The Bad Game

by Adam Millard

  Beep-beeep-beep-thrum…

  Yes! That was it! The new game. Barry had joined the queue, hoping Jamie returned any moment. If he had, Barry would have let him cut in front of him, and not just because that was the kind of kid he was. He would rather have watched Jamie play the game first, so that when the time came, he would know what he was doing.

  The game… it had all been very weird. Lots of shapes and dots and 8-bit cheeps. When the time came for Barry to take the controls, he really didn’t have the foggiest what it was all about, and yet he had made it through at least ten levels. The kids in the line behind him had been mesmerised by the surreal graphics and oddly repetitive music, and Barry had been, too. His heart had been racing, and he’d had, for the first time ever, a feeling of absolute serenity. It had been like the first time he had sniffed glue, only far more concentrated. He’d been able to feel every hair on his body, every pore, every vein beneath his skin, every beat of his frantically-pumping heart. Everything had become so intense on the screen in front of him. The colours—some which he didn’t even recognise—and the shapes, it had all been so hypnotic.

  When he was younger, he used to take out Magic Eye books from the library and then spend hours trying to see the pictures hidden in the seemingly innocuous patterns. He had never been able to do it, no matter how hard he tried or which method he used. He would return the books only to take them out again at a later date. Barry was no quitter, and if there was a picture there on the page, concealed amongst the kaleidoscopic arrangements, then by God he was going to find it. One day, after learning a new technique from his then Science teacher, Mr Cahill, Barry had rushed home from school to give it a try. Lo and behold, Mr Cahill had been right. Almost straight away Barry had picked out that hidden image. At first he thought he had fluked it, and quickly moved onto the next picture, only to discover that it hadn’t been a fluke, that he could now see what almost everyone else could. Those elusive magic eye pictures.

  Playing that new game—Gēmuōbā—Barry had felt the same way he had after figuring out how to beat those veiled images. Only instead of seeing a plane, or a car, or a sailboat, Gēmuōbā had revealed everything to him in a blinding flash.

  He could see those images now, those shapes darting about the screen, over and over, around and around, dots and stripes, beep-beeep-beep-thrum… He could hear that incessant bleeping, the kind of noise that would drive a man insane if he was subjected to it for a long period of time, and yet Barry was comforted by it, by each tinny little note.

  Why am I here?

  He still didn’t know, but the police didn’t put people behind bars unless they had done something wrong. All he had to do was remember what he had done that was so bad.

  Beep-beeep-beep-thrum…

  There were dodgems! Yes, Barry thought, ignoring the black goo pooling at his feet on the cold cell floor. He couldn’t even taste its bitterness, and wouldn’t have noticed it at all if the arresting officer hadn’t insisted he remove his shoes before entering the cell. With just his socks on, he felt the warm ichor as it seeped from his mouth and onto his feet. Yes, there were dodgems, and there was Jamie! Jamie was on the dodgems with that red-headed girl from yesterday! Oh, wow, it was all coming back now, and in a hurry, apparently. In vivid detail.

  Beep-beeep-beep-thruuuuuum…

  The redhead was cute. Barry had seen her first, and then Jamie. And then… things had altered, somehow. Something had changed, and he had… there had been a baby. Where the fuck had the baby come from? And why had it been laughing at him so cruelly?

  Beep-beeep-beep-thrum…

  Barry shifted on the cell bed, which was so low to the ground that the sticky black ichor now dripping from his nose and mouth was rising up around his shins. Had Barry been compos mentis, he might have called out for help or moved himself around the cell, out of the clotted tar which had no right to be evacuating his body.

  Barry had reached into the unwatched pushchair and grabbed that baby by its throat, silencing its laughter. Oh, God, no! I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t do something wrong, something terrible…

  That baby had wrapped its hand around Barry’s little finger as he stepped on up to the arena, to where the cars were bumping into one another, and then Barry had seen Jamie once again, and Jamie had seen him for the first time that day.

  Beep-beeep-beep-thrum…

  Shapes and dots, triangles and lines, spinning and hurtling across the display in time with the music. Level nine, level ten, 100% progress. Gēmuōbā.

  Barry clenched his eyes tightly shut and covered his ears with his hands. The cell was no longer freezing. In fact, it was hotter than hell, or at least it felt that way to Barry. “Make it stop!” he gasped as more black vomit poured from his nose, his mouth, his fucking eyes!

  The baby! It had gone into the arena! He had thrown it into the melee, knowing that it would perish!

  Beep-beeep-beep-thrum…

  He had wanted it to die. Fucking thing had been laughing at him, calling him names and saying terrible things about him. Barry Mills, Barry Mills, Can’t get any girls! It had been chanting over and over, and he had quickly grown tired of that little fucker.

  “I killed it,” Barry muttered, his eyes now wholly black as if they had been scratched out of existence. He climbed to his feet. The plastic mattress squeaked beneath him. I killed that baby, and I meant to. He walked across the cell, almost slipping in the puddle of ichor his body had been leaking for the past ten minutes. As he reached the wall, he stopped, his head no more than three inches from the concrete.

  Your turn, Barry, a voice which wasn’t his own said. He knew what it meant, and he knew it was right.

  As his head connected with the wall for the first time, he felt nothing. His pain was on the inside, and there was only one way to make it stop.

  Beep-beeep-beep-thrum…

  He smashed his head against the concrete again.

  And again.

  And again…

  NINETEEN

  “Come on you lot,” Scottie said to the children still queueing for the new game. “Come back tomorrow. Some of us have homes to go to.” There were mumbles of dissent as the line dispersed. Scottie didn’t know whether to keep the place open for another half hour or so. Money was money, after all, and that machine had worked wonders for him all day long. But as the children siphoned out through the doors, he knew he had made the right decision. The arcade would be open tomorrow, and the game would still be there. Little bastards could come back then. Besides, Scottie had had enough for one day. His head was pounding, and the noise that game made, well… it was enough to drive a man insane.

  After locking up, Scottie set about shutting the place down for the night. Despite being the middle of summer, outside it was already getting dark. There’s going to be a storm, Scottie thought. Well of course there was. There had been no mention of it on the news, no forecasting of it on the weather channels, therefore it was going to happen. That was how the weather in the UK worked; Scottie had lived there all his life, and knew not to trust those pricks up at the met. office.

  Around the arcade he went, switching the machines off. Right on cue, a rumble of thunder off in the distance confirmed his suspicions. “Fucking weather,” he grumbled. The best he could hope for was that it was just showers, that it wasn’t one of those prolonged storms. Weekend holidaymakers tended to cut short their vacation if the weather turned, especially if they were over at the caravan park. It was different if you had a nice warm room, somewhere. A self-catering apartment in the middle of town. If you were up on bricks in the middle of a field, with nothing more than a convector heater and a pack of cards to keep you and your miserable family company, then you had every right to draw a line under the holiday and head back to whichever equally shitty part of the UK you were from.

  “Gēm-u-ōbā,” Scottie said as he came to a halt in front of the machine. He still wasn’t sure he was pronouncing it properly, but it sounded about right, with t
he emphasis on the first syllable. “How much money have you made today, you strange little thing?” On the screen the shapes bounced around, changing direction as they impacted against the invisible border at the edge of the display. “Gotta go to sleep for a while,” he told the machine. “More kids to enthrall tomorrow.” He reached down and unplugged the machine; by the time he straightened up, the dancing shapes had disappeared, leaving only a tiny white dot at the centre of the display. After a second or two, that also vanished.

  The arcade was eerily silent, and Scottie stared in at his reflection momentarily. God, he looked like shit. He wasn’t pretty on his good days, but the face staring back at him from the blank Gēmuōbā display looked positively ill. Dark bags surrounded his eyes, and his mouth appeared to be lopsided, as if he had suffered some sort of stroke. Though as he moved, he realised that it was merely the unevenness of the screen making him look that way. It was like looking into one of those mirrors at the funfair, the ones that give you the appearance of someone short and fat one minute and then skinny and stretched the next. Scottie sighed with relief. For a moment there he had almost convinced himself that it was best to eschew the drinking for the night. “Not fucking likely,” he said. What else was there for him if he couldn’t enjoy a little tot at bedtime?

  With all the machines unplugged for the night, Scottie made his way across to the cage and the desk beyond it. He eased open the drawer and took out the whiskey bottle. Once he had finished what remained of the whiskey, he would make his way across to the pub. Someone—one of the regulars, perhaps—must have seen something. Maybe the photograph of Jake had been discarded, deemed useless by the thief, and someone else had found it, picked it up, for whatever reason.

  Yeah, because half-baked old men liked nothing more than to add to their collection of miscellaneous children photographs.

  As ridiculous as it sounded, Scottie had to cling on to something, to the idea that he would see his son’s face again. If the picture was gone forever, and if it didn’t make an appearance by the end of the night, then Scottie would have no other option; he would call Janet first thing in the morning, assuming he could find her details on the internet. Arrange a meeting, which would be awkward and bitter and Scottie would have to bite his tongue so that he didn’t hurl abuse at the woman he still held responsible for Jake’s death. He would ask for a replacement photo—shit, he’d make copies of it this time—and Janet would probably tell him to fuck off, at least at first. They would both know she would find Scottie a replacement picture, but the fun (for Janet) was in the fight, the feeling of one-upmanship.

  His hatred for Janet was absolute, but part of him felt sorry for her. After Jake died, the marriage dissolved pretty quickly. Scottie had done a little research, and had discovered that the majority of marriages—no matter how strong they had been before the tragedy—break down following the death of a child. The devastation is too much to bear, and parents begin to blame themselves for whatever happened. In Janet’s case, this couldn’t have been truer, only she didn’t blame herself. In fact, she insisted she was faultless throughout. The bitch couldn’t understand how her irresponsible actions had contributed to Jake’s death, and that was why Scottie had divorced her.

  How could she not get it? How could she not see?

  After the divorce—or before it had even gone through, Scottie later found out—Janet had hooked up with some shopping centre manager from Cambridge. Some prick named Julio, or Julian, something like that. Scottie couldn’t imagine being with anyone else so soon after his son drowned, but there she was, old Miss Heartless, fucking around and not giving a shit. It was as if Jake had never even existed. Scottie convinced himself that the bitch had never really loved their son, that she had seen his demise as an opportunity for a fresh start. Dangerous territory, because not long after that, Scottie began to wonder whether there was more to it than that. He started to consider the idea that Janet had led Jake out to the pond to watch the fish, and as their son lowered his face over the water, she’d pushed his head down and held it there until the struggling stopped. Look at the tish, Jake. Look at how beautiful they are. The whole scene had played in his mind like some awful horror film, and he had had nightmares in the weeks following. Every time he woke up, he hated Janet that little bit more.

  Scottie slumped into his chair, whiskey bottle in hand, and lit a cigarette.

  Outside, the sound of sirens—lots of sirens—filled the night.

  Scottie closed his eyes for a moment, thinking back to happier times.

  He was surprised at how few there were.

  TWENTY

  The police removed the body of one Andrea Johnson from the dunes at a little after seven o’clock. A smaller body—that of Mr Binkie, a Yorkshire terrier—was also bagged up and carried across the sand toward the waiting coroner’s van. People gathered on the promenade, shaking their heads and muttering to one another about ‘how awful this is’ and ‘she was only a young girl, by the looks of it’.

  “I can’t believe this shit,” Jamie said, watching as the men in the white plastic coveralls loaded the girl and then the dog into the van. An ambulance, possibly the same one from earlier that day at the dodgems, drove away, superfluous to requirements. “Nothing ever happens in Hemsby, and then this. Twice in one day!”

  Leaning against the railings separating the promenade from the beachfront, Liza looked shocked. “I’m just glad I’m only on holiday here,” she said. “You have to live here.”

  Jamie was about to retort when he realised she was just messing with him. “Oh, ha ha. Yeah, Hemsby isn’t known as the Harlem of the north for no reason.”

  “Well, come on,” Liza said. “That girl didn’t just die in those dunes. I mean, she died, but it wasn’t natural causes.”

  “She might have been jogging,” Jamie said. “People die from jogging all the time. It’s why I don’t do it.”

  “Yeah, she was running when she happened to have a heart-attack. Not only that,” Liza went on, “but at the very same time, her dog, perhaps as a sign of solidarity, also had one.”

  “I see the flaw in my theory,” Jamie said.

  “Thought you might,” Liza said. She climbed down from the step, released the railing, and began to lead the way through the small crowd, who were now also starting to disperse. There was no point sticking around now that the body was gone. “So what do you think? Do you know of any local serial killers doing the rounds?”

  “What, like the Hemsby Hacker?”

  “Is that a real thing?”

  “No it’s not,” Jamie said. “We’re not used to death around here, especially not like what’s happened today.” To say it was odd would have been an understatement. Jamie couldn’t wait to tell his mom when he got home later. “That thing with Barry, well, that would have been enough for us Hemsbyites to talk about for years, but this? Twice in one day? Do you realise how fucked up that is?”

  Liza shrugged, came to a halt in front of a fish and chips stand. She glanced up at the menu, which was a chalkboard hanging at the back of the kiosk, behind an expectant-looking man wearing a red and white stripy uniform replete with matching hat.

  “How can you be hungry at a time like this?” Jamie wasn’t hungry at all. In fact, he felt strangely nauseous, and had had to swallow down bile on several occasions since the discovery of the young girl’s body in the dunes.

  “I haven’t eaten all day,” said Liza. “It doesn’t make me a bad person, Super Jamie.” The vendor seemed to brighten at this little exchange, though he waited patiently, and without speaking, while Liza continued to scan the menu.

  What a strange fucking day, Jamie thought as Liza ordered a large chips, a small cod, and half a dozen onion rings.

  *

  “She’s okay,” a voice said. “Look, she’s waking up.”

  Angela opened her eyes. Everything was blurry at first, and panic washed over her, but her vision cleared after a couple of seconds and she relaxed.

 
“Angela?” Ted Porter said. He was the one holding a cold compress to her head. “Angela, can you hear me?”

  Angela tried to sit up, push herself up onto her elbows, but Deirdre’s face appeared above her. “Stay where you are, Angie. You’ve had a bang to the head.”

  “I’m… I’m okay,” Angela said, ignoring the advice of the landlady. She managed to sit upright. Deciding it was a waste of time trying to talk her out of it, Ted helped the girl as best he could.

  At the bar, the two construction workers were sipping pints and watching nervously. It took a few minutes for Angela to piece together what had happened, but when she did, it all came flooding back and almost knocked her back onto her arse. “The boys!” she gasped, and now she was on her feet. Unstable, but lucid.

  “They fucked off after you knocked yourself out,” Hard-Hat said, upending a packet of peanuts into his mouth. “We smacked the skinny one about a bit, and they took off.”

  Angela’s head throbbed, but it was nothing a couple of painkillers wouldn’t take care of. “But they were…”

  “Off their tits on some kind of legal high,” Bandanna said. “It’s amazing what you can pick up on the streets for two-quid a pop. Remember that time everyone started doing bath salts? Fucking zombie apocalypse, according to the news. Everyone just started eating each other’s faces off.”

  “Those boys were high on something, that’s for sure,” Hard-Hat said. “I couldn’t believe it when I clobbered the fatty with the pool-cue and he didn’t even bat an eyelid.”

  This isn’t real, Angela thought. This can’t be happening. “Where is everyone?” The pub was empty, apart from the construction workers, Ted, and Deirdre.

  “These fellas shut the place up once your little friends decided to leg it.” Deirdre motioned to the hi-vis duo standing at the bar. “Reckoned we owed ‘em a few free beverages for not letting you get murdered.”

  “But the police—”

  “All taken care of,” Ted said, slinging the cold compress across his shoulder. “They’re going to come around first thing in the morning to take a statement.”