ARCADIA
A Game Space Mystery FastRead
Peter Jay Black
Copyright © 2020 by Peter Jay Black
Cover art by THEA
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The right of Peter Jay Black to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or transmitted into any retrieval system, in any form on, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, brands, titles, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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OAKBRIDGE
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*Note to the reader*
This work is a mid-Atlantic edit.
A considered style choice of both British and American spelling, grammar, and terms usage.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
FREE: Game Space Chapters
One
Dorset, United Kingdom. 1992
My little brother Matt was like any other twelve-year-old boy: he acted like a hyperactive, immature, excruciatingly annoying eight-year-old brat.
He’d zip around at a million miles an hour with adrenaline bursting from his ears, and his mouth would be a constant blur of blabbering movement, every word blended with the previous one. Matt could not shut up for a second. He’d even jabber and mumble in his sleep. It was a wonder his jaw muscles never gave out.
You couldn’t see Matt’s bedroom floor through the mounds of clothes and Lego, and he always, always had dirty fingernails.
I was a vegetarian.
Matt only ate burgers.
I had great taste in clothes, always made a point of looking my best, and currently wore the absolute pinnacle of fashion—a plaid skirt, an almost priceless angora cropped sweater, and an older pair of Docs or DMs—Dr Martens boots.
Casual and trendy.
Staying up-to-date with current styles was always number one on my list of priorities. No exceptions.
Whereas Matt the walking fashion horror story wore a stonewashed denim jacket covered in way too many sewn-on patches—everything from NASA rockets and shuttle missions to the Royal Air Force and the Red Arrows. He also wore a pair of matching pale-blue jeans, and never took either off. Not even during the summer months. Matt’s neon-white, toothpick legs hadn’t seen a minute of sunshine in his entire life.
My favourite movies were Young Sherlock Holmes, Beverly Hills Cop, plus Lethal Weapon one and two. Matt watched War Games, Back to the Future, and the Star Wars films so many times each he wore the cassettes out. Then the images would be mostly static with faint, wobbly movement behind. Despite this, he would still play them over and over, his nose an inch from the TV screen.
Regarding our tastes in music, I loved truly great artists like A-ha, Bon Jovi, Whitney Houston, and the old classics from Wham! Matt only listened to “Eat It” by “Weird Al” Yankovic, “Like A Surgeon” by “Weird Al” Yankovic, and “Girls Just Want to Have Lunch” by—you guessed it—“Weird Al” Yankovic. He played them a billion times at full volume to annoy me, and pushed my delicate sensibilities to the point where I wanted to throttle the little sh—
Seriously, if we hadn’t shared the same biological parents—allegedly—I would’ve insisted we had nothing to do with one another. I was a grownup sixteen, so the four years age difference might as well have been forty.
Despite all this, my little brother and I did have one thing in common: our love of Wednesday evenings.
We didn’t go to some youth club or after-school tennis academy. Wednesdays were our time to visit the Professor. That’s what our family called him, Professor, but in reality he was beloved Great-Uncle William. Grandma Edna’s brother, on our mother’s side. They were all a little kooky on that half of the family tree.
The Wednesday evening in question started off the same as every other. Straight after dinner, Mum handed Matt and me several bags filled with groceries to take round to the Professor. She did his weekly food shopping so the old man didn’t starve to death.
He never left his home.
After Mum had said “Don’t be late back” about a million times, Matt and I marched from the house. My little brother gabbled about something immature and pointless, as always, while I tuned him out, as always, wondering how I could convince Dad into handing over the money I desperately needed to buy a new pair of the aforementioned boots.
A few minutes later, we turned a corner and the Professor’s home loomed before us—a renovated Georgian church.
St. Mark’s House, dating back to 1792, formed an imposing silhouette against an otherwise yawn-inducing backdrop. Stained-glass windows adorned all four sides, a tower sat at one end complete with battlements, and a creepy graveyard surrounded the building, filled with moss-covered headstones.
The Professor once told us that the reason why old churches look as though they’ve sunken into the ground wasn’t because the heavy buildings drop over the years. Nope. The real reason is graveyards rise. I shuddered every time I thought about it. The graves were reused so many times over the years that the volume of dead bodies lifted the cemeteries’ ground levels.
Disgusting.
And so, whenever my brother opened the creaky front gate, my shoulders would hitch and I’d pull a face. Matt let me go first and I’d race up the front path, quick as I could, trying not to imagine all the piles of bones and rotting carcasses eager for teenage blood.
That evening, however, as we approached the church porch with its stone archway and pitched roof, all thoughts of flesh-eating zombies left my head as I stopped dead.
Matt slammed into the back of me, almost taking us both out. “Kira.” He peered around me. “What’s wrong?”
I dropped the shopping bags, raised a shaking finger, and pointed.
Two
The oak front door to the Professor’s house stood ajar. Thick black smoke poured through the gap, filling the porch, then spiralling into the sky.
My heart thumped in my chest, and for a split second I thought about running home and calling the fire brigade, but that would take too long. The whole place would have burned to the ground by then. “Stay here,” I said to Matt.
“K-Kira?”
“Stay here,” I repeated, then ran up the front path and threw the door wide open. Acrid fumes knocked me back a step. “Professor?” I coughed and covered my mouth with my sleeve.
No answer from within.
“Professor?” I shouted.
When there still came no reply, I gestured to my little brother to remain where he was. Then, dreading what I was about to find, I held my breath and slipped through the doorway.
Once on
the other side, I tried to remain calm and take stock of the situation. Despite the smoke and the usual clutter, the open-plan interior of the church made it easy for me to scan for the source of the fire. To the right of the door stood a kitchen area—a fridge and freezer below a countertop, a toaster and a kettle, and a small sink filled with dirty dishes. Foot-high flames shot from the toaster, melting its plastic casing and threatening the cupboard above.
Blood pounded in my ears as I went into autopilot mode. I yanked the plug from its socket, snatched an extinguisher from a bracket by the door, and then sprayed its entire contents, aiming every gram of powder at the offending appliance.
With the flames quenched, I backed outside again, coughing and gasping for air, and bumped into Matt. “I told you to stay away.” Dizziness washed over me and I bent double, wheezing, my nostrils, throat and lungs burning.
“What’s happening?” Matt said. “Kira, where’s the Professor?”
I winced and straightened up. “Didn’t see him.”
Matt stepped toward the door but I grabbed his arm.
He shrugged free. “The Professor could be hurt.”
“I don’t think he’s in there.” I tried to shake off the vertigo.
Matt kept staring; his expression fearful. “The Professor is always home.”
Despite horrible images of our great-uncle sprawled across the floor somewhere in the church house, I softened my tone and fixed Matt with what I hoped came across as a confident expression. “Just wait two minutes,” I said. “As soon as it’s safe, we’ll go in. Okay? He’ll be fine.” I wasn’t sure that would be true, but decided not to overthink it, and gestured down the path. “Come on.”
We recovered the shopping bags and by the time Matt and I walked back toward the church house, the smoke had cleared enough for us to enter.
Even so, my chest tightened as we stepped across the threshold. I hoped the Professor was all right, and that my twelve-year-old brother didn’t find the dead body of our beloved relative.
However, my quick, nervous glance around the interior showed everything was still in place, with electrical equipment—VHS video recorders and hi-fi systems—stacked in rows five feet high. Thousands of them, in various states of repair.
Matt checked the top left-hand corner of the church, where a single bed, wardrobe, and bedside table sat wedged between more stacks of household electrical items. “He’s not here.”
“Told you.” I hurried to put the Professor’s groceries away and muttered, “Thank God” to myself. I was also relieved to find the fridge and freezer still worked despite the towering inferno having been mere inches from them.
I sniffed my angora top and cringed. It smelt like a bonfire, and I fought the urge to run home and hand wash it immediately.
Then, pulling a paperback book from the remaining bag, I turned my attention to the room. My eyebrows pulled together. Where’s the Professor? He hardly ever went outside, never left the church grounds, and yet I hadn’t spotted him out there either.
Determined to solve the mystery, I was about to tour the building looking for clues, when I gasped. “Isaac.”
I ran to an alcove filled with an armchair, bookcases and stacks of novels, each a few feet high. A cage—two feet on each side, three tall—sat on a rickety chest of drawers, covered in a thick blanket. I stiffened. “Matt?”
“What?” he said, as he carried on searching the other end of the church.
I kept my gaze on the covered cage. “Come here and check on Isaac. Make sure he’s all right.”
“No way,” Matt said. “That’s your job.”
I ground my teeth. “Please?”
“No. The Professor made me swear not to.” Matt opened a tall cupboard and peered inside. “He said you have to learn to face your fear.”
I balled my fists and grumbled under my breath.
Fear was an understatement. When I was three years old, a neighbour’s dog had attacked me and bitten my leg. I still bore the scar. Ever since, I had felt both extreme dislike and everlasting distrust for all animals. They were unpredictable and savage.
Matt continued his search, ignoring me.
“Fine.” I marched to the cage and grabbed the blanket. If I got bitten or mauled to death, I’d blame Matt. He’d never hear the end of it.
I held my breath, braced myself, and yanked the cover free, jumping back.
A beige hamster gripped the bars, staring at me with black eyes.
I sighed. Thank goodness Isaac was okay. If something had happened to him, the Professor would have been devastated. He was one lucky hamster. I had been certain the smoke would’ve gotten to him. Yay for the thick blanket.
Isaac shuffled over to a bank of buttons fixed to a piece of gnawed wood strapped to his cage. Wires ran from the buttons to a panel hanging on the wall.
Stencilled letters in a column spelled Food, Water, Seed, Night, and Out. By the side of each was a coloured bulb. Isaac pressed the middle button and the purple light corresponding to Seed illuminated.
To be fair, that’s the only button Isaac ever pressed.
I approached, not taking my eyes off him, ready to bolt should he make a sudden move, and dipped my hand into a jar. Isaac stayed where he was, watching as I dropped a few sunflower seeds through the bars.
I edged back and puffed out a breath.
Obstacle courses and experiments crafted by the Professor —a jumbled mess of wires, wood and metal—filled the rest of Isaac’s enormous cage, but Isaac kept his black-eyed gaze on me as he stuffed seeds into his cheeks.
With another shudder, I placed last week’s book—an Agatha Christie whodunit called Death on the Nile—on a side table, then picked up the next story the Professor had left for me: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.
A brief rush of excitement coursed through my veins. I consumed crime and mystery fiction, a passion I shared with my great-uncle. Each week he’d hand over another tome from his vast collection. I would read it, sometimes within hours, using a torch under my duvet, inhaling the words from the pages. Then the next time we saw each other, the Professor and I would share our opinions and observations. Our own private book club.
Heaven.
That was my hour with him. The Professor set aside a different sixty minutes for my brother—one a little less cultured, in my opinion—where he’d teach Max all about science and engineering, but with a heavy emphasis on flying machines, of course.
All that fast-paced adrenaline wasn’t for me.
I was eager to tell the Professor what I thought about Agatha’s latest instalment.
To my right, under several overhead lights, sat a workbench that held all of the Professor’s tools and equipment for fixing various gadgets.
His speciality was repairing video recorders, but the Professor could tackle everything from Walkmans, radios, and pocket cameras to games consoles, boomboxes, and TVs. He was an electronics genius amongst many other things—hence his family nickname.
Growing more anxious about his absence by the minute, I glanced at the kitchen. Strange that the Professor’s repair skills didn’t stretch to toasters, though.
Returning my attention to his workbench, my face fell. “Wait. What’s going on?”
Three
My eyebrows knitted as I stared at the Professor’s workbench.
The light on his soldering iron glowed green, and a tape deck lay open next to it, its circuit board exposed, replacement components ready.
I switched off the iron and touched the side of a nearby coffee mug. Still warm.
Something beeped, then played a muffled tune.
“Rad.” Matt sprang from nowhere and rushed past me. He slid to a halt in front of a full-height arcade machine nestled between stacks of record players. “The Professor got it working.”
Unlike normal arcade cabinets adorned with bright attention-grabbing graphics, this one was flat black and worn at the edges, exposing laminated wood beneath. On the front, in messy purple
paint, was a large question mark. One of the two joysticks had a chunk of plastic missing, and several buttons were also absent. It had seen better days.
The back of the cabinet sat to one side, and a blue glow spilled from within, casting shadows on the wall.
Matt leaned in to the screen.
The image showed a blocky, pixelated outline of a white spacecraft at the bottom of the display. A giant red mothership dominated the top of the screen, constructed from two large triangles on a rectangular base, placed either side of a dome.
Inch-high letters above spelled out:
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ArcadiA.
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Matt grinned and waggled a joystick, but nothing happened.
“I think it’s still broken,” I said.
“No, duh.” Matt thumped a few buttons, then examined the coin slot in the base of the cabinet.
I turned my attention to the rest of the church. The Professor had clearly been working on a customer’s broken gadget, and recently too. I scratched my chin while picturing him sitting at his bench. Something had made the Professor set aside his soldering iron, stand up, and . . . what? My gaze hunted the surroundings for clues.
Where has he gone?
I eyed the toaster, and the plate and knife ready next to it. No way the Professor would have—
Matt let out a yelp.
I spun back around, but couldn’t see him anywhere. “Matt?” I turned on the spot. “Where are you? Stop mucking about. It’s not funny.”
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