The Nightmare Game (33 page)

I felt a bubble being created in my mind and when
I looked up, I saw it emerge, luminous and iridescent, from the top of my
forehead. It expanded greatly as it left my forehead and floated outward,
returning only to encapsulate me within itself. I opened my hands and watched
with joy as more tiny bubbles emerged from my palms, enlarging slightly as they
drifted away, tinkling like tiny bells as they circled with glee about my body.
I was amazed and astonished by this new show as the bubbles danced and
frolicked around me in ecstatic delight. When they finally stopped rising from
my palms, the bubbles slowed their whirling rhythm to an unhurried prance, the
pealing of their little bells morphing into a distant and harmonious chatter of
many voices speaking simultaneously. After a few seconds, the bubbles expanded
again, finally stabilizing when they reached a size slightly larger than
softballs, at which point they became translucent enough for me to see blurry
movements transpiring within them. They then approached me at a leisurely pace,
all the while clearing yet further until they finally became transparent,
crystalline spheres tinged with gold, the moving objects they held within them
coming into focus. Like living, animated snow-globes, one orb after the other
revealed its own, unique scene as it took its turn before my eyes. Each scene
in each orb was different; each exhibited a happy slice of life vignette that
pertained only to one specific person, consigning anyone else present to the
role of indistinct, insignificant window dressing. These orbs became
fascinating entertainment as they passed in front of me. One revealed a man
proposing on bended knee, another displayed a woman reciting marriage vows in a
large church ceremony. As the scenes continued, other globes revealed more
events including the birth of a child, a prom, a man dancing with his wife on
the deck of a cruise ship, a rescue worker saving a baby. Some of the people in
the other spheres were singing and performing, one was surfing, one was flying
a single-engine airplane. Many of the rest of the orbs displayed individuals
enjoying simpler pleasures of life, such as a day spent fishing, working in a
garden, playing with a puppy or going to an amusement park or the seashore with
family. One by one these vignettes played out before me and I began to feel
connected with these people, taking great pleasure in their joys and victories.
I watched without blinking, unable to tear my eyes from this cavalcade of
passing spheres and the stories they presented. Too soon, however, the parade
began to slow down more and more until, eventually, all the globes finally came
to a complete standstill.

My disappointment at its ceasing was allayed when
one sphere in particular drifted towards me until it came to a complete stop
right in front of my face. The scene it held within it was that of a man making
a speech as he accepted an award. As the camera lens of the globe moved in for
a close-up of his face, I realized there was something very familiar about him.
His intelligent, kind eyes twinkled with happiness; his handsome smile, which
showed strong white teeth, was punctuated by deep dimples and revealed in it a
touch of shyness that was mingled with his joy. I recognized him from somewhere
and studied his face carefully, but, as with Ben and Geoffrey, try as I might,
I could not place him. The scene zoomed even closer to his face and he seemed
to be looking directly at me, as if from this globe he could actually see me; I
was certain now that indeed I had met this man before and for the first time my
amnesia really bothered me. No matter how hard I searched my mind, I still
could not remember where or when. Suddenly I was distracted by a profound change
occurring around me. The temperature, which had been so pleasant that I hadn’t
even noticed it, began to drop without warning until was bone-chillingly cold.
Still wearing only the flimsy robe that I’d been given, I began to shiver and
hugged myself for warmth. The light then began to dim until I was surrounded by
a darkness so complete that the entire atmosphere had become completely black;
the only light to be had was consigned exclusively to the globes themselves.
Soon, they too began to dim, losing all color and flattening until they were no
longer spheres but merely black and white disks suspended in the void that
surrounded me. The vignettes were gone, along with all motion and sound, for
the disks contained now only static faces. The one right in front of me that
contained the familiar man’s face began to change as well. All color had
already run out of him, but now also had his smile, which slowly changed into a
horrific grimace. The life drained out of his eyes and he stared at me with a
dead expression. Sores began to cover his skin, which was now shrinking, making
his eyes bulge and his lips pull away to reveal rotted teeth. It was with
horror that my memories bombarded me, bursting into my brain like an exploding
bomb. I remembered at last how I’d arrived at this mansion. It was with terror
that I now recognized this man. He was the first ghoul I’d seen, the horrid
creature that touched my arm, taking the life from it. I looked around and
realized that I was surrounded by the faces of the others that had been with
him, for they had all been changed into those ghastly beings as well. I began
to shake but this time it was not from the cold. Abject fear gripped me,
squeezing my throat and chest so viciously that I could not breathe. The man in
the disk looked me in the face with dead, sunken eyes that somehow still could
see, opened his mouth and grossly, grotesquely rasped out “Help me.”

I screamed.

The world turned to nothingness after that.

“Is she okay?” I heard a soft voice ask.

“She’s breathing fine,” another whispered. “I
think she’s just out cold. Ashley, Ashley, are you alright?”

I wanted to respond but couldn’t because this was
no ordinary sleep. I felt drugged, as if someone had slipped me a mickey. I
struggled hard to come to my senses but managed only one tiny grunt.

“Can’t we just leave her here? She seems awfully
comfortable,” said the voice that I now realized belonged to Illea.

“We can’t,” Ben said. “The purge is going to hit
her tonight and I didn’t get around to showing her where any of the bathrooms
on this floor are. I never imagined that the essence could hit her this hard.
It’s never knocked anybody else out like this before.”

“Everyone else was touched by Arrosha first. Since
Arrosha hasn’t even met with her yet, I’m surprised she even agreed to let
Ashley take essence.”

“You’re right. That possibility just never entered
into my mind.”

“None of us predicted it, Ben. There wasn’t any
precedent. Ashley’s the first person untouched by Arrosha that we’ve ever known
to take essence.”

“Poor kid, I hope that the purge isn’t too bad for
her. I was just assuming that she’d react the way we all did. Oh well, let me
see if I can carry her up to bed.”

Strong arms cradled me. As Ben lifted me from the
floor, a small “uumph” escaped his throat.

“Is she heavy?” I heard Illea say.

“Not too bad, really,” Ben answered. “I’m strong,
I can manage.”

As he walked, I felt a reassuring, floating
sensation, one that I hadn’t felt since I was a small child and still light
enough for my parents to carry. I laid my head against Ben’s strong chest and
gave in to the rare luxury of the floating sensation. In my deep sleep, I was
barely cognizant of Ben’s fluid movements at one point coming to a stop, a halt
that was followed by a low hum and a feeling of ascension; for a fleeting
instant I realized that we must be on the elevator. My mind transcribed our
rise in the lift into a vision of flight over a tropical island, a short dream
that ended as soon as we reached our floor. As Ben continued walking, I tried
as hard as I could to wake up so that he wouldn’t have to carry me further, but
the harder I struggled, the more deeply into sleep I fell, only aware enough to
be relieved that I was with Ben and Illea, that I was among people I could trust.

“Here, let me take her slippers off and then I’ll
get the door,” Illea’s voice broke though the cotton clouding my brain.

“Thanks.”

I next felt myself gently lowered onto clean,
crisp sheets, a soft, sweet-smelling pillow tucked underneath my head.

“Boy, she’s really out,” I heard Ben say.

“Speaking of which, I’m pretty bushed myself. I
think I’ll turn in, too.”

“I’ll see you in the morning, Illea.”

“Goodnight, Ben.”

With no more sounds to awaken me, my slumber
deepened into absolute unconsciousness.

After being out for what seemed like only seconds,
I awoke with a start, my heart pounding. Where was I? What had awakened me? Why
was it so dark? My eyes searched for any light to help me orient until I
quickly found some small illumination peeking out from underneath the closed
bathroom door. That accomplished, my panic began to subside as I, now fully
awake, remembered where I was. I recalled now that I was in a mansion, sharing
a room with a woman named Illea; I could hear her breathing in the other bed. I
remembered my day with Ben, the tour he gave me and the people to whom he
introduced me. New questions came into my mind. How did I get here? Where
exactly was “here”, anyway?

My mind drifted back to the odd meal, for lack of
a better word, that I had shared with the group last evening. What was that
strange substance they called “essence” which we had sucked through the hookah
hoses? Whatever it was, it was incredible. I still felt thoroughly satiated by
it, nourished to my core with a totality that I had never known before in my
life. It seemed that I’d just been introduced to something that made food
obsolete, a poor substitute that in my entire life I would never again desire
as long as there was essence be had.

Still, that had been an awfully strange adventure,
so exotic, so seductive. The dining room with its huge pillows, its hookah, its
caravan-tent atmosphere had seemed like a fantasy. Actually, everything I’d
experienced since arising today had been dreamlike, from the mansion itself
with its curious art collection to its people, all far too flawless to be real.
Speaking of unreal, a bizarre recollection suddenly popped into my mind. Had I
actually witnessed the group having an orgy right in front of me or was it just
a dream brought on by the essence? Then I remembered the creature that the orgy
had turned into before it turned back into the group quietly sucking on their
hoses and realized that, thankfully, the orgy had not been real. I’d been
hallucinating rather wildly, hadn’t I? Yet I hadn’t found it at all frightening
because the essence felt so natural. On the contrary, I’d felt completely safe
and at ease inside of that other-worldly experience of transcendent ecstasy.
Events of the essence trip began to come back to me now, as I reveled in its
afterglow, reliving the joy of the sex visions, the column of light, the
floating orbs. I’d enjoyed every moment of it. I’d been completely enchanted by
the vignettes of the lives of the people in the globes until…

I clasp my hand in front of my mouth to contain
the scream that tried to escape my lips. The globes had changed at the end,
flattened into dead, black and white disks while the people within them had
turned into animated, rotted corpses right in front of my eyes. That was the
key, wasn’t it, the secret of how I’d come here, the secret my mind had
withheld from me, the secret that no one else seemed to know. A mental
floodgate opened and memory surged from it, forcing itself into my
consciousness without check, bringing with it the nightmare creatures that had
chased me down, driven me to this house, had actually fed off me until I very
nearly died.

They must surely still be out there, those
ghoulish fiends, just waiting for me to exit the safety of the mansion so that
they could continue their feast of human energy. I needed to warn the others
immediately. We had to get out of here, all of us. We had to escape. But how?
We were miles from nowhere, so isolated that even Ben didn’t know where the
nearest neighbors lived. From the beginning I thought it was odd that he didn’t
know more about the area in which he claimed to have lived for so long, but
maybe it was only because he never drove out of it. Ben did say that the group
took occasional trips into the city, so I knew that there definitely was a
get-away route. For all I knew, with all of this massive wealth lying around,
the mansion probably had a hangar adjacent containing a private jet or
something of that sort at its disposal. But even if there was air
transportation available, how could we get past those murderous creatures to
get to it? Of course, I thought, even if they didn’t drive out of the area,
there must be at least one car in a garage for a mansion this size to get to
the hangar. Ben would know. I needed to wake up Illea and tell her about the
danger so that she could warn him. Ben would surely have an escape plan. We
might have to stay put and wait until the morning, so we could see what we were
facing, but whatever it took, Ben would get us out of here and safely into the
city.

With a sense of renewed urgency, I jumped out of
bed to wake Illea, but as soon as my feet hit the floor, still more memories
flooded my mind and in a flash I remembered why some of the people in this
mansion, strangers before today, looked so incredibly familiar to me. While I
didn’t recognize all of them individually, I did remember Ben, Geoffrey, Illea
and the three dark-haired women. I also remembered the group as a whole because
they were all such impossibly gorgeous young people and therefore, impossible
to forget. Yet, today, before now, I had forgotten them. I now remembered how
completely intimidated I’d been by virtue of their sheer physical perfection
alone when first I saw them. I’d felt as if I’d accidentally walked in upon a
high-end magazine photo shoot, uninvited. That information in and of itself was
plenty to jostle my memory. Yes, I had seen them before, in a bar of some sort.
What was its name? The Crypt? Yes, that was it, The Crypt in New Orleans. I now
found it hard to believe that I was, at present, living in a mansion side by
side with the beautiful people by whom I’d once felt so intimidated, people to
which I’d felt so inferior as I sat within the confines of that tomblike bar, a
bar that had employed such a rude, ugly bartender whose looks hadn’t stayed
still but kept changing.

I sat back down upon the bed as my mind went into
overdrive when even more memories began rushing back, far too rapidly for me to
take in all at once. I remembered now who I was and that I’d been vacationing in
New Orleans. That was how I’d met those two people named Virginia and Marcus. I
then remembered a man named Edmond. I had dreamt for a long time about Edmond,
hadn’t I? It seemed as if I was supposed to be on some kind of important
mission for him, but I could not remember what it was. I now remembered someone
giving me a necklace with a little dragon amulet. The necklace! I recalled that
it was extremely vital and that I should never take it off. Did I still have
it? My fingers quickly flew to my neck to check and I breathed a sigh of relief
as I found the piece still there, intact. It had buried itself painlessly into
my flesh and protected its existence by disguising itself as the raised,
tattooed body art that Ben had admired so. How could a simple necklace be so
smart and so cunning? It was obvious this was no ordinary necklace, that
somehow it knew that by disguising itself, no one would steal it from me and
that I could not take it off, not even for a moment, not even for something as
innocent a bath or to allow the curious a closer look.

Extra memories brought only extra questions. When
I asked myself why the necklace was so important, I remembered a woman named
Rochere and began to shake without knowing why, feeling even more helpless than
I had before. Why did the thought of her upset me so? I couldn’t remember. Some
of my memories were intact, or at least they seemed that way and there were
others nagging away at me that I still could not recall. Why did my
recollections have to be so splotchy? With a memory resembling Swiss cheese
more than anything else, what on earth was I supposed to do, what actions was I
supposed to take? How could I possibly help Edmond from here? I was lost, I had
hit a dead end. I remembered that whenever I hadn’t know what to do before,
whenever I’d wanted to turn back, there was always Virginia to guide me or
Marcus to push me forward, often more aggressively than I would have liked.
Whenever I was in any real trouble, although the manner of that trouble was
still foggy to me, Edmond always appeared to me in my dreams to bail me out.
Since coming to this mansion, I’d had no guidance whatsoever, no dreams about
Edmond. I couldn’t stay here. I had to get back on track, back to the apartment
in New Orleans so that Edmond could tell me what I needed to do next. But how?
I had no bearings. It wasn’t as though I’d bought a map, rented a car and
driven here. I’d simply gone through that horrible door at The Crypt and been
unceremoniously plopped into this locale, wherever it was. For the time being,
like it or not, I was stuck in this mansion. There was absolutely nothing that
I could do right now except to try to remember as much as possible and try to
work out a plan. In order to make out that plan, though, I needed to know a lot
more, so I tried as hard as I could to fill in the holes, to recall everything
that had happened before my memory had been snatched away. As always, though,
when forced, the memories would not come, choosing to return to me only on
their own, in their own order and in their own time. I had no choice but to
leave well enough alone, even though it was driving me crazy that I could not
recollect every single detail at will.

Maybe it would help me to free-associate. A good
place to start might be with Rochere, that horrible old woman who’d frightened
me in her office, the one it seemed that Edmond and the others feared so much.
I hated her. I remembered her laughing at me when I was lying face-first in
that alley. She hadn’t been old then, though, had she? She’d been young and
beautiful with long, black hair. It hit me then. I’d seen her here at the
mansion, or at least I’d seen her image. Her portrait was in the mosaic of the
Great Room floor. She was also the woman portrayed in the center fresco of that
same room’s ceiling, the one that was being catered to, the one that was being
worshiped. Hers was the face of the polymorphic figure in the huge crystalline
statue as well. She was Arrosha. Rochere was Arrosha. “We are her children,”
Ben’s words burned in my brain. My mind reeled as I realized the implications
of his statement, sending me to the edge of an anxiety attack. Then I
remembered the words of the undulating beast of my essence vision. “Join us.
Join us. We want you.” My anxiety skyrocketed. I worked to stay calm but it was
hard. Rochere was evil and the head of a cult and I was in the dead center of
that cult. I could trust no one here. What should I do now? I couldn’t let on
that I knew, that was certain.

My mind reeled with more questions. Why did this
cult even exist? What part did they play in Rochere’s insane nightmare of a
game? How did they fit into the schemes of that horrible witch? Had they truly
been ignorant of those fiends that attacked me or were they just playing dumb?
I realized now that I wasn’t just stuck inside this mansion, I was trapped,
living in the belly of the beast itself. How could I possibly escape from these
people? As I tried to calm myself, I realized that despite all logic, some
elements inside this situation still refused to make sense to me. All the
pieces would not fit into place because my gut wouldn’t let them. For instance,
with my memories gone, I understood why I had not recognized the group from The
Crypt, but why had they not recognized me? Especially Ben, for he had been
searching to recall where he’d seen me before but could not. Had she wiped part
of his memory as well? Besides, Ben was no vicious monster. I had truly liked
him from the beginning and could not begin to imagine him as an evil minion. He
wasn’t even a slick charmer. While there was always the possibility that I
could be wrong, my deepest instincts told me that he was a good, decent man,
far more kind and honorable than most of the men that I’d ever met. Also,
except for Geoffrey and those three weird women, the rest of the bunch seemed
pretty unthreatening as well. Could it be possible that they were all such
accomplished actors that they had me fooled completely, or were they truly
ignorant of Rochere’s real nature? Perhaps they were merely unknowing dupes,
victims themselves that she had seduced and mislead. If so, might it be a chink
in her armor that could be used against her? It seemed that at one point I had
been told that Rochere had her weaknesses. Surely, with all of her scheming and
expertise, the return of my memory could not have been a part of her greater
plan. Why was I remembering so much right now? It had to be a mistake. What had
caused it? There’d been only one major shift in my thinking since this morning
and that had come as a result of taking essence. Rochere must have misjudged
its impact on me, never realizing that it would cause my memory to return. The
far more important question to which I desperately needed the answer, though,
was what had caused me to lose my memory in the first place? I needed to know,
because I couldn’t chance that happening again.