by Defendi, Bob
“How do you know it’s a magical Artifact?” Lotianna asked.
“It’s always a magical Artifact,” Damico said.
Blame Tolkien.
“DOOOOOOOOM!”
“Ah Hell, I think I hit his reset button.”
“DOOOOOOOOM! for this village! DOOOOOOOOM! for this nation! DOOOOOOOOM! for every living thing! DOOOOOOOOM!”
“Who brings us this doom, good sirrah?” Arithian asked.
“Hraldolf!”
“Oh, good grief, there’s someone in this world named Hraldolf?” Damico asked.
“He is the overlord! He rules the world. He rules the world, and now he’s going to destroy it!”
“Well, of course,” Damico said. “With a name like Hraldolf, he couldn’t have had a very good childhood.”
“He is seeking it,” the old man wailed, pacing back and forth, wringing his hands. He smelled like a locker room after a marathon on the surface of the sun. “He’s looking and looking, but he hasn’t found it.” The old man’s eyes rolled. “He’s seeking!”
“What?” Damico asked.
“DOOOOOOOOM!” the old man said. Omar ordered a beer.
“DOOOOOOOOM! for the kitties! DOOOOOOOOM! for the puppies! DOOOOOOOOM! for babies and the mothers and the sisters!”
“You think he’s going to do the whole phylum?” Damico asked.
“DOOOOOOOOM!”
They were just getting around to lunch when the old man got to the point. By then, Omar and Gorthander compared their new axes, and Damico and Lotianna had moved in close and talked about their favorite films.
“The Artifact is hidden!” the old man said.
“Oh, here we go,” Damico said, paying attention again.
Gorthander and Omar didn’t seem to notice, so Damico said, “Gorthander, Convenient Plot Exposition Man is getting to the point.”
“It is hidden, and he is looking for it. Search beyond the Swamp of Despair! Search past the Mountains of Fell Ruin! Search in the Heart of Darkness itself!” the old man said.
“Is there a bus tour?” Damico asked.
“DOOOOOOOOM!” the old man shouted, then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell over dead.
The silence rang like a giant bell. The kind of bell that’s all big and, you know, bell-like.
“Hmm,” Gorthander said. “My ears hurt.”
Damico stood up. “Shall we? We have to go past the Swamp of Fear or whatever.”
Omar and Gorthander looked at each other, then Gorthander said, “Sure. Why not?”
They stood.
“Oh, good friends, I feel we are about to embark on a grand quest of darkness and honor, of nobility and tears, of—” Arithian said.
“Don’t you start,” Damico said.
He offered Lotianna his hand, and she took it, putting her hand in his. They walked to the door, stepping over Convenient Plot Exposition Man. The corpse’s tongue lolled out. They stepped out the door.
“So, the world’s going to be destroyed, huh?” Gorthander asked.
“Yep,” Damico said.
“Good thing we were in that bar.”
“It is.”
“Sounds like a good disaster to break on.”
It does.
Chapter Fourteen
“Do you think they’ve figured out the book’s all about clichés?”
—Bob Defendi
raldolf built a crooked house.
And in this Crooked House, he placed a Crooked Man.
And for this Crooked Man, he built a Crooked Room.
And in this Crooked Room, they did their Crooked Things.
Hraldolf could hear the screams as he reached the bottom dungeon of his fortress. The shouts wailed and rose on the still air, echoing through the halls, bouncing off rock after rock. It sounded like the screams themselves lived in the deep narrow places of the castle.
These were the very bowels of his domain, and Hraldolf the very colonoscopy weaving through, checking for cancer, thankful he’d had a high colonic the other day to clean things up.
Wow. That metaphor got away from me.
But to finish it off, the problem was Hraldolf himself was the cancer. One can’t find oneself by heading to the torture chamber. If more people knew that, there would be a lot more discussion of bunnies and rainbows in history class.
Hraldolf reached the last hall of his dungeon, and threw open the door.
The room was fifty feet on a side because when Hraldolf enjoyed a good torture, he liked to stretch out. An assortment of racks made up the showcase with iron maidens positioned along the wall. Chairs and strapped tables allowed victims to be secured. Shelf after shelf of screws and saws and knives and hooks lined the walls.
There were ten victims in the room now, three being stretched and the rest strapped to chairs and tables. Most of them were unconscious, but one woman screamed and wailed on the rack closest the door.
“If I come here so often,” Hraldolf said, “why did I put this room at the farthest corner of my fortress?”
“My Liege?”
The Crooked Man glanced up from his work, a bit of drool creeping out of the corner of his mouth, his eyes alight with joy and satisfaction. The satisfaction was just a little too sexual for Hraldolf’s comfort.
The Crooked Man had wispy white hair like uncolored cotton candy. His eyes had turned milky green with age, his face drawn tight and withered with years of hate. He was practically a double blind case study proving the blood of virgins had no good effect on the skin.
Hraldolf shook his head. “Never mind. What are these people in here for?”
“You sent them here, Your Majesty.”
Hraldolf gestured impatiently. “Yes, yes, I know. Assume I’ve forgotten.”
“Well, this one, Your Majesty, wouldn’t have sex with you.”
Hraldolf stared down at the poor woman, drawn and pale on the rack and a strange thing happened. His stomach grew suddenly sick, twisting in his belly. He forced himself under control.
“Do you think spurning my advances is cause for torture?” he asked, trying to keep the quiver out of his voice.
“Your Majesty, I don’t think you actually asked. The way I understand it, she just didn’t offer—”
“Really?”
“—fast enough.”
Hraldolf closed his eyes. He was an evil man, he prided himself on it, but that was ridiculous. This was one of his subjects. He had a nation to run. Evil was one thing, but this was just insane.
“Thank you,” he said to the Crooked Man.
“Your Majesty.”
Hraldolf almost left but instead walked over to the poor woman. Blood encrusted her lips, and her dress was torn and soiled. Blood had dried on her legs too, and he didn’t want to think about what depredations the torturer had visited on her. He leaned down and whispered into her ear.
“I think it’s too late to save you, but if you have children, they will be dukes and duchesses.”
Then he straightened and considered the Crooked Man. “I don’t think I’ll be needing your services any longer.”
“For the whole day?” the man asked hopefully.
“Forever.” Hraldolf shielded the woman’s eyes with his hand and took off his mask.
Chapter Fifteen
“Travelogues are boring.”
—Bob Defendi
ountrysides are inherently tedious. Sure, there are bandits. Often, there are monsters and ninjas and farmers chasing traveling salesmen. Occasionally, there’s a tornado carrying off farmhouses, young girls, and small yapping dogs, but this is about all that ever happens in the countryside.
But this is a fantasy adventure, so they must travel overland to get to the Swamp of Incontinence (or whatever I called it). Maybe there will be a fight along the way. It depends on how Carl rolls on the Random Encounter Tables.
They walked down the road without wondering why a road led
to the Swamp of Ill Luck. Roads go places. There doesn’t have to be a reason, and besides, Damico had long since stopped wondering about this stuff, although that collection of Star Wars Action Figure guns was still a bit of a conundrum.
Conundrum is a great word.
Anyway, they pushed down this road, and it was surrounded by trees and bushes. Occasionally, they wound through some hills. None of this was clear to Damico because Carl wasn’t giving out decent descriptions. Evidently, he didn’t spend a lot of time in the sun.
They camped that night, and when they woke up the next morning, Gorthander made breakfast. Damico came out of his tent and watched the dwarf in confusion.
“Anything wrong?” he asked.
“Not much,” the dwarf said.
“Lotianna said she was cooking this morning,” Damico said. “Is she all right?”
The dwarf shrugged. “She called me a sexist asshole when I reminded her and stormed off into the woods.”
Damico frowned. “Strange.”
“Yeah, well, what are ya gonna do?” The dwarf pulled bacon out of the pan, dropping it into one of the five tankards of beer he’d set out.
Damico had just started toward the woods when Lotianna came walking back toward her tent. She wore a foul expression, and somehow, inexplicably, a shock of her hair had turned white. She resembled Zoe McClellan a little less too. Less wide-eyed ingénue, more Catherine Zeta Jones.
“Are you all right?” Damico asked.
“Yeah,” she said, stopping and squinting at him like she expected him to kick a kitten.
He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “Loti, I—”
“Hey. Don Juan DeGamer. No touchy!” She shrugged his hand off and continued her trudge back to her tent.
“But we—” He cut himself off.
Gorthander could hear anything he said, and Damico wasn’t the kind to kiss (or anything else) and tell.
She was probably in a bad mood. Maybe role-playing intimacy with Carl was too much for her. Damico shuddered. If he had to rely on people role-playing with Carl to get his genuine human contact, he had a very lonely time ahead.
But he wasn’t planning on staying long, couldn’t stay long. At any moment, he could slip away in the real world. He’d been shot in the head. He couldn’t expect to survive forever.
And he missed his late bills and his crappy car and his life. He missed the deadlines and the barrages of e-mail and all the things he’d hated about the real world. It had been his life. There might have been weeks when he nearly starved, but still his life.
He walked to Gorthander. Maybe he’d play with Carl a little. Make it seem like the man fished for compliments. “Are you enjoying this adventure?”
Gorthander blinked at him a few times. Since Damico was in the Game, Gorthander had to think he was a Non-Player Character and that meant Carl was playing him at the table. That question coming from Carl would seem desperate. Damico could only hope the boy had passed it on.
“Uh, yeah,” Gorthander said. “I guess.”
Gorthander let the conversation drop, and Damico smiled at him, not pressing things further. He hoped he’d caused a little awkwardness at the table. Even a feeble stab at Carl felt good.
He walked away.
“I mean,” Gorthander said, “I came back this week, didn’t I?”
Damico froze in place, his stomach plummeting, his limbs growing numb. He turned slowly to Gorthander and started to shiver, the implication of that statement roaring through his head. This week? This week?
He tried the question casually, hoping Carl would pass it, phrasing it so it would seem like a natural thing for the GM to say:
“This is the second week we’re playing, right?”
“Yeah,” Gorthander, Omar, and Arithian said, in perfect unison, though only one was outside their tents.
The second week. A full week had passed since he’d been shot in the head. A week of him bleeding to death? A week of him in the trunk? No.
By now, he had to be dead. Buried.
And Carl had gotten away with it.
Chapter Sixteen
“Death. Don’t talk to me about death.”
—Douglas Adams… no wait! Bob Defendi
e was dead. He couldn’t be dead. He had to be dead. No one survives for a whole week with a bullet in their head. No one.
Dead. The word screamed in him like a thousand upset Trekkies. Dead. It rang and tolled and vibrated in his braincase. Dead. They’d have to drill a hole in his fantasy head to get it out. Dead.
His legs collapsed underneath him, and he crashed ass-first into the grass. Dead, dead, dead. All dead.
He wanted to cry, wanted to scream, but he felt strangely hollow instead. In his mind, Laura San Giacomo, her hair white, screamed, “We… are… dead… and… this… is… Hell!”
And it was. This wasn’t a delusion. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t any earthly thing. This was his punishment. No Exit.
Someday, he’d meet the great horned one himself. Beelzebub. The Hoary Master of the Underworld. The Man in Sensible Hooves. He’d meet great Enemy’s eye, and Damico would ask what he’d done. He’d lived a good life. Helped those who needed it. Tried to make others laugh. Never taken advantage of a woman. Was nice to puppies and kittens, loved children and old people.
Maybe he’d been a little scathing in his criticism from time to time, but it had always been funny. All’s fair in love, war, and the cause of a good joke, right?
Wrong.
He was in Hell. This was his entire existence. Clock in, clock out. The Department of Ironic Punishments owns your sorry white ass now.
He scrambled to his feet, away from Gorthander. He thought the dwarf would follow him, but Damico saw someone standing in the woods about fifty feet away.
“Gorthander,” Damico said. “Company.”
Gorthander’s ax rattled behind Damico, as he reached for his new sword. The man in the woods started to withdraw, but stepped out of the woods instead.
It was Jurkand.
“You!” Damico shouted.
Jurkand moved out of the ambiguous underbrush. Damico walked over to meet him.
“You’re following us,” Damico said.
“I am,” Jurkand said.
Damico glanced over his shoulder at Gorthander who shrugged.
“At least he’s honest,” Gorthander said.
“I want to talk to you,” Jurkand said.
“All right,” Damico said.
“Alone.”
Gorthander frowned and shook his head. Damico nodded back, and Gorthander shook his head again. Damico nodded more vigorously, and Gorthander shrugged and walked back to his breakfast beer.
“What?” Damico asked. He’d rarely disliked another human being so much.
“Do you know who you are?” Jurkand asked.
Damico thought about that. “Yes. Do you?”
“You are the driving force.”
“I see.” He almost edged away from the man.
“I saw what you did to the Barmaid.”
“That was consensual.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Hmm.”
They stood near the edge of the clearing, putting the camp thirty feet behind them, a cluster of tents with the fire in the middle. A wispy column of smoke rose from the fire. A greasier column of smoke rose from each of the beers. Damico shuddered. He’d better cook tomorrow morning.
“So, what did I do to the Barmaid?”
“You gave her the gift of life.”
Damico looked at him sideways. “I’ve been told I was good before, but honestly, I never touched the barmaid.”
“You know what I mean.”
Damico shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
“There is something about you that changes people.”
Jurkand’s eyes were intense, penetrating. He leaned in as he talked. It creeped Damico
out.
“I don’t think I want to hear any more.”
Damico started to leave.
“You can’t leave this world,” Jurkand said.
Damico stopped and glared at Jurkand. What was Carl playing at? No, Satan. What was Satan playing at?
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You aren’t from here,” Jurkand said.
Damico squinted at him. “I’m from right around here. I’d show you on a map if you had one.”
Jurkand appraised Damico for what seemed like a long time. Then he said. “Yesterday I was nothing. I moved from whorehouse to whorehouse, and I never wondered why.”
“Most men don’t need a reason.”
“I had no spark. No essence. No soul. Then yesterday something happened. Where were you yesterday?”
“In the Perilous Dungeon.”
“And before that?”
The sound of the silenced gunshot, the sight of the acre of trunk. Damico had to shake off the images to answer. “On the way to the Perilous Dungeon?”
“I somehow doubt that.”
“What are you saying?”
“Yesterday, this world and everyone in it was dull, lifeless. We had no spark. Then you showed up. I didn’t understand it until I saw you talking to the Barmaid. I saw the effect you had on her.”
“You’re imagining things.” Damico walked away, shaking slightly.
The expression of horror in that girl’s eyes haunted him. He couldn’t be responsible for it. He was a game designer and didn’t bring horror to people. Well, unless he designed a horror game.
“I’m not having this conversation,” Damico called back over his shoulder.
“You’re afraid!” Jurkand shouted.
“Bug off!” Damico shouted back.
“Me, her. How many more people have you affected?” Jurkand shouted. “How many people, just because you’re here? What happens if you leave? If you take their lives with you, isn’t that murder? How many murders? We know of two! Is it ten? One hundred? How can you live with that?”
Lotianna stepped out of her tent, her brow furrowed, her face a scowl. “Shut up!” she shouted. “It’s too early in the morning.”