by Adam Millard
“I vote we switch it on,” Scottie said.
“Do it,” said Liza, touching Jamie’s arm tenderly.
Outside, howls once again filled the night. The horrifying noise was enough to make Angela’s mind up for her. “Okay,” she said.
Jamie nodded.
Ten seconds later, Gēmuōbā was booting up, its screen dancing with dots and triangles, its tuneless beeps echoing around the arcade.
*
“I thought my place was a mess,” Bandanna said as they opened the door to Scottie’s room. There were empty bottles scattered haphazardly around the room. Where there wasn’t a bottle, a fast-food box or bag sat in its place. The bed was somewhere beneath a pile of clothes. A musty smell permeated the room, though it was warm, just like Scottie said it would be. A convection heater in the corner of the room was turned up full, and was kicking out a hell of a lot of heat.
“I’ve slept in worse,” Hard-Hat said. He traversed the floor, which was peppered with more clothes and bottles, and came to a stop in front of a large—almost vintage—TV set. “I’ll be surprised if he’s got cable.”
“I’ll be surprised if he’s got channels,” Bandanna said.
Hard-Hat crouched in front of the hulking set and pressed the button to turn it on. There was a high-pitched beep, and a small white dot at the centre of the screen expanded outwards.
“Let’s find out what the fuck is going on,” Hard-Hat said. He waited for the set to heat up.
*
At the back of the arcade, the figure moved along the wall, leaving arm-flesh on the bricks as its shoulder scraped against them. It didn’t feel pain—hadn’t felt a thing when its head had been caved in earlier. All it knew was that the arcade was like a second home, a place it used to come, a place to which it now returned.
The front door had been locked up when the creature tried it ten minutes ago. There had been no way through the steel bars, no matter how hard it had pulled or pushed or slammed its face into the metal reinforcement. It had staggered listlessly away from the door, groaning, wanting only to get in and yet unsure why it was so important that it did.
And now it arrived at another door, one without steel fortification. It reached down and grabbed the handle, not expecting anything to happen.
When the door creaked open three inches, the boy-thing groaned in ecstasy before slipping into the darkness.
*
Jamie stared at the screen. A moment ago the room had been freezing cold, but now he was sweating, and not just sweating but actually dripping. He felt like he was burning up, deteriorating from an otherworldly fever. God, he hoped he wasn’t changing. Was that even possible? They hadn’t yet got past the MAIN MENU.
“It even feels evil,” Angela said. To Scottie, she said, “How did you not know there was something wrong with this thing?”
Scottie looked offended. “It came from my usual distributor,” he said. “They’ve never sent me an evil videogame before.”
“Well, I think your usual distributor owes you some compensation,” Angela said. “Half your players are either dead or demonic.”
“And all this time I’ve been sticking up for videogames,” Scottie said. “Turns out they can make a kid a killer after all.”
Jamie listened to the conversation, but his eyes never left the display or the strange shapes shifting around the screen. Liza was right next to him; he could smell her, could feel the warmth she offered. She, too, was sweating. Jamie considered telling her to look away. There was no point in both of them staring at the game, risking their lives, but he needed her to translate it for him. Looking away was not an option.
He nudged the joystick down to HOW TO PLAY and pushed the green button. Liza grabbed his arm, gave it a gentle squeeze. They were doing this. They were definitely doing this now.
White text began to scroll up the screen. As expected, Jamie didn’t have a clue what it said. It might as well have been hieroglyphics. “Liza?” he said.
Liza leaned in and, after a few seconds in which she appeared to be getting her bearings, began to interpret the mystifying language as it worked its way from the bottom of the dark screen to the top.
*
“I’ve got nothing,” Hard-Hat said, smacking the side of the TV set with an open hand. The snow on the screen flickered momentarily, giving way to vague monochrome footage of the Queen—who appeared to be smiling and chatting to a line of formally-dressed celebrities—but then she was gone, and the static returned with a vengeance. “How does he even watch this thing?”
Bandanna was perched upon the end of the bed, had moved two pizza boxes and a stack of underwear just so he had somewhere to sit. “I don’t think he watches much TV,” he opined, glancing around the room at the bottles. “And if he does, he probably doesn’t even notice the snow.”
“We’re wasting our time,” Hard-Hat said, pushing himself up from the gravely-stained carpet. “That prick could’ve told us his TV was shit.” He was still staring down at the frazzled goggle-box when Bandanna began to gargle and splutter behind him.
Hard-Hat turned to find his work buddy bleeding out from the throat. A crimson torrent gushed out of him, spraying the already-filthy bedsheets, the clothes scattered around the room, pretty much everything within three metres of Bandanna’s twitching body. There, kneeling on the bed next to Bandanna, one of Hell’s own stared out at Hard-Hat, masticating the flesh it had just torn out of Bandanna’s throat.
Hard-Hat went to scream.
The devil’s son leapt off the bed and onto the workman before any sound came out.
*
“…must play…the game…to its conclusion…” Liza trailed off. The translation wasn’t great, but it was enough for Jamie.
“Okay,” Jamie said. “So the only way to beat this thing is to play it and complete it.”
“That’s what it says,” Liza confirmed.
Jamie grimaced. He had hoped he had misheard, or that it was some sort of mistranslation. The only way to defeat Gēmuōbā was to play Gēmuōbā, and if you didn’t make it all the way to the end, well, you became one of those things out there. “I can do this,” he said. “I… can… do this.”
Scottie stepped forward. “Whoa, whoa, you’re not seriously considering playing this fucking thing?” He shook his head vigorously. “That’s madness, Jamie. You’re going to end up like one of th—”
“Only if I don’t win,” Jamie said. He didn’t see any other way.
“And what if you can’t win?” Scottie said. “What if… what if this thing’s rigged to lose, just like the fucking claw-machines, huh?”
Jamie shrugged. “We have to do something! Hemsby’s not going to be here in the morning if we don’t at least try.”
Scottie tried to speak, but words simply wouldn’t come. Instead he grunted, slapped both hands to his head, and paced frantically back and forth in front of the machine. “You’re going to risk your life, Jamie! This is…” He couldn’t even finish.
“And if I don’t?” Jamie shook his head. “Those kids are all fucked, Scottie. We’ll probably be dead before sun-up. Barry’s in jail, and fuck knows what’s going to happen to my mom, or her mom and dad.” He motioned to Liza. “I have to do this, Scottie.”
Scottie stopped pacing and turned to Jamie. After a few seconds, he said, “Okay! Okay! But just stop swearing, yeah? You’re like a nephew to me, and it freaks me out.”
Jamie smiled. “Deal,” he said.
Turning back to the machine, Jamie took hold of the joystick and hovered two fingers over the green and red buttons.
All or nothing, he thought.
It was time to send Gēmuōbā back to Hell.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The pier was ablaze. Flames licked at the palladium, the fairground, burning everything to the ground. Screaming people fled to the end of the pier, threw themselves into the water to escape the conflagration. Some of them drowned instantly, pulled beneath the ocean by the strong current. Others m
anaged to swim away from the pier and the burning debris as it hurtled into the ocean after them. Fire engines pulled up adjacent to the pier, but they could go no further. As the firemen climbed down from their vehicles, they found themselves under siege. Children of all ages emerged from the shadows—from the night—and attacked them with knives and teeth and baseball bats. One fireman managed to escape the youths, was halfway along the promenade when a blazing Ferris wheel gondola came out of nowhere and crushed him where he stood.
DCI Meadows had been pulling bodies (some dead, others close to death) from the ocean when a fifteen-year-old girl leapt onto his back and ripped away his scalp with nothing but her teeth and brute strength.
As he lay dying, blood spurting from the top of his head, painting the immediate ocean a watery pink, Meadows listened to Hemsby’s demise, and the sickening sounds the fifteen-year-old girl made as she ate away at him from the legs up.
*
The first fifteen levels were a cinch for Jamie. The game, though almost impossible to understand, did have a format, and though Jamie was yet to get to grips with it, he was a helluva lot more confident than when he started.
Triangle, dot, beep-beeep-beep-thrum!
“How’s he doing it?” Angela said. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the screen.
“Jamie’s always been good at puzzle games,” Scottie said, and Jamie heard it. It was exactly the kind of confidence boost he needed. A moment’s lapse in concentration would be all it would take, and he’d be out there, amongst the lunatics, chewing people up, staring out at the world through obsidian eyes.
“You’re doing great, Super Jamie,” Liza said from his side as he finished Level Sixteen, the toughest one yet as it had introduced a new shape without warning.
It was going to get harder. Much harder. Jamie could feel it. His legs were already turning to jelly, and the sweat was pouring from him in rivulets. The constant low thrum in his head, willing him to lose, to fuck up even for a second, was unbearable. That was Gēmuōbā trying to distract him, to make him fail so that he could join its army.
Beep-beeep-beep-thrum!
Jamie progressed to Level Seventeen, and outside the world continued to burn and fall around them.
*
The boy-thing could hear its music, the tune which birthed it. So simple, yet so very intricate, the machine and its music had the power to kill, to hypnotise, to make a child malleable like putty. The boy-thing didn’t know that it had been reworked by the game; just that it felt different, hungry and filled with consummate rage.
The music emanating from somewhere nearby reminded the boy-thing that it was time to kill again.
Onwards it moved toward the music.
Beep-beeep-beep-thrum…
*
Marcus Mills was stopped at the edge of the town by two uniformed police officers. If they hadn’t been wearing hi-vis jackets, he would have ploughed straight through them. The rain made it almost impossible to see the road, and his wipers were already working at full-speed. He pulled the car to the side of the road, settling at the edge of the cliff, wound his window down halfway, and winced as the rain began to spit in at him. The police officers—both in their formative years, by the looks of them—slowly plodded toward the idling vehicle.
Great! Just what I fucking need! The day, Marcus thought, couldn’t possibly get any worse. He’d already lost his son to an apparent suicide—silly little fucker!—and now a couple of tit-heads were preventing him from getting home, where he planned on getting good and drunk.
“The road’s closed,” one of the coppers said as he leaned down to the window. “You must have missed the diversion about a mile back.”
Marcus shook his head. “I didn’t miss anything,” he grunted. “It’s pissing down with rain, if you hadn’t fucking noticed. You can’t see a thing out there.”
“Well I assure you,” said the second copper, who didn’t look old enough to buy cigarettes, let alone wear a uniform, “it was there.”
“Why’s the road closed?” Marcus just wanted to get home. “Perhaps one of you pissing pigs can tell me that much, yeah?”
The first copper—the one closest to the car—was about to exert his authority, it appeared, when the second copper stepped in.
“There’s been a few fires,” he said, pointing off beyond the barrier blocking the road. “Reckon it’s some sort of collaborative arson. We’ve got emergency services down there right now. They’re doing everything they can to make sure people can return to their homes safely, and in due course.”
Collaborative arson? Marcus had never heard anything so ridiculous. Was there some sort of arsonist convention? A place where pyromaniacs could gather, discuss the latest Zippo lighters, compare combustibles? He was about to tell the coppers what he thought of them when, out of the trees to their right, a gang of hooded figures emerged. Four of them, there were, tooled up like football hooligans. When they saw the car, and the policemen standing next to it, they made themselves known with some sort of hellish war-cry.
“What the fu—” The first copper took a knife to the side of the head. There was a meaty squelch as it went in, and another when it came out a second later. The copper slumped to where Marcus could no longer see him, and two of the gang slammed into the car with such force that Marcus could have sworn it moved a few inches closer to the cliff-edge.
A hand came in, wet and bloody, trying to grab Marcus, but the window was already on its way up. The hand was trapped, which should have been enough of a deterrent for this crazed lunatic, but what it did next, even Marcus couldn’t have anticipated.
It began to saw at its own hand just above the wrist. The knife it was using the same one which had finished off the first copper. Somewhere, out of view, the second copper was screaming, begging for mercy, pleading with the fuckers not to kill him because he had a wife and kids, blah, blah, blah…
Marcus was too concerned for his own safety to worry about some pig. A second figure leapt up and onto the bonnet of the car, and when Marcus saw its eyes, blackened orbs within the maniac’s hood, and the machete grasped in the fucker’s hand, he knew that he was going to die out there on the clifftop.
The now-severed hand dropped into Marcus’s lap before continuing its downward trajectory into the foot-well. A second later, though it felt much longer, a bloody stump crashed into the window. The glass erupted as the bone- and sinew-exposed hand came through it. Marcus was too busy fending the stump off to realise that the fucker from the bonnet had now clambered up onto the roof.
The machete came through the steel and material, sank into Marcus Mills’ head, pinning him there with an expression which suggested he still had no idea what was going on.
He didn’t fight back much after that.
*
“Fuck, Jamie!” Scottie suddenly yelled. “Your eyes are bleeding!”
Jamie had felt the warm blood trickling down his cheeks, could even taste it as it dribbled over his lips. “I’m okay,” he said, breathless. He certainly didn’t feel okay, but he couldn’t stop, not now, not when he was so close.
According to Liza in her translation, there were sixty-six levels in all. Jamie was almost at Level Fifty.
“Will somebody wipe that shit off his face?” Scottie said. “It’s going to put him off.”
Angela looked around the room but found nothing with which to clean Jamie’s face.
“I’m on it!” Liza said. She pulled the plush toy Jamie had won for her earlier that day—was it still the same day?—from her handbag and proceeded to cleanse his bloodied cheeks and lips with it. He didn’t even flinch as she went about it; couldn’t afford to let her put him off.
Beep-beeep-beep-thrum…
Round and round we go, Jamie thought as he completed the forty-ninth level, gasping for air and willing his legs not to fail him now.
There was no time to rest, though, as Level Fifty began.
It began at exactly the same time as the howling boy-t
hing came through the cage across the room.
*
Angela screamed as the boy-thing with half its head missing rushed toward them, keening like an injured animal. Scottie couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He had beaten this prick half to death out there in the rain, and yet the speed with which it moved suggested it was only just getting started.
“Move!” Scottie said, and Angela didn’t need telling twice. She darted to the right, to where Jamie and Liza were enraptured by the game. Scottie brought his sock-weapon up and slammed it into Calum Rowe’s half-gone face just as he was upon them. Calum groaned as the remaining teeth spilled from his face, but he kept on coming, barrelling through Scottie as if this was some sort of high-contact sport. As Scottie and the boy-thing flew back across the arcade, neither of their legs touching the carpet now, Jamie began to panic.
“What’s going on!” he gasped, unable to tear his eyes away from the game lest it defeat him.
“Just focus, Jamie!” Liza said, though the tone with which she spoke did little to pacify him. “Don’t lose it now!”
Angela rushed across to where Scottie and the boy-thing were rolling around, grappling on the ground, slamming into arcade machines which clattered and clunked in response. Scottie was underneath. The boy-thing was growling and snapping at his face, only held back by Scottie’s hands, which were wrapped tightly around its throat.
“Hold it there!” Angela said.
“Whu—”
There was a loud thunk! and the boy-thing’s one remaining eye dropped from its socket and dangled, an inch from Scottie’s face, like coal on a piece of string. Then the boy-thing collapsed, its full weight falling on Scottie, and the arcade owner grunted as all the air in his lungs decided now was as good a time as any to disperse.
“What’s happening back there!?” Jamie yelled.
