Rushed: All Fun and Games

by Brian Harmon

  “‘Other place’?”

  “The other world. The one that’s infringing on this one.” He cocked his head, confused, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. “You were just there a few minutes ago.”

  Eric stared at him. Now it was sinking in. The silent world. The cold world. The world that looked and felt like this one, except all wrong. It made sense now. It was like Hedge Lake. When the border between worlds was coming apart, creating gaps that overlapped.

  That was how he ended up in the locked midway, and back in that storage room. That was how Paul ended up on the second floor. It was why they couldn’t find their way out. They weren’t in the same universe. They were close, but they were also somewhere else entirely.

  William turned his head, as if listening to something. “It’s coming.”

  Eric looked up, surprised. “What?” But the word was barely out of his mouth when he realized it was true. The temperature was dropping. And the sounds of the children playing upstairs had dulled.

  Faintly, he could make out that eerie murmuring/whimpering noise he’d heard the first time he came down here.

  William turned and faced the far end of the hallway. “I’ll hold it off.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “It’s stronger than me, but not strong enough to hurt me. And not strong enough to handle me and you at the same time. While I keep it busy, you go get your brother.”

  Eric wanted to argue. This was just a child, after all. But he also wasn’t human. And both he and Todd had assured him that the thing lurking here couldn’t hurt them. This was one of those situations where he needed to leave it to those who knew what the hell they were doing.

  Because he sure as crap didn’t.

  “Oh, and about Eliot,” added William. “He doesn’t always play fair, but he does have to follow the rules. Maybe you can find a way to change them so you can win.”

  Change the rules? How did he do that?

  He didn’t have time to ask. At the far end of the hallway, the lights seemed to be fading. Darkness was swelling, closing in around them like a dense, black fog until, one by one, they winked out entirely.

  And in that crowding gloom, small, shadowy things were scurrying about.

  The rats.

  Or…whatever they were…

  And they were approaching faster with each second that passed.

  “Go!” shouted William.

  Eric hesitated no longer. He turned and bolted for the stairs as the light began to fade around him.

  He didn’t have far to go, but the murmuring and whimpering were swelling rapidly. The lights above him were already dimming.

  He reached the stairwell door and hurled himself through it, only to stumble into pitch-black darkness again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Blind again, Eric fumbled with his phone, trying to light up the screen. But before he could get it right-side-up, he bumped into something and dropped it. Cursing, he knelt down and began searching for it, feeling along the cold tile floor.

  Already, he knew this wasn’t right. He was supposed to be in the stairwell. But the stairwell didn’t have tile. It was carpeted. He remembered clearly from the first time he came down here. He was literally thrown out on his ass. He remembered rolling over, struggling to breathe because the wind had been knocked out of him, and pushing himself up onto his hands and knees.

  The basement hallway was bare concrete, but the stairwell was carpeted, like the upstairs.

  True, that was the other stairwell, the one on the other side of the building, but he didn’t recall this one being any different from that one when he and Paul descended these steps a little while ago. It still should’ve been carpeted.

  Also, what did he bump into? There shouldn’t have been anything there, except maybe the stair railing. But what he hit felt like thin metal. It rattled when he hit it.

  Had he run to the wrong door in his rush?

  More likely, he’d been displaced again, like when he jumped from the mirror maze to the locked midway. Or when he was transported from the hallway back into the storage room. Or how Paul was sent all the way up to the second floor.

  “Where are you?” he grumbled as he groped along the floor, searching for the stupid phone. “Come on!”

  He didn’t like this. Every second that he couldn’t see was another second that his horrid imagination was able to describe the increasingly awful things that might be lurking unseen just beyond his fingertips.

  In particular, he found himself thinking of those rats again.

  What was it with the rats? He’d never been all that frightened of rats. They were disgusting vermin, but they didn’t particularly frighten him. He’d take rats in a heartbeat over spiders or snakes. But something about that illusion in the midway had really rattled him. He couldn’t seem to stop thinking about them.

  Where the hell was that phone?

  What if he couldn’t find it? What if the clown sent it away, just like it sent Paul away? What if he never found the light again?

  The cell phone buzzed and a light blossomed in the darkness. It was Isabelle, pointing out that he was making this much harder than it should’ve been.

  It was just a couple feet away. He turned and snatched it up, colliding with something in the process.

  A tall, metal shelf of some sort stood next to him. The phone had landed partially beneath it. Things rattled and clattered all around him. Something fell onto the floor beside him with a loud bang.

  This definitely wasn’t the stairwell. The stairwell would be a stupid place to put a shelf.

  So where was he?

  He lifted the phone and shined the light around. He didn’t need the brighter, power-draining flashlight. The space around him wasn’t that big. It was another storage room, much smaller than the last. There were no stacks of boxes or bins, nor were there any decorations of any kind. It was much more organized. All around him were shelves loaded with various sizes of cans, boxes, sacks, jars, jugs and plastic containers.

  The shelf he bumped into was loaded with pots and pans. The loud bang was a heavy saucepan hitting the floor. Looking down at it now, he realized that it had probably only missed cracking him in the head or mashing his fingers by mere inches.

  Careful not to knock over anything else, he crossed the little room to the door and grasped the handle. After his last experience like this, he didn’t expect it to open, so he was surprised when he threw his weight into it and practically fell into the kitchen.

  The woman working there was surprised as well. She let out a loud, startled scream and dropped several pizza pans onto the floor. “Oh my god!” she cried, pressing a hand to her breast. “You scared me out of my mind!”

  “Sorry…” Eric looked around, confused. How did he get in the kitchen? He was just in the basement. And on the other side of the building, no less.

  But at least he wasn’t trapped in another storage room. It seemed that William had succeeded in distracting the clown long enough for him to escape.

  But where was William now? What kind of fate had he left the poor boy to? Had he done the right thing by running?

  “What were you doing in there?” demanded the woman, dragging him back out of his thoughts.

  He recognized her. He saw her when he was trying to chase down Eliot. From one of the little windows in the playland that looked over the party room. She was the older woman who was helping Karen and Melodi pass out pizza. The cook. Edna.

  He hadn’t given her much consideration from the playland viewing window, but now that she was standing before him, he found her surprisingly intimidating. She looked to be in her mid to late sixties, with thick, graying hair tied back in a tidy bun. She was short, but surprisingly stout, with the sort of weathered face that didn’t look like it had shared as many smiles as scowls.

  She didn’t look like the sort of woman who was going to tolerate his sort of nonsense. And not just because she was the only employee he’d seen who wa
sn’t wearing a clown nose.

  “Mrs. Boldt wanted me to inspect the building for her,” he replied, standing up straighter and hoping he didn’t sound as full of bullshit to her as he did to himself. “Make sure everything’s up to code, you know.” (As if he had any idea whether it was or not.) “I was checking some…uh…wiring.” He hoped he wasn’t blushing. He felt like he was blushing. Like a guilty, lying child. Not sure what else to say, he added, “Then the lights went out on me for some reason.”

  Surprisingly, she nodded as if that made perfect sense. “They do that sometimes.”

  Apparently, haunted buildings were the place to be when you were caught behaving like a weirdo. Maybe he could blame the holiday wreckage downstairs on a poltergeist and make a clean getaway.

  “I didn’t even know there was any wiring in the pantry.”

  Eric glanced back at the door he’d just stumbled through. “Well… Sometimes they put breakers in there. For the appliances. And if not, sometimes there’re junction boxes in the walls.” At this point, he was simply making things up as he went and trying to look like he knew anything about performing an inspection. “I’m just…mapping it all out.”

  Mapping it all out? What the hell did that even mean? He might as well tell her he was checking on the flux capacitor while he was at it.

  He wished Paul were here. He knew things about building codes and inspections. And he was a master bullshitter.

  But the woman merely flapped her hand at him and began gathering up her dropped pans. “Whatever you say. I don’t know anything about that sort of thing.”

  That made two of them, it seemed.

  Eric bent and picked up the pan that had rolled toward him when it fell. “I’m really sorry about that.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she told him, taking it from him and adding it to her stack. “I was bringing them in to be washed anyway.”

  Eric glanced around, feeling awkward. “Well…I’d better head upstairs and make sure all the…uh…circuits are up to code.” Was that a thing? It sounded like a thing. He hoped it was a thing. Or that Edna at least thought it was a thing.

  “But don’t be busting out of the freezer on me later,” she snapped.

  “Again, sorry about that.”

  “It’s fine.”

  Eric hurried out of the kitchen and made his way to the stairs.

  SMOOTH, said Isabelle.

  “Shut it,” he told her.

  JAMES BOND YOU’RE NOT

  “James Bond wouldn’t have to deal with this crap,” he muttered.

  TRUE, I GUESS

  He turned the corner and nearly ran into Kacie on her way to the kitchen.

  “How’s the inspection going?” she asked him.

  “Fine,” he lied. “Everything seems good so far.” Except for the clowns and the murderous holiday decorations…

  “That’s good. See any ghosts?”

  This caught him off guard for a moment. Then he remembered their last conversation. “Not yet,” he replied. “But if anyone can wake the dead, I imagine those kids out there can.”

  Kacie laughed. “You’re probably right about that. It’s crazy out there. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “No. I think I have everything under control.” He felt impatient. He needed to get to the second floor and find Paul, but he didn’t want to be rude. Or suspicious. “Thanks, though.”

  “Sure. Just let me know if you need anything.” She pointed at him then and added, “And you have to tell me if you find something weird.”

  “I’ll do that,” he replied, but of course that was a lie, too. His goal was to sort this mess out and leave without anyone knowing anything weird had ever happened here. Besides, she wouldn’t believe him anyway. The weird in this building was off the charts. “So far, I haven’t seen anything scarier than clowns,” he added. And that was the truth.

  Her eyes widened behind her glasses. “Oh my god! You’ve heard about the Sinnow Creek Road clown, right?”

  Eric was surprised. “The what?”

  “You haven’t heard about that?” She looked over her shoulder to make sure Melodi wasn’t coming and then said softly, “Sinnow Creek Road is less than a mile from here. For about two years now, people have been reporting some creep dressed like a clown walking up and down that road in the middle of the night, trying to scare people.”

  Eric stared at her, horrified. The very idea of driving down a country road at night and seeing a clown standing on the side of the road was creepy as hell. The idea that said clown might have been wearing an ugly, green sport coat was even more terrifying. How far could these things travel?

  “He was also spotted on some other roads around here not long after he first appeared. And in the past few months, people have been saying they’ve seen him in town, too. In the parks. In alleyways. In empty parking lots. He just appears and disappears. It’s freaking scary!”

  It wasn’t anything unheard of. He’d been seeing stories on the internet about the same sort of thing happening for years now, all over the world. It was harmless. Just some bored individuals trying to creep people out. They weren’t hurting anyone. And it wasn’t like there were any laws against dressing like a clown after dark.

  But it was still pretty terrifying, if you asked him. And this particular clown was a little too much of a coincidence. It sounded like it was haunting an area with a range of about a mile radius, with Bellylaugh Playland right at its center.

  Who was to say that the horrors hiding in this place were bound by these walls? It was silly to even assume such a thing.

  “Jesus…” was all he could say.

  Kacie laughed. “I know, right?”

  No, she didn’t. She didn’t have the faintest idea. Todd told him that the evil lurking beneath them was trapped there, that it had only just grown powerful enough to escape whatever prison it was bound to. But clearly it was able to project its clown persona anywhere in the building. If it could project itself as far as a mile away while trapped inside this building, then what sort of reach would it have when it was free?

  It would be unstoppable.

  “Some people say the guy’s a serial killer who’s supposedly snatched a bunch of women and teenage girls over the past ten years or so. All of them disappeared without a trace. No bodies were ever found.”

  “That’s unsettling,” said Eric.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know if I believe it. I mean, as far as I know, nobody’s gone missing around here in years.”

  Todd said the thing lurking here yearned for blood, yet it didn’t dare risk frightening the children who fed it. What stopped it, if it was capable of venturing so far away, from satisfying its bloodlust outside these walls? He could certainly see how the unfortunate victims might never be found. Their bones might be lying in that other world somewhere.

  That world where Paul was currently stranded…

  “I should probably get back to work,” he said, although he was curious to hear more.

  “Yeah, me too,” she said. “Besides, I think I’m all out of gossip.”

  Eric thought that was probably a good thing. He’d already made a mental note to never come back to Pasoken again if he could help it. “If you think of anything, let me know.”

  “Sure.” She smiled and walked off toward the kitchen.

  He watched her go, then looked down at his phone. “Ever hear of anything like that before?”

  Isabelle’s text popped up before he was done asking the question: MONSTER SERIAL KILLER CLOWNS AREN’T ON MY LIST OF SPECIALTIES

  He nodded. He didn’t figure so.

  BUT IT DOES MAKE A SICK SORT OF SENSE

  It did indeed.

  BUT WHY WOULD THE CLOWN ONLY HAVE APPEARED RECENTLY IF THOSE WOMEN STARTED DISAPPEARING SO LONG AGO?

  It didn’t make sense, but then again, neither did anything else.

  YOU’D BETTER GO FIND PAUL AND WRAP THIS UP FAST

  Chapter Twenty

  He headed
up the stairs to the second floor. The arcade was to his right. To his left was a locked door, behind which was a dimly lit hallway with two more doors. One on the left and one on the right. He let himself into the hallway and picked the left one at random.

  Inside was a reception desk with a cash register and a small waiting room with padded benches. The sign above the desk advertised the prices of a round of laser tag and a little gated-in area behind the desk had a couple dozen futuristic-looking vests and guns hanging on the wall.

  First try. Not bad, given his usual kind of luck.

  This was where you’d pay and get suited up. And the door in the back corner was the entrance to the arena, according to the sign.

  He switched on the lights and peered through the door. There was a narrow, dimly lit corridor beyond it. It ran the entire length of the next room, with several doors opening onto the arena to the right. These doors were marked “Portal 1,” “Portal 2” and “Portal 3.”

  This seemed to be where your teams would split up and enter the arena at different points, so that you didn’t all start off clustered together.

  He and Paul would’ve loved this place when they were younger.

  He walked down the corridor and peered through the first “portal”. The arena was just as Paul described it. A series of tall, flimsy-looking, wooden panels were laid out like a blocky maze, some of them with little windows in them, allowing you to survey the battlefield.

  The whole place was painted in bright, neon colors that glowed under the overhead black lights. The whole thing looked very futuristic. In a cheesy sort of way.

  But it was far too small for anyone to be hopelessly lost in. You could see all the way to the far side of the room.

  “Paul?” he called. “You in here?”

  There was no answer. Nor did he expect to hear one. William told him that Paul was in the other world.

  IT JUST OCCURRED TO ME, said Isabelle, THAT THIS OTHER WORLD CAN’T RUN VERY DEEP IF PAUL COULD STILL CALL YOU ON YOUR PHONES

  That was true. In his experiences, venturing too far into other worlds meant venturing outside of your service area. Which made sense, since Verizon didn’t build cell phone towers outside of this dimension. In order for them to call each other, they’d have to be close enough to this world for the cell phone signals to bleed through to the other side.