Horrorscape Page 11

  Oh, Lisa…

  “I won't answer anything personal,” she said quickly. “And I…I, um, retain the right to veto anything…inappropriate.”

  “What are you, Ally McBeal?” Jason sounded like he might be smirking. “Whatever. It's fine—I accept your terms.”

  Val wasn't finished. “If you hurt her, I swear—”

  “I get it.” His hand fell on her shoulder so casually, so arbitrarily, that she was unable to finish delivering her threat. “But you're being a little over-protective, don't you think? Call off the dogs, Val. Let's not make any threats we aren't capable of carrying out ourselves.”

  “Don't touch me.” She swiped his hand from her shoulder as one would a scorpion or a killer bee. GM had said something very similar to that when he had threatened her friends and mocked her name. Jason hadn't managed that same level of menace, though. Yet.

  No, she certainly didn't feel very caring or protective. James had almost ended up in a fight with Gavin because of her, and now Jason was forcing her to choose to condemn one of two people whom she truly cared about.

  Jason's grip reasserted its presence on her arm. “So we have a deal, then.”

  “I said don't touch me.” She yanked her wrist out of his loose hold. “How many questions?”

  He seemed to think about it. “Ten.”

  “Five.”

  “Nine.”

  “Five.”

  “Eight.”

  “Five.”

  “I don't think you get how this works,” Jason mocked. “You're supposed to go up—don't you know how to bargain?”

  “I'm not bargaining. Five, or no deal.”

  Jason's laughter sounded out in the darkness, horsey and unbearably loud. “Eight, and that's my final offer.” At her silence, he went on. “You don't seem to realize the position you're in, Val. Do I need to remind you? Or do you want James to know what you do in hall closets with our host when he's not around?”

  Val sucked in a breath. Hall closets? “No! I don't—” Wait a minute. “Did he tell you something? Did he lie about me?”

  “Or maybe,” Jason continued, as if she hadn't said anything. “Maybe you don't really care about him at all, and this is just the slap in the face he needs to get the message? Huh?”

  It's not like that—I'm not like that. What did GM tell him? What did he say? She could almost picture it. The two of them talking. GM dropping hints as though tossing Jason a treat. The thought made her sick with helpless, impotent rage. “Eight is fine,” she concluded miserably.

  As if she had a choice.

  ▪▫▪▫▪▫▪

  Two hours passed and the black team—they couldn't help but think of themselves that way; GM, Jason, and Charlie did not exactly inspire feelings of camaraderie—had little to show for their efforts, beyond the fickle intervention of chance. James found a black pawn (“king”) in a soap dish when he went to the bathroom to respond to nature's call. Lisa found a white rook (“the”) in the library, sandwiched between a dusty book on Romanesque architecture and the leather-bound biography of a Russian chess player. Blake found nothing at all.

  Two pieces in as many hours, he thought tiredly. Thirty to go. If they kept on at this rate, they wouldn't finish for days. Was the white team having better luck?

  “Somebody is obsessed with Italy,” Lisa sang, in an entirely too-cheerful voice. It seemed to annoy James, who winced as if her words were an icepick being wedged with slow, painful precision, directly into his eardrum. “I wonder if he's Italian. He speaks French, but doesn't look it. And don't Europeans speak several languages, anyway?”

  “Who cares,” was James's comment.

  “Why don't we start on the second floor?” Blake said, before they could start fighting again and end up giving him a headache.

  It was a reasonable idea. They were in the main hallway now with the staircase looming to their left and the door to their right. James leaned back against the wall, just under a painting of a forest. The trees were tall and pointed, like lances, resembling the Black Forest that had inspired the tales of the Brothers Grimm, which Blake had read when he was a child. James stretched, and his hand knocked against the frame of the painting causing it to swing precariously. He caught it, though, before it could fall and shatter.

  “Careful,” Lisa said unnecessarily, as James straightened it back on the wall. “Breaking his stuff is a surefire way to get him even more pissed off at us than he already is.”

  “Why don't we call it quits and go home?” James responded. “If he doesn't like us, I mean. Why stay? The white team is a bunch of assholes, anyway.”

  “As I recall you were the one who wanted to stay.”

  “Yeah, but I changed my mind. Why do you want to stay?”

  Lisa snorted. “Oh, I want to leave. But I, for one, don't want to let them chase us off like a bunch of schoolyard bullies. Do you want them to win?”

  His face darkened and he yanked his arm back down to his side. “Fuck no. But this isn't much fun—and I'm never going to see any of them again.”

  “We also still haven't found Val,” Lisa pointed out, looking at him accusingly. “Or did you forget?”

  From the flush on the other boy's face, it seemed that James had. Blake frowned. How could he forget about his own girlfriend? She was pretty, too. Not as pretty as Lisa—in fact, Blake couldn't think of any girls offhand who were prettier than Lisa, except maybe that girl from the white team—but far prettier than anyone Blake felt likely to date. He had always been vaguely annoyed by men who took their pretty girlfriends for granted. Particularly since women tended to flock towards those kinds of men, regardless of their personalities.

  The fact that one of his best friends exhibited the very same characteristics of which he was so abhorrent provided a steady source of cognitive dissonance for Blake. Though he would have liked to put in his own two cents, he didn't have the guts. It's none of my business anyway. So Blake sighed and changed the subject like the wimp he was. “We don't even know how many pieces the white team has—or how many Val might have found. We might even be ahead, in which case there's no point in tiring ourselves out over it.”

  Lisa opened her mouth, her eyebrows drawn together, as if to say, We don't even know where Val is. Period. Blake shot her a look, raising an eyebrow. A “don't even think about it” look that he'd inherited from his mother—back when she'd still been around to deliver it. A tremor went through his features at the thought, slight but visible. Lisa saw the wavering expression on his face, paused, and then said, “Yeah, you might be right.”

  There was a pause as each of them calculated how many chess pieces there might be left to find. Four out of thirty-two isn't horrible, Blake told himself. Assuming Val hadn't found more, that was 12.5-percent. It stood to reason that the white team had accumulated a similar amount, leaving roughly 75-percent left for the taking. Pretty good odds. Assuming nobody cheated.

  He wasn't sure where the thought had come from, but once it had, it refused to leave. Blake found himself recalling their host's eyes, how coldly he had looked at Lisa when she'd argued with him. The gaze suggested a man who found the very idea of losing offensive. He'd cheat. Charlie, too. And Jason—if he thought he could get away with it. Brent probably wouldn't, but he didn't seem too bright to begin with. He'd probably go along with whatever his teammates decided.

  Crap. Well, it wasn't like they could do anything about that. Worrying wouldn't help, anyway, and Lisa and James would most likely start another fight over it. Blake decided to keep his thoughts to himself. For now. I'm probably just being paranoid. It made him feel a tiny bit better.

  Not much, though.

  “Don't you think it's strange how he seems to know all of us?” Lisa said suddenly.

  James blinked. “Who knows who?”

  “GM. Our host.”

  Blake winced inwardly at the annoyed expression that traversed his friend's face. “He's nobody I know.”

  “Maybe he went to our s
chool before but his parents transferred him out,” Blake said tentatively.

  For a moment something flickered across Lisa's face. Almost—but not quite—recognition. She shook her head impatiently. “I don't know. I don't think I've seen him before.” This, she directed towards James, responding to the insinuated accusation. “But he won't tell us his name, so I can't tell for sure.”

  Blake had also been wondering about the name thing. That was weird. Especially since the white team didn't seem to have a clue who he was, either.

  “He seems to know Val, though,” Lisa said, after a pause. “And the way she reacted to him—it was almost as if she knew him, too.”

  James frowned suddenly. “Yeah. She said he reminded her of that creepy guy who she used to hang around with freshman year.”

  “Gavin?” Lisa blinked, startled. “She said he reminded her of Gavin?”

  “Wow. Now there's a blast from my past. But he looks nothing like—” She trailed off in thought. “Hmm.”

  “Who's Gavin?” Blake asked.

  “Oh, that's right,” Lisa said, looking up. “You wouldn't remember, would you? You only moved here sophomore year. Gavin was—”

  “Val's first boyfriend,” James said.

  “Not her boyfriend,” Lisa interjected. “A boyfriend wouldn't do what that man did to her.” She locked eyes with Blake. “He alienated her from her friends, forced her to lie to her family. I knew he was a loser, but I didn't know how sick he was. I guess I tried to warn her but I was kind of a bitch back then—” she laughed deprecatingly “—a bigger bitch than I am now, anyway. And I guess I was kind of jealous that a big upperclassman was interested in her, and not me. Even if he was a loser. She ignored me, anyway, and it almost cost us our friendship. And all the while, the son of a bitch was herding her deeper and deeper into this fucking web, toying with her thoughts and feelings by pretending to be something he wasn't.”

  “And what was he?” Blake asked, his mouth dry.

  “A monster.” Lisa gritted her teeth. “A manipulative psychopath. He got off on fear, and somehow he came to the conclusion that Val was the perfect girl to play lamb to his lion.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Blake said, feeling sick. “I think I read something about that when we moved here. I didn't know it was about Val.” Is that who she meant earlier? When she said GM reminded her of somebody dangerous?

  “It wouldn't have her name,” Lisa said. “She was only fourteen, and the sick fuck paid her parents hush-money to keep it out of the courtroom. We never talk about it.” She closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath. “I'm pretty sure GM isn't Gavin, though. Superficial similarities aside, Val didn't look scared enough. She'd go out of her mind if she saw him again. And besides—”

  “He's back on the East Coast, to work through his Freudian mommy issues?” James suggested.

  Lisa looked at him, her expression bitter. “Yeah. That, and he would have already done something to her—and us— by now.”

  ▪▫▪▫▪▫▪

  He was circling, like a wolf deciding where to land the killing strike, and the comparison made Val's tongue wither up inside her mouth. Like the wolf in the closet. Like the wolf in the closet that he left there for me. Most of the questions Jason had already asked were impersonal, though, and, in Val's opinion, slightly pointless. Hardly worth blackmailing over. Why would he waste his eight questions on trivialities—unless there was a purpose to them she hadn't noticed. Or he was trying to distract her from the bigger picture.

  Val was too tired to give in to the conspiracy theories swarming her head like locusts. She just wanted to be alone, and think…and plan.

  “Last question,” Jason said at last, much to Val's relief. “How did you and Lisa become friends?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “A simple one,” he said condescendingly. “You aren't anything alike. It must be an interesting story.”

  Well aren't you just Mr. Observant? Well, duh. Of course he was. Almost uncannily so. He couldn't have trapped her into this situation, otherwise. “It wasn't.”

  “I want to hear anyway.”

  Of course you do. “Lisa wasn't always so outgoing,” she allowed, shoving her thumbs through the belt loops of her jeans and rocking back on her heels. “She was the new girl back in middle school, and didn't have any friends. Except me. I was her first friend.”

  “Until she became the social butterfly and you become the wallflower,” Jason guessed. “Interesting. And she stayed friends with you out of loyalty? No. Out of…pity, perhaps?”

  “Shut up!” Val growled, stepping forward suddenly. “You…you—you don't know what you're talking about. So just shut the hell up right now!”

  Jason snorted. “Jesus, Val. Don't get your panties in a twist.”

  She felt her face color. “You—”

  “I have the upper-hand,” the utterly repulsive boy continued, “Really, I can say anything I like, do anything I like—within reason, obviously—and you can't stop me. So don't tempt me, Val.”

  Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness in the last few minutes or so, allowing her faint glimpses of sealed doors and her captor's knowing smirk. When she spoke again, it was not fear that made her voice tremble, but rage. “We had a deal.”

  “Pissing me off voids it.” Jason glanced over his shoulder, and Val thought she saw a shadow shift against the far wall. But it was over before she blinked, so she couldn't be sure. “Luckily for you, I think you're a riot. So, how about getting out of this hallway? You know, before anyone jumps to any conclusions about us.”

  I could push him down the stairs, Val thought, shaking with pent-up emotion. I won't, I couldn't—but oh, God forgive me, I want to.

  She waited behind him, but Jason held up his hand. “Oh no, you don't. I'm not having you club me or anything from behind. Ladies first.”

  “I don't know the way,” Val said flatly, shaken that he had read her so easily. Even he knows how repulsive he is.

  Or maybe she was just that predictable.

  “I'll guide you,” Jason said. “You don't have to be so sore with me. It's nothing personal. I'm merely using this situation to my advantage. Don't tell me you wouldn't do the same. Left, here.”

  Val turned grudgingly, not trusting herself to look behind her, not letting herself think about whether or not the creep was checking out her ass. “I'm sure Hitler and Stalin said the same thing.”

  That made him laugh, much to her annoyance and disgust. “It's a game, not a dictatorship.”

  “It amounts to the same thing in chess, doesn't it?” It did to Gavin, anyway. Wins and losses, with people as mere pieces to be won—or taken by force. “One person holds all the power. There's no emotional judgment required, either. The logic is reptilian enough that they can teach machines how to play chess.”

  Jason laughed, and she had a childish urge to cover her ears with the palms of her hands until he stopped. “It's really too bad you aren't on our side.”

  “Why?”

  “Right, then straight. Because you're actually rather intelligent—unlike the rest of your teammates—and yet, you have no idea of the advantage that you have…. And you aren't even using it.” He shook his head ruefully, “It's pathetic, really pathetic. What a waste. If you used it correctly, you could go so far.”

  “Then why don't you use it?” Val snapped. “What's stopping you? Common decency?”

  “Biology,” Jason said, with an audible smirk.

  Before she could respond to that puzzling statement, they had arrived in the parlor. Everything was almost exactly the same as they had left it; the mahogany sitting chairs, the silent TV, the half-eaten food, and the Oriental rug—nothing was out of place. For some reason she couldn't explain, that seemed wrong. “What do you mean? How is biology my advantage?” she asked, turning around, only to find that Jason had vanished. Without a single parting word, he had left her in the beautiful but creepily empty room.

  Alone. At last. She was
thirsty—her mouth was, anyway. She poured herself a lukewarm drink, which she sipped as she examined the parlor. A thorough search of the chairs had yielded nothing but lint, and a dime that must have fallen out of one of the players' pockets. Val was a little disappointed—she'd been hoping to find another chess piece or, at the very least, some indication of what she was supposed to be doing in this game—but mostly, she felt relief that she was free from that grim, shadowed corridor. And Jason, too, for that matter.

  She would have to be a lot more careful around Jason and definitely avoid the grandmaster at all costs—not that she hadn't been doing that already, but he always seemed to find her when she was alone. As if he was following her.

  No, things hadn't been going well for her at all. What advantage was Jason talking about? Surely, he hadn't been referring to the penalty round? He said something about biology. Penalty round can't be the advantage. Otherwise, it'd be called 'bonus round,' and it'd be a reward—not a punishment.

  Val looked around for a trashcan and, not finding one, simply dropped her cup on the floor, taking spiteful delight in the way the dark, viscous liquid stained the expensive-looking carpet. Take that, you son of a bitch. She bypassed the staircase, exploring the first floor. She passed a spacious dining room with a dangling chandelier, a bathroom, and a massive library; the shelves of which stretched clear up to the ceiling. None of the rooms provided any clues, however, and Val continued around the corner.

  Val looked up at a framed portrait of an owl moth, and shivered at the large, fake eyes staring out at the observer. Very creepy. She was not surprised. She bit her lip, looking around the room, wondering if the door was open because it had already been explored. But no, a white pawn, barely visible among the tacky plaid pattern of the comforter, was peeking out from under the pillow. Like the other piece, it, too, contained a message. She unraveled the paper inside, revealing the words, “The game.” A box enclosed the two words, presumably to show that they were a pair. What game? Val wondered, and then berated herself for it. Chess, obviously. It was always about chess, always about capture.