18. Glimpsing the Final Boss
Glimpsing the Final Boss
It wasn’t a deer.
“We need to find the staff,” Levi said, standing near the bar with Asher and Zoe. “Or find something that tells us where they went. There’s got to be an office, records, something.”
“There are only two floors, so it shouldn’t be difficult,” Zoe said. “We split up, everyone comes back in an hour with something useful. If we’re lucky, one of these rooms will have a number to contact forest rangers?”
Levi’s stomach turned. Splitting up is how people die.
But Levi had nothing. No map, the journal he carried across three games was gone, and all he had was a mystery woman’s itinerary and a key… He needed to find something or they were all going to sit in this lounge until the fog found a way in and did to each of them what it had done to Tyler.
“Pairs,” Levi said. “Nobody goes alone. Zoe, you and Elliot take the ground floor — the office, the front desk, anywhere that might have paperwork. Jasper, stay with Maddie and Tyler. Keep the windows closed. Keep the door locked.”
Owen looked up from his book. “Should I —”
“Stay here,” Levi said. “Stay with Jasper and help keep an eye on things. If something changes outside, you’ll probably know better than any of us what is happening.”
Owen nodded, a small smile forming on his face. “Got it.”
The staircase carried them from the lounge’s warmth into air that was at least ten degrees cooler.
Asher was in front of him as they entered the hallway, his body a shield and his hand tight on Levi’s.
A few of the wall sconces were flickering and dim, but those could have been like that before the fog.
The strangest thing about the hall was the number of doors left open.
They moved slowly, opening doors gently, listening for sounds of…anything really. It was eerily silent. The first open room was empty—bed made, towels folded, window latched. The second was the same.
The third had a suitcase open on the luggage rack with clothes folded inside. There was a phone on the nightstand, but when Levi pressed the button, nothing happened. It was dead. The bed had been slept in and left in a hurry, the covers thrown back, a pillow on the floor.
“Someone left fast,” Asher said.
“Or didn’t finish leaving.”
The fourth room’s door was ajar. There was a maintenance uniform hung on the back of a chair, some type of worn military surplus boots by the bed, laces still tied like they had been kicked off.
A mug sat on the desk with something dried and dark in the bottom.
The window was latched, but the mechanism was old and loose.
“They didn’t drive down the mountain in this,” Levi mumbled, double checking the latch.
He couldn’t see the shapes in the fog from this high up, but something displaced the fog in front of the window briefly, making it swirl and shift.
Something big. Levi glanced back at Asher to see if he had seen the shift.
Asher was looking at the boots, his head tilted, and his eyes looked far away, like they were staring through the boots.
“Asher?”
Asher blinked, then his gaze snapped to Levi’s face as his mouth settled into his usual smirk—the one where Levi felt like Asher was three seconds from attempting to lick him. “No,” he said. “They didn’t.”
They moved down the hallway. The fifth room, the sixth.
A supply closet — cleaning products, spare linens, rolls of grey duct tape.
The hallway turned at a junction and where the light was dimmer, one fixture dead, the rest casting uneven pools.
Only two doors were open in this hall, one that said “Medical” and the other further down the hall with a sign Levi couldn’t read.
“I’ll see if there are supplies we could use here, go check what is down there,” Levi told Asher.
Asher frowned. “We should stick together.”
“It’s a nurse’s office, not Dr. Faine’s lab, it will be fine.” Levi wasn’t sure it would be fine, but they still had nothing to go on. How was he going to beat the game with nothing?
I’m willing to die a few more times if it advances the game. It means we’ll be out of here faster.
Asher narrowed his eyes. “Sixty seconds, then we meet back in the hall. Deal?”
“Deal.” Levi gave him a little push towards the door further up.
As Levi creaked open the medical office, he peaked inside.
It was just a standard room space, slightly converted with cots, a desk, and a small exam area.
Nothing looked strange. He slipped inside the room, moving to the exam area first. He wasn’t sure what this scenario would do yet, but it was never a bad thing to have medical supplies.
He felt a draft of cold air against his left side and glanced up from the pile of bandages and medicines he was forming on the counter.
There was a crack in the window with a hole in the center, like something small and heavy had once been thrown at it.
The crack fractured further as fog poured through it.
Fuck.
Levi rushed to the door, but a freezing draft hit him like a wall and the door slammed shut. He grabbed the handle and pulled, but it remained closed. This is bad. This is really fucking bad. He planted a foot on the door frame and yanked.
Nothing.
“ASHER!” Levi shouted.
The cold hit him harder, forming ice on the door handle so fast it felt like it burned as the air the temperature dropped all at once. His breath came in thick white puffs as he turned to look at the window.
It exploded inward.
The fog poured into the room, racing across the ground and up the sides of the walls like liquid, rising from the floor, past his ankles, his knees, his waist. The cold was so intense his muscles contracted and his hands went numb at his sides.
“Levi!” Asher’s voice came through the door, his fists pounding on the outside of it.
The thoughts arrived before he could respond, freezing his vocal chords in his throat. His knees buckled and he was on his hands and knees in fog that was up to his chest and still rising.
Nobody would notice if you weren’t here.
It was louder than last night, clearer, not a whisper anymore.
Nobody has ever noticed you. Nobody ever will. You’ve never mattered.
He tried to push back. Fuck off, this is a game. I matter to Asher—
You know Asher isn’t real. You’ll be alone when this ends. Just like before.
That went through everything he had — every defense, every wall, gone.
First you kill your brother, and now you’ll kill Asher when you leave. He can’t exist without you. You will kill him. You’ll be alone. You never mattered.
“Fuck off!” Levi shouted. The fog kept rising, his hands felt stiff on the floor, linoleum freezing under his palms, his vision narrowing.
He staggered up to one knee as his ears began to ring, the sound of Asher’s voice and fists at the door fading. The fog above his head shifted. The grey air condensing against the ceiling, gathering, taking on a shape.
He looked up.
The thing pressed against the high ceiling was folded — bent at the shoulders, waist, and knees because the room couldn’t accommodate its height, and bent again in places that weren’t joints.
The fog hardened into limbs that weren’t limbs, branches that weren’t branches, a body grown rather than built with legs ending in claws made of root that had pierced the linoleum and drawn up around themselves like something taking hold.
Long ragged folds of grey draped from shoulders that weren’t shoulders, hanging in tatters around it, fraying into vines at the hem, and from within the hood stared back a yellowed animal’s skull.
Long hollow snout, its mandible loose, seemingly anchored to nothing, the dark sockets oriented toward him, and the entire skull was adorned with antlers that forked through the cloak and forked again until they brushed the ceiling on both sides, scraping the plaster as the head shifted.
From beneath the skull, where there should have been a neck, hung a curtain of black hair — long, wet-looking, falling past where shoulders would have been on something built right.
The cold coming off it was different from the fog’s cold. Personal.
Levi couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak.
It leaned down.
Slow. Folding through itself, the antlers tilting, the curtain of hair swinging forward and parting around the long snout as it descended.
The skull came level with Levi’s face, close enough that he could see the sockets weren’t empty — fog moved inside them, slow, layered, deeper than the bone that held it.
Close enough that the cold of it was on his skin and in his mouth and behind his eyes, and his breath fogged against the bone and disappeared into the dark of the snout.
It whispered.
“Alone.”
One word, low and layered and wet, coming from a mouth that didn’t exist on a face that couldn’t speak, and it went in and stayed.
His vision tunneled. The skull at the center of the dark, the antlers framing it like a crown, his lungs frozen, his hands numb.
At the edge of the tunnel — peripheral, catching only because his eyes wouldn’t move — he saw the staff.
The long jointed fingers were tightening on it.
The branch was shedding bark in slow curls under the pressure, the way a hand tightens on something it’s about to use.
The door behind him opened.
Asher’s hands gripped him under his shoulders and pulled, and suddenly he was out in the hallway.
He blinked, catching a glimpse of the giant creature through the closing door, its form swirling, displaced by the air that had been let in.
Asher yanked the door shut and just held the handle, breathing hard, his lock picking tools clenched between his teeth, as if he were expecting the thing on the other side to start pulling.
Nothing happened.
Asher stepped away from the door and spit out the lock picks as he dropped beside Levi and pulled him close. He pressed his face against Levi’s hair, his chest still heaving, running his hands running over Levi’s arms. “You’re freezing baby.”
Levi breathed. Each breath pulled more of the weight out of his chest.
His own thoughts came back slowly, and strangely his mind decided to focus on the lockpicks. “You still have those?” he croaked.
“I always keep them in my boots.” Asher huffed a laugh against him. “Did that thing touch you?”
“No. It talked to me.”
Asher’s arms tightened. “What did it say?”
Levi closed his eyes. The word was still in his chest, smaller now but present. “It said alone.”
Asher held him, his arms not loosening, the hallway returning to that eerie quiet as the ringing in Levi’s ears faded. “You’re not,” he whispered. “You’re not alone. You have me. You’ll always have me.”
Levi’s hand found Asher’s wrist and held it, using the heartbeat under his fingers to steady himself as he tried to force the feeling to fade. It didn’t fade all the way.
They sat there for a while. Then Levi said, “We need to seal the building. Every window. Every vent. Every crack. There was duct tape in the supply closet.” He gestured at the door, at himself. “If it can’t get in, it can’t do that.”
“Okay,” Asher said, stroking his hair. “Okay. We seal it.”
That’s one rule we have to follow. That’s enough to start.