“I have a right to—”
“To sleep with whoever will have you?”
“You spoiled little—” Jessica snapped.
“Get your hands off me!”
“I am your mother, Kayla, whether you like it or not. I won’t tolerate your disrespect.”
“My mother? My mother wasn’t a slut!”
“Watch your mouth!”
“I don’t even want to be here. Oh, my God, I hate you! I wish Dad hadn’t died!”
Jessica blinked and drew back. “Of course you miss your father, I—”
“Do not tell me that you miss him, too,” Kayla said. Her tone was ferocious, a mix of anger and deep sadness. “He wouldn’t . . . If you had died . . . he would never have . . .”
“He already was,” Jessica said. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she blanched, covered her mouth with one hand, and reached for Kayla with the other. Kayla slapped her hand away.
“What did you just say?” Kayla demanded. “What did you just say? What did you just say?”
“No one in this world is perfect or without failings, Kayla. Not even your father.”
The room felt cold suddenly, the light gone grim and gray, as the two looked at each other. Kayla’s face was red with anger; her eyes blazed through tears. Her mother was abashed but also, somehow, relieved of a burden.
“Go away,” Kayla said. “This is my room.”
“Kayla . . .”
“If he did, it was your fault!” Kayla said. “Now get out. Get out. Leave me alone.”
At that moment the picture froze, though of course it was no picture but a reality, an actual scene that must have played out in some corner of the time-and-space continuum Messenger so casually defied.
“What is the point of showing me that?” I asked Messenger.
“What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I was none too deferential. I felt bruised by the confrontation I had just witnessed. Maybe it was normal in its own way; after all, mothers and daughters fought. I didn’t know enough to judge who was in the right, or indeed whether they were both right or both wrong.
Messenger let time flow, so next I had to witness Jessica storming from the room and worse, see Kayla break down in tears.
She cried for a long time, deep, wracking sobs, the particular rhythm of a person who has suffered some terrible loss. I found I couldn’t bear it. She was crying for her dead father, and I knew that I must have cried that same way, for that same reason. Perhaps I, too, had lashed out at those around me, unable to come to terms with my own feelings of unfairness and helplessness.
After far too long, Messenger said, “Good and evil are real. But the lines are seldom neat.”
“Great, Obi-Wan,” I said. “And what am I supposed to do with that?”
Messenger either didn’t detect the sarcasm or didn’t consider it worth addressing. He answered the question as though it had been sincere.
“The Messenger must understand,” he said.
“Wonderful,” I said, suddenly feeling exhausted. “So now I understand.”
Messenger did not speak—he waited—and now Kayla was typing again. Not a Pages document but something on Facebook. A status update. I moved closer, curiosity overcoming the niceties of privacy, and read it over her shoulder.
Oh. My. God! she typed. You will not even believe this. But I have a copy of Spazmantha’s so-called manuscript. Okay, here’s the love scene from page 102.
She proceeded to type in an R-rated sex scene between a character named Jason and a girl named Sammie.
It was hastily written, but not so carelessly that it would set off alarm bells in a willing audience that so wanted it to be true.
It was explicit. It was humiliating. It was meant to sound as if it was a poorly disguised version of a sex scene between Samantha and Mason, the boy from the lunchroom. Kayla had some talent—that was the thing. She had enough talent to include some detail for verisimilitude. Enough talent to just about sound as if she was writing something that could be published, though her style could be stilted and overly dependent on multisyllabic words.
I glanced at Kayla’s bookshelf and was not surprised to find Poe and Lovecraft amid the Roths and Greens and Krauses. Kayla had an interest in the gothic.
The Facebook posting sat there, long enough to be read, and then the “Likes” began to add up quickly. And then the “Shares.”
Kayla switched to her Twitter feed and posted a pointer to her Facebook status. And those tweets were retweeted and favorited.
And just like that, the one thing Samantha Early had ever done that made her feel worthy and important was turned into a dirty joke.
Kayla included a sound that Samantha was supposed to have made.
That was the genius moment, I knew. I could practically feel Kayla’s dark pleasure, knowing that this, above all, would be the stiletto to Samantha’s heart.
Gurgle, gurgle, Sammie said.
It was silliness. It was false.
It killed Samantha Early.
“Consider what you have just witnessed,” Messenger said. “Think on it, Mara, and come with me.”
It sounded like an invitation, but of course it was no such thing. Before I could blink, we had left the now cold and remorseless Kayla behind and were once again with Liam and Emma.
11
“I OFFER YOU A GAME,” MESSENGER SAID.
“What game?” Liam demanded.
Messenger would not explain. “If you win the game, you will both go free to consider what you have done. If you lose the game, you will suffer your greatest fear.”
The two of them looked frightened already, like they’d already had plenty of fear, but I could see that Liam at least felt confident in his ability to win a game. Not cocky but confident. Perhaps, I thought, he is an athlete accustomed to games, accustomed to competition, and has a justifiably high opinion of his abilities.
I hoped he was right. I didn’t know then what Messenger meant when he warned of fear. But I was convinced that they deserved only the mildest of punishments.
I liked them; that was the truth of it. I liked that they were in love. It made me wonder again whether I had someone about whom I cared that much. Was I in love, back in my life wherever? I doubted it, somehow.
And what of Messenger? What was that crack Oriax had made about Messenger and someone named Ariadne? No doubt someday when Messenger and I were sitting on a park bench, chatting and eating sandwiches while tossing crumbs to the pigeons, we’d come to that discussion. Hah. Not very likely, that scenario, though I would have liked to know more about him. Maybe there were things he could tell me that would explain away the awful imagery that contact with him had caused to flood my mind.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pushing those fleeting yet vivid memories away, just as I tried to push away memories of Samantha Early’s end. It was ironic, I supposed, that I was simultaneously hungry for memories lost and terrified of memories I had come unwillingly to possess.
“We’ll play,” Liam said, jumping in to accept the wager before Emma could contradict him. Emma’s breath caught and her eyes narrowed in irritation, but she subsided.
“If we refuse, we lose,” Liam said. “If we play, we may win. Right?”
“You have accepted the game,” Messenger intoned. He raised up his hands, palms out toward the two of them. Then, in a movement of such gravity that it could only be a ritual of some sort, he said, “In the name of Isthil, I summon the Master of the Game.”
I very nearly burst out laughing, despite the queasy uncertainty that now defined my moment-by-moment existence. It seemed so like the self-serious phony mysticism I might have expected from a Comic-Con attendee. That urge to laugh died unborn.
There came from the mist a sound, a scrabbly sound that a mouse—no, dozens of mice—might make racing across a tile floor. Then, beneath that sound, deeper, a noise like voices at a great distance, some crying, some it seemed, as I st
rained to hear, like people talking fast and nervously.
These sounds, at once familiar and strange, grew louder as something moved through the mist. I peered into that hateful yellow miasma, anxious—or so I thought then—to catch a glimpse of this Master of the Game. Another Oriax, perhaps? Or a Daniel?
“Do not look into his eyes,” Messenger said, his voice even nearer my ear, more intimate than before, as if this was what passed for a whisper from him.
The creature that slowly took form as the mist retreated reluctantly from him was tall, taller than any man I had ever seen. His skin was brown, like an old oak desk given a walnut stain. He might have been actual wood, a carved figure, a totem but for the fact that he moved, long legs shuffling, giving an impression that his legs were too heavy to lift.
Heeding Messenger’s warning, I kept my eyes on the parts of the creature that I felt were safest: hands, arms, legs, chest. He wore no clothing but needed none, as his entire body was of the same curiously grained wood. He might have been a mannequin, or a puppet except for the size, and the sounds that now quite unmistakably emanated from him, though not from his head, not from his yet un-glimpsed mouth, but from the surface of his body, from the grain, from . . .
Not a grain, no, tiny channels, carvings into his brown flesh, like . . . And there I stopped breathing for a moment because I could not both see and digest what I was seeing and spare the focus required to breathe. Not a wooden grain but an endless maze carved into him, shallow runs that twisted and turned, forming suggestions of leering faces and twisted beasts. There was something Aztec there, something of demonic frescoes. These channels, this maze, it covered every inch of him. Within the channels were holes, black and sudden. It was not entirely rigid, this maze pattern, not entirely fixed, for there was movement there, down within those endless lines and curves and those baffling holes.
I heard more clearly now the sounds of what seemed like desperate scuffling feet and even, perhaps, though I did want to believe it, fingernails scratching as if to escape, or to hold on. And the sounds of voices were ever more unmistakable as wheedling, begging, prayers almost, yes, and cries of despair.
Then as the last of the mist unveiled the full obscenity before me, I saw that things—living things—crawled in those maze tunnels. Human things. No bigger than cockroaches, they were nevertheless human, and they ran and staggered within that endless maze, indifferent to gravity, going up and down with equal ease or equal distress.
There were hundreds. Thousands, maybe. And some fell down the holes or maybe in extremis they jumped, and I knew then that this maze was not merely on the creature’s skin but all the way through him. He was made of some precise wormwood, his entire body a mass of tunnels that might lead to places best not even to guess at.
And still I had not dared raise my eyes to his head, heeding Messenger’s warning not to meet his gaze and now very much convinced, convinced down to the marrow of my bones, that I did not want to look in this monster’s eyes.
But curiosity was as always my weakness, though I had always believed it a strength. I followed a particular denizen of that maze as it ran upward, racing with utter indifference to gravity along the line of the creature’s neck. I followed that scrabbling man, for man is what it seemed to me to be, as it ascended, and I used that focus as my excuse to myself for allowing my eyes to rise, inch by inch, along that twisted wood-hued form.
The man reached an ending and threw himself wildly against a barrier, but it was too late now for me to stop. I knew I would look higher. I knew myself, that much at least, that I had no power to resist the terrible urge to know.
And so my dread-weighted eyelids rose and my neck craned and I saw the skeletal maw, the chipped and ragged teeth, as darkly stained as all the rest of the creature, and now, helpless to stop, I let my willful gaze travel up and ever up and then—
“No!” I cried, the word forced from a convulsing throat.
I turned sharply away but too late, too late by far. I had looked into the eyes of the Master of the Game and seen there the fleshy, swollen worms that gorged upon the insect-like humans.
“No, no, no, no, no,” the voice said over and over again. My voice, though it was strained and unearthly. “No, no, no!”
I knew at that moment that all the pathways, all the tunnels, all the dark holes, the whole of the three-dimensional maze led inexorably to those eyes, to those worms, to that fate.
“Messenger,” the Master of the Game said in a voice that creaked like sapling branches twisted to breaking. “Who are the players?”
For the first time since the appearance of the maze creature, I remembered the presence of Liam and Emma. All of my own horror was there written on their stricken faces. I felt obscurely guilty, as though I was somehow responsible for showing them this terrifying apparition. I saw in their eyes my own wonder and fascination mixed with revulsion. And worse, for they feared that they were to be reduced to lives as pitiable as the damned who lived within the Master of the Game. They saw themselves as those skittering, crying, helpless creatures trapped in tunnels and holes, lost, ever and ever lost in the maze.
And were they wrong? I didn’t know. I had no words of comfort to give them. I had as yet no words of comfort for myself. And as Emma looked to me, she could see my own confusion and dread and this amplified her own.
I did not look again at the monster’s eyes. That was too much. That was a reality that had to be simply denied, pushed aside, and forgotten if I was to maintain my slippery grip on sanity.
“These are the players,” Messenger said. “Liam and Emma.”
“One will play for both,” the Game Master said.
I saw Messenger’s eyes flick and his lips tighten. He didn’t like that. It worried him.
“I’ll play,” Liam said, stepping forward protectively, imagining that he was being heroic, and that, I thought, was heroism, wasn’t it? He had no idea what dangers might face him, and yet, looking at the Game Master, seeing the undeniably supernatural for the first time in his life, he somehow found it within him to push himself forward, to take on his fate.
But Emma was having none of it. “No, no, I’ll do it!”
“Babe, no,” Liam pleaded.
“I’m not going to let you deal with this by yourself, Liam.”
They held each other, side by side, facing the Game Master. Messenger said, “Game Master . . .” But he stopped himself and took a deliberate step back.
“To each his own duty, Messenger,” the Game Master warned. Then, to Liam and Emma, he said, “The boy will play, but never fear, the female will have her own role.”
“Step back, Mara,” Messenger warned me. I obeyed.
The Game Master stood still, then raised his arms. From the blunt stubs where fingers should have been, there grew branches. These branches were leafless, crooked and gnarled, but lacking even the promise of life. They grew and spread to form a sort of bower, a nest or perhaps cage that surrounded and confined the two kids, who held hands throughout until, without willing it, they were simply apart, their own limbs seemingly paralyzed.
Messenger and I, outside this bower, watched.
“Do not attempt to interfere,” Messenger said. “Whatever comes.”
“Don’t you know what is coming?” I asked.
“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.
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