d suffered in the past. Once, shortly after Mother’s death, when we were just beginning to explore the upper floors of the house, Father had broken Levin’s arm. I always wanted to believe it had been an accident; back then, the punishments were more impulsive, uncontrolled outbursts of violence in which Father let loose his need to hurt. Nowadays, everything followed a set routine, an established sequence of pain: the punch, the shirt, the belt, the ice, the tea, the axolotl.
“Where is Mr. Axolotl?”
Levin grimaced with pain as he held the ice to the blood-smeared wound above his brow. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since the last time Father—“ he stopped himself.
The last time had been especially bad. Sobbing, his body curled in on itself like an embryo, Levin had pressed Mr. Axolotl to his chest as he fantasised about running away. He’d mentioned the idea before, almost every time we sat in his room like this. But that particular time, there was something new in his voice, a cadence of desperate determination. “This time I’ll do it,” he said, “I don’t care how. Maybe I’ll run away. Maybe I’ll go to the police. Maybe I’ll hide in one of the other rooms forever.” When I asked him how he intended to survive without a job on the outside, or why the police should believe his claims, or how he’d survive in the other rooms without food, he just shrugged. “I’d rather starve to death than spend another month with Father.”
That had been three weeks ago. Now, there was none of that determination left, and the tiny spark of hope he’d garnered deep inside of himself seemed at long last extinguished.
I tried to think of something to say. “Do you think Father found Mr. Axolotl?”
“He would have let me know if he did, one way or the other. I must have lost him.”
I was startled by the casualness of his answer. That Axolotl, a token of the precious remains of childhood not yet beaten out of him, had always been an object of immense emotional value. It was a relic from an easier time, a memento from a mother that was missed dearly, a companion of tormented nights. To my brother, Mr. Axolotl was—had been—everything.
We spent the rest of that day sitting next to each other on the bed, drinking our tea in a meaningful silence occasionally broken by a question of mine or a monosyllabic answer of his. But even though we didn’t talk much, I could sense that something in my brother had changed, snapped, broken, tumbled down. In the dim light of his room, the glow in my brother’s eyes seemed weaker, and the childlike hopefulness in their depths had vanished.
* * *
Over the next few days, the changes I noticed in my brother remained perceptible. Father let us know that Levin was to remain on the ground floor and operate the cash register while I was to clean the upper floors of the house on my own. We saw less of each other than we were used to. But whenever I did catch a fleeting glimpse of his figure behind the counter, I was reinforced in my belief that some kind of transformation was taking place within him. I saw it in the paleness of his face as he looked up from behind the counter, and in the hollowness of his voice as he welcomed new guests, and from the way he stopped fantasising about his escape, or about anything at all, really.
And I could see it as well when, after a few days, Father conceded that the upper floors of the house were too big an area to be cleaned by one person only, and that yes, your brother needs to help as well, but he’ll never go into the other rooms again, because the other rooms don’t exist, have I made myself understood?
It was bizarre to see Levin in our twisted paradise of nooks and crannies again, a world which had once seemed to him like an inexhaustible source of magic and mystery, and be entirely indifferent to the sublimity of his surroundings. Worried, I neglected my own duties as I watched him brush aside plaster dust and sweep the mouldy carpets without so much as looking up to see if the house offered him new hallways to explore, new rooms to investigate.
Even when the house did extend its hand to us and a new hallway appeared, or an old one we hadn’t seen in some time, or the outline of a door that hadn’t been there before, he declined the house’s offer by non-acknowledgement. It pained me to see my brother like this, and soon I attempted to alert him again of the beauty of his surroundings: look at this, I said, and at that; this is new, that wasn’t there before, and what might be behind this door? But Levin remained uninterested, and as time went on, my attempts became halfhearted, and my belief that I could reawaken my brother’s passion shrunk.
Until we found that door.
Right away my frustrated mind clung to the sight of the door as the solution I’d been waiting for without knowing it. Its outlines were carved into a wall at the end of a hallway that seemed to stretch on endlessly, filled with echoes of the almost premonitory groans and rattles of the house. “Come on,” I urged my visibly anxious brother forward, almost pushing him along the hallway. “Come on, just this one room.”
A faint, muffled buzz reached us from the other side of the door. “Do you want to open it?” I said, but Levin shook his head. His face was ghastly pale, but in his eyes, I believed to detect the smallest trace of excitement and wonder, the knowledge that everything might wait behind this very door. And so I reached for the handle, pushed it down, and let the door creak open.
The faint buzz turned into the roar of thousands of tiny wings. As the door swung open to reveal a gloomy chamber, an amorphous cloud of winged insects came into view. Countless moths whirred and cut across the dusty air in hectic flight, a vaporous mass of different shades of brown blurring into each other. And there was something else, visible now and then in the gaps that appeared and disappeared between the insects as the swarm shifted and morphed around like a single organism—something that looked like a wooden piece of furniture, like a shelf, or a desk.
Almost unconsciously I stepped forward, shielding my eyes with my hands as I ventured deeper into the chamber. The moths grew hectic in reaction to my intrusion. Plushy bodies brushed the skin on my hands, arms, and head. The flapping of individual pairs of wings grew louder and diminished as they whirred past my ears. Then, after a few steps, the buzzing around me grew quieter until almost complete silence, and the tickle of their tiny bodies on mine ceased as the moths retreated into their holes and hiding spots. I retracted my hands from my face; what I’d seen in the rear of the room was a bed. And on the mouldy bedding, positioned with its back to the door, lay a human skeleton.
The repugnant stench of rotting flesh mixed into the dusty air. I recoiled, swallowing down a wave of vomit crawling up my throat, but made forward again immediately to inspect my find. Fine strings of silk spanned from bone to bone to create a web-like structure that held the skeleton together. Caterpillars and young moths feasted on the last remains of skin and flesh not yet gnawed off, bloody feet and feelers crawling all over the bed. But what drew me closer with repulsion and curiosity alike was something else, a pink object the child-sized skeleton was pressing against its chest with the undying strength of a fissured arm.
A stuffed axolotl.
“Levin,” I said, “look at this.”
But when I turned around, my brother was gone.
* * *
I never saw Levin again. At first I was convinced that he’d merely fled the shocking sight of the skeleton and yelled his name as I searched through the maze of hallways and doors. I peeked in even the smallest nooks and chambers, questioned every guest I encountered, but there was no trace of my brother to be found. When I decided to return to the place where we had parted, lonely and exhausted from hours of searching, I found the chamber with the moths gone, the hallway replaced by a wall of naked stone.
These days, Father never mentions Levin, and neither do I. As far as our communication is concerned, no boy named Levin ever inhabited this house. But despite this omission of acknowledgement, there is a Levin-shaped hole in the atmosphere of the house, and reminders of his existence find me wherever I go: the cash register he used to sit behind, which I now operate between sessions of cleaning the upper floors; his room in which we used to drink tea as I lent an ear to his sorrows, which has become a kingdom of dust and decay; the doors to those other rooms we used to explore, which I still enter whenever the house invites me to, hoping for I know not what.
Father is furious whenever he learns of these explorations, and now that my brother is gone, it is I at whom his anger is directed. When I let my hands glide over my back, I feel scarred tissue. And when I look in the mirror, I find the same wound above my brow that Levin always wore. But unlike Levin, I have no one to bring me ice, no one to lend an ear to my hurt and hate, and my increasingly concrete plans to leave in some way, any way I see possible.
I think about hiding forever in the other rooms sometimes.
* * *
Max Zoske is a writer of weird fiction and horror. He has a background in media psychology and a fascination with all things morbid. When not writing, Max can be found exploring abandoned buildings, diving down Wikipedia rabbit holes, or absorbed in a good book. His work has appeared in Chthonic Matter Quarterly and Cosmic Horror Monthly.