The Dark Game

by Jonathan Janz

  “Seriously,” she snapped, rounding on him, “it’s getting a little weird.”

  He muttered, “Sorry,” but didn’t move from the doorway.

  “Check that,” she said. “A lot weird.” She began pushing the door shut. “You’re a great guy, Rick. I wish we could’ve met somewhere else. Then again, I’d have found a way to screw it up no matter where we met.”

  “Lucy—”

  The door closed. The lock snicked.

  Rick stood in the hallway, listening.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lucy’s fist shook, the pills within them hot on her skin. Her other hand clutched the sink, the white porcelain frigid. Her agent’s merry voice repeated in her head, It’s over, Lucy Goosy! It’s over!

  The red coating from the pills swirled in her sweat, patted on the white porcelain. Lucy stared down at the red spots. They weren’t the red of menstrual blood, but that’s what they reminded her of, the beginning of a period, and for reasons she couldn’t explain, this increased her sense of desolation, her fatalistic certainty that this moment, this bathroom, was the end of the road.

  Lucy thought of her manuscript. Remembered the story. How could she not? Every waking moment she hadn’t spent with Rick, she’d been writing or researching. The Fred Astaire Murders was the best thing she’d ever done.

  But it’s gone, Fred reminded her. Granted, it may have been good, but it’s gone now, and it’s just you again. You and your failure.

  She pounded the sink edge. It hurt, so she did it again, harder. She bludgeoned the sink with both fists, the pill juice stippling the porcelain in cherry-red splats.

  Let’s say, just for kicks, you earn enough to justify another advance. What then, Lucy? The same. Damned. Thing. You’ll stumble your way through another atrocious follow-up – The Ginger Rogers Slayings? The Gene Kelly Massacre? – and you’ll be right back where you started. You don’t have the guts or the heart or, let’s face it, the skill to be an honest-to-goodness writer. You’re aging, you’ve sabotaged the one relationship that may have gone anywhere—

  A growl welled in the back of her throat. Lucy pummeled the sink, the sides of her fingers splitting open…

  —and it’s time to do what you should have done years ago, Lucy Goosy—

  …fists slamming, blood splashing the basin…

  —no friends, no family, no husband—

  …the growl becoming a scream…

  —so do everyone a favor and just TAKE THE PILLS—

  With an inarticulate cry, Lucy crammed the handful of pills in her mouth, choked them down, thinking, Down to four contestants now!

  And she remembered something else, something infinitely worse.…

  The pills slid down her gullet, eager to spread their killing poison.

  She remembered Molly, her little sister, and Poland, the place Molly’s life ended. Where both their lives ended.

  That’s right, she thought, her distress fading. The Girl Who Died was Molly, true, but what Lucy should have called the novel was The Girls Who Died. Because Lucy died that day as surely as her sister. Lucy’s death just took a little longer to play out. The successful first book, the failed second. The disastrous third. The wretched excuses for relationships. And all of it leading to this moment, the consummation of the death that began a quarter-century earlier across the Atlantic Ocean on a frozen rural creek.

  She’d died then.

  This was just the removal of life support.

  She looked into the mirror.

  Saw the red pill smear riming her mouth. Her lips were a garish, uneven red. Like an over-the-hill actress gone round the bend, too shaky even to apply her lipstick properly. There were pinkish dribbles on her chin, a trickle of red juice wending its way down her throat.

  She looked ridiculous. Clown-like.

  Lucy stared at her reflection, gripped the sink edge, barely aware of how her bleeding hands ached. She’d done this to herself. Not her agent, not Wells, not the other writers.

  You, Lucy. It was you.

  The clown stared back at her.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  She lurched to the toilet and plunged three fingers down her throat. Her gag reflex triggered hard, and she splashed the underside of the toilet seat with a red torrent of pills, stomach acid, and what little she’d eaten that day. She vomited long and powerfully, but she knew it wasn’t enough. She jammed her fingers farther, scourged the back of her throat, the column of puke so tall and hot this time her whole face hinged open, like some horror movie character giving oral birth to a slimy alien newborn. She knew some of the poison was in her bloodstream, understood this might be a pointless measure, but she made herself gag anyway, this time shoving her fingers so far down her throat a witness would have believed she was attempting to swallow her forearm. Lucy sprayed vomit, the pain indescribable, and then the dry heaves began, clenching her core and forbidding breath. Gonna die, Lucy thought as her lungs seized up. Gonna die, and it won’t even be from the pills. It’ll be from oxygen deprivation.

  She fought for breath, failed, then drew in a single sip. Then she gasped. It burned her windpipe. Her whole body burned. But she was alive.

  Dimly, she realized she was weeping. She might be the most pitiful creature in the cosmos, but dammit, she was still here and still breathing.

  Unlike your sister, a voice whispered. But it was not her agent mocking her this time: it was Wells.

  You abandoned her, Wells said.

  Moaning, Lucy stumbled out of the bathroom. I didn’t mean for it to happen, didn’t mean—

  To kill her? Wells asked.

  Lucy shook her head, but Wells’s voice would not be displaced: You deserve it all, Lucy. The heartbreak, the humiliation, the pain. You bought it all in Poland. You’ve been carrying it with you ever since.

  Not anymore, she thought.

  It’s part of you, Wells insisted.

  “Not anymore,” she said aloud.

  She stood panting in the center of her bedroom and told herself she had moved on from the horror and the pain surrounding Molly’s death.

  But at a marrow-deep level she knew she had yet to face it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  He answered the door right away, but instead of speaking he looked down at her hands, which she’d wrapped in towels. A ragged job.

  “I did something stupid,” she said. “I took some pills.”

  He started toward her. “Let’s get you to a hospital.”

  “I puked them up.”

  “How many did you take?”

  “I don’t know. A lot.”

  “The hospital.…”

  “I think I’m okay.”

  “You a doctor?”

  “What I’m saying,” she continued, “is that by the time we explain it to Wells, hike all the way back to the lane, hitch a ride into town.…”

  “You can still—”

  “What I need is for you to stay with me while I shower. I need you to make sure I stay awake.”

  “They were sleeping pills?”

  “Anti-anxiety,” she said. Thought about it. “There’s irony in there somewhere.”

  “Get in here,” he said.

  He proved a very respectable nurse. She knew it was stereotypical of her to be surprised, but the men she’d known – her occasional boyfriends, her agent – possessed the sensitivity of a socket wrench. Rick got the shower temperature just right, looked in the opposite direction as she climbed inside, then closed the curtain. Despite her disheveled state, she found herself watching his eyes as she stepped into the tub, hoping he’d steal a glance at her. Truth was, she’d lost weight and gotten more exercise and sun since arriving; other than the cuts on her hands and her rumpled hair, she felt good about her appearance.

  But Rick didn’t look, only went out,
leaving the door open.

  She took her time in the shower. There was no razor for her to shave her legs, but she’d done that yesterday, a part of her hoping she’d be wrapping them around Rick soon.

  Which was funny, she thought as she soaped her armpits. She genuinely enjoyed talking to Rick, yet she also wanted to be ravaged by him. She couldn’t recall that combination in all her years of interacting with men. When she and Rick were talking, it was like conversing with an old friend. When she went to bed, she’d imagine him bending her over a table.

  Funny.

  Though her hands ached, she managed to wash away the blood and the pill residue. Wincing, she twisted off the shower knob, drew the curtain aside. She wanted Rick to be standing there, wanted him to see her emerge from the shower. But only his feet were visible in the doorway, like he was manning a post. She reached out, slid a towel off the shelf, and wrapped herself up. As she did, she noticed he had a hole in his left sock where his middle toe poked through, like his foot was performing an obscene gesture.

  “Ready for me?” he asked.

  She bit down on a response.

  “Oh,” he said, popping to his feet. “You can wear this.”

  He handed her a gray Stranger Things t-shirt, his face averted. She accepted it. Whether his shyness was genuine or feigned, she liked it, thought it an interesting facet of his personality. He was highly intelligent, what she would call enlightened. Yet surprisingly old-fashioned.

  He returned to the bedroom. As he sat again, she noticed him retrieving a book. Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight.

  She let the towel fall, squirmed into the t-shirt. Considered how insane she was. A half-hour earlier, she’d been low enough to take her life.

  Now she couldn’t wait to talk to Rick.

  Then he was moving into the bathroom, rifling through the first-aid kit in the medicine cabinet. He found gauze pads, Band-Aids, medical tape. She rested on the toilet lid while he knelt before her and set to work. It wasn’t a neat job, but the effort was there, and he was gentle.

  When he’d finished, he glanced at her mummified hands and asked, “Does it hurt?”

  “Some. My throat’s worse.”

  He seemed to consider. “Was it the lost book that did it?”

  “My doctor said I suffer from mild depression, anxiety, some OCD tendencies. Basically, I’m a mess.”

  He waited.

  She went on. “Everyone says depression isn’t situational. That you can be in a perfectly happy place and be totally down. Empty.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “It’s true, I suppose. But the idea that it’s all chemical for all people…it doesn’t account for everything.”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “It’s not just the book.”

  “Want to talk about the other stuff?”

  “An impromptu bathroom therapy session?”

  “Other room’s more comfortable.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed, and he pulled up a chair. Without really planning to, she told him the parts of her fourteen-year descent she hadn’t previously. The wrongheaded belief that she was better than other writers, the horror she experienced as the delusion slowly came undone. She told him about her family’s dysfunction, how Molly’s death had been like a portcullis falling between her and her parents, barring emotional connection, keeping her forever outside their hearts.

  To her ears, it sounded maudlin, but evidently Rick didn’t think so. He listened intently, asked questions now and then. He sympathized with her parents for having lost a child but considered their freezing out of their remaining daughter unconscionable. She told him she’d never really had a close friend or lover. It was the truth.

  “Do you shut people out?” he asked.

  “When you’re thirty-three and you’ve never been married, people think you’re some sort of oddball. Like that character in The Haunting of Hill House.”

  “Eleanor,” he supplied.

  She nodded. “Eccentric, batty.…”

  He squinted at her. “You sort of remind me of Eleanor.”

  “Piss off.”

  He laughed.

  “So,” she said, fiddling with a bandage, “what should we do now?”

  “I’d sort of like to go down on you.”

  She stopped fiddling with the bandage.

  He took hold of her hips, lifted her backward on the bed until her head was nestled on a pillow.

  The t-shirt had ridden up, and the down comforter was cool and soft against her rear end. She was aware of how odd she must look – bandaged hands, nude from the stomach down – but she only felt slightly self-conscious in his presence.

  He crawled over her, kissed her. Their tongues brushed together, almost shyly, and he broke the kiss, looked at her a moment with that crooked smile. He crawled backward until his head was between her legs.

  Lucy lay back, allowed herself the luxury of feeling his lips, his tongue. He wrapped his arms around her thighs, his biceps flexing against her skin. His tongue began to tease her, gently at first, then with greater insistence. Lucy closed her eyes, a heat already building. Soon she was crying out, her mouth open, the sound a rising sigh. Her body reached that sweet, fiery place, and lingered…lingered…her hips shuddering, her buttocks tightening.…

  And she turned to jelly. When she opened her eyes he was climbing onto her. She gladly took him inside, let him determine the rhythm. She lifted her head, kissed him, tasted herself in his mouth, and for some reason this drove her crazy, and she kissed him harder, her tongue working his, and he moaned deep in his throat. She reached down, cupped his buttocks with her fingers, and gathered him into her, driving him deeper inside, their bodies clapping together, their bellies sweaty, his movements animalistic, and he was grunting, moaning in time with their slapping bodies, and his thrusts began to jag, his control spiraling away, and she kept jerking his ass into her, thrusting her hips, and his groan was of wonderful pain.

  He lay atop her, spent, sweaty, panting. When their eyes met, they were both smiling.

  Later, as they lay together, he said, “I’m supposed to be the brooding one.”

  “I’m not brooding, I’m relaxing. Finally.”

  “Good.”

  “I was thinking about my novel,” she said.

  “Huh.”

  She glanced at him. “The sex was great and everything—”

  “You want to get back at it?”

  She squeezed his hand. “Let’s just lie here a little longer. Then I’ll get to work.”

  “On me or your book?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Fred Astaire is calling.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Will gazed out the window and thought, It’s not possible.

  He watched the trees swaying gently in the moonlight, the ghostly clouds beginning to mass overhead.

  If I go to the island, he wondered, is she going to be there?

  He turned, looked at the computer’s bluish glow.

  The Siren and the Specter.

  He’d never written anything approaching the quality of this story.

  What if they aren’t just stories? What if Rick really did unleash a homicidal maniac on the world?

  Will began to sweat.

  How much worse will your Siren be if she becomes real?

  Do you hear yourself? his inner critic demanded. You don’t have the skill to write a decent character. You really think you can conjure one in the flesh?

  “Dammit,” Will muttered and stalked over to the bed. He sat down, worked his feet into his sneakers. He had to escape this room.

  To the island?

  Maybe I will go to the island. All the way there this time. And if the sand is just sand, I’ll know it was all my imagination. If not.…

  You’ll die?
<
br />   “That’s asinine,” he said. He left his room, moved down the hall. There was no doubt Wells’s estate was…different. Mysterious things happened here, things he had trouble explaining. The Siren he thought he’d spied on the beach. The fact that none of the eliminated contestants spoke to anyone before they departed. And Rick’s story about the cop…Raymond Eddy…

  …Peter Bates.

  Will closed his eyes. He made a mistake when he was a kid, but didn’t everyone? What would have happened if he’d told the cops about Bates? They would have picked Bates up. Will’s abandonment of the fugitive just made Bates’s death quicker.

  Okay, he decided as he neared the stairs, maybe quicker is the wrong word. Starving to death is a hideous way to die, but wasn’t it better than.…

  No, it wasn’t better, and Will knew it. He could pretend it wasn’t his fault, but that didn’t change what he’d done. Or hadn’t done.

  He started down the stairs.

  Froze midway down.

  “Ah…shit,” he muttered.

  It was the last thing he wanted to do, but he had to anyway. He jogged up to the third floor, noting as he did how distinct the carpet patterns had become, how vibrant the colors. Even the banister he clutched shone like new. He was thinking of the restoration of the castle at the end of Beauty and the Beast when he reached the third floor.

  He started down the hallway, which glowed a lambent orange. He knew exactly where the tapestry was. He passed a painting featuring an apparition. A tapestry depicting a severed head. The tapestry he was looking for should be up here on the left.…

  Will stopped.

  Hell. It was worse than he remembered, the resemblance uncanny.

  His body thrumming, he stared into the woven image of the woman in the black dress. The long-stemmed glass in her hand. The knowing smile. The eyes that picked you up, turned you over, and dismissed you as unworthy. The woman from one of Will’s favorite short stories.

  By Roderick Wells.

  Well, fuck a duck, he thought.

  The woman in the tapestry was Amanda Wells.