---

Beverly did not regret many things. The way she treated unworthy boys in high school, the way she schmoozed and seduced her way through life, how lavishly she spent money on fanciful whims; it was all simply her natural state of doing things. They were expected of her, and she had no problem meeting expectations. But, if there was one thing she now regretted, it was a brief lapse in high consumerist tastes at the first sight of this advertisement on an online celebrity news source:

“Curious what path lies between you and the afterlife? Come read your Horrorscope – Consult the universe on the parameters by which you shall pass, perish, and otherwise find peace!”

So morbid, so nouveau, the Horrorscope had taken her broad social circle by storm. Everyone and their dog was looking into the revelations of this bizarre site that offered insight into what was both taboo and tantalizing. How could one not be curious, if not about their own demise, at least how they would stack up to their peers when confiding the parameters of how they might kick the bucket? Beverly was not one to cave in to fads, rather she was the one to set them, but of course she had to take stock in what was the talk of today for utilization across her social platforms. So, one afternoon, she clicked on the site, filled out the personality chart, and input her astrological sign.

The result convinced her eyes to almost bug out of her skull and ruin her labored facial.

“Your Horrorscope is: Beverly’s death will come when she least expects it, and catch her mid-shit on a toilet. At least your spirit will be flushed away.”

How degrading! There was no way she could share such a disgusting and undignified end with her followers. How would that effect the mental picture of her she worked so hard to instill in them? It would corrupt all her hard work – the legacy of being an internet idol. Stifling the surmounting worry that there might be some actual foresight to this stupid little game, Beverly took a strong stance in her vlogs on the side of Horrorscope deniers, and vocally refused to become indoctrinated by what was just another pathetic popular form of marginalization – between those gifted with admirable demises and those condemned to lowly deaths.

Beverly amassed quite a following, rising to become one of the higher ranking members in that unspoken club of influencers who thought bad omens should not be used as a new tool in class wars. She was doing what she considered important work – standing up for those who, like her (though no one knew), got a shoddy shake at this whole Final Destination thing, and were determined not to let it define them.

Then the first Horrorscope came true. It was one of the bad ones, too. Early in the morning on Wildcat Beach, a stockbroker was discovered deceased, victim to a heart attack that stole him away in the middle of intercourse with his lover. But the Horrorscope was not his, no, for he took life too seriously to take stock in such stuff and nonsense. No, the bad fortune was his lover’s, who took him to that beach in the hopes of reaffirming his love for her when her Horrorscope unveiled that “The one you cherish most will crush you under the burden of his love.” Being an artsy type, she read into its meaning and concluded that the burden referred to was the concealment of his affair from his wife, and she became worried he would kill her to cover it up. But, instead of splitting, the woman doubled down and poured her all into making every moment he spent with her as exciting as possible. So exciting, that the stockbroker’s high blood pressure finally caught up with him and he passed away from a heart attack right there on the beach. Right there, right on top of his lover, pressing her into the sand with all two hundred and fifty pounds of his once muscular – now dead – weight, and she, trapped in place by a combination of that weight, the shifting sands, and his terminal erection, was so bereft of air that she couldn’t call for help. Worse, in the art of her secrecy, she had procured the perfect spot to conceal their deeds from the view of beachgoers. That did not conceal them from the tide, however; she drowned beneath the burden of her dead lover as the waters came lapping. They were the only ones to answer her wispy wet cries.

As soon as this first demise foretold by the Horrorscope was confirmed on forums by both the faction that supported its prophecies and the faction that denied them, a flood of new death accounts were immediately marked on public record. Everything from the simple to the complex, from a mere car accident to a shark attack on a golf course, was relayed by that cryptic online oracle and many were coming true within a few weeks. When the Horrorscope site was finally flagged and taken offline (many speculated by the CIA), it only heightened its reputation, and the millions across the world who fed into the mysticism held tightly onto the morbid ticket to the afterlife it once gifted them as a cause for celebration, victimhood, or just to seem interesting at parties.

At first, little changed for Beverly. She had dismissed the Horrorscope’s prediction, and continued her important social services as if it held no power over her mind or her deeds. But then the death toll rose, and she found herself plagued by neuroses. Sure, that whore drowning on the beach fixated on the end of her dead lover’s parasol was perhaps as embarrassing as her own possible fate, but everyone only talked about how she got what she deserved. I don’t deserve something like that, thought Beverly with mounting remorse that she could no longer gather a class act suit against the people in charge of that dreadful website. And why was her misfortune spoken so flatly, with the sardonic little quip after it? Everyone else seemed to get riddles that only hinted how they would die; the golfer who got eaten by the shark had a Horrorscope that read “You will choke on the first bite of an eighteen course meal.” That could have been read any manner of ways, and wasn’t even that close to what happened when you read it with more disciplined expectations. But Beverly’s fortune? There was no art, no mystery, no buffer. She would die on the toilet, halfway through a dump. And she couldn’t live with that.

Her fans noticed first. “Is Beverly losing weight?” “You look better than ever, Bev!” “Damn, as if you weren’t skinny enough, bean-pole.” The replies below her videos were overrun with comments about her looks, because she was, indeed, losing weight at a rapid pace. Combined with her nerves, she continued losing it until her appearance was almost haggard, and her makeup tutorials took twice as long to fill out her sunken cheeks and eyes.

Beverly’s solution to avoiding the Horrorscope – at least until it was proven to be a conspiracy or the fulfillment rate skewed in a more negative direction – was to avoid the urge to go number two. She would eat, let the meal digest for a day or two, then gag herself until it all spurted out the chimney, and instead of sliding down the plumbing. Naturally that led down a path to anorexia, but she was certain that, so long as she convinced herself her body was absorbing enough nutrients, then her body was absorbing enough nutrients. She saw some doctor say it on his channel somewhere that the necessary part of digestion finishes up in a little under forty-eight hours.

As a month waned on since she read her Horrorscope, Beverly became acute to an all-encompassing pain. We know, of course, this was most likely due to a combination of stress and starvation, but it is not always easy to root out the primary sources of pain when there are so many to choose from. She determined it was existential: the pain of all the good work she did on her channel to influence viewers measuring not much higher than a hill of beans in the universe’s “big picture.” This perspective was justified as she continued losing control of her audience, which seemed obsessed not with what she tried to convince them to obsess over, but with the Horrorscope and its mysteries. She felt her presence was slipping away, even on her own fan pages, and every tweet was plagued with replies to “Scope it Out.” Her body numbed inside and out, Beverly wondered if it would be best that she take control of her fate and put the Horrorscope to rest once and for all. So, while taking the subway one evening, and not totally in a stable state of mind, Beverly sighed and stepped off the lip of the platform.

The train missed. There were no other tracks to switch to, but switch tracks it did all the same. Beverly heard the roar of the locomotive go rushing by and away, and lay there on the tracks dumbstruck until the authorities pulled her up and sent her off with a slap on the wrist for being such a clumsy girl. When she got home, she wondered stupidly about it only a little while before grabbing a steak knife and making an attempt at bloodying her wrists. Even then! She was unable to connect; every time she tried to align blade to skin, she would press down the knife on the table as if her arm jumped through time and space to avoid being abused in that way. Hyperventilating, she tried to hang herself with a makeshift noose made from her high-end Balenciaga and Saint Laurent belts. Even then! Everything the belts hung from broke before she even had a chance to tie them around her neck – and she was so skinny by this point, there was no chance of weighing too much anyways.

Hyperventilating, Beverly refused to come to terms with her situation. Over the next week, she tried every artful suicide attempt she could think of – to no avail. Tubs drained, electrical outlets shorted, and, if there was no chance in the object failing to kill her, then her perception was inexplicably altered so that she could not carry out the deed. She was mortified. – How much control over her own life did she truly have if she couldn’t even die how she wanted?
One day, while she was listlessly scrolling what Horrorscope her followers were debating this time, Beverly’s eyes singled out a name that popped up frequently in posts from her neighborhood: “The Cement Stalker.” Apparently, this was a serial killer who would drug his victims before burying them alive in cement – sometimes as a statue, a work of art, or just in the foundation of a construction site. Either way, his prey always became one with the pavement. There had been a shortage in Cement Stalker killings over the past month, since the Horrorscope warned many of his future victims, and he didn’t seem to want to take any chances on being caught to satisfy his artistic spirit. It dawned on Beverly, at the same time dawned on her that the only one who might change her death was someone other than herself, that this “Cement Stalker” was the answer to her dark prayers. Maybe she wouldn’t have to waste away in her own waste after all.

Beverly could have been a detective in another life, if she didn’t find the work so unimportant. Thanks to the tireless resources of her fans’ speculations, she was able to narrow down the type of women the Cement Stalker liked to pick off, the type of bars he frequented, and how he might approach them. There were many hits and misses, but she was eventually approached by a handsome middle-aged man in a Cajun dive bar that just had to be the sociopath she was looking for. And, to test the waters, she flat-out asked him if he was.

He seemed surprised. But, considering she was not put off, and even seemed attracted to the possibility, he confirmed that he was, indeed, the Cement Stalker of internet fame. Relieved to have found her way out, Beverly immediately spilled her plight to him over her fourth dry martini, explaining the fecal matters of her Horrorscope and explaining why exactly she had sought him out. He was her knight in bloody armor, and she only asked that he kill her before burying her in cement, not after; at least her name would live on as the highest profile victim he had claimed yet, and she could rest easy knowing her legacy was secured.

As soon as Beverly had completed relieving herself, or at least paused long enough to take a breath, the Cement Stalker made it perfectly clear that he was not totally on board with this plan. Firstly, she was a high profile internet celebrity, and the last thing he wanted to do was paint a target on his back that police might actually be able to track thanks to the completely open trail necessitated by her job as a completely open person. Secondly, he didn’t want to take the chance of upsetting whatever powers presided over the Horrorscope; clearly something bigger was playing this little game, and he had no intentions of usurping its control over the fate it dictated for Beverly. Thirdly, lastly, and most importantly, the Cement Stalker did not take too kindly at being used and thrown away as just a tool Beverly could use to get the death she wanted. He felt she was not taking into account his feelings, the attachment and creative inspiration required to perform to absolute perfection; he felt she was manipulating him for her own selfish ends. Plus, he could see this was all driving her just a little bit crazy – as a rule of thumb, even though he was starved for action, he only killed normal girls. Avoid crazies like the plague if you want to keep pursuing your calling in life.

Beverly threatened to go to the police after being refused, hoping he might kill her to shut her up. But the Cement Stalker did her one better: he threatened to show she was a hypocrite to all her fans, and make public the embarrassing circumstances of her kicking the chamberpot. It was a stalemate, and Beverly left the serial killer behind unsatisfied.

Murder was her best chance at escaping the end that awaited her. She tried once more at jumping off a building, but a crane swung out and caught her ten feet down, and she gave up entirely at trying to off herself. Despondent and deterred, Beverly returned to her apartment, and started recording a plug video for her sponsors. Even when she was gone, hopefully her channel continued to make an impact on people’s lives, like convincing them to invest in nifty life-changing cosmetics.

That’s when it hit her…when she was gone. The circumstances of her death were not peculiar actually, since most old people died shitting their pants. Was that Horrorscope not just dictating that she would die of old age? All the feeling returned to her limbs, and she laughed at her own nearsightedness. Surely, that’s what it meant! How could she be so hasty, so eager to cave in to neuroses. Beverly laughed so hard she thought she might actually kill herself from asphyxiation, and finished up the video with a renewed skip in her step. She vowed to never focus on the future with such obsession ever again, and to make sure that she gave her all at reassuring her fans to live in the present moment, and not to fear the death that awaits us all.

Beverly was so moved by her enlightenment that she didn’t notice one of those L.A. earthquakes now moving the apartment building, until the walls began to crumble and cave around her. She just kind of stood there, foolishly overconfident, watching her material possessions crushed and her painstakingly decorated backdrop torn apart. She knew, laughing to herself, that no earthquake could kill her, and she was going to go on to live a long, healthy, important life for so long as the Horrorscope had power over the future. This was beyond her, this was beyond Mother Nature – this was Destiny.

The floor gave way beneath Beverly, and she knew she was falling. She expected some stray rod to catch her by the seat of her Lululemon leggings, or some plush bed to break her fall. Those expectations vanished with a crunch as she suddenly felt every brittle bone in her butt and lower spine splinter like a bundle of raw spaghetti broken in half. Every nerve ending was on fire near her belly, veins popping as they strained in her uncomfortable slouched position in the bowels of the imploding apartment building, six floors down from the ruins of her room. Gasping for air, lungs sagging from a shard of rib that had punctured through both of them, Beverly faintly considered that the Horrorscope only ever promised death, not the pains of living. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but Beverly couldn’t say for sure if she wanted to get stronger now; she couldn’t feel below her waist, and that was a pretty clear sign she was now paralyzed down there.

Beverly’s senses adjusted to the darkness, but her consciousness was fading fast. She held on for as long as she could, refusing to let her mind rest when she needed to fight harder than ever. She quickly regretted her own determination. By holding on, by allowing herself to adjust to her situation, Beverly became aware of two things: where she landed reeked something awful, and the only things sharing the room with her bore a close resemblance to a sink and a bathtub.

When news of Beverly’s death in an earthquake made its rounds on social media, the reaction was not exactly what she expected. Her hypocrisy never surfaced, no one was ever the wiser to the inner torments she had endured. Rather, everyone mused at just how fortunate she was never to have read her Horrorscope…What an awful effect that would have had on her psyche! And, as luck would have it, Beverly’s was the last bizarre death to have any relation to the Horrorscope factions. Both sides died down not long after, as did their class warfare, since the site was no longer turning out fodder for their amusement. The Horrorscope was eventually designated an urban legend, and many scholars brought to light doubts on the scope of its predictions in retrospect. The ratio, at least, was proven to be drastically over-exaggerated in the site’s favor.

Beverly went down in influencer history as having such an abundance of grace, class, and luck, that, even in death, even when being crushed by a collapsing building, she managed to find a toilet rather than shit herself. It was actually seen by the internet community as somewhat admirable, a pinch virtuous, and even maybe even a touch miraculous. Perhaps Beverly would have been relieved to know that was the way in which she was remembered post mortem, for the luck of the event, and not for the putrid nature of the act itself.

Nevertheless, Beverly’s end was all she was remembered for. Her hair-care tips, her shopping woes, her gaming videos flaunting her breasts in exchange for tips – all her important work – was lost to time. She would have been mortified to discover that all her influencing rarely influenced anyone at all, drowned out by the next loud voice coming along to add to the white noise. Instead, Beverly was immortalized by her death. Everything that might have been more meaningful, made an impact, was completely overshadowed by the absurdity of her demise. It was almost more pathetic than the demise itself, and one might even consider her lucky she was not around to watch it happen. Worst case scenario, she might have tried in vain to change that inevitability – just as she tried to change the blunt decree of the unerring Horrorscope.

---

---

I thought I once new the definition of the term, “obsession.” The way addicts feel about drugs, the way a boy can feel about a girl when he doesn’t know any better, or vice versa, of course…Not that it matters, now that I truly know what being obsessed is, after twenty-two years of failing to put that label on it when it was so plain, so clear, my eyes couldn’t believe what they were seeing. No one else believed, either, and now I’m not so sure what I saw.

This is my farewell address to obsession.

Twenty-two years ago, I was in tenth grade. It was a good grade, not the kind that made you too worried about life after high school just yet, but did remind you occasionally that it was time to start putting your hens in a coop and testing the egg quality. My close buddy Elijah and I, however, didn’t care. At all. I mean, we would dream big dreams, but they were the fantasy of two little idiots who did nothing but play video games and watch television all day. Most others outgrew that concept of make-believe, but not us, no – these simulated experiences were real enough to us, and sharing them bonded us closer than any sports team or job would. Ignorance is bliss, you know – heavenly, even, if you’ve got someone on cloud nine with you. Then you’re guaranteed to grow never the wiser.

We were walking to the train station one spring Thursday after school, when Elijah stopped abruptly to listen to the wind or something. I stopped, too. It was peaceful, just to stop for a moment, in a world where no one can afford to – especially when you start to wonder if you weren’t standing still already. I needed stimulation after a hard day of learning nothing, and whacked him in the back of his calves with my umbrella to hurry home so we could break out the console.

He started as if out of a trance; I never even noticed he had been in one.

“You hear that?”

“What, the wind?”

“Yeah…But there’s something there, in it…”

I snorted and gave Elijah space, thinking he had passed gas in my general direction as a joke, but he had already darted off to an office building for sale on the other side of the street. I followed, confused by the whole run-around, but we were stuck in a slow “fortify your settlement” part of the RPG we were playing, so I didn’t mind us being too late to get home.
The office building said it was for sale, renting out space or whatever, but it looked more condemned than anything. The blinds were all tightly shut and the lights were all off, but it must have been open since Elijah slipped right between the revolving doors with no resistance whatsoever. I wondered then, it was like a total change in his character had come over him – Elijah was never quick to make a decision or become interested in anything. What was he hearing that made him so single-minded, and why couldn’t I hear anything but the plain old wind? I gave the revolving doors a push and they gave way with ease.

The inside of the office building was roomy and unremarkable; grey concrete walls with boring block pillars, no rooms or dividers, just empty space.

“Elijah?” I whispered, my voice echoing nonetheless. If the place was for sale, wouldn’t there be some sort of real estate representative who would question us if she found us?

“Over here! You gotta see this!”

I snuck over towards the sound of his voice, keeping an eye out for any vagrants who might be camped out in the shadows somewhere, who might be threatened by our intrusion. I spotted Elijah, across the spacious lobby, staring down a stairwell that was oddly placed on its own adjacent to a wall. He vanished into the frame, and I ran after him with a sudden inexplicable urge to leave him behind welling up in my gut. But, honestly, what had happened to us so far? Nothing…there was no reason to be frightened! But I couldn’t help but feel we shouldn’t be there as I crossed that doorway – my hairs stood on end, and my whole body felt it was forced into a friction with some electrical barrier.

I reached out for Elijah’s arm to guide him back, and accidentally shocked him with static.
“Ow! Crap, sorry, man…”

He didn’t even flinch. Instead, his eyes were reflecting the pulse of colorful lights – I noticed them faintly, playing against a wall to our left as they streamed from the right side, midway down a dark corridor that seemed to stretch onwards into a void. Probably just the basement, but I had no desire to confirm.

We walked towards the darkness at the end of the hallway. Clearly we were heading towards the room with the flashing lights, but I felt that electrical barrier again. This time, it pulled me rather than pushed, right past the room with the lights and straight towards the whimpering mouth of darkness some fifty feet ahead. I was lucky I unconsciously held tightly to Elijah’s shoulder, otherwise I might have kept going straight. Then who knows where I might be?
He turned, and I with him, and it was clear we had stumbled into a vintage arcade. All around us, giant machines with joysticks and flashing screens, advertising the poorly pixellated escape you could hop right into for a few minutes of fun, no prior story necessary. I’ve always seen them as a pathetic excuse for the art, where games are now, but Elijah loved that kind of thing – called it a “portal to another time.”

“Bro, you heard all this down here from across the street?”

Elijah shrugged. He seemed confused now, snapped from his trance, no idea where he was. But that confusion was instantly replaced by thrill as he recognized one of the machines.

“Dude, no way!” he laughed as he ran to the machine. “This is Comet Spelunkers! It’s, like, impossible to find a US import of it.”

“Cool, why don’t you play a round and then we get the heck out of here before someone sees us?”

“Oh,” lolled a voice from behind one of the machines, sending another shiver of static across my skin, “why would you need to worry about that?”

Out stepped a totally ordinary young man, primly trimmed and sharply dressed. He smiled lazily and looked sideways at Elijah.

“If your friend wants to play one of my machines, he’s more than welcome to. This is an arcade, isn’t it? The games out here are meant to be played.”

“You’re the owner, then?”

“I was,” the man sighed, “But everyone seems more interested in PCs and consoles nowadays than these old beauties. We’re about to close up shop.”

“Can you blame them? Don’t have to wander into a creepy basement to use a Playstation.”

The man laughed, but I could tell his attention was focused more on Elijah.

“And what about you, boy? You seem to have a basic knowledge about the history of gaming. Comet Spelunkers is a rare beauty, not many people appreciate its underlying qualities.”

Elijah nodded, entranced by the machine…in fact, he seemed to fall back into that trance as soon as the Shopkeeper wandered onto the scene. I, however, was not buying it, eager to get out of there pronto.

“Actually,” piped up the Shopkeeper, who seemed a bit too excited over two non-paying customers, “I have a new kind of arcade game I’d like to show you. It just came in, and I you two seem like a couple of kids who could really appreciate it.”

He held up his finger for us to hold on a second, and disappeared somewhere between the rows of silent, glowing arcade screens. The squeaky sound of a wheel started up, and he reappeared with an oversized arcade machine. At least, that’s what it was shaped like; the rest of it was like nothing I’d ever seen. The screen was misshapen and jagged, the entire body’s circuitry exposed and glimmering cyber green, but it had way more panels and wires than your typical cabinet. Strangest of all: no joystick, no buttons, only two hand-shaped pads on the control panel.

“Ta-da! The video game of the future, Null Passage. It’s a shooter, RPG, and platformer, so just as good as anything you’d get on a console. All you have to do is put your hands on the pads there, and the machine will take care of the rest. That is, so long as your mind stays open to having fun!”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“What, why not?” puzzled Elijah, who had bought hook line and sinker this creepy gaming overseer’s pitch for nonexistent technology. A console that you could play by simply touching it? That was way too good to be true this early in time – We’re not that modern. I took a step back, my instincts prickling at the humming otherworldly machine despite being slightly drawn to put my hands exactly where it beckoned me to. But I was too slow to make up my mind.

“Oh, c’mon, man!” chortled Elijah, slapping me on the back. “What, do you think this is? Tron? The Last Starfighter? This game looks awesome! One of a kind, at least…you telling me you’re willing to pass up a round on a type of game we’ve never even tried before?”

“It’s life-changing stuff, I can promise you that. You’ll never look at a screen the same way again,” affirmed the less-than-trustworthy Shopkeeper.

I shook my head, though I’m not quite sure why…All those things sounded appealing, you know? But I look back now and understand: I was an overstimulated kid. That’s why you play video games, to stimulate those thrills you can’t normally get in the day-to-day, but when you’re overstimulated, it becomes harder and harder to get those highs.

I felt like I was going into a high right then and there, and for no reason – it scared me.
Elijah shrugged and stepped up to the console. He studied it a bit – I could see some doubt working away at him that was quickly lost in the throes of newness – and placed his palms flat against the panel.

“Well? How do I turn it on?”

As if right on cue, the machine whirred to life. The screen flashed several times before a catchy little jingle started playing.

“Holy cow,” gasped Elijah, shocked at whatever he was seeing on the screen, “These graphics are next-level!”

I didn’t see jack shit. It was a bunch of flashing lights. How come he was able to see it, and I couldn’t? Well, maybe it had something to do with those hand pads…Still, no way I was going to take that chance. Better to leave him to whatever he was seeing and ask him about it later.
The Shopkeeper seemed just as entranced by both the screen and Elijah, so I took the opportunity to do a little exploring. The basement was rather small, with really only about thirty machines or so, and didn’t appear to have any adjacent rooms. In other words, it was the most boring, bland arcade I’d ever seen; that helped me relax a bit. No wonder these folks were going out of business. The Shopkeeper was probably all alone down here playing a few classics for the last time, before they were requisitioned or something.

I wandered back to that strange game Elijah was playing, when I heard the Shopkeeper talking to someone on the phone. I didn’t think anything of it at first, until I realized he was speaking in a foreign language. Like, a really foreign language. He didn’t strike me as being a foreigner, but the appearances didn’t matter so much as the language itself; it sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. Some of the words imitated clucking, mash-mashed with digitized coos. Even stranger, I could hear multiple people on the other line, just barely.

Except, the voices weren’t coming from the phone, but from the other arcade machines.
I dismissed it as just weird, propelled more by my desire to get out of there than any draw to a mystery. I felt my hairs prickling again as I approached the Shopkeeper from behind.
His head suddenly whirled on me, giving me a bit of a jolt, but nothing he did seemed out of a malicious nature, or false pretenses. He was a naturally kind as kind could be – but something about him still itched me the wrong way. I returned his smile as nice as I could.

“What language was that? Pretty cool.”

For once, it seemed like I caught him off guard. His expression settled into one of coolness, and my guards rose again when I realized he was thinking about his answer.

“Pascuenese,” was his response. “It’s a rare language, so I imagine it sounds a bit animalistic to those not accustomed.”

I nodded, but made the mistake of not responding. I could feel his gaze bore down on my face, waiting for me to engage so he could explain himself more perfectly. But I didn’t give him what he wanted, and translated that gaze into my signal to leave.

“Well, well. It was really nice to meet you, but, yeah…Elijah and I have got to get going. Homework stuff, you know?”

The Shopkeeper nodded so fervently that I could have sworn he was only playing along to make a mockery of my unease. He reached out his hand for me to shake it. Without even thinking, I accepted…And nothing happened. Kind of anticlimactic, actually. I walked over to Elijah and pulled him gently from the game.

“C’mon, Elijah, let’s get going.”

Elijah turned as if in a daze and reached out his hand. The Shopkeeper smiled naturally and shook it. Or, I should say, clasped it without the shaking part. Something seemed to pass between them – I can’t explain what, but it felt way off. Then Elijah turned to me, still holding the man’s hand.

“It’s okay. I think I’ll stay here a bit longer.”

“Hold on, you think I’m just going to leave you here with…” I looked nervously at the Shopkeeper, thinking it conveyed all my suspicions to both of them. They both looked at me with the same reassuring smile. I sighed.

“All right. But you better tell your parents, kay? I’m not gonna deal with them.”

“Yeah, sure. See you tomorrow!”

Against my best judgment, and probably my worst decision as a friend ever to anybody, I left Elijah down in that basement with his newfound obsession.

The next day, Elijah didn’t come to school. He probably got by with some fib about spending the night at my house, and I was too nervous to admit what I’d done so I let it churn deservedly in my gut until school ended and I could rush over to that bankrupt arcade as quickly as possible. I tackled the revolving doors in a full-on rush, baseball bat in hand, ready to hand the Shopkeeper his ass at the end of my Mizuno B21.

I skidded down the stairs, and was immediately slowed…that yawning, gaping darkness at the end of the underground tunnel again. Except, this time, it seemed to be pushing me away, like a repelling magnet that made every one of my hairs flutter and float like I was underwater. A hum throbbed in my ears, almost like I was on the inside of a machine, and very, very close to its beating reactor – I actually might have lost my balance completely if I didn’t have the glittering lights of the arcade playing on the wall as a focus. It was like staring down the barrel of a shotgun, and I made sure I was aimed upright with lights on either side in my sights.

Turning slowly in my best attempt to pull away from that unseen force, I finally headed into the arcade, bat aloft and a wild look in my eyes, I’m sure, ready to raise Hell to save my buddy.
I sure felt stupid to see Elijah still playing like a maniac at that exact same creepy machine. I peered around, vision blurring from the adrenaline, I guess, and spotted the Shopkeeper scribbling something on a pad over in a corner. He was distracted, which meant it was time we got the heck out of this basement and never looked back.

“C’mon, Elijah,” I lightly roused him back to reality with a hand on his shoulder, “we gotta go. Everyone’s wondering where you’ve been.”

And…He…He shrugged me off! I couldn’t friggin’ believe it in the moment, that asshole. No matter how much gaming we did, we made sure it never affected our attitudes. On one hand, y’know, so our parents didn’t have extra ammo to lob at our obsession, but also because we – the dynamic, our friendship – always took precedent over whatever game we were playing. And he shrugged me off, without even a word, almost mechanically! He acted like he didn’t even notice me, face almost right up against the screen as if trying to avoid my reasonable concern. Now, I might’ve been tired, I might’ve been scared, but I was pissed more than anything at this point, and stormed over to the Shopkeeper, right up to his smug whimsical face.

“All right, pal, what did you do with my friend last night?”

The Shopkeeper lifted one reptilian eye lazily up to me and gave me a slimy blink. I could tell from that expression alone – this was not the first time he’d met such a confrontation.

“Why, nothing at all. He was enjoying Null Passage so much, I couldn’t bear to pull him away from the screen. Why don’t you just let him keep going, hm? I’m sure we have other games in the arcade you’d prefer. Take a look around.”

He waved his little stylus around as if he couldn’t be bothered with me, and went back to marking on his notepad. That’s when I noticed…he wasn’t writing anything down. Or, maybe he was? But nothing was actually being imprinted on the screen when he’d scribble a letter; I don’t even think those were letters he was writing, now that I try and remember it clearer. Confused as I was, I did notice one thing: the pad was in the exact same style as the machine, with green exposed circuitry and electricity crackling live across the wires. And, as I watched the Shopkeeper whittle away at its surface with his pen, I noticed that the movements of his wrist seemed to correlate with Elijah’s movements. Flick to the right, Elijah’s right hand slams forward; scribble a little, his body convulses; slowly push up while holding, and his head gradually leans back. They were all such minor movements, but it was enough for me to realize this Shopkeeper was potentially worse news than I expected. Nevertheless, I turned around, and started to head out the door.

It was a fake-out, of course. I dashed over to Elijah, linked my arm in the crook of his, and put all my body weight into drawing him away. “DO NOT INTERFERE!” shrieked the Shopkeeper, but he was too late! Can’t stop us now, I was already in the process of dragging my friend out the door.

Then…It was a damn blur. I’m trying my hardest to remember the order of events. That’s what matters most, you know? The order. If you plan on rooting out an obsession, you have to be able to trace it back to its roots, to know the order of events that led to its having a hold on you. Problem for me is, that all came afterwards. And the important stuff – the memory of my best friend, how he was, the conversations we had – it’s all been fading away as extraneous data.

Now, when I think of Elijah, I think of how he reacted when I tried to pull him from that cursed machine. How his fingers were wired into the touchpad, where pulsing electricity disappeared under his fingernails and pulsed just there beneath his skin, free-floating beneath his flesh. How his eyes, those stupid, warm eyes, were overrun by circuitry like the paneling of the Null Passage machine, shimmering green and spitting sparks. And his mouth, yawning further than any human jaw should be able to stretch, wires crawling between his teeth and past his lips, and an inhuman sound similar to an AOL Dial Up modem that was shrill enough to break glass piercing the darkness inside him.

There was that, the last image of my friend. Then there was the Shopkeeper, who hurled very angry words in his pescatarian language, mixed in with other words that definitely sounded more animalistic than anything. He grabbed me by my throat, tearing my hold immediately from Elijah as he swept me out of the arcade. Marching forward swiftly, my feet dangling from the air, he held me up by only one of his scrawny arms. Just. One. Arm. Keep in mind: I was a hefty thirteen year old boy, weighing close to a hundred and sixty pounds of flabby, unmanageable burden. No man of that fella’s stature should have been able to hold me up in the air by one arm, I don’t care what drugs he might’ve been taking! The only answer was, he wasn’t human – that was proven shortly enough. I still had enough faculties to take my bat and beat him over the head with it, until his neck CRACK! Snapped terrifyingly to the side. I thought I killed the man! But on he marched, my throat firmly in hand, milky dead look in his unresponsive sideways gaze, head flopping limply against his shoulder.

Then, there was the last thing…The root of my obsession even now, twenty-two years later. The last thing I considered when worrying about my friend, and the only thing that overtakes my mind when I think about that afternoon. As the Shopkeeper carried me towards the stairs like a broken animatronic, I could see the yawning tunnel behind him, with its contradicting polarity. But this time, it wasn’t darkness at the end. There was no end. There was nothing but a beautiful, infinite light, stretching on and on, spinning, spinning, concrete shadows and the colorful lights of arcade machines reaching out towards the edges of a cosmos that had no edge, and would only stretch your mind out until you, too, no longer had an edge.

This time, I felt both push and pull at the same time, especially when Elijah stepped into view and obscured the center of the tunnel with his gaping grimace, frozen in place by that deafening noise as it merged together with the hum of whatever powered that otherworldly building. His body stretched backwards along the wall, spaghettifying down the tunnel like it was some pocket black hole.

Then the wall cut short my last sighting of Elijah and those mystic lights, reminding me that I was being carried upstairs by the throat at the mercy of this broke-neck automaton. I still don’t know what the Shopkeeper was, I was just terrified what he might do, wondered if I had broken something and now he’d gone out of control, then I open up another Pandora’s box of questions I’ll never discover and run the unnecessary risk of losing my mind to another obsession – the obsession of reasoning something out that seems just on the tip of your synapses, but is still all spark and no cell. I felt him constrict tighter around my throat – for a split-second my heart stopped, thinking he was going to eliminate the sole witness – when his grip suddenly vanished and a solid wall hit me in the back. I tumbled over, shaken, and noticed the sounds and smells of the street before I even noticed the concrete at my fingertips.

The Shopkeeper had thrown me out the revolving door and onto the sidewalk. The door kept spinning, glass miraculously unfazed from the impact of an overweight teenager hurled against its middle. Then it picked up speed, those three revolving doors, faster and faster and faster until CHUNK!

They stopped. A single pane of glass, sheen and flat against the building and permitting no re-entry for me. Which made no sense, since they were definitely built at an angle to each other. Nothing made sense in that building, though…The glass was now one-way, all over the building, and, when I hammered as hard as I could against the door with my bat, I barely made a dent. Then the sun came up. Then I cracked it.

Nothing but damn…Brick! A brick wall, where the revolving doors used to spin, plain as sunlight lighting up their mocking stack inches away from my stupid teary-eyed face.

I kept expecting Elijah to turn back up somewhere, dead or alive. Heck, I even expected some “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” shit, you know? Like, maybe he’d show up and be totally different; productive and ambitious, with charm and wit and a craving to be amongst other people. It didn’t even matter when the worst part came…when I called the police and sent them to his parents’ house after blubbering as many details as I could remember, then ran straight home to my own parents, still jittery and wide-eyed. I can still hear the fear in my mom’s voice:
“Oh, honey, baby! What happened? Are you hurt? Where have you been?”

And then my reply in all its frantic blubbering:
“Something happened to Elijah! I don’t know what it was, but we gotta go back to the arcade and make sure he’s all right! We have to go, now!”

And then, my parents looked at each other, with the slightest bit of pity that it pisses me off recalling it as much as their response sends a chill down my spine:
“Don’t worry, baby. Elijah’s right next to you.”

And you’d be damned right if you bet I jumped. For a moment, even, I thought I saw his shadow, hovering next to me as I whirled around. But there was nothing there.

“Um…Not there, there…Isn’t Elijah the name of your imaginary friend? Or was it Elliot, or Edmund, or…”

Elijah. An imaginary friend. I thought it was some kind of cruel joke to toughen me up or something, but it turns out my parents were convinced I had no friends. Not even Elijah. And when I tried to find some photos or screenshots we’d taken, they were all just me. Just me…And sometimes other people, but only in the younger photos, where his spot was cycled out for some other friend I had long ago.

Elijah, all that he was, and had been, vanished from reality without a trace.

We had a very embarrassing confrontation with his parents after the cops informed them which crazy kid called to report their missing child who apparently never existed in the first place. I’m not going to go over the experience because I’ve never been so humiliated, but, not only had both of them forgotten about Elijah as well, it turns out that his mother is barren. So, not only had Elijah’s parents been brainwashed into thinking they didn’t have a kid, but his mother gets the double-whammy of never getting another kid to replace him – to fill up that hole in her heart I could see in her eyes, a hole I understand now that she felt explicitly at the time but had already numbed herself to after failing to explain its existence.

Of course I never gave up that easily. Every afternoon I staked the building out, watched so many folks of varying ages vanish between its revolving doors; and, with no way of telling that they came out again, I am certain they were met with the same fate as Elijah – whatever the Hell that fate was. Oh, and I did gather the courage to storm the castle gates again. And again. And again. It became a nightly occurrence. But the same thing always happens: as soon as I draw close, the doors stop spinning, and it all turns out to be a trick of skyscraper lights on flat pane of one-way glass that is clearly sitting in the space where a door ought to be. I can only explain what ought to be; what actually is has been eating away at my mind for years. I became so focused on the secret…heh, come to think of it, Elijah became less and less my priority. No, the priority was to answer all my burning questions, before they consumed me. I staked outside the building two weeks in my high school days, masquerading as a hobo right around the corner with a secret camera. All I did was prove to myself that the missing do, in fact, disappear from or are replaced in photographs and writing. Oh, and that the Shopkeeper never came aboveground during that whole stint. Not one stinking’ time.

Anyways, for some reason, I still remember Elijah. I’m the only one I know of who still does…I wonder if that’s only because of the specific feeling his memory inspires in me? Not a feeling of loss, or love, or even fondness. All I feel for Elijah now is what the event I just recounted to you made me feel: envy. I felt the push and pull of those lights, but all he felt was the pull. He not only gained an obsession that night – he had it fulfilled for eternity down the length of that tunnel. All because he had the low discernment to hang around a stranger and play some stupid unconventional video game. Was that why I was rejected, why only I went home that night? Why Ezekiel? Why take him, and not me? Who is there left to direct my frustration at?

It took me a while to get past reasoning what happened to no avail, to finally let that feeling of simmer envy and boil over inside of me. I became a building contractor for our city, to categorize every land sale and manage every building. Well, at least in terms of legalities and the like. All so I would have the distinction – finally fulfilled today in two hours time – of tearing that forsaken building down and digging up the secrets of the arcade, my friend’s disappearance, and my obsession.

So, here’s a toast to all three: Farewell.

Damn it, office phone’s going off in the other room…Probably just the crew calling in to say they’re ready.

“Hello, Nulpass Construction Services, Inc., how can I help you?”

“Hey, boss,” yawned a voice on the other end that I recognized as my main site supervisor for the demolition, Lennox Brown. “We were all just wondering if you were planning on getting down here? I know the demolition of this building was pretty important to you.”

“My clock says nine-thirty. That’s when we were starting, right?”

“Um, noooo…You changed it to seven thirty. Bright and early, as soon as the noise ordinance ends, that’s what you said.”

“What the Hell are you talking about? When did I give you permission to change the times?”

“Hey, hey, no reason for yelling… It was yesterday, boss. You called me yesterday and told me to shift the time up, remember? Christ, calm down, everything went fine! Building was weird, though, I get why you’ve been wanting to blow it up so badly.”

“Weird…how? Did you find something?”

“I mean, not really. But what’s the point in windows if it’s all brick behind them? Kind of defeats the purpose, y’know. And there was some humming noise going on below us if you pressed your ear to the wall. Stopped when the building collapsed, though.”

My heart sank. That was it? Decades of building a business and keeping all the secrets and rage bottled up inside, and this was how the trail was going to end? With the destruction of the arcade only in its physical form, with nothing to show?

I poured another glass of whiskey, mind numb from disappointment.

“But that wasn’t the weirdest thing. There was an old arcade game.”

I lurched forward as feeling returned to my body, sloshing whiskey on the table. My whole body was shivering – anticipating.
“What kind of arcade game? In the basement?”
“Basement, no basement here, boss. Thing was sitting in the middle of the first floor, hooked into the ground all by itself. Whew, nothing like any arcade game I’ve ever seen, either! Looks like the manufacturers forgot to cover it up, got all its wires and stuff exposed. And, like, it looks completely untouched by our explosives. Even turns on fine-

“NOBODY TOUCH IT!”

“Wow. Okay, relax, boss. Then what-“

I slammed the phone down and rushed out the door – had to get there as soon as possible! Null Passage was left behind for a reason, there’s no way the Shopkeeper would abandon it unless he wanted me to find them – To guide me to the place where the lights and shadows converge, at the end of the tunnel. Was this a test? Since I failed to play the game when it would cost me nothing, was this finally my reward for penance at dismissing the first opportunity?

On my drive over, running every stop light as hastily as possible, something else creeped into my mind: Who called Lennox and told him to change the demolition times? There were no voicemails on the office phone, almost as if the inbox was wiped clean. Did someone intercept his call? Impersonate me? Was it someone like the Shopkeeper, someone else from the end of the tunnel? Or…Elijah? I couldn’t help feeling uneasy that, whoever it was, they would bypass me to manipulate my business; as if proving my worth to play Null Passage was not their plan at all. Whatever the reason, I had to be at demolition site now.

When I arrived, my men were having their lunch break just outside the ruins of the building, under tents to block the effects that the Summer sun has on the backs of physical laborers. Mainly the desire to slip into a semi-conscious state that might numb the heat. I roused them with a voice tempered in the forge of impatience.

“So! I see you got the show on the road without my approval. And no one here thought it was strange that I shouldn’t be here? I made this company as transparent as possible – any one of you could have picked up the phone and called me to inform me that the time was changed.”
“But that’s ridiculous, we thought you were the one who changed it!”

“Okay, can you point out who, exactly, was the one who told you that?”

I began to have reservations at the hiring of this crew as they looked stupidly from one to the other, unable to determine who exactly gave the order. You can’t have order without a chain of command, and I didn’t come all this way in the construction and destruction business without a structured system.

“Boss, we’re real sorry, but could you remind us who the supervisor is? They aren’t here right now, or they would’ve already yelled at us, too.”

“Of course.”

Wait. Did I hire a site supervisor for this demolition? I thought I did, otherwise I wouldn’t have known about the time change. Come to think of it, while I’m sitting here looking at the ruins of what was once an abandoned apartment complex, I can’t help but wonder why, exactly, it made me feel so terrible at seeing it in a heap of rubble. Did I have ties to this place? There were some huge blanks where I feel I should be remembering something important – but not even a wisp of recollection is there to fill them in.

“Hm. It seems I failed you today, boys. I could have sworn I’d named a supervisor, I’d do it on the Constitution, even, but seeing as there’s no one around here to step up and admit to changing the time without my permission, I guess there really was no supervisor. My bad, let’s move on. Roger,” I pointed to one of the men I knew could trust, Roger Atwood, and motioned him to follow me, “I’m naming you supervisor while we’re cleaning up.”

As the men packed up their lunch break, I led Roger off to the side. I was in need of some closure.

“Roger, do you think I’m going crazy?”

“No, even though you’re acting pretty strange today. And you’re sure you didn’t change the time?”

“I know I didn’t. How did you find out about it?”

There was a long pause as a look of confusion similar to my own muddled Roger’s face.

“You know, I actually have no freaking idea. That, I mean, uh…Huh. Maybe you really do have a reason to act strange today?”

“That’s not the worst part. I have some vague memory of a need to get down here quickly. Something urgent, as though my whole life was building up to that moment.”

“Now that’s definitely weird, maybe keep that part to yourself.”

“Would it mean anything if I said it had something to do with an arcade game?”

“Nope.”

I dismissed Roger to leave me alone with my thoughts. Whatever my mind was blocking out, it couldn’t close off the emotions related to them. Strong feelings of disappointment, hope, frustration, they were all still there even with no experiences to leech off of.

But it was no use obsessing over them, no helping what I can’t remember; there were more pressing matters at hand, anyways. Something disastrous might have happened if a mistake like this happened again, having no supervisor on site – least of all discovering the time had changed all on its own! I’m sure there was an explanation, but, for now, better to leave it alone and focus on finishing our job strong. Ignorance is bliss, after all – I’m sure it will come back to me eventually.

---