The Boundless

I dreamed of the tower again last night. I tried to tell Tanner, but he simply rolled his eyes and zipped up his tent while the summer downpour beat away at the little bridge that serves as our roof.

None of my other vagrant neighbors give me the time of day either. I can’t blame them. Sometimes in our little park bathroom I catch a glimpse of my face in the cracked sink mirror and scarcely recognize the man looking back. Where have you gone, Kurt? those bloodshot eyes say.

The dreams are becoming relentless. My bones are damp. I can feel my heartbeat between my teeth as dusk looms over Piedmont Park.

They’ll be here soon. I reach into my backpack and run my fingers over the handle of the pistol slumbering beneath my windbreaker.

Nothing to do but wait. Wait and remember.

***

I graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in business administration three years ago. I got a job out of college as a producer at the startup Luminous Rise, working on an app called Barfly that delivers booze to your front door. I didn’t expect to be around long, but then the pandemic hit. Luminous Rise went from dangling precariously over the abyss of bankruptcy to becoming one of the most profitable new businesses in the South.

I got a decent pay bump and moved to an upscale loft nestled in the bones of an old car manufacturer in Midtown. There was even a headlight embedded in the wall above my toilet. The apartment was nice but I was lonely. College graduation had come and gone, and most of my friends had left the city to follow their dreams.

That’s how Ronnie found the nightmare.

He had moved to San Francisco to try and break into video games. He worked as a freelance web designer and was – at least according to himself – in heavy demand. In his free time, he ran a YouTube channel called The Breacher, filled to the brim with videos featuring his deep-voiced narration breaking down trivia and secrets of everyone’s favorite video games. Like how John Romero’s severed head shows up in DOOM II. That sort of thing.

Ronnie believed if he built a big enough following, some studio would hire him as a consultant and kick-start his career in gamedev. Seemed foolish but – to his credit – a year after graduation, he had over 12,000 subscribers on YouTube alone and a few thousand on Twitch. Growing these channels became his obsession.

Six months ago, during our weekly Zoom call, Ronnie told our regular group about his newest plan he was devising. The attendees included me, Simon, his fiance Jessica, and Abbi. Simon and Jess had gone to college with us, but then they both moved away so Simon could go to law school on a scholarship. Abbi, she’s a different story. She and I met on Tinder before COVID. We went out to dinner and spent the night together. It was nice. I was hoping we would go further, but she wasn’t interested in anything serious, and that was that as far as romance goes.

Sure, I was hurt, but there was enough between us to stay friends. She loved good movies, knew where to download a copy of Another Metroid 2 Remake and had an infectious passion for musical theater, though she couldn’t carry a tune if it landed in her arms. Once the pandemic hit and everyone was masked up, I introduced her to the others over a Zoom call and everything clicked (as evident when she and Ronnie spent nearly an hour arguing if Super Mario RPG was overrated). She was one of us. A big ‘ol nerd.

Anyway, six months ago Ronnie told us all about the game he found at the Solano Swap Meet. Onscreen, he flashed a PlayStation 2 case featuring a medieval knight thrusting a claymore into the belly of a gargoyle. The Nocturnal Age: Symphony of Birta’s Anguish, the title read.

“That’s a mouthful,” Abbi said.

“I’ve never heard of this,” Simon chimed in.

“That’s because it never left Europe,” Ronnie said. He turned on screenshare and brought up the Wikipedia page for us to see. “The developer was Mirage Tales. They made a bunch of Gameboy Advance tie-in games for sitcoms and cartoons.”

“Like the SpongeBob SquarePants games?” I asked.

“No, that was Vicarious Visions. But same deal really. Mirage Tales was a Swedish studio stuck making shit licensed titles and porting games once console exclusivity deals ran out. The Nocturnal Age was supposed to be their big break but the publisher that had the international distribution rights filed for bankruptcy shortly before it was scheduled to release in the US. Mirage Tales went belly up two years later in ‘05.”

“Bummer dude,” Jessica said. Jessica didn’t play games, outside a handful of Fortnite matches to better understand her fiance Simon’s obsession. I found her commitment to navigating the group’s never-ending gaming bullshit endearing.

“Have you played it yet?” I asked Ronnie.

“It’s supposed to be a King’s Field rip-off but I can’t even find footage of it on YouTube. I haven’t loaded it up yet. I wanted to bring it up here before I did actually,” he said, switching screenshare off.

“I was thinking…” he started before Simon cut him off.

“You want to livestream the game on your channel and have us on there at the same time.”

“Correctamundo!”

When Ronnie began The Breacher, he asked us to help out. Early on, that meant the group watching videos before they went live to give feedback. Later he was adamant about pushing me and Simon onto the channel as co-hosts. We both refused, reasoning we couldn’t give up nearly the same amount of time he did. That didn’t stop him from trying to rope us into videos whenever he could.

“The viewers love you two. They think we have a great dynamic, y’know? College friends who grew up playing video games – that sort of thing.”

I was about to tell him no once again when Abbi spoke up. “And what about new guests?”

Ronnie’s smile grew wider. “I’d love to have you on.”

“Fine,” I answered before I could stop myself. “I’ll do it.”

Simon sighed. “I can’t leave Kurt and Abbi to bear this cross. I’m in.”

“A true hero,” Jessica said, snickering next to him. He playfully pushed her with his shoulder. I imagined Abbi and I sitting next to each other laughing like that.

The group decided we’d stream the following Saturday. “I can’t wait to see what’s on this thing,” Ronnie said, gently waving the game’s case.

***

Saturday night Simon, Abbi, and I joined Ronnie’s Discord to see him waiting patiently, headphones over his ears and a controller in his hand. The title screen on his stream output read The Nocturnal Age: Symphony of Birta’s Anguish. Creepy orchestral music played softly in the background, and beneath the title were the words PRESS START.

I watched as everyone else’s cameras turned on and their faces popped up around the stream in little blocks. Ronnie’s block was at the top of the screen, his widening grin hovering over the stream like some demented DM.

“Holy shit,” Abbi said, “you got it to work.” She was wearing some makeup and looked even prettier than usual.

“Absolute pain in the ass,” Ronnie griped. “The first few attempts at creating an ISO failed but we got there eventually.” He pressed some buttons on his keyboard. “We’re going to start in a minute. Just getting OBS set up. Can everyone do a mic check real quick?”

“Check,” Simon said.

“Check-check DJ Love here,” Abbi said in a deep voice, “Ready to serenade you into the sweet hereafter.”

“Marco,” I said.

“Polo,” Ronnie answered. “You’re a little soft, Kurt. Can you turn it up just a smidge?”

I messed with the volume. “How’s this?”

“Sexy. Voice like silk.”

“What about me!?” Abbi cried.

“Sorry DJ Love. My heart belongs to Kurt and is free for him to conquer at his earliest convenience.”

“Quite the proposal,” Simon said.

“Better than yours,” Jessica added from somewhere behind Simon.

“Alright folks,” Ronnie said. “We’re going in 3…2..1.”

The stream went live and Ronnie did his intro. “Gooooooood evening folks. We’re here to check out a special little gem of a game. We’ve got some friends – familiar and new – along for the ride. Why don’t y’all say hello and introduce yourselves?”

We went around the horn, said our bits, and Ronnie selected NEW GAME. After a lengthy loading screen and some banter between Ronnie and Abbi about the CATS movie, the game opened with our hero standing in the middle of a badly textured forest at night, sword in hand, all conveyed from the first-person perspective.

“This is ugly as sin,” Simon said.

Ronnie chuckled. “Brother this is straight outta 2003. Cut it some slack.” Ronnie moved his character forward until he came across a stump with a piece of parchment on it. The page’s text suddenly appeared onscreen in unintentionally hilarious large letters: RESTORE THE BOOK.

“What does that mean?” Abbi asked.

“That is a great question,” Ronnie said, putting the page down to venture into the forest. “According to the Wikipedia page, and I’m reading verbatim here, The Nocturnal Age drops players into a great forest filled with all kinds of creatures. The player has to traverse several regions, seeking out the pages of a cursed book to reunite them and utter an incantation that will restore the wounded world to its former glory.”

“How Dark Soulsy,” Abbi said.

Ronnie made a face. “I’m not going to lie to y’all, this movement is stiff as hell and I think I’m getting an average frame rate of 20. Can’t wait to see what else we find here.”

As if on cue, three bare-chested men with disfigured faces and massive purple wings protruding from their backs emerged from the darkness and attacked Ronnie. He quickly dispatched them by swinging his sword, which made clanging noises as it cut into the flesh of its foes.

“How’s that combat?” Simon asked, trying to stifle a laugh.

“It’s something, let me tell you.”

We went on for 40 minutes or so like this, searching the forest, slaying various monsters, cracking jokes and making conversation. Abbi and I were talking about how badly we missed going to the theater when Simon interrupted.

“Yo Ronnie,” he said, “turn back to your right. Look over there.”

Ronnie turned, and we all saw what looked to be the silhouette of a tower, past the trees and beyond a small cliff. He walked to the cliff and looked down the slope. We saw a small village with cottages, some shops, and other miscellaneous buildings.

I suggested maybe we were seeing a village drawn onto a 2D background, like matte paintings in The Thing and Star Wars.

Simon shook his head. “Those buildings are 3D objects.”

“Can you get down there?” Abbi asked.

I looked at Ronnie to see his befuddled expression blossom into excited curiosity.

“Folks, I think we’re going to call it here for tonight,” he said.

Simon protested. “We were just getting to the good part!”

“Thanks for tuning in everyone!”

We ended the stream. “That was fun. Thanks for including me,” Abbi said.

Ronnie’s attention was fixed on the village. “Weird shit,” he muttered.

It didn’t seem so strange to me at the time – just some 3D assets in a cheap-ass game – but Ronnie became obsessed with the mystery of the village.

“It took me forever. You wouldn’t believe it,” he told us on our next group call the following week. His eyes were bloodshot but he was grinning from ear to ear. “I brute-forced it. Must have died a hundred times before I found it.”

“Found what?” I asked.

“A path down.”

Simon raised an eyebrow. “You can actually get into the village?”

“Let me show you.”

He loaded up a Discord call and then streamed the game. We watched as he dashed from the start of the game to the cliff overlooking the village. Ronnie navigated to a western section of the slope and carefully worked his way down.

Eventually he was standing in front of the village itself. We saw no NPCs. Everything was quiet and still.

I asked Ronnie if he thought this place was supposed to be accessible eventually. I theorized he could have exploited a glitch that let him reach a late-game area early.

“No, I thought that too at first but then…” Ronnie made a beeline for one of the cottages and opened the door.

“It’s all greybox,” Abbi announced. “Unfinished.” The inside of the cottage had no textures to speak of – just grey furniture and flooring.

“There’s several places like this in the village. It’s like the devs just stopped working on it.”

“That shit’s creepy y’all,” Jessica said, her face popping into Simon’s camera to say hello. “Stop being weird.” Simon shooed her away.

“I was thinking,” Ronnie began.

“Here we go,” Simon said.

“Hear me out. I was thinking I could upload the ROM I made from the disc and give you guys all digital copies for your PCs. Then for Halloween we set up a four-way stream where we all individually explore the village at the same time. Before you groan, I’ll buy everyone here dinner for the trouble.”

“I want a 24-pack of Krispy Kreme donuts,” Abbi declared immediately.

“Abbi, I will buy you 100 donuts if you agree to do this.”

“Hey Jessica,” Simon said loudly, “Ronnie is going to buy us Fogo De Chao. Isn’t that nice of him!?”

“So kind!” Jessica replied unseen.

Ronnie snickered. “Whatever gets you there.”

I told him he could buy my participation with a Thin N’ Crispy pepperoni from Pizza Hut. I’m easy like that, I guess.

Halloween came. It was a huge pain to get the game running on my desktop PC, but Ronnie talked me through the process and soon enough, I was staring at the title screen of my very own and very illegal copy of The Nocturnal Age: Symphony of Birta’s Anguish.

Ronnie, Abbi, Simon, and I were all broadcasting our gameplay and webcam feeds to the Breacher’s Twitch channel. Anyone who popped into the channel would be able to watch all of our progress and reactions as we played. I was monitoring the channel out of the corner of my eye on my laptop and could see there were just over a thousand people watching. I could only imagine Ronnie’s excitement.

All of us individually made our way to the cliff overseeing the village and, following Ronnie’s exact instructions, descended the slope to the settlement.

We cautiously conducted our expedition, accessing random buildings in our respective games. I found a shop with a fully textured and complete interior, with crude polygonal items like swords, arrows, and healing potions sitting on shelves and capable of being picked up and examined.

JUST LIKE RED DEAD, someone in the chat wrote. Indeed, pretty impressive for 2003.

As we explored, we ran through possibilities of why the village might have been abandoned in development. “Maybe this was just too big for the PS2 disc?” Ronnie said.

“Or maybe they got halfway through building it and realized it didn’t fit with the lore,” I suggested.

Simon theorized they could have simply run out of time and money or it could be a debug area.

And then Abbi made her discovery. “Hey guys, look at this.”

She was standing near some of the shops. Before her was a mound of raised ground with steps leading down into darkness.

“Let’s find out where this goes,” Ronnie said.

We each individually made our way to the mound and then, as a group, descended the steps before being met by a loading screen. A couple of seconds later, we were inside a lit room with stone floors and walls as well as a stairwell leading further down. A shiny memory card icon floated over the first step.

“Usually don’t find savepoints in debug areas,” Ronnie said.

“Is this a temple?” Simon asked.

We each saved our files and then descended the stairwell, but every floor contained nothing more than the torches that illuminated them.

“Guess it is just an unfinished area,” Ronnie said. “What a bummer.”

“Not so fast,” Simon said. “I’m on the 20th floor. There’s a chest here.”

“Watch it be a mimic,” Abbi said.

Simon opened the chest. A note. He read it aloud. “Ye of stern heart and mind, continue deep, and treasure ye shall find.”

We decided to keep going, deeper and faster. More floors filled with blank space. Then we hit the 25th floor and suddenly there were rooms and hallways of stone leading back as far as the eye could see.

“There are still floors below us too,” Simon noted.

“Let’s see what’s here then,” said Ronnie.

We fanned out, exploring the 25th floor. I searched every room I came across, finding nothing – no treasure chests, no book pages, no equipment. I was frustrated and ready to turn back when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Someone was standing at the far end of a hallway I had traversed not seconds ago.

I unsheathed my sword. “I think I’ve got an enemy, y’all.” No one replied.

I looked at my laptop and saw the others were focused on searching their floors. I assumed they were too busy to hear me and turned back to my game to discover the figure – a woman with her face covered by a white veil – had crossed the distance and was standing directly in front of me, towering over my character.

Her hand swung toward me before I could press the attack button.

I screamed as the power in my apartment abruptly went dead. I nearly fell out of my chair in sheer terror, unleashing a tide of curses before breaking into laughter. Halloween, indeed.

I messaged Abbi to tell her what happened, and she said they decided to end the stream shortly after I disconnected anyway.

I was a little relieved, truth be told.

***

The next night, Ronnie asked us to hop on Zoom. He seemed annoyed.

“So I recorded footage yesterday of the stream, but I tried to open the file this morning and it was corrupted.”

“The whole thing?” Simon asked.

“Yeah, I mean I’ve had that happen once before, so I guess it’s not too surprising. Just a bummer because I can’t archive it for YouTube.”

His smile and nonchalant attitude did little to hide his disappointment. “Still, both streams have been good for getting people in the door. I was thinking we could do a few more?”

Simon beat me to it. “I dunno, man. I’ve got studying to do.”

“Just two more,” Ronnie promised. “After that, I won’t ask you again…for a while.”

“I’m in,” Abbi said. Naturally, I volunteered as well. Simon followed suit.

A couple days later, Abbi and I masked up and met at a bistro, for a bite to eat on the patio. We were supposed to wait two weeks for our vaccinations to be fully effective, but both of us were impatient and reasoned that the mask and vaccine plus eating outdoors would make it safe.

It was nice to see her real face again and not the pixelated facsimile I’d been looking at for the past year. I took in her freckles, the curve of her smile and the curls of her hair. I had missed being close to her. If she felt similarly, she did not express the sentiment, and I did not fish for it. Sometimes you just have to have faith.

“You’ve really taken to Ronnie’s streams,” I told her as we ate dessert and sipped coffee.

“It’s fun and yeah, maybe he is taking advantage of our time, but it’s not a big deal. He has a dream. It doesn’t cost us anything to support him.”

“You’re just on his side because he’s bribing you with Krispy Kreme.”

“It helps.”

We had another four-way stream the following Saturday, heading to the 25th floor from the save point to pick up progress. We broke into groups. Kurt and I explored that floor while Simon and Abbi delved deeper into the structure.

We searched fruitlessly for 20 minutes in a seemingly endless maze before I found a treasure chest. Within was a single piece of parchment.

“We’re not in a temple,” I said, examining the drawing.

Ronnie turned away from his game to look at my stream. “Who the hell makes an upside-down tower? How deep does this thing go?”

“43 floors and counting,” Simon answered. “Still haven’t found jackshit.”

“I just did,” Abbi said. All of us turned to look at her screen and saw pixelated red runes on a wall next to a torch. “Looks like it’s some kind of fantasy language.”

“Screenshot it,” Ronnie said.

Abbi pressed a button on her keyboard. “Huh.” She pressed it again. “Not working.”

“The emulator might be messing with Print Screen. Can you copy it?”

“Sure,” Abbi said. She disappeared offscreen for a second and then returned with a notepad and pencil. She carefully began to copy the runes.

“Hey chat,” Ronnie said, “if any of you are happening to record this stream and could send it to the email in the channel description, that’d be a big help. We’ve been running into some recording difficulties on my end. Any help is appreciated.”

We went on exploring the structure for another hour. Ronnie and I had nothing to show for our efforts, though the 25th floor continued to sprawl out before us as we made our way from room to room.

I suggested maybe we were seeing some rudimentary version of procedural level generation.

He raised an eyebrow. “In 2003?”

“A lot of games had proc gen. Especially for loot draws in RPGs.”

“Maybe,” Ronnie said.

Simon and Abbi made it down to the 84th floor, making no new discoveries, before we called it quits. We had been playing for hours, delving deeper without realizing how much time had gone by. I logged off and took a shower before heading to bed.

That was the first night I dreamed of the tower. I was standing in a land of utter darkness. The only thing I could see was the building floating in front of me. The structure reached skyward for miles and I could not see where it ended, but the tip of the tower – what should have been the top – was levitating off the ground.

Waves of nausea splashed over me as I gazed upon the strange architecture and yet I felt this inescapable urge to find a way inside.

I reached out, my index finger brushing against the steel of the tip. Indescribable pain overtook my body – an inferno of suffering. I fell to the ground writhing, my body screaming at whatever had made its way inside me.

And then I woke up.

***

Abbi called us all to a meeting two nights later.

She had her notepad out. “I kept trying to figure out what the symbols meant. And then I realized it was written in English – just backwards. The pixelated font made it hard to realize at first.”

Ronnie smiled. “Nice. What’s it say?”

“Surrender the vessel onto us,” Abbi read aloud from her notebook.

“The hell does that mean?” Simon said.

“I’ve tried looking up lore about the game,” Ronnie said. “But there’s nothing out there. No plot summary outside of what we read on Wikipedia. Nothing on any forums anywhere, no guides, no websites – not even any ancient Geocities-type shit.”

“It’s like we’re the only ones who have played this,” Abbi said.

“We have to go back,” someone said. It was me. “Tonight.”

“But it’s not Saturday,” Ronnie answered, surprised that I would be the one to suggest an impromptu stream.

“So? I want to know what the hell is down there. Don’t you?”

I chalked my enthusiasm up to a mixture of curiosity and a wanting-to-be-done-with-all-of-this type of exhaustion but now, I realize there was something inside me desperate to get back to the tower. Something that had come from somewhere else.

“Not like I have anything else interesting going on tonight,” Abbi said.

Simon sighed. “Fine.”

Ronnie clapped. “Surprise stream it is!”

15 minutes later, we were all on stream, searching the tower with four thousand souls watching us on Twitch. How it had come together so fast, I didn’t know, but Ronnie was over the moon.

Abbi and Simon searched deep while Ronnie and I fanned out across the 25th floor yet again. An hour passed. Then another. Empty rooms stretching on for infinity.

I was just about to apologize to everyone for wasting their time when I looked up to see Ronnie with his eyes and mouth wide open in a horrified expression. “Kurt, the chat is say–”

The stream hitched.

“Chat’s saying what?”

I looked over to the chat box but it wasn’t loading right. There wasn’t any text. The stream came back. I heard Simon and Jessica scream.

Ronnie’s distorted audio came back. “Kurt, there’s someth–”

The stream hitched once again, the audio falling and the video grinding to a halt. I finally looked at my own web camera feed to see I was not alone. In the corner of my bedroom, there was a woman with long black hair running down her shoulders. She was facing the wall and completely stark naked.

My heart pounded. I turned around to see no one was there. When I looked back at the camera feed, the woman was still there on the screen but she was moving, turning her head ever so slowly towards me. There was a sickening crack from that corner of the room, like a broom handle being snapped.

I slammed my laptop closed and yanked the power cord to my desktop PC out of its port. The screen went black and the web camera feed zipped out of existence. But I could still see her in the reflection of my dark monitor; her pale face was coming into view.

I grabbed the laptop and bolted, closing my eyes as I passed the corner where she was. I didn’t know if it was my imagination but I swear I felt her breath on the nape of my neck as I barreled out the door.

I ran from my apartment as fast as my legs would carry me, down the stairwell, and through the street until I was several blocks away. I stopped at a bench outside of a Home Depot and video-called Ronnie. He was already on a call with Abbi. They both look relieved to see me.

“Oh thank god,” Abbi said.

“You guys saw that, right?” I said.

“Yeah,” Ronnie said, face flushed. “It can’t be real.”

“It felt fucking real enough to me.”

“Could you have clicked a stream filter button by accident?”

“Come on man, no.”

“I’m out,” Abbi said. “This is too weird for me.”

Ronnie looked from me to Abbi nervously. “I’m sure there’s a logical explanation if we really think it through.”

And that’s when I noticed who wasn’t on the call. “Where are Simon and Jessica?”

“Their stream cut out before yours. We’ve tried calling them. No response yet.”

I told Abbi and Ronnie I heard them scream before I lost the stream.

“We didn’t hear anything like that.” Abbi said.

Ronnie nodded. “Are you sure that’s what you heard? Could you have just been freaking out because of whatever that shit was in the web camera?”

I was adamant.

“We should call the police,” Abbi said.

Ronnie frowned. “And tell them, what, that a video game made our friends disappear? They’re probably having a power outage or something and it’s affecting cell phone towers. The electrical grid in Idaho ain’t worth shit. Let’s give them until tomorrow morning and if we haven’t heard from them, then we can get the cops involved, alright?”

“It’s a fair point,” I said. “I don’t even know what we would tell the police. The night gives us time to get our story straight for tomorrow.”

“And if Simon and Jessica are hurt?” Abbi asked.

“Outside of taking a flight to Idaho, I don’t think we can do anything more,” Ronnie said.

Abbi surrendered. “Okay.”

“Let’s check in tomorrow, yeah?” Ronnie was trying to be reassuring but I could see he was just as shaken as us.

I started the long walk back to my apartment, telling myself whatever I’d seen was a figment of my imagination. I’d left my wallet there anyway, so it wasn’t like I could grab a hotel room for the night.

Abbi gave me a call when I was a block away from my complex.

“Hey, do you want me to come stay over? I don’t mean like sleeping together or anything but – would it make you feel better if I was there?”

I was a little hurt by the clarification but appreciated her care nonetheless. “I’m good. I just need to get some sleep. Thanks though.”

“Yeah,” she said in an odd way. “Okay.”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Call me in the morning and let me know you’re okay.”

“For sure. Sleep well.”

I realized after we hung up that she probably made the offer more for her own comfort than mine but I figured it was too late to go back and hash it all out.

I made it back to my apartment, flipping the lights on in every room as I went. I wasn’t particularly keen on sleeping in my bedroom, so I spent the night on the couch, watching the corners of the room for hours before finally drifting to sleep.

I dreamed of the tower again. This time I was inside of it, wandering the maze of the 25th floor. Amidst all the empty rooms, I found one with that woman inside it, her long black hair flowing down a pale, smooth back. She stood nude in front of a mirror. Through the glass, she smiled at me. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid my eyes upon.

The woman turned. She had no face. I let her approach me and embrace my body. Her hand caressed my cheek. “You’re mine, little one,” the face without a mouth said. As she drew her fingers across my face, pain coursed through my whole body.

Flesh dropped off me. First my legs, then my arms, my face – all falling to the floor in big heaps.

I woke up screaming, the morning sun shining through the window – but the light offered no relief.

***

I made some coffee and called Abbi. She didn’t pick up. I kept calling. Straight to voicemail. I ignored my supervisor’s angry Slack messages about missing a morning meeting, masked up, and Ubered to her apartment in Virginia-Highland.

I knocked on the door, called her name. No answer.

I returned home uneasy and sat down at my computer to try and get through a day of work when I received a call from an unknown number. I ignored it only for that same number to ring me again. I picked up.

“I saw them,” Ronnie said breathlessly.

“Who?”

“Jessica and Simon.”

“That’s great.”

“No, no it isn’t, man.”

I had never heard him sound like this before. I decided to try and keep as calm as possible, hoping my placidity would relax him.

“Where are you calling from?”

“Pay phone at Glen Park. I don’t have my cell phone anymore. You should toss yours.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw Jessica and Simon in my room. They were standing over me…they weren’t right.”

“You sure you weren’t dreaming? Didn’t you used to have night terrors and stuff?” I asked, recalling some uncomfortable evenings when we roomed together in freshman year.

“Dude, this was not a night terror. They were there. I was awake. It was real.” The line went quiet for a second. “Listen, I’m coming to Atlanta. Can you pick me up from the airport?”

I was thrown for a loop. “You’re flying home?”

“I’m scared, man. Just pick me up, okay? I’ll be landing at 9:00 PM.”

“Yeah, I got you.”

“Thanks. And Kurt?

“Yeah?”

“Your phone and computer? Toss ‘em. I’m serious.”

I pushed through the work day, taking breaks to try and call Abbi and Simon with no success, and then rode out to Hartsfield-Jackson at 8:45 PM. Ronnie didn’t show up at the pick-up curb until 9:30 PM. He looked bad, real pale. He threw the duffel he was carrying in the back and got into the passenger seat.

I remember saying, “What the hell happened to you?”

“Just get us to a fucking Waffle House. Please.”

I drove us to the Waffle House on Virginia Avenue. We put in an order and then Ronnie looked around for a bit – his mind elsewhere. I snapped my fingers in front of his face.

“I’m not a dog, man,” he snapped.

“Then stop acting like one. You’ve barely said anything. What happened?”

“I’m not crazy.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“What I’m going to say is going to make me sound like it, but it’s real, and we’re in the shit.”

He proceeded to tell me.

“I woke up in the middle of the night. It was super cold, much colder than it should be in San Francisco right now, and there were these faces above me…Jessica and Simon, but they were all wrong. Their eyes were all messed up. I ran like hell.”

He took a sip of coffee. “I must have wandered The Mission for hours before I came back, and they were gone. I figured the game was connected to it, so I booted up my computer and created a folder to put everything we had read online for research. Except there was a problem.”

“Which was?”

“All of it had disappeared.”

“What do you mean disappeared?”

“All of it, man. That Wikipedia page I showed you guys? It’s not there.”

“Someone could have deleted it.”

Ronnie shook his head. “I checked the Internet Archive. There’s no record of this page ever existing. Search results turn up nothing at all. The game just doesn’t exist.”

“This isn’t funny, dude.

“And I’m not joking. You still have your phone on you like a dumbass?”

I nodded.

“Look it up for yourself.”

I brought out my phone and searched for the game on Google. The food came. Ronnie scarfed down his Texas melt. My ham & cheese hash brown bowl sat untouched as I tried my damnedest to find any trace of The Nocturnal Age: Symphony of Birta’s Anguish on the internet. But, as Ronnie said, it was like it never existed.

“We played hours of that thing,” I said in disbelief. “There’s nothing.”

“Not a goddamn thing.”

We had thousands of people watching us every stream. “Didn’t you tell the viewers to write in if they knew anything about the game?”

Ronnie swallowed his food and wiped his lips. “I went back and checked the analytics on our streams. Nobody was watching,” he said with a little bit of shame.

“There were people in the chat typing messages.”

“Or something made us see what it wanted us to see.”

I was getting real pissed off. “Okay, that’s enough. First Simon and Jessica, then Abbi – you got me. This is good shit.” I looked around at the two other customers in the place. “I guess one of them is recording us, or maybe there’s a microphone under us. This will be great content for the channel, especially when I break your fucking nose.”

I looked under the table. Nothing. When I came back up, Ronnie had somehow gone even paler.

“What did you mean about Abbi?”

“I went to see her today. She wasn’t there. Can’t reach her on the phone either.”

“She’s gone too?”

“What do you mean gone?”

“I don’t know. Gone like Simon and Jessica. Gone but not gone. I’ve seen them…my phone…it’s why I threw it away.” Ronnie started shaking violently. “It’s coming for us next.”

“What’s coming for us?”

“I don’t know. I think it was trapped there and we let it out.”

He planted his face on the table and began to sob loudly. “I killed us, Kurt. I fucking killed us.”

One of the customers peered over at our table and said, rather loudly, “Who cries at a Waffle House?”

The waitress came by. “Your friend okay, honey?”

I reassured her all was fine, that Ronnie had been dumped, and asked for the check. We paid and I yanked him out to the car. There was a downpour happening. By the time we were in the car, he had gotten a hold of himself and we were both drenched.

“Take me to a hotel.”

“Come stay with me.”

“We need to separate. Increases the likelihood one of us will get through the night.”

“This is insane.”

“Kurt, please.”

“Fine.”

I drove him to the Marriott next to the airport. He looked at me. “Can you pick me up tomorrow morning? We need to strategize but I gotta get some sleep first.”

“I have work.”

“To hell with your job, man. This is our lives.”

“I’ll take the day off. But I swear to god, if this is a prank for a stupid video, I’m going to go apeshit.”

Ronnie said nothing. He got out of the car and grabbed his duffel from the backseat. He came around to my window and stood in the rain.

“Remember when I told you to get rid of your phone?”

“Yeah.”

“Do it. Really.”

“I’m n–”

“Promise me.”

“I will leave my phone in my car tonight when I get home.”

He put his hand on my arm and gripped it tightly. “Stay safe. I’m sorry about all this.”

“Just get some sleep. I’m sure it’ll all be fine,” I said, mostly trying to reassure myself. I watched him disappear inside the Marriott and drove home. I broke my promise to leave my phone in the car. I wasn’t going to miss Abbi or Simon calling just to entertain Ronnie’s paranoia.

I slept in the living room again. To help me drift off, I put on Ozark, but the storm killed the power five minutes in. A little shaken but not too perturbed, I loaded up the episode on my phone to watch it there. Marty and Wendy were in the middle of a screaming match when the phone flickered and then went black. I tapped the screen a couple of times and an explosion of light blinded me. I screamed, tossing the device to the floor.

When my sight came back, I reached over and picked up the phone. I turned it over. There on the display was the inverted tower from my dreams, floating over a sea of darkness. Suddenly the phone grew hot. Too hot.

I screeched in pain as I ran to the front door and tossed the thing into the hallway like a grenade. I bolted the door and looked down to see the flesh of my palm had been horribly burned.

A few minutes later, I was wrapping my hand in gauze when I heard her at the door to my apartment.

“Kurt,” Abbi said.

I made my way slowly to the door and looked out the peephole. There, in the darkness, I could see her but something was wrong. Her smile was a cruel pantomime of the one I knew so well.

“Abbi?”

“Hi Kurt.” She was swaying back and forth on her toes.

“You alright there?”

“I could use some company.”

She was talking. But her mouth wasn’t moving.

“I think you should go to a doctor.”

“Why don’t you let me in and then you can drive me there. Or, we could stay in. Do that thing you like. Beneath the covers. Just you and me.”

The smile stretched.

“You’re not her. What are you?”

She stepped closer to the peephole. I could see a shine in both her eyes – and more than a little malice. Two more shapes appeared in the peephole, growing closer. Jessica and Simon. Like Abbi, their skin was ghostly pale and their smiles twisted.

They all spoke at once, a chorus. “We’re from the other side.”

“Are you from hell?”

“Silly boy. There is no such thing as the afterlife. Death is death. No, you people molded us with your vanity.”

I was so scared and furious I couldn’t feel the pain in my hand anymore. I demanded they give me back my friends.

“What’s yours now belongs to us.”

“Leave me the fuck alone.”

“You showed us the crack in the wall. Every mirror, every painting, every screen an unlocked gate. How long can you run before your will dissipates? You don’t need to be afraid. We have a place for you – your friends are already there, waiting.”

“Go away!” I screamed into the door, slamming my uninjured hand against it. The things wearing my friends’ flesh fell silent. And then they all stepped aside so that something else could make its way to stand before my door.

She was nude again and her face as blank as a canvas. “We’ve watched you people for centuries from within the cages you built for us,” she said. “None of you can live without reflection. That is your flaw.” The woman leaned into the peephole, lowering her voice to a delicate whisper. “We will remake this world as our own. You’ve had your time. Now it is ours.”

I blinked. All of them disappeared.

The apartment’s AC hummed as the lights switched back on. I grabbed my keys and ran out the door. I drove to the Marriott in a frenzy, holding out hope he was alright since his double wasn’t in the hallway. There was still time, I told myself.

I made it to the hotel around two in the morning and accosted the poor receptionist. He was very patient, all things considered, but that didn’t stop me from becoming aggravated when told me that Ronnie had never checked in.

“Are you sure?” I asked him for the fourth time.

“Sir, I’ve been the only person on call all night. No one under that name has checked in.”

Somehow managing not to become hysterical, I thanked the receptionist for his time and stepped outside. I stood under the hotel awning for a time, staring out at the damp darkness hanging over I-85 and wondering what was waiting for me there.

Eventually I got into my car and drove away.

***

That was three months ago. I went back to my apartment to grab my wallet and pack a duffel bag of clothing and necessities. I pushed an envelope with my keys under the door, so I could hopefully save some poor leasing agent the trouble of wondering if I was coming back. On the way out, I found my phone in the hallway and stomped it beyond recognition.

I withdrew my savings, all in cash, and threw away my cards so no one could track me. I sold the car on Craigslist as well for the same reason. I didn’t want to allow the chance for my parents to get mixed up in this.

I stuck around Atlanta. I’d lived here all my life more or less and knew where all the scumbag hotels were that took cash and didn’t ask questions. At night, I’d turn the TVs around and cover the mirrors with bed sheets or tape. Still, there were blind spots. Electronic billboards on the interstate. TV displays in stores when I went to fetch groceries. People’s laptops and phones in cafes. Every now and again I’d see the things wearing my friends’ skin smiling at me from the side mirror of a passing car or on the TV screen hanging over a bar.

I bought a wretched little pistol and a box of ammo from a skeevy pawnshop down in Decatur, seriously doubting that a hail of bullets would solve this particular problem. Still, I slept easier with it under my pillow.

The dreams kept coming. The darkness, the tower, the woman without a face who spoke to me more and more. I came to understand she was some sort of priestess. Her people had lived in the dark for a long time. We had given birth to them somehow in our images – reflections, paintings, film, any kind of expression – and to those images they were chained.

Until recently.

You freed us, little one, she whispered in my ear. I’ll take you for myself and then we’ll take the rest of you.

The money ran out a couple of weeks ago, and so I've been here beneath this little bridge in Piedmont Park, with the rest of these broken people. It didn’t take long to get sick. Coughs. My nose is snotty as hell and I keep getting the shivers. Might be a cold or COVID or something worse.

I’m so tired.

They’ve started coming by, always around midnight. It used to be just the ones wearing the skins of my friends, but the group is growing larger. How long before the whole city is under her thrall? Sometimes they approach, perhaps to apprehend me, but stop in their tracks when I plant the pistol barrel beneath my chin.

I don’t know why she wants to possess me in particular but I imagine it’s the only thing that’s kept me alive.

Still, this whole thing is drawing to a close, one way or another. Come morning, I’ve decided I will leave the city. I refuse to believe I am alone in this struggle. Others have to know. I will find them.

I have no illusion about the odds. No money or car. My friends are all gone and every glance at a mirror or a phone or a television is filled with danger. Whatever illness I have will likely hobble me soon. I’ve got nothing left but sheer, dumb faith that we can lock these monsters back in the dark. That I can save my friends. That this can’t be the end of us all.

I close my eyes. I think of Abbi and I in an apartment, her head on my shoulder as we sip coffee in the morning light.

There must be something on the other side of tomorrow.