The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  My eyes zip around the room. With the keening comes a scraping or slithering, like something struggling out of the underbrush.

  From down the hall, where Clint is sleeping.

  Maybe this is real, after all. Maybe someone’s gotten into the house. I look around for something heavy. No baseball bat or trophies, but my utility knife from the ranch sits on the bookcase. I grab it, along with my phone, and tiptoe to my door.

  Light spills into the hallway, the ceiling vanishing in shadows. The stairs are a pool of blackness, and I don’t hear the keening now.

  Sliding my back along the wall, I reach the bathroom I share with Clint. Flick on the light, pull back the shower curtain.

  Behind me.

  It’s the slightest whoosh, like a snake deep in a pile of dry leaves. I return to the hall, where Clint’s door stands closed, and press my ear to it.

  Sssshhh. Something slithering, sliding.

  I knock lightly, so he’s only likely to hear if he’s already awake. Listen again.

  Silence now, but I’m sure the noise came from inside. Using my knife hand, I turn the knob and inch the door open. It doesn’t creak like my own.

  A ruddy night-light shaped like a rocket illuminates the room at floor level. I make out stretches of rug and hardwood, then the edge of the comforter, also decorated with rockets. The curtained window glows spectrally above. The bed is a dark hump, my brother a smaller dark hump in it.

  The closet door hangs open, blocked by a heap of clothes. I’m headed there when the dry-leaf rustle comes again. Then the keening, gentle and soft like a single cricket.

  In the bed. As if Clint is sleeping on the forest floor and not on rocket-patterned sheets.

  The sounds are so subtle. Not nearly loud enough to carry all the way to my room.

  My brother lies on his left side, face to the wall, his shoulder and ribs gently pulsing with his breath. The trilling keening doesn’t stop, so close, in the bed, and now I think I understand what Rory was doing at the mall.

  Something is here, and I need to see it. Something is making its presence known.

  I transfer the knife to my trembling left hand and use my right to wake my phone. Don’t look at the skull.

  Stepping back, I open the camera and frame the bed in the viewfinder. The screen is black at first, the glowing yellow box trying to find something bright enough to focus on. And then I see.

  On top of my brother, its head turned away from me, crouches a glowing bluish-white person no bigger than Clint himself.

  No, not a person—a Random. Its right arm is too long, longer than a human arm, and it’s wrapped around Clint’s neck like a scarf.

  Randoms aren’t real. They’re game monsters. Rough drafts. But I know what I’m seeing. Everything starts undulating again, and it’s all I can do to keep hold of the phone. My breath catches as the Random turns its face to me—or the place where its face should be. It has no eyes, nose, or mouth, just flat, hideous Glare.

  What are you? Why are you here? Are you real?

  As if in answer to my silent questions, something swells within the Glare, an outline like the plaster cast of a human face—alive and struggling, trapped inside the light. The jaws open in a gleeful grimace, mocking and cruel. Milky, pupil-less eyes widen. Hair streams out behind.

  A little girl. Just like me as I imagine myself, daring Ellis to play the Glare.

  It’s not me. It’s real, and it’s going to hurt Clint. The phone thuds from my trembling hand to the floor, but I still have the knife, and I switch it to my right hand, my grip tightening as I dive for the bed. No way to see it now, but I know exactly where it is, and this is no harder than killing a snake. Now, before that impossible arm tightens—

  My eyes close and my ears rush, the windy sound caught inside my head. The keening is an orchestra. I stab and stab and stab into something soft.

  Too soft. Not struggling.

  Control yourself.

  I let the knife go. My body is swollen tight with ferocity; it whooshes out like air from a balloon as I open my eyes and look down. What did I just do?

  My fingers clutch a large stuffed toy, black and white, with round ears and a potbelly—Po the panda. The knife is embedded in his chest, stuffing escaping from four or five stab wounds.

  I’m inches from the dark hump of Clint’s body.

  Oh God, please. Oh God, no. My throat tightens on my breath, strangling it, as I bend over him. The keening and rustling are gone, but the pounding in my head is deafening, and he’s so still. Is his chest rising and falling, or is it my own trembling that makes everything seem to pulse again?

  Just as I’m ready to scream, Clint’s mouth opens in a faint sigh. He turns over on his stomach and burrows deeper into the blankets.

  Asleep. Breathing. Like none of it ever happened.

  Weak as if I’ve been pulled from the churning ocean, I sink to the floor and crouch there. Feel the knife hilt in my hand, the stabbing motion. How close was I to hurting him? How close, because I thought I heard and saw—what?

  And I realize it doesn’t matter if the Randoms are real. All that matters is that they’re real to me.

  What did I almost do? What will I do next time?

  A boy lies awake in the darkness. When his phone buzzes, he doesn’t bother to open his eyes.

  They’re coming more often now. Catching him off guard. At first he was fascinated, almost tickled by every manifestation, but that was before he realized they could touch him.

  He tried turning off his phone for a while, but when he turned it back on, there were two skull texts waiting, and that’s when he first felt a cold, long-fingered hand wrap around his ankle. He was in Starbucks, because he’d felt safer in public. Not anymore.

  Facing them head-on works as long as there’s a slight time gap between the text and the vision. But it can still surprise him. So he’s working on a new strategy: close his eyes and pretend it’s not happening. Because he can’t freak out now, absolutely not, not when he’s finally figured it out.

  Amazing how real it feels. He’s sure that if he opens his eyes he’ll see that leering Joker avatar inches from his face, gazing down at him. Though he knows it’s just his brain filling in the details of his personal worst fail, he is not going to look. NOT.

  Something brushes his hand. He goes rigid as it explores his knuckles—cold, sinuous, chalk-dry.

  Tears trickle down his cheeks. He thinks about how tomorrow, when he posts about this, he will be internet famous. Everyone will want to interview him. He just has to get one person’s permission first, because without her, he would never have known.

  He won’t tell them about this part. The keening in his ears, the cold, glowing flesh against his. And now a weight settling on his chest, making itself comfortable. The part he’s still not 100 percent sure isn’t real.

  Very late or very early, in the dark, the phone buzzes from the nightstand where I’ve hidden it in a tissue box. I ignore it and roll over—onto Po the panda. What’s he doing here?

  I fall asleep wondering—and then sit up with a jerk to find the curtains silver blue with morning. I snuck Po into my room so I could mend his wounds before Clint noticed anything wrong, but I couldn’t find sewing supplies. I searched my whole room for them. I need to ask Erika. I need—

  It’s not quite time for the alarm to go off, but I need to know if I missed any more skulls. I pull the phone from the box and unlock it, shoving night-wild hair out of my face. The house is quiet.

  Last night comes back in more detail. Oh God, if I was hallucinating—is this what happened to Caroline? Did she see Randoms threatening her family members?

  It’s okay, I tell myself, trying to be firm and soothing like Mireya. Whatever was here last night isn’t here now.

  A new text came in at 4:11 this morning. It’s from Rory: We need to talk, now. Coming over.

  Coming over? How does he know where I live? And if he was coming over two hours ago, where is he?


  Maybe he’s been following the clues to Caroline, too, and we can pool our data. Rory’s logical that way—he barely even seemed scared, and right now I’d be happy to listen to his wild theories. I shove Po under the blankets, then rise and open the curtains. Sedge-green cottonwoods shiver against the sky, which is coral over the eastern roofs.

  The street is lined with the familiar Priuses and Avalons and Tauruses—starter cars bought for teenagers by generous parents, parked outside because the family garage is full. With one exception: a dusty little maroon hatchback I’ve never seen before. Could that be Rory double-checking the address, or working up the courage to come knock on our door? Why hasn’t he texted again?

  I tug on jeans and a hoodie and glide down the stairs. Outside, the blue day is veined with saffron, the sun’s first rays so bright they seem solid. Morning air presses against me, inside me, sharp with a hint of brine.

  From the porch, I can’t see the driver’s seat of the hatchback, but it feels unoccupied. Could Rory be wandering around with his phone the way he did at the mall, searching behind the blue bins and bougainvillea for things I can’t see?

  If you run from what you see, it’ll come after you.

  Across the street, a door clicks open. A man’s voice calls, “C’mon, Lex Luthor! Hey, Lexy, big fellow!”

  The big tabby cat races across the street and through the open door, ready for breakfast. It’s only a few strides down the sidewalk to the hatchback, but now I feel stupid. Rory probably meant he was coming over later, after school. No one comes to discuss theories about an urban legend at six in the morning.

  The neighborhood is waking up: A garage door growls open. NPR bleeds through a sunroom window. I’m about to turn tail and go home, to a hot shower and breakfast, when I see something smudged on the driver’s-side window of the hatchback, dark against the sallow reflections of morning.

  A red handprint.

  A woman’s voice cries in the distance, “Don’t forget your lunch!” A car rumbles past as I stare at the handprint on the window, and the world goes blurry and slow around my heartbeat.

  I don’t tell my legs to walk over, but they do it anyway. I don’t tell my eyes to look. The trees, the sky, the street lose their colors. Only the interior of the hatchback’s cab remains in focus. Only the body slumped over the steering wheel.

  It is a body, not a person. His back isn’t swelling gently with each exhale. I can’t see his face, only the cotton-candy hair.

  Below it, his damp T-shirt is the same maroon as the car and the handprint, except for the left sleeve, which is snow white.

  The maroon is blood. Blood coats the fine hairs on his neck.

  My heartbeat slows and my body shifts into some new mode, as if I’m breathing underwater.

  Rory’s left arm is caught under his body, while the right arm trails to the side. Blood has gushed down his neck and puddled in the ridges of the passenger seat, thick and gummy. It’s caked under the fingernails of his pale hand, splayed on the vinyl beside a phone and a chef’s knife.

  The hand in the pile of leaves.

  The knife’s wide blade is cloudy with blood. A duller-red welt circles Rory’s right wrist—as if he was bound, or as if something coiled itself around him.

  Just as my head begins to spin, nausea weakening my legs, the glint of sun on the knife jars me back to reality. I stagger away from the car, reaching for my phone, but it’s not there.

  What was I doing with a phone? Why didn’t I stay in the desert?

  Why is it taking so long to walk back to the house? Why is that passing driver staring at me? Maybe my own skin is coated in drying blood. Last night I almost killed Clint because I acted on the evidence of my eyes and ears.

  I blink the stickiness out of my eyes. I can’t wait to get inside and sluice it off my back and scrub it from under my fingernails.

  Blood trickling between the kitchen tiles. Blood on my arm. Blood on the sand where Emily lies flailing, and freak, freak, freak. This is what happens when we play and lose, when our mistakes and old fears come back to haunt us, and nothing about it is random.

  “May I see that text again?” Detective Lu asks.

  I expected the police station to be noisy, but everyone speaks in undertones, barely audible over the purr of air-conditioning. It’s me who’s disrupting their morning—shivering in my T-shirt, clinging tight to the vinyl chair, unable to lose that sensation of blood congealing on my skin.

  A shower wasn’t enough.

  The detective has a neat, functional bowl cut and an air of competence. I want her to lay everything out in a flow chart and explain it in her calm, even voice, even if the conclusion is that I killed Rory.

  When I’m not worrying about Clint noticing Po is gone, I keep imagining how I might have done it.

  Gravel pattering on my window in the predawn dark. Rory down below. Me sneaking outside to talk in his car, carrying a knife—none of which I remember, but what does that prove?

  On my way back inside to tell Erika and call the police, I checked the butcher’s block in our kitchen. All the knives were in their proper slots.

  Detective Lu puts down my phone, and I see she was reading the text from Rory, the one I’ve already shown her. “Do you have any idea what he might have wanted to talk to you about?”

  It’s the second time she’s asked. The first time was about five minutes ago, when Erika was still in the cubicle with us. That time, I said I wasn’t sure, I barely knew Rory, but I’d seen him acting weird at the mall a few days ago.

  Then I asked Erika if she could get the hoodie I’d left in the car, because the AC here is making me shiver and because I wanted to talk to Detective Lu alone.

  “I think Rory wanted to talk about this.” I grab the phone, pull up the skull text from last night—trying not to flinch—and slide it to her.

  What happened to Caroline is happening to me. The knowledge is like the mysterious threats in a dream, a writhing snakes’ nest or a ruined house about to collapse on my head—I can’t explain it, describe it, or prove it, but there it is.

  Even Mireya won’t believe me.

  Still I make a half-hearted try. “Can you trace the number? I’m almost sure Rory has texts like this on his phone, too.”

  Detective Lu examines my phone. Her expression doesn’t change—friendly but inquisitive. “Is this some kind of prank, sending this picture back and forth?”

  I wrap my arms around myself, trying not to see blood on the knife, blood on the vinyl seat. “It’s not a prank. It’s part of a game called the Glare. If you look up the report on Emily Stoller, you’ll see the same skull. It’s the alert she got right before she ran off the cliff.”

  Not alerts, I realize—triggers. If the rune-tree texts make us think happy thoughts and send us back to the Glare, the skulls send us to our darkest places, where we’re the prey. The danger is inside our heads—inside my head. Hardwired in us.

  “Emily Stoller.” The detective frowns. “That was out of our jurisdiction, but she told medical personnel she thought someone was chasing her, if I remember correctly.”

  “The Glare! They were both playing a game called the Glare that came from the Dark Web. The last time I saw Rory, at the mall, I think he was looking for, uh, the monsters in the game. He was seeing them inside his phone. Just look up ‘Glare’ and ‘skull text’—please.”

  Meme, Mireya whispers in my head. Legend. Tall tale. No one will believe you.

  After a brief hesitation, Detective Lu hits a few keys on her computer, but her eyes keep flitting back to me. “You recently arrived from Arizona, correct? Your stepmom told us you had an unconventional upbringing.”

  “It was actually my fault,” I say in a rush, because I can feel her reaching for the easy explanation—that someone as sheltered as me will believe anything. Cult. Freak. “I found the game. I gave it to my friend, who gave it to Rory. He should never have been playing it. I didn’t think it could hurt anyone; I don’t know if a game can
hurt anyone, but people keep getting hurt, and—”

  I stop, because she’s looking straight at me, and her eyes are filmy with something familiar. It’s the look Erika gave me when I told her about my cardigan sweater stalker—one part amusement, two parts pity.

  The detective takes a long chug from the coffee cup on her desk. “This stuff may all be new to you, Hedda, but it’s not unusual these days for kids to walk around looking for monsters inside their phones. My twelve-year-old almost got run over on her way to a PokéStop.”

  “This was different.” Clint has explained to me all about Pokémon Go. “I saw Rory’s screen, and there was nothing on it.”

  The detective props her chin on her fists. “Did Rory seem depressed to you that day at the mall? Nervous?”

  “Definitely nervous—and excited. You’ll look at all his texts, right?”

  She nods. “Do you think it’s possible he texted you and then drove over to your house because he had a crush on you?”

  The detective’s turning this into a story that makes sense to her, a story without the game in it. A story where I might well be the main suspect.

  I shake my head too hard. “We barely knew each other. Have you seen that welt on his wrist? It looked… weird. Like something had hold of him.”

  “I promise you, the medical examiner will deliver a comprehensive report.” Detective Lu tilts her head, examining me intently now. “What are you thinking could have had hold of Rory?”

  She’s trying to trap me. To tug on a thread that might lead to a tearful confession.

  I force myself to look directly into her pleasant eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll grab my backpack. I can be at school in time for third period.”

  “Hedda.” Bolting the door behind us, Erika looks almost as drained as I do. “You can’t go to school after this.”

  “But Mireya’s expecting me! I was supposed to meet her, and when I texted her, I probably didn’t make much sense. I made her late.…”