Jeff Jacobson - Growth

She stopped at the bottom of the staircase. Knocked on the wall. She’d learned the hard way not to sneak up on people in rural areas. Too many carried loaded firearms, and were liable to shoot you if you surprised them. “Hello? Meredith? Albert?”

No answer.

Sandy took her Taser out and went cautiously up the stairs. At the top, she checked the first door on the left. Bathroom. It was a mess, but empty. Sandy recoiled from the stench, raised her wrist to her nose, and tried to breathe through her mouth.

Unraveled brown and gray bandages had been strewn across the sink. Strips of medical tape festooned the counter like shriveled snakeskins. The gray crust that coated everything reminded her of what she had seen on the floor in the Einhorn kitchen. Clumps of toilet paper had been scattered throughout the bathroom as if somebody had been throwing them like confetti. They coalesced into a tiny mountain near the toilet at the far end. The pile of white paper had stuck together in winding lines, as if the darkened, soiled globs had drawn together like magnets. This left the clean tufted edges of toilet paper to unfurl like pale wisps of flowers on knotty gray vines.

Sandy wished she had her latex gloves but the box was back in the cruiser. She thought back to that night when Meredith had called 911 on Kurt Einhorn. Albert had been bitten or something. Sandy tried to remember. He’d said it was a possum. She’d been worried about rabies, but now she wondered if it had something to do with the fungus.

She didn’t touch anything and backed out of the bathroom. At the end of the short hall, there was one door left. It was closed, of course. It had to be Meredith and Albert’s bedroom. Suddenly, she didn’t want to open it. Didn’t care what was on the other side. She wanted to run downstairs and find the phone in the kitchen and call in the county boys. But they’d ask her if she’d checked the whole house and she didn’t want to have to tell them that she’d lost her nerve.

So she opened the door. Slow and careful.

The room was almost completely dark. Heavy curtains covered the windows. She couldn’t quite tell in the dim light, but it almost looked like they had been duct-taped to the window frame. The door continued to swing open, spilling more light into the room.

There was a circular pile of bodies on the bed. She realized it wasn’t bodies, not exactly. A tangle of children’s arms and legs were wrapped around a central gray mound. For some reason, the mound seemed fragile, like the crown of a jellyfish. It was nearly three feet across and fluttered with the slight wave of air that came as the door swung open.

Surrounding it, the arms and legs intertwined each other in a horrible, frozen wreath. Sandy looked closer and knew why she hadn’t seen a dog or cat in the house; their legs intermingled with the humans’. The whole thing was like looking at some rotten pustule skulking in a badly infected wound. Even after trying to make sense of the thing for several seconds, she still couldn’t see any heads. Instead, it was just limbs wrapped around a strangely raw, unfinished center that was covered with a thin gray membrane, like some half-cooked rotten egg, sunny-side up.

Sandy couldn’t tell if the number of arms and legs accounted for all the children or not. She tried to get a rough count, but it was impossible. They were far too tangled, twisted around each other in shapes that could never be achieved when they were alive. She doubted anybody would know how many of the family had been absorbed into this huge mound until they performed a careful autopsy. She knew that this was something they would be studying for years.

She stopped. Did that arm move? She watched it a while, but it was still.

This was definitely above her pay scale. It was time to call somebody.

The door flew at her, knocking her back into the doorframe. Meredith popped into view from behind it with wild eyes, swinging a fire extinguisher across her body, like an amateur swinging a tennis racket. The bottom rim caught Sandy in the shoulder and slammed her into the wall. With a speed only possessed by the truly disturbed, Meredith raised the tank over her head and brought it down like a sledgehammer.

If Sandy hadn’t gotten her arm up, it would have crushed her skull. As it was, it damn near broke the two bones in her forearm, and drove her to the floor.

Meredith shrieked, “They are going to heaven. They have been saved!”

At the sound of her voice, the twisted mosaic of limbs shivered and twitched. A fragment peeled away from the rough circle, and a number of children’s arms and legs unfurled from a central gray tentacle, like a palm frond that had decided to reach out and go exploring. When the gray, pulpy mass that ran along the center of the branch could no longer support the weight of the tiny limbs, it drifted down to the floor and the arms and legs grabbed hold of the shag carpet and pulled the tentacle forward. It rippled awkwardly along, searching for the voice.

“No, no, not Mommy,” Meredith said sweetly, and gave the crawling thing a quick blast from the fire extinguisher. “Over there. I brought you some food. To give you strength to reach heaven, my darlings.” The tendril shrank away from the puff of frost.

More branches were starting to unfold from the center mass, crawling off the bed, using the children’s arms and legs to propel the tendrils in the same way Sandy had seen the centipede creatures in the Einhorn basement use insect legs. The bigger ones down there had worked the same way, growing into individual fingers and toes and making them dance, connecting two long chains of human fingers and toes and rat and squirrel legs that scurried along in ragged waves, alternating sides as to snake along for prey in S-shaped patterns.

Eight or nine tendrils pulled themselves away from the jelly-like mass and came after Meredith. She gave Sandy a kick and slammed the door, preventing Sandy from getting out. She jumped back to the first corner of the bed and gave the crawling tentacles quick flashes from the extinguisher, directing them at the door and Sandy.

Sandy got mad and rolled to her knees, raised the Taser. Fired. The barbs grabbed hold of Meredith’s right hip and breast and dropped her like a dead tree in a tornado.

A tip of tendril bumped into the bedroom door, rebounded, and then curled up toward her. The tip was a misshapen child’s fist. Too many little fingers unfurled from the center and grabbed at her.

Sandy exhaled, and knew the trick was to keep moving. But two other tendrils joined the first, the floor between the bed and wall bristling with irregular lines of children’s limbs.

She went with her first motion and lunged for the closet. She ripped it open with her left hand and yanked out the pepper spray with her right. The tentacles didn’t like when she blasted them; the fingers curled back together, and the tendrils shrunk into themselves, each pulling back into itself like a firefighter’s collapsible ladder. The space between each of the children’s arms and legs grew shorter and shorter until the limbs slapped against other, back against the main bubble on the bed.

They were still for a moment, as if the center was tasting the pepper spray. Different tentacles crawled off the bed and came for her.

Sandy jumped inside the closet and pulled the door shut. She backed into long dresses and sweaters. The thin strip of light at the bottom broke apart as the things came closer. She held onto the door handle just in case those chubby digits could open doors and heard Meredith whimper.

Sandy knew it wouldn’t be long before Meredith simply walked over and opened the closet to let her family inside.

But Meredith said, “Oh babies. Oh no. No. Please. Not this. Over there.” Her voice took on a pleading, strident tone. “Please. Not me. Babies. Please.”