The Nightmare Game_Slayers

by S. R. Witt

  But Chase wasn’t letting go. She pincered her thumb and finger, digging through muscle and tissue, searching for the softer walls of its sinuses or the vault holding its brain.

  With a strangled gasp, the creature released Chase and tried to escape. Its screams of pain echoed through the basement and its claws scrabbled against the concrete.

  Chase didn’t let the thing go. She had to finish the monster, or it would just slink off and come back at her again when she least expected it. She reversed her grip on the knife and swept it through the space below her right hand.

  The serrated, S-shaped curve of the blade cut into the beast with a sound like tearing cloth. Blood gushed from the slashed throat in a torrent that soaked Chase’s hand and splashed onto the floor.

  Chase held tight to the creature until she felt its body grow limp. She dropped it on the concrete, and it splashed in a puddle of its blood. Shaking her knife hand, Chase discovered it was covered not just in blood, by some sort of clinging ichor. Whatever the stuff was, it had the consistency of taffy left too long on a dashboard on a hot summer’s day, sticky and wet and revoltingly warm.

  Glowing green concentric circles appeared and dominated Chase’s vision. A single pulsing orb of white light orbited within the center ring, and a jolt of indescribable energy burst inside Chase. The light faded from the center of the ring, leaving a gaping hollow in the center of Chase’s guts. Whatever that had been, she wanted more of it.

  Now.

  Light flooded the basement, blinding Chase before she could puzzle out the meaning of the rush of power she’d felt at the moment of her attacker’s death. She blinked her tearing eyes frantically, trying to clear them and force them to adjust to the sudden glare before another attacker could catch her off guard. The basement was no longer filled with boxes and clutter, but far stranger and more worrisome objects. Strips of tanned leather the width of Chase’s palm hung from the ceiling to the floor. Other than Chase and the narrow straps of leather, the only thing in the basement was the creature she’d killed.

  It was a quadruped, but its front legs were shrunken, and its back legs were grotesquely overdeveloped. Layers of muscle bulged beneath its hide, which was covered in rough scales. The head reminded Chase of a canine, but its snout was broader and filled three rows of overlapping teeth that jutted out from its gums in all directions.

  If I hadn’t been wearing my jacket, Chase thought, those chompers would have shredded both my arms.

  She tried to wipe the viscous goo coating her knife hand on one of the leather drapes, but it was an exercise in futility. The gunk clung to her skin with an alarming tenacity, though it dripped off the knife and her jacket easily enough.

  Chase turned in a slow circle, searching for the stairs. But the straps seemed to go on in every direction for as far as she could see. There were no walls, no stairs.

  She listened carefully, trying to hear any sound over the thudding of her heart in her ears. Someone had spoken to her, which meant they had to be somewhere in the basement.

  Using her right hand to part the straps as she walked, Chase went in search of the speaker.

  Now that the lights were on she could see that the leather was covered in intricate designs. Despite herself, Chase found her eyes drawn to them. She stared at the one nearest her and realized that they weren’t decorative designs, they were uniform rows of letters or symbols in a language she didn’t recognize. The symbols were finely detailed and raised up from the hides like old scars. Her fingers brushed against the swollen pink sigils, and she recoiled in disgust. Someone had carved all of this into the flesh of a still living creature and then kept it alive until the scars had formed from the wounds.

  A wet cough echoed through the basement. Chase followed it, ducking around more of the hanging leather scrolls. Her boot scraped across something, and she stared down at the floor in confusion. It was a white, knobby cylinder of some sort, connected to others like it by bits of thick copper wire. She kneeled, careful to keep the blade ready to strike, and turned the object over with her index finger. It rotated once and then stopped, its flanged shape unmistakable.

  It was a vertebra, connected to more vertebra in a long bone snake that lay coiled beneath one of the leather straps. It was at least eight feet long, and most of the bones were the same size and shape. How many spines had been carved out to make this thing?

  “You’re in the shit now, Chase,” she whispered to herself.

  That cough came again, wet and rattling deep in someone’s chest.

  Chase pushed past more of the dangling leather until she found an arched opening in one of the basement’s walls. Beyond the opening, a long narrow passageway led into the darkness.

  She paused at the entrance, eyeing the tunnel beyond. Unlike the basement, these walls were not lined with stone. They were naked earth, polished to a rich, glossy brown shot through with gnarled roots and the still bodies of night crawlers. Tiny bones were visible just below the polished surfaces of the walls.

  With the stairs nowhere in sight, the passage offered the only escape from the basement. Chase took a deep breath and stepped into the tunnel.

  As she followed the passage, the white light of the basement faded away to be replaced by a steady green glow emanating from circles inscribed in the earthen walls around Chase. The symbols were all identical: three concentric circles, three smaller circles arranged in an alternating triangular pattern on each of them.

  It was the same symbols she’d seen on the police officer’s badge. The same one scrawled across several pages in the murder manual. The glowing symbols on the walls around her pulled at Chase’s eyes, dragging her attention down the hall to the ornate door blocking its far end.

  When she reached that door, Chase sucked in a deep breath and listened for any sound from beyond it. With a start, Chase realized the buzzing in her head was gone. This was where she was supposed to be. The circle pattern was repeated on the door, and it glowed so brightly it stung her eyes.

  “Let’s see who’s behind door number two,” she whispered and twisted the knob.

  The door opened smoothly on the polished brass hinges that didn't so much as squeak when Chase let herself into the room.

  She entered a round chamber lit only by thin black candles resting in the center of a low wooden table. The walls were lined by equally spaced archways, each roughly seven feet tall and three feet wide. As Chase’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw the darkened spaces weren’t archways, they were alcoves. No, not alcoves.

  Open coffins.

  The bodies inside were naked, stripped down and desiccated to little more than withered husks. Dark stains covered the corpses from their necks to their toes. Their faces were hidden behind crude masks, and their heads were shaved bald. Though their tomb was primitive, there was something about the display that struck Chase as reverent. Whoever had placed these dead men respected them, maybe even loved them.

  “Chase.” The moist and choked words reached Chase from the coffin directly opposite the chamber’s entrance. Farthest from the candle’s flame, this coffin’s occupant was still cloaked in thick shadows.

  Chase took the candle from the table and raised it before her. Her knife was still clutched in her left hand, ready to stab anyone who leaped toward her from that shadowed opening in the wall.

  “Who are you?” she asked, brandishing the candle like a shield against the darkness. “How do you know me?”

  “Don’t look,” the voice came to her again, faint and whispery.

  Something about the whispered words made Chase hesitate. She could still turn back. She didn’t need to deal with this. There had to be another way out of the basement, she just had to find it.

  But Chase knew that doubt was nothing but the voice of fear whispering in her ear. She’d come this far and she had to take the next step if she ever wanted to see her family again.

  The man in the coffin wore a mask that looked like a pumpkin carved to look like a grinning sk
ull. Trails of blood leaked from around the mask’s edges, drooling down over the man’s naked body to pool on the floor beneath him. Someone had shaved his head, scraping his scalp down to bare skin, and even further to bone in some places. His body was covered with vivid purple bruises, and cuts caked with scabbing blood lined his ribs and abdomen in even rows. Whoever had done this had done it slowly, purposefully.

  He’d been tortured.

  “You shouldn’t have come, Chase,” the man said, “this isn’t what your mother or I ever wanted.”

  The words splashed over Chase like a crashing wave of frigid water. She shivered, and the candle’s flame jumped and threw a wild spray of dancing shadows in every direction.

  “Dad?” Chase recognized his voice at last, and the hand holding the candle shook so badly that hot wax dripped down to scald her knuckles. “Who did this to you? Where’s Mom?”

  And then the question that had been burning a hole in Chase’s thoughts for the past month.

  “Why did you leave us?”

  Her father sighed and unleashed a pained and hopeless rattle that echoed through the round chamber. “We had a plan to stop them. It took us years to put all the pieces into place, but we finally had the Fake IDs and cloned credit cards to buy plane tickets into St. Louis and get a rental car to drive to Crucible.”

  Before he could spell out the rest of his plan, Chase’s father choked on a mouthful of blood.

  Chase tried not to stare at her father, but it was becoming harder as the candle’s light revealed the extent of his injuries. Below the grotesque mask covering her father’s face, his throat was ringed with black bruises separated by stark white patches of puffy skin. His chest was covered with horizontal cuts less than an inch apart, and vertical hashes crossed them like a skeleton’s smile. His left nipple dangled from a stretched flap of skin, and the one on his right was missing entirely.

  Brass manacles cut into the meat of his arms just above his elbows, and chains suspended them above his head. Long strips of flesh had been peeled from his armpits to his elbows, exposing the striations of the raw and meaty muscle beneath. Chase’s stomach sank when she saw her father’s forearms and hands were gone. His arms ended at the manacles that held him upright.

  “Run, Chase. You have to get out of here,” her father said, his eyes rolling up into his skull behind the mask. With a great struggle, he brought his focus back to his daughter. “Find your mom. Take Paxton and get out of Crucible before the Nightmare Game begins.”

  Chase’s eyes trailed down her father's torso to his sides, where a pair of barbed hooks skewered gaping holes in his flanks. Those chains were pulled taut and secured to sturdy rings inside the coffin, holding her father in place.

  Like his arms, Jack Harrow’s legs had been truncated. They ended in a pair of tight iron circlets that crushed the blood vessels in his thighs and kept him from bleeding out.

  “I ‘m not going anywhere without you,” Chase said, her heart a cold dead weight in her chest. “They’ve got Paxton. Let’s get you out of here.”

  Her father started at the news of Paxton’s fate, and a convulsive coughing fit caused him to hack and wheeze. The chains holding him in place rattled and tore at his flesh, releasing fresh trickles of blood. “Too soon,” he gasped. “What’s the date?”

  Chase disregarded her father’s question. They had more important things to worry about. “Let me get you down from there,” she said, her voice shaking. She dripped some wax against the wall and pressed the candle into it, sticking it in place. There was only one way she could see to get her father down, but she’d have to be careful not to make things even worse than they already were. “This is going to hurt,” she said.

  “Don’t,” her father commanded, urgency lending strength to his voice. “It’s too late for me. What day is it?”

  “Sunday,” Chase responded, her voice low and quiet she stared helplessly at her father.

  “The thirtieth?” her father asked, craning his head forward as far as he could.

  “Yes,” Chase said, perplexed by her father's question. “What does it matter?”

  “It’s already started,” her father groaned. Another shuddering seizure wracked his wounded body, and he choked on a mouthful of blood. He spat red onto the floor and cleared his throat to continue. “We tried to stop it, Chase, but we failed. I don’t think we ever really had a chance. I think they were waiting for us to come back. They caught us before we ever got near the altar.

  “You're going to have to play the Nightmare Game. It’s the only way you’ll survive.”

  “Let me get you down. You can show me the way out of the basement. I’ll get you to a hospital. Find Paxton and mom,” Chase pleaded with her father. “Please, let me help you.”

  “The Nightmare Game,” her father said. “Every twenty-one years, we have to play the game to keep the Red God appeased and prevent the Sleepers from rising up.”

  “This is bullshit. Crazy talk,” Chase shouted, denying her father’s words.

  But Jack wasn’t letting up.

  “Not much time now,” her father responded, coughing again. Chase wasn’t sure if he was talking about the rest of his life or the game beginning. “Slayers, martyrs, and sleepers, Chase. You have to be ready before the sun sets.”

  “It’s not real, dad,” Chase said. “It can’t be. This whole town is crazy. Let me just get you down from there, get you to the hospital. We’ll get away from here.”

  “Tried that,” her father said, a grim smile contorting the mask’s features. “Your mom and I cheated in the last Game. We wouldn’t fight one another. We won together. That’s why they banished us. And then we ran. We hid. Didn’t want our kids to go through this. But here we are. I guess it’s in the blood. The goddamned blood.”

  Chase shivered at her father’s words. “All this time, you were training me. You knew this was going to happen?”

  “You have to fight, you have to stop the others. If you win, maybe there’s still a chance.” He coughed again, rattling his chains and retching up a gobbet of blood that clung to the mask’s chin. “The Sleepers are different now, tainted. Corrupted. Their blood is poison to the Red God. There’s a chance…”

  “A chance for what?” Chase begged her father for clarity. For answers. “I don't even know what I'm supposed to do.”

  Her father’s eyes burned fever bright. A stream of nonsense spilled over his lips, confusing Chase as he tried to explain. “You already have your weapon, it’s been blooded. Good, good. It will never abandon you. Sacrifices strengthen the Red God’s altar, but they can weaken it.”

  Chase let anger push the fear away. If the lunatics of Crucible thought they could do this to her family and get away with it, they were sorely mistaken. She gave in to her father’s ravings, gave in to the rage. If they wanted her to take part in some ritual mayhem, she’d show them what she could do.

  She’d destroy them all.

  “What do I need to do, dad?”

  “Take the mask from me.” His eyes blazed with an eerie intensity that compelled Chase to do what he demanded.

  Chase closed her knife and stuck it back in her pocket. She curled her fingers around the mask’s bloody edges and tried to pull it free. But as it peeled away from her father’s face like a fresh scab from an old wound, he hissed in pain, and fresh torrents of blood gushed from the raw flesh beneath the mask’s rough surface.

  “I can’t,” Chase gasped, backing away. She stared at the red stains on her fingers and showed the blood to her father. “It’ll kill you.”

  Sadness replaced the pain in Jack’s eyes. “You have to, Chase. The mask will protect you from the other slayers. Without it, I don’t know if you can do this.”

  “I can’t kill you,” she sobbed. “I can't do it.”

  Jack’s head sagged as the strength leaked out of his body. “You’re strong, Chase. Smart. You’re a hell of a fighter. But none of that may be enough to win the game if you don’t take the mask. The
other Slayers—”

  “I won’t kill you,” Chase said, anger spiking her words. “How do I put an end to this bullshit so I can get you out of here?”

  Her father met Chase’s eyes, and he nodded once, slowly. “I should have told you all of this long before, but I thought we’d outsmarted them. I thought we’d cheated the Red God.

  “I was wrong.”

  He took a long, weary breath before he continued.

  “There are five Sacred Martyrs somewhere in the town. The first Slayer to collect all five of their spirit tokens and deliver them to the Temple of Bones is the victor of the Nightmare Game.”

  Chase’s mind reeled at the words tumbling out of her father’s mouth. She remembered them from the murder manual. All that craziness, all of it, was true. She struggled to wrap her mind around the madness spilling out of her father’s mouth.

  “The Sleepers will try to stop you, they always do,” Jack continued, straining to focus and deliver the words his daughter needed to survive. “Kill them if you have to. Putting them down will make you stronger, but you have to be careful. Their souls are poisoned, and if you take too much of their strength into you, you’ll lose yourself.

  “I’m so sorry, Chase. I should have told you this long ago.”

  “Dad, please,” Chase begged. “This is insane. I can’t just start killing people because of some game.”

  Jack Harrow raised his head to meet his daughter’s gaze, and a slow, broken smile spread across the pumpkin skull mask plastered to his face. “It’s time to let the beast off its leash, Chase. It’s time to be who you really are. Who you’ve always been. Let it help you like it did in Austin.

  “Don't hide from your rage, Chase. Embrace it. When the time comes, the mask will answer your call.”

  His eyes fluttered, and his breathing dropped to a ragged, unsteady gasping. Jack Harrow’s head drooped, and Chase knew the last of his energy was almost gone.