Endless



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  Endless copyright ©2014 by Russell C. Connor

  All applicable copyrights and other rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, for any purpose, without the express, written permission of the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review, or as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

  This is a work of fiction. While some names, places, and events, are historically correct they are used fictitiously to develop the storyline and should not be considered historically accurate. Any resemblance of the characters in this book to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

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  Also by Russell C. Connor

  NOVELS

  The Jackal Man

  Race the Night

  Whitney

  Finding Misery

  Sargasso

  Good Neighbors

  COLLECTIONS

  Howling Days

  Killing Time

  THE BOX OFFICE OF TERROR TRILOGY

  Second Unit

  Director’s Cut

  EBOOK FORMAT

  Outside the Lines (Novella)

  Dark World (Novelette)

  Talent Scout (Short Story)

  Endless (Short Story)

  THE DARK FILAMENT EPHEMERIS

  Volume 1: Through the Deep Forest

  * * *

  PRAISE FOR RUSSELL C. CONNOR’S WORK:

  GOOD NEIGHBORS

  Silver Medal Winner: Independent Publisher Awards

  Bronze Medal Winner: Readers’ Favorite Awards

  “Connor’s ability to richly develop each character and plot thread is fascinating even when the horror is reserved…the constricting pressure as the dread piles on makes this book hard to put down and even harder to go to sleep after reading. This is a great novel…”

  -David J. Sharp, Horror Underground

  SECOND UNIT

  “Intricately plotted and vividly layered with suspense, emotional intensity and strategic violence.”

  -Michael Price, Fort Worth Business Press

  “Drips with eeriness…an enjoyable book by a promising author.”

  -Kyle White, The Harrow Fantasy and Horror Journal

  FINDING MISERY

  “Major-league action, car chases, subterfuge, plot twists, with a smear of rough sex on top. Sublime.”

  -Arianne “Tex” Thompson, author of Medicine for the Dead and One Night in Sixes

  THE JACKAL MAN

  “Connor delivers a brisk, action-packed tale that explores the dark forests of the human—and inhuman—heart. Sure to thrill creature fans everywhere.”

  -Scott Nicholson, author of They Hunger and The Red Church

  * * *

  “Oh, let’s go through the corn maze!” Anna exclaimed, pointing at the hand-painted entrance sign towering over the gap in the wall of corn stalks. Just a few yards further down was another sign marking the exit.

  Jeff took one more look around the pathetic pumpkin patch she had brought him to for their fifth anniversary, mostly to hide the exaggerated eye roll he could feel coming on. The place was packed with families positioning their little brats for pictures amongst overpriced pumpkins that were supposed to be quaint because they were grown right here on this farmland, but the monstrosities were just too deformed to be cute. Seriously, most of these things looked like they would give you cancer if you were stupid enough to eat them. Jeff would never understand why people came to places like this. He would’ve been content to spring for dinner in the city and then just go home, but Anna had wanted to surprise him.

  “C’mon,” she pleaded, taking him by the arm. “It’ll be fun!”

  He allowed himself to be steered toward the entrance, which was lorded over by a slender farmer-type with a blue-and-black checkered shirt and a John Deere cap pulled low over his eyes, slumped down in a plastic chair between the entrance and exit. A group of three teenage girls counted out bills into his hands and then were given permission to enter. They hurried inside, giggling to themselves, and passed a sandwich board sign which read, “ENDLESS CORN MAZE: $5.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he groaned. “Five bucks? Really? To traipse through some hayseed’s cornfield?” What he didn’t add is that he was still fuming about the ten bucks they’d spent for a ‘hayride,’ which consisted of a trip around the farm’s back fields behind a smoky tractor while sitting on itchy hay bales, then stopping twice to feed the cows and chickens. So essentially, they shelled out money for the privilege of performing the farmer’s job for him.

  “I’ll pay for it!” Anna said quickly, beaming at him. She could tell he was miserable, had realized what a mistake this was from the moment they pulled into the lot, and found herself responding with this façade of forced cheerfulness. She couldn’t help herself; that was how she always reacted to his negativity, by plastering on a big, goofy grin in the hopes that it would eventually break down his defenses. Which it never did. If anything, he had only gotten more dour and surly with each passing year of their marriage. Sometimes the muscles in her cheeks ached from holding this false smile in place.

  “All right, fine,” he conceded. He regarded the maze keeper and his sign while Anna dug in her purse, then looked to the left and right, down the tight rows of dark green stalks stretching out in either direction. The entire front wall of the cornfield, from corner to corner, couldn’t be longer than three or four hundred yards. As he studied the field, a family of five strolled out through the exit, laughing and cheering.

  “How long’s it take to get through this thing?” he asked the farmer.

  “’Bout twenty minutes,” the man replied, looking up from his chair. The face beneath the hat’s bill was as rough as sandpaper. “That is, if ya don’t get too turned around.”

  “Twenty minutes?” Jeff smirked. “I guess ‘endless’ has a different definition out here in the boonies, huh?”

  The farmer shrugged and looked into the distance. “Take it or leave it, makes no nevermind to me.”

  “We’ll take it!” Anna jumped between them before Jeff could antagonize the poor man further and slapped ten dollars into his callused palm. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, granting them admission. The two of them walked beneath the entrance sign and into the corn maze.

  ~ ~ ~

  The path was a narrow, beaten dirt trail, bounded by black wire mesh to hold back the corn and help keep the maze defined. Most of the ears had been harvested, leaving behind only a few empty husks and tiny, broken cobs that littered the dirt here and there like the tool fragments of some ancient civilization. The remaining stalks towered a foot over their heads, the tops swaying in the breeze. They had been planted so close together, it was impossible to see more than a few feet beyond the boundary of the trail. After the path took a sharp right turn, the entrance to the maze and the pumpkin patch were lost behind a dense forest of rigid green poles.

  Anna felt a small, pleasant tingle of fear, accompanied by childish goose bumps. She wanted to reach for Jeff, but was too afraid it would make him even more annoyed.

  “Hurry up,” he told her, setting off at a brisk walk. She matched his pace without complaint, even though, with her shorter legs, she practically had to jog. Soon they came to the maze’s first choice, an intersection where the path split to the right and left.

  Anna pointed down the right branch, which curved out of sight
after a few feet. “Let’s go that way.”

  Jeff shook his head. “No, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look, you can’t just blunder around and expect to find your way out. Think about where we are spatially, in relation to the entrance. That way will just take us back toward the front wall of the maze and away from the exit. It’s gotta be a dead end.”

  “But my dad always said to stay to the right when you go into a maze and you’ll find your way out.”

  Jeff exhaled hard through his nose. “Yes, and if you do that, you’ll have to go through every branch in the maze and it will take twice as long. C’mon, I’ll get us outta here.”

  He went left. Anna followed. The idea of being dragged through the maze no longer felt so fun and exciting. She suspected that her husband had taken the farmer’s twenty-minute estimate as a challenge. Why couldn’t he just take his time and enjoy something? He used to be like that, back when they first met, but now everything had to be a rush.

  Ahead, the three teenage girls that had entered the maze before them were trying to decide which fork to take at a three-way junction. Jeff blew past them—trying not to glance at the coltish bare legs beneath their cutoff shorts—and kept going straight. He looked over his shoulder to make sure Anna was following him as the trail curved away, then looked back in time to avoid running into a dead end wall of corn.

  Jeff spun, went back past Anna without a word (she gave him a timid, hopeful grin that sent a spike of raw irritation through him), and returned to the junction. The teenage girls were gone. He chose the left path this time. Seconds later, it fed into a much wider concourse that he figured must run through the middle of the cornfield, a river with multiple tributaries branching off from both sides. He chose the one he figured the most promising, hit a wall almost immediately, came back, and tried another.

  The next few minutes became a trial and error process of exploring different branches at a near sprint and with military precision. Jeff kept a close eye on his watch as he took turn after turn, following the compass in his head back to where the exit had to be. He would show that hick how long it took a real man to get through a maze. He encountered a few other families, all returning to the main concourse from a failed attempt to escape, and mentally marked these as dead ends. Eventually, he realized Anna wasn’t following him anymore. After confirming another false trail, he came back to find her standing in the wider aisle with her arms crossed.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Waiting for you to find the right one.”

  “Yeah, but how will you know when I do? I’m not coming back to get you when I make it to the exit.”

  “Then I guess when you don’t come back, I’ll know to take that one.”

  The hint of sarcasm in her voice caused him to shoot her a sharp look. Sweat rolled down his stubbled cheeks. Finally, he took her hand by the wrist and pulled her into another offshoot. “This is it. I know it.”

  This branch proved to be more complicated than the others. After they had explored every nook and confirmed them all as dead ends, Jeff lashed out with an open palm and sent a withered husk tumbling down the trail. “Goddamn it! Twenty minutes, my ass! We’ve been in here a fucking half hour already!”

  “Maybe you got turned around.” Anna used the farmer’s term very much on purpose.

  “I did not get turned around,” Jeff huffed. He snorted like a bull and held out a hand. “Gimme some water.”

  Anna opened her purse and retrieved the bottle of water they had bought at the hayride ticket booth. It was only half full now, and Jeff removed the cap and drained the rest without offering her any, then tossed the empty bottle into the corn.

  They set off the way they had come, retracing their steps. After another five minutes, Jeff stopped again, panting. “What the hell? We should’ve at least gotten back to the concourse by now. I know it was this way.”

  This time, Anna said nothing. Mostly because she thought he was right. She could swear they had backtracked, but now none of this looked familiar.

  Jeff continued on, and Anna hurried to catch up.

  ~ ~ ~

  They had been in the maze for a solid two hours when Jeff lost the last of his patience.

  This time, he reached over the wire mesh, grabbed a corn stalk, and ripped it out of the dry ground, roots and all. He took the green rod and snapped it over his knee, looking like a sad version of one of the wrestlers he loved so much. Despite her own growing anxiety, Anna put the back of one hand to her mouth to contain a sudden burst of hysterical laughter that would surely turn his ire on her.

  “This is FUCKING BULLSHIT!” he roared, launching the two ends over the cornfield like tiny javelins. The words drifted above the stalks and then faded away quickly in the open, which only served to make him madder. It was so unearthly quiet out here, with only the soft shushing of the wind through the corn leaves. They had yet to find their way back to the main concourse, and hadn’t seen another living soul since leaving it. The maze just seemed to run on and on, with more branches than dead ends. Even the murmur of voices from the pumpkin patch had receded at some point, leaving Jeff’s mental compass without a true north. “There has to be a way out somewhere, for Christ’s sake!”

  Anna rubbed at her goose pimpled arms and looked up. They had arrived at the pumpkin patch late in the afternoon, and now the fall sky was tinged with the hazy gray of twilight. The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees in the last hour, the wind picking up a bitter edge. “What are we gonna do, Jeff?”

  “We’re gonna find a way out, that’s what.”

  “Maybe we should yell for help.”

  “Fuck no, I’m not gonna beg that hillbilly to come rescue me.”

  “What about my cell phone? We could call someone, we could—”

  “Call someone? Like who, the police? Oh yeah, I can hear that one now. ‘911? I’m stuck in a goddamn corn maze. Can you send a helicopter to airlift me out?’ They’ll be snickering about that one at every donut shop in the country for years.”

  Anna bit her lip. She hadn’t figured he would like that suggestion. “They…they wouldn’t leave us in here, would they? Like, close up for the day?”

  “Who the hell knows? I don’t think they were taking a headcount of who all came in. I’d be surprised if they even could count.”

  His insistence on belittling the proprietors was beginning to give her a headache. “But our car’s in the lot.”

  He waved a hand at her and rolled his eyes, but she couldn’t determine what the gesture meant.

  “Jeff…I’m really scared.”

  At this, he turned to her and put his hands on her shoulders. His cheeks and brow were a mess, dirt caked in every crease and crevice. She had loved that face so much once, and had been trying to figure out for so long if she still did. When he spoke, his voice had softened…but couldn’t she see just a little disgust swimming through his blue eyes? “It’s fine. There’s no reason to panic. We’re not trapped in here, that’s…that’s stupid. Just give me another fifteen or twenty minutes, and if we haven’t found the exit, we’ll just…walk out. Straight through the corn, until we get to the edge of the field. All right?”

  “All right,” she agreed. While the idea of a way out comforted her, the actual thought of walking into that jungle of corn stalks creeped her out to no end.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Put your leg here! Right here!”

  “I’ll fall!”

  “No, you won’t! Just hold on to me!”

  “Wait, I—”

  “Ow, that fucking hurts!”

  “Sorry!”

  Anna got her body positioned correctly and fought to keep her balance as Jeff lifted her up on his shoulders. From this vantage, her head was far above the tops of the corn stalks.

  “Well?” he grunted from between her legs. It was the closest his mouth had ever been to her crotch over the course of their relationship. “What do you see?”

&nb
sp; “Turn around.”

  She peered over the cornfield in the gathering night as he spun in a slow circle, looking for any sign of the exit or the closest edge of the maze. Her breath plumed in the cold air. “I can’t see anything but more corn.”

  “Son of a bitch!” He lowered her roughly back down, almost spilling her to the dirt in the process. Jeff didn’t want to concede that a carnival attraction designed for kindergarteners had bested him, but he wanted even less to admit the fear that had been ballooning in his chest for the last half hour, not even to himself. Especially to himself. “All right, fuck this. We’re just gonna start walking in a straight line. Eventually we’ll reach the side.” He moved toward the closest boundary of the trail.

  Anna drew back. “No. No, I don’t want to.”

  He turned, bright red fury stealing up his neck. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t want to go through the corn. I think…I think we should just call someone…” One hand scrambled in her purse and produced her cell phone, the only one they had; Jeff’s had been left to charge in the car. “Listen, if we just—”

  “No! I told you, we’re not fucking calling anyone!” He gnashed his teeth and snatched the phone from her hand. Before she could stop him, he reared back and threw it far into the air. It sailed over the corn in a high arc, visible for just a moment as the screen caught the last glimmers of sunlight, but then she lost it against the bruised backdrop of the sky.

  “That was really stupid, you asshole,” she said through her teeth.

  His eyes widened a bit in shock, she was pleased to see, but he recovered fast. “You wanna stay here, fine. I’m getting out. Right now. See you at home.”

  Jeff slung a leg over the wire mesh and stepped into the cornfield.

  The stalks were so dense, he had to shove his way into them, parting them ahead with his hands and then wriggling through the gap he’d created. Darkness closed around him. Within seconds, he was lost in a world of shadowed, grasping tentacles. They pushed back at him from all sides, their leaves rattling and dry skin creaking and rasping as they rubbed against one another. He pushed on, concentrated on putting one foot down and then the other, being sure to move in a straight line, but the stalks seemed to resist him now, becoming as tight and rigid as the iron bars of a cell.