The Nightmare Game

by Martin, S. Suzanne

  “I have to say that, for the role of seducer, Ben was a brilliant choice on my part. He was a loving, caring, safe man with no designs on you, a man who would foster your ultimate trust. Yes, Ben was the key. But soon after I enlisted Ben, I found that in order to keep him happy, I had to add Geoffrey,” Arrosha sighed, “Ah, if Ben only had had better taste in men we wouldn’t be here right now. Oh, well, what’s done is done. Now only the cleanup remains.

  “I want you to die knowing that you’re probably the last serious contender that Edmond ever sends me. Most of his chosen few are so easy to dispose of, especially after a good bout such as this one. It always takes time for Edmond to recover enough to have much of himself to give his champions. You’re lucky, or unlucky, depending on how you look at it. Edmond was well-rested and well able to help you, to give you the power, strength and healing that you needed. After this, it’ll be decades before he can call any serious challengers again.” She looked at Edmond in the stasis chamber and clucked her tongue. “Pity I can’t just release him and kill him and end this for once and for all. But I can’t. He’s in there with the other half of that amulet you wear. It would be death’s folly to allow them to get together, of course.

  “It’s too bad that I didn’t have an extra stasis chamber, but only the one survived the fall of Pangaea. I had enough resources to make tiny ones to hold in the essence to fit in the hookah, but that was it until I recently found out a way to siphon the energy out of Edmond’s chamber. It was amazingly complicated and happened quite by accident. I’ve never cared for tinkering with anything too technical, you see. I’ve always preferred supervising while others do the heavy lifting.

  “Shame, really. I wish I’d known about that little technique before this horrid game ever started. I’d have been able to kill the bastard in the nineteenth century and be done with him. Then you would never have been put in this situation and we wouldn’t be having this little chat right now.

  “Oh, if only I’d known then what I know now! Then I could have washed my hands of this mess in the beginning when Virginia first began to stalk me. But I suppose that all’s well that ends well and I’ll be rid of Edmond soon enough. When I kill him, which will still be far too gradual for my taste, the stasis chamber will replace the box for his cane’s headpiece and I can come in here and gloat over his corpse. Once he’s dead, I’ll only need to have control over that one piece, for there’ll be no one left to call others to his cause to challenge me or pester me. Then I can be free at last to take my rightful position as ruler of this soon-to-be global, technologically more advanced world.”

  “You’re mad,” I told her, pointing out the obvious.

  “No my dear,” she retorted. “Unlike yourself, I simply know my place. It’s Goddess and soon-to-be Queen of this entire world. It’s been a real bitch, let me tell you, having to put up with upstarts like you coming around, constantly trying to murder me. It’s a nuisance, but at least your kind is soon disposed of, some more easily than others. It’s only once in a long while that people like you and Max come along, people with Edmond’s full strength and abilities behind them, that make my life truly miserable.

  “Oh, I am so giddy with excitement over the thought of being able to kill that man at last! Soon there will be no more Edmond. No more Edmond, no more of his called chosen, no more threats to my existence!”

  “There must be someone else out there that knows about you and that knows the secret behind these amulets!” I screamed. The thought of a world with Arrosha as its ruler terrified me beyond belief. To find out now that I had been Edmond’s last real hope and that I had failed him so miserably made my heart sink as if it were made of lead.

  “I doubt it. Even if someone out there knows about the amulet and all of its secrets, it doesn’t matter, anyway. Without the second amulet, they would still have to go through me first and without Edmond’s support, they wouldn’t stand a chance. The only thing one amulet can do alone is to provide its wearer some protection from me on a personal level. Each piece is essentially useless against me without the other.

  “But if you already knew that this would be Edmond’s last good challenge, that you had to win eventually, why bother playing it out with me this far? Why didn’t you just stop playing and let me go my own way somewhere down the line? You had plenty of chances.”

  “You’ll remember that I did try to kill you several times.”

  “That’s not the same thing. I would have appreciating your not trying to kill me at all. Why not just prevent my arrival in the first place? You could have said that the apartment was booked up. I would have stayed somewhere else.”

  “Because, my dear, I might actually have won this time around and that’s what I really want. Edmond was calling to you, you were ready to come to New Orleans. Once you were in his head, it was an easy task to find you, to contact you. Electronic data transfer makes things so easy these days, don’t you think?”

  As I struggled helplessly against my restraints, she continued, “I suppose I’ll just have to look on the sunny side of this bout and say it was worth it, because now we come to the fun part of the game. At least, for me. I wanted you down here to see Edmond as he really is, so you could understand just how pointless your existence, along with his other helpers’, will be after you die.

  “More importantly, I wanted you down here so that Edmond can see you, his very last real challenger to me, fail so miserably and die so terribly, knowing that he will never again have the strength to do anything more than launch small, futile, impotent efforts against me from this point forward.

  “He can see you, you know. Even though his eyes are closed, sensors within the chamber are transmitting images directly into his brain as if he were looking directly at you. He can’t even close his eyes or look away when things get too grizzly. I want you to know that he will see you suffer and die so that you can realize just how much you’ve disappointed him. Because of you, he has lost forever. Others have failed, but none so completely, my dear, as you have. That’s why I brought you down here. That’s the only thing that has kept you alive so far, but I will soon rectify that mistake. In a few short hours, hours that I promise will be interminably long for you, this game in earnest will be over for good.” She smiled coldly and smugly at me. “Have I answered all of your questions, my dear?”

  I couldn’t answer her. I needed to throw up again, and heaved, but there was nothing left in my stomach.

  “Ah, I see it does. And now we start to kill you. Story time’s over, we torture you, you die now. Max, pick out an instrument and make it a good one.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Max looked up, reluctant to move. After a second, he reluctantly picked up a sharp, nasty-looking scalpel.

  “You see, Ashley. I’ll be having Max use that on you as soon as he removes the necklace from your neck. I’ll let him have a really good go at you, which should get most of its protective energy out of you. Then I’ll throw you to my ‘friends’ in the floor, who are just dying to get their hands on you and rip you to shreds.”

  She spoke more incantations and soon horrible, violent sounds issued forth from beneath my feet, far worse than those from the corridor through which we had just passed.

  “Let me give you a proper introduction to these other ‘pets’. This is where I keep the worst of the worst of my enemies, the strongest and most ferocious, the ones most bent on vengeance. They can’t wait for me to unleash them upon you so that they have their way with you. I feel it’s only fair to give you a taste of what’s in store.”

  As she continued her incantations, I looked down and the floor surrounding me once again came to life. At first it looked like dark, murky water with the forms of transparent, snakelike creatures swimming just beneath the surface. As the floor became more transparent, the forms became more defined and began to emerge as grasping, metallic arms and hands, clawing and scratching at the air. A few yards away, they were very solid, gradually becoming more phantom-li
ke the closer they got to me, disappearing altogether only a few feet away. I screamed.

  Arrosha ceased her incantations and the floor returned to normal. She was breathing hard and looked terrible again, as bad as she did when I first saw her after she’d thrown me off the tower.

  “Oh, did my pets upset you? I’m sorry they’re so vicious. Under normal circumstances, it’s generally quite dead around here. They only get frisky when I’m around and once I’ve added you to my little collection, I’ll be sure to visit often.

  “My darlings want you so very badly,” she continued. “Unfortunately, unlike what I did to you earlier,” she said, pointing to the chains and floor which held me, “this isn’t as simple and they won’t be able to get near you as long as you wear that amulet which hangs about your neck. Of course, with Max’s help, it’s a situation I’ll be remedying shortly. Even then, enough of its energy will remain with you to make you untouchable for awhile. That shouldn’t be too much of a problem, though, because my dear, sweet Max will simply torture the residual protective energy out of you.

  “It’s then I’ll be able to unleash my former enemies upon you. My poor darlings have been so very frustrated for so very long, you see, that they’ll be quite happy to tear you limb from limb. It will be most excruciatingly painful, child. I would like to ask you one more time to hand over the amulet, but you know as well as I that it would be of no use. Now that you know what fate awaits you, the amulet would merely consider my offer to be coercion and would simply return back to its box once you removed it. No matter. I’m quite excited about and very much looking forward to dealing with you properly. However, with that amulet being in this same room, my revelation of what lies in wait for you beneath this floor took far too much out of me again. I’m tired and famished once more. I simply must have someone to eat, this time in a way that satisfies more than just my hunger.”

  Once again she waived her arm and the lights went low. Another young man appeared, again as if from nowhere. He was just as strapping, vibrant and strong as the first one had been, but this one was fully clothed. He was just as surprised and disoriented as his predecessor, but when he looked at Arrosha, instead of fear and revulsion, he smiled, for while rousing the floor had taken a great deal out of her and left her extremely anorexic, in the dim light of the room she now was still beautiful enough to elicit the attentions of a man.

  “Yes, my dear, she said to him. Her voice, which had been shrill and rough just a moment before, was now throaty, husky and soothing, full with the promise of sex. “Come to me, my sweet, make love to me. Yes, that’s it.”

  The young man walked over to her as if he were walking in a dream, his eyes fixed upon her, seeing nothing but her. An overpowering fragrance of flowers, the same one that she had used on me in her office, filled the room. However, instead of formaldehyde undertones, it now contained musky, spicy ones, pheromones that reeked of sex, the same fragrance I had smelled during my essence experience.

  I looked over at Max, who had returned the scalpel to its table, and saw that the fragrance had quite an effect upon him as well. He stared at Arrosha with intense desire in his eyes, took a step forward despite himself and then stopped abruptly, clenching his fists and his jaw while staring intently at the ground. I could tell it took a great deal of willpower for him to stay away from her; but he knew she would punish him harshly should he follow his desires and walk up to her.

  “That’s it, my precious, lovely young thing. Come to me, let me feel your passion,” Arrosha coaxed as the man walked slowly, somnambulistically, nearer and nearer to her. Finally, he approached her and said, with a tone so desperate one could feel that his desire was so extreme as to be painful to him, “I want you. I have to have you. I need to have you.”

  “Then take me, my dear,” she said in a voice both sexual and mocking.

  At this, he took her into his arms and began to kiss her passionately. To the unknowing eye, they could easily be just another couple in the throws of lust. Max peered up form the floor, naked jealousy in his eyes. But within only a few minutes, the young man’s passion began to wane as Arrosha’s vitality grew. His grip on her became looser, he began to pull away. At this point, Arrosha wrapped her arms tightly around him, pulling his body close with her left arm, pinning his head to hers with her right hand. The man began to struggle. Muffled protests emerged from his mouth, now imprisoned by Arrosha’s embrace. He continued to struggle for a little while longer until Arrosha released him, completely and suddenly. He staggered and stumbled around dizzily as if drunk; I imagined he must have felt much as I did when I was trapped in Rochere’s office. He looked extremely ill.

  “S-sorry,” he managed to say weakly. “I – I don’t know what h-happened. I feel bad. I n-need to go h-home.”

  “Then perhaps you should” said Arrosha, waiving her arm. The young man disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared.

  “Where did you send him?” I asked.

  “Where he wanted to be sent. Home, where he will die before the day is through, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. There will be an autopsy; they will attribute it to an unknown disease or, more likely, a congenital defect of some sort or another, as they always do in one so young. Oh, I could have sent him where I often do, to the top of a bridge or a skyscraper, where the poor things inevitably fall off. It’s such a pity, really, all those suicides. Or I could have sent him into a busy highway where he would have been hit by a car. His death would then be most likely ruled accidental, unless the driver was doing something he shouldn’t have been in the first place and then he’ll go to prison for something that was never really his fault.” She smiled at the thought. “But with you here, everything’s going so terribly well for me right now that I thought I’d be generous and just send him home where he can die in peace.”

  Her voice now held a richness and a vibrancy which I’d never heard in it before. She almost seemed to be glowing. At this moment, now that she was fully satiated, she was, by far, the most beautiful woman that I had ever seen in my entire life. Her eyes sparkled brightly; her skin, while still as white as ever, was now tinged with a pinkish blush, setting off the black of her hair, eyebrows and eyelashes with a contrast that was striking and almost startling. She was now luminous and had the supple radiance of youth. Her mouth, which, before her first feeding, had been pulled back into a deathlike grimace, was now luscious and sensuous, with full, red lips. Had it not been for the worldliness in her eyes and the expression on her face, she would have appeared to be no more than eighteen years of age, the epitome of Snow White incarnate. I could truly understand and appreciate now why she was so successful in her feedings off of men. I looked at Max again and could see that her beauty was not lost on him. But mingled with his admiring glances lay signs of bitterness and hatred as well.

  “Now that I’m full, let me get back to you, my dear. Shall we continue, then?”

  “No! Not yet!” I whelped, sounding more hysterical than I wanted. I needed to stall. “Can you at least tell me why you killed or maimed everyone in the group when it was only me that you were after? I need to understand before I die.”

  “First of all, you don’t need to understand squat. I maimed them because I needed to punish them and I ordered Geoffrey to kill the Sisters because you didn’t like them.”

  “What did that have to do with anything?”

  “It made them of no further use to me. Besides, they were never in my original plan for this group, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were just substitutes. You see, there used to be two other, different women amongst my followers, Robert’s girlfriend and another who was intended for any man that Edmond might sent our way. Unfortunately, one day they were both out and about in the city alone and they inadvertently caused a massive, horrible accident. Many people died. Normally, I would have simply swept it under the table and life at the mansion would have gone on as usual. But in this instance there were far too m
any witnesses, not to mention police and news reporters. There was far too much cleanup involved to make it worth my while. So I just killed them.”

  “No one ever mentioned any other women,” I said.

  “That’s because no one remembered them. I wiped them from their minds as easily as I wiped their memory of meeting you that first night at The Crypt. Even Robert did not remember his own one true love.”

  Perhaps not, but it explained a lot about Robert’s behavior at the mansion. Although he did not consciously recall his girlfriend, emotionally, the poor guy was hard on the rebound.

  “The timing could not have been more atrocious. Edmond’s next would-be champion, a man, was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans in two days and there was no woman at the mansion with which to seduce him. I couldn’t use Illea, because there is a limit to how much major memory obliteration that anyone’s mind can accept in such a short period of time. I then fondly remembered three women I had met along the way during my search for Timothy. They were so wonderfully, brilliantly evil that I could not resist bringing them into the group. Victory was so near to me that I could feel it wrapping its delicious arms about me, and I knew I would need someone other than a bunch of goody-two shoes and Geoffrey to help me rule.

  “First, however, the Sisters had to be made suitable Edmond’s chosen man. I needed to wipe out their memories and clean their spirits, so they would be appropriate for what was left of this game. I was in a hurry, so I decided to add all three of them to my group at the same time. But, sadly, transforming all three of those wicked little wenches together whilst trying to erase all of their evil instincts, albeit temporarily, was simply too Herculean a task. It just served to make them permanently stupid.