The Tattooed Heart (Messenger of Fear 2)

“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.