Date: 2015-08-01 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy
Description: When Antimony heads for her cousin Artie's place to spend the day reading comic books and avoiding the rest of her family, she's expecting a peaceful afternoon. She's not expecting a hostile video game to try to kill them both. But sadly, when the Price family is involved, unexpected threats from seemingly innocent and unlikely places are pretty much par for the course. If they want to survive the day, Annie and Artie will need to navigate a maze of riddles, puzzles, and irritating programmers, all of whom seem to have approached their game design with one goal in mind: to wipe two of the youn

SURVIVAL HORROR

Seanan McGuire

SOME THINGS ARE MYSTERIES NOT BECAUSE THEY ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND, BUT BECAUSE WHEN THEY STOOD UP AND SAID “GET OUT,” THE SENSIBLE PEOPLE ALL DID AS THEY WERE TOLD. NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS SOLVING.

—Alice Healy

A COMFORTABLY RENOVATED BASEMENT IN PORTLAND, OREGON

NOW

Artie was burning scented candles again. It wasn’t the real eye-watering stuff that he sometimes used when he got desperate—strictly Yankee Candle, artificial fruit and cliché Halloween all the way—but it was bad enough that I was breathing through my shirt as I tried to focus on the latest exploits of the X-Men, and not on the increasingly strong sensation of drowning in candied pumpkin and mango smoothies.

I tried making some theatrical gagging noises. Artie, his attention focused entirely on his laptop, ignored me. He didn’t even turn around to find out whether something was actually wrong. He just kept typing. I wrinkled my nose at his oblivious back and returned to my comic book, where Emma Frost—telepath with no time for this shit—was not murdering Cyclops—energy manipulator who caused way too much shit. Fun for the whole family.

If I was going to read comic books and marinate in the fumes from an entire scented-candle outlet, Artie’s room was the place to do it. Most of the guys from my comic book store would have happily stabbed one or more family members in the throat if it got them sole ownership of Artie’s basement lair, which had been converted for his use years before. Apart from the bed where I was reading and the desk where he was…well, whatever he was doing, there were shelves upon shelves loaded with comics, books, collectables, and his not-insubstantial DVD collection. If there was ever some sort of disaster that forced us to stay inside for six months, we might actually make a dent in his unwatched TV boxed sets. Until then, they lined the walls and helped keep the heating bills down.

“Scott’s a tool,” I said, not really expecting a response. “I mean, why does he keep getting otherwise intelligent women interested in him? It can’t be the hair. He may be the only person in the entire Marvel Universe who’s never had a decent haircut.”

“Uh-huh,” said Artie.

That was something: that meant he at least was still aware that I was in the room. “And they’re all telepaths, have you noticed that? Maybe he could give you dating tips. Explain how you and Sarah can make things work.”

“Uh-huh,” said Artie.

“Not that you really need any help. You just need to stop denying your raw animal passions and allow yourselves to go at it like rabid weasels in a sack.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, what can possibly be so interesting that me theorizing about your sex life doesn’t even rate a ‘stop that’?” I slid off the bed, leaving my comic book open on his pillow, and stalked over to loom behind him. “What are you doing?”

“Installing a new game.” Artie tilted his head back to look at me. “Sorry, Annie, did you say something?”

I sighed. “Apparently not.” Arthur Harrington—Artie—was my first cousin, but you’d never have guessed, looking at us. Where I got Grandpa Thomas’s genes, tall and rangy with cheekbones you could use to cut bread, Artie got a combination of the usual Healy package (average height, compact, good-looking enough, yet still capable of disappearing into a crowd) and his father’s incubus bonus stats, leaving him with thick black movie-star hair and big brown puppy-dog eyes that made basically everyone he met either want to hand over their wallets or beat the living crap out of him. My reaction to him was somewhere in between. As an immediate family member, his magical woo-woo incubus “you want me, you know you want me, I’m too sexy for this narrative” pheromones didn’t do anything for me, which was why I was allowed in his bedroom. Nonfamily girls weren’t even allowed in the house. Such were the trials and tribulations of raising a half-incubus child.

Artie frowned. “You said something, and I missed it, because I’m a terrible cousin,” he guessed.

“Something like that,” I said. “I was mostly just complaining about the X-Men again. I can’t blame you for tuning that out. What’s the game?”

“It’s a new survival horror puzzle game. Solve the puzzles or Cthulhu’s off-brand cousin comes through a rip in the fabric of the universe and eats you. Sarah would love it.” He paused, apparently realizing what he’d just said, and grimaced before looking back to his screen. “I think the download is finished. Let’s see how this baby launches.”

“Artie…”

“Can’t have a heart-to-heart about Sarah right now. Playing video games.”

“Artie, you invited me over so we could talk about Sarah.”

“Too late look I clicked the button.” He clicked, making himself a liar. I didn’t really have the chance to call him on that, though.

The lights going out as soon as he pressed the “launch” button was a much larger concern.

—

My name is Antimony Price, and the fact that my cousin is a half-incubus on his father’s side has probably already made it pretty clear that my family is more Addams than Brady. That doesn’t mean we’re raised to enjoy being suddenly plunged into total darkness. I squawked like an angry duck, fumbling in my pocket for my phone. “Dammit, Artie, what did you do? You know you’re not supposed to overload the fuses down here.”

“I didn’t do anything!” he protested from directly in front of me. Good: at least he wasn’t trying to move around. Everyone has their strengths in this world, and while I loved my cousin dearly, physical coordination wasn’t one of his.

“Well, somebody did something,” I said, pulling out my phone and pressing the button on the side to activate the screen.

Nothing happened.

I froze, staying silent for so long that Artie cleared his throat nervously and asked, “Annie? Are you still there, or should I be panicking right now?”

“Do you have your phone?”

“What?”

“My phone screen won’t turn on. I know I have a full battery. It’s just not working. Do you have your phone?”

“Um, sure, one second.” There was a rustling noise, followed by silence. Then: “Shit.”

“Yours isn’t working either, huh.” I touched his shoulder, reassuring myself of his location. “Okay, you stay here. I’m going to head for the stairs, go up, and see if the street is blacked out all over, or if we just got lucky.”

“I should play the lottery,” he said, deadpan.

“You should,” I agreed, and took a step backward…or tried to, anyway. Moving my feet was like wading through tar, thick and resistant. I nearly overbalanced, and had to grab the back of Artie’s chair at the last moment to keep myself from falling. If the floor had suddenly started trying to keep my feet, I didn’t want to think about what it would do to the rest of me. “Shit!”

“Annie?”

“Artie, can you move? Can you stand up?” I did my best to keep my voice steady. If I let myself start panicking—much as I genuinely wanted to—I would have a hard time stopping, and that was a good way to wind up eaten by whatever had turned the floor to tar.

“Of course. Why, are you not wearing shoes or something?” The chair shifted under my hands as Artie moved, or attempted to, anyway. He was silent for a long moment before he said, “Uh…”

“Can’t stand up, can you?”

“No, I can’t.” He sounded more puzzled than panicked. Even if his chair was refusing to let him up and I was inexplicably unable to move, he was still in his space, in his home, and he didn’t feel like anything could threaten him here. I knew how wrong he was. In the interests of keeping him calm, I wasn’t going to point it out. “It feels like someone’s glued me to the chair.”

“I’m having the same problem with the floor.”

“Uh. That’s pretty weird, right?”

I swallowed a peal of unhelpful, borderline mocking laughter. “I don’t know, Artie. It’s your room. Did you replace the carpet with the Blob and not tell me?”

The screen flickered before he could answer me, the change in illumination instantly visible in the dark room. Words swam up through the blackness:

THE JESTER’S PRISON

START NEW GAME? Y/N

“Because that’s not creepy at all.” There was a soft tapping sound, as if Artie had pressed a single key. I closed my eyes for a moment, not that it made much difference, given the room’s absolute blackness. “Artie, what did you just do?”

“I said we wanted to start a new game.”

I opened my eyes just in time to see the words disappear, ghosting away into CGI mist before a new block of text replaced them, glowing white and somehow menacing against the darkened screen:

THE JESTER OF THE DIVINE, ROBIN GOODFELLOW, IS BOUND BETWEEN THE WORLDS BY THE WORD OF MERLIN, LAST OF THE GREAT WIZARDS. RESTORE AND REFRESH THE WARDS WHICH KEEP HIM BOUND, LEST THE JESTER ONCE AGAIN RUN RAMPANT OVER THE BROKEN BODIES OF MANKIND.

“Jeez, Artie, what the fuck kind of game is this?”

“I don’t know! I got it from a guy on my forum.”

The text disappeared, replaced by another block:

YOUR WILLINGNESS TO PLAY HAS ACTIVATED ONE OF MERLIN’S FAIL-SAFES. SHOULD YOU FAIL TO RESTORE THE WARDS, ROBIN WILL NOT BE FREED.

“Oh,” said Artie, sounding relieved. “Well, that’s good.”

YOU WILL BE SENT TO JOIN HIM IN EXILE, AND CAN HELP IN MERLIN’S BATTLE TO KEEP THE JESTER CONTAINED.

“And that’s not good,” I said. “Goddammit, Artie, what have you gotten us into?”

“We don’t know that the game is doing anything,” said Artie weakly. The words on the screen disappeared, replaced by a complicated illustration that looked like three triskelions that had been twisted together into a single tangled mass. At the same time, something in the shadows sparked green, and the darkness was filled with distant moaning. “Okay, yeah, the game is doing this,” amended Artie. “Sorry.”

“Who the hell was this ‘guy’ and what forum are you talking about?”

“It’s a support ground for crossbreeds. You know, like me and Elsie? Half-humans talking about how difficult it can be sometimes to deal with living in a mostly human world. It’s educational.” His tone turned slightly distant. “I think I can manipulate these lines. How do you think it’s supposed to fit together?”

“See if you can rotate the triskelions so that they line up,” I said. “Okay, look, is there any chance this was targeted? Did someone figure out who you were and decide that we should really be sucked into a bad pocket dimension for our sins? Because I don’t know about you, but I do not want to meet Robin Goodfellow. That guy was bad news before the Covenant banished him from this plane of reality.”

“I don’t see how they could have.” There was a clicking sound as Artie did something with his mouse. The images on the screen began to rotate slowly. “My profile isn’t connected to my real name, I don’t have a Facebook, my Twitter account goes to a different email address—”

“What’s your handle?”

“Um.” The image kept rotating as Artie admitted, sounding mortified, “Incuboy.”

“How many Lilu crossbreeds are there living in the Pacific time zone, that you know of?” Incubi and succubi were technically just male and female Lilu. We continued to refer to them as if they were separate species in part because it was tradition—which somehow was supposed to make it less confusing—and in part because their natural abilities were so radically different that they might as well have been different species on any practical level.

“Two. Me and Elsie.”

“And does your profile give your time zone?”

Artie’s silence was all the answer I needed. I managed, barely, to resist the urge to clock him one in the back of the head. It might have made me feel better—violence almost always did—but it wouldn’t have helped anything. The conjoined triskelions were still rotating, flashing in and out of alignment with one another.

In and out of alignment…“Are they rotating around the places where they connect?”

“Yeah,” said Artie, sounding relieved that I was apparently done quizzing him. He was going to be really disappointed in a few minutes. “I can stop them by right-clicking, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with them.”

“Try switching to a top view while they spin.”

“Okay.” More clicking sounds followed. The game might not have come with a tutorial, but with as many video games as Artie played, he didn’t really need one. Not for a straightforward point-and-click puzzle game that might or might not be planning to suck us both into an unspeakable hell dimension if we did it wrong.

No pressure.

The view gradually shifted to show the triskelions from above, and as I had hoped, the change in perspective made it clear that each of the three, as it spun, would briefly appear to form a single branch on the three-part symbol. “There,” I said. “If you free the pieces while you’re looking at them like this, you’ll get something that doesn’t look so broken.”

Artie hesitated. The graphics continued to spin. “Are we sure that’s a good idea?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe completing the runes is what sends us off to hang with Robin Goodfellow.”

“The instructions said to fix the runes if we didn’t want to hang with him. Since they appear to be broken currently, and the room is filled with creepy moaning and mysterious darkness, I’m going to go with ‘fix them.’ ” I tightened my hands on the back of his chair. I don’t like things I can’t hit. “Now.”

“All right, all right, I’m fixing them.” I heard the mouse click, and the runes on the screen slowed, finally freezing in a perfect triskelion. The image gleamed bright, etching itself on my eyes, so that when I blinked I still saw it floating on the inside of my eyelids. It hung there for a moment, doing nothing, before it began to spin lazily, the image remaining perfect from all angles. The moans in the darkness stopped, replaced by giggling.

“Okay, that’s not an improvement,” I muttered. “Artie?”

“I don’t know! There were no instructions, remember?” The mouse clicked again. “Nothing’s happening.”

“So this must be the next puzzle,” I said. “We have a rotating protection symbol and giggling in the shadows. What can you extend a triskelion into?”

“Annie, I don’t do runic gingerbread.” Artie sounded like he was on the verge of snapping. I couldn’t blame him. This was a pretty terrifying situation, and at least I was armed. Artie wasn’t much of a fighter. He was more of the “stay home and research and don’t get shot at” school. “I have the book of runes and everything, but it’s not like I’ve ever learned how to use them.”

“Okay, okay, sorry. I just…triple spiral!”

“What?”

“It’s an earlier form of the triskelion. See if you can pull the lines apart or anything like that. You’ll need to get rid of the interior dots, too—try dragging them into the lines.”

“Just a second.” Artie hunched forward, focusing on the screen. One of the dots moved, merging into the nearest curving line of the figure, and the line promptly stretched, twisting outward into one arm of a triple spiral. “Got it!” Whatever he’d done, he repeated it twice more, and the triskelion morphed entirely, becoming a triple spiral before beginning to spin, faster and faster, like a portal opening.

“Oh, fuck,” I said, unable to feel more than dull disappointment. This was supposed to have been a perfectly normal Saturday. Even we Prices (and Price-Harringtons) don’t normally have to deal with evil video games threatening to suck us into portal dimensions if we don’t play along. “Artie, if we get pulled through, grab my hand. You don’t want to lose track of me.”

“Okay,” he said glumly.

The image continued to spin, morphing into a white disk that filled with static before becoming a clear picture of a dark-haired, pale-skinned woman. It was black-and-white, except for her eyes, which were a shade of clear ice blue that looked more like it belonged on a beetle’s wings than on a person’s face. I gasped. So did Artie.

“Sarah?” he asked, sounding equal parts hopeful and horrified.

The image smiled. “Hello,” she said, and it wasn’t our cousin Sarah, which was a relief but also somehow sad—Sarah was convalescing in Ohio with our grandparents, and while trying to suck us into another dimension wasn’t exactly a nice way of saying “I’m feeling better,” it would have been a wonderful indication of her recovery. “I’m so pleased that you were able to solve the first rune. Robin Goodfellow is a tricky sort, and he needs to be contained.”

“That’s a cuckoo,” I said. “There is a cuckoo in your computer.” Math-obsessed telepathic ambush predators. Again, we have an interesting family.

“I know,” said Artie.

The cuckoo woman—who was clearly a video file, and couldn’t see us, thank God—continued, “There are twenty runes ahead of you, each more complicated than the last. Complete them all, and Robin stays contained. Fail, even once, and you’ll share his fate.”

“There has to be a catch here,” I murmured. “Cuckoos don’t go around refreshing the wards on ancient evils for shits and giggles.”

“They also don’t have the magic to do this kind of programming,” said Artie. He leaned forward, until his nose was almost brushing the computer screen. The cuckoo woman was smiling at him beatifically, her part in this little production finished, at least until we did something to trigger another video clip. I couldn’t tell whether the video was still going. She could have become a still frame.

Artie stabbed his finger at the screen. “Look there: behind the door. That’s a hand. She’s working with the hidebehinds.”

“Or the hidebehinds are working with her,” I said. “Shit.”

There’s no such thing as magic, according to my grandma Alice, and since she married a witch and has spent the last thirty or so years jumping from reality to reality looking for him, I guess she’d know. Magic is just a sort of physics we don’t fully understand yet, the kind that allows men to turn into monsters and semi-visible humanoid cryptids to use their uniquely folded perspective on reality to code video games that conceal dimensional portals. Hidebehinds are oddly refractive, and their way of seeing the world doesn’t match up with anything else we’ve encountered, either in this dimension or the ones that they occasionally disappear into. They’re usually harmless. The thought of them joining forces with the cuckoos, who were anything but harmless, was enough to make me want to hide under Artie’s bed and wait for the nice video game to eat us. At least then I wouldn’t be in a world where the hidebehinds and the cuckoos were going to gang up on me in the night.

“No, no, this is a good thing,” said Artie. He leaned forward again, this time focusing on the corner of the screen. “See, if the cuckoos had made this by themselves, it would have been all math problems. The hidebehinds like hidden-eye stuff—naturally—and concealing puzzles in plain sight.” He clicked something. The game’s camera zoomed in on what I’d taken for a smudge, revealing a cobweb with several large swaths missing. The spider was perched in the top corner, black and gleaming.

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“Patch the web.” I couldn’t see Artie’s face, but I could hear his frown. “The question is, do we need to do it in a single pass, or can we strategically choose our moves?”

“Let me see.” I leaned forward. Artie shifted his head a little to the side, giving me a clear view of the puzzle. “Hidebehinds are big on barrow imagery, which tends to be Celtic in nature—not always, but something like eighty, ninety percent of the time. Celtic knots depend on the unbroken strand, or at least the illusion of the unbroken strand.”

“And hidebehinds are all about illusions,” Artie agreed. “Okay. So where’s the move?”

I frowned, leaning closer still. My feet were still stuck to the floor, which created the bizarre sensation that someone was holding me down as I tried to see how to draw the correct line. Finally, I reached up and touched the bottom left corner of the broken web. “Here to…here,” I said, drawing the first line. “Then here, here…” I kept moving my finger, repeating the path Artie would need to send the spider along over and over again as I waited for him to give me the okay to stop.

After the fifth repetition, Artie said, “All right. I think I have it.” He began moving his mouse, replicating the motion of my finger. Finally, he released it, said, “Cross your fingers,” and hit the space bar.

The spider began to move. It raced along the path Artie had traced, leaving a line of gleaming silver behind it. The newly patched web began to glow, and then the camera pulled out again, leaving us looking at the motionless cuckoo, the open closet door, and the otherwise featureless little room.

No: not completely featureless. “Left side, wainscot,” I said. “Is that another puzzle?”

Artie tilted his head. “I think so.” The giggling from the shadows got louder when he tapped on the left side of the screen, and a message popped up:

YOU ARE NOT READY FOR WHAT YOUR ACTIONS WOULD UNLEASH.

The camera didn’t move. Artie sighed. “Okay, well, on the plus side, it’s not going to let us try an advanced puzzle before we clear out the basic ones.”

“Yeah, and on the negative side, we’re stuck here until we either get sucked into another dimension with an ancient evil—which is so Syfy Saturday night, I can’t even—or until we finish the whole game. How big is this thing?”

“I don’t know. A few gigabytes. And hey, we could always die of mysterious causes before we do either.” Artie began mousing around the screen, looking for something clickable.

I groaned. “Way to look on the bright side.”

“I try.”

I resisted the urge to strangle my cousin. It wouldn’t have done either one of us any good, and I couldn’t reach the keyboard from where I was stuck. “All right, while you find the next accessible puzzle, how about you tell me why a bunch of hidebehinds would be targeting you via evil video game. That doesn’t feel like the sort of thing that happens at random, you know?”

“I don’t know! I haven’t done anything!”

I smacked him in the back of the head.

“Ow!” Artie twisted as much as he could, trying to look at me. “What did you do that for?”

“You’re not thinking. You’re supposed to be the smart one. One of the smart ones. Smarter than your sister, or mine. So think. Why would someone be out to get you? What have you been posting on that forum of yours?”

“Nothing.” Something about his tone made it pretty clear that he was lying. I stayed silent. Artie sighed. “Nothing important. There’s a forum about cryptid injuries is all. You know, like ‘how do you patch a tear in the webbing between your fingers,’ or ‘what kind of mange treatments work for therianthropes.’ That sort of thing.” His voice took on a defensive note as he added, “It’s hard not being the dominant species. You don’t always know where to turn for information, you know? So sometimes we turn to each other.”

“What were you posting, Artie?”

He clicked a stripe in the wallpaper. The camera zoomed in, showing another knotwork puzzle, as he said miserably, “Sarah. I was posting about Sarah. How there was this Johrlac girl I knew, and she’d managed to hurt herself pretty bad, and did anyone know what I could do to help her get better.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself from smacking him again. It wouldn’t have done any good, and more, it wouldn’t have been fair. He was asking the same questions we’d all been asking for months. He’d just taken them to a new forum. The fact that he might have gotten us killed in the process was almost irrelevant.

“I guess maybe someone could have gotten upset by me talking about taking care of a cuckoo like she was a person, even though she is a person,” Artie concluded morosely. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know you didn’t mean to,” I said. “Given that there’s a cuckoo in the game, I’m going to bet that it wasn’t talking about Sarah like a person that got you into trouble. It was admitting that you knew she existed at all. This is an assassination attempt.”

“Really? Cool.” Artie dragged something down the side of the line of knotwork, which warped into another series of figures. He began swapping them around, exchanging them for each other at a speed that made it clear he knew what he was doing, even if I didn’t. “I mean, bad and terrible and probably something I’m going to get yelled at for, but you know. Also cool. I don’t get many assassination attempts aimed in my direction.”

“Yes, you’re the family wallflower, I know,” I deadpanned. “What are you doing?”

“This is something Sarah showed me once. It’s a series of mathematical transformations. Fun, huh?”

“Yeah, fun,” I said uneasily. “Okay: cuckoos can’t use magic, at least not runic magic, which means our mystery cuckoo didn’t design the game.”

“No, the hidebehinds did that,” agreed Artie. He clicked his mouse. The figure went through another transformation, going smooth and blending into the wallpaper. The camera pulled out again, and the cuckoo’s lips curled upward in a warm smile.

I jumped—or tried to, anyway, and had to grab for Artie’s chair to keep myself from going sprawling on the tarry floor. I’d grown so accustomed to the cuckoo woman being a still picture that I hadn’t expected to see her move.

“You’re smart; that’s good,” she said, and the disturbing part was that she sounded like she meant it. It was more fun for her if we were smart. “This room has been used to keep Robin imprisoned for generations. Every piece is a puzzle. Every puzzle has a solution. If you can complete them all, the runes will be redrawn, and your release will be at hand.”

“Sounds good,” said Artie, and he started to move his mouse again. I grabbed his arm, freezing him in mid-motion.

“The video hasn’t finished,” I said softly. “She’s still watching you. Look at her nostrils.” The cuckoo woman’s nostrils were very slightly flared, like she smelled something unpleasant. That was the only sign that the feed was still live.

“So?”

“So she said that everything in the room was a puzzle, and she’s in the room. I think…I think if you try to trigger another puzzle while she’s active, it may count as losing. I’d really rather not lose, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Yeah, no, getting sucked into some unknown dimension to hang with Robin, not my idea of a good time.” Cautiously, Artie brought the mouse back around to the cuckoo woman, and clicked on her nose.

Her face split into a grin even wider than the one she’d been wearing before. “Fearless questers, brave and true, what gift can I give to you?” She stopped then, and appeared to be waiting.

“What?” I demanded. “That’s not a riddle. That’s barely even a question. That can’t be the whole puzzle.”

“Sure it can,” said Artie philosophically. “She’s a cuckoo, and cuckoos are all assholes. I bet that’s a super long, easy riddle by their standards. I mean, really, the question is whether or not she’s playing fair. If she is, then there’s an answer we can guess from what we already know. If she’s not, I might as well just do a keyboard smash, because we’re about to be eaten by a video game.”

“Hidebehinds are inherently fair,” I said. “Assume that since they programmed the game—”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“Assume that since they probably programmed the game, they’re making her play fair. That means the riddle has an answer. I can’t promise we won’t be penalized for capitalization or anything, but at least we have something resembling a fighting chance.”

“Oh. In that case…” Artie leaned forward and typed something in before I could object. We both focused our attention on the screen, barely breathing as we waited to see what would happen next.

The cuckoo’s smile faded. “Really? That’s what you want from me, out of everything in this world? I won’t forget.” Then she turned and stormed out of the picture, opening the door on the far wall to reveal a hallway beyond. The door swung slowly shut behind her, but the screen remained lit, and no dread portals appeared. We hadn’t lost the game yet.

Artie let out a slow breath. “Whew,” he said.

I smacked him in the back of the head. “What did you type?” I demanded.

“The only thing I could type. When a cuckoo that isn’t Sarah or Grandma Angela asks what she can do for you, the answer is ‘leave.’ ”

I blinked. And then I laughed. “God, I love you.”

“I know,” said Artie, and he clicked on another puzzle.

—

What felt like hours later, we were still playing, and the darkness still held absolute dominion over the room. The giggles from the shadows had been replaced by moans, except when they were replaced by hellish screams that made it difficult for us to concentrate on the puzzles we were struggling to solve. The cuckoo woman did not return. I had to view that as a good thing, since otherwise, it would have been proof that we had already lost, and that the game was just toying with us. I didn’t like being toyed with.

“I need to pee,” said Artie glumly.

“Yeah, and my feet hurt,” I said. “How many puzzles do you think we have left?”

“I don’t know. Every time I think we’re done, two more pop up.” Artie hesitated before asking the question I’d been fighting not to ask myself for the last four puzzles: “Do you think they’re ever going to end? Because I’m not sure starving to death in my bedroom is any better than being sucked into a prison dimension.”

“We won’t starve to death,” I said. “We’ll die of dehydration long before that point.”

“I knew there was a reason you were my favorite cousin.” The fear in Artie’s voice was getting clearer with every word. “Annie…what if this never ends?”

“It’ll end. You’ll see. We just need to figure out why we’re playing. You posted about Sarah, and there’s a cuckoo in the game: I think it’s pretty clear that the cuckoos sent this for you, after getting the hidebehinds to program it, which explains the fairness. You said you downloaded this from your forum? That means it’s pretty new, right?”

“Yeah. It’s still being play-tested. I guess if I never log on again, they know it works.”

“Okay. So that means they’re not completely sure it does what it’s supposed to. They’re testing. We’re going to have to track them down and kick their teeth in after we get done with this, you realize, but…have you tried hitting ‘escape’?”

“What.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of utter disbelief, like I had just said the most ridiculous thing anyone had ever uttered.

“They can’t have played all the way through every time they decided to test a new puzzle. There has to be a way out.”

“Annie—”

“Can you think of a better one?”

There was a long pause before Artie said, sounding somewhat sullen, “If we get sucked into a localized equivalent of hell for a hundred years, I am blaming you.”

“Maybe we can find Grandpa Thomas while we’re there.” I squeezed his shoulder. “Just try it.”

Artie sighed, raised his hand, and pressed the “escape” key. Words appeared on the screen:

EXIT AND SAVE?

Y/N

“Oh my God say yes Artie say yes right now,” I said.

“Yes!” Artie stabbed his finger at the keyboard. The screen went black. The moaning in the shadows stopped.

The lights came back on.

Without the tarry floor holding me in place, I automatically adjusted my position, and then toppled over as my long-asleep feet refused to hold my weight any longer. I had never been so grateful to get a face full of carpet. I heard Artie’s chair creak, followed by the sound of the bedroom door slamming open and his feet pounding up the stairs, presumably heading for the bathroom.

“Shouldn’t drink so much Pepsi,” I muttered, and began the laborious process of peeling myself off the floor. Artie’s computer screen had returned to an innocuous view of browser and wallpaper—a picture of Sarah taken the summer before she followed my sister Verity to New York. No signs of an ancient evil waiting to either break free or swallow us whole. That was a nice change.

I staggered up the stairs on shaking legs, and passed the closed bathroom door on my way to the kitchen. Either Artie had needed to pee more than I thought, or he was having a quiet cry in the bathtub before he came back out to face the world. If I faulted him for that at all, it was only because I couldn’t be crying in the tub while he was locked in there.

The kitchen clock said that it was almost seven. Artie had launched the game shortly after noon. I’d never been more exhausted in my life.

Aunt Jane turned away from whatever she was stirring on the stove to look over her shoulder at me and smile. “There you are,” she said. “I was just getting ready to send a search party.”

“I don’t think that would have worked.” I walked to the fridge, opened it, and extracted a can of Dr Pepper. After a pause to consider, I made that two. As I walked over to the table, I continued, “They would just have gotten sucked into the magically generated shadows that were holding us captive as we tried to complete a series of complicated puzzles and refresh the wards that were holding Robin Goodfellow in his eternal prison.” I collapsed into the chair across from Uncle Ted and cracked open the seal on my first soda.

Uncle Ted and Aunt Jane both stared at me, not saying a word. I took a long drink of Dr Pepper.

“So, what’s for dinner?” I asked.

“Magically generated shadows?” asked Aunt Jane.

“Robin Goodfellow?” asked Uncle Ted.

Artie appeared in the doorway, eyes red, wiping his hands on a towel. “Oh,” he said. “You told them.”

I took another drink of Dr Pepper.

—

Uncle Ted eyed Artie’s laptop like he expected it to grow teeth and start biting him at any moment. Honestly, that would have been easier to understand than “remotely executable runic magic embedded in the game program by hidebehinds working with a cuckoo for some unknown and probably unpleasant reason.” Even for us, that was pushing the bounds of comprehensibility a bit. “And you say you just downloaded the game, and then the shadows came?”

“Yeah, Dad,” said Artie. He sighed. “I swear there was no ‘contains actual evil’ warning on the file.”

“There rarely is.”

Aunt Jane walked back into the kitchen, waving her phone like it had just unlocked the secrets of the universe. “All right, my contact with the local bogeymen confirmed that some hidebehinds have been taking contract work from whoever’s willing to put down the cash. Something about establishing a competitive multimedia company in a human-dominated market. They specialize in puzzle games and phone apps for cryptids—which does sometimes mean executable magic.”

“Great,” I said. “Let’s go punch them a lot.”

“No can do, my darling, overly violent niece,” she said. “They’re down in Silicon Valley. Even if we could convince your parents to let us take you to California on no notice for the sole purpose of punching people, I can’t get the time off work.”

“Your brother would probably let us take Antimony to California in order to punch people,” said Uncle Ted, giving the laptop another poke. “He’d view it as a bonding exercise.”

Aunt Jane snorted. “No one is crossing state lines in order to commit assault today, all right?”

“But they nearly sucked us into a pocket dimension,” I said. “Don’t they deserve some punching?”

“I’ll set up a conference call and have some words with their CEO about taking money from cuckoos,” said Aunt Jane. “That’s really the best I can do right now. Sometimes you have to explore nonviolent solutions.”

I crossed my arms and leaned back in my seat, glowering sullenly. “I hate nonviolent solutions.”

“Even the X-Men sometimes resolve things without punching,” said Artie.

I swiveled around so that I was glowering directly at him. He quailed.

“I mean, punching would be better, we should really go with punching.”

“See, look there, Annie got her way without punching you, clearly diplomatic methods can work.” Uncle Ted pushed Artie’s laptop across the table toward him. “Uninstall the evil software and you should be fine.”

“That’s it?” I abandoned glaring at Artie in favor of staring at my uncle Ted. “Just ‘uninstall the evil software’? We don’t even have to kill a chicken?”

“Why would you? It’s not like you installed Windows 7.” Uncle Ted started laughing at his own joke. I groaned, which just made him laugh harder.

“You’d think someone would be at least a little upset about us nearly getting sucked into an unidentified pocket dimension,” I grumbled.

“I’m upset,” offered Artie. “Come on. I’ll let you help me write the game review. That’ll make you feel better.”

“The really pathetic part is that you’re right.” I sighed and stood, grabbing my soda. “Let’s go.”

“Awesome.” Artie picked up his computer. “Mom, when’s dinner?”

“About twenty minutes,” said Aunt Jane.

“Great, plenty of time.” He went trotting off toward his basement. I followed him more slowly. My feet still hurt.

The last thing I heard before I slammed the basement door was Uncle Ted saying, far too calmly, “I told those kids video games were going to get them in trouble one day.”

—

Artie was back at his desk by the time I finished stomping down the stairs. He had a browser open and was typing something into a forum window. I stopped, eyeing first his screen, and then him. He reddened.

“I’m just…reporting…that the game is sort of evil,” he said.

“Uh-huh. And then?”

“I’m uninstalling the game.”

“And then?”

“I’m deleting my forum account before I accidentally invite any more assassination attempts from pissed-off Johrlac who don’t like people knowing that they exist.”

“And then?”

“I’m being grateful that it wasn’t the Covenant of St. George.”

“And then?”

He sighed deeply. “I’m apologizing to my wonderful, brilliant, totally not going to punch me in the throat cousin for endangering her life.”

“Good.” I walked back to the bed, where my comic book was still waiting for me. “Let me know when you want to start.” I stretched out on my stomach, getting comfortable, and turned the page. All in all, the afternoon hadn’t been that unusual.

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

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- SURVIVAL HORROR

- Seanan McGuire