Fear Club- A Confession

by Damian Stephens

  “You’re right,” I repeated. “So what if we don’t ever have to deal with Mike Flowers again?”

  As I said it, the truth of the statement be came abundantly clear to me. I handed back the cigarette.

  “It was our choice to keep dealing with him,” I said. “It was always our choice! We never had to do anything.”

  Julie gazed at me. “I just need a break, Charley,” she said. “There’s nothing back there that I want to return to. You said it yourself, remember? ‘No more school, no more books.’”

  I recalled our conversation—had that really only been a few days ago?

  “A break,” I said. “I understand.” I turned to go.

  “Charley?” she said.

  I paused. “What?” I responded.

  “Are you just going to go?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re right. You need a break.” I

  stepped outside the entrance to the Smoking Room. “But this is just too fucking weird. It’s cool—it’s awesome, actually. But I’ve got to know what’s going on.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll—be back, I guess?” I said.

  I started down the hallway, back in the direction I thought would lead me to the entrance of the Emporium.

  It felt like many hours before I came upon something I truly didn’t expect.

  EXIT. The little metal sign with glowing red letters was visible at the far end of a large vestibule dedicated entirely to Christmas decorations opening up at the conclusion of one hallway. The Christmas vestibule reminded me of a department store during the holiday season, with high-ceilinged archways lined in multicolored lights and ornamental pine cones. A clean, reflective, fake-stone floor surrounded glass cases filled with perfumes and jewelry. I could even smell some of the high-priced perfumes from testers sitting on the counter.

  There it was, though. EXIT. A blank metal door with one of those lockable push-bars on it rested innocently beneath it. Who, me?

  When I approached the door, I noticed that there was a lectern set up beside it with something that looked like a guest book on it, lying open. Halfincomprehensible signatures adorned part of each two-column page, and beside the signature, more clearly printed (I noticed upon inspection that the second column said above it, in fine print, “please print clearly”), what looked to be place names.

  Only a few of them appeared to be in roman characters that I could read. The rest rose and fell from the page in all sorts of wild scribbles and loops and ligatures, some resembling alphabets I recognized but could not read, such as Mandarin and Greek. Of the ones in an alphabet that I could read appeared a number I knew of among others of which I had never heard. “Plainfield” and “Seattle” and “Manhattan”...“Providence” and “Vancouver”...“Sunnydale” and “Arkham” and “Hill Valley”...“Golem Creek” and “Tulsa”...

  Gingerly, I tried to push open the door. It wouldn’t budge.

  Suspecting the obvious, I looked back at the “guest book.”

  “please print clearly” gazed back at me.

  I looked around for a pen, and suddenly remembered the Bic pen that Roland the Dreamkeeper had given me.

  “What the hell?” I said aloud. The temptation to find out whether it worked or not seized me utterly. I could just write the words, sign it, and simply peek through the door. If it worked, then Steve and Julie and I had a way out of this place, assuming things turned sour.

  If it didn’t... I had a pretty strong suspicion that the damned thing was going to work. I signed my name with a flourish, and wrote “Golem Creek” as clearly as I could beside it. An audible click sounded from the door, which I immediately opened and peered through.

  ~~~

  Awoke this morning in something of a daze, Charles wrote in his journal that evening. What have I done? The meeting with the Witch... What have I DONE? The Creature must have been a product of that spell...and now Molly, my precious Molly Furnival—

  He stopped, tapping the page with his pen. The little journal was a bit small, but it was the only thing the nurse could find down in the gift shop. Kind of her to get it for him. The dim lights of his hospital room seemed to flicker a bit, but he was feeling lucid enough to try and write down at least something of what he recalled. Perhaps writing it out the way it all happened would make it more...objective, somehow? He could hardly bear it any longer: the sense of confusion that seemed to lie just beneath every thought, word, and action. It certainly wasn’t the booze; he had been sober for almost a week now. Certainly the pneumonia had something to do with it...but the confusion still lay there beneath the surface, somehow more than just the illness, obscuring something, a memory, a meaning he was missing...like a dream that you knew you had, but you just couldn’t bring back...

  Perhaps he could start with the night that the Creature—that slavering beast, like a man and beast hybrid—had stolen Molly from him. Then back up a bit, get a grip on the consequences of his actions.

  Dear, sweet Molly. Couldn’t she see that he was trying to save her from that drug-addled maniac she seemed so absurdly fond of? And he did love her, and felt reasonably sure that she also loved him...but what foolishness had he allowed to take her from him?

  Carefully, he tore out the page on which he had just written. He tried again.

  27 Dec., he wrote. Was that horrible night really only a week ago? Broken-hearted, banished to this strange tavern in a weird corner of this world...

  Much better. Curwen’s Witch had made it quite clear that for every blessing, there would be an equivalent curse. Those blasted rules. What was the point of real magic if you weren’t actually getting away with anything?

  Charles wrote it all down, starting with that terrible night. He got out the sheet of paper upon which he had later recorded the strange message in code at the end of the hall, still tucked carefully into a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot—they were supposed to be discussing it in Howland’s class after winter break. He still had no idea what the message implied or entailed. Nonetheless, he dutifully copied it into the context of his “confession.”

  There had been no clues anywhere to be found, that next day. He had awoken, aching head as usual, back in his apartment, still soaking wet from traversing the rains the night before. He had a sinking feeling that the headache and nausea he felt was more than a simple hangover—as indeed turned out to be the case. But he returned despite this—he had to know if he had really seen her...

  It took some time to find the door labeled “TRAP.” Ha, ha. At the end of the hall? The plaque with the message, unmolested, still incomprehensible. Behind the frosted-glass door...?

  Nothing. Or, rather, no signs of a party or of any sort of gathering whatsoever. A storage room for extra chairs. Some racks for coats. The door left unlocked, even, almost as an apology for its lack of available clues.

  He could practically hear the Witch laughing at him. What was it she had said to him that day, when he had finally had enough of the pain, the loneliness, being without Molly, imagining her in the hands of that awful, blasted d´ecadent, of all things?

  “For these fools of men and their woes, care not thou at all.”

  That was it. A warning. But she had given him the formula from that old book anyway—perhaps to watch him squirm, to make him understand, to convince him, ultimately, that it was Curwen’s power he was playing with. A simple, grade-school test for the know-it-all, whose time had come.

  In recounting the circumstances regarding Curwen’s Witch, Charles was careful to clearly delineate the issue.

  Friends with an old Faery Queen, or so she claimed— although she laughed as she said it. Practically impossible to thoroughly understand; she didn’t just speak in riddles, but in conversation with invisible people in the same room with you. And I should have known that after my interaction with her, after the working of the spell—so simpl
e, it turned out— nothing would be the same.

  The first night, I slept soundly, except for dreams that seemed to repeat my encounter with her, over and over again. When I awoke, the room seemed...different, somehow, changed. Not quite the right room anymore. And this feeling continued, becoming more extraordinary. I would begin to think of something, a food I craved, a book I longed to read, a person I hadn’t seen in ages, and within moments, something would happen that resulted in my encounter with that thing or person.

  The initial pleasantness of this experience gave way to an underlying anxiety, for occasionally things I did not want to experience would also occur; a fall, a loss, any of a myriad of problems. The clock read one-thirty or ten-twenty or whatever...but sleeping—or, rather, dreaming—seemed to have overtaken waking, so what did it matter? The world seemed now to be merely playing dice with me, manifesting desires and fears at random...but where had the objective world gone, the one I so hated and feared before?

  There is another world, and the magic it contains some times bleeds out into this one. Sometimes we can “cut it” in just the right way that it bleeds when we want it to. I feel it is necessary to explain, you see, that I seemed to have stumbled upon a key to the whole mystery. A solution. A means of escape from my own terrible fallibility. And I fear to put it in writing...I fear it...but it must be said: there was a thing I loved more than Molly Furnival, and it was the power to make her love me... The Witch, it seemed, had been right: “For these fools of men and their woes, care not thou at all.” I had been a fool, a common man, and I had paid as a fool always does. “But there is that which remains.”

  Something shook Charles as he wrote the words. Key...means of escape... What was it about a key? He began to feel his fever returning in full force.

  He flipped back through the pages. It almost appalled him that the weight of the pages of his confession seemed somehow lighter now than the weight of his guilt. The little square of letters. There it was. Dobbsfkdq, Aetoibq!... But how in the world was he supposed to...?

  The door said “TRAP.” It was a trap-door; funny, clever...a clue?

  It was the only other anomaly he could think of. But how to make use of it?

  There was something he recalled...

  Oh, gods, it CAN’T be that simple!

  At that moment, a strange mist, scintillating with a purplish-mauve light, came flooding into his hospital room. Almost without meaning to, Charles let the pen fall into the folds of the sheets, and set the little journal on the table by the bed. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and took a few tentative steps on the cold floor.

  His head was...clear.

  He followed the pulsings of light out of his room.

  ~~~

  “And he falls to his death, off Juggler’s Ledge, into the Pit of Demented Pixies.”

  Roland the Dreamkeeper grinned as he spoke, then simultaneously lifted his tea cup and bowed his head slightly.

  Steve’s eyes were enormous. He dropped his pencil, a broad smile replacing his astonishment, and began slowly to clap his hands together dramatically. “Bravo,” he breathed, beginning to clap more furiously. “Bravo!” He yelled it out, then stood and whooped dramatically, striding about the room.

  “I can’t believe it!” he said, still standing, practically shaking with excitement. “That’s—that was absolutely—I can’t believe it!”

  Roland simply sat and grinned, sipping his tea, absorbing the praise impersonally, like a collection plate absorbs sin. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a truly excellent player character, Steve!” he said. “By all means, it is important that you pat yourself on the back. Without your interest and excitement, the words are just marks on a page or vibrations in the air—they mean nothing.”

  Steve still hummed with excitement. He glanced over the large wooden table before them, now strewn mercilessly with maps and dice, scraps of paper bearing numerous notes and calculations, precisely sculpted miniatures that truly seemed to come alive as they played—especially his own, the hero, the half-elf thief Graxx, magically enhanced dexterity and all. The remains of a truly exquisite “lunch” of potato chips and cheeseburgers, washed down with freezing Jolt cola (which Steve felt certain they had stopped making a decade ago), sat on TV-tray tables to the side. Steve could still scent the delicious frying grease from the little miraculous diner down one of the halls, where he and Roland had briefly gone, ostensibly to recoup, but really just to delay the end of the game. Full, freshly cooked meals had already been laid out for them there, though no cook was in sight.

  “But you played the rest of the party,” Steve said, admiration infusing his voice. “All seven other characters in my party, without ever once getting tripped up! Not ever ! How—?”

  “As I said,” Roland replied, “it’s a passion of mine.”

  Steve found it impossible not to continue smiling. His dream come true. The greatest D & D adventure imaginable.

  “Not to mention,” Roland added, leaning back in his chair, “that game’s only one of my lesser accomplishments. You should see some of my actual full-blown campaigns!”

  Steve collapsed to the floor upon hearing this, only partially for dramatic effect.

  Julie walked into the room, smiling broadly. An aroma of fine tobacco wafted in with her. “Hey!” she said. Cheerful, relaxed—what creature was this? Certainly not Julie Evergreen... “What’s up?”

  Steve raised himself back into his seat. “What’s up? Oh, Jules, this is just incredible—”

  “Tell me about it!” Julie said, reclining into one of the chairs. “Roland, did you know that you had the entire Monster Sitter series back there? I thought there were only four... I’ve been reading those for hours now—there’s got to be sixty or seventy of them—”

  “Certainly!” Roland said. “And those stories just keep getting more intricate, don’t they?”

  Julie nodded. “Where on earth did you find them?”

  Roland chuckled. “Here and there,” he said. “And. You know!”

  “Where’s Charley?” Steve asked.

  Julie blinked. “Oh, right,” she said. “I’m not sure. He wandered off.”

  “Wandered off?” Steve repeated.

  Roland did his usual chuckle as he stood up. “Your friend Charley is exactly where he needs to be, right now. Don’t you realize? We’re all exactly where we need to be, every time,” he said, the peculiar emphasis on the word “time” noticeable. He started off toward one of the back hallways.

  “Hey, wait!” Steve shouted, standing up. “What about—”

  “Calm down, Steve, my friend!” Roland said, his voice fading. “Just got to do a little inventory, that’s all. No cause for alarm.”

  Julie gazed after him as he retreated a few paces, then disappeared around a corner. “Right where we need to be?” she said.

  Steve shrugged, sitting back down. “I have no idea what the fuck that means,” he said. “But I can tell you one thing: I ain’t going anywhere! This place fucking rocks. Did you know that there’s a fucking movie theater somewhere in here? Roland told me. He said he’s been collecting movies forever. Probably got damn-near everything by now. I was going to try and find it later, maybe see if I could watch Die Hard again! Can you imagine that? Fucking movie theater—fucking Die Hard! In the movie theater!”

  Julie sat down. “Yeah,” she said, sounding troubled.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked. “There’s a little diner back there, too. We can go get a burger. I think.”

  “I’m—” Julie paused, trying to formulate the right words. The conversation with Charley had finally started getting to her. “Worried?”

  Steve responded with an automatic grimace. “You should be ashamed of yourself, little girl!” he said, wagging a finger at her dramatically. He began doing a poor imitation of Marlon Brando in The Godfather. “All th
is I do for you? And this is how you repay me?”

  Julie allowed a half-smile. “I’m just—I mean—what the hell do we do now?”

  Steve seemed genuinely taken aback. “What do you mean?” he said. “What do we do now? Whatever we damn well please!” He leaned back in his chair and extracted a few Twizzlers from a package beside him. “This is just typical, you know? We finally get to it—we finally make it to fucking Never-Never Land—and you read a few books and you’re done? What do you want? You want to go back there?” He jerked his thumb behind him and bit off half of a Twizzler. “Because, you know,” he said, chewing, “I mean, that’s the way. I guess. Just go back. Go to that pyramid and, I guess, I don’t know, lie down in it? Is that how you get back?”

  “That’s what’s bothering me, Steve!” Julie said. “I don’t know how to get back! Is this really such a great place if we don’t have a way out of it?”

  “Ask Roland!” Steve responded. “Ask Roland, if you’re so interested. He’ll fucking know. That guy knows everything!”

  “Okay, I will,” Julie stood up, turning back toward the hallways. “I’ll ask him. I’ll find out.”

  Steve sighed. “Look, Julie, I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t get it. I really don’t agree with you. I think we should just chill here for as long as we goddamned can, you know? What do they say? ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’” He paused. “Why do they say that again?”

  Julie was shifting her glance from one side to the other. “You saw where he went, didn’t you?” “No, I didn’t,” Steve said. He took a bite out of another Twizzler.

  Julie approached the main hall that started back from the “checkout counter,” then retreated again. “Oh, crap,” she said. “I have no fucking idea where he went.”

  “So go look around,” Steve said. He got up and headed over to an old cigarette machine that sat in one corner, next to a jukebox. “I’ll wait here. And tell you what? I’m such a good friend, that when Roland gets back, if you haven’t found him, I’ll ask him where the exit is myself.” He grabbed a quarter from a stack that sat on top of the cigarette machine, waved it at Julie, and dropped it into the slot. “Love this place,” he said, smiling. He pulled a handle, and a pack of Camel nonfilters ka-chucked into the receptacle at the bottom of the machine. Julie took a few steps down one hall. “Not this one?” she said. Softly playing guitar music came from the room behind her.