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As he peeled it away from his jeans, his thumb popped into its mouth; the child sucked on it, fluttered its eyelids.
    “Get the fuck off me!” Mike tried to toss him away, but the toddler clung to his arm, shimmied his way to Mike’s back. To the backpack.
    “Mmmm…”
    Peeling the bag from his shoulders, he was ready to defend his loot, to grip the baby by the throat and punt him across the hallway. The baby was head-first in the bag, its legs kicking in the air. Mike grabbed it by the ankles and yanked it out.
    “What the… what the fuck?”
    The treasure was gone. The baby chewed sloppy, rotting meat with its gums, rolled it around its mouth with its tongue; rank soup dripped from its body. Mike now saw the bag was saturated with a dark pungent fluid, felt the wet spot on the back of his shirt. And of course, the meat roiled with maggots.
    The baby wiggled, tried bending itself to get to the beefy contents of the bag. Mike flung both into the air, watched them disappear into the living river with a splash. He turned and ran, wasting no time. The hallway just kept going, doors kept zooming past.
    Finding James seemed more and more impossible. It would take him a lifetime, maybe two, to check every door in that hallway.
    Mama was right, Mike thought. This place is absolute evil.
    But he couldn’t leave without James. No matter how much his instinct told him to flee, he wouldn’t give in to it. He would keep looking, had to, regardless of how long it took. And it was then he had a feeling of finality, that he would never leave this place. That he would spend the rest of his days with the flies and maggots and children, searching through the vast hallway, checking doors until he turned to dust. But he shook the thoughts from his head, took a deep breath. James needed him to be strong, he couldn’t freak out now.
    So, at random and without much thought, he chose another door. And he entered.
     
     
     

The twins sat in the middle of the room. When Mike entered, they looked up, acknow-ledged him with a set of smiles. The pulsing maggots dove in and out of their black flesh.
    Mike thought they were identical, two skinny bald boys, but their nudity revealed that the one in the back was female. And even though they looked starved, emaciated, they looked happy to be together in their room, kept smiling and giggling at each other, at Mike. The girl sat behind her brother with her legs wrapped around his waist. They almost looked Siamese, but when the girl leaned back and started picking larvae from her brother’s back and stuffing them into her mouth, Mike could see they weren’t connected. The boy tittered as his sister groomed him, plucked the living morsels and popped them into her mouth.
    They looked up at Mike again, didn’t seem to mind his intrusion at all. “Hi,” they said in perfect unison.
    All Mike could do was purse his lips and furrow his brow. The room, like Cartoon Boy’s, was small, a perfect square. And of course, the flies were there, omnipresent, watching as Mike wandered deeper and deeper into the devil’s labyrinth. Ever buzzing were the flies.
    Lining the walls, crammed shoulder to shoulder, were lots and lots of stuffed animals, like a plush forest. Bears and puppies and monkeys and elephants and unicorns, all with a film of grime hardening their synthetic fur. Mike couldn’t take a step without feeling cotton squash under his boots, some of the animals equipped with squeaky sounds buried in their soft viscera. It was like a whimsical audience for the twins as they cleansed each other, whispered jokes only they could hear or understand.
    “Are you new here?” the girl said.
    “Come sit with us,” the boy said. “Help me clean my sister.”
    “What is this place? Where the fuck is my brother?” Mike was on the verge of tears. He didn’t want to imagine James becoming one of these children; had to shove the images of his brother’s scrawny body awash with maggots out of his