S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11)

by Tanpepper, Saul

  “I have something for you.”

  Eric reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “It’s a note for you. From Mom.”

  Jessie’s eyes went wide with surprise. She took the small square of pink parchment with shaking hands and carefully unfolded it. Few people actually bothered to write anything by hand anymore, much less on paper. It wasn’t that paper was expensive or hard to find; it was just that people preferred to use their Links to send messages. Links were so much more personal and immediate and the messages never got lost, or misdirected, or destroyed in the laundry.

  The paper was thin and delicate. On one side were the faded markings of an ancient receipt from the Golden Dragon restaurant, the order delicately scribbled with dancing stick figures. On the other side was her mother’s note:

  My dear daughter,

  I know how much pain you have endured, and it kills me so to know that I am the cause of so much of your suffering. You didn’t ask for it, yet you always bore whatever came. You always forgave, and each time I betrayed that gift. When I promised you I would stop drinking, I knew full well how hard it would be not to break that promise. I have tried. I can’t change the past, though I am determined not to repeat it. I can’t bear the thought of letting you down again. I won’t.

  I will always love you, even if you stop loving me.

  Your mother,

  Lana

  “It’s dated last Thursday,” Eric said. “The day before you and Kelly got married. I think this means she’s not coming back, Jessie.”

  “No.”

  “It’s her handwriting.”

  “No!”

  Jessie knew it was her mother’s writing. She’d seen it enough times to recognize the tight cursive, the way she always wrote her capital ‘L’ with all the extra loops and curves, like the delicate path of a falling maple leaf. She knew the note was genuine, she just didn’t believe what Eric said it meant.

  “Where did you get this?” she demanded.

  “Jessie, I don’t think—”

  “Where?”

  “I asked a friend of mine to check on some of the guys she’d been seeing recently. As a personal favor.”

  “Been seeing.” Jessie spat the words from her mouth like they tasted bitter. She pushed herself stiffly out of her chair and crossed the kitchen to the sink, gripping the edge and panting like she was going to be sick. But it wasn’t her stomach this time that felt like ejecting itself, it was her whole entire being. The physical aches and bruises were nothing compared to this.

  She spun around, her eyes narrowed. “What friend? Who? Someone on the police force?”

  Eric nodded.

  “What’s the address? Tell me the address where she’s staying!” Jessie was screaming, slapping the counter, sending waves of pain reverberating through her battered body. She didn’t care. Her mother had made promises. But then, instead of keeping them, she’d copped out entirely! “I want to see her, now!”

  Eric shook his head. “I can’t—”

  Jessie swore as she crushed the paper in her fist and hurled it at him. The tiny ball hit him in the face, bounced away and rolled under the refrigerator. Eric barely flinched.

  “I want her to look me in the eye and tell me she’s sorry herself! She expects me to forgive her after this? There’s no god damn way that’s ever going to happen now!”

  “Jessie, sit down.”

  “No! I want to go see her right now! You take me there right now!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why the hell not? You said your friend got this from her—”

  “No, Jessie. The guy she’d been staying with gave it to my friend to deliver to me. To . . . you. She’s not there anymore. She’s moved on.”

  Jessie stared at him. The fact that he’d used the past tense didn’t escape her. “Where is she now? Sponging off some other creep? Can’t you track her down?”

  He raised a hand to calm her. “You know I can’t do that, Jess. It takes a warrant, and to get that I have to provide evidence of a crime. Or get a notice from Arc that her implant was activated. If there were some other way to track her . . . .”

  Jessie narrowed her eyes at him, trying to read his face, his intent. Of course there was another way to track her— using Micah’s illegal tracking app. Problem was, the program was on his tablet, and that was inside Gameland.

  “I think she doesn’t want to be found right now,” Eric finished.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “This guy she was seeing, this George character, he said that she just up and disappeared a few days ago. He says it might’ve been Friday morning. She didn’t even take her clothes.”

  “The day we filed.”

  Eric nodded. “Jessie, this note—”

  “Why didn’t she deliver it then?”

  Her brother frowned.

  “If she wanted me to have this, why wouldn’t she make sure I got it sooner? Especially if she was so god damn sorry?”

  Eric pressed his lips together, took a deep breath, as if silently counting. “Because she’s ashamed, Jess. She told you something and then didn’t follow through. You know how you can be, how you can make people feel when they’ve betrayed your feelings.”

  “This isn’t about me! And we’re not just talking about anyone, we’re talking about Mom!”

  “Look, she’ll come home when she’s ready.”

  Jessie glared at him, ready to explode with anger. But the image of her mother’s broken body came back to her, vivid, almost physical, and it was like somebody suddenly opened up a huge hole in her skin. All the pressure built up inside of her escaped in one deflating rush.

  She collapsed into a chair and placed her face in her hands. Red hot tears leaked onto her palms. She was angry, but somewhere deep inside of her, shoved so far down by her bitterness that she was barely aware of it, there was this strange sort of relief.

  Her mother wasn’t here because she chose not to be. It didn’t make what she’d done right, but at least she wasn’t lying in the mud somewhere. Or in some dark basement. No one had kidnapped her.

  And she wasn’t dead.

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Chapter 18

  Kelly woke with a start, jerking upright and gasping from yet another nightmare. The dark dreams had been plaguing him more and more lately, visions that made him feel as if he were a Player in Gameland and someone was manipulating his mind and his body to do things against his will.

  It’s guilt, he told himself.

  The horrifying images of that place had seared themselves into the very walls of his mind, and while they gave his nightmares a familiar form, they were not the cause of his greatest anxieties. The dreams themselves sprung from a much deeper well, one that had been dug long before the folly of their misadventure.

  He was startled to find Jessie sitting up, her head and shoulders framed in silhouette by the wan light from the streetlamps, still as stone. She hadn’t moved when he’d woken, hadn’t turned to ask him why he’d so unexpectedly sat up or why he was gulping air like he’d just finished a mile-long sprint. Her eyes glistened in the dark in a way that suggested she was aware of him, though her mind was elsewhere.

  He reached out and touched her shoulder and was surprised when she didn’t flinch.

  “Jessie?”

  “Shh!”

  He moved closer to her, felt her stiffen, and the ache in his heart doubled, tripled, grew to immeasurable dimensions.

  I’m losing her.

  Does it surprise you, after what you’ve done? She knows.

  He couldn’t tell how he felt about that. Relieved? Scared?

  How much does she know?

  Enough, came the inevitable answer. Enough to know that you lied to her after you said you wouldn’t. She’ll never trust you again.

  He wished he knew how to fix it. He wanted to fix everything. But he couldn’t. Even just trying would only make things worse.

  “What’s the matter?�
� he asked.

  He expected her to pull away, but she didn’t. She turned her head slightly, not toward him, but away. She seemed to be listening, waiting. Kelly closed his eyes and listened, too. But there was nothing to hear, nothing out of the ordinary, just the same silence broken by the occasional rumble of thunder far away, the whisper of tires on a wet road somewhere, a fitful breeze patiently asking in at the window.

  Maybe it’s the absence of the Undead, their moans, he thought. The night was almost too quiet. It was eerie.

  Jessie laid back down, slumping onto her side, facing away from him. She stayed as close to the edge of the mattress as possible without falling off the narrow bed.

  He tried to pull her to him, but she resisted. “What was it?”

  “I thought I heard something,” she answered, her voice so low that he wasn’t sure she’d actually spoken. Then, a little louder: “Someone crying. Calling my name. Voices. People.”

  She fell silent.

  He thought he knew what she meant. He could hear them, too, inside his head. Crying out for them to help. They were the voices of the people they’d left behind, their dying pleas. Ashley and Jake, left to wander forever.

  He shuddered and closed his eyes and listened to the slow and reassuring sound of her breathing. He tried to match it with his own, but seemed unable to.

  After a while, with his arm still draped over her shoulder, he slipped back into the dark, deep well he had dug for himself, his terrible pit of self-blame.

  † † †

  Jessie waited until she was sure Kelly was asleep, then she slipped from the bed, carefully sliding out from beneath his arm and gently setting it on the pillow so he wouldn’t wake. She found her robe and draped it over her shoulders.

  She had waited for Kelly to return home that evening, half expecting him not to after what had happened that afternoon. But he’d slipped into the house just shy of midnight, crept like a thief up the stairs, and entered her room. Jessie had feigned sleep. The feel of his skin on hers, as he slipped underneath the covers and moved against her, flooded her with dismay and revulsion. But also desire. She couldn’t help herself.

  For the next hour, she’d wept silently for all they’d lost. For the pretenses their lives had assumed.

  It hurt her terribly that they had come to this, but then again, it seemed their relationship had never really been what she’d always thought it was.

  Now, as she stood over the bed and watched him sleeping, she could only muster a deep and abiding sadness from inside of her. Not even anger would come. This was the Kelly she’d always known and loved, the boy who cared so deeply for his brother that he’d gladly make his bed on the floor and lie there through the night without a pillow or a blanket, not truly sleeping, but resting, half awake and listening, just in case little Kyle called out or needed something during the night. This boy, this man with whom she had fallen so irrevocably in love, who had wooed her with his quiet patience, with an ageless sensibility which transcended everything that was so wrong with the world, this friend and lover who had always been so boringly consistent and reliably trustworthy — almost to the point of becoming practically invisible to everyone else — had turned out to be nothing but a mirage after all.

  “What happened to you?” she whispered, so faintly that not even her own ears picked it up.

  She shook her head and headed out, silently closing the door behind her. She didn’t want him to wake again and come looking for her. She needed to do this alone, to prove to herself that no matter what she thought was happening between them, it wasn’t because she was going crazy.

  She tiptoed down the hall and stopped outside Eric’s room. His door was closed, which he only did at night, but she couldn’t hear him snoring. Was he asleep?

  Down the stairs she floated. Past the darkened living room. The moonlight shone in through the kitchen window, and the faucet sparkled, as did the clean dishes in the rack on the counter. The refrigerator hummed quietly against the wall. Tiny lights glowed and blinked: the clock on the microwave oven, the one on the coffeemaker, the stove.

  Thunder in the distance, a brief, dim flash. The skies were full of dry lightning.

  When she got to the back hallway, she paused to look out into the yard. She steadied herself against the door frame. She could see the moon now, peeking from behind a thick, black rag of storm cloud, its edges burning with that cold, white light. The cloud was shaped a little like a turtle, its mouth open and about to swallow the moon. She turned and placed a shaky hand on the door handle to the cellar.

  The night was too quiet. Even the crickets seemed to have fallen mute; earlier, they’d made their lonesome song, so raucous and loud that she had silently wished they’d be quiet so that she could listen for the sound which had woken her, the voice which beckoned just beyond the horizon of her senses.

  Now she wished the cheerful chirps would return, if only to mask the drum of her heart against the wall of her chest.

  The only buzz she could hear was the persistent ringing in her ears; she’d noticed it anew after her fall down the steps — these steps — though it was possible it had been there before. She hoped it wasn’t permanent, that it didn’t mean she had a concussion.

  The crying sound had come to her while she slept, not to her ears but in her mind. More of a sensation, or an echo of something. And it had brought an image to her mind of such sadness and loneliness, like a girl on a faraway hilltop who had lost her way home. The breeze had carried the sound to her.

  She’d woken then, and yet the sobbing hadn’t ended. It had followed her from out of her slumber, had continued even after she sat up and tried to orient herself on it.

  It’s coming from downstairs, in the cellar, deep down below.

  But Kelly had woken and it was as if a switch had been flipped: the crickets, the voices, the crying— all of it had vanished.

  She’d lain still for another hour after settling down again, waiting for him to fall asleep, waiting for the sounds to return. He had, but the night remained silent.

  She didn’t know what compelled her to come down and walk the length of the house. She didn’t know what drew her to the cellar door, other than perhaps a need for certainty.

  She turned the handle and the springs inside the latching mechanism made their thin metallic clicks. The door sprung open a few inches. Jessie pushed it wider. It creaked a little, very faintly. She waited, listening so intently that she was sure she’d be able to hear the slightest inhale, maybe even the rush of blood through another’s veins.

  Assuming it still flowed.

  The air had the same familiar damp-earth tang to it. The dryness of dust and the sweet cloying staleness of the laundry detergent. The wet, musky perfume of molding cardboard.

  It did not smell like dead, plastinated flesh. It did not dredge up images of someone who had died and come back.

  She dipped her foot into that inky pool, feeling for the stair with her toe. The string for the light switch dangled three steps below her. She reached for it, sliding her hand as quietly as she could along the wall, leaning perilously forward. Where was it? Something delicate brushed the backs of her fingers and she jerked back, her heart pounding its way into her ears.

  The string, stupid. It’s just the string.

  She reached again, found it, pulled.

  The bulb exploded with brilliant light, buzzing with a quiet mosquito whine. The filament inside twitched and jiggled. The light sent the shadows scurrying ahead. Jessie had never noticed how dark those shadows were. She’d never before given the spaces beneath each step and behind each riser a second thought. Under the stairs was the perfect hiding spot, large enough to crouch behind, the riser spaces perfectly situated so that one might reach through and grab an ankle.

  She forced a voiceless chuckle from her throat and through her clenched teeth.

  Stop freaking yourself out!

  She plunged down, taking the steps two at a time, dragging her hand on the ba
nister like an anchor to keep from sinking. She reached the bottom, slipped over to the dark corner where the washer and dryer dwelled, and frantically waved her arm around for the string.

  Where the hell is it and shit shit shit SHIT I can hear something behind me and I’m NOT DOWN HERE ALONE!

  A choking cry clawed its way up her throat. The shadows were much deeper and larger and darker and—

  The string curled around her wrist, flicked away, twanged on the aluminum casing for the overhead light. Both hands flew up, searched blindly, eyes everywhere but nowhere that mattered, her breath fending off the fear and shadows. She found the string and pulled it, and another circle of light flooded into the basement. The walls pounced forward and pushed the darkness away. The ceiling fell.

  Jessie gasped for breath. With her back up against the machines, she clutched the edges, white-knuckled, as shadows danced around her. The swaying waltz slowed and finally ended.

  Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound.

  A bubble of laughter erupted from her throat, full of relief and embarrassment. The noise almost startled her. She raised a hand to her lips.

  “What did you expect, idiot?”

  In the darkness behind the bigger boxes, she discovered only the remains of old rags, mummified as they had dried, and in the rotting snares of long dead spiders the entombed husks of flensed houseflies. The corner of one box had given itself over to decay and collapsed, spilling its guts onto the floor— relics of ancient baby toys and pop-up board books, their corners chewed by human and rodent teeth alike. Everything was anointed with mouse urine and liberally dusted by their droppings.

  She turned the light off and headed up the stairs, pausing only once to thrust the handle of a hand broom she’d grabbed by the washer into the darkness behind one of the risers. When she pulled it out, it was covered in a thick dusty shroud of cobwebs.

  Reaching the top of the steps, she pulled the string and the light vanished. Darkness surged upward like water flooding a well. She grabbed the doorknob and pulled the cellar door open and stepped into the hallway.

  Through the window of the back door, a giant shadow reached out for her.