by Ramy Vance
Sandy was peering into the cauldron while Stew was inching his way into the room. “I thought you weren’t into vampires?” Sandy reminded him.
“I wasn’t. A friend tried to get me to play Ravenloft once, but I couldn’t get into it.”
“This is right out of Hunter, in Darkness.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s from one of the Middang3ard Choose Your Own Adventure stories.”
“Never heard of it.”
“With a nickname like Suzuki, I thought you would have for sure.”
“The name’s Robert.”
Stew shrugged. “Everyone calls you Suzuki, dude.”
“Whatever,” Sandy said, “It was an ESL supplemental. You know, for Japanese kids who were learning English, but didn’t want to go through any of those boring modules. “Hello. How are you today? My name is Takashi.” Blah, blah, blah. Middang3ard did a whole series. Now I’m guessing its part of their reaching-out-to-all-cultures-to-prepare-them sales pitch.”
“Fuck, they thought of everything,” Suzuki said. “Wait a minute? How do you know all that?”
“I taught English in Japan for two years. It was part of our supplemental learning material.”
“When?” Suzuki asked.
“Back when we were exploring the Enzaro Realms.”
“Oh yeah. You were always logging in late.”
“Time difference is a bitch, my dude,” Sandy said.
“Hey, where’s Stew?”
Suzuki and Sandy turned to look around through the gothic atmospheric tension. Stew was nowhere to be seen. After a few seconds, a bloodcurdling scream cut through the air. Suzuki ran in the direction of the cry for help, kicking open a door, ax drawn, ready to hack away at whatever undead creature was waiting for him.
Stew was pointing at something, his finger trembling, and he was even whiter than he had been earlier. Suzuki followed Stew’s finger, and he had to stifle the scream that quickly welled up in him.
They were in a kitchen. The walls were covered with blood-colored rust, and there were large washing basins like the sort you would find in a restaurant kitchen.
Steel tables were set up throughout the kitchen. That was not what Stew was pointing at though.
Stew was indicating rows of hooks hanging from the ceiling.
Skinned humanoid bodies hung from the hooks. Some of them had been ripped to pieces and were only hanging by a shred of muscle or tendon. Others had been gutted, their intestines laying on the tables or casually tossed to the ground. There were others that looked to be very fresh, the blood still glistening on their vivisected corpses.
Stew put his hand over his mouth and doubled over, trying to push down the sound of his dry heaving. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he finally managed.
Sandy walked around the corpses hanging from the ceiling. She didn’t seem distressed by the excessive gore. If anything, she looked interested, the kind of interest that she displayed when she was in the library, hunting for new books and spells.
“I would have thought that vampires were neater,” she mused. “You know, they’re billed as being pretty elegant killers. This looks like Leatherface’s jack-off cave.”
“Yeah,” Suzuki agreed. “This is some sick shit. Guess this quest would have been rated R. Graphic violence.”
“And sexual content. Vampires are supposed to be sexy,” Stew said.
Sandy shook her head. “There hasn’t been any yet.”
“Patience, my young Padawan. Patience.”
From the corner of the room came a sound not quite like a scream, but still an obvious plea for help. It came from the corner closest to Stew, and Suzuki motioned for Stew to check it out. Stew looked ready to bolt, but he pulled out his longsword and inched toward a wooden crate in the corner. He unsheathed his other sword and used it to pry open the box, his slashing arm raised, poised to kill whatever was in the box. Stew’s sword stayed in mid-air though as a smile spread across his face, the sort of smile that crops up unconsciously when you see a baby or puppy.
Stew sheathed his swords and waved the rest of the Mundanes over. He pointed to the contents of the box.
A dozen or so large, brown eyes stared up at them. The eyes were attached to small creatures, covered in fluff with grubby noses and comical overbites. Their hands were short and squat, as was the rest of their bodies. Their fur was a subtle tan, and they looked like a cross between a teddy bear and an elongated Furby. The little furballs were trembling with fear.
Suzuki was not impressed by their cuteness. These things could easily be just as deadly as anything else in the catacombs. Stew was already won over though. He looked as if it were taking all his self-control not to reach into the box and grab one of the things to take home as a pet. “Guys,” Stew started. “These aren’t what I thought they were.”
Sandy leaned over the box and started cooing at the furry creatures. Some of them stopped shivering and looked up at her. They mimicked her song. “They are so damn cute. They’re Mogwais, right?”
Suzuki looked down into the box as well, taking a deep breath. “Actually, ‘Mogwai’ is the name for ‘demon’ in a Chinese dialect. The movie adopted the term because according to ancient Chinese legends, Mogwais reproduced when it rained, so the countryside would be littered with them during monsoon season. The addition of Mogwais turning into gremlins through—”
“Suzuki, will you please shut up and just look at the cute gremlins with us?” Stew said.
“They’re called Mog—”
Fred unwrapped himself in Suzuki’s brain. Actually, these are gremouloons. A delicacy for vampires.
Suzuki could feel Fred weaving through his memories, tugging at the unconscious pool of things Suzuki wasn’t even aware he knew. It was an uncomfortable feeling. He’d known Fred to have invaded his memories a couple of times already, and the longer he was with the imp, the easier it seemed to tolerate. The trade-off was that casting magic was also getting easier. They were forming a bond, even if it was mostly unspoken.
Fred relaxed and started his slow retreat back into Suzuki’s pocket dimension. They are very similar to gremlins on your world,” he explained. “It seems that Myrddin has his magical fingers in everything, seeding your world with legends and then having another culture re-appropriate them for a massive, intellectually-devoid audience. There is a certain genius to the wizard’s shrewdness.
Suzuki had to fight the urge to pick up one of the gremouloons. It was almost a compulsion. He needed to feel their soft fur against his face, to stare into their obscenely large eyes, to press his ears to their lips so he could listen to that odd cooing sound they were now making. “They are pretty cute.”
No, they are not, Fred argued. They are disease-ridden, carnivorous rats pumping the air with pheromones that make you want to cuddle them until they can take a bite out of you.
Sandy had leaned farther into the box, her braid dangling almost in reach of the gremouloons. “We gotta let them out,” she pleaded. “They’re trapped here.”
Suzuki shook his head. He was tired of his emotions being manipulated by everything in this village. “Nope,” he said. “They’re dangerous. And we’re much more liable to get caught if we do. I’m seeing a thirty percent increase of detection, putting us at eighty-three percent chance of failure if we let them out.”
“Christ, when did you become a cyborg?” Stew asked.
Sandy clasped her hands in a pleading gesture. “We don’t have to take them with us. We could just let them run wild down here.”
Suzuki shook his head. “What if we swing back and let them out when we’re done?”
“But…but…”
While Sandy and Suzuki argued the proper way to deal with the gremouloon situation, Stew wandered back to the red room. He found his way back to the cauldron, his feet moving as if he were compelled by some force.
The cauldron sat in the middle of the room. It looked as if it had grown larger. Stew leaned over to look
into it. An eye slowly bubbled to the surface of the liquid. It rolled over so that it could look him in the eye. As a scream welled up in Stew as more bits of humans, elves, and orcs bubbled to the top of the cauldron. Now Stew did scream.
It didn’t take long for Suzuki and Sandy to get back to the room, where the found Stew pointing at the cauldron. Sandy went to check it out. “So Stew’s afraid of stew,” she joked.
“I’m not afraid of stew! That thing is filled with fucking dead people.”
Sandy smirked. “Hmm. Stew isn’t very sophisticated. What are these, working-class suckheads?”
“Actually,” Suzuki started, “stew can be a very complex, sophisticated dish. There are an array of flavors that can only be properly explored when given time to soak and come apart in the juices of—”
Stew pitched forward and vomited by a bookcase. “Dude,” he finally uttered after he had wiped his face. “Those are people in that thing.”
Suzuki peered over the edge of the cauldron. “Shit, you’re right.”
“I can’t be in here right now.”
Stew stumbled back to the kitchen full of hanging bodies, and Suzuki and Sandy followed. They quickly passed through the kitchen, trying not to let their eyes linger on the corpses dangling like fresh-cut meat. Stew flung open the door at the end of the kitchen, and they walked into a small room with a few doors on opposite sides. There was a dirt floor, and there was hardly any light.
The room was filled with coffins stacked side by side.
The Mundanes stopped in their tracks. “Fuck,” Suzuki muttered under his breath.
Sandy reached out and squeezed Suzuki’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “They should be out. We still have a couple of hours before sunrise. They should be out hunting.”
“Well, let’s get moving. I wanna get whatever the fuck José wants and get the hell out of here. Let’s see what’s behind door number one.”
Suzuki approached the door closest to him. He fought the urge to go to the coffins and rip them open. He wanted to know for sure that they were empty. The suspense was making him jumpy. If the vampires were in their coffins, this could be a giant trap. They could just be waiting until he turned his back and they could sneak up on him, slip their fangs into the side of his neck. That being said, if they were sleeping in the coffins and hadn’t realized the Mundanes were raiding their home, opening the coffin would be sure death. Moving forward as fast as possible seemed like the only option.
They crossed into the other room. The catacombs were taking on the feeling of a mansion that doubled as a maze. This new room was lavishly decorated, even more so than the red room they had initially stumbled into. There didn’t seem to be anything interesting among the Victorian style furniture, so they opted to try one of the many doors in the room. There was another room, not too different from the one that they had just walked through with just as many doors.
Lost, Suzuki thought. We’re getting lost.
The Mundanes continued to choose room after room, each one looking only slightly different than the one before. Suzuki didn’t voice his suspicions but suggested that they check the room they had been in only a few seconds before. He made a mental note of the red vase that was sitting on a table with lion-motif legs.
When they reentered the room they had just come from, Suzuki noticed that this room had the exact same vase and table as the room they had just been in. “Guys,” Suzuki ventured, “I think something’s up with these rooms.”
Sandy walked to the couch in the far corner of the room and collapsed into it. She kicked her feet up on the coffee table in front of her. “Yeah, I figured so too,” she agreed. “Sometimes it feels like we’re walking into a new room and other times, it’s like it’s a new room, but only slightly different.”
“You think it’s an illusion?”
Sandy nodded. “Probably.”
“Can you dispel it?” Suzuki asked.
Sandy looked around. “I think so, but it’s a really large space. It might take some time.”
“Do you remember anything important from the books? About large spaces and all?” Stew chimed in as he scanned the room for threats.
“Eh. Not really. Nothing like this. The book was mostly a gorefest. Pretty simple on plot and world-building. Just a bunch of scenes where you get to choose how you’re going to kill the suck-heads. There was a lot of really cool vampire stuff though. Like, the design of the vampires in the book was pretty unique, and the feeding stuff was always cool. The vampires didn’t just suck your blood out, but they’d torture you for hours first, making little cuts all over your body so they could do it slowly. They’d be, like, five to a person. It was gruesome. And uncomfortably sexy.”
“And this was to teach English to kids?”
“Nah, ESL is for adults, mostly,” Sandy said, shaking her head. “It’s nowhere near as gruesome as Clash of the Titans. That’s pretty fucking extreme.”
“Yeah. It’s got tons of really up-close munch shots,” Stew agreed.
Suzuki cocked his head to one side in confusion. “What’s a munch shot?”
Sandy used two fingers to mime a person running. Her other swooped down, caught the fingers, and she pretended to throw them into her mouth. She ended with a theatrical crunch.
There was a loud rumbling from somewhere deep within the mansion. Suzuki had to exert every ounce of self-control not to roll his eyes. Instead, he pulled out his hand ax and flipped it into the air as he checked with his HUD to see what the likelihood of his survival was going to be. “There’s a fucking giant in here, isn’t there?” He sighed.
The side of the room exploded, sending books and wood flying everywhere. A young, not-fully-grown giant barrel-rolled into the room. He was holding a club covered in spikes, and skulls and various bones hung from his body. It wasn’t as tall as an adult, roughly standing seven feet. It was small enough to fit into the mansion, but still large enough to rip the Mundanes to shreds with its bare hands.
As was typical of its kind, the giant’s face wore a dumb look of perpetual rage.
The giant swung its club at Stew, who managed to step out of the way as he tumbled forward, having overcommitted to the attack. “Since when do giants hang out with vampires?” Stew shouted.
The giant turned once it had stumbled to its feet and swung his club at Suzuki. “It must have something to do with the Dark One,” Suzuki shouted as he moved to the side and dodged the attack. I’m getting pretty good at this, he thought to himself. The thought was premature. The giant landed the next attack, sending Suzuki flying and nearly shattering his HUD.
As Suzuki stumbled to his feet, he saw Sandy narrowly avoid the giant’s club. Stew was trying to get in a good shot, but the giant never stopped moving. Because it was not fully grown, it had the speed and vigor of youth. The problem was that it was still very obviously a giant. The creature dominated the room, and it was all that Sandy and Stew could manage to keep from being crushed by the giant’s stomping feet and swinging club.
Suddenly the giant stopped. It sniffed the air with its massive, mucus-filled nostrils. Then its eyes settled on Suzuki.
Suzuki checked his HUD. His SD upgrade had been deactivated when he’d been hit.
Now he smelled like a fucking Englishman.
The giant let out a terrifying roar as it turned its back on Sandy and Stew.
Suzuki turned and ran toward the open door in front of him. “Fuck me,” he shouted as he sprinted. The giant was nearly running on all fours, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog, deadly intent on crushing every bone in Suzuki’s body.
The room Suzuki ran into should have been the same one they had come from.
It was not.
Suzuki noticed and made a mental note to check back into that problem later. It was going to be hell getting out of this mansion if rooms kept changing every time they switched rooms. None of that would matter though if he was a greasy stain at the bottom of a giant’s heel.
The ch
ase was on, with Sandy and Stew bringing up the rear, struggling to keep up with the giant’s massive strides. Up ahead, Suzuki was running with every ounce of energy that he could. He flung doors open and stepped into them without so much as a care as the rooms of the mansion magically switched themselves around, creating a tangled web of déjà vu, disorientation, and foreshadowing of the immediacy of death.
Suzuki checked over his shoulder to see if the giant was any further away. He was greeted with a fresh roar from the encroaching juggernaut of a giant that turned his stomach sour.
I cannot keep this up. Gotta figure this out quick. But without his HUD helping him calculate his odds, Suzuki felt lost.
He’d have to wing it.
Fine, he thought as he made his way to another door.
This time, when Suzuki opened the door to a new room, instead of going for the room directly in front of him, he ran to the door in the corner on the other side of the room. As Suzuki ran through the room, he noticed that it was different than the last fifteen he had Benny-Hilled through. Suzuki chose the same door this time as well. Now there was a new pattern. Once Suzuki crossed the threshold of the door, he let the giant barrel into the room. He raised his hand ax and concentrated. A blinding light flashed from his steel, blinding everyone in the room but him. As the giant stumbled around and Sandy and Stew covered their eyes, Suzuki slipped around the giant and grabbed his friend’s hands. He ran through the door that he had come from, closed the door, and opened it again.
The room was empty. No giant anywhere to be seen.
Stew scratched his head, obviously confused, trying to wrap his mind around what had just happened. “There was a giant in here a second ago, right?” he asked.
Suzuki went farther into the room, holding his hands out as if he were worried that he was going to walk into an invisible beast. “Holy shit, I was right,” he shouted as he pumped his fist.
“Care to explain?”
“It’s a pocket dimension,” Suzuki said, smug about figuring it out. “It’s just like we have in us for the familiars, except since they’re rooms and not people, they can keep replicating. Every time we choose a door, it creates an entirely different room. We’re not lost. We’re floating through a dozen iterations of the first few rooms we walked into.”