The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  I keep winding rope around Ellis’s wrists, as loosely as I dare. “People stop dying.”

  “People who were warned. Why do you think I post those messages as L13Survivor? To give them a fair chance.”

  “No, to tempt them.” I lob each word at him. “You put the game online in the first place.”

  Dad crosses his arms and stares at tire treads in the mud, the gun still cocked in our direction. “I hoped you’d understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Without that”—Dad points the gun at the truck bed—“this whole life vanishes. No house, no Tesla, no college for you. No new contracts for me, no healthy bank balance. No career, no respect, no family. Just nightmares.”

  “But your nightmares went away.”

  The trees press around us, and I see my father as a small boy wandering these woods, finding his grandfather inside the black tower. Begging Grandpa Frank to stop waving the shotgun at monsters that weren’t there. Waking in terror from a dream in which those monsters surrounded him.

  “They went away,” Dad says, “after I put the Glare online.”

  I want to laugh, but he looks dead serious. “The Glare keeps your nightmares away?”

  “It contains them.” When he says “them,” his eyes flit over my head, around the clearing.

  He believes it. He’s scared.

  I start to move, but the gun snaps back to me. “Double knot. Your part’s almost done.”

  I knot the rope with tingling fingers. “So you’re saying, if we smash the server, your nightmares come back?”

  Dad’s eyes keep scanning the woods. “You wouldn’t remember, Hedda. But before the Glare, I was working like a dog, racking up debt, waking up screaming at night, trying to convince your mom and everybody else I wasn’t an inch from needing to be institutionalized. Those words the Glare sends to everybody, Ur pathetic—those were the words I kept hearing in my head, just like I had since I was a kid. You’re pathetic. You’ll never amount to anything. I had to get those words out of my head, so I put them in the game, just a little taunting message, and then—”

  “It worked.” He sent his shame to other people, passed it on like a virus, so it wasn’t just his anymore. He wasn’t alone. He was connected.

  He nods. “That server let me sleep at night, and when I was awake and working, all my ideas were gold. I was free—finally. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted—freedom? To get off that goddamn ranch and be your own person?”

  Yes. But not this way. “Whatever happens, I’m going to tell people. You know that. I have to.”

  “Don’t be dramatic.” Dad clears his throat; his voice is weakening. “No one would believe you, and you won’t get any more skulls—I’ve made sure of that. We’ll decondition you, and you’ll be fine, as soon as…”

  Something thuds beside me—the bat. Dad has dropped it to take out his phone.

  “Forgive me,” he says. “One last time. I’d rather you not be around for this part.”

  Ellis sucks in a breath. “He’s crazy. He’s going to—”

  The phone buzzes.

  “—kill me.”

  Ellis’s fingers have mine in a death grip, but it’s too late. My eyes go to the screen like moths to a flame, and I look straight into the empty eye sockets of the skull.

  And the forest comes alive.

  First, the keening. Far off to my left, then to my right, creeping closer.

  In the woods, something rustles. Crackles. Slithers. White flashes high in a ponderosa pine.

  I turn just in time to spot something dashing from a hemlock thicket to the big spruce. My mouth goes dry as I see pendulous arms helping it move, legs bending the wrong way.

  I have no Glare-gun. I’m going to die.

  The sharp scent of pines has turned rusty as blood. I’m on my feet, everything pulsing, every inch of skin a target. This is their hunting ground. This is their game, and I’m in it.

  A voice echoes faintly in my head: He’s going to kill me.

  Ellis said that about Dad, and it makes way too much sense, but where is Ellis? Where’s Dad? Sunlight has turned the whole clearing to pearly haze, the truck only an outline.

  I turn the way we came and see nothing but Randoms.

  It’s like the corridor at school, except instead of jostling in all directions, they come straight at me, pouring up the hill like an invading army, wave after wave. They move like snakes, bodies shaping themselves fluidly to the terrain. And instead of talking and laughing, they’re keening.

  A hundred or more, their eyeless heads drawing a bead on me, their long-toed feet catching boughs and swinging. Keening and keening.

  I can’t move. Can’t breathe. An icy wind gusts toward me. In the glowing mass, I see a face that looks like Anil’s—and then his likeness flows to the next Random and the next, moving across them like a wave. Behind the keening, a distant roar begins.

  Is this what happened to Anil when he ran outside? Did they come for him?

  The thought releases me, and I run for the tower, the only safe place, aiming for that jagged wedge of blackness where the foundation has crumbled. I need to go low, to crawl—

  I’ll be back, Ellis. I can’t die like Anil did.

  I fought back in the game—how do I fight back here? Where’s my ammunition?

  The tunnel smells of slow decay, of subterranean concrete, of ancient fires. I flounder into the heap of junk, dragging myself on my elbows through liquor bottles, Mason jars, mold-spotted greeting cards, all glued into a semi-solid mass by leafmeal and moist dirt.

  Something ice-cold grabs my ankle.

  Not real. I kick out viciously with my free leg, my head swimming. I’m fighting with myself.

  Then I’m past the junk and sitting upright in the center of the tower, panting, in sunlight again. I don’t remember the cold fingers loosening and releasing me, only kicking and kicking. I double over and catch my breath, then roll on my back and gaze up at the opening in the smokestack.

  Blue sky is filmed over with luminous clouds. As I watch, they drift into the shape of a familiar face. Not the skull this time, but the creator. The one it all belongs to.

  My father gazes down, his cloud features frozen in a kind yet patronizing expression, as if we’re still playing chess. He’s with me in this safe place, watching over me, guarding me from the things outside.

  It only works because people believe it.

  I close my eyes and feel the tower press around me, and beyond it, the rest of the Glare.

  His voice was the voice in my head, the one that made me keep playing. He was the Glare, and the Glare was him. The Glare never ignored me. It never forgot me. It always offered what I needed, and by the time I realized there was no way to win, it was too late.

  I’m dead in the game. I died when I was six. I shouldn’t be here at all.

  Never mind, keep playing, my father says in a voice that vibrates deep in my bones, in my blood vessels, through my cell walls and into the coded strings of protein that make up my DNA, so close to his—because we, too, are just code in the end, though we think we’re more.

  Recharge. Keep playing.

  A hectic pulse begins to beat in my head. I gave the kid a chance, it says. I gave him a chance.

  Ellis has lost his chance, and Dad has Ellis, which means I have to get out of here and find them before—

  The black walls of the smokestack pulse, shiny from the sunlight above. Stay. You’re safe here.

  But I can’t stay, because it’s exactly what he wants. I force myself to hands and knees again and crawl toward the opening.

  If I stay here in the tower, Dad will return to the truck without a word about what happened to Ellis, and he’ll set up his server in the cabin again, and he’ll drive me home, and he’ll expect me to keep my mouth shut because I don’t want to go back to the desert and milk goats, because I like living in a beautiful house and riding in a beautiful car, and who would ever believe me, anyway?

/>   He couldn’t control Caroline, Rory, or Ellis, but he thinks he can control me. I haven’t given him any reason to think he can’t.

  The junk pile is harder to scale from this side. I navigate its hillocks and hollows, tin and glass pricking my knees, and something jabs me in the gut—the framed photo I stuck in my hoodie.

  Pulling it out, I realize I’m looking at the whole image. The one on Dad’s desk was cut in two, leaving Dad alone, but now I see the face of the person who stands with a possessive hand on Dad’s shoulder.

  An old man—Grandpa Frank? He smiles, twisted and manic. The eye sockets are hollow, the cheeks too gaunt. It’s the face of a skull.

  The same skull I saw last night at the gas station, on my phone, on the plane.

  Grandpa Frank is the skull, and Dad’s hunched shoulders tell me he fears him, hates him. Enough to slice him out of the photo, enough to haul his possessions out of the cabin and dump them here where they’d never see daylight.

  What did he tell me when I asked about the photo? Sometimes we think that by cutting the worst things out of our lives, just severing them, we can get past them. It’s a sort of magical thinking.

  I understand that too well.

  I unzip my pack and slip the dirt-encrusted photo inside. If he can use magical thinking as a weapon, so can I.

  It only works because people believe it.

  When my fingers meet Raggedy Ann’s soft face, it’s like a chemical reaction—suddenly I’m lifting her out and pressing her to my chest. Still holding her, I scrabble the last inches outside.

  The air shudders with my heartbeat. I can see the truck, see that Dad and Ellis are gone, but the circle of trees and sky keeps pulsing, strobing.

  Flash: nothing there. Flash: something white, and I need cover, I need safety.

  A rune glows on the trunk of the tree Dad used to demonstrate his shooting prowess. I bolt to it and hug it tight.

  Five seconds. The forest continues to strobe, and with every other beat, Randoms creep toward me—from high in the trees, from underground. The keening intensifies.

  I force myself to focus on the world outside the Glare. They must have left on foot. The trail we took here leads on, uphill.

  The keening vibrates in the tree trunks, in my bones. It covers me like water, layer on layer, and I have to make an island in my brain long enough to decide that Dad didn’t take Ellis back to the cabin. For what he needs to do, he went deeper into the woods, deep enough to drown the sound.

  The keening stops all at once.

  And still clutching my doll, my talisman, I run.

  A moving furrow of leaves blocks my path. I leap right over it (not real), dash around the truck, and bend to snatch the bat from the spot where Dad left it. With it in one hand and Ann in the other, I head up the path, tasting iron.

  Leaves slither. White shapes vault from tree to tree.

  Here in these desolate woods, Grandpa Frank saw aliens. Monsters haunted Dad’s dreams. The trail keeps getting steeper. I trip over a sapling and come down hard, my jaws jammed together by the impact. The bat starts rolling down the slope, and I catch it and go on, waiting for the moment when cold fingers will close on my ankle again.

  But they seem to be hanging back. As if they’re waiting for something.

  At some point I drop Ann to get a better grip on the bat. Leaves crackle where she lands, whirling and flurrying, but I can’t stop.

  A few more gasping strides, and I’m cresting the hill. Below, a short, piney downslope ends at a sheer drop-off. The momentum carries me straight toward Dad, who’s dragging Ellis down the incline.

  Dragging, because Ellis is trudging along, hurt but alive, and when I see that, I get my second wind. At the bottom of the cliff grow tall, shimmering maples; their crowns fill the sky.

  I was almost too late.

  Needles slide under my sneakers. I scrabble for footing on the steep slope, tightening my grip on the bat, and come to a stop right above them. Ellis’s head whips around.

  “I smashed your server,” I say, breathless. “It’s gone. Can’t you feel it?”

  Dad turns, too, but there’s only glowing white where his face should be.

  For a sickening instant, I stand frozen, facing a Random wearing my father’s clothes. Under the shiny, pixelated skin, the outlines of his face are crying, straining, as if he’s trapped inside.

  Yet he speaks in a calm voice: “You didn’t smash anything. You know better.”

  I say, “It’s gone, so there’s no point in hurting anybody else. Let him go.”

  As I raise the bat, the Dad-Random presses the barrel of his gun against Ellis’s cheek. “Don’t move, Hedda.”

  The wind rises. The bat freezes in midair. I have to make him believe just long enough to lose his focus.

  “I smashed it because I love you.” I drop the bat and reach into my pack and pull out the stained, dirty photo of Dad in the clawlike grip of Grandpa Frank. I thrust it so close he can’t turn away. “I bet he loved you, too.”

  My father laughs. His face is his face again—pale, sweaty skin and hazel eyes and glasses. “Never,” he says. “He knew I was… pathetic.”

  He stares at the photo like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever seen. When he opens his mouth again, no words come out.

  Now, while he’s distracted. But as I bend to grab the bat, Dad’s laugh turns to a moan. He lowers the gun and tears the photo from my hand.

  “You did smash it,” he says.

  Ellis yanks himself free, stumbling straight into me, while Dad staggers backward, down the slope, eyes still glued to the image. The amusement on his face has twisted into shock, and then into horror. The moan rises again in his throat.

  “Run!” Ellis yells.

  I don’t run. I can’t even move, only watch as Dad’s head darts like he hears something behind him. Back the other way, and then he cranes his neck to scan the treetops. I can’t see anything that isn’t there, can’t hear anything but the sound he’s making, but I know exactly what he sees and hears.

  Rustling. Slithering. Keening. Fleeting white shapes in the trees.

  He thinks I smashed the server. He thinks Grandpa Frank’s monsters are coming for him.

  And because he believes it, they are.

  My father jerks backward as if a rope has yanked his ankle. He drops the photo and nearly drops the gun, then regains his footing and turns in a wobbly circle, aiming it wildly. I duck—but he’s not aiming at us, not even seeing us. There? There? Where are they?

  Magical thinking. Dad’s nightmares are immune to bats and bullets. They are everywhere.

  Ellis shields me with his body as my father breaks into a flailing run along the edge of the cliff—only to halt and turn in a circle again, cradling the gun against his chest. He is distinctly keening now.

  “The hell?” Ellis whispers, as I say, “He doesn’t see us anymore.”

  And then the nightmares fall on my father.

  The gun claps. We both duck, and when we raise our heads again, he’s down like a tree in a gale. He rolls and thrashes in the pine needles, his hands clawing desperately, trying to rip invisible fingers from his neck. His glasses go flying.

  Another gunshot, and I press my hands to my eyes. The sounds of struggling stop abruptly.

  I hear a choked sob or gasp that could be any one of us—a small sound, a pleading sound. Then silence, and I lower my hands, but I don’t look down.

  Ellis moves first.

  When he lets me go, I sink to my knees. My muscles have gone watery, and it takes all my effort to keep my gaze on him as he approaches the edge.

  “What?” I ask when he doesn’t move.

  Ellis keeps looking down. Shakes his head.

  After what feels like hours, I walk closer to the edge and look, too. Dad lies on his side with his arms contorted against his chest as if he’s still fending off an invisible assailant, and his temple—

  Blood pools under his head, in his hair. I look away.
/>
  He seems naked without his glasses. I look around for them, wanting to prop them back on his nose, but Ellis says, “Don’t touch anything. They’ll need to see exactly how it happened.”

  Ellis is the one who leans close and checks for a pulse. I wait for him, feeling the tree against my back, sturdy and strong. I let my mind go blank.

  The photo lies in the dirt, facedown, saying Ur pathetic over and over. I don’t pick it up.

  On the way back down the hill, I discover Raggedy Ann. She is mud-stained, and her right arm and left leg have been ripped from her body.

  I tuck her in the crook of my arm. It’s okay. It’s okay. The missing limbs are nowhere to be found.

  We smash the server into dozens of pieces, and then hundreds, using Ellis’s hammer. Irritated by the noise, crows caw and fly off in a scuffle of wings.

  I wish it had exploded. I wish it had fought back. But it’s only a machine.

  Who were the original Randoms? Aliens escaped from a military base? Kids who tormented Dad at school, or frat bros who mocked him in college, or girls who wouldn’t date him? It doesn’t matter. When the nightmares stopped, he thought he’d escaped, but they were still there waiting for him, the instant he thought his server was gone.

  The instant he saw his own version of the skull.

  The sun is past the zenith now, the tower standing stark against the blue. I keep expecting Dad to limp down the trail toward us, carrying his gun.

  I’ve told Ellis about the bloody clothes and the laptop in the cabin. They should help bolster the story we’ll tell.

  “Could you have a concussion?” I ask. “He hit you hard.”

  “Not dizzy yet.”

  My mind keeps slipping back to the top of that cliff, like the memory is something I need to steady myself. I’m there, standing in the golden-lime-green light that sifts through the maples, when Ellis says, “Nobody would believe us if we told them everything. You know that?”

  “I know.”

  Blink, and we’re in the Prius again, jolting back up the dirt road toward the highway. Silver feathers of cloud linger above the pines.