A warm mug of hot chocolate (not coffee, not now) sits in my hands, waiting to be drunk. There’s wisps of steam coming from it, bright and sweet and bringing with it the scent of the marshmallows floating atop the mix. I can feel the heat of it coming in through my hands, moving through the veins and towards my core, holding tight to my circulation and helping it along through my body.
Jay, sitting next to me on the couch, his own mug of tea half-drunk and cooling on the table, is staring at me. He’s doing a very good job of doing it in a sweet way, but he’s still staring, and even though I know it’s because he cares, its still just… tiring.
I’ve moped enough. Breathe. In and out. Smell the hot chocolate that your very nice friend made for you and relax, just a little. Enough to talk.
“So. The last week has been… really weird.”
“Ilia, I was worried you were hurt.”
I turn and give him a Look:™:, one that’s a bit undercut by the fact that I was, in fact, hurt. “I was- ok. Well, I wasn’t fine. But I’m ok.”
Jay frowns, scooting just a bit closer and looking at her intently. “Hun, I’ve never known you to take longer than six hours to text. And then I got a call from your job? I didn’t even know I was your emergency contact. They couldn’t reach you either. If something did happen, the only way I would know about is by… I don’t know, breaking down your door and asking your roommates, but I know you don’t talk to them like at all. I was scared, hun. What happened? Did someone hurt you?”
I go to shake my head, and then let out a shaky breath, wrapping myself tighter around the mug in my hands.
“If it was just a really bad depression moment or something… you can tell me. You mentioned that-”
I do manage to shake my head this time, grunting to interrupt. “No. I’ve… it’s been bad, yeah, but I’d still text. I’d just… tell you that I need space. That I need a break. I’ve been in that position, where someone just vanishes, I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“...You did, though.”
Part of me wants to snap at him. Explain that three days is nothing. I’ve had stretches where things went on for months, where I had barely enough energy to drag myself to the bathroom and back when I needed it. I’ve had people that I didn’t talk to for weeks, longer, because the weight of silence, on the back of the weight of the exhaustion and the pain, was just too much.
But in spite of all of that, there’s the simple fact that he’s right. I did ghost him. He was worried, and panicked, and he is my emergency contact, and I never told him about that either, and if I had gotten eaten in that forest? Or fallen through the mold in that old house? Or gotten into an accident, or run over, or hate-crimed- there wouldn’t exactly have been much warning of that either. The fear, especially when so much of what I have in this town relates to him, is not only valid, it’s real, real in a way that I can’t just laugh off or bite at.
So I just sigh, and take a drink of hot chocolate.
“Yeah. I did. Not… not for that reason, though. I wasn’t in a place to reach out. And for my standards, that’s… a lot.”
He nods, quiet. Leans back a bit, as if realising that he’s pressuring me, so close. “Was it… did someone hurt you?”
I throw my head back, mumbling to myself a little murmur. “Ugh. That’s… no. No, nobody hurt me. I got… trapped somewhere. Went exploring and ended up screwed over, unable to get out, and while I was down there… some stuff happened. Some pretty bad stuff.”
For a little while, there’s silence.
Jay reaches out to the table, picking up his coffee. He takes a long, slow sip. He turns back to me.
“Ilia, that tells me jack fucking shit.”
I laugh, a sharp, scuffed sound that comes off more as a bark than not. “Fuck off, man, I’m unveiling trauma here.”
“Yeah, and doing a bad job of it,” he says, though he says it with a smile. “Seriously, if you don’t want to say, that’s fine, I’m just… worried. If you got assaulted, or-”
“No, nothing like that. Nothing that… nothing that I can really talk about, I think? Or maybe just nothing that you can really help with. Not in a bad way, just in a ‘this is a very big deal and super crazy and weird’ way, and there’s not a lot that would make sense if I said it out loud.”
He scoffs. “Try me. I’ve heard some weird shit, babes.”
I cock an eyebrow, raising it high as I stare at him. “I’m sure you have, but not like this.”
He leans forward again, reaching out a hand and placing it on the edge of the blanket I have around me. There’s a painful sort of sincerity to him now, his eyes sparking bright with it. There’s almost a weight to his presence, one that wasn’t there before, a feeling of intensity that wasn’t there before. No jokes here, not now.
“Please,” he says. “Try. If it could help you, then try.”
There’s a lump in my throat. Like I’m going to cry, but not. There’s no tears, no choking, but still it screams there, an emotion coming through to the real world with the flesh as a vector.
I laugh. There’s no humor in it. It is a dry and empty thing, made to fill the air and give voice to something, at least.
“Yeah. Alright. Fuck it. Why not right? Why not just say.
“Jay, my closest friend in this shithole town, radiant burst of light in the darkness that is moving to a new place away from a bunch of assholes. I found some bad fucking shit.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just lets the silence sit, waits for me as I wrestle with the lump in my throat, with the scream hiding behind my eyes at the feeling that comes from pulling back up all the things I’ve only just recovered from. But he waits, patient, and doesn’t push.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
Now there are tears. Just a few. I take a sip of hot chocolate. The swallowing hurts, my throat too tight for it, but it still helps.
And, with that one little push… I start to talk.
I tell him everything.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“...so that’s… a lot.”
I laugh, low and soft. “Yeah, Jay. It’s a lot.”
“And… you’re sure that…”
“I am, to the best of my recollection, speaking to you the truth as I know it. Every event. I can’t speak to what happened in the game, necessarily, that’s… well, best-case scenario, it’s all in my head. But for the rest, I have proof. Gas mileage, receipts from the purchase, the extra game cartridge in the- no!”
He’d turned to look at it, gotten up as if to go into my room to check- but my hand is on his arm, clenching tight to it. He looks down at it, then at me, his hand coming up to hold mine, wrapping around it warmly.
“Hey. It’s ok. Sorry, I just… it’s a lot, right? Part of me does want to check.”
“Yeah, no, I get it, just… not on your own. I can show you, after. I… would rather you not touch it. Or be alone with it. I’m worried as is that I’ve somehow infected you just by saying something- I’d rather not have you get sucked into it too. I don’t think that’s how it works, but… better safe than sorry.”
He nods. “Ok. I’m with you. But you… you know that-”
“That it sounds insane. Yes, I know. It sounds like I’m tripping balls, or like I had a psychotic fucking break, I know. But… I’ve confirmed everything I can as much as I can. And I’ve done just about everything I can to figure out what’s going on. Still got barely any fucking clue, though.”
He shrugs, the beads in his braids jingling with the movement.. “Barely is better than nothing, babes. None of this makes any sense. A cursed videogame- that led you to another cursed videogame, and somehow also transported you into the game- and now you don’t know what’s real. Which, hey, very fair. I don’t think I’d be faring much better.”
I scoff, despite myself. “Yeah, probably not.”
“Hey! This is when you say ‘No, Jay, you absolute studmuffin, you gorgeous bedazzled queen and prince of all things delicious, I’m sure you’d be as a paladin, unmaking any challengers with ease!”
This time, I really can’t help it. He gets one hell of a laugh out of me, hard enough that I spill a marshmallow onto my hand and have to lick it up. “Sorry, Jay, but I’m an honest sort.”
He rolls his eyes. “Fine. Well, what have you figured out about it?”
I sigh. “To the best of my knowledge, everything that’s happened so far in the ‘real world’ has actually happened. I did drive out to the outskirts of town, find an abandoned house, found a weird ass place. The first game did arrive, the forums I posted about it in are in my history, even if they got deleted, and I have the headset. But to be honest, there’s… there’s one last test I haven’t tried. Wouldn’t really work without someone else to… witness, I guess.”
He’s tense now. All the concern that the humor we’ve been slinging was holding at bay is back now, louder. “Ilia. Honey. What do you mean witness? Don’t do anything-”
I shake my head. “No. Nothing… self-harm-y. Been through plenty and I know what that looks like, how to avoid it. I promise, it’s not something that’ll hurt me. I think.”
“You think?”
I laugh softly. “Yeah. I think. Cause frankly, if this does work… well, it’s certainly going to say a lot, at least. I just… need something from you, ok?”
He takes in a deep breath. It… it actually means a lot more to me than if he’d just said yes immediately. He takes the time to actually think it through, and I see him look at me, and then back at the dark of my room upstairs, and then at nothing at all for a while.
“Yeah. If I can help you, then I want to. Anything.”
I have to swallow some more hot chocolate, the lump back, bringing with it a heat in my eyes that almost spills over.
Then, I take a long, slow breath, in as deep as it can go, and back out just as slowly. I put the mug down, now matching Jay’s on the table, and take the blanket off my shoulders, sitting upright, and then standing tall. I stretch, crack my neck, and look at the wall I’ve been staring at, on and off, since I got to the living room.
“Just… stand over there. On the side. Get a good angle, and just… watch. Carefully. Tell me what you see.”
He gulps, looking over to where I indicated… but he nods, and he does follow along with instruction. He steps over to the side of the main room- it’s not a large space, what with being a condo apartment with three people living in it, two in the same room, one to each of the others. It’s enough space for him to come around, next to the little staircase up to the “upper floor”, and stare at the wall I indicated, and at the space between me and it.
“Here good?”
I nod. “Yeah. Just… make sure you watch, ok? And if you don’t see anything, you don’t see anything- but make sure.”
I walk forward slowly, never letting my eyes leave the wall.
The wall with the crack in it.
It’s a lot like the one in my room. Not identical, though- the shape is different, as is the material behind it, both in coloration and density. But just like up in my room, here in my living space, there’s a crack in the wall, and behind it, the pulse of mucus and meat.
I walk towards it. And when I get close… I reach out.
It feels warm. Not hot, like I expected, no feverish heat. Just… warm. Like I’m touching it through a layer of clothing, maybe, even as I feel how wet it is, how it reacts, ever so slightly, to my touch. It flinches from the contact, just like any other skin would- except there’s a lot less skin than I’d like.
Fuck. Less skin than I’d like. That’s what life’s come to, it seems.
I push my fingers in against it. There are… seams, in the muscle, in the weird veins and fatty tissue behind the wall. It feels like fingering a warm steak, feeling those juices that aren’t quite blood and the fat and tissue that isn’t quite what it would be when it was complete.
I push in a little deeper. I don’t break eye contact with it.
“Jay?” I ask; “Where are my fingers right now?”
He frowns. Leans closer, and then squints really hard, leaning forward further.
“I… is your wall… soft?”
I laugh a bit. Quiet. Hushed.
Slowly, I reach around one of the segments I can feel, wrapping my finger around it. And then… I pull.
The house creaks.
It’s slight, a sound not unlike the house settling- except it’s not a sound I’ve heard before, a new sound, one that pulls from and reacts to the pressure in my hand as I pull something out of the wall. It drags forward, slow, the house creaking with it as it does- until I’m holding, in my hand, a piece of severed muscle, connected to the wall by strings of mucus and a few long, trailing ligaments.
“Jay? What am I holding right now?”
For a little while, Jay says nothing. Dead silence. Just the fading sound of the house creaking, and the sound of my heartbeat in my ears, as loud as it’s ever been.
“Ilia, do you have… do you have meat in your walls?”
I let out the loudest, most painful breath of air I’ve ever felt in my lungs, and hear it turn into a sound of relief and misery both, a single loud sob. I turn to look at Jay, a soft little smile on my lips, an exhausted catharsis in my eyes.
“Yeah, Jay. I guess you could say that.”