The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  Someone was here, not long ago. Their outline is pressed into the air mattress. Their lips touched the gummy rim of the glass; their fingers leafed through the book. They spent the night here, reading before bed—far from everyone, alone in their private realm. With their server?

  Something protrudes from under the bed, and I bend to find a thin silver laptop plastered with stickers. Question Authority, names that are probably bands. I reach for it, but stop at the sight of a dark, smudgy fingerprint.

  Rising, I nearly trip over a plastic bag lying on its side. The drawstring that closes it is loose, and clothes spill from the opening: a T-shirt and sweatpants covered with brown stains.

  Red brown. I stare down at the stiffened fabric, my pulse suddenly thundering in my ears, seeing Rory in the car again.

  “Shit!” Ellis says.

  I jump, but he’s not seeing what I am. He’s up in the loft, face to the wall.

  Sweat beading under my shirt, I climb the wobbly ladder and find him staring at a spot under the eaves. On the pine boards is a dustless rectangle the size of a small chest.

  “The server. It was right here—see that outlet? They took it away.”

  “You think they…” I still feel weak from the discovery of the laptop and clothes; it’s hard to focus on anything else. “Because they saw us on the camera?”

  “No, we just got here. Maybe they know things are closing in on them—too many dead people. Or maybe they were just redecorating. Let’s look for other buildings.”

  “The tower.” I try to get my breathing under control. Too many dead people. If I show Ellis the bloody clothes, will he insist on leaving immediately? Finding the police?

  That might be the rational thing to do, but we can’t leave yet. We need to see the tower.

  We’ll just keep on being careful.

  Ellis reaches for my hand. “You okay?”

  I nod. It can wait. “The tower next.”

  The tower stands alone in virgin forest.

  Chasing its silhouette on the horizon, we scramble down the far side of the hill, cross a field of grass and scrub oak, climb another slope. The trees close in almost immediately, their mossy trunks damp to the touch. Leaf litter lies spongy on the ground, each step bringing scents of vegetal decay.

  I remember my dream of leaves swirling as the Randoms dragged Rory underground. Something clammy brushes my face, and I bat it away—a scarlet maple leaf.

  And a voice in my head keeps saying, Get to the tower. Get to the next level. Of course you can do it, you’re not scared—keep playing.

  When I was six, the Glare must have been every kind of exciting—Christmas and birthdays, carnivals and amusement parks, promises of more, better, bigger, soon. A secret between Mom and Caroline, something I craved because I was excluded. Every unbearable anticipation, every sleepless night, every reason to keep living.

  We pass an oak that could fit three of me inside its base. No rune on the massive trunk (there should be), but someone has carved words there: The only winning move is not to play.

  And that feels oddly right, too.

  “Hedda!” Ellis calls, ahead of me.

  A last bend brings me into a clearing, and here’s the tower. I stand still, drinking it in—less like a tower now and more like the base of a giant, rough-hewn chimney, narrowing as it rises. Each of its four faces has a bricked-in archway at the base. The only actual way inside is a person-sized hole where the bricks have crumbled.

  The hole is half-blocked by dirt and trash—rusty cans, yellowed newspapers, silverware. I kneel on the junk pile and clamber gingerly toward the opening, hoping for a glimpse inside. There’s no magical power source in there, of course, but—

  One of my hands sinks through loose dirt and closes on something hard and right-angled. I yank my fingers free, dislodging the object—a small framed photo.

  A boy beside a lake with a fishing pole. Dad.

  What’s this doing here? It should be at home in Dad’s study, just as this forest and tower should only exist on screens. Everything telescopes, dreamlike, as I flip the photo over and see a childish scrawl: Ur pathetic.

  And in that instant, I see all the things I overlooked, all the evidence I didn’t put together.

  His favorite quote on the tree. His childhood photo. His calm voice telling me Caroline created the Glare. And the same voice saying, Sometimes you have to turn your back on the old demons and rise above the bullshit, Hedda.

  Demons. Randoms.

  “Hedda!” Ellis calls, louder. Warning.

  I scramble up, stuff the photo in my hoodie, and join him. A few paces past the tower, in a muddy clearing, a new-looking Ford F-150 is parked with a black canopy drawn tightly over the bed. The open tailgate offers a glimpse of shiny plastic and metal—electronics.

  “The server,” I say, at the same time Ellis says, “Shit.”

  Dad steps out from behind the truck, wearing faded jeans and a flannel shirt.

  I feel my heartbeats space out, my breaths, my blinks, as he walks unhurriedly toward us. Above, two crows wheel upward in a chaos of shiny wings.

  Ellis already has the hammer out of his pack, ready to smash the server; sun flares silver on the handle. His face is frozen in puzzlement.

  “Hedda! What on earth?” Dad’s own face shows jovial surprise, but the expression is paper-thin. He walks like someone who hasn’t slept in days. “What brings you out here?”

  “What brings you?” I keep my voice neutral. You’re supposed to be in San Diego.

  Dad detours to open the cab. “I own the place. This used to be my grandpa Frank’s property, and now Erika’s hell-bent on selling it, so I came to have a chat with a real-estate agent. She didn’t tell you?”

  Because she didn’t know. He told Erika one lie, and now he’s telling me another. “We came from Bolinas,” I say, emphasizing the name.

  “Stunning place. Great beaches.” The smile is forced, as if he knows perfectly well who’s in Bolinas—or was.

  Ellis sees it, too. Hoarse with suspicion, he asks, “What’s in the truck?”

  Dad glances at Ellis as if noticing him for the first time. “Equipment. Doing a little moving from one office to another. You’re the Westover boy, aren’t you?”

  Ellis edges toward Dad. Warning bells ring in my head: He’s not thinking. He’s going to do something reckless.

  “I’m surprised you don’t know my name, Mr. Vikdal,” Ellis says. “I mean, you’ve been telling Hedda all about my sister.”

  Dad’s eyes flick to me. “I didn’t know Caroline well, I’m afraid. My wife did.”

  “Are you sure of that, Dad?” I remember the drawing of the skull Caroline did, the one Ellis showed me in the yard night before last. Seen from the corner of my eye, it looked like a man’s face.

  His.

  More and more pieces are fitting into place. The night Mom fired Caroline as a babysitter, she said, she found her at the computer in Dad’s study. Caroline may have been Mom’s intern, but Dad could have been her real mentor.

  My oblivious, cerebral, above-it-all father shouldn’t have anything to do with a half-mythical game that kids dare each other to play in dark rooms. With blood under fingernails and wild runs off cliffs and rulers stabbed in eyes. But here he is.

  “She was going to tell on you, wasn’t she?” Ellis’s voice is raw. “So you had to get rid of her.”

  Dad’s eyes go flat, as if his sociable exterior is a rubber band that’s been stretched to the snapping point. But when he turns to me, he sounds helpless, almost plaintive: “Hedda, what’s going on? What’s the matter? Is it what happened with your poor friend the other day?”

  We’re back in our old roles, me a problem he’s trying to solve. But the land we stand on, the trees around us, the tower—they all testify against him.

  “You made the Glare,” I say.

  “Oh, Hedda, not the Glare again. Whatever your mother says, a game can’t hurt you.”

  “You know it can
.” He has to, or he wouldn’t be lying. He wouldn’t have loaded his equipment into that truck. His eyes wouldn’t have that sickly, exhausted sheen. “We’re going to turn it off before it hurts anyone else.”

  Dad’s hazel eyes flit from me to Ellis. “I’m so sorry you have to see us like this,” he says. “The thing is, Hedda suffers from certain… phobias.”

  My face burns. “It’s not just me!”

  But Dad keeps speaking to Ellis in that awful reasonable tone, as if he’s decided Ellis is the saner one: “I don’t know what she’s told you, but I blame myself for not addressing the problem sooner. Maybe we can go home and do that now. Would you mind putting down the hammer?”

  Ellis tucks the hammer behind his back like a little boy who’s been caught at something. “Is that the game server?” he asks, gesturing at the truck bed.

  “I have a couple of servers in there. But this story of the Glare…” Dad glances between us in that plaintive way again. “Hedda, I feel to blame. I knew Jane was unstable. I never should have—”

  My nails jab into my palms. “My friends are dead.”

  “And I’m so sorry.”

  He looks sorry, and for an instant I almost believe there’s no deadly game, only turmoil in my head, off-kilter and fractured memories and guilt and confusion.

  Then Ellis grabs my hand and says, “Your whole damn property is a life-sized version of the game that made my sister hurt herself. I’ve played it. I know.”

  Dad goes very still. “Hedda, has he been drinking?”

  “No.”

  I squeeze Ellis’s hand, and he goes on, his voice gaining strength, “And then you took on a persona and went on message boards and taunted people and dared them to play. You’re L13Survivor, aren’t you?”

  “I have no idea—”

  “My sister wouldn’t have done that, and she wasn’t a survivor anyway. There are no survivors of level thirteen. Did you push her off that cliff?”

  Without giving Dad time to deny it, he yanks me toward the truck bed. “Let’s get this done.”

  While Ellis is reaching for a handhold on the tailgate, Dad comes at us faster than I’ve ever seen him move before, and the patronizing mask on his face is gone like it never existed. He has no expression at all.

  Something silver in Dad’s hand arcs through the air and goes thwap, jerking Ellis’s head to the side. Ellis crumples to his knees.

  “No!” I grab the silver thing—a baseball bat—and try to wrest it away.

  Dad pushes the fat end at me like a battering ram, hitting me right below the collarbone. The impact knocks the breath from my lungs and spreads outward in ripples of pain, vibrating from my toes to the roots of my hair.

  When I can breathe again, I’m slumped against the side of the truck beside Ellis, looking into the barrel of a handgun.

  Dad’s expression is focused, his stance easy. He’s like a different person. “Snap out of it!” he says.

  I raise my hands, each heartbeat splintering the world in two. There’s blood in Ellis’s hair, trickling down his cheek, and the sight sends prickles down my legs.

  Ellis moves—crawling, reaching for the hammer in the grass. I stretch out, too, trying to nudge it closer.

  Dad’s booted foot kicks the hammer away. With a grating click, he cocks the gun and aims it at Ellis, who collapses with a dull moan.

  I breathe shallowly around the crater of pain in my chest, my brain still telling me this is Dad. He’s a man of words, not violence. I just need to explain. But something deeper, pulsing in my throat, says there’s no point.

  And I realize why Caroline didn’t tell me who was running the server. She assumed I knew who created the game.

  “You gave Caroline the Glare.” Now I understand why I was always so eager to play. My universe revolved around Mom, but Dad was the elusive star on the horizon.

  The Glare is Dad’s private place, an extension of his mind. He populated it with memories and movie quotes and his own childhood terrors. Where else would I go to understand him? To make him love me?

  Mom would have warned me if she’d known. But she was so wrapped up in her theories about evil screens reprogramming brains that she failed to notice the reprogrammer in her own house. And I kept my shameful secret—that I’d tried to win the game of Dad and failed—until the desert buried it, and I kept it even from myself.

  Dad is looking down at Ellis in a way so blank it scares me.

  “I tried,” he says. “Honestly, Hedda, I thought you were more levelheaded than your mother. But you had to dig out that address and start passing it around.”

  “I didn’t know!” From the corner of my eye, I see Ellis stagger to his feet.

  Dad sees, too. He swings the bat.

  “Don’t!”

  The bat halts inches from Ellis’s temple. His ragged breaths mingle with mine as I step between them, trying to believe Dad won’t hit me again. He doesn’t want to hurt me.

  “You don’t understand.” My voice comes out jagged. “All you need to do is turn off the server, and it stops.”

  “He doesn’t give a shit,” Ellis says. “He wants to hurt people; he probably gets off on it—”

  Dad sidesteps and snaps the bat down on Ellis’s shoulder, his arm remorseless as a pendulum. Ellis gasps. My wild rush at Dad tears a scream from my throat, and I don’t remember the gun until he’s knocked me backward into the grass.

  I force myself upright to see Dad whack Ellis a second time on the shoulder and press the gun to his forehead. To me he says, “Go in the truck and get the backpack.”

  Ellis curls up on the ground, arms shielding his head. I step toward him, but Dad says, “Do it.”

  He speaks softly, like we’re playing chess again and he’s ordering me to concentrate. Sobbing breaths burst from my lungs as I hobble to the truck and get the pack.

  Dad’s right; none of this would have happened without me. I found the Glare, I gave it to Mireya, I dragged Ellis here. It’s my fault he’s bleeding.

  All this time I spent trying to impress my father, and I can’t even reason with him. I can’t do anything.

  The sky is still blindingly blue above. The pine and spruce press close around us with their clean, resinous odor. Dad wipes sweat from his face with the hand holding the bat. His eyes are slick. “There’s a rope in there. Get it.”

  I rummage in the backpack—sweatshirt, flashlight, water bottle—and he says sharply, “Just the rope. You’re in this now, understand?”

  “No. I don’t.” I ease the nylon rope out, keeping an eye on both of them. Ellis is clutching his wounded shoulder, and his bangs are matted with blood; he doesn’t look in any shape to run.

  “I gave the kid a chance!” Dad emphasizes each word in a pained way, jabbing the bat in Ellis’s direction. “His sister, too—I only went to Bolinas to sound her out, but she wasn’t reasonable. She was going to call some tech blogger and try to make him believe her story. And your little friend with the pink hair thought he was going to publish some kind of viral exposé. Thought I’d just let him tell everybody I put that game online. He was bugging me for a ‘comment,’ if you can believe that.”

  “You did fucking kill my sister,” Ellis spits out.

  While I say, “Rory? You mean Rory?”

  I remember the laptop in the cabin. The bloody clothes.

  Dad just says, “Tie his hands. Tight.”

  He kicks Ellis in the side, but there’s no venom in his voice as he goes on. “Your friend came to see me with a kitchen knife, Hedda. When I triggered him, he grabbed it. Went for me.” He wipes sweat from his forehead. “He was primed for violence. I acted in self-defense.”

  The rope goes slippery in my fingers. “You triggered Rory? With a skull text?”

  “I can’t control how it affects people.” Now he sounds self-righteous. “I never meant it to work that way—you think I can program monsters into people’s heads? The prototype didn’t go beyond level thirteen. The skulls were an in-j
oke.”

  “A joke?”

  “A goof on all those urban legends. Back then, when Caroline told me she was seeing things, I thought it was just her. I didn’t make the connection to what happened to you until I checked my server log. It shouldn’t work, Hedda. It only works because people believe it. The things people see when they get the text that says Ur pathetic—none of that’s real.”

  “I know that.” I remember the disappearing image. “But how—”

  “I don’t know!” His hair’s sticking up from his forehead, his eyes wild. “They see those words and that skull, and they imagine whatever made them feel the most pathetic, I guess. Or at least Caroline did. It’s like they need to see it.”

  I shake my head, my mouth going dry. “Why would they need to see something that hurts them?” Why would you write Ur pathetic on a photo of yourself?

  “If I could answer that question…” For a moment his face shows a ghastly clash of expressions: guilt, remorse, incredulity, disgust. Then nothing. “You know better than I do. Tie him tight, and I promise I won’t hurt him.”

  I squat beside Ellis and reach for his wrists, close enough to feel him trembling.

  “Go,” he whispers. “Run.”

  “No!” I turn to Dad. “You know this is wrong—you just said so. You don’t want to do it. Why—”

  A clap splits the air. I turn just in time to see a strip of bark from the fir behind us go flying like shrapnel. The trunk bears a new wound, pale and oozing, inches above our heads.

  Tendrils of smoke bleed from the barrel of Dad’s gun. “That’s the one useful thing I learned from Grandpa Frank,” he says.

  My fingers feel swollen and alien as I loop the rope around Ellis’s wrists. He’s clenching his fists, and I know that’s smart; when he relaxes, so will the rope.

  This is a game, just like chess, just like the Glare. We need to beat him.

  “You don’t want to hurt us,” I say. “Why can’t you just stop the game?”

  “Hedda.” It comes out in a sigh, as if my name hurts him. “What do you think happens if I shut down the server?”