The Nightmare Game

by Martin, S. Suzanne

  “The technology,” he went on, “is above her. She’s kinda like a really good driver that’s useless under the hood. She’s an expert at usin’ her machines, but she don’t know a thing about fixin’ them. Anything new she finds out about how her stuff works is strictly by accident.

  “To this day, she still don’t know all the rules of the amulets. She ain’t as familiar with them as you’d think she’d be. Except for the stuff she found out in the very beginning, it’s almost like they’re just about as new to her as they are us or somethin’. She used to think they were easier to get than they really are. She’s been learnin’ a lot of their rules the same way that we’re learnin’ – trial and error. It’s why she don’t have them yet.

  “That ain’t her only failin’, either. She underestimates people. For instance, she wound up givin’ the group way too much essence and as a result, Geoffrey figured out that she was druggin’ him with the water.”

  “I was wondering about that,” I said. “Why’d she do that?”

  “It was an accident. She was experimenting with makin’ those zombie things to bring you down, to make you helpless so she could steal your memory. She learned with me that she had to use somethin’ like the zombies to force you to take the water. It was the only way to remove your resistance. Get rid of the memories and you get rid of the resistance. Simple as that. Even with those tricks, though, as long as she’s been around people, and it’s been a long, long time, she still underestimates us like crazy.”

  “Max,” I said, leaning up to the bar and lowering my voice to a whisper. Max said she wasn’t listening, but I still felt paranoid. “The guy in the portrait, he said something about her using black magic.”

  “Yeah, she uses it,” he replied. “She’d use it a whole lot more, but it don’t like her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “See, the thing about black magic is this. For it to work well, for it to work easy, you gotta bow down to it and she won’t bow down to anybody or anything. So she don’t use it except when she really has to, when the technology won’t support what she wants to use it for. She’s used her dark magic a lot against you, cause the machines of her technology don’t like goin’ against that necklace you wear. Oh, she hates usin’ black magic, but she’ll do it if she has to, and she’s got to lay it on thick to fight that amulet. It’s why it takes so much outta her and why, when she absolutely has to use it, it makes her look like death.”

  “What else did she use against me?” If Max was going to be such a fountain of information, it really behooved me to pick is brain right now while he was in the mood to talk.

  “Oh, man, you got the full sales pitch. They really laid it on thick for you. She played Ben as much as she was tryin’ to play you. He was a true believer and actually thought he was doin’ somethin’ good for you, the poor schmuck.

  “Take that transformation ceremony, for example. I’m so glad you didn’t fall for that one!”

  I was too embarrassed to tell Max that I almost did.

  “She got all those saps believing that it means something, when it’s just a bunch of bull. It seems real to her followers, but it’s just more of her razzle-dazzle. It’s just a cover, a sham ceremony that’s been put in place to get hold of the amulet. Transformation ceremony, my ass! I’ll give her one thing – she certainly is patient when it comes to gettin’ that amulet, that’s for sure. The ceremony has nothing to do with the changes they experience.” Max rolled his eyes, a gesture that made his current deformities look even more grotesque. “Arrosha uses her ancient technology to perform those transformations. Hell, she’s used transformations on me more times than I can count. The whole thing’s just a scam that’s set in place waiting for whoever the guy in the portrait sends her way.”

  “Max, you’ve been here a long time. Do you know where she keeps the man in the portrait? Where I can find him?” I asked.

  “In a room somewhere. I don’t know where it is, exactly. Might be nowhere, for all I know. It’s got no windows and no outside doors. It’s just some weird, long room.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “You don’t. You gotta wait for her to bring you to him.”

  Max picked up a glass and started to wipe it forcefully, as if trying to wipe away his past mistakes. By the way he did it, I knew he did that often.

  “I was handsome before she came along,” he said, more to himself than to me. “People told me so. She won’t kill me, you know. She just keeps playin’ with me like I was her own personal pile of playdough, makin’ me better when she’s happy, makin’ me worse when she’s pissed.

  “Shit, I was really goin’ somewhere before all this started. I used to play for the minors, but it was just a matter of time before I hit the majors. I had talent, dammit, real freakin’ talent.

  “She ruined my life and that necklace with its cursed amulet ruined my life. I coulda, woulda been somebody if I’d never gone to that damn apartment. And look at me now. On top of it all, she wound up killin’ my girl anyway.

  “I used to be handsome, you know that?” he said, as if remembering I was there. “You know that ever since she got her hooks into me, no woman’s touched me? Can you blame them, though, I mean? No woman’s ever looked at me with love, only with repulsion. Or, if they’re really nice, with pity. No woman’s ever kissed me since Gizelle. Arrosha killed her anyway and now I wish she would have killed me, too. Heck I wish she’d kill me now. I wish somebody would. Then I wouldn’t have to live like this anymore. Death would be a blessing to me, a real freakin’ blessing.”

  Max wandered off somewhere in his mind at this point, no longer talking or even looking at me. He merely wiped the counter as big tears welled up in his eyes until they rolled down his cheeks.

  He kept going over that same spot on the counter, lost in his activity until suddenly he looked up, startled, an old fear showing in his eyes.

  “She’s ready for you now. She’s finished with her preparations and you can go on in. Might as well and get it over with.”

  I got up from the barstool and shook his hand. He seemed overly grateful for such a small gesture.

  “It’s been nice to meet you, Max,” was all I said.

  “Same here,” he responded, but the surprise on his face said it all. He was someone who had been so long abused and who needed someone, anyone, just to show him a little kindness. He smiled broadly at me, a smile that looked grotesque upon a face that Arrosha had purposely engineered never to smile.

  I went through the door and into the tiny room where three doors had once stood, then two. Now only one door remained, the door that I now knew would seal my fate forever. It would be all or nothing tonight, victory or doom. There would be absolutely nothing in between.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  As I stared at that third and only remaining door for a few long minutes, I wondered what terrors awaited me on the other side this time. I turned the knob slowly, for it was with caution that I entered, remembering what happened to me when I entered the previous doors. If the floor went out from under me or if I was met by immense suction again, I wanted to be at least somewhat prepared.

  Thankfully, however, I didn’t get sucked into the room and the floor stayed put. I entered into a perfectly plain room without fanfare, a narrow room quite a bit longer than it was wide, incredibly ordinary and unremarkable. It was white, an incredibly ordinary and unremarkable shade of white. It was not blinding blue-white or even white-white, but rather the same, nondescript off-white as the inside of a cheap apartment. It was well but blandly lit, with no perceivable light source. And, save for an equally bland bench and box, the room was completely empty. The bench was the kind that opened for storage and could easily have served as storage for toys, linens and the like, but when I walked over to inspect it, it was empty. The box, which sat at the other end of the room opposite the bench, was cardboard and very large, the sort that might have housed an expensive refrigerator in a past incarnation. Someo
ne had neatly cut a door, now closed, into the side facing the bench. Both the bench and the box were painted the same bland off-white as the walls and ceiling.

  After I finished checking the bench, I decided to investigate the box. When I walked around it, its outside revealed no secrets. My touch indicated that it was extremely light. When I lifted it, the bottom been cut out and it, too, was empty. Confused now, I put it down.

  I then went back for a closer look at the bench. Even taking into consideration the fact that it was empty, while heavier than the box, it proved to be far lighter than it appeared. Freestanding and unattached, it moved easily away from the wall, for the white, solid concrete floor beneath it provided little resistance. I was perplexed, for there seemed to be no point to this room. In an ordinary place, I would have left, but, as usual at The Crypt, the door I’d arrived through had completely disappeared and no longer existed.

  A second, more thorough examination of the box revealed nothing, either. There just wasn’t much to it. It was simply an empty box out of which someone had cut the bottom and into whose front they had cut a door, as if it had been prepared as a child’s playhouse. Its bottom dimensions were squarish, for it was about as wide as it was long, but the box was quite tall, taller, in fact, than myself. I could see no reason for the objects to exist, or for this entire room, for that matter. I opened its “door” and walked in, turned around inside it a few times, opened the door and walked out. Nothing.

  Entering the box the next time, I closed the door behind me using a string that was attached, thinking that perhaps this was the door I needed to walk through in this world that operated with different rules, but again, nothing happened. After I left, I closed its “door” behind me, thinking that perhaps this would trigger something, but it did not. It didn’t even disappear behind me, like the other doors around here had.

  Frustrated, I gave up. Mixed into my confusion was the anxious feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I shook the box and checked the bench one more time before giving up on both altogether. I’d come prepared for a fight, but all I’d found so far, it seemed, was a prison.

  The room was so unnaturally quiet, that the only noise I could hear was the sound of my breathing and of my own heart beating.

  “Hello?” I called, but the only one to answer me was the echo of a near empty room. I was grateful that the claustrophobia that had plagued me most of my adult life hadn’t reappeared yet, and that I hadn’t been forced to resort to taking deep breaths and other meditation techniques upon which I relied just to keep myself calm. I figured that I had Edmond to thank for my current composure and the amulet as well, which, when touched, exuded a calming energy.

  For a while, I was fine, even managing to relax momentarily, hoping the air didn’t run out until I could find a way out of here. Was that Arrosha’s plan, I wondered, to keep me here until I suffocated? It seemed anticlimactic somehow. Just as soon as I’d reached a level of comfort, though, the lights dimmed considerably and the room was left in twilight.

  There were no visible light switches in the room, no way of controlling the lights, so I went on alert. My heart began to beat faster as I waited for whatever was going to happen to happen. The light remained bright inside the box, however, a fact to which the outline of its closed “door” attested. The minutes passed and yet nothing else happened. I could either stay where I was or I could check it out. While I knew there was nothing in the box, since I’d checked it myself several times already, I decided to go ahead and try again just because it gave me something to do.

  With caution, I walked up to the box and opened the door, then closed it again. As before, there was nothing in it and I breathed a sigh of relief. The bench was still empty as well, so I sat upon it. As I did so, the light was dimmed for a third time and the room, with the exception of the door outline on the box, was now plunged into total darkness.

  I sat there for a few more minutes until I got antsy enough to think about checking yet one more time when the door to the box now opened of its own accord. Out of it stepped the most hideous woman that I’d ever seen. Dressed in black funereal shrouds was the young version of Rochere, her skin as white as chalk, her lips blood red, her hair black. She smiled at me with a vicious hunger on her face. I sat there, just frozen in fear for a second. As this woman returned my stare, her canine teeth grew long and sharp, until they nearly reached the length of her chin. The smile on her face grew ever more brazen as, slurping, she licked her teeth with her tongue and the whites of her eyes turned to red and began to glow.

  At the opposite side of the long room, she said absolutely nothing, but began to move toward me, very slowly and very deliberately. When she reached her hand out pointing toward my throat, the heat in the room rose dramatically, as if this room were an oven that someone had just turned on.

  In a panic, I looked around for somewhere to run, but there was nothing in the room but the empty bench. The light inside the box extinguished, sending the entire room into pitch-blackness, Arrosha’s now seemingly disembodied eyes, glowing red, drifting toward me.

  While intellectually, I knew that she cold not come very close to me because of the necklace and amulet, the darkness of the room left me with no depth perception and her eyes seemed to come dangerously close. So with nowhere else to run, backed up against the bench, I opened the top and crawled inside. The box was much deeper than it originally appeared. Even so, it was surely a deathtrap, but as Rochere’s floating, disembodied eyes seemed to grow closer, I closed the lid of the bench in temporary retreat.

  I heard her scratching upon the lid of the bench, laughing an insane cackle as she did. The lid of the bench opened a crack as red, glowing eyes peered inside. Her hideous laugh stopped momentarily, replaced by soft slurping noises, the sound of the thing that was Rochere licking its lips and fangs. As I prayed that she couldn’t get any closer to me, the bottom of the bench opened, plunging me into what seemed to be an endless void.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The air was pushed out of my lungs as I fell sharply downward. Then everything vanished. The wind was gone, the downward motion was gone, the air around me was gone. With no air left in my lungs, I tried to gasp for oxygen, panicking, left to wonder how long it would take for me to suffocate in this new vacuum which held me suspended in mid-air. Just as I thought there was no hope, Arrosha’s mansion appeared suddenly in front of me. Frozen and floating in mid-air, I sucked in a quick lungful of air and began to breathe again. As I looked around from my odd perspective, I wondered why I was back here. No sooner had this question manifested itself in my mind than I heard a loud scream coming from within the house. In a jump, without moving a muscle, I was suddenly closer, standing now at the side of the house, watching the commotion of Arrosha’s followers as they ran away from the mansion in a panic. I had no intention of getting any closer, but it seemed I had no say as to where I stood or what I saw, so again, without any movement on my part, another jump landed me near the back doorway where I’d exited with Ben on my first outing.

  More screams.

  “The mirror!” a man’s voice yelled in the chaos. It came from the bottom floor of the mansion. “It’s gone! It’s gone! It’s not where it’s supposed to be! It’s not on the third floor!”

  “She moved it! She moved it! How are we supposed to get out of here now?” came another panicked shout from within the house.

  Another jump placed me on the garden path that led to the fountain. No sooner had I landed there than time seemed to return to normal. Wham! Someone had just slammed into me. It was Robert and I was surrounded by the followers.

  “Ashley! Where’d you come from? No matter,” he said, breathing hard from a combination of panic and exertion. “We’ve got to get out of here! The mirror’s gone! Can you help us?”

  “How?” I answered, befuddled. I had no idea of how to help him, let alone from what. “What’s going on here?”

  “Creatures,” Kenny answered. “They’re loose
inside the mansion. We don’t know how they got there. They’re horrible, like zombies or ghouls or something. And they’re after us.”

  “I don’t know how to help you,” I confessed.

  “But you got out of here the last time without using the mirror,” Antonio said.

  “The only other way I know is the reflecting pool,” I answered, “but I don’t think that will work with so many people.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Robert said. “The reflecting pool, people!”

  “Geoffrey!” I heard Ben yell as he herded the group forward. “Where are you?”

  “Ben,” I told him. “Don’t worry about Geoffrey. He can take care of himself.”

  “He’s missing,” he said.

  “Just look after yourself now,” I advised.

  We all started to run toward the reflecting pool, not knowing what we would do once we got there. We’d just come up to the two stone guards when the screams of those in front of us pierced the air.

  “It’s gone! The reflecting pool, it’s not here anymore! It’s disappeared!” they cried.

  Ben and I caught up with the others, who were already gathered on the stone platform. Standing around the spot where the pool used to be, they were completely confused and baffled as to what to do next.

  “They’re coming!” Illea screamed, as she pointed behind me.

  When I looked to the direction in which she was pointing, I saw the ghoulish brigade of creatures that had once attacked me shuffling up the walk, already nearing the fountain, a lackluster army walking to the sluggish cadence of a slow, non-rhythmic beat of “help me”. Upon seeing these creatures again, horror gripped my heart.

  “Run!” I screamed.

  “Where?” asked Timothy.

  “I don’t know!” I said. “Just run! We can’t let them catch us!”

  As if on cue, the two stone guards turned around, raised their hands and pointed to the same place.