“I am the Messenger of Fear. He is the Game Master. To each our own duty.”
Something was growing like fruit from the unnatural branches. It bulged a sickly white blob that formed gradually into a flattened cylinder. Then upon one flat face of the cylinder, the pointed black hand of a clock. Just one hand. And just one number, at the top, where the twelve should have been. That number was zero.
While Emma, Liam, and I all stared at this odd fruit, something else was growing from the other side of the bower. It took the shape of hanging vines, six of them, as long as bullwhips.
“The game is a puzzle of twelve and one,” the Game Master said. “Twelve pieces that must be assembled in one minute.”
“Can’t be too hard,” Liam said with bravado that I prayed was not misplaced. “Where’s this twelve-part puzzle?”
The cracked-tooth mouth smiled a skull’s smile. “This is your puzzle.”
At that the bullwhip tendrils erupted into life, whirling around Emma. It was no more than three seconds of mad flailing, with a noise like old-style Venetian blinds being thrashed.
The vines withdrew.
Emma’s flesh and clothing alike were marked with red lines. She reminded me of charts I had seen in butcher’s shops of cows divided by roast and steak and rib.
She blinked. “Oh,” she gasped.
Her arm, severed at the elbow, fell to the ground. No blood flowed. The severed end was a perfect, smooth, bloodless cross-section showing deep red muscle, white ligaments, honeycombed pearl bone, a thin wrapping of tan flesh.
Her scream rose in her throat and Liam bellowed in fear, and a second whip flew and a second piece dropped.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” I cried, fists pressed to my mouth so hard I drew blood.
The whips flew and a hand, a leg, she toppled over and in midair was sliced in half at the waist, revealing organs cut through, intestines sluicing digested food that stopped as if by magic at the place where they were cut.
The pieces lay scattered. Eleven of them. An arm, a leg, a thigh . . . and Emma’s head, mouth open in a soundless scream.
The pieces lay inert, all but that terrible, wordlessly, soundlessly screaming head.
A final slash of the vine, and Emma’s head fell into two pieces like a split coconut, the halves rolling apart, both eyes on one piece, the mouth on another, the nose bisected.
I felt my knees collapse, and this time Messenger let me fall. I did not lose consciousness—I came to rest sitting on the cold ground, staring, mewling, my mind reeling back from the horror.
The vines descended, slowly now, like patient, stalking pythons, each looking for and finding a piece of Emma. Then, one by one, almost playfully, they threw the pieces into the bower, where they stuck like hellish apples hanging from a tree.
“Time starts . . . now,” the Game Master said.
The clock hand began to move. It had passed the place where the “two” would have been, and Liam still stood, frozen, panicked.
“Liam! Move!” I shouted.
The Game Master hissed at me, like a cat, and his worm-filled eye sockets glowed with an eerie green light. But Liam sprang into action. He first took the two halves of Emma’s head and, weeping and sobbing and with shaking hands, pressed the two pieces together.
Then pieces of torso, heavy as sandbags, slipping from his hands. He shoved and rolled the largest piece into the approximate space where it should be.
Already his time was half-done.
“Hurry!” I urged, and in my anger at this horrible trickery, I looked the Game Master in the eye, defying him, cursing him even as I wept for Liam and Emma.
A thigh. A leg. A piece that was at first hard to place until it was rolled over and showed itself to be a hip.
Ten seconds left.
Leg to thigh. Arm to shoulder. It was like the children’s song. The knee bone’s connected to the hip bone, the hip bone’s connected to the . . .
Five seconds!
Liam struggled with the two meaty chunks that would together form his love’s upper torso.
Two!
Liam grabbed Emma’s head and pushed it down against the severed neck.
A gong sounded.
No one breathed. I was sure even Messenger did not.
The Game Master said, “The player has won.” He was, without any doubt, disappointed. But he maintained his monstrous dignity as the bower, that tangle of imprisoning branches, withdrew into his maze of a body.
Emma sucked suddenly at the air. She coughed. Liam bent over her on hands and knees and raised her up until she was sitting. He put his arms around her, and the two of them sobbed into the other’s shoulder.
“Am I needed further?” the Game Master asked.
“No,” Messenger said. “Not at this time.”
“Have I performed my office?”
“Yes. You may withdraw.”
The Game Master nodded. It was an almost amiable gesture. He stepped back and the mist wrapped around him, and he was soon gone from view. The sound of his captive creatures skittering and crying lasted for another few seconds and then faded beyond hearing, though not beyond memory.
“Stand,” Messenger said to Liam and Emma.
I was amazed that they could manage it, and indeed it took some time. They seemed as stiff and weak as if they were very old people. But finally, helping each other, they stood erect, still holding hands, their faces masks of apprehension.
“You did wrong,” Messenger said. “But you played the game and prevailed. You are free to go on with your lives.”
“Are you kidding me?” Emma demanded. Her voice was shaky with the aftereffects of terror but powered by outrage. “You do that to us? You do that? And then—”
Liam cut her off. “He said we can go. Let’s go.”
Emma was not so easily silenced and lashed us with a furious onslaught of curses in both Spanish and English. But Liam managed to get her into the car, closed the door, and with a baleful look back at Messenger and, I suppose me as well, started the engine and drove off into the night.
I am never without words, but not then, not at that moment when I felt so utterly drained, so helpless and hopeless that I feared I would simply slip into unconsciousness.
“You are tired,” Messenger said.
I was shaking too much to even nod my head.
“Yes, you need sleep. And food. We will go.”
He watched me, saw my incapacity, the shock that reduced me to a near-paralytic state, and nodded.
“It is very shocking, the first time. You will grow more accustomed to it.”
I wanted to tell him that the very idea of becoming accustomed to such foulness made me want to vomit. I wanted to tell him that I would have no part of this, not now, not ever. I wanted to rage and beat my fists against his impassive face.
But he was no longer there.
I was in a bed.
The covers were pulled up to my neck.
My head rested on a soft pillow.
And sleep took me.
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MY DREAMS.
I don’t want to speak of them—to speak of them, to relate the details, in some way makes them more real. I have decided to tell the truth here, as far as I can. But even as I determine to tell every detail, those details slip away, just out of my grasp. The dreams are like wraiths, like smoke, all incorporeal, all of it elusive as dreams so often are.
But as dreams will, they left behind a pall, a sense that in my sleep I had been victimized, my mind taken over by dark beasts that reveled in my fear and laughed at my dull efforts to snatch meaning from raw emotions.
I rolled out of the bed, examining everything around me as I did. Was this my bed? I had slept in it, but was it mine? Was this my room?
I touched the pillow thoughtfully. It was slowly recovering from the weight of my
head upon it. Was that fabric familiar to me? And this quilt. Was it mine?
The room was almost a square, with gray walls and a warm hardwood floor. A window shade allowed only the dimmest of light to sneak around its edges. A table lamp on the nightstand illuminated the contours of a desk and chair.
Slippers awaited my feet. Somehow I had been dressed for bed, though my last memory was of a heedless surrender to exhaustion. I wore soft, baggy shorts and a T-shirt. I pushed my fingers back through my hair, smoothing the few tangles. I wiped at my sleep-crusted eyes with the back of my hand.
There was a cork bulletin board over the desk. A blue ribbon hung there. I thought of looking more closely at it and learning whether it would tell me something of the reality or falseness of this place. This was not my bedroom. I had long since abandoned any faint hope that all of this was a dream. The dreams of my sleep were dreams, but what had happened with Liam and Emma, with the Game Master, with Samantha Early, Oriax, and Daniel, all of that I now accepted as real.
Messenger was real, that taciturn but not completely emotionless creature whose careless touch had set off a cascade of horror but who was, for all of that, not truly wicked. Or so I reassured myself.
It was Messenger who had sent me to this bed. I would not call it “my” bed. It was Messenger who must have seen that I had reached my physical and mental limit. Maybe I should have blushed at the idea that he had undressed me and then dressed me as I now was, but I dismissed that notion. He was not to be touched. Surely his fingers on any part of my body would have awakened me screaming, no matter how deep the sleep.
There were three doors. One was almost certainly a closet. Another, I fervently hoped, was a bathroom. The largest door, the one most completely framed in painted molding, was surely the exit. I was nervous to check it, for fear that I would try the handle only to find that I was a prisoner.
I nerved myself to try the closet. It was deep but not wide. Clothing was hung and shelved on the left side. There was an overhead light activated when I tugged on the string.
I sighed in disappointment: it all looked very much like the sorts of things a girl like Kayla would wear. Too fashionable, too adult for what I imagined my own tastes to be. I could not call up memories of my own closet or my own shopping preferences, but I had convinced myself that I was a simpler, more straightforward person than that. But when I pulled a top from its hanger, the immediate impression was that it was likely to fit me.
I gathered a few things and went to the bathroom, which was, to my great relief, a very normal bathroom. There was a toilet, quite welcome at that moment. And there was a shower, which was my next stop.
Has there ever been a better relief for stress and the effects of jading fear than hot water coursing through hair and over skin? I showered and shampooed and felt as if I might just stay beneath that comforting spray until the hot water ran out. But it felt cowardly to hide away longer than necessary, or at least longer than I could justify.
I dried and dressed and stepped back into the bedroom. It was as I had left it. My eye was drawn to the posters on the walls, the same, it seemed at a superficial glance, as those on Kayla’s walls. Presumably Messenger, or whatever other creature of his had made this place, had relied on those images to create the layout and decorations.
I was suddenly aware that I was dying of hunger and thirst. No food magically appeared, which meant that I must risk the final door. I approached it with my heart beating too fast and my breath too slow, convinced that opening it would reveal my imprisonment.
But when at last I nerved myself up and threw open the door, I saw there only a mundane hallway with another room at the end of it, a room of which I could see only a sliver but which looked very much like a kitchen.
Down the hallway I went, dressed in clothing that I was convinced was not mine but which nevertheless fitted me perfectly, at least in terms of size if not in terms of character.
The apparent kitchen was indeed a kitchen. Sun-dappled leaves rustled softly just beyond the window. A bowl of fruit sat on a butcher-block island. A loaf of bread sat unopened.
I seized greedily on an apple, bit into it, and drew open the refrigerator door. Yogurt. Milk. Cold cuts and condiments. A dozen eggs and a package of bacon. Butter and orange juice and cranberry juice, too, because my mother believed it protected against infections.
I ate the apple, found cereal in the cabinets, ate some of that as well, and then fried an egg, which I ate with toast.
I felt much better after eating. If warm showers are the greatest of comforts, then surely wholesome food is the second greatest. Something in the simple rituals of composing my meal gave me reassurance that I had some small degree of control over my life.
I wondered if I should clean up after myself. Had Messenger summoned a helpful maid from the collection of allies and opponents he appeared to have? Would any such maid be a monster, like the Game Master? Or perhaps a transcendent beauty like Oriax? I managed a laugh at that notion, an honest laugh that sent me wondering whether I was in fact resilient enough to endure whatever might yet come my way.
Just one thing remained: to open the beckoning door to the back deck, step out into the sunshine I saw through the window.
I cleaned up after myself, placing my trash in the bin and my dishes in the dishwasher. Then I grabbed a peach and a paper towel to absorb any juice, and opened the door to the deck. As I twisted the knob, it occurred to me that something had been missing from the bedroom and the hallways leading to the kitchen: Wouldn’t there be family photographs somewhere in one or both locations? But I was unwilling to backtrack. I wanted to exploit my temporary sense of well-being to push on further, servant as always to my curiosity.
I opened the door, and where the leafy deck might be, there stood Samantha Early.
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“I CAN’T GO TO SCHOOL. I’M SICK.”
For a moment I thought Samantha was talking to me. She was looking right at me, and since I had just come through the door, there was no way she could be speaking to someone behind me.
“What?” I said. She did not respond and I heard then a second voice. Impossibly, it was behind me. I spun and saw that the kitchen, the one I had just been in, was gone, as was the house. As well as the peach that had been in my hand.
Instead we were in a driveway. A Ford SUV was warming up, tailpipe purring smoke and steam, a man in the driver’s seat, a chubby man with pleasant features, a receding hairline, a blue-striped dress shirt and loose tie. He had a travel mug of coffee in his hand.
“Oh, come on, Sammie, you’ve skipped the last two days. This is going to start affecting your grades.”
Self-conscious, I moved to get out from between the two of them, though of course I was invisible to them.
“Dad, I really don’t feel . . . It’s my time of month. I have cramps.”
The father looked as uncomfortable as fathers will when such things are discussed, but he shook his head and said, “Come on, Sam, grab your backpack and let’s go. I have a staff meeting first thing and there’s construction on the 101.”
The 101? That phrase struck a chord with me, but no doubt that road went all over the country and—
“Will she go to school, won’t she go to school—the suspense is killing me.” The intimacy of the voice combined with the highly charged sensuality that somehow permeated the flippant tone told me instantly that Oriax was with me. I turned eagerly to see her.
She was dressed differently this time, still exotic, still sporting the sort of leather outfit that would not have been out of place on a female superhero, but less black and more green. And an amulet had been added to a green ribbon choker around her throat. It was a jewel, as big as a cherry tomato, but of a rich green color that held sparkling starlight within.
She saw me staring at the jewel—the emerald,
I supposed it was—though if it was real, it would cost Samantha’s father’s yearly salary. “You like?” Oriax asked me.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“You should get one,” she said. I thought she was preparing to remove it and hand it to me, but then her eyes flicked to my right and she lowered her hands. “There you are, Messenger. I was wondering why you’d leave poor . . . what’s your name again?”
“Mara,” I said.
“Messenger-in-waiting,” Oriax said. It was a sneer, but as she said it, she winked at me so I didn’t take it amiss. “Has he told you the big reveal yet?”
“The big what?” I asked. I felt rather dull, but then I was destined to feel rather dull in her company.
“Leave us, Oriax,” Messenger said.
“Not just yet, Messenger,” she said. She turned languidly away from me as Messenger moved closer. “It’s not a done deal, Messenger, and you know it. She may still choose to come with me, to follow the path of . . .” She pouted, thinking of just the right word before finishing with, “Excitement.”
“She’s not for you, Oriax, or for your mistress. She’s chosen her path. She will stay on it.”
Were they discussing me? As if I was some object to be bartered or sold? Hadn’t she just mentioned a choice? Did I have a choice? What was the nature of that choice?
“I think you’re wrong, Messenger,” Oriax said, and there was an edge to her voice now. “I think she’s demonstrated that she could be very useful to us. Very happy with us. You forget: I know all that she does not.”
I don’t know why I reacted so strongly to that. Maybe it was just the idea that Oriax knew me, that she knew who I was, all of what I was, or at least more than I knew. I reached out instinctively and touched her arm.
When I had touched Messenger, I had been deluged by terrifying images of pain, fear, loathing, and despair. In touching Oriax, I unleashed a similarly intense flood of imagery, but . . . oh, the intensity and the suddenness was all the two experiences had in common. For these were not images of pain but of pleasure.
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