The Tattooed Heart

  It was not a wealthy family. There was a worn, tattered feel to everything. But poverty does not create evil, poverty could not explain Trent. It would not justify the hazing of Samira, far less the desecration of graves, racist graffiti, and a brutal physical assault.

  “Why?” I asked, not even really intending to say it out loud because of course I assumed Messenger would not deign to answer. “Why do people do evil things?”

  Messenger’s answer stunned me. “Why did you?”

  Now it was my turn to avoid answering. I didn’t know the answer. Why had I done the evil thing that resulted in my being condemned to this life?

  Why Trent?

  Why me?

  Silent and abashed, I followed Messenger down to the basement room where Trent was on his back on a padded bench, lifting weights, aided by his friend, Pete.

  I steeled myself for my duty. I would bring fear to this place.

  9

  WE BECAME VISIBLE. IT WOULD HAVE SEEMED TO the two boys as if we had popped in out of thin air.

  Trent lost control of one of the heavy dumbbells he was lifting. It crashed to the concrete floor. He kept his grip on the other, lowered it to the floor as well, sat up, and said, “What the hell?”

  Pete took two careless steps back and nearly tripped over the bench.

  “Trent Gambrel and Peter Markson,” Messenger said. “You are called to account for your actions.”

  “Who are you? Get out of here! Get out of here right now!”

  Trent had retrieved a lighter dumbbell and now stood brandishing it as a weapon.

  “I offer you a game,” Messenger said.

  Trent cursed violently and swung the dumbbell at Messenger. The weight passed harmlessly through Messenger’s shoulder. So Trent lifted it high and brought it down with all his strength on Messenger’s head. It passed like a knife through butter and swept away on the bottom of its arc, hitting Trent in the shin.

  He cursed again and yelled in pain.

  Messenger waited until the boy’s hopping around had stopped. Pete made a dash for the stairs but managed only two steps before he found himself unable to move.

  “If you accept the invitation to the game and lose, you will suffer a punishment,” Messenger said, not sounding blasé, but not reacting to Trent’s rage, either. “If you refuse the game, you will suffer punishment. If you accept the game and win, you will be allowed to go on without any further interference.”

  “What is this, man?” Pete cried. “Help! Help!”

  Yelling for help and shouting obscenities and threats went on for a while and Messenger let them go on until both boys were winded, and finally accepted the reality that they could neither leave, nor summon help, nor strike either Messenger or myself.

  “I offer you a game,” Messenger said again, in tones identical to the first time.

  “What the hell, man?” Trent whined. “Who are you? Who’s the chink?”

  I have to admit that slur struck home. I’d listened with distaste to a long string of such slurs, but this was the first directed at me, personally. I’d never really heard anyone deliberately attack me as an Asian American before. Oh, I’d heard the sort of soft bigotry, the assumption that I must be a grind because I’m Asian, or that I must play violin and be great at math. (Neither, unfortunately.) But this was the first time someone had just come right out and called me a name in that way. To my face.

  I would like to say it had no effect. But it did. It had the effect of siphoning off some of the concern I felt for what they were about to endure.

  “He’s the Messenger of Fear,” I said.

  “Yeah?” Trent looked defiantly at Messenger. “Well, I’m not afraid.”

  I bit my tongue and stopped myself from saying, you will be soon. But yes, the slur had made me spiteful and less pitying than I might otherwise be. I’m not proud of that.

  “If you accept the challenge and prevail, you go free. If you play the game and lose, you will be punished. If you refuse to choose, you will be punished. You have seven seconds to decide. Play or pay? Seven. Six.”

  More threats, more cursing.

  “Five.”

  Defiance and rage.

  “Four.”

  “Who the hell are you to—”

  “Play the game, you fool!” And with that, Oriax made her entrance.

  “Whoa.”

  I was unsurprised by the boys’ reactions.

  “Play his game, you stupid boy,” Oriax snapped. “You may win. If you refuse, you lose. And if you lose, well, then, little Trent and even littler Pete, you will very likely end up drooling and shivering, cringing like beaten dogs along the gloomy corridors of the Shoals, lost forever to your sorrowful mothers.”

  I admired that. The way she could just spit that out as fluently as a rapper.

  “What’s the game?” Pete demanded, nervous and yet reassured by Oriax, who must have seemed like an ally to him. He was staring without restraint at Oriax, barely even glancing at her eyes.

  “Listen to me,” Oriax snarled. She was not interested in their attraction to her, she had a goal, and she could conceal it no longer. She focused her burning-ember gaze on Trent. “You, at least, have a future. You may do . . . great things. Great and terrible things. If you survive this day. If.”

  I wanted to ask her to explain, but doubted she would. Messenger said nothing, and something in his body language warned me to stay silent as well. But as always, curiosity . . .

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “No,” Messenger said curtly. “The servants of Malech are granted certain powers not given to us. They see further in time. But no human may be punished for what he may do in the future. Nor,” he added pointedly, “for the things they say to us.”

  So he had heard that chink remark. And he had seen that it annoyed me. I fell silent.

  “All right, we’ll play your game,” Trent said. “Isn’t that right, Pete? We’ll play his game. And we’ll win it, too.” He offered a fist for a bump but Pete was seeing very little but Oriax.

  “You have accepted the game,” Messenger intoned. He raised up his hands, palms out toward the two of them. It had the character of a religious liturgy, a memorized prayer. “In the name of Isthil, I summon the Master of the Game.”

  I tensed at this. I had not enjoyed my earlier encounters with the Master of the Game, and though I was prepared now, I was still not looking forward to it. There may come a time when that monster’s appearances will seem mundane to me, but that time had not yet come.

  The Master of the Game scared the hell out of me.

  Something that seemed very much as if it were poison gas began to fill the room. It was a mist, a mist the yellow of fresh-bruised flesh or an aging carnivore’s teeth, a sickly cloud that swirled and swelled until half the basement was obscured by it.

  I had a sense that the earth-enclosed walls of the basement had been pushed out and the room itself had become huge. The weight bench and the ancient sofa on which Pete had sat all seemed smaller, almost like the furnishings of a doll’s house. The low-ceilinged basement had become a vast, empty hangar with only a few pitiful sticks of furniture clustered in the middle.

  Then, the random-seeming swirl of that sinister mist began to move with more purpose, forming itself around an emerging object.

  The Master of the Game approached.

  I thought I had encountered the Master of the Game before, and had steeled myself for his nightmare aspect, but as Oriax changed with each encounter while nevertheless maintaining her core reality, so, too, it seems the Master of the Game could change, though by what arcane rules of logic or design I could not guess.

  This time as he emerged from the mist there was a fuzziness and lack of definition about the edges of his lumbering Sasquatch form. It was as if the edges that defined his fell shape were jumpy, writhing, and vibrating, like bad animation.

  He still had two legs and two arms and a lump of head, but he was no longer a creatu
re of carved wood as he had seemed to me, no longer a hideous carved maze through which trapped souls raced helpless. Now his body seemed to be made of jittery string segments all—

  “Oh, God!” I cried as the truth became terrifyingly clear. The Master of the Game was made entirely of frantically whipping snakes.

  It was as if someone had fashioned a mold of a very, very large man and then compressed into that mold a million serpents. They maintained the shape of a man, but the whole of him pulsed and slithered. A smell of wet copper and decay wafted toward us.

  And the sound. The sound it made was hissing, rattling, the rapid sliding of scale over scale, multiplied a million times to become not the slithering of a snake or even many snakes, but that of every snake. If snakes had a god this was the sound he made.

  Trent and Pete tried to run. Who wouldn’t? But they found they could not move their feet. They yanked at their feet, and reached for pipes and weight stands and scraps of furniture to pull themselves away, desperate. The effect would have been comical had it been some other place, some other time, facing something less awful than this monster from the mist.

  Pete had started to weep. Trent was yelling at him, “Don’t lose it, man, don’t lose it!”

  “Messenger, who are the players?” the Game Master asked with a voice as deep as the center of the earth.

  “These are the players. Trent and Pete.”

  The first time I’d seen the Game Master face two players, he’d chosen one to play for both. I looked at him, wondering—and reeled in shock. The serpents that made him up were chasing tiny, desperate, crying people. Men and women, girls and boys, all so very small, so very small that the serpents’ mouths were as big as church doors to them, and the fangs as big as telephone poles. They ran and dived and crawled in terror, each no bigger than a very small cockroach or very large flea.

  I focused on a single one of the doomed creatures and saw a woman crawling, hand over hand, across the rapidly sliding back of one snake as another, its mouth wide, its slitted eyes fierce, chased her. The woman lost her balance, rolled onto her back, and was pinioned between two of the serpents as the third, her predator, jerked its mouth forward and drove a fang straight through her chest.

  My hand was over my mouth, frozen in the buzzing lethargy that so often accompanies shock.

  Pete fell to his knees and began to pray, some of the words loud, some mere guttural grunts, all desperate.

  “This isn’t right, man,” Trent said, his voice choking with fear. “This isn’t . . . You can’t . . .”

  “Both will play,” the Game Master said. With a flourish of his serpentine hand and a touch of the dramatic in his voice, he said, “Behold.”

  Then the ground beneath us erupted upward, pushing the crust of cement aside like it was the caramelized sugar on a crème brûlée. Up came the soil, vomiting out of the ground beneath, piling up and up, and lifting us along with it, rising and rising until it was a hill too large by far to be contained within the basement, too large to be contained within the house. But the house above us had simply ceased to exist in this space that was now a very long way from being part of a Des Moines residential neighborhood.

  And yet this was only the beginning, for now the basement that had already grown vast grew boundless. And up through soil came rocks, and after rocks came great massive piers of bedrock, and with each new seismic thrust we were lifted up and up, now perched atop a small surviving circle of concrete balanced on a growing pillar of stone.

  But even the bedrock now gave way as glowing, red-hot magma came boiling out, spilling over itself, quickly solidifying into fantastic, jagged shapes. Higher and higher it rose, swallowing the soil, swallowing the rock and the massive piers of bedrock, climbing toward us. It cooled and solidified far faster than was natural—as though anything about this could ever be natural. Soon the pillar was encrusted with fantastic protrusions.

  We were far up in the air, though there was no sky to be seen. We could have seen for miles in any direction, yet there was nothing to be seen, nothing at all but the mist that now encircled the tower like a slow-motion tornado.

  Finally the tower had grown high enough. My feet rested on a circle of concrete that magically let none of the magma’s killing heat touch me, though the air around was like an oven.

  We stood there, Messenger, Oriax, me, and the two screaming boys. Any pretense of playing the tough guy was gone from Pete, who wept and begged and bargained. Trent, too, was undone, no longer cursing, just staring in awe at what had been done, and trembling.

  “The game is this,” said the Master of the Game. “You will climb down this tower of stone. The one who touches the ground first, is free. The other will be judged to have lost.”

  I saw desperate cunning flash in Pete’s eyes. He was smaller and nimbler than Trent. Trent was powerful but not quick.

  Pete thought he could win. Trent, for his part, feared that Pete was right.

  I looked over the edge. I am no great judge of distance, but the tower was at the very least thirty stories tall, with sides that were a barnacle-like encrustation of wild knobs and points, crevices and overhangs. Climbing down from this height would be hard and nerve-wracking. Particularly for two boys who already shook from fear and disorientation.

  “Begin.”

  They each ran to the edge, and each looked down as if trying to find an easy path. I doubted there was an easy path, only difficult and deadly ones. But as I’d expected, Pete was the first to sit, roll onto his belly, and stick his legs out in search of a toehold.

  Trent was five or six feet to Pete’s right as he, too, began his descent.

  “This is trickery,” Oriax muttered, and stared daggers at Messenger.

  “I do not meddle in your domain, Oriax, stay out of mine.” I believe that was the harshest I’d ever heard him be toward Oriax. He despised her, that was a given. He was, without a doubt, her enemy, which I supposed made her mine as well. But he rarely spoke to her, and this warning had the impression of real teeth behind it.

  Oriax fell silent.

  There were rules in this universe, hard to define, but real; rules that limited his role and hers as well. I wondered who enforced those rules and how it was done. I wondered what punishment could be inflicted on creatures who, after all, could move easily through space and time.

  No time to consider that in any detail. For now there was only watching the descent of the two boys.

  Pete had gotten out to a lead and there was no pretense on the part of either boy that this was anything but a race. I could see Trent’s hands gripping an outcropping of the rock. There was already a red smear on his fingertips.

  I knelt to feel the volcanic rock and was surprised at how sharp it was. I had of course seen pictures of lava fields in places like Hawaii, but I had never touched the pockmarked dark stone that seemed almost like a fossil of what had been liquid, burning stone. It reminded me of the fireworks snakes children light on the Fourth of July. But instead of ash it was an endless Swiss cheese of knife edges.

  And it was down this treacherous surface that the two boys now raced, gasping, crying out in pain as soft flesh met stone, as muscle strained against gravity, as terror and the anticipation of worse to come stole their breath, robbed their hearts of vitality, and weakened their muscles.

  I could see ripples of heat rising from the rocks lower down and wondered how they would possibly hold on. I wondered if this game was unwinnable. Did the Master of the Game play fair? Even if he did not, I was not going to call him out on it. I dreaded the day when it would be me, and not Messenger, who dealt with the dread creature.

  They were only a quarter of the way down the rock face when it became clear that Pete would win and Trent lose—clear to Trent at least. So now he began to move crab-like across the surface of the tower, drifting sideways to be directly above his nimbler friend.

  A rock came loose in Trent’s hand and for a heart-stopping moment he swung out from the surface, hand w
aving wildly and holding a rock half the size of his head. But his strength came into play as he strained the muscles of his right arm to lever his body back to hug the vertical face. He still held the rock that had come loose.

  Trent looked down, and saw his friend’s head perhaps ten feet below him. He did not simply release the rock in his hand, he threw it.

  Was he aiming at Pete’s head? I thought so. But he missed his head and instead the rock smashed onto Pete’s grasping fingers.

  “Ahhh! Hey! Hey!” Pete yelled.

  Trent did not even pretend to apologize. Instead he reached far down with his left leg to find a tenuous foothold, then with a left hand grab, a right hand grab, and a scraping of his chest that shredded his T-shirt and left a smear of red, he halved the distance between his feet and Pete’s head.

  “No fair!” Pete yelled. “He’s trying to knock me down!”

  Oriax let loose a disgusted laugh. She at least could guess—as I, too, had come to expect—what was coming. She had seen the trickery obscured by the Game Master’s bland words.

  “Trent, damn it! You’re supposed to be my friend!”

  Trent stomped straight down on Pete’s head. The blow barely connected, but it spurred Pete to action. He now saw the way his erstwhile friend intended to win the race. He saw that Trent meant to kill him if necessary.

  Down Pete scrambled and down came Trent. Pete’s wounded hand was slicked with blood and he missed his grip, wobbled precariously, found his balance, only to take the toe of Trent’s boot straight in the side of his head.

  In vain Pete cried out.

  In vain Oriax seethed.

  A second kick. A cry of pain.

  “Fall, you ——!” Trent yelled. “Fall!”

  A last kick, and this one was straight into Pete’s temple. The blow stunned him. He reached for a handhold, caught only air, and for an awful moment that stretched on and on, he tottered between life and death.

  Then he fell.

  It took only a very few seconds for him to fall the forty or fifty feet to the ground, to smack into the crumbled concrete and rock fragments below. He had no time to scream. Just enough time to achieve momentum so that he hit the ground with a surprisingly loud sound.