by Adam Cesare
“Welcome,” Robby said, placing a pizza box down on the table Dan and his friends were seated around. The pizza was meatball and green peppers, the kind of food Dan was supposed to avoid nowadays, but it smelled so good. His mouth watered and he lifted up a slice.
Using his right hand, he was surprised to find that it no longer hurt to move his fingers. In fact, his fingers seemed younger.
He looked back up at Hank and Yosef. Hank’s glasses weren’t so thick and the end of his nose was no longer marked with red veins. Yosef’s beard was only a peachfuzz mustache clinging to his upper lip. They were teenagers again and so was Dan Boden.
“So what do you want to play after we eat?” Hank asked, his smile highlighting something that Dan had forgotten about: Hank had freckles! Wasn’t that amazing? Noticing something that small and having it flood you with emotion all these years later.
“You’ve got to let them go!” a black kid yelled from the arcade floor, intruding in Dan’s meal with his friends. Dan didn’t begrudge him though: everyone should be allowed to have a good time at the arcade.
Suddenly there was a bottle of Coke in his left hand, the green glass smooth and cool against his palm. It was moist and good and he gripped it tight. The slice of pizza folded in his right hand and the Coca-Cola in his left, Dan spoke to Hank again.
“What did you ask?”
“What’s on the agenda after pizza? They just got that new Tron game in, I want to check it out, don’t you Yosef?”
Yosef probably wanted to play Centipede, Dan thought to himself. Classic Yosef.
“Open your hand!”
Did the kid mean him? Why should he?
“Please, Dan!”
Well, he did use the magic word.
Dan set the bottle down on the table and opened his fist, whipping the condensation on the red, checkered tablecloth.
“Why did you do that, Dan?” A voice asked. There was a new kid at the table with them. That was okay, but Dan had wished he’d asked permission to join them. It was the kid from the arcade earlier, the one who dressed in black and said cruel things. Had all that been today? It was getting hard to remember what day it was. What year.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Chris Murphy said.
As he said that the room darkened, the table disappeared and the bottle dropped to the ground, breaking into a million pieces.
When Chris Murphy was around, the arcade ceased being wonderful.
Dan awoke from his daydream just long enough to watch himself be torn in half.
CHAPTER 18
Closing off the kitchen door had been tricky, but Robby had been able to manage it.
There were very few electronics back in the kitchen beside the fryers and those were too far away from the door to be of much use. The door was analog and there was no alarm connected to it, so there was no waypoint for him to travel to and take control of. What he did instead was use the nearest wall outlet, materializing three strands of ectoplasm and squeezing them out of the socket. Even with all the nourishment from the EMTs, Kate and, now, Dan Boden, pushing a new armature out of the wall was taxing. Worse yet were the boxes stacked in front of the outlet that he had to push over. He was tired and it felt as if he were rolling a tube of toothpaste, trying to get the last drops of energy out of it so he could finally have some clean teeth.
Using the doorframe for stability, Robby sent the rope up to the keyhole, flattening the end out and filling the mechanism of the door with plasma. Even if Jason was able to wrestle the pry bar from him, the heavy steel door wasn’t going anywhere unless they could unlock it.
Funcave was now completely secure.
Hank and Yosef were now digested and Robby had been sure to hide any items he couldn’t breakdown (Hank’s glasses or Yosef’s metal fillings, for instance) where no rescue workers could find them. Suzanne, Eddie, and the Kent boy were well on their way to disappeared and Robby hoped to have them gone by the time the fire department arrived. He didn’t need any more witnesses.
Nothing was perfect, there were still some stained bits of carpet and the broken crane machine, but Robby wouldn’t be suspected of the crimes committed here tonight. He didn’t give much thought to what explanation the police would give it, but he was sure that it would be terrestrial. Besides, once tonight was over nobody would hear from Robby Asaro ever again. He’d be content. He already felt Chris’s hate subsiding, once all this was done, he would be back in control.
The flickering of memories had stopped now. Either that or he’d learned to ignore it. He knew every secret these people ever kept, so in a way he was closer to them than their parents, lovers or spouses. He was giddy with anticipation to know everything about Tiffany Park, anxious that he would be disappointed but sure that he wouldn’t.
But first things first: he had to make sure that neither Jason nor Tiffany were around to tell anyone what really happened.
CHAPTER 19
Jason had taken back his sweatshirt to wipe the slime off of the keys. Tiffany didn’t need it anyway, she’d dried off and now it had gotten hot in the arcade.
All the machines were radiating heat, she wondered if they had always been like that or that now since the arcade was blocked off from the bowling alley the heat was exacerbated. She knew that the real answer was probably worse, that inside each machine the circuits were smothered with those things, waiting to lash out at her and tear them apart. That’s why they were running hot.
“There are six silver ones,” Jason said, dropping the sweatshirt to the ground as he walked and leaving it there. He fanned the keys out in her direction. “Pick one,” he said.
She wanted to tell him to choose, that she didn’t want to be responsible for guessing wrong and having them stuck here any longer than they had to be. She thought of Dan, his right side being torn from his body from his shoulder down, the pathetic little hop that his good half had done before it flopped over, dead, the blood pouring out of him.
“That one,” she said, pointing to a key. She tried to choose the shiniest among them, hoping that the glint was some sort of divine signal, even though she didn’t believe in God. She didn’t believe in ghost octopi either, so stranger things had happened.
They passed the ticket redemption counter, but Tiffany hardly looked in that direction, she kept her eyes glued to the Skee-Ball. In her mind, she watched as tentacles rose up out of the holes, pelting the wooden balls at her and Jason, beating them to death as tickets streamed out of the slot, rewarding every hit. The arcade is striking back, she thought, not even the claw game is safe.
She could breathe easier when they had passed the row of machines. Even though the air was usually clogged with fried food, it smelled cleaner in this section of the building. It were as if the infection that had taken hold of the machines hadn’t reached this far, like there was still a chance to save Funcave’s soul.
They ducked under the lunch counter and walked through the doorway into the darkness of the kitchen. Without the arcade machines surrounding them, the air was cooler and Tiffany’s claustrophobia dissipated, but there was no light to see by.
She took Jason’s hand, instinctually, no longer thinking in boy/girl terms, just looking for another human being in the void.
“Fuck,” Jason gasped, but he’d only bumped into a cardboard box on the floor, the sudden obstacle causing him to jerk back. The keys jingled somewhere ahead of her and Jason struck up a flame, the small Bic lighter he carried forming shadows of orange and black in the room.
The floor at their feet was covered in white and red napkins, the Funcave insignia emblazoned on each. Stacks of the napkins rested inside the box to her right.
Behind the boxes, she could see the door. There was no crack at the bottom, no way to tell whether or not the real world lay on the other side. The lack of proof made it that much harder to believe that this was the end. That escape would be this easy.
“Hold this for me,” Jason said and handed her the lighter. She’d le
t it go out for a second, but flicked it on again. The metal of the starter burnt her thumb, but she didn’t care.
Jason held the key up to the light.
He gave her hand a squeeze. “Here we go,” he said. She wished he would stop talking, stop building it up. If you didn’t act like there was a chance it wasn’t going to work, then success seemed more likely.
There was a moment where it didn’t seem like the key was going to fit, but then it began to slide home. The metallic clatter as the grooves of the key ran over the tumblers was one of the sweetest sounds Tiffany had ever heard.
“Just turn it already,” she shouted.
“I’m trying,” Jason said and she could see that he was telling the truth, the veins on his hand and forearm stood out as he struggled to turn the key in the lock.
Tiffany opened her mouth to say something, but she didn’t know what. Instead of words, her mouth was spattered with the coppery taste of blood and sweat as Jason’s face seemed to cave inward.
No.
The tentacle had hidden itself inside the space between the door and the frame, made itself paper thin and struck while neither of them had been looking. Instead of the gentle slathering in ooze that the others had undergone, this time there was only one appendage. It had reduced itself to the size of a pencil, dense and sharp at the end, and shot into Jason’s nostril, looping back out his tear duct.
Tiffany watched for one horrifying moment as Jason’s eye rolled backward, displaced by the writhing mass that had wrapped itself around his cheekbone. The tentacle pulled and Tiffany heard the snap of bone.
Too late, she pressed the flame to the strand and watched as the rope melted with a hiss. It had been so easy to break the filament with flame, why hadn’t they tried it earlier? His tether to the wall broken, Jason dropped to the ground, dead.
The broken end of the thing that was still connected to the door lashed out, but not fast enough to catch her. She pressed herself flat against the boxes behind her, tripping and landing hard, the thin layer of napkins doing little to cushion the tile floor of the kitchen. In the struggle, the flame was extinguished again, she was momentarily in darkness, half expecting something to slither up her leg and end it before she could regain her sight.
Burning her thumb again, she rolled the starter, the flame refusing to appear the first attempt but jumping to life with the second.
The tentacle wasn’t chasing her down, but instead had wrapped itself around the doorknob. She watched as it flexed, the key still in the knob, the rest of the keys wobbling on the ring below. There was a dull snap and the key ring dropped to the floor, bouncing off of Jason’s lifeless chest.
The creature had broken the key off inside the lock.
Hopelessness, ashy and bitter, filled Tiffany Park.
“Why are you doing this?” she screamed, first at the tentacle itself, then at the room around her, sensing that she was surrounded.
The hopelessness peaked and then receded, replaced instead with anger. It was a nihilistic, proactive anger. She’d found the thing’s weakness too late to save her friends, probably to save herself, but she would not go quietly.
The knuckle of her thumb ached, but she pressed down on the lighter harder, ignoring the heat. With her free hand she gathered up a bundle of napkins and held them over the flame. They smoked and sparked, before lighting up the room in a brilliant amber glow. The flame ate them up before she could let them go, embers swirled at her feet but were not enough to ignite the napkins on the floor.
She tried again, taking a bigger handful this time, then laying them down against one of the boxes.
“Fuck you,” she yelled, to no one but the empty room. She filled her pockets with napkins and when those were full, she stuffed the waistband of her jeans.
The flames in the kitchen were tall now, but she couldn’t trust them to do the job. Exiting the kitchen, she ducked under the lunch counter and started for the ticket redemption area. She cut herself breaking the display case with her shoulder, but couldn’t tell how badly. She set fire to a row of stuffed animals, the cheap plush material smelled awful as it burned. The scent was a mix of plastic chemicals and bleached paper but it was still better than the fungal stink of the arcade.
She grabbed a half-engulfed bear by its neck and tossed it over to one of the Skee-Ball lanes. Out of the ball door, a tentacle emerged, touched the flames, and immediately fizzled.
For the first time in a long time, Tiffany wished that she could see herself. If only she was one of those girls that carried a compact in her pocket, she’d be able to see her wild pyromaniac hair, the look of destructive joy that had curled her grief-stricken mouth into something like a smile.
At the start of the arcade floor, she bent, found a section of frayed carpet and pulled it up, the fabric ripping easily. Around her the machines chirped, their volume cranked and the radio switched off. The bells and 8-bit music no longer sounded cheerful, but frantic. If it were a person, she’d be burning the arcade alive and loving it.
The carpet ignited and she used the flame to start up a wad of napkins, now soggy from the sweat of her belly. She tucked the sputtering mound of paper under Mortal Kombat, the demo screen showing a fight between Scorpion and Johnny Cage.
“Finish him!” the game cried, as if it understood irony. It took a moment but the particle board of the machinery went up.
From the coin door of Street Fighter Alpha, from where she hadn’t been watching, an appendage had snaked up her Vans, yanking her foot out from under her. It had her now, but she whipped her foot into the flames, not feeling the heat, and watched as the arm evaporated.
The blast had been strong enough to soften the soles of her shoes, but it didn’t hurt. The fire had cleansed her. That was all.
She lit up five more machines before she ran out of napkins. The room was thick with smoke, so she ducked down and crawled to the gate. There were no sirens yet, so much for the fire trucks that a small part of her brain still believed would rescue her.
Tiffany sat with her back to the front wall, the concrete cool against her spine. There she waited, but not for long. Above her, through the dense smoke, she could see movement.
In all the excitement she’d forgotten about the classic arcade. The ceiling writhed, the tentacles a frantic mass of movement. They knew that this was the end, but they were going to drop down upon her before they burned up.
“I killed you,” she said, looking up as they made their tentative decent, the boiling air causing them to drip like melting icicles. The heat was destroying them, but not fast enough.
It had a hold of her, she couldn’t fight it anymore. Even though she could feel its fear, its anguish at the arcade cabinets burning, it wasn’t angry with her. To Tiffany’s surprise it was trying to reassure her, let her know that she was going to be safe. If only she’d just trust it.
You can live on. Please. You’ll be royalty.
Maybe it was mind control, but she believed it. She called the presence by its name—Robby—and gave herself over to it, following it into oblivion as the fire raged around her.
EPILOGUE
George Allen’s home arcade was completely bitching, but it was not yet complete.
He’d lain down carpeting, bought a dehumidifier, and had five of his six top games already refurbished and installed, but there was still something missing.
This project had all started when he’d picked up a run down Neo Geo cabinet at a garage sale. He hadn’t planned to start collecting, it had just happened. A few clicks around on the internet and he’d landed on a series of videos telling him how to get the machine looking and playing like new.
George was now a hobbyist. Well, he was more than that really. In a day and age where most arcades were closed, most games being sent to the landfill, George was helping to preserve cultural artifacts. At least, that’s what he’d told his wife when she’d snooped around in his credit card statements.
One Burger Time, a Sinistar and a Bl
ack Knight pinball machine later and his dream arcade was nearly complete. It had to be, he was running out of room. There was only one machine he hadn’t tracked down yet: Ms. Pac-Man.
It was not a hard machine to find by any means. But he could never land on one in the right condition for the right price. The problem he was finding was that most of the machines for sale were reproductions that included Galaga in the same cabinet. No offense to Galaga, but George wanted an original.
His problem was solved when he stumbled on a Craigslist post about an estate auction being held at a burned-down arcade. He drove up to New Hampshire, paid his hundred bucks and came back home with a slightly-charred (but original) Ms. Pac-Man tied down to the bed of his truck.
Once he’d scrubbed off some of the carbon scoring and touched up the paint on the corners of the machine, he drilled open the coin door (the keys hadn’t been included in the auction) and poked around. Aside from a moist, fishy smell the insides of the machine looked pristine. Before he dug any deeper and opened the back of the machine up, he decided to try plugging it in. The colors on screen were bright and vibrant, the sounds were note perfect and the controls were slick and responsive.
He’d gotten a great deal and probably wouldn’t have to check the tube for a year or more.
§
Behind the screen, beyond where George Allen had thought to check, something stirred. The movement was strained and weak from the journey across two states, but the spongy material caked behind the marquee had held firm. In the days after being re-introduced to a new arcade, the spark of ideas and electricity allowed itself to feel stronger, until it had grown into a physical manifestation of that strength.
Inside of George Allen’s Ms. Pac-Man machine, there were two human hearts beating as one. One the heart of a princess, the other the heart of a God.