Periphery (First Draft) – Part Three (And Short Horror Game Reviews!)

“See, it’s funny because the reviews are short and so are the games.”

You know the drill by now. It’s another section of this short story that I’ve been working on, one that I would currently call “psychological thriller” and will probably call “suburban horror” by the time that it’s done, but for now also call “Jerry.” You can find part two here. But before we get back to the trials and tribulations of plot vehicle and internal monologue man Daniel, here are a few more burst reviews of horror video games that I’ve played in honor of the spooky season. How’s that for a two-for-one steal?

HORROR GAMES I’VE PLAYED IN THE LAST MONTH OR SO REVIEWED IN TWO SENTENCES OR LESS: OUTSIDERS EDITION

How Fish is Made (2022): What a disgusting game this is. I love it and I will not tell you any more; it’s free and takes fifteen minutes to beat, so play it.

Bloodwash (2021): This game has an irresponsible amount of side content, collectibles, and extras for what would otherwise be maybe a half an hour of game where you try to do your laundry while being chased by a serial killer. That extra content isn’t a bad thing; that, and the voice acting, really make the thing come alive in a visceral way.

Paratopic (2018): Way too much driving and ends right when it seems to be going somewhere, and yet it does everything else so well that I had to play it twice just to be sure I’d seen what I thought I saw. Be seeing you friendo.

Lost in Vivo (2018): The only game on this list that actually made me feel really afeared, Lost In Vivo managed to awaken the primal parts of my brain that I thought endless jumpscares had long since killed off. This game made me a dog person.

Faith (2022): MORTIS. MORTIS.

“Periphery,” By Andy Sima (2022)

Where we left off: 

            My sleep was, thankfully, refreshing, and I awoke outside of the spiral I had dug myself into my last night. But it was anything but dreamless. There was something, once more, as always, beyond the edge of my perception that I couldn’t quite remember about the dream, and it seemed crucial. All I could picture now was a deep, uncomfortable red. Like the color of blood, or a ruby, or the space between stars. No, that wasn’t right. Like blood. That’s more like it.

            I got ready for the day, and I felt better than I had last night. Not by much. But at least the only thing on my mind now was the color red, and not anything else….

…. Except for maybe the homework that I hadn’t finished yesterday. Fucking hell. I had completely forgotten it in my star-filled stupor, and if I didn’t get it done, I would surely fall behind in my astronomy classes. You fucking idiot! It’s alright, though, they weren’t really due for a few days, at least not until tomorrow, and I would have time tonight to work on it, if I didn’t get too much work in my other classes today, and You should have done it last night yeah I should have done it last night but that isn’t going to help me now but how will I ever find the time to make up for it and

            I couldn’t do this. Not again. I can’t start another day like this. It would take some effort, but I had to resist the urge to spiral deeper. It wouldn’t take me anywhere good.

            As I got dressed and threw my, thankfully lighter, books into my backpack, I noted that I had a missed call from my mother. Odd, she didn’t typically call this early. I also had a missed text from last night, something about plans for Thanksgiving. Good, this would give me something to distract myself with on the way to classes.

            I punched in her number and put the phone on speaker as I finished up my breakfast. I went to grab a package of Pop-Tarts for the road, but hesitated. Something about them didn’t feel right. There was something I needed to remember again, and did these Pop-Tarts have something to do with it? No, that wasn’t right. Right? Why would any reasonable person care so much about Pop-Tarts? You aren’t reasonable. Clearly people would dislike me if I liked Pop-Tarts too much. I had to stop thinking about that and move on to

            “Hey bud, how’re you?” my mom’s voice pierced through my thoughts. I scooped up my phone, shut off speaker mode, and put it to my ear as I locked the apartment door behind me. I made my way through the grimy cement hallway, down the stairs and making sure to avoid the uncomfortably piss-colored stains at the ground floor landing.

            “I’m alright, I guess,” I said, not untruthfully. “I’ve been thinking more about that telescope.”

            “What about it?” she asked. “You got a minute to talk about plane tickets first, though? For Thanksgiving? We’re gonna go try and see your aunt and uncle.  What do you think?”

            “Sounds fine to me. I have classes until that Tuesday before,” I replied, not entirely sure if that was correct. But it had to be. Why would I say it if I didn’t remember it?

            “Great, that’s all I needed to know!” she said. “I’ll just change the date and… done! Sweet, we’ve got plane tickets now. So, what did you want to talk about?”

            I crossed the busy street separating the quadrangle of classical educational buildings from the rapidly developing mid-urban sprawl of the surrounding student housing, passing into the center of campus. I checked both ways, and counted the buttons of my shirt. “Do you remember why I couldn’t sleep for days after that night? After I counted the plane and had that meltdown?”

            “What do you mean? You couldn’t sleep because every time we’d take you to bed, you’d go to count the stars, remember what happened, and start crying until you got so exhausted you’d finally fall asleep. It was a couple weeks of hell until we could get into see a doctor.”

            “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t remember it being like that,” I said, talking without thinking about it. My subconscious pulled up images before me. I could see the red shag carpeting of my childhood bedroom, sumptuous and plush and one of the ugliest things I’d ever seen. I remembered the way that the screws holding the curtain rods above my windows were coming out of the plaster, and how if I pulled on the curtains, they would shake up and down. And I remembered a star at my window, every night. Watching me. Observing me. Counting me. “I remember seeing a ghost at the window where the telescope used to be, and when the lights would go off, there would be things floating above my bed. It terrified me. They didn’t go away for months, and no one else could see them.”

            There was a pause, a disconcerting silence from her end. Why did you bring this up now, you liar? You fucking phony! What are you doing? I had classes on the far end of the quadrangle again, actually in a building just off the main quad, to the north, almost in the engineering campus area that relegated the more unsavory intellectuals and unfortunately placed hopefuls away from the rest of the liberal arts population. So I had time to talk now. But I know what you’re thinking. This is like the ghost from yesterday. But it’s not like that. It can’t be like that. The words came so naturally, and I can see the picture forming in my mind’s eye. I can remember it. My subconscious dredged it up from the shackled-up corner of my mind I’d hidden away for years. Right? I didn’t feel like I was just making this up. You need help.

            “I don’t recall that at all,” my mom said slowly. “What kinds of things did you see? Did you tell your doctor about this, back then? When, exactly, did you run out of medication? This week?”

            She thinks you’re a fucking loony now. Wait. She still loves me. She has to still love me. I’m her son. She has to. Right? Even if I’m remembering things now. Oh, God, she must think I have schizophrenia or something now. But it’s not that. It’s just onetwothreefour all these memories are coming faster now, the way that the airplane startled me in the telescope, and I onetwothreefour pushed it off the window platform and then lied about it falling, the sound it made when it shattered, the hum and the spinning of the metal discs on the sidewalk as the tube came apart and the lenses cracked like a sedan in a collision with a freight train onetwothreefour onetwothreefour onetwothree

            “Daniel?” My mother said. I jumped at her voice, and looked around. My neck twitched, and my eyes felt like they were bulging out of my head. I was in the foyer of the astronomy building. That wasn’t right, though, because I had a “physics of light in space” honors seminar today. On the engineering campus. IN the engineering building. I don’t remember walking into the astronomy building.

            “Sorry, there was some bike traffic I had to avoid,” I said, leaving the astronomy building and hot-footing it northwards to make it in time for class. “I, uh, don’t think I mentioned it to anyone at the time.”

            “Oh, honey, that seems like something you should have told someone about,” she said. “Have you… seen anything since then?”

            I contemplated telling her about the ghost at the window yesterday morning. But I thought better of it, since I was almost to class anyway and really had to wrap up this conversation in a way that wouldn’t have her call a wellness check on me. “No, I haven’t. It was just something that I’d been thinking about for a little bit now. I, uh, I’m gonna mention it to my therapist next week when I see them.”

            “Are you sure you’re ok to wait until next week for that?” she said.

            You need help NOW.

            “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said. “I’m ok, I promise. Just been a stressful couple of days, what with my meds running out over the weekend and-”

            “You said they ran out yesterday?”

            “They did. Yesterday. Today is Thursday? Yeah, yesterday. Sorry about that. Listen, I’ve got to go, I’m at class now. I love you! I’ll talk to you on Sunday for our normal chats, ok?”

            “I, uh, well, ok. I love you too! Have fun at classes today.” She said, and I hung up the phone as I stepped into the physics building. The muscles in my neck pulled and stretched on the right side of my body, straining at my collar bone as if to tear it in two. I could feel the pressure under my skin, a hard knot of flesh and what felt like bone. No one heard me on the phone. It’s fine. People still like me. I mean, they don’t know anything about me. They must feel neutral towards me, right? You look like you’re having a stroke.

            My right eye twitched, slammed shut, and my head pulled to the side before finally relaxing, steam escaping from a pressurized vent through miles of concrete tunnels. Somehow, I had come out of that phone call feeling better. I could focus on class today.

            It being an honors seminar class, it was an intimate affair, just a few tables and chairs and an enormous device like a cross between a telescope and a laser pointer dominating the far end of room. The furniture was real wood, too, not the cheap particleboard shit the other buildings tended to use. The floor and walls were a deep oak with a lacquer veneer, and the windows had leaded glass that, of course, looked out onto the busy road that, if you walked far enough along, you could reach about a dozen different bars. Nevertheless, this was classical.

There were ten of us, me and the professor included, and I grabbed my seat next to another guy I’d met a few times before. I was the last one to arrive, even though I wasn’t late. We weren’t friends, but we were friendly. I think his name was Anish, or else another name with an A at the start. He had black hair, and normally I’d say he was rather handsome, but whenever I looked at him now, his face looked… blurry.

I tried to smile at him as I sat down, but something about my look must have been off-putting, because his brow furrowed and his mouth took on a shape I couldn’t quite make out.

            “Are you ok, man?” He asked me, low and under his breath. The professor, a short, stocky woman with thick-rimmed glasses, blond hair curled into a bun on the top of her head, and the name of Dr. Christy, was turning open a set of PowerPoint slides and pulling down a drawstring projector screen that covered up the odd laser machine.

            “I’m fine, why do you ask?” I said.

            “Your, uh, well, uh, you look a little sick,” he said. I turned to look away from him, you idiot! What are you doing? And brought one hand up to my face to feel, and it seemed as though it were carved out of stone. I couldn’t exactly figure out what kind of face I was making. It seemed to be involuntary, and I didn’t know what emotion I was expressing. But I could feel how wrong it must look. The right side of my mouth was pulled down like someone had tied a string to the corner of my lip and attached a ten ton weight to it, exposing some of my teeth in a skeletal grimace. My right eye was screwed up like some sort of Junji Ito sketch, eyelid seeming to flip over sideways to latch my vision shut. Oddly, I didn’t feel like any of this was getting in the way of normal movements. You goddamned moron, they’ll all think you’re crazy now. Whatever I looked like, they were all sure to hate me now. Fuck. Hell. What was I doing? They’ll all hate my now and think I’m stupid. And I’ll fail all my classes. Fuck! How would I ever graduate now? Was it even worth it to try anymore?

            I turned a bit to address Anish again, though I didn’t turn to face him completely. “Hey, sorry about that. It’s, uh, a nerves thing. I’m ok. I hope my horrible ugliness won’t be a distraction to you.”  He frowned harder. “You know? Like that one Spongebob episode?”

            He raised a half-smile, maybe remembering. Or maybe not. “Yeah, I think so. Well, glad to know you’re ok.” And he turned to the front of the classroom.

            Idiot! Onetwothreefour onetwothreefour You thought a stupid joke like that could save you? I could never show my face around here again. He’d know what was going on if I looked at him straight. I’d become a distraction in class. I could never look at the teacher, until whatever was happening with my face passed. They were all going to hate me. Right?

            The lecture started, finally, though it was more of a conversation than a lecture. The professor would point out some information on the PowerPoint slide, and someone would ask a question or interject with an answer to a question posed earlier, and it went smoothly enough that I could keep my head down and pretend to be taking notes the whole time. But I couldn’t stop the creeping dread that I would never be able to look at anyone again. They would know. They would know what was wrong with me. They would know and they would hate me, and I’d be left with nothing but my own thoughts and that inner critical voice watch it and the red stars and nothing else. They’d know. They’d know and

            Suddenly, class was over. Anish scooted the wooden car back, and I jerked over to look at him, breaking my solemn oath to never do that again, and he looked me up and down as he stood. “Glad to see you’re looking better,” he said. “Sorry about that. You were just so pale earlier, it was like you’d-”

            “Seen a ghost?” I added. I cocked a half-smile. “Guess all I needed was some good old enlightening discussion. Thanks for checking in on me.”

            He smiled, a real one this time. I could see it through the filter over his face. “Sure thing. See you next week.”

            I waited a minute, and once everyone else had left or was walking towards the door, I stood up and half-ran, half-fell towards the professor.

            “Hey, Dr. Christy, I’ve got a quick question,” I said.

            She smiled warmly as the projector screen slipped up into the ceiling with an immense snap. I jumped, involuntarily, and her smile faltered for just a moment. Goddamnit, now she knows. “I’ve got a quick answer,” she said. “Maybe.”

            “Is there something on my face?” I asked. “That’s- that’s not the question. I just need to know.”

            Her smile wavered again. “Nope, looks like a face to me. What’s the real question?”

            I didn’t actually have a question. I just suddenly felt the need to ask something. But like with before, I had to let my subconscious give way. And maybe if I did, it would pull some strings on whatever was just out of sight in my head.

            “If a star were born, and the light reached us within our lifetime, what would it look like to an amateur astronomer? Like, with a Walmart telescope? And, uh, the opposite, too. Would someone be able to see a star die with a regular cheap telescope? What would that even look like?”

            “Great question,” she said, smile fixing itself. “It depends on what kind of star, how far away it is from us, if anything big, like a dust cloud, is in the way to obstruct the light, other factors like that. But we see stellar novas all the time, and they are readily visible with the naked eye. We just saw a supernova for the first time a few years back. As for stars being born, that’s trickier. It takes so long for stars to form, they don’t ‘turn on’ like a light bulb. You almost definitely wouldn’t be able to see one with the naked eye. We’ve been watching the Pillars of Creation for decades now and they don’t look like they’ve moved an inch. Not the naked eye, anyway. But there’s way more to go into it than that. You want some recommended readings?” Absolutely fucking not.

            “Sure,” I lied. “Maybe you could email them to me?”

“Tell you what, I’ll put something together before class next Tuesday, and I’ll share it with you and anyone else who might be into it. Any other questions?”

“No, I think that’s it. I have to get to my next class,” I said. “Thanks!”

“Sure thing!” She said as she stuffed a ream of papers into a shoulder bag. I dipped out of the room as soon as she looked away, and once I was out of sight, one hand flew to my face and the other hand flew to the buttons on my shirt. Onetwothreefour my face seemed fine now, not twisted or distorted in any way, onetwothreefour and surely that was a normal enough interaction with Dr. Christy, right? Onetwothreefour I shouldn’t have asked her about my face onetwothreefour but I’m glad I came up with that question, I didn’t have anything else really planned, and yet onetwothreefour what did I actually want to talk to her about? There was something I was forgetting, right?

My legs spun under me with their own locomotion as I pulled my phone out of my pocked on the way to the following class, back on the main quadrangle. I had an elective on local ecosystems. There was a text from Stephanie, and my heart totally stopped and my brain briefly reconvened all its shattered pieces into one large “oh, shit.” The text read, simply, Hey dude! Call me when you get a chance.

There wasn’t a snowball’s chance on the sun I was calling her. I texted back What’s up? And, to my utter horror, the “read” notification appeared instantly and the three typing dots popped up at the bottom of my screen. She might as well have been breathing down my neck.

Wanted to check up on ya, you left the meeting early ystrday, she said. Coffee after class?

Oh. That was easier. Coffee I could do.

Sure! I texted back. Four at the Paradise Café?

Sounds grood! She texted back.

*Good lol she texted again.

Haha I replied. I mentally kicked myself, and then physically pinched my arm in disappointment. What the hell kind of response is “Haha”? Surely I should have said something better than that. Something a person deserving of a position of leadership in an environmental activism club would say….

And so ends part three. This is already turning into something of a novella, not a short story. Like I said last time, I’ll be cutting out quite a bit before the “final” draft, but still, this is much longer than I anticipated. The next part should hopefully be the ending, though. Can you feel that tension ratcheting up? Hopefully, because if not, then I’ve failed at what I set out to accomplish. Leave your predictions in the comments below! Or write them in ashes at the bottom of the dead firepit. I’ll see them, either way.