Book Six, Chapter 19: The Fever Dream

I was there, in the pit.

I had thought about it since the beginning of the storyline, since before I knew that Hell was a literal, physical place. Somehow, I had known I would have to go there. Maybe I had seen it in a dream.

Maybe I had known what was going to happen.

Because, as I came to my senses at the bottom of a very long slide, I started to realize that I remembered far more of my nightmares from the previous nights than I could have recalled initially.

Everything was familiar. Too familiar.

I looked behind me as I stood up. There was no slide. I’d never seen a slide. But I had the sensation of riding down one as I fell into Hell.

Above was only darkness, and behind me was a dark cavern with arcade games stuck in the walls, as if they’d been excavated halfway by some very confused archaeologists.

Hell was a fever dream, the kind you have, and then you wake up needing to puke.

The arcade games were live and beeping, playing their music into the darkness. If I had been brave enough to try, I was sure they would have been functional. They looked so real.

Hell was a dark inversion, a mockery of the world above, or at least this type of Hell was. It was not a spiritual Hell, although that place seemed to exist in this lore as well.

It was a trap that I had just dove into.

I looked all around.

It wasn’t all arcade games. There were tables, the exact same ones that were used in the restaurant above, stacked on top of each other and fused together, leg to tabletop, as if they had grown out of each other.

And maybe they had.

“Riley,” a voice called out to me. Ramona’s voice.

This was a physical place, so it made sense that we would be near each other, having entered one right after another.

The voice came from beyond the giant stack of tables that grew one from another.

“Ramona,” I called out. We were Off-Screen. I did not need to be too careful.

Or so I thought.

I started contemplating how I, or she, might be able to crawl through the thicket of table and chair. It was densely packed. More like a jungle plant than furniture.

I observed it carefully.

There was something so strange, not just in the fact that it was logically bizarre.

I felt a deep unease in my stomach, staring at the mass of plastic checkered tablecloths. The canisters of red pepper flakes and parmesan cheese were stuck to the tops of the tables, even the ones that were upside down.

I knew I should be walking in that direction. I had just heard Ramona. But something stopped me.

Something that I had never been particularly good at listening to. But now, there was nothing left to drown it out.

My grandmother’s gift, of course.

My background trope gave me slight psychic powers. But that was meaningless in and of itself. It didn’t list out the abilities of those powers. They varied from storyline to storyline. That was the hazard of being a psychic: you never knew what you were going to get.

Something told me to be very afraid of those tables.

And I realized, as I stared at them, that I could not see them on the red wallpaper. Worse, I realized I couldn’t see anything on the red wallpaper.

Nothing at all.

That must have been a trope. I knew I might have missed some. Trying to remember things that you dreamed the night before was difficult enough; needing that information in a life-or-death circumstance the next day was a cruel joke.

Had I dreamed of a trope that would turn the red wallpaper dark except for the glowing of my status indicators?

Since I had seen the red wallpaper in person, I knew that what had happened was that the lights that shone down on it had been turned off. And I couldn’t see anything posted there.

It was darkness except for those status indicators, which always looked like elevator buttons to me.

I wasn’t Written Off. That was good news. I wasn’t Dead, nor was I Captured.

But I suspected that beyond the darkness, there was a poster there, for some type of monster that looked like a perfectly innocent amalgamation of props.

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“Riley,” the voice called out again. “Where are you? I can’t see. It’s dark. I can’t move. I need you.”

Ramona would never say that.

“Don’t,” another voice called out from over by the arcade machines, where they stuck out like little gems in a loaded mine, beeping and blasting soft, dreary game music.

“I’m over here,” that second voice called again—still Ramona’s.

“Well, now I’m starting to grow suspicious,” I said sarcastically.

Hell wasn’t just a trap; it was filled with traps.

If I couldn’t go toward the tables, and I couldn’t go toward the arcade machines leading down the dark cavern, my only other option was to go out a doorway behind me.

Perhaps I was silly not to have considered it before, but then again, the furniture was calling to me.

I slowly backed away, keeping my eyes on the tables, and headed for the door.

The jig was up, and the tables knew it.

Because whatever ability allowed them to look like tables suddenly allowed them to look like themselves.

And themselves was horrific.

They looked like a spider, but at the end of every leg was another spider. And multiple spiders would lead to the same spider.

That’s how my dumb brain interpreted what I was seeing as the tablecloths changed color and grew hair.

It was one beast, like some hairy latticed worm, but with all the charm and grace of a centipede.

Luckily, striking out toward me was not its goal. Instead, the mass of hairy legs and bodies withdrew into the dark place beyond the tables.

I didn’t stick around to see much more of it or try to see what the arcade amalgamation turned into.

I was through the door and walking on black and white checkered tile, the same that we had in the back kitchens.

In fact, I was walking through a maze made of back kitchens. The details were remarkable. The only thing they were missing were the ovens.