My disappointment at its ceasing was allayed when one sphere in particular drifted towards me until it came to a complete stop right in front of my face. The scene it held within it was that of a man making a speech as he accepted an award. As the camera lens of the globe moved in for a close-up of his face, I realized there was something very familiar about him. His intelligent, kind eyes twinkled with happiness; his handsome smile, which showed strong white teeth, was punctuated by deep dimples and revealed in it a touch of shyness that was mingled with his joy. I recognized him from somewhere and studied his face carefully, but, as with Ben and Geoffrey, try as I might, I could not place him. The scene zoomed even closer to his face and he seemed to be looking directly at me, as if from this globe he could actually see me; I was certain now that indeed I had met this man before and for the first time my amnesia really bothered me. No matter how hard I searched my mind, I still could not remember where or when. Suddenly I was distracted by a profound change occurring around me. The temperature, which had been so pleasant that I hadn’t even noticed it, began to drop without warning until was bone-chillingly cold. Still wearing only the flimsy robe that I’d been given, I began to shiver and hugged myself for warmth. The light then began to dim until I was surrounded by a darkness so complete that the entire atmosphere had become completely black; the only light to be had was consigned exclusively to the globes themselves. Soon, they too began to dim, losing all color and flattening until they were no longer spheres but merely black and white disks suspended in the void that surrounded me. The vignettes were gone, along with all motion and sound, for the disks contained now only static faces. The one right in front of me that contained the familiar man’s face began to change as well. All color had already run out of him, but now also had his smile, which slowly changed into a horrific grimace. The life drained out of his eyes and he stared at me with a dead expression. Sores began to cover his skin, which was now shrinking, making his eyes bulge and his lips pull away to reveal rotted teeth. It was with horror that my memories bombarded me, bursting into my brain like an exploding bomb. I remembered at last how I’d arrived at this mansion. It was with terror that I now recognized this man. He was the first ghoul I’d seen, the horrid creature that touched my arm, taking the life from it. I looked around and realized that I was surrounded by the faces of the others that had been with him, for they had all been changed into those ghastly beings as well. I began to shake but this time it was not from the cold. Abject fear gripped me, squeezing my throat and chest so viciously that I could not breathe. The man in the disk looked me in the face with dead, sunken eyes that somehow still could see, opened his mouth and grossly, grotesquely rasped out “Help me.”
I screamed.
The world turned to nothingness after that.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Is she okay?” I heard a soft voice ask.
“She’s breathing fine,” another whispered. “I think she’s just out cold. Ashley, Ashley, are you alright?”
I wanted to respond but couldn’t because this was no ordinary sleep. I felt drugged, as if someone had slipped me a mickey. I struggled hard to come to my senses but managed only one tiny grunt.
“Can’t we just leave her here? She seems awfully comfortable,” said the voice that I now realized belonged to Illea.
“We can’t,” Ben said. “The purge is going to hit her tonight and I didn’t get around to showing her where any of the bathrooms on this floor are. I never imagined that the essence could hit her this hard. It’s never knocked anybody else out like this before.”
“Everyone else was touched by Arrosha first. Since Arrosha hasn’t even met with her yet, I’m surprised she even agreed to let Ashley take essence.”
“You’re right. That possibility just never entered into my mind.”
“None of us predicted it, Ben. There wasn’t any precedent. Ashley’s the first person untouched by Arrosha that we’ve ever known to take essence.”
“Poor kid, I hope that the purge isn’t too bad for her. I was just assuming that she’d react the way we all did. Oh well, let me see if I can carry her up to bed.”
Strong arms cradled me. As Ben lifted me from the floor, a small “uumph” escaped his throat.
“Is she heavy?” I heard Illea say.
“Not too bad, really,” Ben answered. “I’m strong, I can manage.”
As he walked, I felt a reassuring, floating sensation, one that I hadn’t felt since I was a small child and still light enough for my parents to carry. I laid my head against Ben’s strong chest and gave in to the rare luxury of the floating sensation. In my deep sleep, I was barely cognizant of Ben’s fluid movements at one point coming to a stop, a halt that was followed by a low hum and a feeling of ascension; for a fleeting instant I realized that we must be on the elevator. My mind transcribed our rise in the lift into a vision of flight over a tropical island, a short dream that ended as soon as we reached our floor. As Ben continued walking, I tried as hard as I could to wake up so that he wouldn’t have to carry me further, but the harder I struggled, the more deeply into sleep I fell, only aware enough to be relieved that I was with Ben and Illea, that I was among people I could trust.
“Here, let me take her slippers off and then I’ll get the door,” Illea’s voice broke though the cotton clouding my brain.
“Thanks.”
I next felt myself gently lowered onto clean, crisp sheets, a soft, sweet-smelling pillow tucked underneath my head.
“Boy, she’s really out,” I heard Ben say.
“Speaking of which, I’m pretty bushed myself. I think I’ll turn in, too.”
“I’ll see you in the morning, Illea.”
“Goodnight, Ben.”
With no more sounds to awaken me, my slumber deepened into absolute unconsciousness.
After being out for what seemed like only seconds, I awoke with a start, my heart pounding. Where was I? What had awakened me? Why was it so dark? My eyes searched for any light to help me orient until I quickly found some small illumination peeking out from underneath the closed bathroom door. That accomplished, my panic began to subside as I, now fully awake, remembered where I was. I recalled now that I was in a mansion, sharing a room with a woman named Illea; I could hear her breathing in the other bed. I remembered my day with Ben, the tour he gave me and the people to whom he introduced me. New questions came into my mind. How did I get here? Where exactly was “here”, anyway?
My mind drifted back to the odd meal, for lack of a better word, that I had shared with the group last evening. What was that strange substance they called “essence” which we had sucked through the hookah hoses? Whatever it was, it was incredible. I still felt thoroughly satiated by it, nourished to my core with a totality that I had never known before in my life. It seemed that I’d just been introduced to something that made food obsolete, a poor substitute that in my entire life I would never again desire as long as there was essence be had.
Still, that had been an awfully strange adventure, so exotic, so seductive. The dining room with its huge pillows, its hookah, its caravan-tent atmosphere had seemed like a fantasy. Actually, everything I’d experienced since arising today had been dreamlike, from the mansion itself with its curious art collection to its people, all far too flawless to be real. Speaking of unreal, a bizarre recollection suddenly popped into my mind. Had I actually witnessed the group having an orgy right in front of me or was it just a dream brought on by the essence? Then I remembered the creature that the orgy had turned into before it turned back into the group quietly sucking on their hoses and realized that, thankfully, the orgy had not been real. I’d been hallucinating rather wildly, hadn’t I? Yet I hadn’t found it at all frightening because the essence felt so natural. On the contrary, I’d felt completely safe and at ease inside of that otherworldly experience of transcendent ecstasy. Events of the essence trip began to come back to me now, as I reveled in its afterglow, reliving the joy of the sex visions, the column of light
, the floating orbs. I’d enjoyed every moment of it. I’d been completely enchanted by the vignettes of the lives of the people in the globes until…
I clasp my hand in front of my mouth to contain the scream that tried to escape my lips. The globes had changed at the end, flattened into dead, black and white disks while the people within them had turned into animated, rotted corpses right in front of my eyes. That was the key, wasn’t it, the secret of how I’d come here, the secret my mind had withheld from me, the secret that no one else seemed to know. A mental floodgate opened and memory surged from it, forcing itself into my consciousness without check, bringing with it the nightmare creatures that had chased me down, driven me to this house, had actually fed off me until I very nearly died.
They must surely still be out there, those ghoulish fiends, just waiting for me to exit the safety of the mansion so that they could continue their feast of human energy. I needed to warn the others immediately. We had to get out of here, all of us. We had to escape. But how? We were miles from nowhere, so isolated that even Ben didn’t know where the nearest neighbors lived. From the beginning I thought it was odd that he didn’t know more about the area in which he claimed to have lived for so long, but maybe it was only because he never drove out of it. Ben did say that the group took occasional trips into the city, so I knew that there definitely was a getaway route. For all I knew, with all of this massive wealth lying around, the mansion probably had a hangar adjacent containing a private jet or something of that sort at its disposal. But even if there was air transportation available, how could we get past those murderous creatures to get to it? Of course, I thought, even if they didn’t drive out of the area, there must be at least one car in a garage for a mansion this size to get to the hangar. Ben would know. I needed to wake up Illea and tell her about the danger so that she could warn him. Ben would surely have an escape plan. We might have to stay put and wait until the morning, so we could see what we were facing, but whatever it took, Ben would get us out of here and safely into the city.
With a sense of renewed urgency, I jumped out of bed to wake Illea, but as soon as my feet hit the floor, still more memories flooded my mind and in a flash I remembered why some of the people in this mansion, strangers before today, looked so incredibly familiar to me. While I didn’t recognize all of them individually, I did remember Ben, Geoffrey, Illea and the three dark-haired women. I also remembered the group as a whole because they were all such impossibly gorgeous young people and therefore, impossible to forget. Yet, today, before now, I had forgotten them. I now remembered how completely intimidated I’d been by virtue of their sheer physical perfection alone when first I saw them. I’d felt as if I’d accidentally walked in upon a high-end magazine photo shoot, uninvited. That information in and of itself was plenty to jostle my memory. Yes, I had seen them before, in a bar of some sort. What was its name? The Crypt? Yes, that was it, The Crypt in New Orleans. I now found it hard to believe that I was, at present, living in a mansion side by side with the beautiful people by whom I’d once felt so intimidated, people to which I’d felt so inferior as I sat within the confines of that tomblike bar, a bar that had employed such a rude, ugly bartender whose looks hadn’t stayed still but kept changing.
I sat back down upon the bed as my mind went into overdrive when even more memories began rushing back, far too rapidly for me to take in all at once. I remembered now who I was and that I’d been vacationing in New Orleans. That was how I’d met those two people named Virginia and Marcus. I then remembered a man named Edmond. I had dreamt for a long time about Edmond, hadn’t I? It seemed as if I was supposed to be on some kind of important mission for him, but I could not remember what it was. I now remembered someone giving me a necklace with a little dragon amulet. The necklace! I recalled that it was extremely vital and that I should never take it off. Did I still have it? My fingers quickly flew to my neck to check and I breathed a sigh of relief as I found the piece still there, intact. It had buried itself painlessly into my flesh and protected its existence by disguising itself as the raised, tattooed body art that Ben had admired so. How could a simple necklace be so smart and so cunning? It was obvious this was no ordinary necklace, that somehow it knew that by disguising itself, no one would steal it from me and that I could not take it off, not even for a moment, not even for something as innocent a bath or to allow the curious a closer look.
Extra memories brought only extra questions. When I asked myself why the necklace was so important, I remembered a woman named Rochere and began to shake without knowing why, feeling even more helpless than I had before. Why did the thought of her upset me so? I couldn’t remember. Some of my memories were intact, or at least they seemed that way and there were others nagging away at me that I still could not recall. Why did my recollections have to be so splotchy? With a memory resembling Swiss cheese more than anything else, what on earth was I supposed to do, what actions was I supposed to take? How could I possibly help Edmond from here? I was lost, I had hit a dead end. I remembered that whenever I hadn’t know what to do before, whenever I’d wanted to turn back, there was always Virginia to guide me or Marcus to push me forward, often more aggressively than I would have liked. Whenever I was in any real trouble, although the manner of that trouble was still foggy to me, Edmond always appeared to me in my dreams to bail me out. Since coming to this mansion, I’d had no guidance whatsoever, no dreams about Edmond. I couldn’t stay here. I had to get back on track, back to the apartment in New Orleans so that Edmond could tell me what I needed to do next. But how? I had no bearings. It wasn’t as though I’d bought a map, rented a car and driven here. I’d simply gone through that horrible door at The Crypt and been unceremoniously plopped into this locale, wherever it was. For the time being, like it or not, I was stuck in this mansion. There was absolutely nothing that I could do right now except to try to remember as much as possible and try to work out a plan. In order to make out that plan, though, I needed to know a lot more, so I tried as hard as I could to fill in the holes, to recall everything that had happened before my memory had been snatched away. As always, though, when forced, the memories would not come, choosing to return to me only on their own, in their own order and in their own time. I had no choice but to leave well enough alone, even though it was driving me crazy that I could not recollect every single detail at will.
Maybe it would help me to free-associate. A good place to start might be with Rochere, that horrible old woman who’d frightened me in her office, the one it seemed that Edmond and the others feared so much. I hated her. I remembered her laughing at me when I was lying face-first in that alley. She hadn’t been old then, though, had she? She’d been young and beautiful with long, black hair. It hit me then. I’d seen her here at the mansion, or at least I’d seen her image. Her portrait was in the mosaic of the Great Room floor. She was also the woman portrayed in the center fresco of that same room’s ceiling, the one that was being catered to, the one that was being worshiped. Hers was the face of the polymorphic figure in the huge crystalline statue as well. She was Arrosha. Rochere was Arrosha. “We are her children,” Ben’s words burned in my brain. My mind reeled as I realized the implications of his statement, sending me to the edge of an anxiety attack. Then I remembered the words of the undulating beast of my essence vision. “Join us. Join us. We want you.” My anxiety skyrocketed. I worked to stay calm but it was hard. Rochere was evil and the head of a cult and I was in the dead center of that cult. I could trust no one here. What should I do now? I couldn’t let on that I knew, that was certain.
My mind reeled with more questions. Why did this cult even exist? What part did they play in Rochere’s insane nightmare of a game? How did they fit into the schemes of that horrible witch? Had they truly been ignorant of those fiends that attacked me or were they just playing dumb? I realized now that I wasn’t just stuck inside this mansion, I was trapped, living in the belly of the beast itself. How could I possibly escape from these people? As I tried to c
alm myself, I realized that despite all logic, some elements inside this situation still refused to make sense to me. All the pieces would not fit into place because my gut wouldn’t let them. For instance, with my memories gone, I understood why I had not recognized the group from The Crypt, but why had they not recognized me? Especially Ben, for he had been searching to recall where he’d seen me before but could not. Had she wiped part of his memory as well? Besides, Ben was no vicious monster. I had truly liked him from the beginning and could not begin to imagine him as an evil minion. He wasn’t even a slick charmer. While there was always the possibility that I could be wrong, my deepest instincts told me that he was a good, decent man, far more kind and honorable than most of the men that I’d ever met. Also, except for Geoffrey and those three weird women, the rest of the bunch seemed pretty unthreatening as well. Could it be possible that they were all such accomplished actors that they had me fooled completely, or were they truly ignorant of Rochere’s real nature? Perhaps they were merely unknowing dupes, victims themselves that she had seduced and mislead. If so, might it be a chink in her armor that could be used against her? It seemed that at one point I had been told that Rochere had her weaknesses. Surely, with all of her scheming and expertise, the return of my memory could not have been a part of her greater plan. Why was I remembering so much right now? It had to be a mistake. What had caused it? There’d been only one major shift in my thinking since this morning and that had come as a result of taking essence. Rochere must have misjudged its impact on me, never realizing that it would cause my memory to return. The far more important question to which I desperately needed the answer, though, was what had caused me to lose my memory in the first place? I needed to know, because I couldn’t chance that happening again.
The Nightmare Game Page 30