Regus was standing over me, and I was confused. It took me a second to remember that although I had believed him to be dead for two decades, this was obviously not the case. That video wasn’t from 1975. It could have been recorded right before it was mailed to me.
“What’s going on?” I asked, my voice shaking.
The old man smiled. “Well, the games gone a bit off course, in the best way.”
A feeling of hope rose ever so slightly in my chest. “The game. This is part of it, right?”
Regus let out a quiet, ominous chuckle. “Sort of. My own personal game.” He leaned over, and I watched his latex-gloved hands begin to fiddle with the bags of fluid on the tray beside me.
“For you, I’m afraid this is going to be very real.”
A shudder ran through me. I began to pull harder at my bonds, not bothering with subtly, writhing on the cool metal. Regus didn’t give me a second glance, and I soon understood why—no matter how much I struggled, there was no way I had the strength to free myself.
“It’s about time to change your bags, eh?” the old man asked without looking at me. He held up the bag with the clear liquid to the light, tapping it gently. Small air bubbles floated up to the space at the top, and I felt sick.
“Don’t touch me,” I said, my jaw tense with fear. Regus gave me a side glance, as though just reminded that I was there.
“All in good time Sam. But I wasn’t speaking to you.”
He moved away from my body. I lifted my heavy head to track him, my neck cramping. He carried the bag to the far side of the room, to where the curtain concealed something unknown. He reached a withered hand out and pulled back the veil—
I still can’t shake the image of it. There were two IV stands, each holding a plastic bag like the one that Regus had carried over. One had about a half inch of the clear liquid left in it. The other was fit to burst, fat with the amount of blood that had been deposited within it. Each had a long tube cascading down, and each were connected to a limp hand embedded with a needle.
It was Ander.
His eyes were half-closed and vacant, staring up at the light that shone on him without squinting. He was bound much like me, with leather straps holding him in place. Not that they needed to. He was completely unresponsive, and most notably, he was absolutely gray. Not in the metaphorical way that a character might turn gray with fear or sickness. It was as though all color had been drained from his skin. He looked like a monochromatic corpse.
“Ander!” I cried out, but didn’t get a response. I feared the worst, until I saw it—the smallest movement in his lips, the shape of some words I couldn’t make out, as though he was trying to answer me. His eyelids fluttered as Regus took the almost empty bag off of the IV stand, and began hooking up the new, full bag. “What are you doing to him?” I called with panic.
“I’m saving him,” Regus answered, checking to make sure the bag was secure, and then moving to the other side. He removed the bag full of blood off of the stand. It was so full a line of red began to run down and drip off of the bottom. “Maybe save isn’t the right word. Preserve. I’m preserving him.” Regus put on the empty bag, and as he reattached it to the stand, the cord attached to Ander’s hand pulled slightly. The unconscious young man let out a slight groan.
It clicked in my mind, suddenly and terribly. The two IV’s, the two bags, that awful smell of chemicals and death—
Ander was being embalmed alive.
Telling him to stop wasn’t going to do any good, that much went without saying. Instead, I asked the question at the very forefront of my mind. “Why?”
This time, Regus did look over at me. “Why not?” I hesitated, unsure of how to answer the question. He let out an impatient sigh. “I started this business as a celebration. Though much of what you learned about me and my ‘family’ is fake, it is true that I am an Egyptologist. I thought I had found a way to mix together everything I love about forgotten culture, science, and performance. To quell this urge of mine to educate the disillusioned young people that would take bait such as this. The promise of a thrill without any of the actual danger.” He shook his head. “But that’s not enough. It was never enough, to watch a fake story run its course over and over. I wanted, more than anything, to participate in something real. And you’ll get to experience it too.”
His tone almost sounded as though he thought I was lucky. “Well, isn’t this some sort of... business?” I asked carefully. “Won’t people notice when none of your actors, or your customer, come back from one of your—your parties?”
At this, he gave a full, deep laugh. “How kind of you to worry about me. I assure you, Sam, I have taken every precaution when it comes to my staff. I only hire those with a limited circle of contacts, and have provided a thorough excuse for each to explain their lack of communication.” He looked at me, a glimmer in his eye.
“And as for you, my customer—well, no one knows you’re here, do they? To those in your life, it’ll be as though you’ve just disappeared.” I closed my eyes for a moment. He was right. I hadn’t known about the party when I arrived, and it was clear that Regus had forged whatever forms I was meant to sign. No one at the newspaper knew where I had gone.
I mustered up whatever ounce of bravery I had left within me, and said that classic and futile phrase: “You’re not going to get away with this.”
Regus’ smile widened. “Do you really think this is the first time I’ve done this?”
He leaned over and examined Ander’s slack face. He reached a thumb and pulled up on his eyelids, revealing unresponsive pupils underneath. “I think he might finally be out. It takes a surprising amount of embalming fluid to kill a man, even one as scrawny as this.” He paused. “I’ll be able to remove the organs soon. The brain hook is my favorite.”
The old man made his way back over to my slab. “Now we can start on you.”
I pulled against my bonds again as he rolled forward another IV stand from somewhere behind me. The leather was rubbing painfully against my wrists now. He hung the empty bag and connected the long tube. Then came the needle.
Despite the violent shaking of my entire body, I felt the familiar bee-sting bite of a needle going into the flesh of my arm. He adjusted something, and as I watched, drops of my own blood began to fall from my vein and into the plastic.
Then came the second bag, the one that I feared the most.
“Please. Don’t.”
He ignored me. Soon the bag was hung on the second stand.
“You don’t have to do this.”
He traced the tubing to its end and inserted it into the needle. I turned my head to look at Ander. His eyelid gave two more flutters, so he wasn’t dead yet. I wondered if he could tell what had happened to him. Or if he knew I was about to meet the same fate.
The sharp point of the needle pressed against my skin.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
CLANG
I quickly opened my eyes. The old man was no longer looming over me, and the needle was no longer aimed at my arm. Instead, a woman stood in his space, in a pose I’d seen her in before.
Greta, spittle and blood streaming from her mouth, eyes more red than white, stood with the large piece of her canopic jar raised above her head.
“Greta,” I said breathlessly, briefly forgetting that this was not this woman’s real name. She didn’t say anything as she lowered the jar and began to undo my bonds. Her hands were shaking violently and she blinked quickly. Whatever poison she had been forced to ingest hadn’t been a high enough potency to kill her immediately, but it had certainly taken its toll.
“You have to help Ander,” I said quickly. She had freed one of my hands, and I started on my other arm. She turned her attention to Ander, and paused at the sight of him so destitute on his slab.
She stepped towards him. “I’ll get him. You go,” she croaked, before coughing violently, gasping for air. She took the IV’s out of either of his arms, and started on his buckles. I quickly took out my own needle with a wince.
I was so engrossed in removing my own ties, I didn’t notice that Regus had gotten up.
“Greta!”
My warning came too late. Just as the woman turned around, Regus’ hands were around her neck, each fingertip pressing against the purple bruises I had seen earlier. I supposed Regus was responsible for those, too.
Regus let out wild snarls and grunts as Greta tried to pry his grip from her neck. Her face turned red, then violet, as the two bashed around the room, knocking against one of Ander’s IV stands and knocking it over. The bag of blood splattered on the ground like a water balloon.
I finished my last buckle. I could see that behind me was a doorway, one that undoubtedly led out of the basement and towards an escape. But I couldn’t leave Ander. Not like that.
I was undoing his bonds as fast as I could, as Regus and Greta continued to swirl around the room. Greta pushed Regus hard against the shelves on the wall, and one jar fell to the ground, the suspended creature within squelching cold and wet onto the concrete.
Last buckle. Ander was no longer bound to the slab, but he was unconscious. “Ander,” I said, lightly smacking the sides of his sallow cheeks. “Ander.”
His eyes fluttered ever so slightly open. “Sam?”
“We’ve got to go. Now.”
I helped him off the table, but his knees buckled when his feet hit the floor. We made our way towards the door, me dragging him along. There was a loud crash as Greta and Regus knocked the metal tray of tools to the ground. Regus was on top of her, and although the older woman’s legs thrashed around violently, I knew there wasn’t much hope.
“A little bit farther,” I said quietly to Ander. I stole one glance back at the two struggling on the floor, just in time to see Regus reach a hand out, and grab one of his tools. It was a long, thin metal pole with a hook on the end.
It didn’t take much force to plunge it through Greta’s chest.
She struggled for another moment, then fell still.
Before Regus could turn his eyes towards Ander and I, we were gone.
We had been under the house, as I had suspected. I was incredibly grateful that I recognized where we were when we emerged—only one turn away from the parlor.
Graham’s decapitated body was still there, covered in the sheet, though of course, Fawn’s body wasn’t. We stepped over it, and were quickly out the door.
I urged Ander’s tired body on, and pushed him as gently and as quickly as I could into the back seat of my car. He made no sounds of protest, and I couldn’t tell if this was because he understood the dire situation we were in, or if he had again fallen unconscious. Or worse.
I got into the driver’s seat and turned on the car. I backed down the dirt driveway without turning my head, my eyes transfixed in front of me instead, on the silhouette of the old man standing in the open doorway of that great and horrible house.
My adrenaline had lasted me on the drive to hospital, the speed of which was both unsafe and absolutely necessary. The sun was finally rising as I burst through the doors, no doubt sounding insane as I tried to explain to anyone that would listen what exactly had happened.
But once I was in the waiting room, as doctors and nurses tried to save Ander’s life, I fell into a deep sleep.
When I woke, it was late afternoon. My entire body ached, drained from the stress of the evening. I eyed the small bruised dot on my arm, where the needle that was meant to empty me of my life-force had once been embedded, and shuddered.
I approached the woman at the desk, and asked her about Ander. “The guy I brought in here—is he alright?”
I waited with bated breath for the answer. He had looked so terrible when I had last seen him, it seemed unbelievable to think that was something he could come back from. But, to my great surprise, the woman smiled. “He’s perfectly fine, sweetheart.”
“He checked out a few hours ago.”
I blinked. That couldn’t be right. “Are you sure?”
The woman nodded. “Absolutely.” We stood in silence for a few moments, as I tried to unpack what she had told me. Then, it looked as though she suddenly remembered something. “Oh! I almost forgot.” She rolled her chair back, and fumbled around for something in the bottom drawer of her desk. “He left you this.”
She held out her hand, but I didn’t take it. I only stared.
It was a small red envelope.
I drove home with it in my pocket. I went in the front door and placed my keys on their hook. I sat in a chair at my kitchen table, and just looked at it, sitting there on the wood.
Then, I opened it.
It was a small bit of paper. Written on it, in the same font as every punishment I had read before, were four simple words, which I read again, and again, and again:
“Thank you for playing.”
---
Credits
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