“Not sort of. It was.”
It felt like a cork had just been pulled from him, and weeks, months, and years of enthusiasm were gushing out. He forced a laugh that sounded more bitter than he’d intended.
“So all those people on forums, all their theories, the legends…There are going be some pissed-off geeks out there.”
Oblivious, Lorna carried on: “Looking at all the games around now, especially the ones with clocks telling you how much time you’ve spent playing…Wow, I mean, we’re a step away from plugging ourselves into The Matrix, really.”
“So can Desert Walk be completed?”
“Oh, now, if I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” she said.
“It can’t, can it?” There was desperate hope in his voice. Lorna mimed closing a zipper across her lips. “Okay, well, tell me what all the objects in the desert are about. Do they have a point? Are they clues?”
Lorna shook her head. “No, before we released the game we decided we needed a way to sell it to the suits; they wouldn’t have been happy with a game where nothing happens, so we hinted at a possible ending and put in a few objects that players could ‘find’ if anyone did decide to check it: a cactus, a rusty old van—”
“A kid’s shoe.”
She frowned. “Don’t remember that one. I remember a cricket bat…There’s a few others. Maybe there was a shoe.”
“What about the hungry kid?” Since Saturday, Sam hadn’t managed to find the gaunt child again, although he’d traveled in much the same direction he had done before and even stumbled across the same cactus—or at least he thought it was the same cactus.
“Pardon?” Lorna said, although from her tone, Sam understood she’d heard him the first time.
“The hungry kid. What’s he about?”
Lorna sat up straight, her face stiff and wary. “Are you being funny?”
Not liking the rapid shift in the tone of the interview, and feeling protective of his remaining enthusiasm, Sam tried changing the subject. “Let me ask something else, then: Why was the game pulled?”
She glared at him and said nothing.
He tried changing the subject again, not understanding what was happening, what he had done wrong. “Okay, you’re a nurse now, I take it? Why did you leave gam—”
Lorna stood up and put on her coat. She was leaving.
Sam panicked. He tried to say something to rescue the situation. “Sorry, did I say—”
“You’re a piece of work, aren’t you?” she said, ejecting the words like insects that had flown into her mouth. “Hungry child? Why was the game pulled? Did someone put you up to this?”
“Honestly,” Sam said, holding up both hands. “I don’t know what I’ve said.”
Lorna looked down at her coffee mug, then back to Sam, then at the laptop, then back to the coffee. Sam knew exactly what she was thinking, so he shut his laptop and turned to put it down on the floor out of harm’s way. He heard her sigh, but when he turned back to face her, she was already through the coffee shop door and out onto the high street.
In the following days Sam wrote three apologetic emails to Lorna. It wasn’t that he felt anything remotely close to guilt over what had happened in Manchester (how could he if he had no idea what he done?), he just didn’t want anything to affect the publication of his blog about Desert Walk. Her revelations were going to generate a lot of traffic and there was potential for them to etch his name in the history of gaming, even if on a personal level they had deeply upset him.
He couldn’t bear to play the stupid thing now. He packed up the MSII and put it back in the cupboard. Even if there really was a way to complete the game, he had no intention of being the subject of a stupid prank anymore. Two decades was long enough. He came close to throwing the game away, standing over the kitchen bin for a good minute with the cartridge in his hand before reminding himself how much it had cost him in both sleep and cash. Perhaps he’d sell it on for a profit when his blog revived interest in the game.
The game wasn’t done with Sam, though. The sheer amount of time he’d put in during the first week had scarred him to the point of it dominating his dreams. More than once he awoke in the dark hours before dawn, his hands still clutching an invisible controller, the sound of electronic footsteps echoing in his mind.
He hadn’t seen much of Jamie. Days after his last email to Lorna, he bumped into him in the kitchen and reported that the kettle was back in commission. “Did you complete it in the end?” he said when Sam broke the news that the Desert Walk days were done.
“Yeah, pretty much,” Sam said. “Now you can loaf around here all day and get your caff-buzz on again.”
Jamie flicked two fingers in Sam’s direction, but Sam became distracted by an email on his phone. It was a response from Lorna. All it contained was an Internet link to a BBC news article. With Jamie still wittering away, he went upstairs to open it on his laptop.
JOHN TAYLOR RETURNED TO PRISON
The headline meant nothing to him, so he read the article. The first few paragraphs were equally confusing, the details of a drug bust in a rough part of Newcastle. It was only when he reached the fourth paragraph that he felt something close to understanding.
Taylor served a fifteen-year sentence after causing or allowing the death of his 3-year-old son Jeffrey. Taylor, along with his partner Amanda, was jailed following Jeffrey’s death in 1992. Jeffrey was found dead by Taylor after a self-confessed five-day “computer game and drug binge,” during which Jeffrey was locked in an upstairs bedroom unattended. Hospital staff alerted authorities when the condition of the child’s body showed signs of severe dehydration and malnutrition.
It took a number of reads to process what Lorna Fry was trying to tell him; each time his brain filtered out more and more of the words around the phrase computer game and drug binge until that was all he could focus on.
His limbs feeling heavy and weak, Sam searched online for anything more about the death of Jeffrey Taylor and found very little outside of John Taylor’s rearrest. After scrolling through pages and pages of articles from earlier in the year, he found an article dated 2002 from a local Manchester paper.
AUNT URGES TOWN TO NEVER FORGET JEFFREY TAYLOR
In an interview on the tenth anniversary of Jeffrey’s death, his aunt, the patron of a charity dedicated to helping families in inner-city areas, recalled her feelings about the case:
I think about him all the time. The horror of that room. They found a copy of a book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, in with him. His favourite. They said he’d started eating the pages. I mean, it’s just unthinkable, how hungry he must have been. And how lonely, all that time wondering what he’d done wrong and wondering why no one was coming to help him. I still wonder that now, I mean, the bedroom was at the front of the house. How can no one have heard him? All that time? Why did no one help Jeffrey? He must have been so hungry.
For a while, Sam stared at the wall beyond the flat screen television. Later, he found himself staring at the console cupboard.
—
Jamie clicked Send at the bottom of the online job application form with a practiced carefulness that came with owning large fingers in the digital age. When the screen confirmed the form had successfully sent, Jamie relieved his spine of his considerable weight by leaning back from the coffee table and collapsing onto the sofa.
This would show Sam.
Using the remote, Jamie brought up the television menu screen. It was nearly one a.m. It had taken an hour. Three down, one to go, he thought. But there was no way he’d get through another one without refreshment. With a groan he got to his feet and went to the kitchen. He switched on the light, took out the tea bags, then flicked on the kettle.
Living with Sam had been all right at first. They’d had some good laughs, seen some decent movies, smoked some excellent herb. Sam had really helped him get his head straight about the divorce, and in return he felt he’d helped Sam deal with all the baggage left behind aft
er Afshan. There had been a good balance and it had been like old times, before jobs and money and partners. It wasn’t the same now, though. Sam’s little comments had been growing more and more barbed of late, and Jamie knew he had to get out before he threw a punch at the bloke. That Sam would rather spend time playing a computer game where you walked about in an endless, empty desert for no real reason than spend time with Jamie really was the final nail.
The kettle hissed as the water started to boil. Seconds later both the light and the kettle went off.
“Oh, for f—” He stopped when he heard a high-pitched shriek somewhere above him that ended so quickly his mind immediately began to doubt he’d heard it. His cholesterol-smothered heart started to work harder than it was used to. Jamie hadn’t liked that sound at all. He fumbled his way to the electricity box in the downstairs hall. “Sorry, mate,” he yelled in the direction of the stairs. “Just the kettle again.” He didn’t care if he woke Sam up. He didn’t want to be the only one awake in the house after having heard that noise.
“It was a fox,” he said out loud and flicked the master switch back on. “Outside.”
It was a child, his mind taunted. You know it was a child.
Jamie went upstairs, not to find the cause of the upsetting cry, but to wake Sam up so he didn’t feel so alone. He turned on every light he passed, though it didn’t help.
He knocked on the door when he reached Sam’s bedroom. “Sam, you awake, mate?” He didn’t wait very long for a reply. He pushed the door open and walked inside.
Sam’s mattress was immaculate but for a small indentation on the blanket where it looked like someone had recently been sitting. On the floor was the MSII control pad at the end of its fully stretched cable. Jamie followed the cable up to the console, which was resting on the floor beneath the flat screen. When he looked at the flat screen, what Jamie saw was so incongruous that at first all he could do was stare.
Eventually he walked over to the television. A triangular shape was jutting from the center of the otherwise black screen. When Jamie pulled at it, the whole television threatened to topple forward. It was stuck there, as if the glass had set around the protruding object.
He saw Sam then, huddled in the corner by the cupboard, clutching his knees. His wide eyes were fixed on the dead television. “I didn’t think he could come through,” Sam said, his voice riding the juddering of his chest. “I thought I could help—Jamie—but he was too hungry. I didn’t think he could come through, though. I don’t, I don’t…” His words ended in a series of deep breaths.
Jamie looked back at the thing poking out from the television like a paper shark’s fin. The object had no meaning to Jamie in that moment, although it would mean something to him later. It was the corner of a thin children’s book. He couldn’t see all the words on the cover, because some were clearly on the part of the book that resided on the other side of the glass, inside the television, perhaps. But it didn’t take a great leap of logic to work out the title from what he could see, and from the cover image of a young girl, sitting at a table sharing a cup of tea with a tiger.
* * *
S. R. Mastrantone writes and lives in Oxford in the UK. His short fiction has won the Fiction Desk Writer’s Award and been featured internationally in venues such as Shock Totem, LampLight, and carte blanche. He is currently working on his first novel. His favorite games are Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and all of the Oliver Twins’ Dizzy games (except Fast Food Dizzy, give that one a miss); he is painfully aware of just how old-school he is on this matter. You can find him at www.srmastrantone.com and @srmastrantone.
RAT CATCHER’S YELLOWS
Charlie Jane Anders
1.
The plastic cat head is wearing an elaborate puffy crown covered with bling. The cat’s mouth opens to reveal a touch screen, but there’s also a jack to plug in an elaborate mask that gives you a visor, along with nose plugs and earbuds for added sensory input. Holding this self-contained game system in my palms, I hate it and want to throw it out the open window of our beautiful faux-Colonial row house to be buried under the autumn mulch. But I also feel a surge of hope: that maybe this really will make a difference. The cat is winking up at me.
Shary crouches in her favorite chair, the straight-backed Regency made of red-stained wood and lumpy blue upholstery. She’s wearing jeans and a stained sweatshirt, one leg tucked under the other, and there’s a kinetic promise in her taut leg that I know to be a lie. She looks as if she’s about to spring out of that chair and ask me about the device in my hands, talking a mile a minute the way she used to. But she doesn’t even notice my brand-new purchase, and it’s a crapshoot whether she even knows who I am today.
I poke the royal cat’s tongue, and it gives a yawp through its tiny speakers, then the screen lights up and asks for our Wi-Fi password. I give the cat what it wants, then it starts updating and loading various firmware things. A picture of a fairy-tale castle appears with the game’s title in a stylized wordmark above it: THE DIVINE RIGHT OF CATS. And then begins the hard work of customizing absolutely everything, which I want to do myself before I hand the thing off to Shary.
The whole time I’m inputting Shary’s name and other info, I feel like a backstabbing bitch. Giving this childish game to my life partner, it’s like I’m declaring that she’s lost the right to be considered an adult. No matter that all the hip teens and twentysomethings are playing Divine Right of Cats right now. Or that everybody agrees this game is the absolute best thing for helping dementia patients hold on to some level of cognition, and that it’s especially good for people suffering from leptospirosis X, in particular. I’m doing this for Shary’s good, because I believe she’s still in there somewhere.
I make Shary’s character as close to Shary as I can possibly make a cat wizard who is the main adviser to the throne of the cat kingdom. (I decide that if Shary was a cat, she’d be an Abyssinian, because she’s got that sandy-brown-haired sleekness, pointy face, and wiry energy.) Shary’s monarch is a queen, not a king—a proud tortoiseshell cat named Arabella IV. I get some input into the realm’s makeup, including what the nobles on the Queen’s Council are like, but some stuff is decided at random—like, Arabella’s realm of Greater Felinia has a huge stretch of vineyards and some copper mines, neither of which I would have come up with.
Every detail I enter into the game, I pack with relationship shout-outs and little details that only Shary would recognize, so the whole thing turns into a kind of bizarre love letter. For example, the tavern near the royal stables is the Puzzler’s Retreat, which was the gray-walled dyke bar where Shary and I used to go dancing when we were both in grad school. The royal guards are Grace’s Army of Stompification. And so on.
“Shary?” I say. She doesn’t respond.
Before it mutated and started eating people’s brain stems, before it became antibiotic-resistant, the disease afflicting Shary used to be known as Rat Catcher’s Yellows. It mostly affected animals, and in rare cases, humans. It’s a close cousin of syphilis and Lyme, one that few people had even heard of ten years ago. In some people, it causes liver failure and agonizing joint pain, but Shary is one of the “lucky” ones who only have severe neurological problems, plus intermittent fatigue. She’s only thirty-five years old.
“Shary?” I hold the cat head out to her, because it’s ready to start accepting her commands now that all the tricky setup is over with. Queen Arabella has a lot of issues that require her Royal Wizard’s input. Already some of the other noble cats are plotting against the throne—especially those treacherous tuxedo cats!—and the vintners are threatening to go on strike. I put the cat head right in front of Shary’s face and she shrugs.
Then she looks up, all at once lucid. “Grace? What the fuck is this shit? This looks like it’s for a five-year-old.”
“It’s a game,” I stammer. “It’s supposed to be good for people with your…It’s fun. You’ll like it.”
“What the fucking
fuck?”
She throws it across the room. Lucidity is often accompanied by hostility, which is the kind of trade-off you start to accept at a certain point. I go and fetch it without a word. Luckily, the cat head was designed to be very durable.
“I thought we could do it together.” I play the guilt card back at her. “I thought maybe this could be something we could actually share. You and me. Together. You know? Like a real couple.”
“Okay, fine.” She takes the cat head from me and squints at Queen Arabella’s questions about the trade crisis with the neighboring duchy of meerkats. Queen Arabella asks what she should do, and Shary painstakingly types out, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself.” But she erases it without hitting send, and then instead picks SEND AN EMISSARY from among the options already on the screen. Soon, Shary is sending trade representatives and labor negotiators to the four corners of Greater Felinia, and beyond.
2.
After a few days, Shary stops complaining about how stupid Divine Right of Cats is and starts spending every moment poking at the plastic cat’s face in her lap. I get her the optional add-on mask, which is (not surprisingly) the upper three-quarters of a cat face, and plug it in for her, then show her how to insert the nose plugs and earbuds.
Within a week after she first starts playing, Shary’s realm is already starting to crawl up the list of the one thousand most successful kingdoms—that is, she’s already doing a better job of helping to run the realm of Felinia than the vast majority of people who are playing this game anywhere, according to god knows what metrics.
But more than that, Shary is forming relationships with these cats in their puffy-sleeve court outfits and lacy ruffs. In the real world, she can’t remember where she lives, what year it is, who the President is, or how long she and I have been married. But she sits in her blue chair and mutters at the screen, “No you don’t, Lord Hairballington. You try that shit, I will cut your fucking tail off.”
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