Chapter 33 #2
There are no resets, he said to himself again. It’s good. It’s good that Asher isn’t the same out here. I don’t have to be the man I was in there either. I let people die so I could find fucking keys. I should be glad. I should be grateful.
But I promised I’d help him remember.
Levi meant those words when he said them, but he never, not once in a million years, thought he would wake up to a world where Asher was the creator of the game they were trapped in.
He tried to make himself question it, to figure out how to get Asher back, but it always came back to the same thing: the man he loved didn’t exist.
So he didn’t try.
“— and her teacher pulled me aside afterward,“ the towncar’s driver, David, said, “and said she’s never seen a fifth-grader pick up the choreography that fast. I mean, she’s been doing ballet since she was three, but still.”
Levi blinked. David had been talking, though to be fair, he was always talking, Levi just rarely responded.
There was a photo of a little girl in a pink leotard in the driver’s side visor, her hands on her hips, grinning with her whole face at whoever held the camera.
He’d seen it however many times he’d been in the car, but this was the first time he’d really looked at it.
“I’m sorry,” Levi said. “I’ve been — I’m sorry. I’ve been a bad passenger.”
David’s eyes found him in the rearview. “You’re not a bad passenger, kid. You seem like you have a lot going on. How’d therapy go today?”
“Fine.” It hadn’t been fine. “I made it through.”
David laughed — a short, kind laugh that gave the comment somewhere to land. “That’s progress.”
Before the game, Levi liked to run. He would run up three flights of stairs at the end of his run, sometimes two at a time. He liked doing that, because what he lacked in strength, he made up for in speed. Now, each step was a negotiation between his legs, the cane, and his grip on the rail.
He stood on the landing between floors two and three, leaning on his cane.
He’d been on this landing the night Ethan died.
He’d stood there and thought about not doing the rest of the stairs.
Not in a way he’d told anyone about. Just a thought, brief and heavy, sitting in his legs like concrete.
I could not do them. I could sit here. I could just not.
And then he did them anyway. He was doing them now. Barely.
By the time Levi reached his door, he could smell thyme.
Or rosemary? He wasn’t sure, but it made his stomach cramp.
The scent was thick enough in the hallway that it seemed to seep from under his own door, which didn’t make sense.
Mrs. Dhaliwal in 3A, probably. Or 3C. Someone cooking for a Sunday dinner.
Or Monday? He didn’t know what day it was.
Levi squeezed his eyes shut as he opened the door.
He always needed a moment behind his eyelids before he could look at the apartment now.
It was dark, he never bothered with the lights anymore, but more than anything, he had to remind himself what he would see.
The last time he came back from physical therapy, he opened the door and saw one of Dr. Faine’s creatures skittering out from beneath his bed towards him.
He knew it wasn’t real, but that didn’t stop him from sleeping in his bathtub that night.
He closed the door behind him, placed his forehead against the door, and turned the lock.
You’re in your apartment. There is a small couch. Coffee table. Bed in the corner. Computer desk. TV. Nothing else. There are no monsters. No blood. No decay.
He counted softly to himself, squeezing the handle of his cane. On eight, he opened his eyes and stared at the door. It was the same door it had always been. So far so good. He turned towards his apartment.
Oh no…
The apartment was lit with warm, amber light, dancing and flickering gently.
Candles adorned every surface, all of them lit.
On the windowsill, on the bookshelf, on top of the TV, on the kitchen counter he could see from the doorway beyond the partition.
Tea lights and pillars, all of them seeming to be chosen at random with no rhyme or reason…
No no no.
No.
This was a new one. This had never happened in the game. Every other thing he hallucinated was an echo, at least, of something he experienced. What was this?
In the middle of his living room, his coffee table had been moved back against the couch, and there was a small card table he didn’t own with a white cloth draped over it.
Two folding chairs sat on either side and two place settings had been set using his own plates, from his own cabinet, with napkins folded into triangles.
A bottle of wine sat open next to two glasses.
The smell coming from the hall was stronger too…it was coming from his oven.
From behind the divider wall that led into his kitchen, there was a sound he knew well.
It was the step-click of someone using a cane, but it sounded wrong to him.
He hadn’t moved. It was probably the least of his concerns, the auditory hallucinations, now that he was imagining entirely new situations superimposed on his apartment—
Asher stepped into view.
Levi’s eyes went to his face first because his face was the thing Levi had been trying to hold in his head for two weeks and failing.
The mismatched eyes — brown and green, both focused entirely on him, on a face that really was that symmetrical.
The game hadn’t enhanced that. The jawline, the cheekbones, the way the candlelight sat in the planes of his face— the game had rendered him faithfully.
He was grinning at Levi like he did in the game when Levi did something he liked; his eyes a little too wide, rocking forward a little like he wanted to do or say something and he hadn’t decided which to do yet. Levi felt a sob clawing up his throat.
It’s not real. He’s not real. I’m getting worse—
Then he saw the rest of Asher. The hospital gown, a long coat, half-laced black boots, leaning on an arm brace to his left, a scalpel held delicately in his right hand, the tip pointed down…
And there was so much blood.
On his jaw, rubbed into one cheek, dried in his hair and on the front of the gown so it stuck to his chest.
Asher’s smile did not change while Levi looked at any of this.
There are no resets.
But the man standing in his apartment was the same man from the game. The same smile. The same stillness. The weight of two weeks of telling himself none of it was real all came down at once into the small space behind his sternum.
“Hey, baby,” Asher said cheerfully. “Did you miss me?”
It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not —