The Dark Game

by Jonathan Janz

  Bent at a ninety-degree angle, Evan peered up at Bryan. The sweat stung his eyes. The blur made it seem like there were two Bryans rather than one.

  “You don’t get to put them on yet,” Bryan repeated.

  Evan eyed him through the stinging sweat for a long moment, then decided to hell with it, he’d put the damn things on anyway.

  A zinging sound rent the silence of the forest. The boxers were jerked from his hands and flying away from him. Evan’s glasses flew off. He straightened in time to see Bryan snatch the spear deftly out of the air. He plucked the boxers off the barbed point.

  Teeth clenched, Evan retrieved his glasses. “Why’d you do that?”

  “You lied to me.”

  Evan regarded the glittering spear tip. “How personal does it have to be?”

  “Juicy,” Bryan answered.

  Evan hung his head. “I used to spy on girls.”

  “Spy how?”

  “Watch them when they didn’t know it.”

  “Naked?”

  Evan swallowed. “Yes.”

  Bryan’s expression grew doubtful. “You’re awfully vague about it. Weirdos have kinks they fixate on. But you just said ‘girls’. Why is that?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Why’d you say ‘girls’?”

  Evan shook his head. “Fine. I used to watch my sisters take showers.”

  Bryan’s face lit up. “Evan! That is juicy. Older or younger?”

  “One older, one a couple years younger.”

  “Excellent.” Bryan reached down, grabbed Evan’s shirt, and tossed it backhand.

  “What about the underwear?”

  “How’d you watch them?”

  “Please stop this.”

  “You peek at them around the shower curtain? Your sisters weren’t in the shower together, were they?”

  Evan rolled his eyes. “No, they weren’t together.”

  “So how’d you—”

  “With a drill, okay? I used my father’s drill to make a tiny hole.”

  Bryan’s face clouded. “Through the tile?”

  “It wasn’t tile all the way up. There were…there was drywall between the tile and the ceiling.”

  “Did you jack off?”

  Evan pursed his lips, hot shame burning his cheeks. “Yes I did, okay? Can I have my clothes back now?”

  “That’s pretty good,” Bryan said. “I’ll give you the rest, but don’t put them on yet.”

  Bryan balled up the clothes, but hesitated.

  “What now?”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “For God’s sakes,” Evan said. “I already told you something I’ve never told anybody, now give me back my pants!”

  “Who were you thinking about just now?”

  Evan shook his head. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “You’ll tell me about whacking off to your little sister, but you won’t admit to what you were just thinking. It stands to reason the thing you aren’t telling is worse than the one you told.”

  Evan shook his head in astonishment. “What in the hell is wrong with you? Why are you so insulting? What gives you the right to—”

  “This,” Bryan said, raising the spear.

  And before Evan knew what was happening, Bryan was slinging it right at him, the gleaming point hardly wavering as it sliced down the path, whizzing toward his stomach. Evan jerked his hands together instinctively. White hot pain sizzled his palm. A shallow cut, but one that bled freely.

  “Talk,” Bryan said, catching the rope spear. “And if you leave anything out, I’ll put this through your windpipe.”

  Evan looked up slowly from his wound.

  And started to talk.

  Chapter Ten

  From The Stars Have Left the Skies, by Elaine Kovalchyk:

  Kerri squirms in the passenger’s seat and knows something has changed. Scott’s teeth are chattering so violently she’s reminded of those joke-store wind-up teeth, and though she’s freezing too – she still can’t get over the fact that Scott got the Hummer started despite the fact that it’s hovering below negative forty degrees out here – a weird species of calm is beginning to sough over her, not unlike a sifting of powdery snow. The only parts of Scott that aren’t mummified by scarves are his mouth, his nose, and his eyes, and what skin is visible is already bright pink from the chill. The Hummer, miraculously, hasn’t gotten lodged in the grille-high drifts yet, but she suspects it’s only a matter of time. They’re approaching a ridge, and though it isn’t steep, it’s going to be enough to fold its bone-white fingers over their vehicle, the same way the other vehicles they’ve passed were claimed by the snow.

  How many dead? she wonders again. How many corpses per car?

  For the first time in days the sun is out and absolutely beaming over the hardpacked snow, yet it doesn’t provide the merest suggestion of heat, only a brain-piercing sunglare. Scott’s teeth are clicking so rapidly she’s sure they’ll chip, and that’s when she sees it, the farmhouse to their left. Kerri remembers the psychologist – psychiatrist? She can never remember the difference – who lives there, recalls the stories about him, but frankly she doesn’t care about any of that now because it isn’t just the psychologist/psychiatrist she sees in the window of the farmhouse, it’s a phalanx of faces, six or seven of them at least, the pink oval chins and the boiled-egg eyes goggling at the Hummer as it bulls its way up the ridge.

  The Hummer begins to lurch.

  “Stop at the farmhouse,” she says in a voice so tight she doesn’t recognize it.

  “Fuck that,” Scott says and rips off his gloves.

  She shoots a glance at his knuckles, sees they are white, though not the bluish-white of the barren iceworld entombing them. She imagines the skin of his hands turning gray and sloughing off, revealing lusterless bone, and the thought unnerves her to such a degree that she glances at his face to make sure he still has a face. She’s seen the denuded bodies, has no idea what is doing that to people, as if the worst cold spell in recorded history isn’t enough, as if death wasn’t already a certainty.

  Kerri is thinking this when the Hummer slams into a drift.

  The seatbelt whips her against her seat, and Scott says, “I guess you get your wish.”

  She stares at him uncomprehendingly and he grins a singularly terrible grin and explains, “The farmhouse. Hell, it was your idea to begin with.”

  That’s right, she realizes. Her idea has never been to escape, has always been to find shelter in another house. Because Scott has begun to scare her. Seventeen days snowed in their home, and her husband no longer resembles the man she married. Or the man she thought she married.

  “Come on,” he says, and begins to open his door.

  “Wait,” she yells, but it is too late then, and she sees it happen with crystalline clarity:

  The door crunching into the frozen drift, the gap between door and frame perhaps six inches.

  The figures from the farmhouse, two men, evidently attempting to rescue them. They stumble through the snow, shouting, but something makes them stop, their eyes widening in terror, and then they beat a wild retreat back the way they came.

  Scott is watching them too, and he grunts, in his cynical way, “No more Good Samaritans, huh? Well, screw it. Come on,” and he grabs her hand too roughly, and when he turns and looks at her, she sees the first beetle crawl over his shoulder. It must have dropped inside from the roof, or perhaps it emerged from the drift itself, but now there are a dozen of them, gleaming obsidian beetles no larger than pencil erasers, teeming over Scott’s exposed flesh. He begins to scream, but they’re already feeding on his skin, peeling his lips back, his teeth and jawbone exposed like something on the desert sand.

  Chapter Eleven

  When they
sat down for dinner that evening Lucy noticed the extra chair and figured it was for Wilson. She didn’t like that at all, got goose bumps thinking about the stone-faced man. Rick sat catty-corner from her. As Miss Lafitte, the tiny maid, walked around filling their water glasses, Lucy mentally implored Rick to look at her, but he appeared too consumed with his thoughts to pay her any mind. He’s in the zone, she thought, a little wistfully. What she wouldn’t give to be there too.

  Lucy’s gaze was drawn to Evan. His skin appeared sallow, his shoulders slumped. Had Wells given him a stinging private critique?

  He’s next, she thought. Then wondered, Where’s Tommy?

  Servants bustled about the room, several Lucy hadn’t seen before. They filled water glasses, brought in trays of bread and silver tureens of soup.

  “I could get used to this,” Bryan remarked.

  Anna’s eyes glittered as she studied the coffered ceiling. “To hell with getting used to it. I’d like to live here.”

  Lucy tracked Anna’s gaze to the French doors that led to the courtyard and experienced a moment’s vertigo. Not only were the curtains new – or at the very least, they’d been washed and bleached – but the brass door handles gleamed like they’d just been installed.

  What’s so extraordinary about that? she wondered. The servants spent their day preparing the room. So what?

  So it feels like we’ve traveled back in time to when the dining room was first built.

  She brushed away the thought with a shiver.

  Wells entered with his wife. Lucy stared at the man, stunned at the change in his appearance. She supposed it was a matter of simple grooming: he’d shaved, and the hair around his ears had been trimmed. Yet there was something more at work, something subtler yet more profound. His eyes shone with a vitality that hadn’t been there the first night. The deep grooves in his forehead were less pronounced.

  It’s the chandeliers, she told herself. You saw him by firelight last night. The glow in here is more flattering.

  Still.…

  Mrs. Wells sat to her husband’s right, the empty seat to Wells’s left. Lucy waited with crawling flesh for Wilson to occupy the empty place.

  Wells said, “Tommy Marston has left us.”

  “I knew it,” Bryan said, sitting back.

  Lucy glared at him. “You don’t have to look so gleeful.”

  “He didn’t say goodbye to anybody?” Elaine asked.

  “Why,” Bryan said, “you hurt he didn’t share a moment with you before he left?”

  But rather than taking the bait, Elaine frowned. “Neither of them did. Marek just went with that cop, and Tommy…he just disappeared?”

  “Stop being sentimental,” Anna said. “Eliminations are part of the contest.”

  “That doesn’t mean we have to be heartless,” Elaine countered.

  Anna opened her mouth to respond, but stopped abruptly. Lucy followed her gaze and discovered Wells leaning on the table, his expression livid.

  “Are you quite finished carping?” Wells said.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Anna said.

  He glanced at Elaine, who averted her eyes. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  Wells looked at Bryan, who drew back a little, shrugged. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Our words,” Wells said, “have meaning. When one claims he didn’t mean anything by what he said, he’s lying through his teeth. Have you forgotten the importance of honesty?”

  Bryan lowered his gaze. “I apologize.”

  “That’s better,” Wells said. He pushed away from the table and nodded. “Tonight marks the end of our third day together, and experience has taught me that the fourth day of any endeavor can be trying. At roughly four days, fatigue sets in. It’s why many writers never finish their first novel, and if they do, it’s the only one they ever write.”

  Wells swept the group with his keen eyes. “At four days, the initial burst of creative energy is all but spent. Enthusiasm is potent stuff, but like a magnesium flash, it is short lived. Writers cannot endure on a single blinding burst. They must continually search for means of renewal, of inspiration.”

  Wells smiled and said, “Please welcome our guest.”

  The dining room door opened.

  Lucy’s first thought upon beholding Corrina Bowen was that the woman was both shorter and scrawnier than she would have guessed. In a Publishers Weekly feature, the black-and-white photos depicted an elegant, sweet-natured woman with a knowing smile and a perceptive gaze.

  In person, Bowen’s gauntness was borderline disturbing. Her light brown skin and frizzy gray hair looked healthy enough, but the knobby appearance of her shoulders – bare in a navy blue sundress – and the manner in which her cheekbones protruded troubled Lucy. A quick mental estimate put the woman in her early seventies, but because of the haggard look in her eyes and the prominence of her bones, Bowen could pass for someone ten years older.

  The group applauded, the others apparently not as shocked by Bowen’s appearance as Lucy was, and as the sounds of adulation swelled, Bowen responded with a humble bow.

  As she sat, her gaze lingered on Lucy. If Bowen noticed how forced Lucy’s return smile was, she didn’t let on.

  At dinner they talked of Bowen’s books, the successful film adaptations. Bowen confessed to an aversion to the films, arguing they routinely missed the point of her stories. Lucy listened but said little. Anna kept turning away from Bowen’s gentle-voiced descriptions to whisper to Rick, who seemed uncomfortable.

  Near the end of dinner, Wilson entered and said to Mr. Wells, “The woman from the New York Times is on the phone again. She wants a quote about being named Nobel Laureate.”

  “I gave her one last week,” Wells said. He shook his head. “That’s ten minutes I’ll never get back.”

  “She claims she needs more. I wouldn’t bother you, but her deadline is this evening.”

  Wells sniffed, placed his cloth napkin on the table. “Typical inefficiency,” he muttered. He glanced at Corrina Bowen and said, “I know this reporter’s type. If I don’t provide some witty aphorism, she’ll dream one up and make me look foolish.”

  With that, he left the dining room. Lucy noticed Anna watching after him with a starstruck gaze.

  After dinner they had drinks in the courtyard and patiently awaited the chance to speak with Ms. Bowen. Lucy spoke to Sherilyn and Will a bit, but she spent much of the time by herself walking about the courtyard. It was a bit depressing out here, the landscaping overgrown in some places, the plants blighted in others. The walkways and pavers were cracked and moss-covered, the marble and granite benches weathered and sinking. Much of the ivy creeping up the brick and stone walls around them had withered and died, and damp catches of leaves choked the majority of the gardens. A characterless gray fountain, ten feet high, stood disused and forlorn in the center of the courtyard.

  Bryan stood staring up at the fountain and scribbling in his notebook. As Lucy looked on, Wilson appeared from the other side of the fountain and approached Bryan.

  Wilson’s voice was just audible from where Lucy stood, twenty feet away. “You need to spend less time looking around and more time doing,” Wilson said to Bryan.

  Bryan didn’t even look at the servant. “I’m writing, like Mr. Wells told us to.”

  Wilson reached out, seized Bryan’s wrist.

  “Hey,” Bryan started, but Wilson cut him off.

  “I’m not talking about writing, Mr. Clayton. I’m talking about doing.”

  Bryan stared incredulously at Wilson. “Let go of my— that hurts, dammit.”

  “Keep your voice down, Mr. Clayton,” Wilson said, and as though Bryan were a child, the servant drew him closer.

  Lucy strained to hear Wilson’s words.

  “This is a process of elimination, Mr. Clayton. I need you to be more competitive.
” He squeezed Bryan’s wrist; Bryan winced. “Do we understand each other?”

  “I think so,” Bryan said in a small voice.

  Wilson released him, smiled broadly. “Enjoy the rest of your evening, Mr. Clayton. And get to work.”

  Watching after him, Bryan rubbed his wrist. Then, he moved toward the French doors and disappeared inside.

  Lucy frowned, appraised the remaining dinner guests.

  Rick had disappeared early on. Anna did as well, though they left at different times. Their dual absences cast a cloud over Lucy’s mood, and when someone tapped her on the shoulder and she turned to find Corrina Bowen smiling at her, Lucy was utterly unprepared.

  “I hear you’ve been through the circus already,” Bowen said.

  The woman stood about five feet tall, weighed no more than a hundred pounds.

  Lucy managed a smile. “This is an unexpected thrill.”

  Bowen nodded as Lucy told her how much she enjoyed her work, how deeply she admired her skill.

  Bowen said something Lucy couldn’t make out.

  Lucy leaned forward. “I’m sorry?”

  The serene grin still fixed on her face, Bowen repeated, “Escape now.”

  Lucy drew back slightly. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  The grin was still there – just the merest hint of white teeth gleaming through pink lips – but the eyes had widened considerably.

  “Get out while you still can.”

  Lucy glanced about and noticed the others were occupied. Evan and Elaine were squabbling. Sherilyn and Mrs. Wells were listening to Roderick Wells, and Will was standing by himself, looking out of place and miserable.

  When Lucy glanced again at Corrina Bowen, the woman’s grin had fled. Her eyes were huge and haunted, her mouth trembling. Bowen leaned closer, grasped her by the shoulders. “Can’t you see I’m in hell, girl? Can’t you see where all this is leading?”

  The breath puffing out of the woman was fetid, a rank broth of coffee and halitosis. Lucy tried but could not look away. The fingers on her shoulders dug deeper.