Hell’s Orchestrator

I pushed up the stairs towards the tenth floor of his building–a high rise of dark, stained concrete. My pulse doubled, nervousness and blood pumping into my legs. I stopped on a floor landing to see how many I’d made. Eight. I thought there would have been an elevator. Maybe there was and he tried to tell me, but it wasn’t until I tried to open the locked lobby door at the end of the shitty courtyard filled with dead grass and dry shrubs that I realized I left my phone. Inside, the lobby looked drab. Fluorescent lights prostate and lined up in their coffin fixtures above short, grey carpet. I wanted to blow him off; not for retaliation, just for ease. Tell him I got lost. It wouldn’t be a lie.

I reached the tenth floor, counting the apartment numbers as I went along. The room numbers stopped before his. I went back and forth, up and back down again, trying. Leaned against the railing, trying to see the ground through the mosaic patterns cut out of the cinderblocks that walled the building off from the rest of the world, probably so nobody fell or jumped. The wind was fast this high up, whipping my hair against my face with malice.

A door opened behind me. Fear poured from nowhere into my stomach up to my cheeks. I turned around. An older man stood obscured by darkness and the chain lock.

“What do you need?” He said in a quiet and strange accent.

“Sorry, I’m looking for my friend’s apartment,” I said.

“Never seen you before.”

“Sorry, I’m not from around here, not originally, I–” he interrupted me but I couldn’t make out what he said. “What?” I asked. He said it louder and I still couldn’t make it out. I almost went along with it. “I’m so sorry, what?” I asked again, afraid he would burst through the door.

“Room. Number.” He said.

“1013.” His eye shrunk to a slit and stayed there uncomfortably long. A finger came out, curled pointing down the walkway.

“Around the corner.” I would have thanked him had there been time to before he slammed the door shut. I walked to the end of the walkway which I failed to notice wrapped around the outside of the building. The doors on my left and a view of the city to my right, partitioned by the imperfectly shaped holes in the cinder. Looking at it was like watching an airplane overhead against night. Inviting somehow.

I found his room. I felt nervous again and wished I had gone back after all, cursing the old man for helping me. I closed my eyes against this endless cycle, envisioning myself as something wholly different from me so I could do what came next. I knocked on the door. The little sliver of light refracted through the peephole went dark. Mason opened the door wearing clunky headphones attached by limp wire to a controller in his other hand. A few greasy strands of hair fallen from underneath the headphones hung in his always smiling, always welcoming face.

“Henry! Come on in, take a seat, take off your coat and stay awhile, all that shit. Stretch your legs after all those stairs,” he said as he skipped back to his chair. I took my shoes off. I held my coat, looking around for a coat hanger that did not exist. I made an “uh” sound, and without turning to look–

“Throw it on the floor for all I care,” he said. I draped it over the back of the loveseat next to his chair. “Almost done with this match.”

“No worries,” I said. The place was lit by a small lamp, a meager light as if it might die soon, flickering so rapidly you could only see it on the drywall where it cast tiny shadows of the texture. He had a few framed…well I couldn’t tell what they were. In the poor lighting they appeared like blurry images of moving body parts taken in darkness. I sat down on the couch to watch him play this bloody shooter I didn’t recognize as he ran around with a knife, sneaking up on other players to trigger an animation. His character held the other by the hair and ran the serrated blade back and forth a couple times on the other guy’s neck.

“I don’t recognize this one,” I said.

“Wouldn’t expect you to,” He said.

“Why is that?”

“It’s banned in the U.S. and a few other countries. Came out a few years ago but sales

were halted.”

“How’d you get your hands on it?”

“Oh, well I’m part of this online group that works in restoring and working on

forgotten games and such. You wanna hop in for a round?”

“No, I haven’t played a shooter in forever, I’m afraid I would suck.”

“What have you been playing?” He asked.

“Nothing since moving here. I haven’t really had the time.” His round was over and he

was at the top of the leaderboard. He threw off his headphones dramatically.

“Well then, without further ado,” he said, stomping down the dark hallway to the right of the T.V. set. Then it was quiet. I looked around the place again finding nothing new but dark spaces. What’s worse, the place lacked windows from what I could see. Just a closed off box inside of a closed off tower. Could you even maintain fresh air to breath in a place like that? My bouncing shoe made the only sound throughout the place; everytime I noticed it I stopped myself, and everytime I forgot and took it up again.

“Close your eyes,” his voice came from out of the room, only then I noticed his one eye peeking from behind the hall corner, watching me as I unknowingly chewed away at the loose hanging skin around my fingernails.

“Uh,” was all I could manage.

“Just fucking do it,” he said a little aggressively. I forced a laugh. Once my eyes were closed I thought again to that player’s violent end. His footsteps compressed the carpet, getting closer. I opened my eyes into an indiscernible squint and saw him kneeled before the T.V. unraveling wires. I closed them again. A switch flipped and a light glowed through my eyelids riding on buzzing drone like old synthesizers that melded into each other before silent blackness again. I knew what came next.

“Who is responsible for this hell,” we both spoke alongside the voice from the opening of Hell’s Orchestrator. I opened my eyes to the pixelated and jagged edged menu screen as a lighting strike formed the title. “Holy shit, this is an original copy, how did you get your hands on this?”

“Never took them off,” Mason said with a smile.

“Do you know how much this goes for these days?” I asked.

“Not enough.”

“It’s been so many years,” I said. The melancholy caress of nostalgia.

“The search is over my friend,” he said with a controller extended my way. I took it with a substantial feeling like a revelation that I had held myself back with muddled intuition from good things, but there I was. I remembered the giddiness of fear when he pressed start; the odd fabricated sounds coming from pointy faced demons created from code to kill you, the player.

He skipped the cut scene, which bothered me, but I decided not to say anything. We started out in the strange little cabin room. There were two lanterns on the table instead of the usual single lantern; something I’d never seen before having never played with another person. We stepped out into the world that was rendered to represent hell as a closed space however fleshly alive in its horrible textures. I had to orient myself to the tank controls, those brilliant movements so terrifying in their confinement. I almost ran through the door I always started with when I was young before he stopped me to go through another one across the way. He knew exactly what he was doing, whereas I had never really known the full layout of the first level. We went back through, running down the red-dark halls until I found the door marked by an insignia.

“I never did manage to see what was behind here,” I said. He opened it. I looked at him and he just smiled at me. “How did you do that?”

“Cheat cartridge,” he said. I didn’t notice until then that there was an adapter underneath the game itself–clunkier than the regular market ones. His stare remained on me as long as the loading screen, and I looked at him once to make sure it wasn’t a trick of my eye. He kept looking, completely expressionless like he was waiting for a reaction.

It loaded. The room was too big for the flashlight to illuminate it all. One of the demons hopped out of the dark in front of me. Mason shot us both. My side of the split screen pronounced my death.

“I didn’t know you could friendly-fire in this,” I said and he laughed. He kept laughing.

“I’ll revive you,” he said. Back in the save room I was revived. I went to the door and he said “hold on.” When I stopped I could hear him click the shooting button, but nothing happened.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. We went back to the secret door. This time I went forward to open it, but as I did he shot me again. Laughter screeched out of him. Loud, hysterical laughter as he looked right at me. Goosebumps raised all over, tightened my scalp.

“Come on, man,” I said. The calm I gathered in such short time was falling away, exposing me.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said, his laughter lowered to a chuckle. “You get three seconds head start to make it to that room before I kill you.”

“Mmm, I don’t know,” I said. “I kind of just want to see the room.”

“Go,” he said and I ran for some reason. He seemed so set, and I already tried saying no. I was running about in the hallways without knowing which path to follow, and as he followed he kept on with the quiet, drooling chuckle. The insignia glowed its promise of safety ahead. He sat back, wiped his mouth.

“Beatcha,” I tried to say. He let it go once we got in. I kept my breath short, feeling as though I might choke and sob if I really took in a full breath. He showed me to a hidden chest. Inside floated a tape the cover of which looked just like the smeary pictures on his apartment walls. The light from the T.V. made it clearer to me that it was an actual photograph, one of a person coated in splotchy low resolution red. Mason was watching me again, scanning my face for reactions as if he had personal stakes in them. The tape was titled “JAY’S DEAD.” Underneath: WATCH/STORE?

I stood up.

“Where’s the bathroom at?” I asked while wiping my sweaty hands across my pants.

“Aren’t you going to watch?” He asked.

“I’ve been holding it.”

“There,” he pointed. I went to the first door in the hallway and opened into a line of hung up clothing and coats. That shrill laughter again.

“Very funny,” I said. The hallway light switch made an empty click and no light. I used

the ghostly, blue light on my keychain. It shined off of two doorknobs. I went deeper, using the light to see into the next room as I pushed the door ajar, afraid like something far worse than a closet might be waiting for me. A waft of colder air came from the barren, windowless white walls. There was only a twin mattress on a metal frame. I pushed the door open a bit more, peaking through, and I found a desktop computer bigger than any I’d ever seen, and in the darkness it seemed to have ports of unknown use all over. I went for the last door, quickly opening and closing it behind me.

There was no door knob lock, but a heavy deadbolt with a thud like a vault door. His laughter had stopped. My hands glided over the lumpy wall in search of a switch. I went to the mirror and looked on either side, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. His footsteps marched down the hallway. I leaned against the door ready to hold it back, holding hope that a serrated blade wouldn’t enter me through the door. The light came on.

“Gonna need that,” he said as he giggled away. It came as no surprise that there was no window. The bathroom was the very corner of the apartment that seemingly had only one way in and out, but I felt strangely okay. The feeling held no permanence, I knew, but seeing everything around me, though under the light of yet another dying bulb, behind a deadbolt clearly stronger than anything this building’s owner would have had installed, was comforting in comparison to the dark halls and rooms surrounding me in the living room. Alone at least. I considered that I might have skewed the situation before I even arrived the way I always do. I tried to calm myself in the mirror. I did all of the things I was told to do: paid attention to the pissy smell, hum of the bulb, the feeling of my breath. Yet doubt burned a fire behind my face. Too far gone at a point, I had to leave. I took another moment in the comfort of the light.

I unlatched the deadbolt and opened the door. The light from the bathroom illuminated at least the hallway, which screamed silently into the perfect dark space beyond. The game was repeating a short, barely recognizable loop like it had frozen. I called out to no answer. I felt an instinct to run for the door, but I couldn’t will myself to. I stood at the edge of the hallway, seeing now that the T.V. was darkened but not off, emitting enough light to make out the shapes of chairs like crouching men and the softest glimmer on the doorknob like divine signaling. It wasn’t frozen either. Distorted in static waves was an enlarged version of the tape’s image, an actual person covered in something like blood surrounded by blackness. I walked towards the door, and came upon the shape of him like a living shadow.

“Hey, man, I…I got a text,” I said. He moved at me, reaching towards my belt. I stepped back and he got closer. A knock at the door fired off like gunshots. Like in the worst of dreams, I couldn’t will myself to make any sound. We both stood still in the dark, and then they returned as slams. He turned around and opened the door to a very bright flashlight. The flashlight moved back against the railing outside.

“No guests, it’s too late.” It sounded like the man from before. Mason mumbled a name in reply but the man shouted back.

“He must leave. Now!” the man said. I took it upon myself to struggle past Mason, I think he grabbed my shirt, but I pushed my way out. I followed the man who was now dressed in all white pressed slacks and an orderly button up, looking back only once to see the face of Mason’s lonely goodbye. I followed, trying to keep up pace. Before turning a corner, I saw between the empty spaces in the blocks a plane lifting higher, higher, leaving us all behind.

“What’s going on?” I asked. He only slammed his door shut behind him without ever looking at me. I ran down the stairs and out towards the city.