The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  “The game.”

  Adrenaline pumps through me, heat spreading to my toes and fingertips, blotting out the chill of the night. A twig snaps in the flowerbeds, and I rise and hover on the edge of the porch steps, surveying the lawn. “The… game?”

  “The Glare,” Ellis says. “Did Emily play it? Did you give it to her?”

  “No!”

  Nothing but stillness, stars glinting through the cottonwoods and the bay pricking my nostrils. But everything—the dark trees, the neat lawns and bushes—is menacingly alive in a way it wasn’t a second ago.

  Liquory breath wafts closer as Ellis comes up behind me. “Hedda, you must remember the Glare.”

  Mireya and Rory say that word so casually. In Ellis’s mouth, it has thorns, and I wrap my arms tight around myself, not wanting to admit I’ve been playing it. “It’s a game on the Dark Web. It scared me when I was a kid.”

  “It scared us.” His voice has dropped to a whisper. “The first time you got a skull alert, the game said this was the end for you. Or that’s what I remember, anyway—we were so scared. For years I thought I imagined most of it.”

  “We played the game together?” Of course we did. That’s why he’s in my nightmare.

  The boards are cool under my bare soles. The streetlight washes Ellis’s T-shirt, leaving his face in shadow, as he says, “The woods. The black tower. The wind. The keening when they come.”

  “For so long, I thought I dreamed it all,” I say. “I dreamed about us playing.”

  “You were so good at it. Me, I could barely use a keyboard back then. I didn’t want to play, but you dared me. Said I was chicken.”

  For a second I wonder if he’s really as creeped out as he seems or if he’s playing one of his stupid drunken pranks on me. But I remember how he used to hide his eyes during the scary parts of movies, and cold rushes on my skin like a wind rising.

  “I haven’t said a word about this for nine or ten years, because people would laugh me out of town. They’d say it’s an urban legend. But everything got freaky after that skull text.” Ellis scrubs his fingers through his hair, like he’s worried I’ll laugh, too. “You made me come over one day—you were so scared. You were writing all over the walls of your dad’s study with a Sharpie.”

  “I don’t remember.” But that explains the creepy feeling I got when I explored Dad’s study on my first day back, like something bad had happened there.

  “You kept getting that skull text on your tablet,” Ellis says. “That same damn creepy picture, over and over and over. You said they were after you.”

  Leaves stir above us, a puzzle breaking and reforming around the stars. That cold sense of recognition keeps sweeping over me, like a fire driving sparks in my face. When I got stuck on level 13 last night, when it told me this was the end, it wasn’t the first time.

  “In my dream,” I say, “you tell me I’m dead.”

  “That’s what you used to say after you started getting the skulls. That you’d died for the last time and now you were going to die for real.”

  Control yourself. Don’t get unstuck.

  But I’m not. I’m getting to the bottom of things, sorting them out. “That’s a horrible thing for a kid to say.”

  Ellis nods. “We were both in a weird place back then, because of Caroline. You got the game address from her—that’s what you told me, anyway.”

  The babysitter sits at a desk, outlined in blue computer glow. She tells me not to look, this game isn’t for kids. “I don’t think she would have given it to me. I think maybe I stole it.”

  “Maybe.” Ellis sinks down at the top of the porch steps. The way he mentions Caroline, I can tell her story is a heavy stone around his neck, weighing him down the way Mom’s fears and warnings weigh me.

  “All I know is, you said it came from Caroline,” he says. “You said maybe the Glare was what… hurt her, and maybe if we played it, we’d figure out how to fix her. Like magic.”

  Sitting down beside him, I think of the Randoms slithering through the trees. Jumping on me, throttling me. What kind of little kid would want to play that game, let alone convince another kid to play it? “Oh, Ellis. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “It’s not your fault. I wanted to believe. I found Caroline the night she did it—you know that, right? She was supposed to be watching me.” He presses his forehead against his knees. “I heard something in the basement, and I went down there and Caroline was sitting and moaning with her hands over her eyes. She was like Emily, only less frantic, like she was a mouse cornered by a cat and waiting for it to pounce. And she just kept saying, ‘They’re still here. I still see them.’”

  I can still see.

  I gingerly touch his hand. He shudders, then grasps back hard, weaving his fingers through mine. “My folks didn’t want to discuss any of it. Caroline was ‘sick.’ She had a ‘breakdown.’ They sent me to a shrink, obviously, to express all my feelings in a safe space, blah blah, but I wasn’t going to talk about that night with a stranger. So I talked to you. My house was a nonstop funeral, people whispering behind closed doors, and I’d run over here, and you’d be your normal self. You were never bored, always off on a new plan or obsession. Never scared of anything.”

  “Until the Glare,” I say.

  His fingers grip mine so hard I nearly gasp. He’s pulling me off-kilter, into some wild, erratic orbit that could end with me crashing into the sun, but I need to hear this, need to know.

  “And after the skull texts, you started doing freaky things, just like Caroline did. You played that game to beat the Glare, to save her, but it ended up taking you away from me, too.”

  I breathe evenly so he won’t feel me trembling. Never scared of anything. “But Caroline’s better now, right? You said she got some sight back?”

  “Yeah. She was in this fancy clinic on a shit ton of drugs, and then she went to a halfway house and my parents were convinced she was good as new. They started talking about college. We had a couple of family dinners with her, super awkward—she just seemed so brittle—and then she flew the coop. Vanished. That was five years ago. My folks even hired a private detective to try and find her, but she obviously didn’t want to be found.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say.

  “Me too. I guess it’s all just coming back to me. What happened tonight, how freaked out Emily was, and that skull…”

  His breathing is ragged, his fingers loosening around mine. The breeze moves the treetops, and I feel a million miles from the desert. Wonder if Mom, in the Southern Hemisphere, could feel half this far away.

  “You didn’t give Emily the game, did you?” He sighs. “But you couldn’t have, right? You don’t even know her.”

  “No.” But Mireya could have, and I need to know.

  I reach down into myself, searching for the fearless, stubborn little girl he remembers. Searching for logic, for grounding, for courage. “Ellis, I don’t know what really happened to Caroline back then, or what happened to Emily tonight. But the Glare’s just a game. Mireya and I have been playing it. I even got one of those skull texts, and I’m fine. It’s a rough draft, Mireya says, and the designer—”

  Ellis yanks his hand from mine. His face twists, and for a moment I think he’s going to shake me until I admit the Glare caused Emily’s accident. Or until I spew forth the recollection of those months he remembers so well and I don’t, when I was a girl who made up stories about dark magic, stole forbidden games, and dared boys to play them.

  Instead, he stands up, staggers down the steps, and vomits into a bush.

  When he speaks again, his voice is hoarse, and he pauses between the words. “How the fuck could you play it again? Or let Mireya play it? Did the desert bleach your brain or something, or did you really just forget? Look up the Glare, and then come back and tell me that skull text doesn’t mean anything. And stop playing it now.”

  Mireya comes to the front door in a plaid bathrobe, phone in hand. She looks smaller someho
w with no makeup and dark circles under her eyes. “What happened? You look like zombies were chasing you.”

  “Ellis,” I whisper as we tiptoe upstairs.

  My body is still taut from his parting shot. After he staggered off into his own backyard, I texted Mireya and then ran all the way here.

  I sink onto the bed, focusing on the warm light of the lamp with its rose-colored scarf wrapped around the shade. Nothing here can hurt me. I need Mireya to assure me that Ellis is off-kilter and a game had nothing to do with what happened to Emily or Caroline.

  “Just breathe.” Mireya looks promisingly fierce. “What did Westover do? If he messes with you, I’ll drag him till he’s sorry he ever saw you.”

  I ball my fist in the daisy-patterned bedspread and take a deep breath. “Why did Emily get a text with a skull?”

  She just shakes her head, looking perplexed, and I say, “Ellis showed me the text she got. You didn’t give her the Glare, did you?”

  “No!”

  “You gave it to Rory without telling me.”

  Mireya swivels her desk chair toward me, her face turning stony. “Rory’s a gamer. He’s the only person I gave it to. Tell me everything Ellis said.”

  Ellis’s half-coherent story pours out of me, and Mireya listens with a scowl, swigging from her energy drink. When I get to the part about me writing on the walls, I slow down, and she interrupts.

  “Wait a second. Do you remember any of this?”

  “Some of it! Well…” I think I remember how it felt to write on the study walls, black ink spilling from the Sharpie like blood from a cut. And I remember seeing Caroline play a scary game, though I can’t be 100 percent sure it was the Glare. “Mireya, Ellis told me to ‘look up’ the Glare. You said you googled it and didn’t find anything.”

  Mireya’s silent for a moment, blowing a strand of black hair off her forehead. Then she types something on her keyboard and hits enter. “I didn’t want to say anything before, because I knew it would scare you. You have to understand, this is a thing, just not an actual thing.”

  How can something be a thing and not a thing? She’s beckoning me over, so I bend to read what’s on her screen:

  The Glare on the Dark Web: Real or Legend?

  It lurks in the internet’s dark places. It has a level no one can beat. And if you try thirteen times and fail, you will die in real life.

  I break off and turn to her, my chest so tight my head seems to be floating off like a balloon. “You knew about this?”

  She doesn’t meet my eyes. “Just read the rest.”

  If you spend enough time on gaming forums, sooner or later you’ll hear some version of this story about a first-person shooter called the Glare. You may even have viewed images that people claim they received as text alerts from the game server—text alerts that have supposedly been linked to crimes, suicides, and self-harm. But did the Glare ever actually exist?

  The story starts nearly a decade ago with an anonymous post on the horror-gaming forum Charybdis from the user “L13Survivor.” I am the only person to get past level thirteen of the Dark Web game called the Glare, it began. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you are lucky. If you haven’t started to play the game, don’t.

  The game sends you text alerts whenever you stop playing. If you block them, they will start again from a different number. If you die thirteen times on level 13, the game won’t let you play anymore, but the text alerts will continue. First the game will tell you, “Ur pathetic.” Then you’ll get images of a skull.

  If you keep seeing the skull, you will die in real life.

  Maybe it’s the power of suggestion and conditioning—a devilish psychology experiment. Maybe it’s a curse. It doesn’t really matter.

  This game killed its first tester. It will kill you.

  Don’t look for this game. Don’t play this game. I am posting this as a public-service announcement.

  My vision starts to blur as I skim the rest. People have posted stories about how somebody—their boyfriend’s friend’s niece, their sister’s ex, their cousin’s in-law’s brother—found the Glare and started playing and then died under mysterious circumstances. Drownings, falls, car accidents. One person has posted a supposed text alert from the Glare, but it’s too blurry to identify.

  The article says “L13Survivor” has posted again over the years, repeating their warnings. Skeptics think the anonymous poster made up the entire story “for the lulz,” but no one has ever unmasked them, “and so the legend lives on to tempt intrepid explorers of the internet’s dark places.”

  “You knew all this,” I repeat, straightening and looking down on Mireya, my nails pricking my palms. “And you still let me play.”

  Her eyes turn hooded, defensive. “Look, when I first tried your link, I’d never heard of the Glare. Rory’s the one who knew about the urban legend—when I told him I was playing this weird game, he practically came over and grabbed it off my hard drive. He said nobody’s proven the Glare even exists. You can’t search the Dark Web, and no one’s ever posted a verified link.”

  “Nobody should post a link. You see what it says, right?” Don’t. You will die. How can someone ignore a warning like that?

  Mireya sets her jaw. “Hedda, come on. I know you’re a noob, but this is obviously a hoax. Rory thinks somebody coded our game to feed the legend of the Glare—that’s why it’s so simple, like a mock-up. Or maybe the Glare is real, but the ‘cursed level thirteen’ part is a legend. I mean, obviously, right? How can a game kill people?”

  “I don’t know!” Anger boils up in me, but she looks so sure that I shove it back down. Control yourself. “My mom thinks screens can kind of… possess you.”

  “Like the devil? Seriously?” Mireya turns to the keyboard and types madly, search results flashing on the screen. “Check out some of these other stories, okay? The Glare isn’t the first ‘deadly game’ meme.”

  She gives me the desk chair, and I read while she sits hunched in a straight chair beside me, chewing her bottom lip, eyes fixed on the screen.

  I read about the 1980s arcade game that supposedly gave kids seizures and memory loss, and the demonic Dark Web game that supposedly brought swarms of flies to your window, and another with images so horrifying it drove people literally insane. None of them ever proven to exist, just campfire tales fabricated by kids eager for clicks. Or that’s the majority opinion.

  I want to imagine glittering strings of text zipping back and forth across the globe as thousands of people debate the Glare and conclude it isn’t real. Except it is real, because I’ve played it, and I’ve died thirteen times on level 13, and who knows?

  “Isn’t it wild?” Mireya says. “All these urban legends, and the Glare could be real. This is, like, historic. We could be the first people to post an authentic link to it.”

  “Don’t.” The word is a creature forcing its way out of my throat. “Don’t post anything, please.”

  I stop, because she’s staring too hard at me.

  “You don’t seriously believe these unsourced stories from random people? Ellis could just be trying to get a rise out of you. You saw how tanked he was. And Emily—her asshole boyfriend probably sent her that skull. I don’t know what made her jump, but I can tell you it wasn’t a game.”

  “You should have told me.” She’s as stubborn as Mom, not even listening to me. “Even if it’s a hoax, I need to know this stuff. I need to have control.”

  But I was the one who gave up control, wasn’t I? Why’d I keep playing night after night? The Glare went round and round like a carousel, like a roller coaster. The highs were always giddy, and the lows were cold sludge in my gut, and every time I told myself I was going to stop, I got one of those texts, and a calm voice in my head said, You were doing so well, just try the next level, and so I tried until I died for the last time.

  Sweat trickles down my neck, though the room isn’t hot. I rise and go to the window, press my face to the screen, and breathe in e
arth, grass, car exhaust.

  I still want to play. I remember wanting to be inside that tower more than anything. Mowing down Randoms. Running and not making it. Dying over and over.

  I can control myself. I can, I can.

  A touch on my arm, and I whip around to see Mireya looking frazzled. “Ellis shouldn’t have freaked you out that way,” she says. “Even if it’s all true about what happened when you were kids, you’re not kids anymore.”

  I close my eyes and see the desert, vast and tawny on the horizon. Penning me in, keeping me safe. “Still, you should’ve told me.”

  “You could’ve googled it yourself. It’s not like I stopped you!”

  Those iron bands grip my chest again. I haven’t felt angry like this since my last night with Mom. “Did you want to see what the Glare would do to me? You keep saying I’m weird, brainwashed or whatever—was this your idea of shock treatment?”

  Mireya backs away from me. “You have gaps in your memory—that’s not normal. I’m trying to help you.”

  “No, you think I’m a freak. You watched me play that game to see what would happen, and now maybe you want to see me come apart like Emily.”

  Her face reddens. “Don’t you dare compare yourself to Emily. What happened to her has nothing to do with a stupid game.”

  “I don’t know why she ran off that cliff!” My cheeks are burning, too, as I push my way past her to the door. I need to get out of here before I say something even more horrible. “I got a skull text last night, okay, Mireya? That’s what I was going to tell you on the way to the beach, but then I was scared you’d laugh at me. I got one, too.”

  I don’t cry till I get home to my safe, well-lighted kitchen. Even then, it’s not crying so much as tremors that grip my shoulders in waves, squeezing stray tears from my eyes. My hands shake so hard I spill Erika’s fancy pomegranate juice on the floor, so I stop trying to pretend everything’s fine and lean back against the counter and let it wash over me.

  Mireya’s right—I shouldn’t compare myself to Emily. Mireya would never knowingly hurt me, but I keep remembering what Mom used to say about how normal kids would roll their eyes and treat me like a freak show. Mireya was barely even interested in hanging out with me till she found out I had missing memories.