The Dark Game

by Jonathan Janz

  This is all wrong, Will thought. Wrong time, wrong place. A glance at Bryan. Wrong ally. Just get up from the table and deal with it later.

  Sherilyn nodded. “Oh, I get it. That means Wilson is able to, what? See the future? Solve crimes for the government?”

  “For Wells,” Bryan corrected. “Wells created the character. Wilson does his bidding.”

  “If he wanted a handyman that badly, why not just hire one? He’s got plenty of cash.”

  “Wilson is how we got here,” Bryan said. “He touched our handwriting samples, figured out who had the right combination of character traits.”

  “This oughta be good.”

  “Discretion. Ambition. Some level of talent.”

  “Of course,” Sherilyn agreed, mock serious.

  “What else?” Lucy asked, though she didn’t look like she wanted to know.

  “We all have terrible secrets,” Bryan said.

  Sherilyn spiked her napkin on the table. “I’ve had enough of this shit. Why don’t we ask Miss Lafitte here? According to you, she’s a figment of Corrina Bowen’s imagination.” She glared at Will. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That this little maid is a killer?”

  Miss Lafitte stared at the wall.

  Will put up his hands. “Let’s just forget it, okay? Miss Lafitte, I apologize. I didn’t think—”

  “Why are you apologizing?” Sherilyn demanded. She rotated her chair to face Miss Lafitte. “You’re just a make-believe person.”

  Lucy cringed. “Sherilyn.…”

  “I’m making a point,” Sherilyn snapped. Turned her attention back to Miss Lafitte. “Why don’t you tell us what it was like in Haiti? Did the plantation owner abuse you? Was there really all that lust and deceit?”

  “I’m going upstairs,” Lucy said, rising.

  Sherilyn put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder, kept her in her chair. Will watched the maid step over to the platter of ham, grasp the carving knife.

  He said, “No, don’t—”

  The maid pumped the carving knife into the side of Sherilyn’s throat, the foot-long blade slicing all the way through her neck. The maid wrenched the knife out, blood spraying from both sides of Sherilyn’s throat. Lucy screamed, Bryan scrambled away. Will gaped in horror.

  Sherilyn cupped her wounds.

  The maid slashed down. Sherilyn’s ear split in half, blood bubbling from the wound like crude oil. Sherilyn half rose, her eyes almost all white. The maid pumped the knife into her breastbone, jerked it out with a horrible scrape. The maid stabbed her again, the wounds spraying everyone with scarlet.

  A head taller than the little maid, Sherilyn swayed on her feet.

  “You should not mock me,” the maid said.

  And plunged the knife straight through Sherilyn’s voice box.

  Chapter Two

  The last thing Lucy saw before Will grabbed her hand was Sherilyn dropping to her knees, the tip of the carving knife poking out the back of her neck like a bloody dorsal fin.

  “Run,” Will said, his voice barely more than a croak.

  He dragged her away from the psychotic maid. They reached the doorway and bolted through. The hallway was empty, but that meant nothing. The world had come unhinged, Sherilyn was dead, and there was a homicidal maniac loose in the mansion.

  Lucy and Will broke for the foyer. She let go of his hand, cast a glance over her shoulder. She reached the front door first, fumbled with the handle, and with Will crowding her, got the door open. The day was gunmetal gray, and if it stormed, they’d be exposed out here.

  But nothing would compel Lucy back inside that mansion. Not her manuscript, not the chance at literary redemption. Certainly not Roderick Wells and his spookshow of a retreat.

  She and Will hurried through the meadow. Will labored for breath, even more out of shape than she was. He grabbed her arm. Lucy tried to shake loose, but Will wouldn’t let go of her. Finally, she rounded on him, both of them nearly falling as they stopped.

  “We have to go,” she said. “Miss Lafitte—”

  “Agreed. But we can’t go near that island. The lake. We have to…” he licked his lips, “…we have to take the long way around.”

  She started to move.

  He seized her again. “Wait.”

  “That psychopath is coming.”

  “Which one?” Will asked.

  Lucy stared at him, appalled.

  “What about yours?” Will asked. “You know, the guy in the tuxedo?”

  Lucy hadn’t thought about the Fred Astaire Killer. The notion, despite all she’d seen, was too absurd to entertain. Those were words on paper. A story. And being part of a story was different to being spawned by a story.

  Will grasped her upper arms and spoke directly into her face. “We’re past the doubting stage, Lucy. This is happening. You need to believe this, so you can help me.”

  She stared into his eyes. “Help you with what?”

  “I don’t know, either get out of here or—”

  But Lucy didn’t catch the rest because something exploded out of the forest behind him. He saw her eyes shift, had time to whirl and face whatever it was, and then someone was crashing into him, knocking Lucy aside, and as she fell she caught a glimpse of Will’s head snapping back, his skull bashing the unforgiving trail. He lay without moving.

  Bryan, however, rose to his feet. Grinned at her.

  “All right, gorgeous,” he said, the Bowie knife glinting in the overcast light. “Looks like it’s down to you and me.”

  Chapter Three

  The tendrils were subtle.

  The lightlessness, Rick was certain, was essential to their attack. They didn’t dart at him, drag him screaming into the undulating soil.

  They were treacherous because their touch was so light. You didn’t even sense it until you were being drawn forward into the wall of dirt. The tendrils were gossamer thin and not unbreakable, yet they found a way onto your body, insinuating themselves like a virus, creeping, swarming, until three dozen of them had bound you up.

  Their combined strength was obscene.

  At first Rick’s breathing had been too loud for his ears to be of any use. The tendrils had slithered over his legs, his shoulders, and it wasn’t until he broke contact with the door that he realized he was being drawn forward.

  After an interval of horrorstruck panic, Rick forced himself to calm down, to listen to the darkness. He’d read that when one sense was taken away, the others grew more acute. He didn’t know if this was true or not, but he found it was at least easier to concentrate when the only stimuli were sounds and tactile sensations. There was a smell, sure, but that was unchanging. There was a taste in his mouth, but that stemmed from his own terror, the acrid tang of adrenaline.

  There was no light at all. No vision.

  But the sounds were constant. He imagined a white noise machine dialed down to its lowest volume, nearly inaudible, but detectable if you strained hard enough. Along with the white noise, which he imagined was the constant unspooling of the threadlike tendrils, there was another sound, one that reduced him to a quivering child.

  He’d seen too many movies, read too many books. Images of Frodo suspended in Shelob’s lair, of young tourists attacked by carnivorous plants inside an ancient ruin, of Poe’s character prematurely interred inside his coffin, the cold wood pressing in, the air dwindling to fatal thinness.…

  But that other sound…dear God, the sound was worse than the images, a voracious chorus that swelled each time the soil believed it was about to claim him.

  Rick shivered. It was an unfortunate irony that though he’d lived with insomnia for more than two decades, now, when he needed to stay awake the most, the inexorable blue tide kept rolling in, weakening his mind when he needed to remain sharp.

  What, Rick wondered as he pressed agains
t the door, did the tendrils look like? Were they colorless strands, like a spider’s web? Or did they possess some pigment, the jaundiced yellow of the light bulbs or the foreskin pink of underwater plants?

  The filaments wormed their way across the floor, the walls, the ceiling. Once he’d found himself nodding off only to realize the door behind his back was moving. Only it hadn’t been the door, it had been a crisscrossing web of tendrils that had wrapped him up so completely that he could scarcely move his limbs. Alone, each strand was frail. Together they formed a net like steel mesh.

  The tendrils seized him.

  As the strands hauled him nearer, he understood he was hearing the ridges themselves, the undulating brown-purple surface moaning in expectation.

  Yes, he thought wildly, his arms pinioned to his sides, there was something appallingly sexual in the noises. They didn’t just long to devour him, they wanted to mate with him. In their high-pitched cry he heard lust, ferocity, and exultation. He recalled how the ridges had pumped and moved. He bucked against the netting. He didn’t know how far he’d been dragged, but if he wasn’t upon the undulating wall, he would be at any moment. It was this thought – his flesh chewed and sucked by the hungry ridges – that forced him to jerk his right shoulder down. The web didn’t tear, but it did give slightly. He heard the baying of the broken filaments. Rick contorted his body, wrenched down with his left shoulder, and this time he felt a perceptible give. He tightened his abdominal muscles, jerked his shoulders down in a violent crunch, and the whole web shifted enough to allow his elbows to move. Then he was flailing against the threadlike assemblage, his hands bursting free, his fingers steamshoveling at the web entombing his legs.

  His wrist brushed the wall, and at the slimy feel of it, the nodes squirming against his flesh, Rick bellowed in terror. His feet were bound up by the ravenous web, but the strands were too numerous to snap. He dug at the webwork, and again he brushed the moist, meaty wall. But this time he felt the damp surface enfold the tip of his middle finger, a rapid scratching sensation on his flesh. In the moment before he jerked his hand away, he was reminded of a cat’s tongue, the tiny bones embedded in the pink tissue lapping at him, abrading his flesh. The image was enough to nudge him into a frenzy. He tore madly at the strands. Then he was clambering back, whimpering against the steel door.

  He had no idea how long he’d been down here, but his internal clock told him it was midmorning.

  If that were the case, no one would have raised a fuss about his absence yet. Hell, maybe no one had even noted it.

  Rick thought of Elaine’s undulating corpse. The slow feeding of the purple-brown ridges.

  The sucking sounds.

  His airway narrowed. His flesh crawled as the tendrils continued to grope for him. He tried for a very long time to suppress the scream.

  But he could only hold back the terror so long.

  Rick gave in.

  Chapter Four

  Lucy pelted down the trail, Bryan’s laughter pursuing her.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?” he called.

  Lucy pounded around a bend, bared her teeth. She remembered the playdates her parents used to set up with the other homeschooled kids. There was one family, twin boys, a snot-crusted girl who rarely spoke. Lucy figured the reason the girl never spoke was because of the way her brothers tormented her.

  During playdates the twins would concoct games designed to exploit their physical advantage, normal games with macabre twists. Tag, they’d say, though it wasn’t really tag. It was Push Tag, it was Make-Lucy-It Tag and then dance out of arm’s reach because she wasn’t very athletic. And the moment her fingers would brush one of their shirts, the tagged boy would shove her to the ground, and the game would start over again. When Lucy complained the boys were bullying her, their mom would say, “They’re just boys, dear. Don’t pay any attention to them.” And Lucy’s mom would nod and not say a word, and Lucy would slink back outside for more torture.

  “I think he took off,” Bryan called, very near now.

  Lucy kept running, but as the woods grew darker, the trees denser, and the sky overhead an increasingly moody gray, she noted without humor the irony of her situation. Earlier, she’d tried to end her life. Now she’d do anything she could to prolong it.

  “You may as well give up,” Bryan called.

  He was closing on her. She scampered down a hill, followed the trail though a thicket of pines. The boughs loomed so close they scraped her arms as she rocketed past, but Bryan’s footfalls were audible now, their heavy clumping rapid and relentless. Ahead, the trail curved, the thicket of pines showing no signs of thinning. She neared a wall of deep green needles.

  Without thinking, she lunged into the pine trees. The crashing sounds drowned out all else. She bulled her way into the network of pines, the needles scratching, the branches flicking her breasts and whapping her belly. Cobwebs collected in her eyelashes. Her skin crawled at the thought of spiders in her hair, their eggburst babies teeming over her ears, burrowing into her scalp.

  She stumbled into a slender clearing and worked furiously to dislodge any bugs from her hair.

  Then she remembered Bryan.

  Eyes widening, Lucy listened. The forest was noiseless.

  She was sure he’d seize her, startle her one last time. But he remained silent, hidden.

  She threw glances all around, but swaddled as she was by the pine boughs, she could see nothing, hear nothing.

  She had to move.

  She pushed through the trees, closed her eyes as prickly needles raked her skin. She reached out, found another gap, opened her eyes.

  Stared in disbelief at what lay before her.

  A house. One she’d seen before.

  No, she thought.

  But the protest was feeble. The house was real. Lights glowing inside, a hostile ribbon of black smoke curling from the chimney.

  Whether it was coincidence or another element of Wells’s accursed magic, this place looked exactly like the one in Poland.

  But Bryan was coming.

  Lucy emerged from the pine grove and approached the house. Two stories tall, the gabled A-frame reminded her of a fairy tale.

  Out here in the forest she stood no chance. Bryan was a hunter, a survivalist, a depraved asshole who’d kill her for sport. She knew it as surely as she knew this house was an exact replica of the Poland house, the one owned by her mother’s uncle, or some other faceless relative. At least here she might find refuge.

  As she hurried nearer, Lucy glanced at the sky, judged the storm to be imminent. Another reason to take shelter.

  She mounted the stoop, raised her fist, but paused. Knocking would echo in the woods. She might as well call out to Bryan, invite him to murder her.

  Just go in. If the homeowner got testy, Lucy could throw herself at the person’s mercy. Maybe it would be an old woman. She’d dial the police and soon Lucy would be rescued.

  Or it could be a crazed hilljack who’d blast her with a shotgun the moment she stepped through the door.

  At least it would be quick.

  Lucy tried the handle. Unlocked. She entered.

  Her mother sat at the kitchen table.

  She didn’t look up as Lucy closed the door. Lucy considered saying something, but her mom’s morbid silence forbade it. Outside, distant thunder rumbled.

  She stopped, peered down at her mom. She half expected the woman to be the age she’d been when Molly died. But the seamed forehead, the crow’s feet that no amount of Botox could erase…this was her mother as she was now. Though Lucy hadn’t seen or spoken to her for years, she was certain of this.

  She became aware of a persistent creak.

  It was coming from upstairs.

  “You in there?” a voice called.

  Lucy gasped, spun.

  Bryan.

  He’d spoken
from just outside the door, which she’d forgotten to lock.

  A thudding sound. Bryan’s fist.

  Another.

  Lucy glanced about, spotted a knife rack. She hurried over, grasped the largest handle, and drew it out. A chopping knife.

  “Lucy?”

  She retreated, found herself in a narrow hallway. Behind her were two bedrooms. To her right, the stairs leading up.

  Lucy chose the stairs.

  She was halfway up when the front door closed. She listened.

  “Wilson?” Bryan called. “You here?”

  Lucy frowned. Was this Wilson’s house? And if it was, what of the woman at the table? Just a phantom?

  The groan of floorboards below.

  Bryan’s voice: “If you’re here, Wilson, I hope you stay out of my way. I’m doing what you told me to. If Forrester’s gone, it’s almost over.”

  Lucy grasped the handrail. Stepped onto the next riser. The next. The stairs were not carpeted, but they made little noise as she climbed. Maybe Bryan would think she’d bypassed the house. If so, she could simply wait here until nightfall, and then, under cover of darkness, attempt her escape.

  “Someone up there?”

  Lucy cringed. He wasn’t directly below her, but he’d advanced well into the kitchen. Had he noticed her mother?

  Was her mother really there?

  Moving as methodically as she could, Lucy climbed the final three risers and found herself in a dark hallway.

  “Lucy?”

  Instinctively, she backpedaled, and before she realized where she was going, she bumped the door of the back bedroom, the one in which she and Molly had slept.

  Her hand shook so wildly she could barely grip the knob. She slipped inside. She reached down, thumbed the lock, the cheap kind any kid could open with a paperclip.

  She was trapped, her only hope that Bryan would ignore the upstairs and head outside to continue the hunt.

  She turned and her breath clotted.

  Her father dangled from the ceiling, a length of electrical cord noosed around his throat. His corpse was bloated, discolored, the way it had been when she’d found him on the fifth anniversary of Molly’s death. After the accident, he’d been taciturn, a ghost flittering around the edges of their house. Then, as quietly as he’d mourned his youngest daughter, he’d hanged himself from a garage rafter.