The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  Ellis is arranging our huge coffees in the cup holders. I don’t hear the too-familiar vibration of his phone. It slips down my spine and roils inside my gut, a signal bypassing my brain.

  And like a fool, I look back at the closest screen.

  The girl dancing with the Pepsi is gone. In her place is a skull made of clouds and light. Gaping eye sockets, grinning mouth.

  My heart takes a wild leap, and I free-fall, wind whistling in my ears, even as my brain reminds me, Not real! Blink. Ground yourself.

  I do blink—hard—and visualize dirt and seedlings as I slide into the car, fists clenched, spine rigid. I don’t have to glance at the pump to know the skull is gone now. It’s not real, only conditioning and suggestion.

  “Ellis.” It’s hard to speak through my tight jaw. “You need to turn your phone all the way—”

  I stop short. Ellis sits hunched double, his face hidden against his knees and his fingers wrapped around the wheel, rocking slightly back and forth. A continuous sound comes from deep inside him—a hum? a moan?

  “Ellis!” Did the phone affect him, too? But he never played to the end of the game. The greenish light makes his pale fingers seem to glow.

  I touch his shoulder, somehow cold even through the sweater. The noise he’s making gets louder. “Are you okay?”

  The cold intensifies, and I snatch my hand away, at the same time the sound sharpens to a point that hurts my ears. Keening.

  I lurch away, my head hitting the window so hard I see starbursts, but it’s too late. The thing is turning to me.

  It has no eyes or nose, and yet it is Ellis—a younger Ellis. I recognize the slumped shoulders, the nervous sideways droop of the head. I can almost hear him saying, “I don’t want to play that game again!” though all that comes from the gaping hole of his mouth is the keening.

  The mouth is lipless. It wears a grin—no, a rictus of pain.

  My hand creeps into my pack and closes on the utility knife. “Stop it!” I yell, trying to cut through the sound. “This isn’t real.”

  Where Ellis’s eyes should be, jagged slits open—no iris, no pupil, just polished obsidian directing a keen, alien gaze at me. The face is a white mask. The fingers, long as shoelaces, unwind from the steering wheel and reach out clawlike for my shoulder.

  I’ve died like this in the Glare dozens of times (throttling, strangulation), and I move on instinct—ripping the knife free of my pack and jabbing at the hand, forcing the distended fingers to release me.

  The keening turns to a bray of pain. “Hedda—”

  I don’t wait to see if he’s okay, if there still is a him. I shove open the door and run.

  Out of the deadly pool of light, away from the will-o’-the-wisp screens. Don’t turn. Don’t look. The keening goes on, soft but distinct, in the grass, in the woods—everywhere. I run in the dark and toward the dark, my breath coming short and weeds pricking my ankles, till strong hands grip me from behind, yanking me to a stop, and I scream, “No! Get away!”

  “It’s me.” A deep voice, a human voice.

  I know Randoms. The hands will wrench me around and lace themselves fast on my throat and push till I have no air left. I clutch the knife, ready to stab it backward into soft flesh, into something.

  And that same voice says, “If I let you go, will you promise not to run?”

  Blink. Remember the soil. Blink. Remember him on our lawn, the warmth of his hands.

  These hands are warm, too. I nod, my breath coming in sobs, and as the fingers release me, I let the knife go.

  I sink down in the grass and breathe the smells of airborne seeds and crisp stalks, of summer dried out and blowing away. I feel it—him—sitting beside me, keeping a couple of feet between us. The keening is fading, almost gone.

  Ellis’s voice says again, “It’s me.”

  “I know.” I close my eyes. How will he look if I turn around? He could be Anil, Rory, Mireya, Emily. Anyone who reminds me of the damage I’ve done.

  But I need to act like he’s Ellis. Like he’s real. “Did I hurt you?”

  “Scared the shit out of me.” He breathes. “But it’s just a scrape. What did you see?”

  “Not important.” I can’t stop seeing that miserable little hunched Random—its hideousness like an accusation, its eyes hungry for me. I don’t want him to know.

  “Has it gone away yet?”

  “I’m not sure.” I don’t dare turn around, but remembering the warmth of his hand, I say, “You can touch me if you want.”

  Fingertips on my back, and then the hand spreads itself flat. Five fingers, normal length, and a palm.

  “It’s my fault.” Ellis’s voice has a halting, uneven cadence to it. “I unlocked the phone to check my messages. I must have messed up my Do Not Disturb settings.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  His head is closer, his chin almost resting on my shoulder, each inhale warm against my ear. Real. Human. I reach for the hand that hangs at his side and drape his arm around me, remembering how we stood at sunset.

  His chest is solid against my back, his heartbeat a dull resonance. “We’ll make it stop.”

  Will we? “Ellis, I saw a skull without getting a skull text, just triggered by the noise. It’s all in my head now.”

  Ellis rests his chin on the crown of my head. “I know, but you’ll get better.”

  He’s so confident I won’t be like Caroline or Anil. Never stabbing him in the eye because I think he’s a Random, never hurting myself. What power does he have to say I’ll get better?

  None at all. Just the warmth of his arms and the husky vibration in his voice that makes some clenched part of me unfold.

  “Okay,” I say, and open my eyes.

  We sit without speaking, me staring off into the darkness and feeling him without seeing him, my finger on the steady pulse in his wrist. Sooner or later, I’ll turn around. I’ll trust him to be real.

  Ellis exhales and shifts, his breath on my hair. Abruptly the weight of him against me becomes so real I’m afraid to budge, almost afraid to think, and I have to break the silence with the first stupid thing that comes to mind: “Did you really bag Jerusha Pierce?”

  “’Scuse me?”

  “Anil said so.” It’s beyond stupid, and I laugh weakly, but it’s all good, I need to focus on anything but how physically close we are, and how much closer my body seems to want to be, and how recently I looked at him and saw a Random.

  His lips graze my ear. “No. I did not. And now I want you to turn around.”

  I twist in his arms, eyes closed. Knowing this is ridiculous, a waste of time, and best-case scenario I’ll end up one more girl clinging to him in the Encyclopedia of Ellis, just like Mireya hinted long ago at the barbecue.

  Worst-case scenario, he still isn’t him.

  The first kiss is so light I barely feel it, a slight press of the lips. Then he catches my bottom lip between his and releases it, and hair tickles the tip of my nose as he says, “Open your eyes.”

  It’s hard to find breath to speak. “Not yet.”

  “It’s just me.” Laughter gurgles in his throat. “The one who was too chicken to play to the end.”

  “You’re not—”

  Before I can finish, his mouth opens, his tongue darting between my lips. As he pulls back I open my eyes, feeling a flood of warmth in my chest, too, like the time I drank from his flask.

  I don’t see a Random. Just the curve of Ellis’s cheekbone, barely visible in the dark, and the glint of an eye. I creep my fingers around his waist, under his sweater and T-shirt, to feel the human skin. I reach for his face—

  And he disentangles himself from me and stands up, offering a hand to hoist me to my feet. “We should get back on the road.”

  Walking back to the car, I still feel his mouth on mine, the tickle of late-night stubble. “Did you do that just to… bring me back?”

  “Of course.” Ellis doesn’t look at me, but his tone still has that gentle laugh
ter in it. “Because making out right now would be weird and inappropriate, right?”

  I buckle up, still too aware of every move he makes—adjusting the rearview, flicking the hair out of his eyes. Remembering the burnt-coffee taste of his mouth and the weight of his sweater as I peeled it away from his waist. “I guess.”

  “Too much heavy life shit going on. One of us would end up exploiting the other one’s fragile emotional state. Let’s never speak of it again.” He hits the ignition button. “Hedda, I’m kidding.”

  “Oh!” And for the first few miles, all the way to the entrance ramp, I say nothing.

  He asked me what I saw back there, and now I feel wrong about not telling him. But how do you tell someone, You’re my greatest fail? After everything that’s happened, daring you to play is still what I’m most ashamed of?

  When we’re on the freeway, he clasps my hand where it rests on my thigh. “When I said the desert misses you, I was actually thinking… I’d like to visit you in the desert. With no distractions. Just us and all that open space.”

  “I’d like that, too.” My voice is small and dry. “Though there’d also be goats.”

  He chuckles and releases my hand, but I still feel his grip.

  “Your phone’s off now, right?” I ask.

  And then we laugh—an electric, semi-hysterical laughter that leaves us weak-limbed—till the silence of the road takes over again.

  When the wheels hit dirt, I open my eyes to a sea of evergreens.

  The sun has just risen. We’re on the brink of a hill, walls of forest on either side, every needle seething with reflected light. As I watch silvery feathers of cloud float in the sky, it’s easy to forget everything that happened in the dark.

  Not that I necessarily want to forget all of it.

  “Almost there,” Ellis says, and guzzles the last of my mega-coffee.

  “Do you want to sleep for a few hours? You’ve been up all night.”

  He shakes his head. “Got the old adrenaline pumping, couldn’t sleep if I tried. Let’s just go check it out. Maybe it’ll be another dead end.”

  “Maybe not.”

  I imagine the source of the Glare close by, hidden everywhere and nowhere, a forest of wonders primed to fascinate and terrify. It doesn’t feel evil. It feels as incapable of moral choice as an engine gasket, and maybe that’s worse.

  I don’t know if I’ll ever get the Randoms out of my head, whether we smash the server or not. But when Ellis meets my eyes, it’s like he’s running his hand down my bare spine, and something inside me flexes and expands.

  If only I’d listened to him when we were six. If only I hadn’t been so obsessed with impressing Mom and Dad. But for me, the only way to have parents was to impress them.

  A few miles along the dirt road, Ellis says, “I think we’re going to have to walk from here.”

  A hundred yards ahead looms a ten-foot chain-link fence with a padlocked gate. “This is private land?” I ask. “I thought it was a forest preserve. A campground or something.”

  “We’re on the very edge of the preserve. The roads probably stop once you get in there.”

  This road continues on the other side of the fence, winding through yellow grass until it disappears behind a wooded hill. Ellis parks in a dirt pullout, and we grab our packs and lock the doors. “Connectivity this far out must cost a mint,” he says. “If somebody is running that server from here, they have a satellite hookup.”

  “So we’re trespassing?”

  “Probably. You chicken?”

  “No!” Then I see his grin and realize he’s teasing.

  “I was worried there for a minute.” He jabs a toe in the fence and scales it easily, then straddles the top and extends a hand. Two-thirds of the way up, I wobble, and he catches hold of my waist. “It’s okay, you’re good.”

  I let him steady me and survey the landscape, trying not to think too much about his fingers grazing my bare skin. There it is—off to the right, hulking above the trees.

  “The tower! I mean, the smokestack.”

  Suddenly Ellis’s hands on my waist could be anyone’s hands. The world slides under me, as if I’m a fixed figure on a scrolling backdrop. Everything reorients itself around the square black tower—oak, pines, spruce, grass patches, road, pale blue sky, us. I know where I am because I’ve been here before—not in real life, but inside the game.

  Ellis is staring in a different direction. “That’s a camera.”

  I follow his gaze to a small black plastic cube affixed to a gatepost. “You think someone’s watching us?”

  “Motion activates it, and they probably monitor it on their phone. If they’re bothering to. You okay?”

  I nod, and he removes his hand. My heart canters with fear and excitement as I jump down on the other side. They could know we’re here. They who? The drop takes my breath away, and my head spins, fatigue overwhelming the haze of mini-mart coffee. I can still see the very top of the tower.

  On the ground beside me, Ellis peers at his phone, safely in airplane mode; he’s filled it with photos of the images we found in Caroline’s cabin. “If the tower’s due north, the cabin could be just over that hill.”

  “This whole place is part of the game.” I look where he’s pointing, at a trail leading up a slope toothy with rock ledges. Reality. Stay in it. “I mean, this place inspired the game. I died on that hill once. A Random hid in a cranny under a ledge.”

  Ellis doesn’t seem as spooked as I am, but then, he didn’t play as much. “Let’s go that way. If we’re looking for a server, just from a logistics standpoint, I’m gonna say the cabin is a better bet than that ruined tower or smokestack or whatever.”

  I can’t argue with that, much as I long to explore the tower, so I follow him up the hill where tall pines churn like surf. Sharp-spined cones crunch under our feet.

  A cone rolls at my feet. A rustle to my left, and I turn, Glare-gun raised, but the attack comes from above—a flash of white, an impossibly long arm jerking me sideways. The screen judders and turns to a negative image, then blacks out.

  “Hedda!”

  I look up into his blue eyes, shaking off the memory. “Don’t you remember this place?”

  “Sort of.” He slips his hand in mine—warm, with a steady pulse at the base of his thumb. “I think I prefer the version without things trying to kill me.”

  As the trail winds up and around the rock ledges, we break into single file, staying close enough for me to smell the sweat that darkens the collar of his T-shirt. The sun is getting hotter, and I pull off my hoodie, too.

  What if we were out here for a hike and a picnic—on a date, like my parents all those years ago? Would the birdsong still seem unusually muted? When Dad brought Mom here, did he sense a darkness inside her, or did that come later?

  “We should approach carefully,” Ellis says. “Just in case—you know, in case someone’s here and they saw us on the cameras.”

  “I know.” The deciduous trees are speckled with red, just as they were in my dream. Each step takes us over mats of dead leaves that crackle underfoot.

  Crackling, rustling, slithering. Them.

  A hollow rap against a trunk makes me whirl, but it’s only a woodpecker. The Glare tugs at me, more memories pressing in.

  The Glare is a forest. The Glare is a labyrinth. It’s alive with glowing eyes, sentient sounds, eager fronds that reach out and stroke my hand. It’s a dead forest of ones and zeroes, a place we can all experience, but where we’ll always be alone. I see now how artfully the game designer re-created this landscape, weaving details into a tapestry, and yes, that feels like Mom, who notices beauty even in the desert.

  I try to focus on things the digital world can’t replicate: the rich, gritty smell of decaying leaves. The mushy give of the path under my feet, firming as we climb the rocky spine. The width of Ellis’s strides—the strides of a young, fearless athlete who’s not scared of the Glare, not like when he was six. Not as scared as he shoul
d be.

  I tell myself I’m not scared, either. Maybe we’ll find someone in that cabin, but for now there’s only us and the woodpecker and the muted songs of other birds undisturbed by civilization.

  “How are we going to get rid of the server?” I ask.

  “Got some tools from the trunk.” Ellis pats his pack. “Hammer should do it.”

  He can’t have forgotten what he saw so vividly illustrated last night: Destroying the server will stop the texts, but it won’t make me stop seeing Randoms. For those of us who’ve already been conditioned, it may be too late.

  It should be so easy to control something that’s all in your head.

  “There!”

  We’ve reached the brow of the hill, where silvery grass trembles across a small clearing. Beyond, the cabin hunches in a grove of scrubby pines.

  True to the photo, it’s smaller and rougher than the cabin where Caroline lived. Bark streaks the logs. Close enough to see the porch and the white satellite dish on the roof, I imagine Mom and Dad standing there, arm in arm.

  Ellis pulls me away from the path. “Let’s go around the sides first.”

  We split up and case the cabin, though the place feels profoundly empty. A generator purrs from a shed against the back wall. Peering into a bleary window, I’m trying to make sense of the dimness inside when a splintery impact makes the frame shudder.

  I freeze, heart racing, my shirt damp against my back. Where are the safe trees? Are they coming?

  But it’s just Ellis bashing in the door with a hefty tree branch.

  “I thought we were going to approach carefully,” I say as a whole rotten board rips free, sending him staggering inside.

  He says between pants, “Didn’t see anybody, and there’s no road up here anyway, just the trail.”

  Sure enough, there’s no one in the cabin, which consists of a single room and a rickety loft. One corner holds a sleeping bag on an air mattress; another, a camping table covered with cans, kitchen implements, and half-empty water jugs.

  No sink, but polarized outlets and a dangling lamp make it clear the place is wired. On an orange crate beside the makeshift bed, someone’s left a glass of cloudy water and a paperback called Knights of the Moons of Triton.