The Devil Made Me Do It
I waited, kicked back in the overstuffed recliner staring down the young ambitious looking plainclothes detective as he walked across the room toward me. Before he opened his mouth, I knew he wouldn’t get any farther than any of the others. My story was airtight and all my alibis solid. This routine of calling me in to talk about the game, the book, or the murder hardly even fazed me at this point. A dozen years have come and gone since I lost my best friend to the devil and every single detail remains etched in my brain as if it happened yesterday. I’d blocked all I could from interfering with my daily life, but sometimes the little black tendrils of dread crept back inside my head.
This rookie didn’t scare me. The way he held his eyes and his shoulders told me he didn’t have much real experience under his belt. He called me because he wanted to make a name for himself by cracking a cold case and putting someone in jail. So he picked my case because it looked like someone should have been guilty. At least this would be a fun afternoon making this uniform dig for answers.
“Where do you want to start officer?” I set my jaw and glared at him testing him.
I knew he couldn’t be that tough. I’d already talked him into springing for an upscale suite with the Chicago’s best view of Lake Michigan. This one would be easy to break. He took a seat in an uncomfortable looking chair across from me and flipped through the case file on the coffee table. I smiled and sipped on a glass of aged whiskey. This stuff is expensive and brought me a bottle, just like I asked
“The Necronomicon” He licked his lips.
The sound of the word sends a chill down my spine. “Yeah,” I knew the book well. Even though I couldn’t read a single word inside it.
“You say it caused the death of a” he paused and looked down at the folder in front of him “a Ms. Natalie Briggs.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “Isn’t that why I’m here?” I looked over my glasses into his eyes. “You want me to slip up and admit something I didn’t do. You want me to say I did it. You are gunning for some cop trophy or respect points down at the precinct aren’t you.”
“No, not exactly Mr. Cardoza.” He said taking a deep breath. “The department believes you have information that could be helpful in an active investigation. I think you will like what I have to offer you.”
His answer surprised me so much I choked on my drink. I’d been called in for interrogations a few times since Nat’s murder. Usually, they asked me all these trick questions trying to get me to admit to killing her. Apparently, this interview had a different agenda. “What’s the offer?”
“How about this, we talk for a bit go over your story?” He offered. “Like two friends chatting about the good old days. Then I tell you about the new information and we figure out how we can help each other out.”
The offer seemed good and I wanted to trust him, but something deep down told me not to. “What’s the catch?” I asked wiping my lips.
“No catch. Let me be clear Hank, I’m not after you.” He smiled and waved off my concern. Then he reached over to an electronic recording device sitting on the table and pressed the red button. “Officer Michael Briggs and Hank Cardoza, October 1st, 2019.” He said in a disinterested and clear tone into the microphone. Then he turned back to me. “As best as you can tell me how the incident got started. Take me days or weeks back if you have to.”
“Ok.” I nodded and took a deep breath. “These memories have been locked away for a long time.” I shuddered as the threads of memories clawed their way back into my conscious mind.
“Take your time,” Briggs said he licked his pen and scribbled on a blank sheet of paper.
I began telling him my story.
“I don’t remember the exact year, I’m sure that’s written down somewhere, but I would guess it started the summer after I graduated high school. My nerd squad tried to figure out how to make money. We eventually decided to make video games. We set up all of our computers’ in Jason Garza’s garage one day and got started. They were the big tower kind with the full CRT monitors. We decided to start a video game company. We were too young and dumb to know how big a risk it was, or what might happen if we did succeed. We just did it. In the beginning, there were four of us. Jason, William Alcorn, myself and this other guy named Nelson. I don’t remember his first name if I ever knew it, everyone always just called him Nelson.
Anyway, we published a couple of indie games like Stones of Doom and The Gates of Wrath. Since I was terrible at drawing, I was put on task to develop all the decision subroutines and Intelligence loops to go behind the scenes. It was fantastic almost like the Wild West. Video games were new so there were no rules. Our biggest successes came from the dark psychological horror games. The graphics weren’t the greatest but they could mess with your head. That was my specialty, getting in someone’s head and keeping them up at night.
Somewhere along the way, Jason I think, started dating this girl named Natalie, we all called her Nat. She was good at story writing, I mean good. Between my coding and her messed up stores, the whole thing blew up. I mean we couldn’t make disks fast enough. Big stores like Circuit City and Babbage’s were ordering tens of thousands of units at a time. I wish I could remember what game it was, probably Hell Commander or something, I don’t even know it matters right now.
After all the craziness started dying down, we got an offer from some big company I’d never heard of before AGES games or something. They offered us a nice office space downtown, all new computers, anything we wanted. They wanted to be the biggest game maker and they needed our expertise to draw people in and get them hooked. Their thing was they wanted to scare people with real stuff, like so real it could happen. They said we should take it to the extreme. They even gave us this insane travel budget to go to where all the weird relics and legendary monsters came from.
Jason got pretty pissed, said if we took the offer we would be selling out. He believed in the real artistry of everything and wanted to stay independent. We had some heated board meetings but in the end, Jason got freedom and we were allowed to keep all the money and Nat stayed with us. She said he was a narcissistic controlling piece of garbage and we would be better off without him. Since we were working out of Jason’s garage, we had to move out quickly, I think we just ripped the hard drives out of the computers and left him to deal with the leftovers. That made him mad too, he threatened to sue for damages but he never did.
I started right away on a prototype AI structure that had the ability to learn, like really learn. The idea was the longer you play the more it gets to know you so it can just keep tormenting you on deeper and deeper levels. I know it’s messed up, but it’s what I did. Nat and Nelson got to work on the main game idea. Initially, the interface was a cute fluffy bunny or something that would reside on your computer, play with you, and help you do stuff on the computer. Nat wanted something you could put on your smartphone, they were new back then but she saw the potential. This was the first attempt at multi-platform gaming, ever.”
Officer Briggs put up his hand to stop my story. He said, “This is an interesting segment of video game history Mr. Cardoza, but I don’t see how it is important to the case.”
“It’s important because it explains how two college-age kids wound up in upstate New York standing outside the Levoy mansion, the founder of the Church of Satan’s home, without a clue,” I said.
“Can we take a quick break?” Briggs asked. “Need anything, coffee, water, smokes?”
“I’m good,” I said. I could feel the sweat starting to bead up on my forehead and back. This wasn’t going to be pretty but it had to be done. I took the time alone to meditate and try to remember more details about Levoy.
Briggs came back with two cups of coffee and a bottle of water in his hand; he slid one over to me and placed several packages of cream and sugar on the table. “Just in case.” He looked at his notes for a second. “Tell me about your meeting in The Crypt.
I nodded and shook my glass. “I think I’ll be ok. So you want to know about the famed home of Peter Levoy. I guess you didn’t get to see it before it burned down. That’s too bad.”
The scent of the charred motor oil style coffee turned my stomach so I took another sip before I continued.
“That place was messed up. As we approached, the air suddenly turned cold. Even though it was the middle of summer, all the trees within a mile of the place were grey or black with no leaves. Almost like the place was circled in some kind of perpetual winter. The closer we drove the weirder it got. The wall was massive and covered with black algae. Now that I think about it, the wall may have been there to keep the horrors in instead of keeping the world out. Inside the fence were a bunch of stone altar things and pentagrams scorched into the ground. The whole place smelled of burnt flesh. I could have lived my whole life without ever going there.
Then there was the house, I say house but really, it was more of a castle the exterior constructed entirely of hand-hewn stones. Giant round turrets in the corners made to look like medieval towers. Stained glass goat heads in all the windows. The doors held intricate carvings of devils and demons in various states of torment. Larger than life-size gargoyles with red gem eyes that reflected the sunset and little vents carved into them so they growled when the wind blew. I know it sounds cool, but in person, you almost want to pee yourself.
Levoy must have heard us pull up because by the time we made it onto the porch he was waiting at the door. What shocked me most about his appearance that day was how normal he looked. The entire place looked like some macabre theme park and there he was wearing an old pair of blue jeans, construction boots and a polo shirt with a priest collar.
He welcomed us inside quickly and I found the inside of the place even more nightmarish than the outside. Sculptures and paintings of every horrible monster ever conceived. We made our way to a relatively tame drawing room made up to look like a torture chamber.
“How can I help you?” He said his steely gaze and low tones astounded me.
After placing the fancy recorder on the table with the external microphone pointed directly at Peter himself I asked, “What can you tell me about the devil? You know the real one, the guy behind the myths and legends.”
“Honestly. The devil, as such, does not exist. The legends and myths are just that, untrue stories repeated over time slowly growing to these heinous tales we all know. Tell me.” He said. “Have you ever seen the devil, or did something bad happen and you just blamed him for it?”
“What about all these symbols and objects?” Nat blurted out. “The burns in the yard, the obvious animal sacrifices. What about all that?”
He just shrugged. He didn’t get angry and shout back. Her comments just rolled off him. “The cornerstone of our religion is that you can believe or not believe in anything you want. If our members want to build stone altars and sacrifice livestock, why should I stop them? There are no ordinances prohibiting such things. I say let it happen.”
We asked him the questions several different ways but he always ended up with the same answer that they didn’t really believe in the supernatural. All in all our first meeting at The Crypt was disappointing. Levoy was a major disappointment. With that much power and influence of a group of people, he didn’t do anything with it.
For some reason that night, Nat decided to go back over the recording a few times on the computer. I guess she’d been watching some of those ghost-hunting shows or something. She sent me this text at 3:00 in the morning that just said, “I just found something crazy, call me when you get up.”
I wish I’d seen the message when she sent it, but I was asleep. Back in those days, I played a lot of StarCommand. It was a big tournament weekend. I was so upset after I lost in the first round to the Koreans I started taking shots with Nelson. I passed out before her text came in. I still regret losing, or at least not staying up to see the results, might have avoided this whole thing. It hurts but I can’t do anything about it at this point.
I saw the message when I got up and texted her back. I heard her phone chime in the hallway then she knocked on my door. I would have jumped out of my pants if I’d been wearing any, but I slept naked then so I wasn’t. I screamed, god, I screamed like a little girl. How did she get in my house? I never did know, but there she was standing in the hallway waiting for me.
“Get dressed and come on.” She called out. “We got to go.”
“Go where?” I shouted back at her scrambling to find some clothes. I wound up slipping on my 2005 WarCrimes competition jumpsuit from the previous year’s competition because it was hanging in the closet and I didn’t have time to investigate the clothes on the floor.
“Harvard?” She shouted back at me.
“Why are we going there?” I asked yanking the door open.
She clutched a laptop and had a slightly unhinged look in her eye. “I found what we are looking for, it is up there.”
I just gave her a dumb look still half trying to wake up my head pounding. Before I asked any more questions, I downed a handful of headache killers.
“The Department of History has a copy of the book. We have to go see it, today.” She squealed excitedly. “Here.” She said handing me the laptop. “I downloaded the latest copy of the AI for the AGES game so you can work on it while I drive.”
Since we were, going so big and we had so much free money to play with our little outfit purchased a version of Watson to build upon rather than trying to develop an online autonomous brain from scratch. We had a small problem though. Watson had the Asimov algorithm hardcoded into the core of the system. You know the big three rules that robots have to follow: Don’t harm humans, Obey Orders, and protect itself.
Honestly putting that in the core was a good idea, that way no one could steal the software and make it run a tank or artillery. It didn’t do any good for us, but overall I could see why it would be there. We had no way to decompile the system and change it so I had to figure out a workaround. If the algorithm tripped the entire system shutdown, which I’m sure you can guess would be a major problem. I discovered an emergency loop intended for safe shutdown larger robotics and things of that nature. On the ride, I tinkered with the shutdown trip and ways to overcome it.
A few phone calls and a dozen text messages later we had an appointment with the book’s curator. I never will know how we made it from Chicago to Cambridge in less four hours, but somehow we did. When we arrived at the library, we met with Professor David Rolod. He was an odd character. Sunk in eyes so black that they almost looked red skin so pale and white I don’t think he’d ever been outside in the sun. He said something about having a congenital defect that made it hard for him to get around. He seemed mad about it. I mean I get it being upset about not being able to move around, I would be too. But why take it out on everyone else.
On the way down to see the book, he kept warning us not to look at it for too long. He told us not to read certain passages. He really seemed to think that just touching the book would infect us with some sort of evil that we wouldn’t be able to shake. Honestly, he was a weird dude. I didn’t believe most of what he said. He took us to some storage area underground where you have to have special faculty access to even access. The halls were dirty half the lights didn’t work. Not at all where I expected them to keep the most infamous book ever written. Dr. Rolod unlocked the door and stood outside, he refused even to be in the room with the book.
Even in the dim and dusty light, the Necronomicon was the most intriguing thing I’d ever seen. Tannish whitish rough leather, that I later found out was actually human skin framed in by a thin layer of pure sterling silver. A few hieroglyphic symbols burnt into the cover. The pages inside were all cut differently most of them were worn and wrinkled. Nat opened the book to the most wrinkled page in the center if I remember correctly it was titled in English “Cerebral implantation and Ventricle Manipulation” The rest of the text was some form of Latin I’d never seen before or since. Nat seemed to understand it; she mumbled to herself as she read down one page then flipped to the next.
Before long Rolod started shouting about how our time was up waving his cane all around. I mean walking stick, that’s what he preferred to call it, and I’d like to honor his request since he is dead and all.”
“Dead?” Officer Briggs looked at me over his reading glasses then shuffled through his papers. “I don’t see that detail in any of the case notes. Can you tell me more about that?”
I nodded and continued. Yea, not long after we met with him, maybe a week, one of the school janitors found him dead in the book vaults. The campus police only investigated a little and said it was clearly a suicide. He’d hung himself from the pipes in the empty room next to where they kept the Necronomicon. No one I spoke to at the university was even surprised. Seems he was always ill and in a lot of pain. I guess he just got tired and decided he’d rather not deal with it anymore.
“Interesting.” Briggs scratched his neck. “That’s awfully convenient that the only curator of this allegedly demon possessed book died a week after you visited.”
“See. I knew you were trying to get a confession.” I crossed my arms and glared at him again.
“That’s not where I’m going with this. It’s new information, that’s all.” He assured me as he scribbled in one of the notebooks. “Mr. Cardoza, was this the only time you ever saw this Necronomicon?”
“Unfortunately not.” I shook my head and sat back into the chair.
“After we got back from seeing the book in Massachusetts we basically jumped on a flight for the Carpathian mountains to check out the origins of Vlad Tepes. Man, that is a crazy place; I don’t think I’ve seen more superstitions people anywhere. When we got off the plane they made us put on these crucifixes and garlic flower necklaces. They were uptight about it. I thought the Levoy mansion was crazy; this place was so much more, so much deeper and darker. Every square inch of the place made my skin crawl. We took a behind the scenes bus tour to Dracula’s castle, were allowed poke around in the torture rooms, and walk the fields of impalement. The whole place just felt off, you know. Nat and I were separated from the group and wound up in some kind of Chapel or something on the west end of the main castle. That place was the freakiest and most ghastly place I’ve ever been. I felt like the carved statues would try to eat me.
Anyways Nat just walked right in and up to the podium. She plopped her bag down and pulled out the Necronomicon. I asked her about it and she told me Rolod gave it to her before we left the University. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Thought maybe he just liked being theatrical and there was nothing wrong with the book in the first place. I didn’t find out until a few weeks later he’d hung himself. After she put the book on the podium, she read a couple of passages from the book. As soon as she’d finished one of the devil statues behind her snapped in half and fell over. She picked through the broken bits and found a scroll. I asked her what was written on it and laughed. She said I wouldn’t understand it. She was probably right so I left it. We had to hurry but we did catch up to the group before they left the castle.
A couple of months later Nat and I were able to locate a nearly complete English translated copy of the book online. She started working on uploading the spells and manuscripts we thought would be the most useful to the AI database. I finally figured out how to bypass the Asimov kill switch. I’ll try to explain it. All of the decisions of the AI were stored in a non-volatile log before they were processed and enacted. If anything caused it to trip the system did a quick reboot, stepped back exactly one decision and tried again, avoiding the option that caused the shutdown. It wasn’t perfect, but it allowed us to gather information on what would cause the system to trip.
Once I figured out the Asimov switch AGES was willing to give us more time to develop the game. William, who was by far the least technical person in our group got very comfortable with business meetings and making them believe we could do anything. We had to keep reminding him as long as he never promised a delivery date we could keep milking the golden cow for as long as we wanted. I mean we were developing the best game ever, but why rush it right.
After we got back from the Carpathians Nat started spending a lot of time with the AI engine. I mean like a whole lot. To be honest, I wanted to go out with her, but she just seemed so consumed by this thing. Every waking moment she sat in front of her computer with either the English manuscript or the real Necronomicon on the desk typing away. Some days she stayed much later than everyone else and came in early too. Some days I’m not even sure she ever left the office.
Development went pretty well for a while. We had an open sandbox world for players. Many quests to pick up. Achievements and awards out the wazoo. Everyone was waiting for me. The Asimov breaker kept locking the system up. The single step back idea didn’t work very well because it kept trying to kill in slightly different ways. I had to put a decision gate of five tries where it would step back several more steps, that didn’t work either. It seemed by the time the AI decided to destroy someone, it was just going to do it and there was no way to stop it. Then one night I was working late with Nat and she suggested I put in an Asimov precheck and then just pass the results to the breaker to ensure the system never crashed or locked up because of bad AI. That woman was amazing.
AGES setup a contest for us to bring in some high-quality beta testers. They advertised an opportunity to dual the devil. Applicants had to write an essay on why they were the best qualified to defeat the devil it had to include their biggest fears and what they thought the devil might do to them to defeat them. These kids, they just gave us everything we needed to destroy them. They had no idea. We gave all the applications to the AI and it selected 50 people for the beta.
We sent them emails and made it sound like they won something amazing. They did not win, they lost big time. We actually wound up having to shut down the beta. Kids started disappearing, well not exactly disappearing but they logged into the game and never left their computers. Five of them wound up in the hospital from dehydration. Two were institutionalized because they tried to kill their families with kitchen knives. It was a mess.
“Hold on,” Briggs said. “Your beta testers were trying to commit murder based on what they saw in your game and you are okay with it?”
“Allegedly.” I corrected him. “Our game allegedly caused them to attempt murder. No one was ever able to prove that is what the game that told them to do it. It was only a small percentage we were comfortable with, so we wanted to press on with testing.”
The big bosses at AGES started getting nervous. They wanted to pull the plug but William convinced them to let us run it a second beta. This one had to have a 0% occurrence of attempted murder. I thought that number was too small, I mean at any given point in the day someone is bound to be contemplating stabbing everyone in their family with a steak knife.”
“No, no they aren’t” Briggs said. “Most people don’t think about chopping up their loved ones.”
I shrugged.
“So we took the pool of applicants and selected 100 this time, to give us a better more rounded result. We got a few reports of people going to the hospital, but no one at AGES really complained. We thought everything was ready, we had promotional material printed and commercials made. We even paid for some cable spots when it happened. One of our beta testers, a student at Virginia Tech, got up one morning, April 16 to be exact, and started shooting people. Overall thirty-two people died including our tester Cho. To be honest there was a history of mental illness there. I don’t think it’s fair just to blame our game for what happened.
Even though there was no direct proof that we were responsible for any of it, the AGES people flipped out. They demanded we pull the plug on the entire project. In fact, they were so scared they sent a team with a police escort to our office to collect and destroy all of our servers and backups. From the time the news broke until they were, banging down our door was about an hour. It seemed like they were expecting it to happen. They confiscated the entire network and locked us out of the office. William called and said we were all terminated but AGES promised to compensate us for our time.
At this point, Nat just spiraled out of control. She almost stopped eating and sleeping entirely. She just sat in her basement and looked at the Necronomicon all day and night. She stopped paying the bills. When her landlord threw her out, she came to me, gaunt, wild-eyed and talking pure craziness. Saying stuff like “He’s coming.” and “We must prepare the way for Beelzebub.”
To be honest this really freaked me out. Who was this at my door wearing torn up clothing hair matted and dirty. I didn’t know what to do. Finally, I decided to call Levoy, I still had his number, maybe he could help. He told me to come to the mansion right away and to bring the book. So put Nat in the back seat of my car and buckled her in. The entire ride she thrashed about shouting.
When we got to the mansions, Levoy helped me carry her into the main chapel to perform an exorcism. He brought in some holy water and a few ceremonial instruments. You know blades, sculptures, texts, and elixirs. He tied her arms and legs down with some red ropes and started walking around her chanting. She writhed and screamed. Eventually, she broke the ropes and grabbed the book and one of the knives.
I grabbed a goblet of holy water and threw it at her. That just made her mad and she started running at me. Ran through the door to the chapel and knocked a candle stand over to slow her down. I wasn’t thinking, God forgive me I wasn’t thinking. The candles fell over on her and the holy water caught fire. She lost her balance and fell over into a tapestry of some kind. It caught fire too. Levoy emerged from the chapel and saw the fire. We ran out of the castle as fast as we could. He called 911 when we got to my car. By the time they got there, Nat was dead and the book completely consumed.”
I folded my hands and sat back in the chair with a sigh. “That’s it. That’s the whole story.”
He spun the pen in his hand and clicked the button a few times before speaking. “That matches up.” He said. “I haven’t been completely honest with you up to this point Hank.”
“What?” I tried to jump up out of my chair but I couldn’t move. “What did you do to me?”
“Just relax. The paralysis is temporary.” He said with a smile. “As I said, we just talk then everybody goes home.”
“You poisoned me,” I said. “How am I supposed to believe anything you say?”
“Honestly, it was for your own benefit.” He said. “Well. Mostly your benefit. I needed to make sure you didn’t do anything stupid like run away or try to jump me.”
“Who are you?” I said. I could feel the muscles in my face starting to go loose. I didn’t know what or how he’d drugged me but I knew I wouldn’t be able to talk much longer.
“You know my name.” He said. “But that’s not what you are asking, is it? You want to know why I’m here. What am I really after? I’ll get there my friend.”
I tried to nod in agreement but I couldn’t move at all my neck muscles were completely relaxed I couldn’t even feel them anymore. I could feel my eyes starting to flutter closed. Briggs must have noticed too because he came over and slapped me across the face.
“Ouch.” I cried.
“Keep your eyes open.” He smiled a sick smile. “Basically your muscles go to sleep unless you feel pain, then they wake back up. Isn’t that convenient?” He balled up a fist and punched me square in the chest, digging his knuckles deep into my ribcage. “Just in case, you know. Make sure your heart and lungs don’t doze off.”
I coughed trying to catch my breath.
“Let me continue the story where you left off.” He said. “So after AGES shut you guys down, and that woman died. What did you do with yourself?”
I took a breath and tried to speak clearly. “I moved back in with my mom.”
He nodded. “Did you do any more game development?”
“No. I got a job.” I said.
“Where?” He asked.
“What do you mean?” I asked
“Where have you been working for the last ten years?” He said.
“My job,” I said.
“Doing what?” He asked. “Don’t say my job; say specifically what you’ve been doing.”
I just stared at him. I couldn’t remember. Where did I work? Where did I even live? My mother died five years ago. “What is going on?” I shouted at him
“See, this is why I sedated you.” He smiled again. I hate that smile so much. “You don’t know. I bet you can’t give me a clear specific memory of anything since your friend died in that fire can you?”
I shook my head.
“Let me fill you in on some details. Okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What choice do I have?”
“There is a police report about a fire at a deserted warehouse north of the city. The reports state they found two men unconscious in the woods nearby. Do you know who those men were?”
“Me and Levoy?” I said
“Almost. You and your friend Nelson.” He said. “You guys couldn’t remember what happened, how you got there or anything. You were just two idiots laying in the grass with your clothes all burnt up. The arson investigator said in his report the fire was planned and executed by a professional to destroy evidence. No one knew what that evidence was, and you two looked too dumb to be involved so they let you go. I begged them not to release you, but they did.”
“That’s where the trail went cold. You just vanished off the planet. No cell phone, no credit cards, no bills of any kind. To everyone on the outside, you ceased to exist for a long time. I looked for you everywhere. I didn’t know your mother’s name, because she remarried, or else I would have been camping outside your house waiting. “
The more he talked the more my stomach sank. I think it was from his words, could have been from the drugs, I’m not completely sure either way. “Why?” I asked. “Why were you stalking me?”
He got up, strolled across the room, and looked out at the water lapping around the boats for a couple of minutes. “Because,” he sighed. “You knew something I needed to find out. From the sound of it, you don’t even remember her.” He slammed an open hand against the window.
“I remember Nat I think about her every day, that’s the only way I could have gotten through all this. I loved her. You know I didn’t mean to hurt her.” I blurted out.
“You see, that’s the thing.” He looked back at me with a tear running down his cheek. “You don’t.”
“Yes, I do.” I objected.
“Do you know what your friend Nelson’s full name is?” He asked.
“No, I said that already,” I said.
“Nathaniel Nelson. His former work associates called him Nate.” He said.
“So?” I asked.
He shook his head. “My God, how do not remember anything?”
“I do remember.” I felt my blood starting to boil even though I couldn’t move. “I remember everything and I told you everything.”
“Most of that is a lie!” He shouted.
“What?” I stopped. “I know,” I trailed off. The more I thought about what he was saying the less sure I was about my story. Were there parts I couldn’t remember correctly? After all, I’d been working for a long time things are jumbled up sometimes.
“Let me just lay out the facts for you and you tell me if anything comes to memory.” He said.
“Ok” I agreed because I really didn’t know what else to do.
“You and Nate Nelson worked in your dad’s garage building stupid little video games you shared with your friends. For some reason, I cannot explain, the both of you were hired for a summer intern program with SnowStorm games. Honestly, it was a dream job. They assigned you to do field research for the upcoming third installment of their DevilKiller game series. They sent you to Harvard to check out the original Necronomicon. They wanted pictures and some samples of the text. Nothing too serious, just a little something to spice up their enemies with some realism.
Therefore, you and Nelson drove up there and met with that Rolod person. The main floors of the school have security cameras, the lower areas do not. So we don’t know exactly what happened. The three of you took the service elevator down to the vault. About a half an hour later Nelson and you came back up the elevator without Rolod.”
“Yea, that’s what I said.”
“Here’s where the story started to get a little different from what you told everyone. Around midnight that night the cameras show you coming back into the building. You opened the door with Rolod’s keycard and took the service elevator again. About an hour later, you came back up the elevator alone carrying a big black bag that shimmered ever so slightly in the weirdest way. Your shirt was torn up and you had some blood on your face. The campus police came but you had already left the scene by the time they got there. They found Rolod hanging from a pipe down in the vault and the Necronomicon was gone. We can only assume you killed him and stole the book.”
“No, I didn’t, I went to dinner at the burger place and then went to sleep,” I said.
“I hate to tell you, but the burger place and the hotel you claimed to stay in don’t exist.” He said. Here’s the campus map.” He held up a paper with an aerial view of the school.
My chest quivered as I looked at it. I would have shaken my head if I could move it.
“So you took the book but no one knew right away because, as you said, it looked like a suicide. Somewhere in the middle of everything, you stole a laptop running a hacked version of IBM Watson. After your trip to Harvard, you went to Romania and visited the castle of Vlad the Impaler, the hero of Carpathian, the murderer of thousands. I did confirm a report of vandalism to one of the chambers in the castle but the Romanian government wouldn’t give me copies of their investigation.
Soon after you turned in your reports on Transylvania, the internship ended. You and Nelson went back to making games in your garage, but something was different. The new games all had dark and insidious overtones. They were some of the first, and some of the best, horror games of their time. Some even stand out today.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Not really a compliment.” He said. “That part about the Virginia Tech shooter was all bogus; you just tossed that in there to make it sound more serious.”
“It really happened.” I protested.
“Yea a bunch of people died, but you and your video games didn’t cause it. Dude was mental, that’s it.” Briggs said. “After some indie game success, you and Nelson started doing this shockumentary web video series. Don’t even be proud, literally, no one watched it. You staged this pretend sacrifice at this old warehouse. You even kidnapped a little girl just to make it look more real. Something went wrong, or right, I don’t know. The warehouse burned down and you two pretended you couldn’t remember what happened.”
“I really don’t remember,” I said. “Where did you even get all this junk?”
“Pssht. It’s the storyline for your online game, Dueling the Devil. I’m guessing that is where you used the Watson clone, as the brain for the game. It started showing up online about five years after you went missing. Honestly, it looks like all the development stuff you really did. You fed the Necronomicon into the game and it created a new memory you could live with.
Instead of disappearing, Nelson went to intense therapy, he even found God. Somewhere in his path to healing, he started remembering what happened and he wrote it all down. I was able to get my hands on his notes after he killed himself.”
“Oh my God.” I gasped.
“I guess the truth was too much for him. Briggs shrugged; then he abruptly looked me in the eye again. “How are you feeling?”
“My head is starting to hurt,” I said closing my eyes.
“Good.” He said.
My brain was so foggy I couldn’t remember anything clearly. I tried to focus on Natalie, the center point of my affection and grief and I couldn’t picture her face. “Why can’t I remember her anymore?”
“Who?” He asked.
“Natalie, I’ve thought about her every day for twelve years and now I can’t remember her at all.”
“Because that girl you remember doesn’t exist!” He slammed his hands down on my arms and clamped down. “Natalie Briggs was my twelve-year-old sister. You and your friend kidnapped her and tied her to a rock in a warehouse. You cut her face from her skull while she was still alive then you burned her to cover your tracks.”
“That’s not possible. I would know if that really happened. I would never forget.”
“Shut up.” He slapped me again. Then he stood up and walked over to the corner of the room where I’d left my bag. He almost tore the cover off when he opened it and dumped it into my lap. Into my lap fell a tan leather book with silver edges.
“How have I had the Necronomicon with me this entire time?” I gasped.
“It’s a powerful book.” He said. “Open it.”
“I don’t want to.” I struggled for words.
He reached around to his hip and grabbed his pistol. “Open it, now.” He demanded.
My hand trembled as I pushed it to move over the book, I was barely able to move at all. I lifted the cover and piece of leather with red fragments of hair around the top slid out of the book. I slowly recognized it to be the remains of a human face. As I touched it, I began to remember. I could see this little girl tied on a rock crying. I watched my hands slide a box blade down the edges of her face as Nelson held her still. My stomach turned, I wanted to throw up, but I couldn’t. He blood shooting all over my face and hands. Nelson laughing. I couldn’t breathe.
“Please.” I looked up at him with tears in my eyes. “I can’t live with myself. Please.” I begged.
He put the gun away. “No, death would be too good for you.” He turned away from me and picked up the hotel phone. “Help, help.” He cried into the phone, his voice as delicate as a woman. “He’s going to kill me.” He cried again then hung up the phone.
He looked at me one last time his eyes flashed red just for a second. “I’ll see you in hell.” He said. Then he turned and just walked out of the room. I could hear police sirens on the street. The room phone rang again. I tried to get up to answer it, but my legs still didn’t work.
