“Uh-huh.”
“Okay, what can possibly be so interesting that me theorizing about your sex life doesn’t even rate a ‘stop that’?” I slid off the bed, leaving my comic book open on his pillow, and stalked over to loom behind him. “What are you doing?”
“Installing a new game.” Artie tilted his head back to look at me. “Sorry, Annie, did you say something?”
I sighed. “Apparently not.” Arthur Harrington—Artie—was my first cousin, but you’d never have guessed, looking at us. Where I got Grandpa Thomas’s genes, tall and rangy with cheekbones you could use to cut bread, Artie got a combination of the usual Healy package (average height, compact, good-looking enough, yet still capable of disappearing into a crowd) and his father’s incubus bonus stats, leaving him with thick black movie-star hair and big brown puppy-dog eyes that made basically everyone he met either want to hand over their wallets or beat the living crap out of him. My reaction to him was somewhere in between. As an immediate family member, his magical woo-woo incubus “you want me, you know you want me, I’m too sexy for this narrative” pheromones didn’t do anything for me, which was why I was allowed in his bedroom. Nonfamily girls weren’t even allowed in the house. Such were the trials and tribulations of raising a half-incubus child.
Artie frowned. “You said something, and I missed it, because I’m a terrible cousin,” he guessed.
“Something like that,” I said. “I was mostly just complaining about the X-Men again. I can’t blame you for tuning that out. What’s the game?”
“It’s a new survival horror puzzle game. Solve the puzzles or Cthulhu’s off-brand cousin comes through a rip in the fabric of the universe and eats you. Sarah would love it.” He paused, apparently realizing what he’d just said, and grimaced before looking back to his screen. “I think the download is finished. Let’s see how this baby launches.”
“Artie…”
“Can’t have a heart-to-heart about Sarah right now. Playing video games.”
“Artie, you invited me over so we could talk about Sarah.”
“Too late look I clicked the button.” He clicked, making himself a liar. I didn’t really have the chance to call him on that, though.
The lights going out as soon as he pressed the “launch” button was a much larger concern.
—
My name is Antimony Price, and the fact that my cousin is a half-incubus on his father’s side has probably already made it pretty clear that my family is more Addams than Brady. That doesn’t mean we’re raised to enjoy being suddenly plunged into total darkness. I squawked like an angry duck, fumbling in my pocket for my phone. “Dammit, Artie, what did you do? You know you’re not supposed to overload the fuses down here.”
“I didn’t do anything!” he protested from directly in front of me. Good: at least he wasn’t trying to move around. Everyone has their strengths in this world, and while I loved my cousin dearly, physical coordination wasn’t one of his.
“Well, somebody did something,” I said, pulling out my phone and pressing the button on the side to activate the screen.
Nothing happened.
I froze, staying silent for so long that Artie cleared his throat nervously and asked, “Annie? Are you still there, or should I be panicking right now?”
“Do you have your phone?”
“What?”
“My phone screen won’t turn on. I know I have a full battery. It’s just not working. Do you have your phone?”
“Um, sure, one second.” There was a rustling noise, followed by silence. Then: “Shit.”
“Yours isn’t working either, huh.” I touched his shoulder, reassuring myself of his location. “Okay, you stay here. I’m going to head for the stairs, go up, and see if the street is blacked out all over, or if we just got lucky.”
“I should play the lottery,” he said, deadpan.
“You should,” I agreed, and took a step backward…or tried to, anyway. Moving my feet was like wading through tar, thick and resistant. I nearly overbalanced, and had to grab the back of Artie’s chair at the last moment to keep myself from falling. If the floor had suddenly started trying to keep my feet, I didn’t want to think about what it would do to the rest of me. “Shit!”
“Annie?”
“Artie, can you move? Can you stand up?” I did my best to keep my voice steady. If I let myself start panicking—much as I genuinely wanted to—I would have a hard time stopping, and that was a good way to wind up eaten by whatever had turned the floor to tar.
“Of course. Why, are you not wearing shoes or something?” The chair shifted under my hands as Artie moved, or attempted to, anyway. He was silent for a long moment before he said, “Uh…”
“Can’t stand up, can you?”
“No, I can’t.” He sounded more puzzled than panicked. Even if his chair was refusing to let him up and I was inexplicably unable to move, he was still in his space, in his home, and he didn’t feel like anything could threaten him here. I knew how wrong he was. In the interests of keeping him calm, I wasn’t going to point it out. “It feels like someone’s glued me to the chair.”
“I’m having the same problem with the floor.”
“Uh. That’s pretty weird, right?”
I swallowed a peal of unhelpful, borderline mocking laughter. “I don’t know, Artie. It’s your room. Did you replace the carpet with the Blob and not tell me?”
The screen flickered before he could answer me, the change in illumination instantly visible in the dark room. Words swam up through the blackness:
THE JESTER’S PRISON
START NEW GAME? Y/N
“Because that’s not creepy at all.” There was a soft tapping sound, as if Artie had pressed a single key. I closed my eyes for a moment, not that it made much difference, given the room’s absolute blackness. “Artie, what did you just do?”
“I said we wanted to start a new game.”
I opened my eyes just in time to see the words disappear, ghosting away into CGI mist before a new block of text replaced them, glowing white and somehow menacing against the darkened screen:
THE JESTER OF THE DIVINE, ROBIN GOODFELLOW, IS BOUND BETWEEN THE WORLDS BY THE WORD OF MERLIN, LAST OF THE GREAT WIZARDS. RESTORE AND REFRESH THE WARDS WHICH KEEP HIM BOUND, LEST THE JESTER ONCE AGAIN RUN RAMPANT OVER THE BROKEN BODIES OF MANKIND.
“Jeez, Artie, what the fuck kind of game is this?”
“I don’t know! I got it from a guy on my forum.”
The text disappeared, replaced by another block:
YOUR WILLINGNESS TO PLAY HAS ACTIVATED ONE OF MERLIN’S FAIL-SAFES. SHOULD YOU FAIL TO RESTORE THE WARDS, ROBIN WILL NOT BE FREED.
“Oh,” said Artie, sounding relieved. “Well, that’s good.”
YOU WILL BE SENT TO JOIN HIM IN EXILE, AND CAN HELP IN MERLIN’S BATTLE TO KEEP THE JESTER CONTAINED.
“And that’s not good,” I said. “Goddammit, Artie, what have you gotten us into?”
“We don’t know that the game is doing anything,” said Artie weakly. The words on the screen disappeared, replaced by a complicated illustration that looked like three triskelions that had been twisted together into a single tangled mass. At the same time, something in the shadows sparked green, and the darkness was filled with distant moaning. “Okay, yeah, the game is doing this,” amended Artie. “Sorry.”
“Who the hell was this ‘guy’ and what forum are you talking about?”
“It’s a support ground for crossbreeds. You know, like me and Elsie? Half-humans talking about how difficult it can be sometimes to deal with living in a mostly human world. It’s educational.” His tone turned slightly distant. “I think I can manipulate these lines. How do you think it’s supposed to fit together?”
“See if you can rotate the triskelions so that they line up,” I said. “Okay, look, is there any chance this was targeted? Did someone figure out who you were and decide that we should really be sucked into a bad pocket dimension for our sins? Because I d
on’t know about you, but I do not want to meet Robin Goodfellow. That guy was bad news before the Covenant banished him from this plane of reality.”
“I don’t see how they could have.” There was a clicking sound as Artie did something with his mouse. The images on the screen began to rotate slowly. “My profile isn’t connected to my real name, I don’t have a Facebook, my Twitter account goes to a different email address—”
“What’s your handle?”
“Um.” The image kept rotating as Artie admitted, sounding mortified, “Incuboy.”
“How many Lilu crossbreeds are there living in the Pacific time zone, that you know of?” Incubi and succubi were technically just male and female Lilu. We continued to refer to them as if they were separate species in part because it was tradition—which somehow was supposed to make it less confusing—and in part because their natural abilities were so radically different that they might as well have been different species on any practical level.
“Two. Me and Elsie.”
“And does your profile give your time zone?”
Artie’s silence was all the answer I needed. I managed, barely, to resist the urge to clock him one in the back of the head. It might have made me feel better—violence almost always did—but it wouldn’t have helped anything. The conjoined triskelions were still rotating, flashing in and out of alignment with one another.
In and out of alignment…“Are they rotating around the places where they connect?”
“Yeah,” said Artie, sounding relieved that I was apparently done quizzing him. He was going to be really disappointed in a few minutes. “I can stop them by right-clicking, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with them.”
“Try switching to a top view while they spin.”
“Okay.” More clicking sounds followed. The game might not have come with a tutorial, but with as many video games as Artie played, he didn’t really need one. Not for a straightforward point-and-click puzzle game that might or might not be planning to suck us both into an unspeakable hell dimension if we did it wrong.
No pressure.
The view gradually shifted to show the triskelions from above, and as I had hoped, the change in perspective made it clear that each of the three, as it spun, would briefly appear to form a single branch on the three-part symbol. “There,” I said. “If you free the pieces while you’re looking at them like this, you’ll get something that doesn’t look so broken.”
Artie hesitated. The graphics continued to spin. “Are we sure that’s a good idea?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe completing the runes is what sends us off to hang with Robin Goodfellow.”
“The instructions said to fix the runes if we didn’t want to hang with him. Since they appear to be broken currently, and the room is filled with creepy moaning and mysterious darkness, I’m going to go with ‘fix them.’ ” I tightened my hands on the back of his chair. I don’t like things I can’t hit. “Now.”
“All right, all right, I’m fixing them.” I heard the mouse click, and the runes on the screen slowed, finally freezing in a perfect triskelion. The image gleamed bright, etching itself on my eyes, so that when I blinked I still saw it floating on the inside of my eyelids. It hung there for a moment, doing nothing, before it began to spin lazily, the image remaining perfect from all angles. The moans in the darkness stopped, replaced by giggling.
“Okay, that’s not an improvement,” I muttered. “Artie?”
“I don’t know! There were no instructions, remember?” The mouse clicked again. “Nothing’s happening.”
“So this must be the next puzzle,” I said. “We have a rotating protection symbol and giggling in the shadows. What can you extend a triskelion into?”
“Annie, I don’t do runic gingerbread.” Artie sounded like he was on the verge of snapping. I couldn’t blame him. This was a pretty terrifying situation, and at least I was armed. Artie wasn’t much of a fighter. He was more of the “stay home and research and don’t get shot at” school. “I have the book of runes and everything, but it’s not like I’ve ever learned how to use them.”
“Okay, okay, sorry. I just…triple spiral!”
“What?”
“It’s an earlier form of the triskelion. See if you can pull the lines apart or anything like that. You’ll need to get rid of the interior dots, too—try dragging them into the lines.”
“Just a second.” Artie hunched forward, focusing on the screen. One of the dots moved, merging into the nearest curving line of the figure, and the line promptly stretched, twisting outward into one arm of a triple spiral. “Got it!” Whatever he’d done, he repeated it twice more, and the triskelion morphed entirely, becoming a triple spiral before beginning to spin, faster and faster, like a portal opening.
“Oh, fuck,” I said, unable to feel more than dull disappointment. This was supposed to have been a perfectly normal Saturday. Even we Prices (and Price-Harringtons) don’t normally have to deal with evil video games threatening to suck us into portal dimensions if we don’t play along. “Artie, if we get pulled through, grab my hand. You don’t want to lose track of me.”
“Okay,” he said glumly.
The image continued to spin, morphing into a white disk that filled with static before becoming a clear picture of a dark-haired, pale-skinned woman. It was black-and-white, except for her eyes, which were a shade of clear ice blue that looked more like it belonged on a beetle’s wings than on a person’s face. I gasped. So did Artie.
“Sarah?” he asked, sounding equal parts hopeful and horrified.
The image smiled. “Hello,” she said, and it wasn’t our cousin Sarah, which was a relief but also somehow sad—Sarah was convalescing in Ohio with our grandparents, and while trying to suck us into another dimension wasn’t exactly a nice way of saying “I’m feeling better,” it would have been a wonderful indication of her recovery. “I’m so pleased that you were able to solve the first rune. Robin Goodfellow is a tricky sort, and he needs to be contained.”
“That’s a cuckoo,” I said. “There is a cuckoo in your computer.” Math-obsessed telepathic ambush predators. Again, we have an interesting family.
“I know,” said Artie.
The cuckoo woman—who was clearly a video file, and couldn’t see us, thank God—continued, “There are twenty runes ahead of you, each more complicated than the last. Complete them all, and Robin stays contained. Fail, even once, and you’ll share his fate.”
“There has to be a catch here,” I murmured. “Cuckoos don’t go around refreshing the wards on ancient evils for shits and giggles.”
“They also don’t have the magic to do this kind of programming,” said Artie. He leaned forward, until his nose was almost brushing the computer screen. The cuckoo woman was smiling at him beatifically, her part in this little production finished, at least until we did something to trigger another video clip. I couldn’t tell whether the video was still going. She could have become a still frame.
Artie stabbed his finger at the screen. “Look there: behind the door. That’s a hand. She’s working with the hidebehinds.”
“Or the hidebehinds are working with her,” I said. “Shit.”
There’s no such thing as magic, according to my grandma Alice, and since she married a witch and has spent the last thirty or so years jumping from reality to reality looking for him, I guess she’d know. Magic is just a sort of physics we don’t fully understand yet, the kind that allows men to turn into monsters and semi-visible humanoid cryptids to use their uniquely folded perspective on reality to code video games that conceal dimensional portals. Hidebehinds are oddly refractive, and their way of seeing the world doesn’t match up with anything else we’ve encountered, either in this dimension or the ones that they occasionally disappear into. They’re usually harmless. The thought of them joining forces with the cuckoos, who were anything but harmless, was enough to make me want to hide under Artie’s bed and wait for t
he nice video game to eat us. At least then I wouldn’t be in a world where the hidebehinds and the cuckoos were going to gang up on me in the night.
“No, no, this is a good thing,” said Artie. He leaned forward again, this time focusing on the corner of the screen. “See, if the cuckoos had made this by themselves, it would have been all math problems. The hidebehinds like hidden-eye stuff—naturally—and concealing puzzles in plain sight.” He clicked something. The game’s camera zoomed in on what I’d taken for a smudge, revealing a cobweb with several large swaths missing. The spider was perched in the top corner, black and gleaming.
“So what do we do?” I asked.
“Patch the web.” I couldn’t see Artie’s face, but I could hear his frown. “The question is, do we need to do it in a single pass, or can we strategically choose our moves?”
“Let me see.” I leaned forward. Artie shifted his head a little to the side, giving me a clear view of the puzzle. “Hidebehinds are big on barrow imagery, which tends to be Celtic in nature—not always, but something like eighty, ninety percent of the time. Celtic knots depend on the unbroken strand, or at least the illusion of the unbroken strand.”
“And hidebehinds are all about illusions,” Artie agreed. “Okay. So where’s the move?”
I frowned, leaning closer still. My feet were still stuck to the floor, which created the bizarre sensation that someone was holding me down as I tried to see how to draw the correct line. Finally, I reached up and touched the bottom left corner of the broken web. “Here to…here,” I said, drawing the first line. “Then here, here…” I kept moving my finger, repeating the path Artie would need to send the spider along over and over again as I waited for him to give me the okay to stop.
After the fifth repetition, Artie said, “All right. I think I have it.” He began moving his mouse, replicating the motion of my finger. Finally, he released it, said, “Cross your fingers,” and hit the space bar.
The spider began to move. It raced along the path Artie had traced, leaving a line of gleaming silver behind it. The newly patched web began to glow, and then the camera pulled out again, leaving us looking at the motionless cuckoo, the open closet door, and the otherwise featureless little room.
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