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Examinations

Now, amid the sea of greige.

Nobody talked to one another. It wasn’t hard for Owen to vibe the raw feelings in the room. It was like a telepathic frequency buzzing in the air, lines of black electricity linking them all, transmitted in dark looks.

Owen wanted to go look at the books on the bookshelf, but Lore was already over there, and…he didn’t want to be near her now. He felt like shit for throwing her under the bus like that. But he felt like shit, too, for what she said to him, and how she’d been ignoring him for years, and how she’d used their idea without ever asking him, and, and, and…

He wanted so badly to chew his fingernails right now. Not just the nails—he wanted to bite into the tips of his fingers, eating the tops off like bits of carrot. The urge was intense, and he realized suddenly he did not have his trazodone—the one drug in a long litany of drugs he’d tried over the years to blunt those urges. So now it was, what, willpower he had to rely upon? That’s not going to go well! he thought, madly.

Instead, he chewed his tongue. Bit into it like it was jerky—not hard enough to draw blood. But it might be swollen later.

He looked over at Nick, who sat there, also restless, his jaw working. Nick was intimidating. Like sharkskin, you rubbed him the wrong way, you bled. One drunken night, Nick had told Owen, “I’m just jealous of you, Nailbiter,” but Owen figured that was bullshit because what was there to be jealous of? Nick had a great relationship with his father, even if his mother had passed on years before. Nick didn’t seem to have cares or worries—he did what he wanted, without fear.

Over the last several years, Nick emailed the group again and again, talking about Matty, sending them links to some Reddit thread or another about staircases people found in forests, swamps, deserts—about doors in the middle of nowhere, or furniture that just showed up somewhere, or whole houses. Owen, he realized now, was the only one who actually responded to Nick, even if it was just head-patting, over-polite, placating condescension. And he also realized now that maybe he and Nick had more in common than he knew. Nick really had no reason to be jealous. Neither of them had their shit together. Neither of them had done anything at all with the time they’d been given.

Owen hazarded a look at Hamish, who sat there, head slumped back, mumbling something to himself. A prayer, maybe. God, he was a Christian now? That tracked, he guessed. Back when they were kids, Hamish was, in his words, “just spiritual, dude, no organized religion for this guy.”

Do I want to be him instead of me? Owen wondered.

No, he did not.

Do I want to be like Lore?

Successful but cold, driven but alienated?

Owen didn’t know.

All he knew was that right now, he wanted to be alone. Somewhere in a dark corner, chewing his fingers down to the literal bone.

But being alone right now…

Didn’t seem smart. And certainly wasn’t possible, anyway.

Instead, he went to look at dead fish.

Owen didn’t know anything about fish, or aquariums. He had a hamster once; it escaped its glass-walled prison and got into their walls and died, creating a smell that made his father so mad, he swore up and down to Owen that they would never again get a pet of any kind, because the death of any pet would just be a grave inconvenience to the man. In college, at Sarah Lawrence, in the short time when Owen and Lore got an apartment off campus, they had a cat—a silky black shadow named Invader Zim who bit them all the time. And at no point did he ever have fish.

(Owen told himself he was simply not capable of sustaining another life.)

(He was, after all, barely capable of sustaining his own.)

The fish in the tank numbered thirteen, and they consisted of varieties he’d seen before, though only one he could identify by name: angelfish. Two of those floated at the top. Flakes of them falling away like fish food—fish eat the flaky food, fish die and become the flaky food. He wondered if the other fish—fish once golden, once black, once silverish-see-through, fat fish, skinny fish, tiny fish—would eat that mess if they were still alive. He suspected they would. That was the world they lived in.

The tank was long. Were Owen to stretch out his arms in cruciform, the tank would be roughly the distance of fingertip to fingertip.

The water, brackish.

A little astronaut—not a deep-sea diver, but weirdly, an astronaut—stood at the bottom, a tiny escape pod opening and closing, puking up a weak flurry of greasy yellow bubbles each time.

And next to it—

Was a penknife.

A Schrade Old Timer penknife.

Angled blade open and pointed down, stuck in the aquarium gravel.

A small trail of blood arose from it, diffusing as it drifted.

Owen’s heart caught in his throat, and he blinked and took a step back—

And the knife was gone.

You’re just seeing things, he told himself. You’re tired. You’re hungry. And this place is—it’s just messing with your head . It’s messing with all our heads .

—

It took Lore a minute or two to realize—these books on this bookshelf, they were just curated bullshit. All the books were new, untouched, unopened, unread—few novels, no poetry, almost all of it was, like, books about architecture and books about pedestrian art and books about fashion, and all of them pale and few of them offering much color, and she was sure now that whoever put these books here did it because of the way they looked and because of what the books said about the owners of this—

House? Was this a house?

Was it just a room?

Were these rooms connected at all—physically, or thematically, or what?

Nick wandered over near to her. He shot her a bored look, and she shrugged at him. They didn’t exchange words as he walked to the two doors in the corner, and her middle cinched up. He’s going to leave us, she thought. He lied to get them here for one purpose: to find Matty Shiffman. And why did you come here, Lore? she asked herself, having no answer. Still. Nick seemed now like a bullet fired from a gun—it would not be turned away from its trajectory, not until it hit what it was aiming at. She admired it. She understood it, more to the point. Because though Nick hadn’t been like that through much of his life, she had been. Lore always saw the target and went for it. Never distracted, never dissuaded.

Except, lately…

She killed that thought before it had babies.

Nick opened the first door.

Darkness awaited him.

No lit room. Just the dark.

Lore thought she could see something in there—the geometry of furniture. Not sure what kind, or where. A bedroom? She couldn’t be sure.

Nick gave her another look.

She said nothing, just shook her head a little.

Don’t go in there was the message.

He sighed and gave one long look into the dark before closing the door.

Then, the next door.

This one Lore couldn’t see, so she idly walked behind Nick—not too close up on him; she didn’t want to seem over interested (though why that was, she could not say), hovering behind him as he opened it.

This room: lit, but poorly. A small bathroom. Grimy subway tile shower behind a filmy curtain. A toilet in the corner. A white sink, above which hung a mirror that was shattered from the center out, as if it had been struck.

No other door in that one, and no window.

Nick grunted, closed the door, then wandered off without further commentary. Lore stood there for a moment, staring at the doors with a sharp twinge of fear and suspicion. Then something caught her eye. Something back at the bookshelves. One pop of color on a low shelf.

A familiar pop of color.

It was her book.

The one she’d written ten years ago.

It was The Crazy Bitch’s Guide to Game Design, a title she loved then, hated now, and had almost gotten her canceled on Twitter about five years back when everyone was trapped in their homes during the pandemic and was bored and vengeful and looking for any taste of blood in the water to excite them. They said the title was ableist and misogynist and it probably was, but like Grandpa Simpson said, It was the style at the time . And all of it was based on how an early meeting with an Activision executive had him ranting at her that she was a “crazy bitch” and her ideas about gaming were “pretentious trash” and “full of avant-garde horseshit.”

After that meeting, she vowed to do her thing without the help of some fucking megacorp, and she raised some capital and went on to make her own game—The Robot Relationship Simulator, which was less about robots and relationships and more about navigating trauma and how you infected others with your own bullshit, like a computer virus spread from person to person. It was really hot for an indie game, in part because (at least, this was her theory) she made it so you could romance and fuck different robots, and games where you could romance and fuck the other characters were always going to be a winner.

Soon as they announced it was on the ballot for best indie game at the Game Awards, who came swanning into her DMs but the same Activision exec, Kevin something-or-other. Or maybe it was Kenny? Whatever. He wanted to hire her and, by the sound of it, wanted to fuck her, too. She told him to eat nails. He sent her a photo of his cock as, what, revenge? Enticement? She posted the DMs to Twitter, and it caused a huge shitstorm—she outed him, a guy whose name she couldn’t even remember, and not only did a lot of other women say he’d done similar to them, but then women started naming names of other rapey scumfucks in the industry. That snowball didn’t just get bigger—it made a hundred other snowballs, all rolling downhill, all growing larger and larger, crushing anything in their paths.

Thing was, it didn’t change shit, not really.

The men who got called out had to spend some time out of the industry, but they came back eventually, just at other companies. Like priests shuttled from church to church after they diddled a kid. And women didn’t suddenly get hired in record numbers. Furthermore, all Lore got at the end of it was just more harassment from Gamergatey chodes who pretended to be serious “devil’s advocates” who were “just asking questions” but who really just wanted to slut-shame women and keep them from getting their cooties all over their Important Men Games. You know, the ones with the guns and the bouncing-tit physics.

So Lore wrote a book. Because she was angry, and because yelling about stuff on social media didn’t do anything except make her life worse.

That book was The Crazy Bitch’s Guide to Game Design .

And here it was, on this shelf, in this place.

It felt like—

Like a message.

But what was that message, exactly?

Lore reached for her book.

—

“You okay?” Hamish asked Owen as he stared at the fish tank. The knife. It was there. It was just fucking there. Yet now it was gone.

“Oh. Yeah. Just—just peachy. You?”

Hamish laughed a little. “Oh yeah, man, fucking great, this has been a really killer vacation. Love this Airbnb Nick picked.”

Owen chuckled—a small, dark laugh. But a real one.

“Yeah, this is pretty messed up.”

“I…I shouldn’t have come here, man, I shouldn’t have left my family, and I should have never set foot on that staircase, and I did, and then—then you came after, and I wish I had stayed behind because maybe then you would’ve stayed and we, you and me, we’d still be okay—” He tried like hell to hold it back, but a single gulping sob came out of him like a gasp of agonal respiration.

Owen thought, I would’ve gone anyway.

Because Lore did.

“Ham, listen. It’s not like that. You and I being left behind wouldn’t have made it any better. That would’ve been its own kind of hell.” As it has been since Matty went away. Owen shrugged. “Maybe this is the only way out . You don’t have to be sorry.”

“Nick does,” Hamish said, in a low voice.

Owen’s gaze flicked toward Nick, who wandered back to the closet door that they’d come through. He gave them each lifted eyebrows, then pulled the door open a few inches and peeked in. “It’s just a wall now,” Nick said. “The way we came is gone.” He bared his teeth. “This fucking place.”

Owen and Hamish said nothing.

Then Nick wandered off again, back toward Lore.

“I dunno,” Owen said, once they were out of earshot again. “It seems like Nick has been trying to figure this out for a long time. All those emails? He’s been trying to get us to look for Matty since forever. He’s been trying to tell us something, and…we didn’t listen. He just wants to find Matty.”

“Yeah. Okay. Maybe.” Hamish sniffled. “We good, though?”

“You and me, we’re good. But this place—we’re not good here. Something’s wrong with this house. Something is rotten.”

“If it even is a house.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

—

Page after page of hate.

That’s what Lore was looking at. It wasn’t her book. Well, it was —on the cover, and some of the pages in the book, especially pages toward the front? Yeah, those were hers. But then—one page had a series of tweets about her. Another page was a Reddit thread, again, all about her. Forum posts supposedly about her game but really about her quote-unquote “mannish face.” Gross memes using photos of her to make her seem crazy, ugly, insane. A naked porn-star body but with her face deepfaked onto it. Then, most hateful of all, awful reviews of her games, her books, her art. One stars, fuck her, commie leftist bitch, crazy whore, I heard she fucked this guy, fucked this girl, I heard she’s Antifa, I heard she’s a dude, she’s bi, she’s trans, she’s a liar, a narcissist, a thief, she didn’t even write these games, she stole them, she stole them —

The fucking nerve of these people, it made her want to vom a hot rage geyser all over the page—

“Yo,” Nick said, hand on her shoulder.

She reflexively closed the book fast—it snapped shut like a crocodile’s mouth. “Jesus. What?”

He shot a conspiratorial look over his shoulder.

“You and me, we get it,” he said.

“Get what?”

“Why we’re here.”

“Nick, just spit it out. I don’t want to play games.”

“You ran up those stairs. Owen was right. You did not hesitate. I got us here and you were off like a shot, and I just wanted to say, I see you. Okay? I see you, and I appreciate you. I know we weren’t always the closest in the group, but—”

“Nick.”

“But I’m just saying, I admire you, and I admire that you went up those stairs and did the right thing. Those two over there, ehh, I don’t know about them.”

“ Nick . Listen. Nick. You lied to us, and maybe it was for a good reason—”

“It was. You can see that! It was .”

“—but this is all pretty fucked up, and I’m not interested in this little whisper campaign thing you’re doing right now. I’m kinda pissed at those two and maybe they’re pissed at me, and honestly, I’m real pissed at you too right now because all of this is screwing with my head in a big, big way. And so like I said, I have no interest in playing—”

Games .

Games.

Lore looked at the book in her hand.

Quietly, she slid it back onto the shelf.

“You strokin’ out?” Nick said.

But she ignored him and pushed past. Then she said to the other two, “This isn’t a regular house. It’s not a haunted house. It’s a game .”