The Centre of Decay

By Ann Hoffmann

Jenny was ready. She’d read every adventure book she could get her hands on. Her plan was foolproof. And it began with peanut butter and maple syrup, the perfect ingredients for an effective distraction. The peanut butter would catch her parents’ attention. Then, once they’d begun to clean up the mess, they’d notice the stickiness of the maple syrup. They wouldn’t leave the old man like that, not even to lecture her. She’d have as long as the sponge bath took, and if she was really thorough, she’d have ages.

“Don’t want you getting messy, Buster,” Jenny said. She tossed her satchel onto the kitchen table, and a half-bald creature tumbled out. He was an ugly little thing, beady glass eyes and uneven patches of brown fur scattered across his body, but he was the most loyal companion a girl could have. She often reassured him that his rat-like tail, long ago stripped of its marvellous fur, didn’t make him any less of a squirrel. And yet, she’d never once had to encourage him to stand his ground. Only a brave adventurer could have such a brave sidekick.

Jenny stepped towards the old man, a jar of peanut butter in one hand and a spoon in the other. If it wasn’t for the subtlest movement of his chest as he breathed in and out, he would seem no different than Buster, dead and stuffed. His skin was deathly grey and his wrinkles so deep and numerous that he looked like a shrivelled-up apple. His eyes, as colourless as his skin, were always fixed straight ahead and never closed.

She climbed onto the old man, her knees digging into his sagging flesh. Still, he looked straight ahead, his expression flat and unchanged. Jenny spread the peanut butter across the old man’s face, pushing it into the creases in his skin. Yet, they were more like crevices, and as she pushed in more and more peanut butter, none of them could be filled. She wondered how deep his wrinkles were, how long it would take to remove all the peanut butter, if it could even be done.

With stage one of her distraction complete, Jenny turned her attention to the maple syrup. She’d managed to unscrew the peanut butter’s lid without issue, but she knew the syrup would be a different story. She blamed the stickiness. But Jenny was prepared. She figured that if garden shears could cut through a branch, they could surely cut some plastic.

Jenny set the syrup jug on the kitchen floor and sat crisscross in front of it. The shears were heavier than she expected, an oversized extension to her small body. She yanked them open, lined them up with the neck of the jug, and then, with all of her strength, slammed them shut. The lid went flying and ricocheted off of the cabinets. The jug fell over. Maple syrup oozed out, coating the kitchen tiles. She hurriedly grabbed the jug, the stickiness covering her fingers.

“Something always goes wrong when adventuring,” she reassured herself and Buster. To continue on was what made a true adventurer, that and going places long forbidden.

This time, Jenny tried to balance on the old man’s boney knees. After the spill, she didn’t much care to end up stickier. She poured the maple syrup over his head and watched it seep through his scraggly white hair, run down his peanut butter-smeared face, and drip down the collar of his shirt. He smelt sickly sweet, a strange contrast to his usual absence of a smell.

Having finished with the distraction, Jenny tossed the peanut butter jar and maple syrup jug into the sink and ran some water over her sticky hands. While she dried them, she admired her work. There was something about what she’d done that felt powerful, like pouring cranberry juice on a white couch. Often, regardless of where she was in the house, Jenny felt as though the old man was looming over her, observing. And yet, he never moved, like some piece of furniture shoved to one side of the kitchen, ignored but not forgotten. Her parents didn’t much care for him, but he’d been part of the house as far back as Jenny remembered, and it wasn’t like they could get rid of him. So, they dusted him every so often.

Jenny had been careful not to get peanut butter in his eyes, but she couldn’t say the same for the maple syrup. He was absolutely coated with the stuff, droplets decorating his eyes like morning dew on unwanted weeds. He didn’t seem bothered, hadn’t so much as moved. He was still watching, always watching.

She shoved Buster back into her satchel and started towards her bedroom. She paused at the door to the study. It would have been so much simpler to enter that way, if it weren’t for the rusty chains.

“I guess that wouldn’t be much of an adventure,” Jenny said. “Huh, Buster?”

She’d tried to get into the study before, but she was littler then, and not particularly sneaky. After that, her mother had started buying chains, and she never let them rust so badly they could be broken. Jenny kicked the pile of older chains next to the door, and the metal crumbled. It was always odd when her mother replaced the chain with a new one, so shiny and out of place in the house.

Jenny hurried the rest of the way to her room. Even with the distraction in place, she still needed to think about timing. She’d never had a good sense for how long her father’s appointments would be. Fortunately, she’d done the rest of her preparations earlier. She tugged on a pair of swimming goggles and tied her scarf so that her mouth and nose were protected. Lastly, she put on her bicycle helmet, modified with a flashlight and a lot of duct tape.

Ready to properly begin the adventure, Jenny turned to face her mural. Really, it was just a white tarp, a makeshift wall, but she’d convinced her father to paint their family on it. Her mother stood off to the side, radiant as ever. And her father, he looked younger. His hair was still brown and his skin less wrinkled. He had his wooden cane with that delicately carved lion’s head. It looked strange to her now, seeing him like that. She’d gotten used to his wheelchair in the last few months.

Her parents had knocked down her wall a few times because of the mold. Eventually, they’d suggested the tarp as an alternative to rebuilding it. It didn’t get moldy the way her wall used to, but when she lay in her bed in the dark, she didn’t like thinking about the thin layer of plastic between her and the house’s insides. Today, though, she was a brave adventurer.

Jenny removed the tacks one by one and let the mural fall to the floor. There was a dark, square opening about the size of an end table cut into the wall. The darkness was bordered by a white fuzz. It was growing again, breaking down the wall. The musty smell permeated her scarf. Her father had suggested moving her to another room, but her mother had insisted that everything was fine, that all they needed was a tarp. Besides, it wasn’t like the rest of the house was much better.

Jenny got on her hands and knees. She’d been making maps of the house for weeks, so she had a pretty good idea of the direction she needed to go. The distance was more of an unknown. There were no rooms between the study and her bedroom, but the doors were far apart. She wasn’t sure if this meant the study was enormous, or if the house had just been built funny. She wasn’t afraid of getting lost, or at least, she knew that her location wouldn’t be a complete unknown. She’d never been in the house’s insides, but she figured the old man’s gaze would follow her just as it always did. However the house had been built, she was pretty sure that like her bedroom and many of the other rooms in the house, the study had to have places where the wall was damaged, hopefully enough for her to get through it.

She clicked the flashlight on. She could only just fit through the gap, even though she was small for her age.

All Jenny could see was white fuzz, like she was crawling through the inside of a pillow or cloud. It was soft under her fingers but also sticky. She’d half expected it to melt away when her skin touched it, but when she pressed her fingers into the fuzz, it just seemed to get harder, while still sticky. She was starting to wish she’d brought a pair of gloves, but at least she had a sweater on. She wiped some of the fuzz from one of the wooden beams with her sleeve. The wood was spongey and crumbled away as she poked at it. Her parents had replaced the beams the last time they opened the wall, and yet the new wood already looked like it had been rotting in a forest for years. It smelled like it, too.

The further Jenny went, the less the light seemed to carry. It gave the white fuzz a yellow tint, but she couldn’t see more than an arm’s length in front of her. Fortunately, she’d not run into any turns, as though the house was leading her directly where she wanted to go. Except the further she crawled, the stranger it seemed that she was still crawling. She should have reached the study by now.

Anteyer by Mickyrose

2024; digital photo

The fuzz was increasingly taller and more varied in colour: greens, oranges, and blacks. Some of it was so tall that it almost seemed like she was crawling through a jungle, like she was a proper adventurer. She couldn’t even see the shapes of the wooden beams anymore. Her flashlight began to flicker.

“This is fine,” she told Buster. “Everything is fine.”

She knew he didn’t need reassurance. He didn’t have anything to be afraid of, one of the few benefits of being dead. She’d had a cat once, a live one, and it had been frightened of everything. When it wasn’t sickly, it spent its days cowering and hissing, mostly at the old man, sometimes at Jenny’s mother. But occasionally, it had seemed like the cat was hissing at the house itself, that watchful gaze that invaded each and every room. When her mum had said no to replacing the cat, she’d gotten Jenny a doll, but Buster was a much better adventurer.

Jenny heard the long, muffled creak of the front door opening. Even with the thick layer of fuzz, she could hear that her parents were talking, but she couldn’t quite make out what they were saying.

“Jennifer!” her mother shouted.

For just a second, Jenny thought about backing out of the tunnel, but no, she had to see this adventure through. She had to see the study. No true adventurer would call it all off because their mother shouted for them.

Her flashlight flickered again and then went dark. She hit it. And when that didn’t work, she shook her helmeted head around, expecting to hit a wooden beam or something that would knock some life into the flashlight. But nothing felt quite solid anymore. Even the fuzz below her fingers continued on, semi-soft, as far as she could feel. The light flickered for a moment, and she saw how the fluff swirled around her, covered her. Then, she was plunged back into darkness.

“I’m not scared of the dark,” Jenny told Buster, holding her satchel close.

Despite the darkness, she’d have sworn she could see his beady glass eyes. And she could tell from the way he was looking at her that he didn’t buy it.

“I’m not.”

She reminded herself that Buster wasn’t worth arguing with. Besides, his judgemental eyes were negligible in comparison to the unending gaze she felt. And as she crawled through the tunnel, that feeling had not changed. As unsettling as she usually found it, the familiarity was a twisted comfort while enclosed in the fuzz-coated tunnels.

Jenny continued to crawl, seeing nothing, feeling only the awful stickiness under her fingers and smelling the rot that had consumed the wooden beams.

“You’re not allowed to be afraid of the dark either, Buster. You’ll make me afraid.” Her heart was pounding in her ears like a storm hammering a tin roof. “Fear’s contagious.”

It couldn’t be much further. It just couldn’t. So, she kept crawling, even when she began to smell a different rot, something stronger than that of the beams, something putrefied.

Jenny had grown accustomed to how her fingers sank into the thick layer of fuzz coating her path. Each time she crawled forward, she expected that awful sensation. But this time, her hand sank into something else. Fur brushed against her fingers as they descended through a thin layer of skin into mush and liquid. The feeling and smell made her gag.

“I think my hand’s in your cousin, Buster.”

She’d travelled so far already. She couldn’t turn around, regardless of how disgusted and exhausted she was. And while she wouldn’t admit it, she was awfully afraid as well.

The further Jenny went, the more dead things she came across, bats and rodents far bigger than Buster. She didn’t understand how her mother could spend all of her time in the study, how she could stand the smell. Jenny had never gotten a clear answer on what her mother did in there, only being told how important it was. But surely it wasn’t the ideal place for doing anything important.  At this rate, it had to be full of fuzz and dead things. Or rather, it ought to have crumbled away entirely. After all, it seemed to be the centre of decay.

Suddenly, the tunnel of fuzz seemed to open up, and light, which was as dim as the early evening but bright in contrast to the tunnel, blinded her. Without hesitation, she tumbled through the opening. She’d expected to roll onto a wooden floor, but rock after rock dug into her as she rolled, and wall after wall crumbled when she hit them. And even when she was still, the world kept spinning.

Jenny lay like that for a long moment, rocks pressed into her back, as she waited for the dimly lit room to steady. And when it did, she was puzzled. There was no fuzz, apart from what clung to her. And there was no hint of anything dead, besides the brownish red that painted her hands. There was no smell of rot, no smell at all. It was quiet and cold and empty of anything that was anything.

A series of walls surrounded the room, the inner walls having nearly entirely crumbled away and the outer ones staying mostly intact. The floor was the remains of eroded concrete. And that was all there was. She’d imagined her mother spending her days and nights hard at work in the study, seated at a fancy desk, doing whatever it was that was so important. There was no desk. There was no chair. There was nothing.