by Nick Cole
Free Climb.
It was disabled when I’d first seen it, but that was back when the Samurai had only one hand. Now it’s active. I click it and the Samurai’s fingers splay outward, the axe either returning to inventory or dropping off into the darkness. Sooner than I expect, the Samurai’s fingers find purchase, and a quick assault of rapid damage shotguns my health bar. But the Samurai’s fall stops. In the dark of the pit, the Samurai hangs precariously from the jutting lip of a carved and leering demon, similar, vaguely, to the one I’d seen on my last fall from the ledge where I’d fought Creepy.
I look up. The hole above me is raining paving tiles and water from the pool. A lone skeleton tumbles past me, falling off into the blackness below. I see Plague’s dark outline against the moonlit night above. He stands among the burnt matchstick silhouettes of the skeletons and the night and the moon.
Part of the stone staircase spirals down through the demon’s head, out one eye, in through the other and out the mouth just below my handhold. My movement keys bring the Samurai liquidly up onto the rotting stone staircase that spirals through the demon’s head. Again, I check above and see Plague, torch in hand, being followed by a collection of ancient bony warriors, descending the staircase, which must have begun right below where I’d stood in the Pool of Sorrows.
I could fight them on the stairs one at a time, maybe two, but they’d have the advantage of numbers and attacking from above. Not the best position to defend.
I start down the staircase, into the unknown.
The stairs weave down into the pit, dancing sharply inward then darting out crazily over dizzying drops into misty nothingness. There are flickering shadows at every turn as lonely drips and mournful disembodied moans resound over ambient. The torchlight of my pursuers makes me nervous. At times I see it high above, winding down along the precarious rocky stairway. At others, not at all. I experience a sense of vertigo as I move downward quicker than I probably should, occasionally striking out at shadows I suspect of being something more.
At last I reach the bottom. Above me, I hear the thump of Plague’s hobnailed boots and an occasional wet gurgling cough coming down the well after me. Behind those sounds, I hear the clickety-clack of the skelies, their bony feet scurrying down the stony staircase. In front of me a wide hall stretches off into misty nether. A sickly green iridescence washes the darkness all about me. I can see the outlines of canted tombstones and crosses standing out against the gloom, leading off into nothing. The ambient soundtrack begins with an abrupt twang from an electrified bass guitar. It’s disturbing and lonely. Then it’s joined by runs of descending minor scales from a Hammond B3 organ.
This hall does not bode well for my Samurai if the ambient soundtrack is any indicator.
I move forward, equipping the axe from inventory. I move cautiously, one step at a time. There’s danger here, a trap of some sort, but from where and how, I don’t know. In the back of my head a voice screams for me to move faster and get as far away as I can from Plague and the skelies, but now, with my spider sense on overdrive, I have to find the trap first. Otherwise . . .
It comes quickly, maybe thirty feet down the hall with no end in sight. From the walls and the floor, hands, necrosis dark, oozing green, patches of white bone underneath, erupt like an explosion.
Everywhere bony hands are reaching for me.
The simulated undead crawl from beneath the programmer’s vision of a rocky and forgotten tomb tunnel. I run forward fast, moving quickly, hoping the end of the passage lies somewhere shortly ahead. A zombie, gap toothed and grinning through green patches of ragged flesh, rises up, shambling and abrupt. I crush its head with one terrific blow of the axe. Already two more shamble after me, moaning like burning paper scraps consumed in a fire. I step back, raise the axe, then smash it down on the first, almost cutting it in two. The other swipes at me for a paltry amount of damage. He gets it next with a twirling blow from my axe. Beyond these, the hall stretches out over ground that’s becomes like a sea of waving grass. Except it’s not waving grass. There’s no breeze down here.
Fields of the rising hands of the undead. Crawling out of the earth. Not waving. Clutching.
The Axe of Skaarwulfe glows a soft, bloody red, casting a thin light like a cone of hell in a gray shadowy nightmare. Behind me zombies shamble forward. Ahead, they wait, moving slightly, as if sensing my approach.
I have no other choice.
I go forward swinging, slashing, hacking my way through the Halls of the Damned.
By dawn, the wan New York winter light begins to suggest itself into the room Sancerré and I once shared, as the game announces shutdown. I receive an e-mail on my Petey telling me when the game will resume next. But even as the unseen game masters tidy up the business of a black-market game, I am still crunching my way through zombies. For close to five hours, the sounds of brittle broken bones and wet gurgling slaps have resounded across my room as the Axe of Skaarwulfe weaves destruction in wide, sickening arcs across and along the Halls of the Damned. For the past hour I’d seen a massive foundation rising off in the distance of the cavernous hall. Maybe the tower, I hoped.
By no means have I killed all the zombies. There are too many of them. Fifty-seven thousand, maybe more, maybe less. I’ve lost count. It’s unreal. It’s insane. It’s the dream of a madman with a penchant for masochism and a degree in game design. In-game, behind me, off in the distance, I hear Plague’s unholy band pursuing me. But they too have to fight the zombies. The blunderbuss resounds in deafening cannonades that echo off the walls of the murky chamber. Sprays of lead shot find purchase in thick, wet, pulpy decomposing flesh that sounds all too real over ambient.
I ignore it and continue to cut a path of destruction toward the foundation of the tower. Soon, within the last moments of the game, I reach a rising platform of rickety wooden stairs and a giant iron door leading into the foundation of the massive stone edifice.
Then the game thanks me for not dying and hopes that I will next time. The screen goes dark, leaving only a jack-in-the-box laughing in sickly long loops on my monitor. I turn my computer off, stand, and immediately feel slightly sick. My spine and skull ache. Blood courses into areas it seems unfamiliar with. My right index finger refuses to bend. Too many, far too many, clicks of the mouse.
I stumble for the couch and crash down into it, telling myself I need pancakes and milk and bacon and light, or life? I’m deciding which when I realize I’m sleeping, or dead.
I couldn’t have gotten up even if I’d tried.
In my dreams, I’ve never left the Halls of the Damned. Sancerré is there and so is Iain. Both keep telling me it’s great to be there and that sooner rather than later I’ll understand why. I keep trying to use my axe to slay milling zombies that are somehow a threat to Sancerré, but I can’t lift it from the ground. So I drag it behind me through crowds of lingering zombies holding martini glasses. Except all the zombies are really actors, extras, waiting for the director to call “action” and then, I’m convinced, they’re really going to get me. In the dream I’m sure of it. Even Kiwi is a zombie. He says, “Cheers, mate,” and then the beer he’s just drunk drains out through his ragged throat. The bony man, Faustus Mercator, is there too. He’s grinning, talking to zombies, nodding at me through cigarette smoke and real live jazz somewhere far off.
Chapter 16
It’s not really sleep. Not with battlefield dreams of automatic weapons and other nightmares that clutch and grasp from inside gray-green shadows. Then it’s white morning light and too many cigarettes as I lie, almost catatonic, on the sofa. Sancerré’s sofa. A sofa someone will probably soon come and take away.
What will be left of us then?
Out on the streets it’ll be cold. Winter hasn’t even fully invested the city yet. Up on the Grand Concourse, on the protected walkways, they’re just taking down the last of the New Year’s Eve decorations around New Times Square. But it costs money to get up there, and down here the streets
of the world’s once most populous city remain quiet, locked beneath a deep blanket of snow.
I check my Petey and there’s no message from Sancerré.
I’ve got six hundred e-bucks sitting in an account and a free dinner at someplace called Seinfeld’s. But getting off the couch is more than I can handle. I want scotch, some food. I need to transfer that six hundred into my account before the next automatic and final rent demand hits in three days.
Meanwhile, the fridge holds nothing besides the cheese that passes for even the vaguest notion of sustenance, and the bottle of scotch is way over there, across the room.
I doze, and when I wake to the pulse of my Petey, I notice a lit cigarette still dangling from my lips. How did I start smoking again?
It’s an anonymous text. Probably some spammer has managed to penetrate my feeble FreeWare defenses.
Tonight Only. Elite Membership. The Chasseur’s Inn.
“Really, tonight only!” I exclaim sarcastically. I hate spam. I’m supposed to believe that tonight only, I’ll be allowed into only the most coveted of nightspots, the Elite Lounge, where celebrities go to disappear, a place about which little is known other than the obligatory “what is not known” teaser. My hatred of spam almost drives me into a fury that would have surely sent me across the room for scotch. And ice, if I was truly committed. Instead I manage to flop one leg down onto the floor where it refuses further service.
Game hangover is real. I don’t need to see the public service ads to know about it. I’m living it.
My Petey double pulses. Must be important. It’s a message that, whoever sent it, manages to answer all my social avatar’s questions and ensure the necessity of an Emphatic Message.
Be there tonight, PerfectQuestion reads the message.
Underneath, in a font best reserved for fifteenth-century cartographers, Faustus Mercator. Your new pal.
I’m up, and my head throbs from the sudden change in altitude. I grab the scotch bottle and carry it to the fridge where I find one ice cube. Outside, the city is smothered in ice. Inside my fridge, not so much. I pour two fingers, think better of it and use the whole fist. It’s hot, and it vanquishes game hangover in a round.
Things are getting weirder and weirder.
I bring up my music app and crank out some “White Rabbit.” I’m going deep old school, way back to the days of the early minutes of Second Grunge. The Cobains let go and drag the melody down to the basement. I think about Faustus Mercator and wonder, not if he is dangerous, but how dangerous he is. Probably very. Very dangerous. Muy dangeroso. The guy radiates creepy menace in a way JollyBoy aspires to.
Under the influence of my morning scotch, a line by Warren Cosmo, lead singer of the Cobains, keeps running through my mind: “He be dangerous so I holla, ’cause it’s not just another hookah-smoking caterpil-lah.” I’m Alice. So the caterpillar could be . . . I don’t know what. WonderSoft collectively . . . or Enigmatrix. And the bony man, Faustus Mercator, he’s definitely the Cheshire cat. The seventeen-minute musical interlude complete with ancient Hammond B3 organ à la the Doors sets in, and I wonder if I’m Alice, or is Sancerré? And what is RiotGuurl?
RiotGuurl. Her life’s complicated? Mine’s a SoftChip diagram with a Marto-Chinese instruction manual. First off, I’m about to get kicked out of our . . . my apartment, and my only hope to save myself from indigence is to finish, and not just finish but beat, an illegal online game that may or may not resume, not just anytime soon, but ever. Second, my girlfriend has definitely gone off the radar and for all intents and purposes is sleeping with someone else. Add bonus points for the fact that she refuses to go gently, in my mind, into that good night of lost loves. My real job, the one where ColaCorp is being handed its lunch every round, is just a few battles away from no longer being an actual job. Finally, there’s this creepy guy, Faustus Mercator, and he wants me to present said pass to the fully enhanced gorilla hormone-juiced goon squad that call themselves doormen at the most exclusive club in Upper New York City, the Chasseur’s Inn, and waltz right in for . . . what?
“What” is the question, PerfectQuestion.
Add that said doormen slash gorilla goons have been known to deliver a courtesy beating for mere brazen attempts to inquire about entry membership into aforementioned exclusive club. And on top of that, a gentle hint to a coworker for possible “more” . . . has been rebuffed. I mean, let’s call it as it lies. I’ve been rebuffed. Nothing new there, and yet . . . the sting. No, sting’s not the right word. The . . . matter . . . the matter . . . I need more scotch . . . the matter (ahhhh) remains unresolved.
I drift under the embrace of warm smoky scotch and imagine the possibilities of RiotGuurl. Things are afoot. Strange doings. And soon my drifting turns to sleep. Peaceful, necessary, perfectly undisturbed sleep with bonus heavy snoring and some drool.
There are no dreams of war unrequited, or even love unrequited for that matter. When I wake a few hours later, I’m not hungover, and outside my window gentle sleet is falling thickly across Gotham.
I wonder if it will ever stop. I wonder if it’s been snowing my entire life and any change, any sun remembered, is just a dream, a fantasy I once had. I dress and hit the silent streets. Above, or so the view from my doorstep tells me, the city lights up there are coming on, pulsing beneath the clouds that separate old New York from Upper New York above. I’m headed there, and my one serviceable gray suit and white button-down had better cut the mustard for both Seinfeld’s and the Chasseur’s Inn. I’ve done what I can to my hair and gone with restrained messy. I need a shave, and the razor I don’t find reminds me that Sancerré had been leaving long before she ever left. I wonder how long. Which moments were real? Which were mine to remember?
The SkyBus at 30 Rock is the best place to go up for me. As long as possible, I want to stay off the grid, and the farther I have to walk to get to a station, the less anyone who might be watching knows about where I actually live.
30 Rock smells of urine and burnt-out energy-efficient light tubes. I avoid a collection of bums singing in the lobby around a portable barbecue the Port Authority guards won’t leave the safety-glass secure elevator transit zone to put out. I pay the forty bucks to get up to the Grand Concourse. I guess I’m dressed okay, not well, but well enough, because the security guy is more interested in wrinkling his nose at the bums than grading my ability to stay up on the concourse. I receive my pass and head to the boarding staircase for the next SkyBus headed uptown. Literally.
I have until six a.m. tomorrow up there. Then my pass expires. Then I’m an illegal.
The bus is clean and nice, with subdued lighting, chrome fixtures, and massive soft recliners emblazoned with the Upper New York logo. Within a minute, under the pressure of acceleration, the brand-new shuttle bus climbs upward along the rail that leads to Upper New York. We’re almost vertical as my seat gently adjusts itself so that I’m sitting upright as we climb straight into the sky.
I already feel the difference the concourse brings out in a person. It’s as if you’re leaving whatever you were below, behind you. You’re someone else now, and the acceleration is freeing you from that other guy who slips off your back and into the vents at the rear of the bus and down into the icy gutters of New York.
It’s only a seven-minute trip, but the bus dispenses a limited amount of cocktails. I settle on a another scotch, no mixer, and by the time I use my Petey and get a scan for the bill, the drink comes and I’ve got four minutes to finish it.
Then again, do I need to finish it now? I could take it with me. Drinking on the Grand Concourse in the middle of a snow-swept night, headed for a great meal, then the most exclusive club above town, would be . . . something to remember.
The drink makes it with me past security, and I step out onto the wide curving concourse. Snow cascades horizontally through the blue light thrown up from the floors of the immense walkway. It should be icy cold high up, but the environmental systems here are state of the art, and any cold
is kept at bay by silent superconductors, exchanging cold air for stable energy, in turn heating the terraces, supplying power, and holding the Grand Concourse to its four arched anchors over old New York. After all the hurricanes and floods of the past, this was once considered the greatest engineering project of all time, an entire city built in the clouds.
Until the SkyVault.
Miles above, in low earth orbit, another city, this one built in space, rides shotgun over the planet Earth, exchanging goods with intersystem freighters returning from Mars. There are echelons of reality, and then there are echelons beyond reality. And then there is the SkyVault. Tonight, as I make my way to the edge of the Grand Concourse, which winds itself like a broad flat river through the serpentine mesh of upraised spider legs and wraith fingers that are the high towers of Upper New York, tonight the Grand Concourse is enough for me. The Grand Concourse is a ceiling for old New York that I’ve stared at for a long time, but really, it’s just one of the global anchors for the SkyVault. It’s a floor I’ve only been to once before. I’ve remembered that day ever since as one of the best of my life. It was unreal, and my mind kept rejecting the memory and the dream of the boy I once was the last time I was here, the one time when my family spent an entire day here in Upper New York. Or at least my mind wanted to reject it. I guess deep down I didn’t. Instead I dreamed about it. I used to draw pictures of it as a kid every day after our first visit. A fantastic city made of arches, hovering over the remains of old New York. Finally, seventeen years later I’ve returned. Seventeen years after my family attended a one-day company picnic up here, I’m back. I’d always imagined I’d get back up here a lot sooner than I did.
I remember everything about that day.
I remember later, as a teenager, forcing myself to forget how amazing everything had been to a nine-year-old boy. It was too hard to live with in the town we were from, and to know that all this, the bright fingers that clutched at the sky floating above, was here and that this was every day for some people, while for others it was just a moment. A day at PlanetDisney. A day to be held for just a moment in your hand, and then forever in your mind.