After all the players had bolted out of the dining room and ran outside, Savannah had been grateful for the moment of respite. Having to be in character continuously for hours and hours was mentally taxing, she was discovering, and the hyper-realistic game environment was crawling under her skin. She found herself incredibly on edge, jittery, like she was trying to jump out of her own skin—with the extra-creepy feeling that something else might be lurking to jump into it behind her.

In all the productions she’d done, she could pal around with some of the actors backstage, but here, all the other actors were in character as well, all the time. Delphine was a ghoulish old hag, Gilbert an imperious old prick, and Armand was just as icky as he was pretty, with something disjointed behind the eyes. She’d seen photos of the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley; he’d had a similar sort of manic perverseness in the windows to his soul, as if humans were insects to be dissected or pinned to specimen boards. How the game system was able to create those effects were a marvel.

She excused herself from the dining room and asked her GM for a moment in the dressing room.

Yellow arrows appeared in her HUD, pointing to a side door, which she followed. The arrows led her back down to the basement, which was as dark as ever.

“Could I get some lights, please?” she asked.

“You may continue to follow the arrows,” said the GM’s voice. “Non-player characters may not adjust the game environment.”

“Gee thanks,” she said dryly.

The arrows led her across the basement chamber’s gloom toward one of the corners. A door swung open for her, letting dim, red light spill through. She trotted toward the door, which closed behind her, and she found herself in a narrow hallway.

The sensation of her clothing shifted instantly. She no longer felt like she was wearing elaborate, nineteenth century costume, complete with corset; now it was just a toe-to-chin wetsuit. But she still felt the caustic pressure of the good luck charm Himura had given her. It lay against her bare skin like a coin that was just a little too hot to wear comfortably.

The passage walls were jammed floor to ceiling with conduits, circuitry, and pipes. LED strips illuminated the space just enough for her to see. She traveled maybe fifty feet until she found a stairs. A sign read: DRESSING ROOMS, with an arrow pointing down.

She stripped off her visor and unzipped her gamesuit to her sternum. The rig was comfortable, but it still felt good to be free of it.

At the bottom of the stairs was the dressing room, but a male voice came from within, as of someone having an animated phone conversation. The dressing room she found to be very much like others she’d encountered, complete with chairs, mirrors, and lights, but also a drink machine that dispensed everything from coffee to juice to straight liquor. In need of a pick-me-up, she punched in a quad espresso.

If not for the voice, she might not have noticed the man sitting in the corner, away from the mirrors and lights. While she awaited her jolt of energy-juice, she observed him. He wore what looked like a maintenance coverall. She could make out nothing of his face, because he wore a baseball cap low on brow, which made his frizzy brown curls stick out so comically she was reminded of the Muppets. A set of bulky headphones was clamped over his ears, and wraparound sunglasses concealed his eyes. He spoke so quickly, almost mumbling, that she couldn’t catch the gist of his conversation, only a word or two here and there, a chuckle, an animated expostulation. He made no movement to acknowledge her presence, except to pick up a respirator mask, fist-sized filters on either side of the cup, slide it over his nose and mouth, and continue his conversation. A chill went up her spine. Because of how completely the respirator muffled his voice, she suddenly doubted he was talking to another human, through the headphones or any other communication device she couldn’t see.

She took her cup of black gold from the dispenser tray and sank into the chair farthest from him, opened the top of her gamesuit, probing for the necklace. But it wasn’t there. Her fingers found no chain, no disc.

“Where the hell did it go?” she asked, unzipping further and questing around inside the suit for where it might have gone. The skin where it had rested against her breastbone felt raw, like a sunburn. Must be allergic to the metal or something. She looked down her front, around the sides, nothing, down the legs, nothing.

“Want to see my knife?” said a voice right beside her.

She jumped out of her chair with a yelp and found herself face-to-respirator with the man. “Jesus Christ! You scared the shit out of me!” It took a moment to realize what he’d said, but when it did, her hands turned to fists and she took two steps back.

His impenetrable sunglasses regarded her placidly. His hands were empty. She saw no knife on his person, but his coverall had long sleeves and many pockets. She backed toward the door, glancing around for something that might be used as a weapon, heart pounding with alarm.

He was muttering again. “…if you ask me what kind of person I am I’ll give you an in-depth analysis of…”

Then he turned away, went back to where he’d left his toolkit, and retrieved it. Then he circled around her and walked out as if she weren’t there. “…they’re in there, I’m telling you, I didn’t believe it either…”

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When he was gone, she breathed a gust of words her mother wouldn’t appreciate. “Holy Christ, what a creepoid!” She checked the stairs. No sign of him. Working in bars, she’d had more than a few guys peg her creepoid meter, but this one was a whole new level of Get-the-Fuck-Away from-Me.

She shut the dressing room door, and felt air tugging it open. In the corner where the man had sat was a small access hatch standing ajar. Multi-colored lights flickered beyond. She shut the door, then put a chair under the doorknob, making sure Mr. Weirdo didn’t sneak up on her again. Her inner tech nerd took over, curious to see what lay behind the curtain, so to speak. She went to the access hatch, which stood about four-feet high. On the floor lay a plastic sign—NO ADMITTANCE—waiting to be attached to the door.

“Well, it’s not ‘no admittance’ yet, is it?” she said, and pushed it open.

Multi-colored flashes spilled out, tweaking her curiosity. She stooped and entered, finding herself in a tunnel even more jammed with high-tech wizardry than the hallway, nearly all of it comprehensible to her. The tunnel was only about twenty feet long, and opened into a much larger space. She emerged onto a catwalk ringing an open, cylindrical chamber so large she couldn’t see its limits, not the opposite side, nor the top, nor the bottom. The air smelled of ozone mixed with something biological, like an insect cage. Her mind swam, because it had to be an optical illusion. But she wasn’t wearing her visor, so all this was coming straight into her eyes.

In the center stood a structure that stretched toward the upper and lower limits of the chamber, resembling a series of tuning forks of various sizes, from enormous to smaller than her hand. Up and down the column, multi-colored, translucent curls stretched like slow-motion lightning. The kaleidoscope of lights danced in the space with no clear source. With all those dancing lights, she should have been able to see the opposite side of the chamber, but it was just blackness. The air was filled with a vibration she could sense, but not hear, as if it crawled over her skin and wormed into her ears to tickle her auditory bones. She had twenty-twenty vision, but somehow everything looked blurry. The structure hung vertically suspected, by what she couldn’t see, about thirty feet away, suggesting the cylinder was roughly sixty feet in diameter, but couldn’t she see the other side? A sharp ache stabbed behind her left eye, spreading to her temple and across that half of her skull. Her eyes watered fiercely. She squeezed them shut, trying to rub the pain away, grabbing the rail of the catwalk to steady the wave of vertigo.

Her vision swam and blurred.

There were things moving in the darkness of the void, dim, translucent shapes swimming like fish in a cylindrical aquarium, circling the strange central column, spiraling up from below, spiraling down from above. They came toward her in different sizes, from the size of minnows to the length of her arm, darting and wiggling, questing. Hunting.

She was going to spew her breakfast over the rail. Her knees quaked. Her hands trembled. Her tongue tasted of bile.

Her eyes couldn’t focus on the things in the void. As soon she tried, they would fade from existence, like moving in and out of shadow. But she could glimpse them from the corner of her eye, like a hideous melding of moray eels and deep sea angler fish, underslung jaws full of needles, fins and spines and antennae and eyes, too many eyes.

Savannah’s mind couldn’t grasp how she could still be in the game. That was the only explanation, right? Her visor was back in the dressing room, her gamesuit quiescent.

A hot sting shot up her arm from her wrist. One of the translucent creatures wriggled through her wrist as if she were no more solid than water. She hissed in pain and jerked away, but her quick movement seemed to catch the attention of several others, including one that was at least seven feet long. The creatures moved like blinding, questing fish, but they came toward her like a school.

She reeled away from the railing and plunged back into the access tunnel, her heart threatening to leap out of her chest, her mouth so dry her tongue felt like boot leather. Bouncing off the walls, scrambling, stumbling, half on all fours, she threw herself down the tunnel, the short distance to the dressing room feeling like an eternity. She burst into the dressing room and sprawled face-first, spinning to see if she were pursued.

But the dark tunnel remained empty of all but the dancing lights.

Sweat soaked the interior of her gamesuit, worse than the worst case of flop sweat she’d ever had. She jumped for the access door and yanked it closed.

Her forearm still ached hotly. Stripping off the gauntlet revealed a deep, reddish-black bruise spreading across her skin. Had that thing bitten her somehow, from the inside?

Her GM’s voice came over a loudspeaker, “Ms. Perry, please rejoin your game session as soon as possible.”

“Something just bit me!”

“An animal of some sort?”

“Yes!”

“What kind of animal? I will file a pest removal report.”

“I—I don’t know what it was.” She found herself at a loss. Would this machine believe her?

“Can you describe it?”

Screw it. Damned if she would let a machine judge her for being crazy. She did her best to describe the creatures she’d seen. When she finished, she asked, “Are those things part of the game?”

“Your description doesn’t match anything in the entire corpus of zoological entities that exists on Earth. Are you trying to deceive me?”

“No!”

“Are you joking with me?”

“I wish I was.”

“Where did this happen?”

She described the immense chamber.

“Unfortunately, you entered a restricted area, in violation of your employment agreement. This will be your only warning. Any further violations will result in your immediate termination.”

“What was that thing, in the chamber?”

“Please return to your game session immediately. The players are looking for you.”

“What if I say, ‘Screw you?’”

“You have that option. But allow me to warn you that we will be unable to provide you with a favorable reference for any further employment you seek going forward.”

Savannah took a moment as the words sunk in. “Are you saying I’ll be blackballed?”

“Please return to your game session immediately. Your violation will be overlooked this time.”

Savannah staggered to her feet, teeth clamped down on her frustration. She needed this job. Back here the dressing room, all the vertigo and strange sensory disturbances had ceased. Caused by proximity to that chamber, maybe? She felt like herself again, except for the aftermath of having the shit scared out of her.

She took a moment to take a deep breath, compose herself, then downed her espresso like a jolt of liquid invigoration.

“I’m a professional, goddammit.”

Then she peeked out the dressing room door, checking for Mr. Weirdo—no sign of him—replaced her visor, and headed back to Château de Delacroix.