I glanced at Kayla’s bookshelf and was not surprised to find Poe and Lovecraft amid the Roths and Greens and Krauses. Kayla had an interest in the gothic.
The Facebook posting sat there, long enough to be read, and then the “Likes” began to add up quickly. And then the “Shares.”
Kayla switched to her Twitter feed and posted a pointer to her Facebook status. And those tweets were re-tweeted and favorited.
And just like that, the one thing Samantha Early had ever done that made her feel worthy and important was turned into a dirty joke.
Kayla included a sound that Samantha was supposed to have made.
That was the genius moment, I knew. I could practically feel Kayla’s dark pleasure, knowing that this, above all, would be the stiletto to Samantha’s heart.
Gurgle, gurgle, Sammie said.
It was silliness. It was false.
It killed Samantha Early.
“Consider what you have just witnessed,” Messenger said. “Think on it, Mara, and come with me.”
It sounded like an invitation, but of course it was no such thing. Before I could blink, we had left the now cold and remorseless Kayla behind and were once again with Liam and Emma.
“I OFFER YOU A GAME,” MESSENGER SAID.
“What game?” Liam demanded.
Messenger would not explain. “If you win the game, you will both go free to consider what you have done. If you lose the game, you will suffer your greatest fear.”
The two of them looked frightened already, like they’d already had plenty of fear, but I could see that Liam at least felt confident in his ability to win a game. Not cocky but confident. Perhaps, I thought, he is an athlete accustomed to games, accustomed to competition, and has a justifiably high opinion of his abilities.
I hoped he was right. I didn’t know then what Messenger meant when he warned of fear. But I was convinced that they deserved only the mildest of punishments.
I liked them; that was the truth of it. I liked that they were in love. It made me wonder again whether I had someone about whom I cared that much. Was I in love, back in my life wherever? I doubted it, somehow.
And what of Messenger? What was that crack Oriax had made about Messenger and someone named Ariadne? No doubt someday when Messenger and I were sitting on a park bench, chatting and eating sandwiches while tossing crumbs to the pigeons, we’d come to that discussion. Hah. Not very likely, that scenario, though I would have liked to know more about him. Maybe there were things he could tell me that would explain away the awful imagery that contact with him had caused to flood my mind.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pushing those fleeting yet vivid memories away, just as I tried to push away memories of Samantha Early’s end. It was ironic, I supposed, that I was simultaneously hungry for memories lost and terrified of memories I had come unwillingly to possess.
“We’ll play,” Liam said, jumping in to accept the wager before Emma could contradict him. Emma’s breath caught and her eyes narrowed in irritation, but she subsided.
“If we refuse, we lose,” Liam said. “If we play, we may win. Right?”
“You have accepted the game,” Messenger intoned. He raised up his hands, palms out toward the two of them. Then, in a movement of such gravity that it could only be a ritual of some sort, he said, “In the name of Isthil, I summon the Master of the Game.”
I very nearly burst out laughing, despite the queasy uncertainty that now defined my moment-by-moment existence. It seemed so like the self-serious phony mysticism I might have expected from a Comic-Con attendee. That urge to laugh died unborn.
There came from the mist a sound, a scrabbly sound that a mouse—no, dozens of mice—might make racing across a tile floor. Then, beneath that sound, deeper, a noise like voices at a great distance, some crying, some it seemed, as I strained to hear, like people talking fast and nervously.
These sounds, at once familiar and strange, grew louder as something moved through the mist. I peered into that hateful yellow miasma, anxious—or so I thought then—to catch a glimpse of this Master of the Game. Another Oriax, perhaps? Or a Daniel?
“Do not look into his eyes,” Messenger said, his voice even nearer my ear, more intimate than before, as if this was what passed for a whisper from him.
The creature that slowly took form as the mist retreated reluctantly from him was tall, taller than any man I had ever seen. His skin was brown, like an old oak desk given a walnut stain. He might have been actual wood, a carved figure, a totem but for the fact that he moved, long legs shuffling, giving an impression that his legs were too heavy to lift.
Heeding Messenger’s warning, I kept my eyes on the parts of the creature that I felt were safest: hands, arms, legs, chest. He wore no clothing but needed none, as his entire body was of the same curiously grained wood. He might have been a mannequin, or a puppet except for the size, and the sounds that now quite unmistakably emanated from him, though not from his head, not from his yet un-glimpsed mouth, but from the surface of his body, from the grain, from . . .
Not a grain, no, tiny channels, carvings into his brown flesh, like . . . And there I stopped breathing for a moment because I could not both see and digest what I was seeing and spare the focus required to breathe. Not a wooden grain but an endless maze carved into him, shallow runs that twisted and turned, forming suggestions of leering faces and twisted beasts. There was something Aztec there, something of demonic frescoes. These channels, this maze, it covered every inch of him. Within the channels were holes, black and sudden. It was not entirely rigid, this maze pattern, not entirely fixed, for there was movement there, down within those endless lines and curves and those baffling holes.