James held tight to Anastasia’s hand protectively and welcomed her returning squeeze. Elwood walked ahead of them with the lantern held aloft. Ivy and Ash had gone downstairs to the entrance of Renard’s chambers, while the rest of them explored the second floor.

Except for the music room, Delphine’s room, and a closed door that Anastasia said was Gilbert’s chambers, the second floor was mostly empty rooms that had housed servants in the family’s more affluent past.

He kept his ears tuned for any more scratchings inside the walls, but those had subsided. All he could hear now were his friends’ footsteps and the moaning tumult of the storm. Lightning slashed stark shadows of window panes on the floor. Somewhere in the house, a shutter banged in the wind.

Suddenly Anastasia doubled over, clutching her stomach.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

“I think I must get to the water closet,” she said, her voice trembling. She hunched over as if her her body had gone limp as a dish rag. “Can you help me?” Her gaze implored him.

He took her wrist and slung it over his shoulders. “Maybe you got a bad Cornish hen.” He said it as a half-joke but the look on her face made him forget the attempt at levity.

She shook her head and pointed weakly, then cradled her wrist against her belly. “At the end of the hall.”

Elwood’s lamp light flickered as he led the way, keeping a close eye on Anastasia. The lamp formed a globe of wan light around them, and the darkness closed behind them with every step.

At the door of the bath and water closet, she squeezed his hand and gave him a wan smile, then disappeared through the door.

He caught Elwood’s gaze, saw Ellie’s intelligence—and unease—looking out from the mature man’s face. James said, “It’s just a game, right? Just a game.”

Elwood nodded. “Just a game. But then why am I so on edge?”

James didn’t want to think about that question. He hoped Annie was all right.

A minute passed.

“You think Ivy and Ash are okay?” he asked.

“I haven’t heard any screaming or gunshots, have you?” Elwood said with a faint smile.

“No news is good news.”

Another minuted passed, during which he kept reminding himself that no one was going to really get hurt. What happened to Ash had been some sort of fluke. A character who was killed would simply respawn.

“You think she’s okay in there?” Elwood asked quietly.

“I dunno, how did women even take a pee in all those clothes?”

“It was a biological horror story,” Elwood said.

“A real shit show!” James slapped his knee in exaggerated fashion and loosed a breathy guffaw.

Elwood rolled his eyes.

“Oh, come on, that was funny.”

Elwood’s lip curled up. “Okay, it was a little bit funny. A tiny bit.” He knocked on the door. “Anastasia, are you well?”

No reply.

James knocked. “Annie?”

Still nothing.

“Let’s leave her be,” Elwood said. “It is rude to disturb a lady at her toilet.”

“Yeah, but what if she needs help?” James had the unshakable fear that something was really wrong with the person whom he knew as Anastasia. But there was a real woman under there. Or least, he was pretty sure.

He clasped the door knob and tried it. Locked.

A light at the far end of the hallway caught his eye, an orange-gold bloom, an oasis of light. They had left no light burning in Delphine’s empty chamber.

“Are you going to check it out or me?” James said, his chest suddenly tightening.

The masterful strains of a harpsichord echoed down the hallway. James’s mother had made him take piano lessons for three years, and he mainly had learned two things: that he would never be in any good at it, and that he knew how to recognize virtuoso playing when he heard it. The notes and chords were so full it was like two people were playing, like the difference between a six-string and a twelve-string guitar. He’d had a guitar phase as well, one he might enjoy going back to. Babes dug guitar players.

“Wait here,” James said.

Elwood hefted his sword cane. “I shall keep an eye on you.”

James took a deep breath and steeled himself. There was a lot of pitch black between him and that light down the hallway. So near, yet so far. Then off he went, getting farther from Elwood’s sphere of light with every step.

He didn’t recognize the musical composition or composer. His mother had made him listen to a lot of classical music. He knew the work of all the big names and some of the lesser ones. But these strains were discordant, grating across his already taut nerves. With each step, his heart beat harder, his feet got heavier, and he couldn’t help but wonder if it was his own physiological reaction to fear or that the gamesuit was working on him. How much did it matter?

For the last half of the trek, he trotted tiptoe down the hallway until he reached the open door, which was not Delphine’s room, but the music room. But as he peered into the light around the door frame, he saw the harpsichord, then Delphine sitting behind it, her fingers working the keys furiously. The lamp atop the harpsichord seemed to dim to the point he wondered how she could see the music. In the dimness, the years seemed to fall away from her, her hair to lose its silver and become a rich, honey-gold, piled high in an elegant coiffure, ringlets dangling across marble-smooth, sculpted cheekbones, her lips becoming full and moist, the sagging flesh of her throat becoming taut and pink. She wore only a diaphanous night gown of lace and silk that exposed her lithe shoulders. Her smooth arms danced back and forth up and down the keyboard. He couldn’t be sure in the dim light, but he might have just seen a third appendage dart into view between the left and right, a hand where none should be.

Successful Perception Check! Gain 2 points to increase any skill! Perception checks represent moments of sharpened sensory acuity.

But that meant what he had seen was real.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

His vision swam.

You have failed a Stability check! Stability loss: 3 points.

He staggered backward to lean against the opposite wall, his skin crawling, the strength leaving his legs.

Delphine spotted him, her eyes swiveling toward him like spotlights, impossibly beautiful, impossibly hungry, impossibly cruel. As she rose from her bench, her young, firm breasts lifted the low bodice of her nightgown, her flesh alabaster pale, soft and supple, and, for a sixteen-year-old heterosexual boy, impossible to look away from. She looked so much like Anastasia. Delphine’s lips peeled back in a hungry smile, her teeth impossibly strong and sharp.

She said, “Perhaps you’d like to stay and…watch me.”

“Uhh… uhhh…”

“You’re such a tasty young thing.”

Then he saw something tucked behind her ribs under her right arm. Something that moved surreptitiously. Another arm. And a hand with three fingers in the middle and a thumb on each side.

“Uh, no thanks!” he managed to garble before he spun and ran back toward Elwood’s lamp.

Delphine’s laughter followed him down the hall as he cast looks back over his shoulder every other step.

When he reached Elwood, he looked back and saw the light in the music room go out.

Elwood, seeing the look on James’s face, said, “What was it?”

“Sweet old lady Delphine is… isn’t… She’s a mutant or something!” He half-expected to see her charging toward them, clinging to the ceiling like an insect. “She’s young now! But she has an extra arm! And the hand is messed up! And I think she eats people!”

“James, you’re babbling,” Elwood said.

“You’re lucky I’m here at all. I just took another Stability hit.” Then he remembered he wasn’t exactly helpless. He touched his thumbs to his forefingers, and tongues of Eldritch Fire licked from his hands, casting lurid, dancing light down the hallway. But there was no sign of Delphine.

He took a deep breath and held the Eldritch Fire ready while he told Elwood what had happened.

“That sounds most disconcerting,” Elwood said.

“Don’t I know it! We need to get Anastasia and find Ivy and Ash,” he said. He let the Eldritch Fire dissipate, then tried to shake the feeling back into his hands. He pounded on the bathroom door. “Annie, are you okay?”

No reply.

“Dammit!” he said.

Elwood nodded toward the door with a raised eyebrow. James nodded.

“Annie, we’re coming in!” he called.

Together they threw themselves against the sturdy wooden door. It succumbed to their strength and flew inward, spilling them into a room decorated by tiles of pea-green and white. Elwood’s lamp cast stark, dancing shadows around a large, claw-foot bathtub in the center of the room, a wash basin on a vanity with a mirror and a stool. Another door stood ajar. James ran to check it, and found a toilet, which closely resembled an outhouse he’d seen once—a wooden bench but with a smooth, porcelain seat around the hole.

But no Annie.

“Dammit!” he said.

The room had no other exits.

“Secret doors?” Elwood said.

James blinked furiously trying to trigger skill checks, but his HUD was frustratingly blank. “C’mon, Sean, gimme a clue,” he muttered to the GM.

But no response. Which was weird.

“Sean, are you there?” he said.

No response.

A spike of apprehension shot through him. “Ellie, does your GM answer you?”

Elwood said, “Galadriel, are you there?” He waited for a few seconds, then shook his head with widening eyes. “Okay, we need to find Ash and Ivy right now. Annie is just going to have to be safe in her own house.”

James licked his lips with a dry tongue. “Right. Downstairs?” No one would hurt her here, right?

“Downstairs.”

Together they hurried to the stairs, down them, and rounded the banister in time to see another light coming from the right. James had just enough time to light his Eldritch Fire before Ash and Ivy burst around the corner.

Four simultaneous expulsions of relief collided in mid-air. Then all four started speaking simultaneously. Then stopped. Then started.

Ash waved his hands. “Where’s Anastasia?”

“We lost her,” James said. “Disappeared in the bathroom upstairs. And if you see Delphine…” He shuddered, unable to wipe that voracious look in her eyes—part hunger, part lust—from his mind.

Ivy gave him a look of concern. “Why James, you look like someone just walked over your respawn point.”

“Delphine’s a mutant vampire. Or something. I dunno. She got younger. And has an extra arm.”

Ivy and Ash traded glances.

“Where?” Ivy asked.

James pointed at the back of his rib cage. “Like, about here.”

Ash said, “That explains the corset.” Ivy nodded.

“What corset?” James asked.

“Never mind,” Ivy said as she handed him a battered, leather-bound book about an inch think. “Do you understand other languages?”

James blinked and tried to recenter himself. “Uh, yeah,” he said, momentarily checking his character sheet because he couldn’t remember in the moment what he had picked. “Latin and Occult Languages.”

“This is Renard’s journal. Neither of us can read it,” Ivy said.

James took it. As he thumbed it open and started turning pages, he saw it was written in what looked like Latin.

The markings on the page rearranged themselves to look like English, but the words and sentences made no sense.

Successful Skill Check! Gain 4 points to increase your Latin skill! The journal is written in Latin but in an occult cipher.

The gibberish rearranged itself again into writing that made sense.

Successful Skill Check! Gain 5 points to increase your Occult Languages skill!

You have unlocked Renard Delacroix’s personal cipher.

Suddenly the GM’s Sean Connery voice came into James’s ears. “This is an important occult artifact, and you have broken a difficult cipher to read it successfully. Would you like to Fast Read it?”

“Sean!” James said. “You’re back!”

“Back?” the GM said.

“Uh, yeah! Both Ellie and me tried to talk to you a few minutes ago!”

A second passed, then, “Would you like to Speed Read the journal?”

“No explanation, huh?” James said. “Not okay, Sean.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean,” the GM said.

Elwood was telling Ivy and Ash about the utter absence of the GM.

“Okay, fine,” James said. “Lay some spicy hot knowledge on me.”

The book in his hands came to life, rising out of his hands in a dramatic ruffling of pages. He glimpsed pages and pages of crabbed, cramped writing that went to every margin, mixed with odd diagrams and illustrations and tables that somehow made sense to him, all of which blasted from the pages into his vision, where he felt it nestle into his brain. Dizziness swept over him, and a lance of pain spiked behind his left eye.

You have suffered an 8-point Stability loss.

Reading some occult and eldritch tomes causes a shift in your understanding and perception of reality.

This understanding increases your Eldritch and Occult skills by 3 points each. You now understand Renard Delacroix’s research into the nature of the multiverse, and you will never be the same.

He tried to squeeze his thumb into his eye to make the pain go away, but found his thumb stymied by the game goggles. He blinked a few times, and when he could focus them again, Delphine Delacroix was coming out of the darkness, her face a rictus of gleaming teeth and blazing eyes, coming for Ivy.

He yelped a frenzied warning a shoved Ivy out of the way. He and Ivy went down in a tangled pile, Ivy crying out in surprise and alarm. He flipped onto his back bringing his hands up to fry Delphine into a crispy critter…

But there was no Delphine.

Only Elwood and Ash looking at him like he was crazy.

He hurriedly got to feet. “Sorry. I guess I’m seeing things now.” He offered Ivy his hand to pull her up. “Sorry, sis.”

“What did you see?” Elwood asked.

“Delphine coming to rip Ivy’s head off.” His voice was shaky as a chill shot through every limb, and cold sweat soaked his neck. “Jesus, I thought that was real.”

“Real?” Ash asked in a strange tone.

“You know what I mean,” James said.

“I’m not sure I do,” Ash said. “I mean, I don’t know what the game is doing to us, but… I’m so sorry, you all, but maybe we’re actually in danger.” He looked straight at Ivy, guilt-stricken. “And I’m feeling awful that I got us all into this.”